I must mention another instance of the old-time indomitable New England spirit that came to my knowledge during these sad days. The Germans levied upon the city of Boston an indemnity of three hundred million dollars, this to be paid at the rate of three million dollars a day; and on the morning of July 4, two of von Kluck’s staff officers, accompanied by a military escort, marched down State Street into the now deserted region of banks and vaults and trust companies, to arrange for the regular payment of this sum. Entering the silent halls of a great banking house, they came to a rear office with the door locked. A summons to open being unanswered, they broke down this door; whereupon a shot, fired from within, killed the first soldier who crossed the threshold. A German volley followed, and, when the smoke cleared away, there sat a prominent Boston financier, his father’s Civil War musket clutched in his hands and the look of a hero in his dying eyes. All alone, this uncompromising figure of a man had waited there in his private office ready to defy the whole German army and die for his rights and his convictions. CHAPTER X 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: