Meeting the Enemy Read Online Free PDF

walking down the street with Sir Edward Grey, he would hang the latter on the nearest lamp post. He then expressed a desire to hang various British statesmen, but as I did not express any fear for the safety of the British Cabinet Ministers, he gradually cooled down, and expressed the hope that whatever happened we might always be friends, which, as I observed, was the only sensible remark he made.
     
    On 5 August, Reverend Williams entered the embassy to find a large hall filled with unshaven British journalists and correspondents who had been ordered by the German police to remain there overnight, ‘a strange sight’, Williams recalled. He quickly became aware of the prevailing atmosphere of fear and excitement. ‘I’m sure they mean to shoot us,’ one individual said. Williams watched as one of the embassy secretaries ‘who was afflicted with a stammer was doing his utmost to say something urgent on the telephone, but could only produce unintelligible sounds’.
    Their fears were unfounded. The embassy staff, along with the journalists and correspondents, departed by train very early on 6 August, leaving the American Embassy under Gerard to handle British interests. This included looking after scores of distressed British citizens who had become stranded in the capital, living with the threat of arrest and internment. British subjects had already been picked up on their way to the British Embassy and now they would be stopped as they went to the American Embassy. Gerard remonstrated with the Germans when he discovered that British subjects ‘without distinction as to age, or sex’ were being removed to the fortress of Spandau for questioning.
    After the death of Henry Hadley, Elizabeth Pratley had been whisked off for interrogation. Did Mr Hadley have picture postcards or portraits with him of any kind? Had Mr Hadley been seeing other gentlemen while in Berlin? Her replies were deemed evasive or hesitant enough for her to be taken to Münster and a ‘military prison’ for further questioning by an officer. ‘He hoped Mr Hadley had not been espionageing [sic] their ships. I said I was sure Mr Hadley had not. There was an interpreter there [and] he read a paper to me and said I was arrested as a spy.’
    Elizabeth protested her innocence. After extensive searches of her luggage, she was finally released: they had all the information they required, she was informed. Elizabeth was by now in such a weakened and nervous state that she was taken to a Roman Catholic hospital to recover.
    Not every Briton leaving Germany told stories of threat and harassment, of an enemy swelling with bellicose pride. Perhaps surprisingly The Times published readers’ letters praising the kindness individuals had received in Germany. One lady, Florence Phillips, took the newspaper to task over a report by a correspondent who described ‘ad nauseam’ and ‘in lurid terms the sufferings experienced by travellers in Germany in the last few days’. Travelling with a friend from Baden-Baden to Berlin, she maintained that that was not her experience.
     
We met with much more than the ordinary courtesy extended to women travelling. I was very much impressed by the real kindness and chivalry shown to us on three different occasions by German men, who voluntarily gave up their places to save us from sitting on our bags in a crowded corridor, and who put themselves to much trouble to obtain food for us at the stations . . . I should like to put on record that during all those hours of intense excitement, with a nation newly called to arms, we did not meet with a single instance of rudeness in Germany.
     
    In another letter dated 8 August under the headline ‘German Kindness’, the exotically named Bampfylde Fuller contended that, throughout a motor tour of Germany in early August, ‘Our experiences have been wholly of kindness and helpfulness. We were stopped every few miles by armed patrols, our papers examined, our boxes sometimes