Book Description

This is not a "war book." It has not been my privilege at any stage of the Great Blood-Letting to come into close contact with the spectacular clash and din of the fray. Abler pens than mine, many of them wielded by the "neutral" hands of American colleagues, are immortalizing the terrible, yet irresistibly fascinating, scenes of this most stupendous drama. But every drama has its scenario and its prologue and its behind-the-curtain scenes--none ever written was so rich in these preliminaries and accessories as is Europe's epic. To have witnessed and lived through some of these was vouchsafed me; and to take American readers with me down the line of the past year's recollections and impressions is the sole object of this unpretentious effort. History, Carlyle said, was some one's record of personal experiences. To such experiences, as far as possible, the pages of this book are confined. For thirteen years to the week--I have always had a respectful horror of thirteen--I was a resident of Berlin. During the first five years of that period my identity was clear: I was the representative in Germany of an American newspaper, the Chicago Daily News. But in 1906 I became an international complication, for it was then I joined the staff of the London Daily Mail, which converted my status into that of an Americanserving British journalistic interests in Germany. It was not long afterward that welcome opportunity presented itself to renew home professional ties in connection with my British work, and for several years prior to the outbreak of the war I carried the credentials of Berlin correspondent of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. They were on my person, with my United States passport, the night of August 4, 1914, when the Kaiser's police arrested me as an "English spy." I feel it necessary to introduce so highly personal a narrative with these details in order to make plain, at the outset, that it is the narrative of an American born and bred. My proudest boast during ten years' association with Great Britain's premier newspaper organization was that I never lost my Americanism. My English editor, on the occasion of my earliest physical conflict with the Mailed Fist in Berlin, doubtless recalls taking me to task for invoking the protection of the United States Embassy, just as my British colleagues, concerned in the same imbroglio, had invoked the aid of their Embassy. Of the reams I have written for the Daily Mail in my day, I never sent it anything which sprang more sincerely from the heart than the message to its editor that I had not renounced allegiance to my country when I pledged my professional services to a British newspaper. I have no higher aspiration, as far as this volume is concerned, than that critics of it, hostile or friendly, may pronounce it "pro-Ally" from start to finish. I shall survive even the charge that it is "pro-English." I mean it to be all of that, as I have tried to breathe sincerity into every line of it. But I shall not feel inclined to accept without protest an accusation that the book is "anti-German." It is true that I regard this essentially a German-made, or rather a Prussian-made, war, and that I hold Prussian militarism and militarists solely responsible for plunging the world into this unending bath of blood and tears. It is true that I wish to see Germany beaten. I wish her beaten for the Allies' sake and for my own country's sake. A victorious Germany would be a menace to international liberty and become automatically a threat to the happiness and freedom of the United States. My years in Germany taught me that. But I cherish no scintilla of hatred or animosity toward the German people as individuals, who will be the real victims of the war. I saw them with my own eyes literally dragged into the fight against their will, fears and judgment. I know from their own lips that they considered it a cruelly unnecessary war and did not want it. They were joyful and prosperous a year and a half ago--never more so. They craved a continuance of the simple blessings of peace, unless their tearful protestations in the fateful month preceding the drawing of their mighty sword were the plaints of a race of hypocrites, and I do not think the percentage of hypocrisy higher in Germany, man for man, than elsewhere in the world. The German's Gott strafe England cult, for example, is no revelation to any man who has lived among them. Their hatred for Perfidious Albion has long been vigorous and purposeful.