There was no guard of honor to bid Sir Edward Goschen and his staff Godspeed from the Wilhelmstrasse. No single German was so poor as to do them reverence except a couple of sleepy policemen and half-a-dozen blear-eyed, early-rising Berliners on their way to work. None of them had yet learned to say _Gott strafe England_, so the lonely cavalcade of luggage-laden taxis, which were hauling Great Britain’s official representatives on the first stage of their journey out of the enemy’s capital, proceeded on its way without molestation or demonstration. The very day the Kaiser’s ambassador to England, Prince Lichnowsky, was accorded a departure from London amid honors customarily reserved for a ruling sovereign. Great Britain’s ambassador to Germany was leaving like a thief in the night, the Imperial Government having requested him, when shaking the dust of Berlin from his miscreant feet, to slink to the railway station as inconspicuously as possible and long before the righteous metropolis waked. Otherwise, it was solicitously suggested, _Kultur_, giving vent to the holy venom which now filled the Teutonic soul, might feel constrained to stone the Ambassador afresh. Thus, I, too, chaperoned by Grew, sneaked out of Berlin. My old German teacher was right. She said there was no word for "gentleman" in the Kaiser’s language. The fashion in which his people went to war with England proved it. CHAPTER XII SAFE CONDUCT Lehrter Bahnhof, the gateway through which so many American tourists have passed out of Berlin en route to Hamburg or Bremen steamers, was not _en fête_ in honor of the departing _Engländer_. My memory traveled back irresistibly to the last time the British Embassy in force was assembled there--to greet King George and Queen Mary when they arrived to visit the German Court in May, 1913. The rafters rang on that occasion with the blare of a Prussian Guards band thundering _God Save the King_, cousins George and William embraced fondly and kissed, and the station was swathed in the entwined colors of Germany and England. It was a different and forbidding aspect which the old brick and steel barn of a train-shed presented this muggy August morning. At every entrance sentries in gray and policemen with Brownings at the belt stood guard, for railways and stations were now as integral a part of the war-machine as fortresses and guns. Inside, infantrymen in gray from head to foot--all Germany had now grown gray--carrying rifles with fixed bayonets patrolled the platforms, searching each Englishman, as he came along, with glances mingling watchfulness and contempt.