Chapter 10

LORD KITCHENER VISITS AMERICA AND DISCUSSES OUR MILITARY PROBLEMS

I was standing with Count Zeppelin in the doorway of Mrs. John L. Gardner’s Fenway palace when the news of the great sea horror reached Boston. The German submarine U-68, scouting off the coast of Maine, had sunk the American liner _Manhattan_, the largest passenger vessel in the world, as she raced toward Bar Harbor with her shipload of non-combatants. Eighteen hundred and sixty-three men, women, and children went down with the ship. No warning had been given. No chance had been offered for women or children or neutral passengers to escape. The disaster duplicated the wrecking of the _Lusitania_ in 1915, but it exceeded it in loss of human life. The American captain and all his men shared the fate of the passengers intrusted to their care.

In Boston the effect on the German officers and men was unbelievable. Tremont and Boylston and Washington streets, echoing with cheers of the exulting conquerors, resembled the night of a Harvard-Yale football game when Brickley used to play for Cambridge University. The citizens of the big town, their senses deadened by their own disaster, received the news, and the ghastly celebration that followed it, without any real interest. The fact that an ex-Mayor of Boston and the son of the present Governor were among those that perished failed to rouse them. Boston, mentally as well as physically, was in the grip of the enemy.

That this was just the effect the Germans planned to produce is shown by General von Kluck’s own words. In an interview that he gave me for the London _Times_, after the occupation of Boston on July 2, 1921, General von Kluck said:

“The way to end a war quickly is to make the burden of it oppressive upon the people. It was on this principle that General Sherman acted in his march from Atlanta to the sea. It was on this principle that General Grant acted in his march from Washington to Richmond. Grant said he would fight it out on those lines if it took all summer--meaning lines of relentless oppression. In modern war a weak enemy like Belgium or like New England, which is far weaker than Belgium was in 1914, must be crushed immediately. Think of the bloodshed that would have stained the soil of Connecticut and Massachusetts if we had not spread terror before us. As it is, New England has suffered very little from the German occupation, and in a very short time everything will be going on as usual.”

The veteran warrior paused, and added with a laugh: “Better than usual.”

As a matter of fact, within a week Boston had resumed its ordinary life and activities. Business was good, factories were busy, and the theatres were crowded nightly, especially Keith’s, where the latest military photo-play by Thomas Dixon and Charles T. Dazey--with Mary Pickford as the heroine and Charley Chaplin as the comedy relief--was enjoyed immensely by German officers.

As to the commerce of Boston Harbor, it was speedily re-established, with ships of all nations going and coming, undisturbed by the fact that it was now the German flag on German warships that they saluted.

I received instructions from my paper about this time to leave New England and join General Wood’s forces, which had crossed the Delaware into Pennsylvania, where they were battling desperately with von Hindenburg’s much stronger army. On the day following my arrival at the American headquarters, I learned that Lord Kitchener had come over from England to follow the fighting as an eye-witness; and I was fortunate enough to obtain an interview with his lordship, who remembered me in connection with his Egyptian campaigns.

“The United States is where England would have been in 1914 without her fleet,” said Lord Kitchener.

“Where is that?”

“If England had been invaded by a German army in 1914,” replied the great organiser gravely, “she would have been wiped off the map. It was England’s fleet that saved her. And, even so, we had a hard time of it. Everything was lacking--officers, men, uniforms, ammunition, guns, horses, saddles, horse blankets, everything except our fleet.”

A sudden light burned in Lord Kitchener’s strange eyes, and he added earnestly: “There is something more than that. In 1914 Germany was wonderfully prepared in material things, but her greatest advantage over all other nations, except Japan, lay in her dogged devotion to her own ideals. She may have been wrong, as we think, but she believed in herself. There was nothing like it in England, and there is nothing like it in America. The German masses, to the last man, woman, and child, were inspired to give all that they had, their lives included, for the Empire. In England there was more selfishness and self-indulgence. We had labour troubles, strike troubles, drink troubles; and finally, as you know, in 1916 we were forced to adopt conscription. It will be the same story here in America.”

“Don’t you think that America will ultimately win?”

Lord Kitchener hesitated.

“I don’t know. Germany holds New York and Boston and is marching on Philadelphia. Think what that means! New York is the business capital of the nation. It is hard to conceive of the United States without New York.”

“The Americans will get New York back, won’t they?”

“How? When? It is true you have a population of eighty millions west of the Allegheny Mountains, and somehow, some day, their American spirit and their American genius ought to conquer; but it’s going to be a job. Patriotism is not enough. Money is not enough. Potential resources are not enough. It is a question of doing the essential thing before it is too late. We found that out in England in 1916. If America could have used her potential resources when the Germans landed on Long Island, she would have driven her enemies into the sea within a week; but the thing was not possible. You might as well expect a gold mine in Alaska to stop a Wall Street panic.”

I found that Lord Kitchener had very definite ideas touching great social changes that must come in America following this long and exhausting war, assuming that we finally came out of it victorious.

“America will be a different land after this war,” he said. “You will have to reckon as never before with the lowly but enlightened millions who have done the actual fighting. The United States of the future must be regarded as a vast-co-operative estate to be managed for the benefit of all who dwell in it, not for the benefit of a privileged few. And America may well follow the example of Germany, as England has since the end of the great war in 1919, in using the full power of state to lessen her present iniquitous extremes of poverty and wealth, which weaken patriotism, and in compelling a division of the products of toil that is really fair.

“I warn you that America will escape the gravest labour trouble with the possibility of actual revolution only by admitting, as England has admitted, that from now on labour has the whip hand over capital and must be placated by immense concessions. You must either establish state control in many industries that are now privately owned and managed and establish state ownership in all public utilities or you must expect to see your whole system of government swing definitely toward a socialistic regime. The day of the multi-millionaire is over.”

I found another distinguished Englishman at General Wood’s headquarters, Lord Northcliffe, owner of the London _Times_, and I had the unusual experience of interviewing my own employer for his own newspaper. As usual, Lord Northcliffe took sharp issue with Lord Kitchener on several points. His hatred of the Germans was so intense that he could see no good in them.

“The idea that Germany will be able to carry this invasion of America to a successful conclusion is preposterous,” he declared. “Prussian supermen! What are they? Look at their square heads with no backs to them and their outstanding ears! Gluttons of food! Guzzlers of drink! A race of bullies who treat their women like squaws and drudges and then cringe to every policeman and strutting officer who makes them goose-step before him. Bismarck called them a nation of house-servants, and knew that in racial aptitude they are and always will be hopelessly inferior to Anglo-Saxons.

“Conquer America? They can no more do it than they could conquer England. They can make you suffer, yes, as they made us suffer; they can fill you with rage and shame to find yourselves utterly unprepared in this hour of peril, eaten up with commercialism and pacifism just as we were. But conquer this great nation with its infinite resources and its splendid racial inheritance--never!

“The Germans despise America just as they despised England. John Bull was an effete old plutocrat whose sons and daughters were given up to sport and amusement. The Kaiser, in his famous Aix-la-Chapelle order, referred scornfully to our ‘contemptible little army.’ He was right, it was a contemptible little army, but by the end of 1917 we had five million fully equipped men in the field and in the summer of 1918 the Kaiser saw his broken armies flung back to the Rhine by these same contemptible Englishmen and their brave allies. There will be the same marvellous change here when the tortured American giant stirs from his sleep of indifference and selfishness. Then the Prussian superman will learn another lesson!”