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
No story of our Berlin war Embassy would be complete without a reference
to the Ambassador’s lieutenants, who, inspired by his own example of
unruffled good nature and limitless patience, capably played their own
trying parts. At Judge Gerard’s right hand was Joseph Clark Grew, First
Secretary, Harvard ’02, who, having shot wild beasts in the jungles of
Asia, would naturally not quail before Germans, no matter how stormy the
conditions. Grew is one of the exceptional young men in our diplomatic
service, because, he has weathered its snares unspoiled. A
distinguished secretarial career at such important posts as Cairo,
Mexico City, Vienna, Petrograd and Berlin, in the course of which he
frequently acted as Ambassador or Minister in charge, has left him, at
thirty-five, as natural, human and American as no doubt many Harvard men
are while still beneath the democratizing influence of the campus elms.
I mention the preservation of these qualities in Grew because they have
been known to disappear in many of our worthy young fellow countrymen,
jumped precipitately from college into representative positions abroad,
and who thenceforth refused to brush shoulders with anything beneath the
rank of royalty.
In Roland B. Harvey and Albert Billings Ruddock, respectively Second and
Third Secretaries, Judge Gerard was also the fortunate possessor of a
couple of adjutants who, in the presence of emergency, showed that
hustle and _bonhomie_, besides being American talents, are diplomatic
traits of no mean order. To preserve calm during the passport stampede
of the first week of August, 1914, was to exhibit the _finesse_ of a
Disraeli. Harvey and Ruddock are types of the younger generation of
American diplomatists who go in for the career with a view to devoting
themselves to its serious side and from among whom, some day, we ought
to evolve a professional service worthy of the name. Neither of them
ever struck me as being afflicted by such emotions as filled the breast
of a certain well-known young man when promoted from a European
first-secretaryship to one of our important ministerships in South
America. "Well, old boy," I asked him, "what do you think about going
to ----?" "Oh," he rejoined, "I suppose it’s all right, but it’s a h--
of a way from Paris!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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