THE a.s.sAULT.

by Frederic William Wile.

INTRODUCTION

This is not a "war book." It has not been my privilege at any stage of the Great Blood-Letting to come into close contact with the spectacular clash and din of the fray. Abler pens than mine, many of them wielded by the "neutral" hands of American colleagues, are immortalizing the terrible, yet irresistibly fascinating, scenes of this most stupendous drama. But every drama has its scenario and its prologue and its behind-the-curtain scenes--none ever written was so rich in these preliminaries and accessories as is Europe's epic. To have witnessed and lived through some of these was vouchsafed me; and to take American readers with me down the line of the past year's recollections and impressions is the sole object of this unpretentious effort. History, Carlyle said, was some one's record of personal experiences. To such experiences, as far as possible, the pages of this book are confined.

For thirteen years to the week--I have always had a respectful horror of thirteen--I was a resident of Berlin. During the first five years of that period my ident.i.ty was clear: I was the representative in Germany of an American newspaper, the _Chicago Daily News_. But in 1906 I became an international complication, for it was then I joined the staff of the _London Daily Mail_, which converted my status into that of an _American_ serving _British_ journalistic interests in _Germany_. It was not long afterward that welcome opportunity presented itself to renew home professional ties in connection with my British work, and for several years prior to the outbreak of the war I carried the credentials of Berlin correspondent of the _New York Times_ and the _Chicago Tribune_. They were on my person, with my United States pa.s.sport, the night of August 4, 1914, when the Kaiser's police arrested me as an "English spy."

I feel it necessary to introduce so highly personal a narrative with these details in order to make plain, at the outset, that it is the narrative of an American born and bred. My proudest boast during ten years' a.s.sociation with Great Britain's premier newspaper organization was that I never lost my Americanism. My English editor, on the occasion of my earliest physical conflict with the Mailed Fist in Berlin, doubtless recalls taking me to task for invoking the protection of the United States Emba.s.sy, just as my British colleagues, concerned in the same imbroglio, had invoked the aid of their Emba.s.sy. Of the reams I have written for the _Daily Mail_ in my day, I never sent it anything which sprang more sincerely from the heart than the message to its editor that I had not renounced allegiance to my country when I pledged my professional services to a British newspaper.

I have no higher aspiration, as far as this volume is concerned, than that critics of it, hostile or friendly, may p.r.o.nounce it "pro-Ally"

from start to finish. I shall survive even the charge that it is "pro-English." I mean it to be all of that, as I have tried to breathe sincerity into every line of it. But I shall not feel inclined to accept without protest an accusation that the book is "anti-German." It is true that I regard this essentially a German-made, or rather a Prussian-made, war, and that I hold Prussian militarism and militarists solely responsible for plunging the world into this unending bath of blood and tears. It is true that I wish to see Germany beaten. I wish her beaten for the Allies' sake and for my own country's sake. A victorious Germany would be a menace to international liberty and become automatically a threat to the happiness and freedom of the United States. My years in Germany taught me that. But I cherish no scintilla of hatred or animosity toward the German people as individuals, who will be the real victims of the war. I saw them with my own eyes literally dragged into the fight against their will, fears and judgment. I know from their own lips that they considered it a cruelly unnecessary war and did not want it. They were joyful and prosperous a year and a half ago--never more so. They craved a continuance of the simple blessings of peace, unless their tearful protestations in the fateful month preceding the drawing of their mighty sword were the plaints of a race of hypocrites, and I do not think the percentage of hypocrisy higher in Germany, man for man, than elsewhere in the world. The German's _Gott strafe England_ cult, for example, is no revelation to any man who has lived among them. Their hatred for Perfidious Albion has long been vigorous and purposeful.

During the war I have lived in Germany, England and the United States--a week of it in Berlin, three months at different periods in America, and the rest of the time in London. My observations of Germany have not been confined to the six and a half days the Prussian police permitted me to tarry in their midst, for my work in London has dealt almost exclusively with day-by-day examination of that weird production which will be known to history as the German war-time Press. I am quite sure the perspective of the life and times of the Kaiser's people in their "great hour" was clearer from the vantage-ground of a newspaper desk near the Thames embankment than it could possibly have been had it been my lot to view the Fatherland at war as an observer writing, under the hypnotic influence of ma.s.s-suggestion, of Germany from within.

Though I deal with Britain in war-time, no pretense is made of treating so vast a subject except by way of fleeting impressions. Indeed, nothing but snap-shots of British life are possible at the moment, so kaleidoscopic are its developments and vagaries. I am conscious that the pictures I have drawn are, therefore, superficial, but no portrayal of a people in a state of flux could well be otherwise. Although the concluding chapters were written in October, conditions now (in mid-December) have altered vitally in many directions. Sir John French no longer commands the British Army in France and Flanders. Serbia has gone the way of Belgium. Gallipoli has been abandoned. The Coalition Government, established at the end of May, is widely considered a failure at the end of December. The Man in the Street, that oracle of all-wisdom in these Isles, is asking whether the war can be won without still another, and more sweeping, change of National leadership.

I hope my British friends, and particularly my professional colleagues of ten years' standing, will not find my snap-shots too under-exposed.

The camera was in pro-British hands every minute of the time. If the pictures appear indistinct, I trust the photography will at least not be criticized as in any respect due to lack of sympathy with the British cause.

F. W. W.

London, December 20, 1915.

New Introductory Chapter

HOW EUROPE VIEWS AMERICAN INTERVENTION

It will hardly be possible for any faithful chronicler of that transcendent event to record that America's entry into the war set embattled Europe by the ears. The most such a historian can say of the impression created in Allied countries is that the abandonment of our neutrality toward the "natural foe to liberty" produced profound satisfaction but nothing in the way of a staggering sensation. Even in Germany and among her va.s.sals, declaration of war by the United States failed to provoke consternation, although it was received in a spirit of nonchalance which was more studied than real. The Damoclean sword of Washington had hung so long in the mid-air of indecision that when the blow fell its effect was to a large extent lost upon beneficiary and victim alike. The peoples who became our Allies were gratified; the Germans mortified. But our leap into the arena stained with nearly three years of combatant blood was so belated that it seemed bereft of the power to plunge either our friends into paroxysms of enthusiasm or our enemies into the depths of despair.

I am speaking exclusively of the first impressions generated by President Wilson's call to arms. In Allied Europe, as well as Germanic Europe, opinion is changing, now that the words of April are merging into the deeds of midsummer. Still different emotions will fire the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of both our comrades-in-arms and of the common foe when the full magnitude of American intervention dawns upon their reluctant consciousness. As yet the illimitable import of America's "coming in"

is only faintly realized. Europe's att.i.tude toward the new belligerent is too strongly intrenched in decade-old disbelief in the existence of American idealism and in gross ignorance of our actual potentialities for war, spiritual as well as physical, to be lightly abandoned. We shall have to win our spurs. There is at this writing no inclination whatever to present them to us on trust.

In the introduction to the original edition of _The a.s.sault_, which was completed at the end of 1915, I was un-neutral enough to utter the pious hope that Germany would be beaten. I confessed to the creed that "a victorious Germany would be a menace to international liberty and become automatically a threat to the happiness and freedom of the United States." I said that "my years in Germany taught me that"--years lived in closest contact with Prussian militarism long before it had taken the concrete form of savagery at sea. With that pa.s.sion for corroboration of his own prejudices and predictions, which is inherent in the average man, and which dominates most writers, I rejoice to feel that our government and country have at length joined in liberty's fray from the identical motives which induced me at the outset to take the only side that it seemed possible for an American to espouse.

Properly to a.n.a.lyze Europe's mentality in respect of the United States'

entry into the war we need to bear in mind that for the thirty-two preceding months President Wilson was the riddle of the political universe. Europe had been a.s.sured ceaselessly since August, 1914, that America was overwhelmingly and irretrievably pro-Ally, though its confidence in such a.s.sertions was shipwrecked when we failed to go to war over the _Lusitania_ incident and was never fully restored. Not even Berlin could reconcile the Washington government's invincible neutrality with the alleged existence of universal counter-sentiment.

Europeans are educated to believe that public opinion is the only monarch to whom the American citizenry owns allegiance. They were unable to comprehend a president who so resolutely refused to bow to the people's sovereign will. In its myopic misconception of American conditions, Allied Europe indulged in grotesque misinterpretation of Mr.

Wilson's hesitancy and mystic diplomacy. He had been "re-elected by German votes." In London Americans were solemnly asked if the true explanation of his policy did not lie in the fact that he had "a German wife!" It was also mooted that he had "a secret understanding" with Count Bernstorff. The president was this, that and the other thing--everything, in fact, except what he ought to be. No American chief magistrate since Lincoln was ever so magnificently misunderstood, none so incorrigibly maligned.

Thus it was that although the United States' action under President Wilson's sagacious leadership did not fill Europe with either animation or excitement, it nevertheless came as a full-fledged surprise to both sets of belligerents. Briton, Frenchman, Russian and Italian, as well as German, Austrian and Hungarian, each in his own dogmatic way, had long since and definitely made up their minds that America did not mean to fight. Their c.o.c.ksureness on this cardinal point was not unnaturally supported by the circ.u.mstances of President Wilson's re-election on what was commonly understood to be the democratic candidate's paramount campaign issue--his success in keeping the country out of the war. In the two or three days in which Mr. Wilson's fate trembled in the balance of the Electoral College, a London newspaper, venting splenitic feelings long pent up, gratefully acclaimed the premature announcement of Mr.

Hughes' triumph as an historic and deserved rebuke of the statesman who was "too proud to fight."

Within a month President Wilson, in his first public utterance since election day, made his "peace-without-victory" address to the Senate.

This cryptic deliverance was interpreted in Allied Europe as not only obliterating all possibility of America's entering the war against Germany, but as actually promoting Germany's efforts, launched about the same time, to secure a premature, or "German," peace. There was probably no time during the entire war when feeling against the president and the United States in general ran higher in England and France than during the ensuing weeks. It was not so much what one read in the public prints, for press utterances were restrained if not unqualifiedly friendly, that impelled many an American in London and Paris to seek cover from the withering blast of criticism and impatience to which he now found his country subjected. It was rather the sentiments encountered among Englishmen and Frenchmen in private that supplied the real index to, and revealed the full intensity of, the disappointment and indignation now aroused in Allied lands.

Indelibly impressed upon my memory is the pa.s.sionate outburst of a dear--and, of course, temperamental--French friend in London. He is a gentleman, a scholar and sincere lover of America, where he found the charming lady who is now his wife. He had retired to a bed of illness in consequence of the climatic iniquities which will forever make it impossible for a Frenchman ever really to like England, and I was paying him a neighborly visit of inquiry. Though I had hoped and intended that the acrimonious topic of America would for once be eliminated from our conversation, I was not to be spared what turned out to be almost the most violent castigation of the United States and all its works under which I could ever remember to have winced. I was left in no doubt that his outpouring of righteous Gallic wrath, though it sprang to a certain degree from temperature as well as temperament, was the voice of France crying out in holy anger with the great but recreant sister republic.

Wilson had "surrendered to the Germans and pro-Germans." They were now getting their reward. The president was "playing the Kaiser's peace game." He may not have meant to do so, but that is what his Senate manifesto amounted to, in French estimation. "The Americans care only for their money." So be it. France would not forget. _Jamais_!

Americans would rue the day they had sent back to the White House the man who was now stabbing crucified democracy in the back!

The essential difference between the French and the English is that Frenchmen usually say what they feel, and Englishmen feel what they do not say. Emotions were given to Frenchmen to be expressed; to Englishmen, to be suppressed. Almost identically the same emotions which fired the French soul, as typified by the instance I have just cited, filled British b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but owing to the psychic machinery with which his organism is equipped the Englishman was able more successfully to stifle them. The public tone toward the latest manifestation of our "war policy" was punctiliously correct. It was discussed by the great newspapers in terms of polite dismay but almost invariably in good temper. Yet millions of Britons were boiling within, and if wearing their hearts on their sleeves had been "good form," there is little reason to doubt that their ebullitions would have been no less articulate or meaningful than those of my distinguished French friend herein narrated.

It was about at this time, the end of 1916, that an American colleague, Edward Price Bell, of _The Chicago Daily News_, set forth in the columns of _The Times_ upon a bold adventure--an attempt to persuade captious Britons that, far from desiring to "play the Kaiser's game," President Wilson was actually anxious to make war on Germany, and, indeed, was deliberately, as was his way, proceeding in that direction. It was a risky throw for the doyen of the American press in London, who enjoyed a reputation for sanity and sagacity and who had good reason for desiring to preserve the respect of a community in which his professional lot had been cast for sixteen years. I purpose summarizing the course of Bell's effort to scale the walls of British prejudice because of its immensely symptomatic and psychological interest.

"I believe that Wilson wants to go to war," Bell wrote to _The Times_ on December 23. "I believe that he wants to fight Germany. I believe that he wants Germany to commit herself to a program that would warrant him in asking the American people to enter the conflict." In every allied quarter in Europe, practically without exception, Bell's letter produced a prodigious and contemptuous guffaw. Americans in Europe, any number of them, joined in the gibes. Undismayed, Bell returned to the attack within three days. "America can not keep out of this war unless Germany gives way," he wrote on December 26. "The time may come very soon when President Wilson will be under the necessity of making his appeal to the American nation." The thunderer did not consign Bell's letters to the editorial waste-basket, where most Englishmen believed they belonged, yet it declined, in its scrupulously courteous way, to a.s.sociate itself with its correspondent's manifestly fantastic and fanatical sophistry.

In an editorial comment _The Times_ expressed its reluctance to place any trust in Bell's exposition of the policy "which Mr. Wilson so carefully wraps up." Bell had by this time become a laughing-stock far beyond the confines of the metropolitan area of London. Paris, Petrograd and Rome read his letters and shook with incredulous mirth.

The feelings of fellow-Americans toward him began to be tinged with pity.

Yet Bell broke forth afresh on New Year's Day with his third letter to Printing House Square, a.s.serting, roundly, that "America will and can support no peace but an Entente peace." On January 25 _The Times_ printed Bell's fourth letter within five weeks, in which he this time declared unequivocally that "Mr. Wilson's purpose is solely to inform the world what America stands for and what he is willing to ask America, if need be, to fight for."

Germany now proclaimed her new policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.

Mr. Gerard was recalled from Berlin and Count Bernstorff received his pa.s.sports in Washington. Yet Allied faith in America, momentarily revived by these events, took wings once more when it became known that Mr. Wilson's next "step" would be armed neutrality. The editor of _The Times_, who had been exceptionally tolerant of the pestiferous Bell, imagined now, I fancy, that events had at length put a timely end to the letter-writing energies of the Chicago scribe; for Englishmen, with notably few exceptions, had by this time pretty well "eliminated"

America from their calculations. But on February 22, inspired perhaps by the rugged traditions clinging to that date, Bell cleared for action for the fifth time and next day _The Times_ printed him for the fifth time. He wrote: "I will risk the view that we are on the edge of great things in America--things worthy of the country of Washington and Lincoln. America, I feel, is about to fructify internationally--about to make her real contribution to humanity and history." _The Times_ now went so far as to suggest, with characteristic prudence, that Bell's "sagacious and racy letter deserves careful consideration by all who are trying to understand the situation in Washington." Unhappily, there was little evidence in the continued British mistrust of America that _The Times'_ counsel was being taken widely to heart.

On February 27 Bell craved the indulgence of _The Times_ for his sixth, and final, epistle to the skeptics. With what was destined to turn out to be rare prescience and penetration, he now said that Mr. Wilson's delay in coming to grips with Hohenzollernism meant only that "the president wants the public temper so hot throughout America that it will instantly burn to ash any revolutionary unrest or any opposition by the pacifist diehards." Five weeks later the United States and Germany were at war, with the American nation united in fervent support of the president's p.r.o.nunciamento that the task which demanded the renunciation of our neutrality was one to which "we can dedicate our lives, our fortunes, everything we are and everything we have." The hour of Europe's awakening from its scornful dreams had come.

For several days after Congress, at the president's instigation, voted to "accept the gage of battle," there lay neatly folded up in a certain front room of the American Emba.s.sy in London a fine, new American flag.

It had been put there for a special purpose--to be hoisted at a psychological moment believed to be imminent. Our people in Grosvenor Gardens, in their hearty, imaginative American way, considered that there might possibly be a "demonstration" in welcome of Britain's latest comrade-in-arms. There were visions of a procession, bra.s.s bands and cheering crowds; and the spick and span stars and stripes were to be flung to the glad breeze when the "demonstrators" reached the scene and called for a speech from Amba.s.sador Page on the Emba.s.sy balcony. Such things happened when Italy and Roumania "came in." Surely history would not fail to repeat itself in the case of "daughter America." But neither procession, bands, cheers nor crowds ever materialized. After all, we could not expect Englishmen to celebrate in honor of the greatest mistake they had ever made in their lives. That would be something more than un-English. It would be a violation of all the laws of human nature.

Yet I suppose there was not an American in Great Britain who was not keenly disappointed at the conspicuously undemonstrative character of our welcome into the Allied fold. I must not be understood as minimizing the warmth of either governmental or press utterances evoked by President Wilson's Lincolnesque speech to Congress and the action which so promptly ensued. The sentiments expressed by Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Bonar Law, Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Bryce, in and out of Parliament, and the thoughts which found vivid expression in the columns of the newspapers of London and the provinces left little to be desired; but eloquent and hearty as they were, their effect upon that all-powerful molder of British public opinion known as the Man in the Street was strangely negligible. I am sure I am not the only American in England who, waiting for words of greeting from British friends and not getting them, was irresistibly constrained to search for the reason.

Our chagrin was not lessened by a.s.surances from Paris that "France was going wild with joy"; that the president's speech was being read aloud in the schools and officially placarded on all the h.o.a.rdings of the republic; that the government buildings were flying the tricolor and "Old Glory" side by side; and that American men were being publicly embraced in the boulevards.

Many Americans found themselves, for reasons never entirely clear to them, the objects of "congratulation." I know of at least one instance in which a very estimable American lady, showered with "congratulations"

by British friends on the action of her country, preserved sufficient presence of mind to suggest that she thought "congratulations" were due to the Allies. Another favorite view advanced by _vox populi_ was that America had only "come in" at this late stage of the sanguinary game because "the war was won" and intervention now was "safe" and "cheap."

It was not uncommon to be told that our determination to "spend the whole force of the nation" was due to commercial ac.u.men and our desire to safeguard the heavy "investment" we had already made in the Allied cause. Last-ditchers--their name was legion: the Englishmen who refused to believe even yet that America "meant business"--declined to throw their hats into the air and shout until "big words" had become "big deeds." Much more impressive in my own ears seemed the explanation that Britons were not tumultuous in our honor because these days of endless sacrifice--the spring offensive in France was at its height and the nation's best were falling in thousands--were not days for cheering and flag-waving. And, finally, there was that extensive school of thought which had always and sincerely opposed American intervention on the ground that America, as a neutral granary and a.r.s.enal, was a more effective Allied a.s.set than a belligerent America which would naturally and necessarily husband its vast resources for its own military requirements.

The story of Germany's state of mind toward America's entry into the lists against her is soon told. The German government and German people looked upon us as all but declared enemies throughout the war. They felt, and repeatedly said, that we were doing them quite as much damage as neutrals as we could possibly inflict in the guise of belligerents.

That, indeed, was the argument on which Hindenburg and his fellow-strategists based the "safety" of inaugurating unrestricted submarine warfare and the moral certainty of war with the United States as a result. Not all Germans blithely relegated the prospect of a formally hostile America to the realm of inconsequence. Hindenburg and Ludendorff know nothing about America. But men like Ballin, Gwinner, Rathenau and Dernburg know that the United States, in a famous German idiom, is, indeed, "the land of unlimited possibilities." There can be no manner of doubt that the vision of America's limitless resources harnessed to those of the nations already at war with their country always filled the business giants of the Fatherland with all the terror of a nightmare. But as those elements, both before and during the war, were as a voice crying in the wilderness of Prussian militarism, they were condemned to silence when the dreaded thing became a reality; and the only note that issued forth from Berlin was the "inspired" croak in the government-controlled press that only the expected had happened; that Hindenburg's plans had been made with exact regard for that which had now supervened, and that Germany's irresistible march to victory would not and could not be arrested by anything the Americans could do.

Doubts were universally expressed in America and in Allied Europe as to whether the Kaiser's government would permit President Wilson's crushing indictment of Prussianism to be published in Germany. One heard of picturesque schemes to drop millions of copies of the speech over the German trenches and towns from aeroplanes. In at least one widely-read German newspaper, the _Berliner Tageblatt_, a Radical-Liberal journal which has not entirely surrendered its old-time independence, the president's speech was printed almost verbatim. In nearly every paper there were adequate extracts. But such effect as they may have been designed to create upon the German body politic--particularly the president's insistence that America's war is with "the Imperial German Government" and not with "the German people"--was nullified by the press bureau's imperious orders to editors to reject Mr. Wilson's "moral clap-trap" as impudent and insolent interference with Germany's domestic concerns. Under the leadership of the celebrated Berlin theologian, Professor Doctor Adolf Harnack, meetings of German scholars and _savants_ were organized for the purpose of giving public expression to the "unanimity and indignation with which the German nation protests against the American president's officious intrusion upon matters which are the affair of the German people and themselves alone." Or words to that effect.

Meantime the so-called comic press of Germany, which to an extent probably unknown in any other country of the world gives the keynote for popular sentiment, engaged in an orgy of unbridled abuse of President Wilson, the United States and Americans in general. The _leitmotif_ of hundreds of cartoons, caricatures and jokes was that the "American money power" had "dragged" us into the war. _Simplicissimus_ epitomized German thoughts of the moment in a full-page drawing ent.i.tled "High Finance Crowning Wilson Autocrat of America by the Grace of Mammon."

The president was depicted enthroned upon a dais resting on bulging money-bags and surmounted by a canopy fringed with gold dollars. A crown of sh.e.l.ls and cartridges is being placed upon his head by the grinning shade of the late J. Pierpont Morgan. In the background is the filmy outline of George Washington, delivering the farewell address.

Then, of a sudden, German press policy toward the United States underwent a radical change. Silence supplanted abuse. It became so oppressive and so profound as to be eloquent. The purpose of this organized indifference soon became crystal-clear: on the one hand to bolster up German confidence in the innocuousness of American enmity, and, on the other, to slacken the United States' war preparations by committing no "overt act" of word or deed designed to stimulate them.

Bernstorff had by this time reached Berlin and there is reason to suspect that his was the crafty hand directing the new policy of ostensible disinterestedness in American belligerency. The arrival of American naval forces in European waters; the inauguration of conscription; the far-reaching preparations for succoring our Allies with money, food and ships; the splendid success of the Liberty Loan; the presence of General Pershing and the headquarters staff of the United States Army in France; the enrollment of nearly ten million young men for military service; our ambitious plans for the air war; the girding up of our loins in every conceivable direction, that we may play a worthy part in the war--all these things have been either deliberately ignored in Germany, by imperious government order, or, when not altogether suppressed from public knowledge, been slurred or glossed over in a way designed to make them appear as harmless or "bluff."

Finally, in an "inspired" article which offered sheer affront to the large body of truly patriotic American citizens of German extraction, the _Cologne Gazette_ bade Germans to continue to pin their faith in "our best allies," _i.e._, the German-Americans, who might be relied upon (quoth the semi-official Watch on the Rhine) to "inject into American public opinion an element of restraint and circ.u.mspection which has already often been a cause of embarra.s.sment to Herr Wilson and his English friends." "We may be sure," concluded this impudent homily, "that our compatriots are still at their post."

Events have marched fast since America "came in." In Great Britain and France men of perspicacity are not quite so jubilant over the effects of the Russian revolution as they were three months ago. They realize that the amazing cataclysm which began in Petrograd on March 13 warded off a treacherous peace between Romanoff and Hohenzollern, but also, alas!

that it has effectually eliminated Russia as a fighting factor for the purposes of this year's campaign. Englishmen and Frenchmen are only now beginning to comprehend the immeasurable task that confronts New Russia in the erection of a democratic state on the ruins of autocracy while faced by the simultaneous necessity of warring against an enemy in occupation of vast Russian territory.

To-day there is little inclination in London or Paris to underestimate the providential importance of American intervention. The specter of dwindling manpower in both countries is of itself sufficient to cause them to gaze gratefully and longingly toward our untapped reservoir of human sinews. _What is happening in chaotic and liberty-dazed Russia forces Englishmen and Frenchmen, however disconcerting to their pride, to acknowledge the absolute indispensability of American support_.

There are many among them candid enough to admit that democracy's horizon might now be perilously beclouded if the United States had refrained from playing a man's part in the battle of the nations. In Berlin, too, the true import of America's decision is dawning upon government and governed alike.