The moral of the story as I saw it was quite different from what he had intended it to be.

A few days later I was again in the crowded beer hall when Herr Thomas entered. He liked to be in the limelight, and had a most extraordinary manner of apparently addressing his conversation to some selected individual, but carried it on in a tone which could be heard throughout the entire room. The Russian whistle which he still wore, and of which he was very proud, threatened to become a millstone about his neck, for returning refugees were accusing him of inefficiency during his reign, since they asserted that the Russians had stolen their goods from under his very nose.

After he had hurled the usual invectives against the invaders for my benefit, two splendid looking officers, captain and lieutenant, both perfect gentlemen, said that they hoped that I would not become so saturated with this talk that I would write unfairly about the Russians. They added that they had been impressed by the Russian officers in that region and the control which they had exercised over their men.

Early next morning I met the big man with the black beard who was either on my trail or had encountered me again by chance. When I said that I was going to Allenburg, of the destruction of which I had heard so much, he practically insisted that I go with him in his carriage. A mysterious stranger in brown was with him, who also assisted in the sight-seeing.

We road through a gently undulating farming and grazing country to the Alle River, where we boarded a little Government tug which threaded its way through dead cows, horses, pigs, dogs, and now and then a man floating down the stream. Battered trenches, ruined farmhouses, splintered woods, the hoof marks of Russian horses that had forded the stream under German fire, showed that the struggle had been intense along the river. The plan of battle formed in my mind. It was clear that the Germans had made the western bank a main line of defence, which, however, had been broken through.

"Just wait until we reach Allenburg," said the man in brown, "and you will see what beasts the murdering Russians are. Wait until you see how they have destroyed that innocent town!"

According to the course of the battle and the story of the Russian destruction of Allenburg, I expected to find it on the western bank, but to my great surprise it is on the eastern, with a considerable stretch of road, separating it from the river. We left the boat and walked along this road, on each side of which lay willows in perfect rows where they had been skilfully felled by the Russians. This sight evoked new assaults from my guides upon "the beasts" whom they accused of wanton and wilful violation of the arboreal beauty which the Allenburgers had loved.

I put myself in the place of the citizens of Allenburg, returning to their little town devastated by war; I understood their feelings and I sympathised with them. I was seeing the other side of Germany's page of conquest. The war map of Europe shows that she has done most of the invading, and during all the days I spent in the Fatherland I never heard a single word of pity for the people of the regions overrun by her armies—except, of course, the Pecksniffian variety used by her diplomats. It was now any rare privilege to return with German refugees to their ruined country, and they vied with one another when they talked to me in the presence of my guides in accusing the Russians of every crime under the sun. The war had been brought home to them, but in the meantime other Germans had brought the war home even more forcibly to the citizens of Belgium and northern France, but the thing could not balance in the minds of those affected.

I was conducted to a combination home and chemist's shop, the upper part of which had been wrecked by a shell. The Russians had looted the place of chemicals and had searched through all the letters in the owner's desk. These they had thrown upon the floor instead of putting them back neatly in the drawers.

My guides laid great stress on such crimes, but I took mental note of certain other things which were not pointed out to me. The beasts—as they always called them—had been quartered here for three weeks, but not a mirror had been cracked, not a scratch marred the highly polished black piano, and the well-stocked, exquisitely carved bookcase was precisely as it had been before the first Cossack patrol entered the city.

The owner viewed his loss philosophically. "When we have placed a war indemnity upon Russia I shall be paid in full," he declared in a voice of supreme confidence.

My guides never gave me an opportunity to talk alone with the few civilians in the place, and at the sausage and beer lunch the conversation was based on the "wanton destruction by the beasts of an innocent town."

After they had drunk so much beer that they both fell asleep I slipped quietly away and went about amid the ruins. I came upon human bodies burned to a crisp. Heaps of empty cartridge shells littered the ground, which I examined with astonishment for they were Russian, not German, shells, and must have been used by men defending the town.

I met a pretty girl of seventeen drawing water at a well, who had remained during the three weeks that the Russians were there to care for her invalid father, and had not suffered the slightest insult. Yet all my informants had told me that the Russians had spared none of the weaker sex who had remained in their path.

Further investigations had revealed that the Russians had not fired a shot upon the town, but that the Germans had destroyed it driving them out.

I entered a little Roman Catholic church in the undamaged section of the town and noted with interest that nothing had apparently been disturbed—this the more significant since the Russians hold a different faith.

I walked back towards the river and strolled through the neat, well-shaded, churchyard to the ruins of the large church, the dominating feature of the town. It was clear from what was left that the lines of the body and the spire had been of rare beauty for such an insignificant place as Allenburg.

"Too bad!" I remarked to a white-haired old man who was sitting on a bench mournfully contemplating the ruins.

"Sad, so sad!" he said in a voice full of grief. "And it seems sadder that it had to be done by our own people," he added.

"Were you here during the fighting?" I asked.

"I was," he answered. "I would rather die than leave this place, where I was born and where I have always lived."

I returned to the anxious guides add told them that I had visited the ruins of the church.

"A destruction which could serve no military purpose," declared the man in brown. "You see the methods of the people Germany is fighting."

I expressed a desire to seek only one more thing, the church on the road to Friedland which had been destroyed by the Russians after the sixty maidens had been driven into it. We went to it, but, alas! it had not been disturbed in the least. I somehow felt that my guides saw the lack of destruction with genuine regret. The big man with the black beard was at a loss to reconcile the story he told me at Konigsberg with the actual facts found on the spot.

"Somebody must have made a mistake," was all he said.

My last view of Allenburg was from across the river with the long rays of the setting sun burnishing the ruins of the once beautiful church, the church I saw months later on the screen in the London display room, the church that has been shown all over the world as evidence of Russian methods in war.

I went all through East Prussia studying first hand the effects of the great campaign. My luck increased from day to day. I secured a military pass to visit all hospitals in the XXth Army Corps, which aided my investigations not a little. The prejudice which I had against the Russians died in East Prussia. It was buried forever the following winter when I was with the Russian Army in the memorable retreat through the Bukowina. In East Prussia I was in an entirely different position from a man investigating conditions in Belgium, for I was in the German's own country after he had driven out the invader. I tried to see some youth whose hand had been cut off, but could not find a single case, although, everybody had heard of such mutilations. The fact that no doctor whom I questioned knew of any case was sufficient refutation, since a person whose hand had been cut off would need something more than a bandage tied on at home.

When the Russians entered the province they struck yellow and black posters everywhere announcing that it was annexed to Russia. In view of this the Russian officers were instructed to restrain their men and to treat the natives well. Isolated cases of violence, for the most part murder and robbery of the victim, had occurred where men had broken away from restraint, but they were surprisingly few.

After I returned to Berlin I met an American correspondent who was in East Prussia when I was. His sympathies were pro-German, but he was an, open and fair-minded man, who, like me, had left Berlin with a deep feeling against the Russians, thanks to the excellent German propaganda. "I went especially to get some good stories of Russian atrocities," he said. "I thought that every mile would be blood-marked with evidence, but I came back defeated. Some petty larceny and robbery, a Red Cross flag torn to shreds by a Russian shell, two old men murdered and robbed by Cossacks, and a woman in the hospital at Soldau, who had been outraged by five Cossacks, was all that I could find, even though I was aided by the German Government."

My own first-hand investigations convinced me that it would be difficult for any army in the world to conduct a cleaner campaign than Russia conducted in her first invasion of East Prussia. I remind the reader that I am speaking of the first invasion, for I have no personal knowledge of the second. Subsequently in Germany when. I spoke of the matter I was always told that it was the second invasion which was so bad. Perhaps! But I had been fooled when Berlin cried wolf the first time.

By a stroke of fortune while in East Prussia I became "assistant" for two days to a Government moving picture photographer who had a pass for himself and assistant in those happy days of inexactitude. We formed the kind of close comradeship which men form who are suffocated but unhurt by a shell which kills and maims others all about them. That had been our experience. He had, moreover, been over much of the ground covered by me behind the front.

"I am instructed to get four kinds of pictures," he explained. "(1) Pictures which show German patriotism and unity. (2) Pictures which show German organisation and efficiency. (3) Pictures which show evidence of humanity in the German Army. (4) Pictures which show destruction by the enemy. Some of my pictures are kept by the Kriegsministerium for purposes of studying the war. The greater part, however, are used for propaganda both at home and abroad. Furthermore, I must be careful to keep an accurate record of what each picture is. The pictures are then arranged and given suitable titles in Berlin,"

I thought of all this in the London display-room when the familiar picture of the ruined church flashed before my eyes with the title Beautiful Church at Allenburg Destroyed by the Russians—a deliberate lie on the film.

I have nothing to say against the Germans for knocking their own town to pieces or against the British and French for knocking French towns to pieces. That is one of the misfortunes of war.

The point is, that the propaganda department of the Wilhelmstrasse fully understands that people who do not see the war, especially neutrals, are shocked at the destruction of churches. The Germans have been taught an unpleasant lesson in this in the case of Rheims. Therefore they answer by falsifying a film when it suits their purpose with just as little compunction as they repudiate promises.

"A little thing!" you might say.

That adds to its importance, for it is attention to detail which characterises modern Germany. It is the subtle things which are difficult to detect. The Government neglects nothing which will aid in the ownership of public opinion at home and the influencing of neutrals throughout the world.



CHAPTER VII

THE IDEA FACTORY

A group of diplomats and newspaper correspondents were gathered at lunch in a German city early in the war, when one of the latter, an American, asked how a certain proposition which was being discussed would suit public opinion. "Will public opinion favour such a move?" he questioned.

"Public opinion! Public opinion!" a member of the German Foreign Office repeated in a tone which showed that he was honestly perplexed. "Why, we create it!"

He spoke the truth. They certainly do.

The State-controlled professor, parson and moving-picture producer appeal to limited audiences in halls and churches, but the newspaper is ubiquitous, particularly in a country where illiteracy is practically unknown, and where regulations bidding and forbidding are constantly appearing in the newspapers—the reading of which is thus absolutely necessary if one would avoid friction with the authorities.

In a free Press, like that of the United States or Great Britain, the truth on any question of public interest is reasonably certain to come to light sooner or later. Competition is keen, and if one paper does not dig up and publish the facts, a rival is likely to do so. The German Press was gaining a limited degree of freedom before the war, but that has been wiped away. As in other belligerent countries news of a military nature must quite properly pass the censor. But in Germany, unlike Great Britain, for example, all other topics must be written in a manner to please the Government, or trouble ensues for the writer and his paper. To a certain extent the Press is a little unmuzzled during the sittings of the Reichstag—not much, but somewhat, for the reports of the Reichstag proceedings are strictly censored. The famous speech of Deputy Bauer in May, 1916, was a striking example, for not a word of his speech, the truth of which was not questioned, was allowed to appear in a single German newspaper. The suppression of most of Herr Hoffmann's speech in the Prussian Diet in January, 1917, is another important case in point. This is in striking contrast to the British Parliament, which is supreme, and over whose reports the Press Bureau has no control. The German Press Bureau, on the other hand, revises and even suppresses the publication of speeches. When necessary, it specially transmits speeches by telegram and wireless to foreign countries if it thinks those speeches will help German propaganda.

The Berlin and provincial editors are summoned from time to time to meetings, when they are addressed by members of the Government as to what it is wise for them to say and not to say. These meetings constitute a hint that if the editors are indiscreet, if they, for example, publish matter "calculated to promote disunity," they may be subject to the increasingly severe penalties now administered. If a newspaper shows a tendency to kick over the traces, a Government emissary waits upon the editor, calls his attention to any offending article or paragraph, and suggests a correction. If a newspaper still offends, it is liable to a suspension for a day or even a week, or it may be suppressed altogether.

But in peace, as well as in war, editors all over Germany were instructed as to the topic on which to lay accent for a limited period, and just how to treat that topic. For example, during the three months preceding the war, Russia was bitterly attacked in the German Press. From August 1 to August 4, 1914, the German people had it crammed down their throats that she was the sole cause of the war. On August 4 the Government marshalled the editors and professors and ordered them to throw all the responsibility on Britain, and the hate was switched from one to the other with the speed and ease of a stage electrician throwing the lever from red to blue.

How do the editors like being mere clerks for the Government? The limited numbers of editors of independent thought, such as the "relentless" Count Reventlow, Maximilian Harden, and Theodor Wolff, detest such a role, and struggle against it. After sincere and thorough investigation, however, I am convinced the average German editor or reporter, like the average professor, prefers to have his news handed to him to digging it up for himself.

In this connection the remark made to me by the editor of a little paper in East Prussia is interesting. After the Russians had fallen back he told me of two boys in a neighbouring village whose hands had been cut off. He said that he was going to run the story, and suggested that I also use it. I proposed that we make a little trip of investigation, as we could do so in a couple of hours.

He looked surprised. "Why, we have the story already," he declared.

"But I am not going to write it unless I can prove it," I replied.

A moment later I heard him sigh with despair as he half whispered to a cavalry captain: "Yes, yes, alas, over there the Press is in the hands of the people!"

Many newspaper readers run more or less carelessly through articles, and many more simply read the headlines and headings. The Official Press Bureau, for which no detail is too minute, realises this perfectly, with the result that German newspaper headings are constructed, less with a view to sensationalism, as in some British and American papers, or with a view to condense accurately the chief news feature of the day, as to impress the reader—or the hearer, since the headlines are cried shrilly in Berlin and other cities—with the idea that Germany is always making progress towards ultimate victory. The daily reports of the General Staff have been excellent, with a few notable exceptions such as the Battle of the Marne and the Battle of the Somme. During reverses, however, they have shown a tendency to pack unpalatable truths in plenty of "shock absorber," with the result that the public mind, as I know from my personal investigations, is completely befogged as to the significance of military operations which did not go in a manner satisfactory to the German leaders. In all this the headline never failed to cheer. When the Russians were smashing the Austrians in the East, while the British and French were making important gains and inflicting much more important losses on the Somme, the old reliable headline—TERRIBLE RUSSIAN LOSSES—was used until it was worn threadbare.

What would you think, you who live in London or Hew York, if you woke up some morning to find every newspaper in the city with the same headlines? And would you not be surprised to learn that nearly every newspaper throughout your country had the same headlines that day? You would conclude that there was wonderful central control somewhere, would you not?

Yet that is what happens in Germany repeatedly. It is of special significance on "total days." Those are the days when the Government, in the absence of fresh victories, adds the totals of prisoners taken for a given period, and as only the totals appear in the headlines the casual reader feels nearer a victorious peace. On the morning of March 13, 1916, most of the papers had "total" headlines for Verdun.

Not so the Tageblatt. Theodor Wolff, its editor, has had so much journalistic experience, outside of Germany, and is, moreover, a man of such marked ability, that he is striving to be something more than a sycophantic clerk of the Government. He is not a grumbler, not a dissatisfied extremist, not unpatriotic, but possesses a breadth of outlook patriotic in the highest sense. On the morning after the Liebknecht riots in the Potsdamer Platz, his paper did not appear. The reason given by the Commandant of the Mark of Brandenburg was that he had threatened the Burgfriede by charging certain interests in Germany with attempting to make the war a profitable institution. But there are those who say that the police were very watchful in the newspaper offices that night, and that the Tageblatt did not appear because of its attempt to print some of the happenings in the Potsdamer Platz.

It has been the custom of Herr Wolff to write a front-page article every Monday morning signed T. W. On the last Monday morning in July, 1916, in a brilliantly written article, the first part of which patted the Government on the back for some things, he delicately expressed a desire for reform in diplomatic methods which would render war-making less easy. Then he added that if some statesman, such as Prince Bulow, had been called as adviser in July, 1914, a way to avert the war might have been found.

This so angered the Government, which has successfully convinced its great human sheep-fold that Germany is the innocent victim of attack, that the Tageblatt was suppressed for nearly a week, and, like the ex-Socialist paper Vorwaerts, was permitted to reappear only after it promised "to be good." Theodor Wolff was personally silenced for several months. This was his greatest but not his only offence. All over Germany the people have been officially taught to regard this great war time as die grosse Zeit. Wolff, however, sarcastically set the expression in inverted commas—thereby committing a sacrilege against the State.

Throughout Germany monuments have been reared and nails driven into emblems marked DIE GROSSE ZEIT. I have often wondered just what thoughts these monuments will arouse in the German's mind if his country is finally beaten and all his bloodshed and food deprivation will have been in vain.

The Press has, of course, been the chief instrument, reinforced by the schoolmaster, professor and parson, in spreading the doctrine of scientific hatred. It is not generally known that Deputy Cohn, speaking in the Reichstag on April 8, 1916, sharply criticised the method of interning British civilians at Ruhleben. He went on to say that, "reports of the persecutions of Germans in England were magnified and to some extent invented by the German Press in order to stir up war feeling against England."

I saw a brilliant example of the German Press Bureau's attention to details in the late autumn of 1914. I was on a point of vantage half way up the Schlossberg behind Freiburg during the first aerial attack by the French in that region. In broad daylight a solitary airman flew directly over the town and went on until he was directly over the extensive barracks just outside. Freiburg is a compact city of 85,000 inhabitants, and it would have been easy to have caused damage, and probably loss of life to the civilian population. It was clear to me in my front-row position and to the natives, with many of whom I afterwards discussed the matter, that the Frenchman was careful to avoid damaging the town, and circled directly over the barracks on which he dropped all his bombs. The Freiburg papers said little about the raid, but to my surprise when I reached Frankfurt and Cologne a week later, newspaper notices were still stuck about the cities calling upon Germans to witness again the dastardly methods of the enemy who attack the inhabitants of peaceful towns outside of the zone of operations.

The French very properly and effectively practised reprisals later, but the Germans believe that the shoe is on the other foot. And so it is in, everything connected with the war. The Germans tell you that they use poisonous gas because the French used it; in fact, only their good luck in capturing some of the French gas generators enabled them to learn the method. Britain, not Germany, violates the laws of the sea. It was the Belgians who were cruel to German troops, especially the Belgian women and the Belgian children.

When the Verdun offensive came to a standstill a spirit of restlessness developed which was reflected in the Reichstag, where a few Social Democrats attacked the Government because they believed that Germany could now make peace if she wished, and that further bloodshed would be for a war of conquest, advocated by the annexationists.

During the succession of German military victories, especially in the first part of the war, there was plenty of "front copy" both as news and filler. Some of the accounts were excellent. The reader seldom got the idea, however, that German soldiers were being killed and wounded, and after a time most of the battle descriptions contained much of soft nocturnal breezes whispering in the moonlight, but precious few real live details of fighting.

Regarding this point, a German of exceptional information of the world outside his own country expressed to me his utter amazement at the accounts appearing in the British Press of the hard life in the trenches. "I don't see how they hope to get men to enlist when they write such discouraging stuff," he said. After the Battle of the Somme opened, the German newspapers used to print extracts from the London papers in which British correspondents vividly described how their own men were mown down by German machine-guns after they had passed them, so well was the enemy entrenched. On that occasion one of the manipulators of public opinion said to me, "The British Government is mad to permit such descriptions to appear in the Press. They will have only themselves to blame if their soldiers soon refuse to fight!"

This is one of the many instances which I shall cite throughout this book to show that because the German authorities know other countries they do not necessarily know other subjects.

As weeks of war became months and months became years, the censorship screws were twisted tighter than ever, with the result that docile editors were often at their wits' end to provide even filler.

On July 14, for example, with battles of colossal magnitude raging east and west, the Berliner Morgenpost found news so scarce that it had to devote most of the front page to the review of a book called "Paris and the French Front," by Nils Christiernssen, a Swedish writer. I had read the book months before, as the Propaganda Department of the Foreign Office had sent it to all foreign correspondents.

It became noticeable, however, that as food portions diminished, soothing-syrup doses for the public increased. Whenever a wave of complaints over food shortage began to rise the Press would build a dyke of accounts of the trials of meatless days in Russia, of England's scarcity of things to eat, and of the dread in France of another winter. The professors writing in the Press grew particularly comforting. Thus on June 30 one of them comforted the public in a lengthy and serious article in the evening edition, of the Vossische Zeitung with "the revelation that over-eating is a cause of baldness."

The cheering news of enemy privations continued to such an extent that many Americans were asked by the more credulous if there were bread-tickets in Kew York and other American cities. In short, Germany is being run on the principle that when you are down with small-pox it is comforting to know that your neighbour has cholera.

The key-note of the German Press, however, has been to show that the war was forced on peace-loving Germany. Of the Government's success in its propaganda among its own people I saw evidence every day. The people go even one step farther than the Government, for the Government sought merely to show that it was forced to declare war upon Russia and France. Most of the German people are labouring under the delusion that Russia and France actually declared war on Germany. This misconception, no doubt, is partly due to the accounts in the German papers during the first days of August, 1914, describing how the Russians and French crossed the frontier to attack Germany before any declaration of war.

A German girl who was in England at the outbreak of war, and who subsequently returned to her own country, asked her obstinate, hard-headed Saxon uncle, a wealthy manufacturer, if Germany did not declare war on Russia and France. She insisted that Germany did, for she had become convinced not only in England but in Holland. Her uncle, in a rage, dismissed the matter with: Du bist falsch unterrichtet. (You are falsely informed.)

An American in Berlin had a clause in his apartment lease that his obligations were abruptly and automatically terminated should Germany be in a state of war. Yet when he wished to pack up and go his German landlord took the case to court on, the ground that Germany had not declared war.

The hypnotic effect of the German newspapers on the German is not apprehended either in Great Britain or in the United States. Those papers, all directed from the Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstrasse, can manipulate the thoughts of these docile people, and turn their attention to any particular part of the war with the same celerity as the operator of a searchlight can direct his beam at any part of the sky he chooses. For the moment the whole German nation looks at that beam and at nothing else.

* * * * *

In the late afternoon of an autumnal day I stopped at a little wayside inn near Hildesheim. The place had an empty look, and the woman who came in at the sound of my footsteps bore unmistakable lines of trouble and anxiety.

No meat that day, no cheese either, except for the household. She could, not even give me bread without a bread-ticket—nothing but diluted beer.

Before the war business had been good. Then came one misfortune after another. Her husband was a prisoner in Russia, and her eldest son had died with von Kluck's Army almost in sight of the Eiffel Tower.

"You must find it hard to get along," I said.

"I do," she sighed. "But, then, when fodder got scarce we killed all the pigs, so bother with them is over now."

"You are not downhearted about the war?" I asked.

"I know that Germany cannot be defeated," she replied. "But we do so long for peace."

"You do not think your Government responsible at all for the war?" I ventured.

"I don't, and the rest of us do not," was her unhesitating reply. "We all know that our Kaiser wanted only peace. Everybody knows that England caused all this misery." Then she looked squarely and honestly into my eyes and said in a tone I shall never forget: "Do you think that if our Government were responsible for the war that we should be willing to bear all these terrible sacrifices?"

I thought of that banquet table more than two years before, and the remark about creating public opinion. I realised that the road is long which winds from it to the little wayside inn near Hildesheim, but that it is a road on which live both the diplomat and the lonely, war-weary woman. They live on different ends, that is all.



CHAPTER VIII

CORRESPONDENTS IN SHACKLES

Towards the end of 1915 the neutral newspaper correspondents in Berlin were summoned to the Kriegs-Presse-Bureau (War Press Bureau) of the Great General Staff. The official in charge, Major Nicolai, notified them that the German Government desired their signature to an agreement respecting their future activities in the war. It had been decided, Major Nicolai stated, to allow the American journalists to visit the German fronts at more or less regular intervals, but before this was done it would be necessary for them to enter into certain pledges. These were, mainly:—

1. To remain in Germany for the duration of the war, unless given special permission to leave by the German authorities.

2. To guarantee that dispatches would be published in the United States precisely as sent from Germany, that is to say, as edited and passed by the military censorship.

3. To supply their own headlines for their dispatches, and to guarantee that these, and none others, would be printed.

After labouring in vain to instruct Major Nicolai that with the best of intentions on the part of the correspondents it was beyond their power to say in exactly what form the Omaha Bee or the New Orleans Picayune would publish their "copy," they affixed their signatures to the weird document laid before them. It was signed, without exception, by all the important correspondents permanently stationed in Berlin. Two or three who did not desire to hand over the control of their personal movements to the German Government for an unlimited number of years did not "take the pledge," with the result that they were not invited to join the personally conducted junkets to the fronts which were subsequently organised.

Nothing that has happened in Germany during the war illustrates so well the vassalage to which neutral correspondents have been reduced as the humiliating pledges extorted from them by the German Government as the price of their remaining in Berlin for the practice of their profession.

It was undoubtedly this episode which inspired the American Ambassador, Mr. Gerard, to tell the American correspondents last summer that they would do well to obtain their freedom from the German censorship before invoking the Embassy's good offices to break down the alleged interference with their dispatches by the British censorship. When the Germans learned of the rebuff which Mr. Gerard had administered to his journalistic compatriots, the Berlin Press launched one of those violent attacks against the Ambassador to which he has constantly been subject in Germany during the war.

As I have shown in a previous chapter the German Government attaches so much importance to the control and manufacture of public opinion through the Press that it is drastic in the regulation of German newspapers. It is therefore comprehensible that it should strive to enlist to the fullest possible extent the Press of other countries. At least one paper in practically every neutral country is directly subsidised by the German Foreign Office, which does not, however, stop at this. The attempt to seduce the newspapers of other nations into interpreting the Fatherland as the Wilhelmstrasse wishes it to be interpreted leads the investigators to a subterranean labyrinth of schemes which would fill a volume.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28, 1914. Long before that Dr. Hammann, head of the Nachrichtendienst of the German Foreign Office, had organised a plan for the successful influencing of the Press of the world. In May, 1914, the work of a special bureau under his direction and presided over by a woman of international reputation was in full operation.

The following incident, which is one of the many I might cite, throws interesting light on one method of procedure. The head of the special bureau asked one of the best known woman newspaper reporters of Norway if she would like to do some easy work which would take up very little of her time and for which she would be well paid.

The Norwegian reporter was interested and asked for particulars.

"Germany wishes to educate other countries to a true appreciation of things German. Within a year, or at most within two years, we shall be doing this by sending to foreign newspapers articles which will instruct the world about Germany. Of course, it is not advisable to send them directly from our own bureau; it is much better to have them appear to come from the correspondents of the various foreign newspapers. Thus, we shall send you articles which you need only copy or translate and sign."

This has been the practice in German journalism for years, and its extension to other countries was merely a chain in the link of Germany's deliberate and thorough preparations for the war.

With a few exceptions, German reporters and correspondents are underpaid sycophants, mere putty in the hands of the Government. Therefore, the chagrin of the officials over the independence and ability of the majority of the American correspondents is easy to understand. The Wilhelmstrasse determined to control them, and through them to influence the American Press. Hence the rules given above.

When a man signs an agreement that he will not leave Germany until the end of the war, without special dispensation, he has bound himself to earn his livelihood in that country. He cannot do this without the consent of the Government, for if he does not write in a manner to please them they can slash his copy, delay it, and prevent him from going on trips to such an extent that he will be a failure with his newspaper at home. His whole success depends therefore upon his being "good" much after the manner in which a German editor must be "good." If he expresses a wish to leave Germany before the end of the war and the wish is granted, he feels that a great favour has been conferred upon him and he is supposed to feel himself morally bound to be "good" to Germany in the future.

The American journalistic colony in Germany is an entirely different thing from what it used to be in pre-war days. Before 1914 it consisted, merely of the representatives of the Associated Press and United Press, half a dozen New York papers (including the notorious New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung), and the well-known and important Western journal, the Chicago Daily News. To-day many papers published in the United States are represented in Berlin by special correspondents. The influx of newcomers has been mostly from German-language papers, printed in such Teutonic centres as Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, etc. Journals like the Illinoiser Staats-zeitung, of Chicago, which for years past has barely been able to keep its head above water, have suddenly found themselves affluent enough to maintain correspondents in Europe who, for their part, scorn lodgings less pretentious than those of the de luxe Hotel Adlon in Unter den Linden.

The bright star in the American journalistic firmament in Berlin is Karl Heinrich von Wiegand, the special representative of the New York World. The New York World is not pro-German, but von Wiegand is of direct and noble German origin. Apart from his admitted talents as a newspaper man, his Prussian "von" is of no inconsiderable value to any newspaper which employs him. Von Wiegand, I believe, is a native of California. Persons unfriendly to him assert that he is really a native of Prussia, who went to the United States when a child. Wherever he was born, he is now typically American, and speaks German with an unmistakable Transatlantic accent. He is a bookseller by origin, and his little shop in San Francisco was wiped out by the earthquake. About forty-five years of age, he is a man of medium build, conspicuously near-sighted, wears inordinately thick "Teddy Roosevelt eye-glasses," and is in his whole bearing a "real" Westerner of unusually affable personality. Von Wiegand claims, when taunted with being a Press agent of the German Government, that he is nothing but an enterprising correspondent of the New York World. I did not find this opinion of himself fully shared in Germany. There are many people who will tell you that if von Wiegand is not an actual attache of the German Press Bureau, his "enterprise" almost always takes the form of very effective Press agent work for the Kaiser's cause. He certainly comes and goes at all official headquarters in Germany on terms of welcome and intimacy, and is a close friend of the notorious Count Reventlow.

My personal opinion, however, is that he is above all a journalist, and an exceedingly able one.

Von Wiegand's liaison with the powers that be in Berlin has long been a standing joke among his American colleagues. Shortly after the fall of Warsaw in August, 1915, when the stage in Poland was set for exhibition to the neutral world, he was roused from his slumbers in his suite at the Adlon by a midnight telephone message, apprising him that if he would be at Friedrichstrasse Station at 4.30 the next morning, with packed bags, he would be the only correspondent to be taken on a staff trip to Warsaw. Wiegand was there at the appointed hour, but was astonished to discover that he had been hoaxed. The perpetrators of the "rag" were some of his U. S. confreres.

Von Wiegand for nearly two years has been the recipient of such marked and exclusive favours in Berlin that Mr. Hearst's New York American (the chief rival of the New York World, and the head of the "International News Service" which has been suppressed in Great Britain, where it has been proved to have maliciously lied on divers occasions) decided to send to Germany a special correspondent who would also have a place in the sun. The gentleman appointed to crowd Mr. von Wiegand out of the limelight was a former clergyman named Dr. William Bayard Hale, a gifted writer and speaker, who obtained some international notoriety eight years ago by interviewing the Kaiser. That interview was so full of blazing political indiscretions that the German Government suppressed it at great cost by buying up the entire issue of the New York magazine in which the explosion was about to take place. Enough of the contents of the interview subsequently leaked out to indicate that its main feature was the German Emperor's insane animosity to Great Britain and Japan and his determination to go to war with them.

Dr. Hale also enjoyed the prestige of having once been an intimate of President Wilson. He had written the latter's biography, and later represented him in Mexico as a special emissary. Shortly before the war he married a New York German woman, who is, I believe, a sister or near relative of Herr Muschenheim, the owner of the Hotel Astor, which in 1914 and 1915 was inhabited by the German propaganda bureau, or one of the many bureaus maintained in New York City. From the date of his German matrimonial alliance Dr. Hale became an ardent protagonist of Kultur. One of his last activities before going to Germany was to edit a huge "yellow book" which summarised "Great Britain's violations of international law" and the acrimonious correspondence on contraband and shipping controversies between the British and American Governments. This publication was financed by the German publicity organisation and widely circulated in the United States and all neutral countries.

Dr. Hale, a tall, dark, keen-looking, smooth-shaven, and smooth-spoken American, received in Berlin on his arrival a welcome customarily extended only to a new-coming foreign Ambassador. He came, of course, provided with the warmest credentials Count Bernstorff could supply. Long before Hale had a chance to present himself at the Foreign Office, the Foreign Office presented itself to him, an emissary from the Imperial Chancellor having, according to the story current in Berlin, left his compliments at Dr. Hale's hotel. He had not been in Berlin many days before an interview with Bethmann-Hollweg was handed to him on a silver plate. Forthwith the New York American began to be deluged with the journalistic sweetmeats—Ministerial interviews, Departmental statements, and exclusive news tit-bits—with which Karl Heinrich von Wiegand had so long and alone been distinguishing himself.

I have told in detail these facts about von Wiegand and Hale because between them the two men are able to flood the American public with a torrent of German-made news and views, whose volume and influence are tremendous. The New York World's European news is "syndicated" to scores of newspapers throughout the American, continent, and the service has "featured" von Wiegand's Berlin dispatches to the exclusion, or at least almost to the eclipse, of the World's other war news. Hale's dispatches to the Hearst Press have been published all the way across the Republic, not only in the dailies of vast circulation owned by Mr. Hearst in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, but also in a great many other papers like the prominent Philadelphia North American, which subscribed to the "International News Service."

The German authorities understand all this perfectly well. That explains their unceasing attentions to von Wiegand and Hale, and to other valuable correspondents. One of these recently undertook to compile a book on Belgium in war-time for the purpose of white-washing Germans in American estimation. Accompanied by his wife, he was motored and wined and dined through the conquered country under the watchful chaperonage of German officers. He has returned to Berlin to write his book, although it is common knowledge there that during his entire stay in Belgium he was not permitted to talk to a single Belgian.

Although nominally catered to and fawned upon by the German authorities, the American correspondents cut on the whole a humiliating figure, although not all of them realise it. It is notorious they are spied upon day and night. They are even at times ruthlessly scorned by their benefactors in the Wilhelmstrasse. One of the Americans who essays to be independent, was some time ago a member of a journalistic party conducted to Lille. He left the party long enough to stroll into a jeweller's shop to purchase a new glass for his watch. While making the purchase he asked the Frenchman who waited on him how he liked the Germans. "They are very harsh, but just," was the reply. A couple of weeks later, when the correspondents were back in Berlin, Major Nicolai, of the War Press Bureau, sent for the correspondent, said to him that he knew of the occasion on which the American journalist had "left the party" in Lille, and demanded to know what had occurred in the watchmaker's shop. The correspondent repeated precisely what the Frenchman had said. "Well," snarled Major Nicolai, "why didn't you send that to your papers?" I may mention here that these parties of neutral correspondents are herded rather than conducted when on tour.

The American correspondents had a sample of the actual contempt in which the German authorities hold them on the day when the commercial submarine Deutschland returned to Bremen, August 23. For purposes of glorifying the Deutschland's achievement in the United States, the American correspondents in Berlin were dispatched to Bremen, where they were told that elaborate special arrangements for their reception and entertainment had been completed. Count Zeppelin, two airship commanders, who had just raided England, and a number of other national heroes would be present, together with the Grand Duke of Oldenburg at the head of a galaxy of civil, military, and naval dignitaries. The grand climax of the Deutschland joy carnival was to be a magnificent banquet with plenty of that rare luxury, bread and butter, at the famous Bremen Rathaus accompanied by both oratorical and pyrotechnical fireworks. The correspondents were given an opportunity to watch the triumphal progess of the Deutschland through the Weser into Bremen harbour, but at night, when they looked for their places at the Rathaus feast, they were informed that there was no room for them. An overflow banquet had been arranged in their special honour in a neighbouring tavern. This was too much even for some of the War Press Bureau's best American friends, and the overflow dinner party was served at a table which contained many vacant chairs. Their intended occupiers had taken the first train back to Berlin, thoroughly disgusted.

It is fair to say that several of the principal American correspondents in Berlin are making a serious effort to practise independent journalism, but it is a difficult and hopeless struggle. They are shackled and controlled from one end of the week to the other. They could not if they wished send the unadorned truth to the United States. All they are permitted to report is that portion of the truth which reflects Germany in the light in which it is useful for Germany to appear from time to time.

Germany has organised news for neutrals in the most intricate fashion. A certain kind of news is doled out for the United States, a totally different kind for Spain, and still a different brand, when emergency demands, for Switzerland, Brazil, or China. There is a Chinese correspondent among the other "neutrals" in Germany. The "news" prepared for him by Major Nicolai's department would be very amusing reading in the columns of Mr. von Wiegand's or Dr. Hale's papers.

There is a celebrated and pro-Ally newspaper in New York whose motto is "All the news that's fit to print." The motto of the German War Press Bureau is "All the news that's safe to print."



CHAPTER IX

ANTON LANG OF OBERAMMERGAU

While I was at home on a few weeks' visit in October, 1915, I read in the newspapers a simple announcement cabled from Europe that Anton Lang of Oberammergau had been killed in the great French offensive in Champagne. This came as a shock to many Americans, for the name of this wonderful character who had inspired people of all shades of opinion and religious belief in his masterful impersonation of Christ in the decennial Passion Play was almost as well known in the United States and in England as in his native Bavaria, and better, I found than in Prussia.

British and American tourist agencies had put Oberammergau on the map of the world. The interest in America after the Passion Play of 1910 was so great, in fact, that some newspapers ran extensive series of illustrated articles describing it. The man who played the part of Christ was idealised, everybody who had seen him liked him, respected him and admired him. Thousands had said that somehow a person felt better after he had seen Anton Lang. As a supreme test of his popularity, American vaudeville managers asked him to name his own terms for a theatrical tour.

And now the man who had imbued his life with that of the Prince of Peace had thrown the past aside, and with the spiked helmet in place of the Crown of Thorns had gone to his death trying not to save but to slaughter his fellow-men.

Truly, the changes wrought by war are great!

* * * * *

In Berlin I inquired into the circumstances of Anton Lang's death. Nobody knew anything definite. Berlin knew little of him in life, much less than London, New York or Montreal.

Munich is different. There his name is a household word. Herr von Meinl, then Director of the Bavarian Ministry, now member of the Bundesrat, told me that he believed that there was a mistake in the report that Anton had been killed.

Later, when tramping through the Bavarian Highlands, I walked one winter day from Partenkirchen to Oberammergau, for I had a whim to know the truth of the matter.

On the lonely mountain road that winds sharply up from Oberau I overtook a Benedictine monk who was walking to the monastery at Ettal. We talked of the war in general and of the Russian prisoners we had seen in the saw-mills at Untermberg. I was curious to hear his views upon the war, and I soon saw that not even the thick walls of a monastery are proof against the idea-machine in the Wilhelmstrasse. Despite Cardinal Mercier's denunciation of German methods in Belgium, this monk's views were the same as the rest of the Kaiser's subjects. He did, however, admit that he was sorry for the Belgians, although, in true German fashion, he did not consider Germany to blame. He sighed to think that "the Belgian King had so treacherously betrayed his people by abandoning his neutrality and entering into a secret agreement with France and Great Britain." He recited the regular story of the secret military letters found by the Germans after they had invaded Belgium, the all-important marginal notes of which were maliciously left untranslated in the German Press.

We parted at Ettal, and I pushed on down the narrow valley to Oberammergau. The road ahead was now in shadow, but behind me the mountain mass was dazzling white in the rays of the setting sun. "What a pity," I thought, "that the peasant must depart from these beautiful mountains and valleys to die in the slime of the trenches."

The day was closing in quiet and grandeur, yet all the time the shadow of death was darkening the peaceful valley of the Ammer. I became aware of it first as I passed the silent churchyard with its grey stones rising from the snow. For there, on the other side of the old stone wall that marks the road, was a monument on which the Reaper hacks the toll of death. The list for 1870 was small, indeed, compared with that of die grosse Zeit. I looked for Lang and found it, for Hans had died, as had also Richard.

I passed groups of men cutting wood and hauling ice and grading roads, men with rounder faces and flatter noses than the Bavarians, still wearing the yellowish-brown uniform of Russia. That is, most of them wore it. Some, whose uniforms had long since gone to tatters, were dressed in ordinary clothing, with flaming red R's painted on trousers and jackets.

An old woman with a heavy basket on her back was trudging past a group of these. "How do you like them?" I asked. "We shall really miss them when they go," she said. "They seem part of the village now. The poor fellows, it must be sad for them so far from home."

Evidently the spirit of new Germany had not saturated her.

I went through crooked streets, bordered with houses brightly frescoed with biblical scenes, to the Pension Dahein, the home of the man I wished to see. As he rose from his pottery bench to welcome me, I felt that beneath his great blue apron and rough garb of the working man was true nobility. I did not need to ask if he was Anton Lang. I had seen his picture and had often been told that his face was the image of His Who died on the Cross. I expected much, but found infinitely more. I felt that life had been breathed into a Rubens masterpiece. No photograph can do him justice, for no lens can catch the wondrous light in his clear blue eyes.

I was the only guest at the Pension Daheim; indeed, I was the only stranger in Oberammergau. I sat beside Anton Lang in his work room as his steady hands fashioned things of clay, I ate at table with him, and in the evening we pulled up our chairs to the comfortable fireside, where we talked of his country and of my country, of the Passion Play and of the war.

I had been sceptical about him until I met him. I wondered if he was self-conscious about his goodness, or if he was a dreamer who could not get down to the realities of this world, or if he had been spoiled by flattery, or if piety was part of his profession.

When I finally went from there I felt that I really understood him. His life has been without an atom of reproach, yet he never poses as pious. He does not preach, or stand aloof, or try to make you feel that he is better than you, but down in your heart you know that he is. He has been honoured by royalty and men of state, yet he remains simple and unaffected, though quietly dignified in manner. He is truly Nature's Nobleman, with a mind that is pure and a face the mirror of his mind.

To play well his role of Christus is the dominating passion of his life. Not the make-up box, but his own thoughts must mould his features for the role, which has been his in 1890, 1900 and 1910.

His travels include journeys to Rome and to the Holy Land. He is well read, an interesting talker, and an interested listener. He commented upon the great change in the spirit of the people, a change from the intoxicating enthusiasm of victory to a war-weary feeling of trying to hold out through a sense of duty. To my question as to when he thought the war would end, he answered: "When Great Britain and Germany both realise that each must make concessions. Neither can crush the other."

The doctrine that "only through hate can the greatest obstacles in life be overcome" has not reached his home, nor was there hanging on the wall, as in so many German homes, the famous order of the day of Crown Prince Rupert of Bavaria, which commences with "Soldiers of the army! Before you are the English!" in which he exhorts his troops with all the tricky sophistry of hate.

Anton Lang has worked long hard hours to bring up his family, rather than accept fabulous offers for a theatrical tour of America. He refused these offers through no mere caprice.

"I admit that the temptation is great," he said to me. "Here I must always work hard and remain poor; there I quickly could have grown rich. But the Passion Play is not a business," he continued earnestly. "Nearly three hundred years ago, when a terrible plague raged over the land, the people of Oberammergau vowed to Almighty God that if He would save their village, they would perform every ten years in His glory the Passion of His Divine Son. The village was saved and Oberammergau has kept its promise. You see, if I had accepted those theatrical offers I could never again live in my native village, and that would break my heart."

There is carefully preserved in the town hall at Oberammergau an old chronicle which tells of the plague. There will undoubtedly be preserved in the family of Lang a new chronicle, a product of the war, printed in another country, a chronicle which did not rest content with a notice of Anton's obituary, but told the details of his death in battle.

Frau Lang showed me this chronicle. She seemed to have something on her mind of which she wished to speak, after I told her that I was an American journalist. At length one evening, after the three younger children bad gone to bed, and the eldest was industriously studying his lessons for the next day, she ventured. "American newspapers tell stories which are not at all true, don't they?" she half stated, half asked.

My natural inclination was to defend American journalism by attacking that of Germany, but something restrained me, I did not know what. "Of course," I explained, "in a country such as ours where the Press is free, evils sometimes arise. We have all kinds of newspapers. A few are very yellow, but the vast majority seek to be accurate, for accuracy pays in the long run in self-respecting journalism." I thought that perhaps she was referring to the announcement of the death of the man who was sitting with us in the room. We both agreed, however, that such a mistake was perfectly natural since two Langs of Oberammergau had already been killed. In fact, Anton had read of his own death notice in a Munich paper. The American correspondent who had cabled the news on two occasions had presumably simply "lifted" the announcement from the German papers. Frau Lang could understand that very well when I explained, but how about the stories that Anton had been serving a machine-gun, and other details which were pure fiction?

She had trump cards which she played at this point. Two gaudily coloured "Sunday Supplements" of a certain newspaper combination in the United States were spread before me. The first told of how Anton Lang had become a machine-gunner of marked ability, and that he served his deadly weapon with determination. Could the Oberammergau Passion Play ever exert the old influence again, after this? was the query at the end of the article.

A second had all the details of Anton's death and was profusely illustrated. The story started with Anton going years ago into the mountains to try out his voice in order to develop it for his histrionic task. There was a brief account of how he had followed in the path of the Prince of Peace, and of the tremendous effect he had upon his audiences.

Then came the war, which tore him from his humble home. The battle raged, the Bavarians charged the French lines, and the spot-light of the story was played upon a soldier from Oberammergau who lay wounded in "No-Man's Land." Another charging wave swept by this soldier, and as he looked up he saw the face of the man he had respected and loved more than all other men, the face of Anton Lang, the Christus of Oberammergau. The soldier covered his eyes with his hands, for never had Anton Lang looked as he did then. The eyes which had always been so beautiful, so compassionate, had murder in them now.

The scene shifted. A French sergeant and private crouched by their machine-gun ready to repel the charge, the mutual relationship being apparently somewhat that of a plumber and his assistant. They sprayed the oncoming Bavarians with a shower of steel and piled the dead high outside the French trenches. The charge had failed, and the sergeant began to act strangely. At length he broke the silence. "Did you see that last boche, Jean?" he asked. "Did you see that face?" Jean confessed that he did not. "You are fortunate, Jean," said the sergeant. "Never have I seen such a face before. I felt as if there was something supernatural about it. I felt that it was wrong to kill that man. I hated to do it, Jean.—But then the butcher was coming at us with a knife two feet long."

I finished reading and looked up at the questioning eyes of Frau Lang and at the wonderful, indescribable blue eyes of the "butcher" across the table, who, I may add, is fifty-two years of age, and has not had a day's military training in his life.

"And look," said Frau Lang, "these men are not even Oberammergauers."

She pointed to one of the illustrations which depicted a small group of rather vicious-looking Prussians, with rifles ready peering over the rim of a trench. The picture was labelled "Four apostles now serving at the Front."

"And see," continued the perplexed woman, "there is Johann Zwinck, the Judas in the play. It says that he is at the front. Why, he is sixty-nine years old, and is still the village painter. Only yesterday I heard him complain that the war was making it difficult for him to get sufficient oil to mix his paint."

I was at a loss for words. "When one compares such terrible untruths with our German White Book," declared Frau Lang, "it is indeed difficult for the American people to understand the true situation."

I felt that it would be useless for me at that moment to explain certain very important omissions in the German White Book. Anything would look white in comparison with the yellow journal I had just read. But I knew, and tried to explain that the particular newspaper combination which printed such rubbish was well known in America for its inaccuracies and fabrications, and although it was pro-German, it would sacrifice anything for sensation. But the good woman, being a German, and consequently accustomed to standardisation, could not dissociate this newspaper from the real Press.



CHAPTER X

SUBMARINE MOTIVES

The German submarines are standardised. The draughts and blue prints of the most important machinery are multiplied and sent, if necessary, to twenty different factories, while all the minor stampings are produced at one or other main factory. The "assembling" of the submarines, therefore, is not difficult. During the war submarine parts have been assembled at Trieste, Zeebrugge, Kiel, Bremerhaven, Stettin, and half a dozen other places in Germany unnecessary to relate. With commendable foresight, Germany sent submarine parts packed as machinery to South America, where they are being assembled somewhere on the west coast.

The improvement, enlargement, and simplification of the submarine has progressed with great rapidity.

When I was in England after a former visit to Germany I met a number of seafolk who pooh-poohed extensive future submarining, by saying that, no matter how many submarines the Germans might be able to produce, the training of submarine officers and crew was such a difficult task that the "submarine menace," as it was then called in England, need not be taken too seriously.

The difficulty is not so great. German submarine officers and men are trained by the simple process of double or treble banking of the crews of submarines on more or less active service. Submarine crews are therefore multiplied probably a great deal faster than the war destroys them. These double or treble crews, who rarely go far away from German waters, and are mostly trained in the safe Baltic, are generally composed of young but experienced seamen. There are, however, an increasing number of cases of soldiers being transferred abruptly to the U-boat service.

The education of submarine officers and crew begins in thorough German fashion on land or in docks, in dummy or disused submarines, accompanied by much lecture work and drill. Submarine life is not so uncomfortable as we think. With the exception of the deprivation of his beer, which is not allowed in submarines, or, indeed, any form of alcohol, except a small quantity of brandy, which is kept under the captain's lock and key, Hans in his submarine is quite as comfortable as Johann in his destroyer.

Extra comforts are forwarded to submarine men, which consist of gramophone records (mostly Viennese waltzes), chocolate, sausages, smoked eels, margarine, cigars, cigarettes, and tobacco, a small and treasured quantity of real coffee, jam, marmalade, and sugar. All these, I was proudly told, were extras. There is no shortage in the German Navy.

I learned nothing of value about the largest German submarines, except that everybody in Germany knew they were being built, and by the time the gossip of them reached Berlin the impression there was that they were at least as large as Atlantic liners.

Now as to German submarine policies. The part that has to do with winning the war will be dealt with in the next chapter. But there is also a definite policy in connection with the use of submarines for winning the "war after the war."

The National Liberal Party, of which Tirpitz is the god, is at the head of the vast, gradually solidifying mammoth trust, which embraces Krupps, the mines, shipbuilding yards, and the manufactures. Now and then a little of its growth leaks out, such as the linking up of Krupps with the new shipbuilding.

The scheme is brutally simple and is going on under the eyes of the British every day. These people believe that by building ships themselves and destroying enemy and neutral shipping, they will be the world's shipping masters at the termination of the war. In their attitude towards Norwegian shipping, you will notice that they make the flimsiest excuse for the destruction of as much tonnage as they can sink. It was confidently stated to me by a member of the National Liberal Party, and by no means an unimportant one, that Germany is building ships as rapidly as she is sinking them. That I do not believe; but that a great part of her effort is devoted to the construction of mercantile vessels I ascertained beyond the shadow of a doubt.

I have met people in England who refuse to believe that Germany, battling on long lines east and west, and constructing with feverish haste war vessels of every description, can find sufficient surplus energy to build ships which will not be of the slightest use until after the war is finished. I can only say that I personally have seen the recently completed Hamburg-America liners Cap Polonio and Cap Finisterre anchored in the Elbe off Altona. They are beautiful boats of 20,000 and 16,000 tons, a credit to the German shipbuilding industry, which has made such phenomenal strides in recent years. At Stettin I passed almost under the stem of the brand new 21,000 ton Hamburg-South America liner, Tirpitz—which for obvious business reasons may be re-named after the war.

Both at Hamburg and Lubeck, where the rattle of the pneumatic riveter was as incessant as in any American city in course of construction, I was amazed at the number of vessels of five or six thousand tons which I saw being built. Furthermore, the giant North German, Lloyd liner, Hindenburg, is nearing completion, while the Bismarck, of the Hamburg-America Line will be ready for her maiden trip in the early days of peace.

Another part of the National Liberals' policy is the keeping alive of all German businesses, banks and others, in enemy countries. Some people in England seem to think that the Germans are anxious to keep these businesses alive in order to make money. Many Germans regard John Bull as extremely simple, but not so simple as to allow them to do that. So long as the businesses are kept going until after the war, when they can again start out with redoubled energy, the Germans desire nothing more. The Deutsche Bank, for example, which bears no comparison to an English or American bank, but which is an institution for promoting both political and industrial enterprise, is entrenched behind so powerful an Anglo-German backing in London, I was informed on many occasions, that the British Government dare not close it down. The mixture of spying and propaganda with banking, with export, with manufacture, seems so foreign to Anglo-Saxon ways as to be almost inconceivable.

Coincident with the destruction of foreign shipping, and the maintenance of their businesses in enemy countries (England and Italy especially) is the exploitation of the coal and other mines, oil wells, and forests in occupied enemy territory. The French and Belgian coalfields are being worked to the utmost, together with the iron mines at Longwy and Brieux. Poland is being deforested to such an extent that the climate is actually altering.

It is a vast and definite scheme, with such able leaders as Herr Bassermann, the real leader of the National Liberal Party, Herr Stresemann, and Herr Hirsch, of Essen. "We have powerful friends, not only in London, Milan, Rome, Madrid, New York, and Montreal, but throughout the whole of South America, and everywhere except in Australia where that verdammter Hooges (Hughes) played into the hands of our feeble, so-called leader, von Bethmann-Hollweg, by warning the people that the British people would follow Hughes' lead."

So much for the commercial part of submarining.

U-boating close to England has long ceased to be a popular amusement with the German submarine flotilla, who have a thoroughly healthy appreciation of the various devices by which so many of them have been destroyed. The National Liberals believe that the British will not be able to tackle long-distance submarines operating in the Atlantic and elsewhere. Their radius of action is undoubtedly increasing almost month by month. From remarks made to me I do not believe that these submarines have many land bases at great distances—certainly none in the United States. They may have floating bases; but this I do know—that their petrol-carrying capacity altogether exceeds that of any earlier type of submarine, and that their surface speed, at any rate in official tests, runs up to nearly 20 knots.

The trip of the Deutschland was not only for the purpose of bringing a few tons of nickel and rubber, but for thoroughly testing the new engines (designed by Maybach), for bringing back a hundred reports of the effects of submersion in such cold waters as are to be found off the banks of Newfoundland, for ascertaining how many days' submerged or surface travelling is likely to be experienced, and, indeed, for making such a trial trip across the Atlantic and back as was usual in the early days of steamships.



CHAPTER XI

THE EAGLE AND THE VULTURE

AS enthusiastic, war-mad crowd had gathered about an impromptu speaker in the Ringstrasse, not far from the Hotel Bristol, in Vienna, one pleasant August evening in 1914. His theme was the military prowess of Austria-Hungary and Germany.

"And now," he concluded, "Japan has treacherously joined our enemies. Yet we should not be disturbed, for her entrance will but serve to bring us another ally too. You all know of the ill-feeling between the United States and Japan. At any moment we may hear that the great Republic has declared war." He called for cheers, and the Ringstrasse echoed with Hoch! Hoch! Hoch! for the United States of America.

That was my introduction to European opinion of my country during the war. During my four weeks in the Austro-Serbian zone of hostilities, I had heard no mention of anything but the purely military business at hand.

The following evening from the window of an "American-Tourist-Special Train" I looked down on the happy Austrians who jammed the platform, determined to give the Americans a grand send-off, which they did with flag-waving and cheers. A stranger on the platform thrust a lengthy typewritten document into my hands, with the urgent request that I should give it to the Press in New York. It was a stirring appeal to Americans to "witness the righteousness of the cause of the Central Powers in this war which had been forced upon them." Three prominent citizens of Vienna had signed it, one of whom was the famous Doctor Lorenz.

Berlin, in an ecstasy of joyful anticipation of the rapid and triumphal entrance into Paris, was a repetition of Vienna. True, in the beginning, Americans, mistaken for Englishmen by some of the undiscerning, had been roughly treated, but a hint from those in high authority changed that. In like manner, well-meaning patriots who persisted in indiscriminately mobbing all members of the yellow race were urged to differentiate between Chinese and Japanese.

So I found festive Berlin patting Americans on the back, cheering Americans in German-American meetings, and prettily intertwining the Stars and Stripes and the German flag.

"Now is your opportunity to take Canada," said the man in the street. In fact, it was utterly incomprehensible to the average German that we should not indulge in some neighbouring land-grabbing while Britain was so busy with affairs in Europe.

The German Foreign Office was, of course, under no such delusion, although it had cherished the equally absurd belief that England's colonies would rebel at the first opportunity. The Wilhelmstrasse was, however, hard at work taking the propaganda which it had so successfully crammed down the throats of the German citizen and translating it into English to be crammed down the throats of the people in America. This was simply one of the Wilhelmstrasse's numerous mistakes in the psychological analysis of other people. But the Wilhelmstrasse possesses the two estimable qualities of perseverance and willingness to learn, with the result that its recent propaganda in the United States has been much more subtle and very much more effective.

The American newspapers which reached Germany after the outbreak of war gave that country its first intimation that her rush through Belgium was decidedly unpopular on the other side of the Atlantic. Furthermore, many American newspapers depicted the Kaiser and the Crown Prince in a light quite new to German readers, who with their heads full of Divine Right ideas considered the slightest caricature of their imperial family as brutally sacrilegious.

But the vast majority of Germans never saw an American newspaper. How is it, then, that they began to hate the United States so intensely? The answer is simple. In the early winter of 1914-15, the German Government with its centralised control of public opinion turned on the current of hatred against everything American as it had already done against everything British, for the war had come to a temporary stalemate on both fronts, and the Wilhelmstrasse had to excuse their failure to win the short, sharp pleasant war into which the people had jumped with anticipation of easy victory. "If it were not for American ammunition the war would have been finished long ago!" became the key-note of the new gospel of hate, a gospel which has been preached down to the present.

Just before I left Germany the "Reklam Book Company" of Leipzig issued an anti-American circular which flooded the country. The request that people should enclose it in all their private letters was slavishly followed with the same zest with which the Germans had previously attached Gott strafe England stickers to their correspondence.

The circular represented a 7000-ton steamer ready to take on board the cargo of ammunition which was arranged neatly on the pier in the foreground. The background was occupied by German troops, black lines dividing them into three parts, tagged respectively—30,000 killed, 40,000 slightly wounded, 40,000 seriously wounded. This, then, is the graphic illustration of the casualties inflicted upon the German Army by a single cargo of one moderate-sized liner.

Since at such a rate, it would take less than two hundred cargoes of this astoundingly effective ammunition to put the entire German Army out of action, one wonders why Britain troubles herself to convert her industries.

Ere the first winter of war drew to a close the official manipulators of the public opinion battery had successfully electrified the nation into a hate against the United States second only to that bestowed on Great Britain. And so it came about that the Government had the solid support of the people when the original submarine manifesto of February 4th, 1915, warning neutral vessels to keep out of the war zone, threatened a rupture with the United States. When two weeks later Washington sent a sharp note of protest to Berlin, the Germans became choleric every time they spoke of America or met an American.

"Why should we let America interfere with our plan to starve England?" was the question I heard repeatedly. Their belief that they could starve England was absolute. What could be simpler than putting a ring of U-boats round the British Isles and cutting off all trade until the pangs of hunger should compel Britain to yield? I heard no talk then about the "base crime of starving women and children," which became their whine a year later when the knife began to cut the other way.

In 1915 it was immaterial to the mass of Germans whether America joined their enemies or not. Their training had led them to think in army corps, and they frankly and sneeringly asked us, "What could you do?" They were still in the stage where they freely applied to enemies and possible enemies the expression, "They are afraid of us." "The more enemies, the more glory," was the inane motto so popular early in the war that it was even printed on post cards.

The Gulflight, flying the Stars and Stripes, was torpedoed in the reign of submarine anarchy immediately inaugurated. But two can play most games, and when the British Navy made it increasingly difficult for U-boats to operate in the waters near the British Isles, the German Foreign Office and the German Admiralty began to entertain divergent opinions concerning the advisability of pushing the submarine campaign to a point which would drag the United States into the war.

Only a few people in Germany know that von Bethmann-Hollweg strenuously opposed the plan to sink the Lusitania. That is, he opposed it up to a point. The advertisement from the German Embassy at Washington which appeared in American newspapers warning Americans could not have appeared without his sanction. In the last days of July, 1914, backed by the Kaiser, he had opposed the mobilisation order sufficient to cause a three days' delay—which his military opponents in German politics claim was the chief cause of the failure to take Paris—but in the case of the Lusitania he was even more powerless against rampant militarism.

For nearly a year after the colossal blunder of the Lusitania, there existed in the deep undercurrents of German politics a most remarkable whirlpool of discord, in which the policy of von Tirpitz was a severe tax on the patience of von Bethmann-Hollweg and the Foreign Office, for it was they who had to invent all sorts of plausible excuses to placate various neutral Powers.

The Kaiser after disastrously meddling with the General Staff during the first month of the war, subsequently took no active hand in military, naval and political policies unless conflicts between his chosen chieftains forced him to do so.

One striking instance of this occurred when the Wilhelmstrasse discovered that Washington was in possession of information in the "Arabic incident" which made the official excuses palpably too thin. After the German authorities became convinced that their failure to guarantee that unresisting merchantmen would not be sunk until passengers and crew were removed to a place of safety would cause a break with the United States, Tirpitz asserted that the disadvantages to Germany from America as an enemy would be slight in comparison with the advantages from the relentless submarining which in his opinion would defeat Britain. He therefore advocated that no concessions be made to Washington. Von Bethmann-Hollweg was of the opposite opinion. A deadlock resulted, which was broken when the Kaiser summoned both men to separate and secret conferences. He decided in favour of the Chancellor, whereupon Washington received the famous "Arabic Guarantees." It is highly significant that these were never made known to the German people.

Then followed six months of "frightfulness," broken pledges, notes, crises, semi-crises, and finally the great crisis de luxe in the case of the Sussex. When, a few days after my return to England from Germany, I used the expression "Sussex Crisis" to a leading Englishman, he expressed surprise at the term "crisis." "We did not get the impression in England that the affair was a real crisis," he said.

My experiences in Germany during the last week in April and the first four days in May, 1916, left no doubt in my mind that I was living through a crisis, the outcome of which would have a tremendous effect upon the subsequent course of the war. Previous dealings with Washington had convinced the German Government as well as the German people that the American Government would stand for anything. Thus the extraordinary explanation of the German Foreign Office that the Sussex was not torpedoed by a German submarine, since the only U-boat commander who had fired a torpedo in the channel waters on the fateful day had made a sketch of the vessel which he had attacked, which, according to the sketch, was not the Sussex.

The German people were so supremely satisfied with this explanation that they displayed chagrin which quickly changed to ugliness when the German Press was allowed to print enough of the news from Washington to prepare the public mind for something sharp from across the Atlantic. I have seen Berlin joyful, serious, and sad during the war; I have seen it on many memorable days; but never have I seen it exactly as on Saturday, April 22nd, the day when the Sussex Ultimatum was made known through the Press. The news was headlined in the afternoon editions. The eager crowds snapped them up, stood still in their tracks, and then one and all expressed their amazement to anybody near them, "President Wilson began by shaking his fist at Germany, and ended by shaking his finger," was the way one of the President's political opponents summarised his Notes. That was the opinion in Germany. And now he had "pulled a gun." The Germans could not understand it. When they encountered any of the few Americans left in their country they either foamed in rage at them, or, in blank amazement, asked them what it was all about.

It was extremely interesting to the student of the war to see that the people really did not understand what it was all about. Theodor Wolff, the brilliant editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, with great daring for a German editor, raised this point in the edition in which the Ultimatum was printed. He asserted that the German people did not understand the case because they purposely had been left in the dark by the Government. He said, among other things, that his countrymen were in no position to understand the feeling of resentment in the United States, because the meagre reports permitted in the German Press never described such details as the death agonies of women and children struggling helplessly in the water.

This article in the Tageblatt was the striking exception to the rest of the Press comment throughout Germany, for the German Government made one of its typical moves at this point. "To climb down or not to climb down," was a question which would take several days to decide. Public opinion was already sufficiently enraged against America to give the Government united support in case of a break, but it must be made more enraged and consequently more united. Thus on Easter Sunday the full current of hate was turned on in the German Press. President Wilson was violently attacked for working in the interest of the Allies, whom he wished to save. Germany would not bow to this injustice, she would fight, and America, too, would be made to feel what it means to go to war with Germany. The German Press did its part to inflame a united German sentiment, and the Foreign Office, which believes in playing the game both ways when it is of advantage to do so, with characteristic thoroughness did not permit the American correspondents to cable to their papers the virulent lies, such as those in the Tagliche Rundschau, about the affair in general and President Wilson in particular. These papers were furthermore not allowed to leave Germany.

On the evening preceding the publication of the Ultimatum, Maximilian Harden's most famous number of the Zukunft appeared with the title "If I Were Wilson." On Saturday morning it was advertised on yellow and black posters throughout Berlin, and was quickly bought by a feverish public to whom anything pertaining to German-American relations was of the sharpest interest. The remarkable article was directly at variance with all the manufactured ideas which had been storming in German brains for more than a year. The British sea policy was represented in a light quite different from the officially incubated German conception of it. President Wilson was correctly portrayed as strictly neutral in all his official acts. This staggered Harden's readers quite as much as his attacks on the brutal submarine policy of his country.