September 27th

Browsing in the Zimmerstrasse bookshop this afternoon, a familiar haunt in other days, I came across a sheaf of propaganda broadsides that were put out by Finance Minister Helfferich early in 1918 to push the Seventh War Loan, which apparently was not going like hot cakes and needed pushing. The many advantages of these bonds were set forth in glowing language, but there was one feature as to the collateral behind these scraps of yellow wilted paper which amused me. It read: “OUR ENEMIES WILL PAY.” Now that the uncomfortable boot is on the other foot, the loser in the conflict is indignant that payment should even be mentioned.

As I was about to barter for this and other sheafs of wartime literature, Theodor Wolff, long famous as the editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, came in. He recognized me as an American correspondent he had known before the war, but he was evidently unaware of my present mission and I did not enlighten him. The Weimar people or the local Soviet have confiscated the evening edition of his paper and the status of the morning Ausgabe is somewhat uncertain, so the great editor proposes to take a vacation. His thoughts had turned to Italy, and he wanted a copy of young Goethe’s Reise-Bilder of that fair land.

“In these days it is not in great demand,” explained the clerk, but he scurried around in the hope of securing a copy of the rather outmoded classic.

“If they will let me—and of course I am not at all sure that they will-I plan to descend the Brenner, see once again that gelobtes land, breathe in the fragrance of the orange and the lemon blossoms, if they still bloom, and above all I hope to get rid of this war cough, which is wearing me down,” said the once greatly feared and still-influential editor.

As to the future of the Vaterland, Herr Wolff was oppressed by gloomy forebodings. “The new men who have to face the problems of today are without political experience, and the task that awaits them would tax the most expert. Yes! the Social Democrats will miss

Bebel and Auer and Singer, who are gone. I did not approve of their politics but they at least knew what they wanted.”

Turning then abruptly from the domestic scene, Wolff gave me a message which he evidently hoped would in some way reach Paris, or even America. “At the Conference the victors could have chopped Germany into fragments and remnants. That would have been a solution, although a bad one. Or the Allies, under the guidance of America, could have bound the Germans to them by a treaty of friendship, which might have resulted in peace and security for all. Unfortunately the Conference pursued neither of these courses.”

Herr Wolff likes Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, although he is ready to admit that his selection for the post of plenipotentiary at Versailles was a mistake. “Bernstorff wanted the job, but Erzberger greatly admired Brockdorff and so he was chosen. What, in addition to this personal liking, that counted greatly in his favor, was the fact that during the war, when so many of our diplomats fell down, Brockdorff did a good job in Denmark where he was Minister. More than any other of our men he was successful in circumventing the British blockade. More than any other man, I think, he helped to keep our war machine going—and greased.”

When I mentioned that the Count’s attitude on the historic day at Versailles had been subjected to severe criticism, he nodded. “I have no knowledge of the facts,” he admitted, “and perhaps I should say nothing. But for the little it is worth, this is what I think. For years he has been in delicate health, and particularly under the strain of his mission in Copenhagen he, always addicted to the bottle, has been drinking enormous quantities of cognac. He admitted to me once that without these deep potions he simply could not keep going. But this, I think, is the real explanation of his tantrum that led to the fiasco of his mission, and fiasco it was, I admit. You see, Brockdorff is an imaginative, high-strung fellow, and he had persuaded himself that at the Conference he would have the opportunity to play, in reverse, the role of Talleyrand at the Vienna Congress. He ‘conceded’ that he was abler than any of the men with whom he would have to cross swords, that he knew more than any other delegate the deep crosscurrents that would clash. It was an opportunity to save Germany from the wolves and also to place Brockdorff on the pinnacle to which he had long aspired. Then when he arrived they placed him behind a stockade! I readily admit that this precaution probably saved his life, but it also prevented him, at least so he thinks, from playing the Talleyrand role, from acting the great part of which he had dreamed so often that to him, at least, it had become a reality. When this dream dissolved—well, I admit he acted very foolishly. But if you knew Brockdorff you would see how natural it was. Having failed in the west, his eyes are now turning to the east. In Russia he hopes to find our salvation. In a few weeks, unless I’m greatly mistaken, he will be sent to Russia.”¹

Herr Wolff did not think much of the men that the Colonel has in mind for German leadership (though of course I did not reveal his hopes). He said Rathenau was an “hysteric, a weathercock.” When defeat and collapse in the west were undeniable he had, doubtless with his tongue in his cheek, suggested a “levee en masse of the civilian population”—and then he went to Holland.

“Stresemann,” he thought, “was a much abler man, but he doubted the Allies would be inclined to trust him. In the early years of the war he had been an ardent disciple of von Tirpitz and an Annexationist—on a large scale. When poor Bethmann-Hollweg suggested in 1917 that we had better let Alsace and Belgium go, because we could not hold them, Stresemann made a savage attack on the Chancellor in an executive session of the Conduct of the War Committee of the Reichstag. No, the new men are our best bet. They at least bring fresh minds to the problems, but even so we are gambling with fate.” A pathetic incident awaited me on my return to the hotel. Two stalwart Russian girls were helping into the elevator a tottering old lady swathed in black. Wearing dark glasses, she hardly saw at all and evidently was bewildered and in great distress. One of the girls said to her: “But, Countess, the Artz says if you but submit to the operation he will rid you of those horrid cataracts and you will see again just as in the old days.”

“But I don’t want to see again,” protested the old lady. “The world is so ugly, so ugly.”

After depositing them and carrying me higher to my floor, Karl, the elevator attendant, explained: “That is the Countess Kleinmichel, once a great lady at the court of the Tsars. She but barely escaped the Bolsheviki and she arrived here without money and without her jewels. A syndicate of Russian dressmakers who also escaped have taken charge of her and are keeping her afloat. They secured for her, in remembrance of the days when she was the best-dressed woman in all the Russias, a little cottage down at Baden-Baden, and every now and then they bring her up to Berlin to see if her sight cannot be restored.”

Countess Kleinmichel! That indeed was a name to conjure with at the Tsarist court before the ten days dawned “that shook the world.”

I had never met her, but often in those distant days I had seen her driving down to the island or along the Neva behind her famous Orloff trotters. Hers had been the role of Princess Pauline in Vienna; to be seen in her salon was a title of nobility; to sit at her dinner table, well, that simply opened all doors. As a matter of fact, at least so I have been told by those who were in St. Petersburg at the time, the smashing of her banqueting hall was the first overt act of the Revolution. The Countess had ignored the rumblings, paid no attention to the “common” people, until this historic night when they invaded her palace, stole the silver and the jewels, tore from the court ladies their Parisian gowns. Lucky were those who, like the amazed hostess, were able to make their escape to the refuge of a friendly legation. Poor lady! I can well understand she has no desire to see the world that is so different from that in which she was the queen.

* * *

B.² came in this morning with a bulky manuscript written, not typed, by Herr von Jagow, who presided over the Imperial Foreign Office for the first two years of the war—until he was eased out by the military men. It is a defense of his stewardship, and even the hasty glance I was able to give it reveals its value as source document. It is written in Latin letters and not the “Gothic” characters which Bismarck loved and urged his countrymen to retain.

I told B. once again I was not in Berlin for a post-mortem, as many seemed to think, but to assess the possibilities of the future. I could only suggest that I be authorized to send it on to the Congressional Library, where it would be available to future historians, but this was not agreed to, so I kept the manuscript for twenty-four hours and then returned it to the ex-diplomat, who, now entirely out of the running, is vegetating in a little cottage near Potsdam.

Even during the hasty reading, at least of most of it, I found the document of absorbing interest, although not by any means convincing. Jagow insists that in permitting the existence, and indeed in encouraging the activities, of the Narodna Obrana in its anti-Austrian propaganda, the Belgrade Government incurred moral responsibility for the murder of the Archduke. Then he asserts, “It is not true that we drifted into the tense situation lightheartedly. We knew full well that the position we took up brought us near, very near, to war, but for obvious reasons we had no choice but to stand by our Ally. For some years now the South Slavs, spurred on by Russia, had threatened the integrity of the Danubian Monarchy and also the position and security of the German people in Mittel-Europa. We could not advise the Austrians, our partners in an endangered Deutschtum, to pursue an unworthy course even if it promised a postponement of hostilities—and that is all anyone, even the most optimistic, hoped, as the ultimate conflict was clearly inevitable.

“We had to assist Vienna to secure satisfaction for the dastardly murders, but after all the men at the Ballplatz were the representatives of a great power—we could not treat them as children in leading strings. Had the Austrian demands for satisfaction, which the Entente called an ultimatum, been shown to us we would most certainly have asked that it be ‘toned down.’ Indeed our archives will reveal that as soon as we were permitted to have an inkling of what the note contained, I was instructed by the Chancellor to ask that it be softened, but the reply came that it was too late, that the fatal message had gone forward to Belgrade and had in all probability been delivered. In any event, it was beyond recall. But admitting the stiffness of the note and deploring it, as the Imperial German Government did at the time, is far from conceding that we agreed with Sazonov in saying it aimed at reducing the Serbs to a state of vassalage. So, unhappily, it was on these irreconcilable interpretations of the Austrian demand that the issue was joined. Then Russia mobilized and war was inevitable.

“We, and I personally, with especial vehemence, are reproached for not having given more wholehearted support to Grey s plea for a conference. I agree that his sincerity cannot be questioned and that he wanted to avoid war, or at least to localize it, to keep Britain out; but he did not appreciate our position. We were bound to the Danubian Monarchy not only by a solemn treaty but by the ties of the common danger with which we were confronted. Xo protect Austria from the disruptive schemes of the South Slavs, to maintain her as a strong and independent power, was a Lebensfrage for us; it was truly a matter of life and death for the German Empire and the German people as well. Looking back, I think we went to great lengths in our endeavor to escape war. Had we gone any farther we would have lost our self-respect and endangered the future of the German race. I say again, Grey was sincere with his conference idea, but I assert he went about it the wrong way. As always, I fear he demonstrated his complete ignorance of Continental conditions. Practically he proposed that Austria should submit her case to a jury, the members of which through their organs of public opinion, the press, and the pulpits, had already voted disapproval of her course. It would have looked as though Austria, the culprit, was brought before a jury of her peers merely to receive condign punishment. To that humiliation we could not expose our Ally; the form of her demand we disapproved of, but its purpose was a just one and we could do no other than stand by it and by her.”

More briefly Jagow speaks of the march through Belgium. “In the Entente countries, and in America, this move is regarded as a blunder, one of those that are more disastrous than crimes, but no one there views the question from our standpoint or realizes the difficult choice with which we were confronted. With our General Staff for twenty years it had been axiomatic that when the inevitable renewal of war between France and Germany came, our armies would have to advance through Belgium. Many voices were raised in civilian circles against this plan because of the nearly century-old neutrality treaty to which we were a party, protecting Belgium from invasion by any and all of her neighbors. Now from 1904 on our General Staff was quite satisfied that military conventions had been arranged by Belgium with England and France authorizing England to send an expeditionary force to the Low Countries upon the outbreak of the expected war. In this case—and the fears of our soldiers, as it now appears, rested on solid foundations—a direct frontal attack, say by the way of the Vosges or by Verdun, would have left us with an exposed flank, a most precarious position to be placed in, so the view of the soldiers prevailed.

“That was the situation—our predicament, if you like—that the Chancellor hinted at when on August 4, 1914, he defended the march through Belgium with the words ‘Not kennt kein Gebotor’ ‘Necessity knows no law.’ It is also a fact that the Imperial Government gave to King Albert every assurance that if his government and people did not resist the passage of our troops any possible damage done or supplies requisitioned would be paid for, and compensation given even for the interruption of commerce and civilian activities, and that when the military emergency was over, the civilian authorities would be reinstated and the independence of Belgium would be maintained against all comers by Germany. Unfortunately for them, and I admit for us, the Belgians would not accept these terms. They preferred to join up with France and England, and so the duel between the two powers who had so much to fight about became a world war.”

Still more briefly Jagow dismisses the story of the War Council in Potsdam on July 5 th, at which the Kaiser presided and, as frequently reported, yielded to the arguments advanced by Hindenburg to the general effect that the crisis was a heaven-sent opportunity to settle for all time political and military supremacy in western Europe.

“No such council was held on that date or any approximate date. All those stories are Geschichten nicht Geschichte (gossip—not history) . Hindenburg, who is charged by his fiery eloquence with having turned the scale in favor of war, was not even in Berlin at the time. He was living the placid life of a retired officer in his cottage in Hanover and was not called back to active service until several weeks later, when he was sent to East Prussia where the Russian invaders were meeting with better success than the Army Command had anticipated.”