Ten Years Near the German Frontier: A Retrospect and a Warning
Tekst'Why,' asked the devout Danish Conservative, who believed that kings were still all-powerful, 'why does not King George of England help his cousin?'
It was only too plain that in spite of all warnings, 'his cousin' had put himself beyond all human help.
The Russian soldiers calmly doffed their caps and said 'I will go home for my part of the land!' The condition of Petrograd was such that chaos had come again. To save the lives of the Tsar and Tsarina, Kerensky insisted that capital punishment should be abolished. Count Christian Holstein-Ledreborg, fresh from Russia, reported that at the soldiers' meeting in the banquet room of the Winter Palace, speakers imposed silence by shooting at the ceiling! There was an attempt on the part of the new democrats to have prostitution, hitherto the luxury of the rich, put within the reach of all.
Russia had gone out of the war; it was surely time for us to go in. On April 7, 1917, I informed the Foreign Office that the President at Congress had declared us in a state of war with Germany. Further patience would have been a crime.
From that day the Legation took on a new aspect. Our decks were cleared for observation and action. Mr. Cleveland Perkins, who had courageously assumed the duties of the Secretary of Legation although relieved by a secretary, had new and difficult duties thrust upon him, to which he was fully equal. Mr. Seymour Beach Conger and Mr. John Covington Knapp were invaluable. No words of mine can express my sense of their self-sacrificing patriotism. Mr. Groeninger did three men's work and Captain Totten kept us all up to the mark by his fiery and persistent enthusiasm. No great dinners now! Even if we had been in the mood, fire and food had become too scarce. Mr. Conger did a most important service; he looked after the crowds of late comers from Germany, and discovered what light they could throw on German conditions. The State Department came to the rescue of our staff, which was few but fit; Mr. Grant-Smith was sent from Washington, with instructions to spend all the money that was necessary. He made a complete organisation, and I, struck heavily in health, laid down my task regretfully, leaving it in hands more competent under the changed circumstances.
There is no use in hiding the fact that, even before Russia broke, we who feared the triumph of Germany had many dark days; but there was never a time when my colleagues of the Allies despaired. How Mr. Allart, our Belgian colleague, lived through it, I do not know! The Danes stood by him manfully, and he never lacked the sympathy of his colleagues; but he suffered.
'The moment that England is seriously inconvenienced,' a German Professor of Psychology had said, 'she will give in.' We know how false this was. The race, pronounced degenerate, whose fibre was supposed to be eaten up with an inordinate love of sport, showed bravery to the backbone when it awakened to the real issues of the war. The upper classes of the English were splendid beyond words. Their sacrifices were terrible in the beginning, but their example told; and long before the crash of Russia came, there was no question of 'business as usual.' The British nation had realised that it was fighting, not only for its life, but for the principle on which its life is based. Yet the victory was by no means sure. 'The Empire may go down under the assaults of the Huns – let it go rather than that we should make a single compromise,' said Sir Ralph Paget. Mr. Gurney, Colonel Wade, and all the staunch men connected with his Legation, echoed his words.
Mr. Wells, the novelist preacher, may say what he will of the failure of English education, but it has produced men of a quality which all the men can understand and admire.18 As to the French, they, too, had their sober hours, and the saddest was caused, perhaps, by the dread that we had forgotten what the war was for; such soldiers as they were! – Captain de Courcel and Baron Taylor, suffering from wounds, and yet counting every hour with pain that kept them from their duty. But we came in none too soon; from my point of view, it is unreasonable to believe that the apparent disintegration of Germany and Austria was the cause of our victory. The cause of it was the increase of man power on the Western Front. In Copenhagen, our best military experts said, 'If the United States can be ready in time to supply the losses of the French and English; if your aviators can get to work, victory is assured.' These experts feared that we would be too slow, and there were dark, very dark, days in 1916 and 1917.
President Wilson's ideals were, in the beginning, looked on as doctrinaire – breezes from the groves of the Academies. Some of the elders and scribes of Europe, adept in the methods that nullified the good intentions of the Hague conferences, looked on his explanation of the aims of the conflict as the courtiers of Louis XIV. might have contemplated the pages of Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity, if Chateaubriand had lived at Port Royal in the time of those cynics; but the people in all the Scandinavian countries took to them as the expression of their aspirations. The chancelleries of Europe heard a new voice with a new note, but the people did not find it new. President Wilson found himself, when he gave the reasons of our country for entering the war, interpreting the meaning of the people. Until he spoke the war seemed to mean the saving of the territory of one nation, or the regaining it for another, or the existence of a nation's life. Standing out of the European miasma, with nothing to gain except the fulfilment of our ideals, and all to lose if there were to be losses of life and material, we gave a meaning to the war, – a new meaning which had been obscured.
Nevertheless, let us not forget that Germany has not changed her ideals; all the forces of the civilised world have not succeeded in changing them. Of democracy, in the American sense of the word, she has no more understanding than Russia – nor at present does she really want to have.
To a certain extent she conquered us. She obliged us to adopt her methods of warfare; to imitate her system of espionage; to co-ordinate, for the moment at least, all the functions of national life under a system as centralised as her own. If she gave temperance to Russia, an army to England, religion to France, she almost succeeded in depriving our Western hemisphere of its faith in God.
Her efficiency was so expensive that it was making her bankrupt; she was paying too much for her perfection of method. To justify it in the eyes of her own people she went to war. France was to pay her debts and Russia to be the way of an inexpensive road to the East. Her methods in peace cost her too much; a short war would save her credit. To our regret, perhaps remorse, we have been forced by her to fight her Devil with his own fire; and now we hope for a process of reconstruction in this great and populous country based on our own ideals; but we cannot change the aspirations or the hearts of the Germans. We can only take care that they keep the laws made by nations who have well-directed consciences, – this lesson I have learned near to their border.