Ten Years Near the German Frontier: A Retrospect and a Warning

by Maurice Francis Egan

In the third place, Copenhagen was near the most potent country in the world—Germany under Prussian domination. I make the distinction between 'potency' and 'greatness.'

And, in the fourth place, it gave anybody who wanted to be 'on his job' a good opportunity of studying the effect of German propinquity on a small nation. Unfortunately, in 1907-8-9-10-11, no experience in watching German methods seemed of much value to our own people or to the English. The English who watched them critically, like Maxse, the editor of the National Review of London, were not listened to. Perhaps these persons were too Radical and intemperate. The English Foreign Office had, after the Vatican, the reputation of having the best system for obtaining information in Europe, but both the English Foreign Office and the Vatican Secretariat seemed to have suddenly become deaf. We Americans were too much taken up with the German gemütlichkeit, or scientific efficiency, to treat the Prussian movements with anything but tolerance. The Germans had won the hearts of some of our best men of science, who believed in them until belief was impossible; and, with most of my countrymen, I held that a breach of the peace in Europe seemed improbable. There was always The Hague! The only thing left for me was to let the Germans be as gemütlich as they liked, and to watch their attitude in Denmark, for on this depended the ownership of the West Indies.

My German colleagues, Henckel-Donnersmarck, von Waldhausen, and Brockdorff-Rantzau, were able men; and, I think, they looked on me as a madman with a fixed idea. Count Rantzau, if he lives, will be heard of later; he is one of the well-balanced among diplomatists. I realised early in the game that my work must be limited to watching Germany in her relations with Denmark. I knew what was expected of me. I had no doubt that the United States was the greatest country in the world in its potentialities, but I had no belief, then, in its power to enforce its high ideals on the politics of the European world.

In fact, it never occurred to me that our country would be called upon to enforce them, for, unless the Imperial German Government should take it into its head to lay hands on a country or two in South America, it seemed to me that we might keep entirely out of such foreign entanglements as concerned Western Europe and Constantinople and the Balkans. If, however, there should be such interference by France and England with the interests of Germany as would warrant her and her active ally in attacking these countries, Denmark and, automatically, her islands would be German. Then, we, in self-defence, must have something to say. Secret diplomacy was flourishing in Europe, and nothing was really clear. After the event it is very easy to take up the rôle of the prophet, but that is not in my line. If a man is not a genius, he cannot have the intuition of a genius, and, while I accepted the opinions of my more experienced colleagues, I imagined that their fears of a probable war were exaggerated. Besides, I had been impressed by the constantly emphasised opinion—part of the German propaganda, I now believe—that our great enemy was Japan.

Since the year 1874, when I had been well introduced into diplomatic circles in Washington, I had known many representatives of foreign powers. Since those days, so well described in Madame de Hegermann-Lindencrone's Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, the German point of view had greatly changed. It was a far cry from the days of the easy-going Herr von Schlözer to Speck von [Sternberg] and efficient Count Bernstorff, a far cry from the amicable point of view of Mr. Poultney Bigelow taken of the young Kaiser in the eighties, and his revised point of view in 1915. Mr. Poultney Bigelow's change from a certain attitude of admiration, in his case with no taint of snobbishness, was typical of that of many of my own people. I must confess that no instructions from the State Department had prepared me for the German echoes I heard in Denmark; but even if Treitschke had come to the United States to air his views at the University of Chicago, I should probably have considered them merely academic, and have treated them as cavalierly as I had treated the speech of the waiter in the Trafalgar Square hotel about 'changing all that.'

Nietzsche's philosophy seemed so atrocious as to be ineffective. But we Americans, as a rule, take no system of philosophy as having any real connection with the conduct of life, and, except in very learned circles, his was looked on as no more part of the national life of Germany than William James is of ours. In a little while, I discovered that the Kaiser had imposed on the Prussians, at least, a most practical system of philosophy, which our universities had come to admire. I had not been long in Denmark when I realised that Germany, in the three Scandinavian countries, was looked on either as a powerful enemy or as a potential friend, and that she tried, above all, to control the learned classes.

The United States hardly counted; she was too far off and seemed to be hopelessly ignorant of the essential conditions of foreign affairs. Her diplomacy, if it existed at all, was determined by existing political conditions at home.

I visited Holland and Belgium; Germany loomed larger. She was bent on commercial supremacy everywhere. One could not avoid admitting that fact.

As to Denmark, it was piteous to see how the Danes feared the power that never ceased to threaten them. Prussia has made her empire possible by establishing the beginnings, in 1864, of her naval power at the expense of Denmark. The longer I lived in Denmark the more strongly I felt that Germany was getting ready for a short, sharp war in which the United States of America, it seemed to me (as I was no prophet), was not to be a factor, but Russia was.

The members of the German Legation were very sympathetic, especially the Minister, Count Henckel-Donnersmarck. He loved Weimar; he loved the old Germany. It was a delight to hear him talk of the real glories of his country. His family, in the opinion of the Germans, was so great that he could afford to do as he pleased; I rather think he looked on the Hohenzollerns as rather parvenus. He was of the school of Frederick the Noble rather than of William the Conqueror.