My Four Years in Germany

by James W. Gerard

After dinner I went to the station to say good bye to the French Ambassador, Jules Cambon. The route from the French Embassy by the Brandenburg Thor to the Lehrter railway station was lined with troops and police, so that no accident whatever occurred. There was no one at the station except a very inferior official from the German Foreign Office. Cambon was in excellent spirits and kept his nerve and composure admirably. His family, luckily, were not in Berlin at the time of the outbreak of the war. Cambon instead of being sent out by way of Switzerland, whence of course the road to France was easy, was sent North to Denmark. He was very badly treated on the train, and payment for the special train, in gold, was exacted from him by the German government.

Then I went for a walk about Berlin, soon becoming involved in the great crowd in front of the British Embassy on the Wilhelm Strasse. The crowd threw stones, etc., and managed to break all the windows of the Embassy. The Germans charged afterwards that people in the Embassy had infuriated the crowd by throwing pennies to them. I did not see any occurrences of this kind. As the Unter den Linden and the Wilhelm Platz are paved with asphalt the crowd must have brought with them the missiles which they used, with the premeditated design of smashing the Embassy windows. A few mounted police made their appearance but were at no time in sufficient numbers to hold the crowd in check.

Afterwards I went around to the Unter den Linden where there was a great crowd in front of the Hotel Adlon. A man standing on the outskirts of the crowd begged me not to go into the hotel, as he said the people were looking for English newspaper correspondents.

So threatening was the crowd towards the English correspondents that Wile rang up the porter of the Embassy after we had gone to bed and, not wishing to disturb us, he occupied the lounge in the porter's rooms.

Believing that possibly the British Embassy might be in such a condition that Sir Edward Goschen, the British Ambassador, might not care to spend the night there, I ordered an automobile and went up through the crowd which still choked the Wilhelm Strasse, with Holand Harvey, the Second Secretary to the British Embassy. Sir Edward and his secretaries were perfectly calm and politely declined the refuge which I offered them in our Embassy. I chatted with them for a while, and, as I was starting to leave, a servant told me that the crowds in the street had greatly increased and were watching my automobile. I sent out word by the servant to open the automobile, as it was a landau, and to tell the chauffeur, when I got in, to drive very slowly.

I drove slowly through the crowd, assailed only by the peculiar hissing word that the Germans use when they are especially angry and which is supposed to convey the utmost contempt. This word is "Pfui" and has a peculiar effect when hissed out from thousands of Teutonic throats.

As we left the outskirts of the crowd, a man of respectable appearance jumped on the running board of the automobile, spit at me, saying "Pfui," and struck Harvey in the face with his hat. I stopped the automobile, jumped out and chased this man down the street and caught him. My German footman came running up and explained that I was the American Ambassador and not an Englishman. The man who struck Harvey thereupon apologised and gave his card. He was a Berlin lawyer who came to the Embassy next morning and apologised again for his "mistake."

The following day, August fifth, I spent part of the time taking over from Sir Edward the British interests. Joseph C. Grew, our First Secretary, and I went to the British Embassy; seals were placed upon the archives, and we received such instructions and information as could be given us, with reference to the British subjects in Germany and their interests. The British correspondents were collected in the Embassy and permission was obtained for them to leave on the Embassy train.

During the day British subjects, without distinction as to age or sex, were seized, wherever found, and sent to the fortress of Spandau. I remonstrated with von Jagow and told him that that was a measure taken only in the Middle Ages, and I believe that he remonstrated with the authorities and arranged for a cessation of the arbitrary arrests of women.

Frederick W. Wile, the well-known American correspondent of the London Daily Mail, was to go out also with the British party, on the ground that he had been a correspondent of a British newspaper. In the evening I went to the Foreign Office to get his passport, and, while one of the department chiefs was signing the passport, he stopped in the middle of his signature, threw down the pen on the table, and said he absolutely refused to sign a passport for Wile because he hated him so and because he believed he had been largely instrumental in the bringing about of the war. Of course this latter statement was quite ridiculous, but it took me some time before I could persuade this German official to calm his hate and complete his signature.