“How is it,” he said, “that you all have such an intimate knowledge of my part of America?”
Perhaps this direct query took the Premier by surprise. Anyhow, he confessed:
“Well, you see I have just finished reading Henderson’s ‘Life of Stonewall Jackson.’”
Grayson’s response was in the good old American fashion:
“My dear sir, no matter what office you run for, you’ll have my vote!”
There was one interlude to my activities in Paris that should be mentioned if only for the sake of the stir it created back home. This was my speech at Coblenz, when I told the American soldiers there that another war impended.
It was in May of 1919 that we took a trip to the occupied territory and visited Coblenz, Cologne, and Wiesbaden. I remember that we were at first much impressed by the unbending dignity of the young captain who was our escort until, one day, we stopped at Treves for lunch. We had just seated ourselves when a woman’s voice called out:
“Why, hello Pinky!”
We all turned round, but the Captain jumped. He had red hair, and the woman who greeted him by the nickname that his hair had won him before he achieved his military dignity was Peggy Shaw, of New York, who soon showed us her soldiers’ theatre and rest-room in a barn where she served lemonade out of buckets to the Army of Occupation. Thenceforward, the Captain was “Pinky” to us all.
At Coblenz we were billeted at the house of Von Grotte, the German president of the Rhineland provinces, and when I woke that first morning I could not help thinking of the changes that had taken place in my life between my birth at Mannheim in 1856 and this day at Coblenz in 1919. Soon I was seated in the Coblenzer-Hof partaking of a good American breakfast of oatmeal, eggs, bacon, wheat-cakes and molasses, and no doubt a better meal than any German had that day, and looking at “Old Glory” afloat over Ehrenbreitstein. How full historically the interim had been! How strange to see the American flag above this fortress on the Rhine, while, below, a bronze statue of William I looked on in woeful contemplation of the wreckage to his Empire that his grandson had wrought.