At this last dinner at the Chancellor's he took me off in a corner and said, "As I understand it, what America wants is cruiser warfare on the part of the submarines." And I said, "Yes, that is it exactly. They may exercise the right of visit and search, must not torpedo or sink vessels without warning, and must not sink any vessel unless the passengers and crew are put in a place of safety."
On the morning of the third of May, I heard that the German note had been drafted, but that it would contain a clause to the effect that while the German submarines would not go beyond cruiser warfare, this rule, nevertheless, would not apply to armed merchantmen.
As such a proposition as this would, of course, only bring up the subject again, I immediately ordered my automobile and called on the Spanish Ambassador, stating to him what I had heard about the contents of the note; that this would mean, without doubt, a break with America; and that, as I had been instructed to hand the Embassy over to him, I had come to tell him of that fact. I gave the same information to other colleagues, of course hoping that what I said would directly or indirectly reach the ears of the German Foreign Office. Whether it did or not, I do not know, but the Sussex Note when received did not contain any exception with reference to armed merchantmen.
With the receipt of the Sussex Note and the President's answer thereto, which declined assent to the claim of Germany to define its attitude toward our rights in accordance with what we might do in regard to the enforcement of our rights against England, the submarine question seemed, at least for the moment, settled. I, however, immediately warned the Department that I believed that the rulers of Germany would at some future date, forced by public opinion, and by the von Tirpitz and Conservative parties, take up ruthless submarine war again, possibly in the autumn but at any rate about February or March, 1917.
In my last conversation with the Chancellor before leaving the Great General Headquarters, when he referred to the cruiser warfare of the submarines, he also said, "I hope now that if we settle this matter your President will be great enough to take up the question of peace." It was as a result of intimations from government circles that, after my return to Berlin, I gave an interview to a representative of a Munich newspaper, expressing my faith in the coming of peace, although I was careful to say that it might be a matter of months or even years.
Thereafter, on many occasions the Chancellor impressed upon me the fact that America must do something towards arranging a peace and that if nothing was done to this end, public opinion in Germany would undoubtedly force a resumption of a ruthless submarine war.
In September of 1916, I having mentioned that Mrs. Gerard was going to the United States on a short visit, von Jagow insistently urged me to go also in order to make every effort to induce the President to do something towards peace; and, as a result of his urging and as a result of my own desire to make the situation clear in America, I sailed from Copenhagen on the twenty-eighth of September with Mrs. Gerard, on the Danish ship, Frederick VIII, bound for New York. I had spent almost three years in Berlin, having been absent during that time from the city only five or six days at Kiel and two week-ends in Silesia in 1914, with two weeks at Munich in the autumn, two days at Munich and two days at Parten-Kirchen in 1916, and two week-ends at Heringsdorf, in the summer of the same year, with visits to British prison camps scattered through the two and a half years of war.
On the Frederick VIII were Messrs. Herbert Swope of the New York World and William C. Bullitt of the Philadelphia Ledger, who had been spending some time in Germany. I impressed upon each of these gentlemen my fixed belief that Germany intended shortly, unless some definite move was made toward peace, to commence ruthless submarine war; and they made this view clear in the articles which they wrote for their respective newspapers.
Mr. Swope's articles which appeared in the New York World were immediately republished by him in a book called "Inside the German Empire." In Mr. Swope's book on page ninety-four, he says, "The campaign for the ruthless U-boat warfare is regarded by one man in this country who speaks with the highest German authority, as being in the nature of a threat intended to accelerate and force upon us a movement toward peace. Ambassador Gerard had his attention drawn to this just before he left Berlin but he declined to accept the interpretation."
On page eighty-eight he writes, "Our Embassy in Berlin expected just such a demonstration as was given by the U-53 in October when she sank six vessels off Nantucket, as a lesson of what Germany could do in our waters if war came."