The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-TimeWile, Frederic William
History
The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time
Wile, Frederic William
World War, 1914-1918
Sir Edward Goschen, unlike other British Ambassadors I knew in Berlin,
was never at any moment of his career there under any delusions as to
the _leitmotif_ of German policy toward Great Britain. No Teutonic wool
was ever pulled over his eyes. During the week of tension which ended
with war, he bore himself with tact and firmness characteristic of the
highest diplomatic traditions. Though never surrendering a position in
the trying negotiations with the Kaiser’s Government, the Ambassador did
not cease, up to the hour when he asked for his passports, to labor for
such peace as would be consistent with British interests. It is not
customary in the British service, I believe, to send a diplomatic
official back to a country with which England has meantime been at war,
but Sir Edward Goschen could return to Berlin with his head high,
enjoying not only, I am sure, the limitless confidence of his own
Government, but the unalloyed respect of Germany, as well.
Our party having been politely herded into the royal waiting-room of the
station, a couple of silk-hatted and frock-coated young Foreign Office
officials now buzzed busily about us, checking off our respective names
and identities on their duplicate lists, lest no unauthorized
_Engländer_ should escape through the ring of steel drawn tight around
Germany’s frontiers. Our safe-conduct train had now pulled in. We
found ourselves a somewhat indiscriminate collection of refugees.
Besides Sir Edward Goschen, there was, of course, the full embassy
family of secretaries, attachés, clerks, the wives of one or two of
them, and one bonnie group of babes with their blue-and-white "nannies."
Sir Horace Rumbold, the Counselor of the Embassy, who had conducted the
initial negotiations with Germany, monocled and unruffled, was as calm
as if he were starting off for a week-end in the country. Captain
Henderson, the Naval Attaché, and a prince of sailormen, had no inkling
of the undying discomfiture soon to be his, as an ingloriously interned
captive in neutral Holland, for his first assignment from the Admiralty
was to command a detachment of the ill-starred naval expedition to
Antwerp. Colonel Russell, the Military Attaché, was quitting German soil
with emotions a little different from those of the rest of us, for he
had seen the light of day at Potsdam in 1874, while his late father,
Lord Ampthill, was British Ambassador to Germany. It was only a few
weeks previous that the colonel’s own Berlin-born son had been
christened "William" under the august Godfatherhood of the Kaiser, who
sent the babe a golden cup emblazoned with the Hohenzollern arms. With
us, too, were Messrs. Gurney, Rattigan, Monck, Thomas and Astell, Sir
Edward Goschen’s able staff of secretaries and young attachés, who had
all "sat tight," in their British way, so splendidly during the
preceding forty-eight hours. The official party also included the
British Minister to Saxony, Mr. Grant-Duff, and Lady Grant-Duff, whose
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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