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My trip to America was made principally at the instance of von Jagow and the Chancellor, and, in my farewell talk with the Chancellor a few days before leaving, I asked if it could not be arranged, since he was always saying that the civilian power was inferior to that of the military, that I should see Hindenburg and Ludendorf before I left.
Rations and R.E. material were loaded at Sailly, taken by train to the Mansion House Dump at Vermelles, and then by mule-drawn trucks to the front. The Exeter Dump was lively at times, especially when a machine gunner on Fosse 8 slag heap, popularly known as Ludendorf, was pointing his gun in that direction.
Because he had for years specialised in the study of this region he was suddenly called to the command of the German army which was opposing the Russian invasions. Ludendorf, who had been Colonel of a regiment at the attack on Liege, was sent with him as his Chief of Staff. The success of Hindenburg in his campaigns is too well known to require recapitulation here.
Von Falkenhayn had made many enemies in this section because he cut down the ammunition manufacturing until these men were losing money. So the first thing von Hindenburg did was to double all orders for ammunition and war supplies and to send Ludendorf to the industrial centres to make peace with the men who were opposed to the Government.
I suppose they will be telling him the next thing that Capt. Seeley and Ludendorf married sisters and the 2 of them has agreed to lay off each other.
We went to Grunewald, we passed Ludendorf's villa, curious credulous Ludendorf, who took Winston Churchill at his word when the later penned his appeal to Germany in the "Evening News" to save Europe by fighting the Bolsheviks, and prepared a plan whereby the German army was reconstituted in the strength at which in 1918 it was dissolved.
But the world was not to learn of it for some weeks. On the 27th of January, the Kaiser's birthday, the Chancellor, Field Marshal von Hindenburg, First Quartermaster General Ludendorf, Admirals von Capelle, von Holtzendorff and von Mueller and Secretary of State Zimmermann were invited to Great Headquarters to attend the Kaiser's birthday dinner.
At this banquet Gerard made the statement, "As long as such men as Generals von Hindenburg and Ludendorf, as long as Admirals von Capelle, von Holtzendorff and von Mueller headed the Navy Department, and the Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg directed the political affairs there would be no trouble with the United States."
But when the crisis came the Chancellor was as weak as the Kaiser and both of them sanctioned and defended what von Hindenburg and Ludendorf, the ammunition interests and the navy, proposed.
Many Germans in a position to know told me that the real dictator of Germany was Ludendorf.
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