Twenty Years in Europe

Twenty Years in Europe
Samuel Byers

Samuel H. M. Byers

Twenty Years in Europe / A Consul-General's Memories of Noted People, with Letters / From General W. T. Sherman

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

While staying in Switzerland and Italy as a consular officer, during a period of well on to twenty years, I kept a diary of my life. Without being a copy of the diary, this book is made up from its pages and from my own recollections of men, scenes, and events. It was during an interesting period, too. There were stirring times in Europe. Two great wars took place; one great empire was born; another became a republic; and the country of Victor Emmanuel changed from a lot of petty dukedoms to a free Italy. It seemed a great period everywhere, and everything of men and events jotted down at such a time would of necessity have its interest. This book is not a history-only some recollections and some letters.

Among the letters are some fifty from General Sherman, whose intimate friendship I enjoyed from the war times till the day of his death. They are printed with permission of those now interested, and they may be regarded as in a way supplementary to the series of more public letters of General Sherman printed by me in the North American Review during his lifetime. They possess the added interest that must attach to the intimate letters of friendship coming from a brilliant mind. Their publication can only help to lift the veil a little from a life that was as true and good in private as it was noble in public.

    S. H. M. BYERS.

St. Helens, Des Moines.

CHAPTER I

1869

A LITTLE WHITE CARD WITH PRESIDENT GRANT’S NAME ON IT-A VOYAGE TO EUROPE-AN ENGLISH INN-HEAR GLADSTONE SPEAK-JOHN BRIGHT AND DISRAELI.

In the State Department at Washington, there is on file a plain little visiting card, signed by President U. S. Grant. That card was the Secretary’s authority for commissioning me Consul to Zurich. “I would much like to have that little card,” I said to an Assistant Secretary, long years afterward. “Most anybody would,” replied the official, smiling. “You may copy it, but it can not be taken from the files.”

That card, in its time, had been of consequence to me. It took me from a quiet little Western town to a beautiful Swiss city, where I was to spend many years of my life, and where I was to meet people, look on scenes and experience incidents worth telling about. And now it has led to my writing down the recollections of them in a book.

I had served four years, that were full of incident, in the Civil War. At its close the opportunity was mine to enter the regular army with a promotion; but many months in Southern prisons had nearly ruined my health and I declined the proffered commission.

“You did well,” wrote General Sherman to me, “to prefer civil to military pursuits; and I hope you will prosper in whatever you undertake. You now know that all things resulted quite as well as we had reason to expect” (referring to the Carolina campaign), “and now, all prisoners are free-the war over.”

The years immediately following the war were spent in efforts to get well, and now when this offer to go to Switzerland, with its glorious scenery and salubrious climate, came, I was overjoyed.

On the 23d of July, 1869, my newly wedded wife and I were standing on the deck of an ocean steamer in the harbor of New York. It was the “City of London.”

As the sun went down in the sea that night, many stood on the deck there with us, straining their eyes at a long, low strip of land bordering the horizon, now far behind them. It was America. Some were looking at it for the last time. My wife and I were not to see it again, except on flying visits, for sixteen years. The gentle breeze, the summer twilight, the vast and quiet ocean, the limitless expanse, the silence, save the panting of the engines, the white sails and the evening light of distant ships passing, gave us a feeling of far-offness from all that belonged to home.

Shortly the great broad moon, apparently twice its usual size, quietly slipped up out of the sea. At first we scarcely realized what it was, it was so great, so splendid, so unexpected. Moonlight everywhere is calming and impressive to the senses, but at sea, spread out over the limitless deep-with the great starlit tent of the heavens reaching all around and down to the waters, it touches the heart to its very depths. We scarcely slept that night-the sea and the moonlight were too beautiful. We walked the deck and built air castles.

August 3, 1869.-Yesterday our ship entered the Mersey and turned in among a wilderness of masts in front of Liverpool. We walked about some in the city of Gladstone’s birth, and that night had our first experience of the quiet comforts of a little English inn. The gentility, the welcome, the home snugness, the open fireplace, the teakettle, the high-posted, curtained beds, all contrasted strongly with a noisy, American tavern, with its loud talk and dirty tobacco-spitting accompaniments. The enormous feet of the Liverpool cart-horses also impressed us.

This morning we called at the American Consulate. The clerk said the Consul was away at the bank. Possibly like Hawthorne, one of his predecessors, he found nothing to do here but look after his salary. Anyway this Consulate is one of the best things in the gift of the President. In Hawthorne’s time, the pay was four times that of a Cabinet officer. Some years, the fees equaled the President’s own salary.

August 10.-The sights we had most wanted to see in London were the Tower, the Abbey, the Fish Market, the docks, and the fogs; these and Mr. Gladstone. The fogs we did not need to see; we could feel them in our very bones. It was fog everywhere. Three people were reported killed the very day we got here-run over by wagons and omnibuses, plowing through the murky thickness. Street lamps are burning in the middle of the afternoon.

Billingsgate Fish Market was not half so wicked as I had heard. It is said to be two hundred years old. It smells as if it were a thousand. There is possibly nothing so interesting to an American elsewhere on English earth, as the “Poets’ Corner” in Westminster Abbey, and, next to that, the Tower of London.

The opulence of the London docks also simply amazed us. Imagine an underground wine vault, seven acres in extent. The total vaults of the Eastern Dock Co. measure 890,000 square feet. The St. Catherine Docks cost nine millions of pounds.

John Lothrop Motley, the historian, is American Minister at London. We called. Found him a tall, aristocratic, consumptive-looking man, apparently not over glad to see traveling Americans. He had in his youth been a fellow student of Bismarck. Later, his daughters married Englishmen. Mr. Motley, like some other Americans sent to high office in London, is not extremely popular among his own countrymen. Neither did Grant approve him; but removed him later, spite of his backing by Charles Sumner.

The Secretary of Legation kindly got me a ticket to the gallery of the House of Parliament. It seemed extraordinary good luck, for whom else should I hear speak, that very afternoon, but John Bright, Mr. Gladstone and the future Lord Disraeli. I looked for oratory in Mr. Gladstone and saw none, either of voice, manner or word. The subject possibly required none. It was the Scotch Education Bill. The tall, grave, spare-looking man stood there with papers in his hand, talking in the most commonplace manner. Often he turned to some colleague and looked and waited as if expecting an explanation. At last he sat down suddenly, as if he had got up out of time. Mr. Disraeli had been sitting there, writing something on the top of his hat, which he had just taken off for the purpose. There seemed to be no desks. When I first noticed numbers of the members with their hats on, I wondered if the session had begun. What I noticed about Mr. Disraeli was the long legs he stretched out before him, the dark, intellectual face, the large features, the yellow skin, the long black hair, the Jewish expression. He followed Mr. Gladstone, but in a voice so subdued that I, in the gallery, did not understand a word he said. Burly John Bright, with his noble face and sturdy mien, followed. He looked like the typical Englishman. He spoke to the bill in an earnest voice and loud enough, but said nothing that I remember. A Scotch member then rose in confusion, mumbled a few words, got scared, mixed up, turned red and sat down. And this is English oratory, I meditated, and called to mind the names of Douglas and Webster and Lincoln and Blaine. I suppose I was simply there on the wrong day.

Sunday.-We spent a rainy Sunday in London, walking about the deserted streets. Every blind was down-there was silence everywhere. We seemed the only people alive in great London town. Our melancholy was added to by having, through misunderstanding, missed a train that was to take us to a friend in the country, where a hot dinner and English hospitality had awaited us.

At the Channel.-Up to this time there had been nothing so interesting and romantic to me in English scenery as the big castle above the white cliffs of Dover. There was the high, sloping, green plateau and the grey old Castle a thousand feet above us-below it was the sea-across the Channel, only thirty miles away, lay sunny France.

CHAPTER II

1869

IN SWITZERLAND-THE ALPS-EMBARRASSMENT IN NOT KNOWING THE LANGUAGE-CELEBRATED EXILES MEET IN A CERTAIN CAFE-BRENTANO-WAGNER-KINKEL-SCHERR-KELLER-AND OTHERS.

We stayed in Paris for a week. Then, one night, we crossed the plains of France, and at daylight saw with beating hearts the Jura Mountains. They were as a high wall of cliff and forest, green, deep valleys and running rivers, between France and the land of William Tell. The afternoon of that day saw us at our journey’s end. We were in beautiful Zurich. “Next to Damascus,” said Dixon, the English traveler, “I adore Zurich.”

That day the Glarus Alps, that usually shine so gloriously in front of the city, were obscured with clouds. But the beautiful lake was there, and old walls, and ivy-covered towers, and all the story of a thousand years.

Zurich was half a mediæval city in 1869. Years have since changed it; its walls and towers have been torn down, and granite blocks and fashionable modern streets take the place, in part, of its picturesqueness, as we saw it at that time.

Pretty soon I was, in a way, representing my country in a republic five times as old as our own. My predecessor recognized that he had been “rotated” out of office. He knew American party customs and turned over to me a few chairs, a desk, some maps, a flag, some books, some accounts and an enormous shield that hung over the door with a terrible-looking eagle on it, holding a handful of arrows. This was the coat of arms.

Living was cheap in Switzerland in the seventies. For one whole year we stayed in the “Pension Neptune,” a first-class place in every sense. Our apartment included a finely furnished salon, a bedroom, and a large room for the consulate. For these rooms, with board for two persons, we paid only $3.00 per day. Just outside the pension, workmen were laying street pavements of stone. They worked from daylight till dark, for forty cents a day. The servants in the pension were getting ninety cents a week and board. The clerk in the consulate was working for $300 a year, without board. Good wine, and we had it always at dinner, was a franc a bottle. Things have changed since then. Switzerland is a dear country to live in now.

In the “Neptune” we found the interesting family of Healy, the American artist. He had painted half the famous men of Europe, even then. There, too, was the family of Commander Crowninshield, distinguished of late days as an adviser of the President in the Spanish War.

What we were to do now, was to learn the French and German languages. Good teachers received but two francs, or forty cents, a lesson, and the necessity of the situation impelled us to hard study.

One evening, shortly after our arrival at Zurich, we were out boating with some friends, on the beautiful lake. There were myriads of pretty water-craft, filled with joyous people, circling all about. On a floating raft near by, a band of music was playing airs from Wagner. Zurich was a Wagner town. It was nearing sunset, when suddenly I happened to cast my eyes away from the people and the boats toward the upper end of the lake. “Look at the beautiful clouds,” I exclaimed. My companion smiled. “They are not clouds,” said he. “They are the Glarus Alps.” It was the fairest sight I ever beheld in my life. Some clouds on the horizon had suddenly floated away, and the almost horizontal rays of a setting summer sun were shining on the white snowfields and ice walls of the mountains, turning them into jasper and gold. “That is what we call the ‘Alpine glow,’” continued my friend. “It is like looking at the walls of Paradise,” I exclaimed. Pretty soon the sun went down behind the Zurich hills, the jasper and the gold faded from the ice and the rocks of the distant mountains, a cold gray-white, striving to keep off the coming darkness, fell upon the scene. It was the mountains putting on their robes of night. These were the scenes that I was now to live among. Music, they say, takes up the train of thought, where common words leave off. That night, by the waters of Lake Zurich, the soft strains of well-tuned instruments expressed a delight for me that tongue could not utter or pen describe.

Switzerland is full of scenes as glorious as this Glarus range, but this scene here, we were to have from our dining-room window always.

September 5.-The consul of the French Empire called to-day to pay his respects to the consul of the great republic. My consular experiences were about to commence. I was in a dilemma. My Swiss clerk, who spoke six languages for twenty-five dollars a month, had stepped out. I, a plain American, spoke no language except my own.

“Bonjour, Monsieur,” cheerily chirped the Frenchman. I advanced, and, seizing his neatly gloved hand, said “Good morning” in the plainest American. “What! Monsieur, you no parlez Francais? Ah! certainlee. Monsieur he parle Allemand. Monsieur speak a leetle Dutch?” he continued, bowing and smiling. “I am sorry,” I interrupted in embarrassment. “No Dutch-no Francais.” “Oh! Monsieur no understand. No, no. Ah, si, Monsieur, he speak Spanish, certainlee-Spanish better-Spanish better-very fine-Americans all speak Spanish-veree.” Again I shook my head, and again the consul bowed, and I bowed, and we both bowed together; and, after a few more genuflections and great embarrassment, he smiled and went backward out of the room. The situation was absurd. Then the Italian consul called, and then the Austrian consul, and similar scenes occurred. The same nonsense, without understanding a word.

I saw at once what was necessary for me to do. Solid months, years, day and night almost, were to be spent learning the language of the people among whom I was to live. Of course, Americans are not born with a knowledge of international law and an ability to speak half a dozen foreign languages.

The routine work of legalizing invoices, attending to passports, getting foolish fellow-countrymen out of jail, and helping others who were “strapped” to get to the nearest seaport, went on. Then there was the doing the polite thing generally by American travelers who called at the office to pay their respects to the consul.

There were many Americans abroad even then. The Swiss hotels reaped great harvests from the rich American and English nabobs who traveled about, displaying themselves and throwing away money.

“I have special charges for all these fine fellows,” said the landlord of the Bellevue to me. “Indeed, I have three rates, one for the Swiss, a higher one for foreigners, and a still higher one for the Americans and English. The rooms are the same, the dinners are the same, the wines the same; but the bills-ah, well, I am very glad they come.”

Soon I commenced writing reports for our Government. They were asked for on every conceivable subject, from sewer building to political economy. Every American who has a hobby, writes to his Congressman to know what they do about such things in Europe. The Congressman asks the State Department and the State Department asks the consul. He must answer in some way.

In this way, and in guarding against frauds on the customs, the time passed.

In the meantime my official position secured me the entrée into Swiss society. It enabled me at last to know Swiss life and to meet men and women worth the knowing. Many of them living in Zurich, or passing there, had European reputations, for the city, like Geneva, had that about it that attracted people of intellect. Zurich is called the Swiss Athens. Novelists, poets, historians, statesmen and renowned professors occupied chairs in the great University, or whiled away pleasant summers among the glorious scenery of the Alps near by.

August 10, 1870.-On this day I made the acquaintance of a remarkable man. It was Lorenzo Brentano of Chicago. He called at the consulate, and, after first greetings, I found out who he was. It was that Brentano who had been condemned to death after the Revolution of 1848 in South Germany. He had been more than a leader; he had been elected provisional president of the so-called German Republic. When the cause failed on the battlefield, he fled to America, and there, for many years, struggled with voice and pen for the freedom of the slaves, just as he had struggled in Germany for the freedom of his countrymen. The seed he helped to sow in Germany, at last bore fruit there, and he also lived to see American slavery perish. He was a hero in two continents. He had made a fortune in Chicago and was now educating his children in Zurich. His son is now an honored judge of the Superior Court of Chicago, a city Brentano’s life honored. He was also at this time writing virile letters for European journals, moulding public opinion in our favor as to the Alabama claims. We needed his patriotism. Americans will never know the great help Brentano was to us, at a time when nine-tenths of the foreign press was bitterly against us. I once heard a judge on the bench ask Brentano officially if he wrote the letters regarding America. “Yes,” said Brentano, who was trying a case of his own, and was a witness, “I wrote them.” “Then that should be reckoned against you,” said the judge, so bitter and unjust was the feeling abroad concerning our country, especially among Englishmen traveling or living on the Continent at this time. A kind word for America or Americans was rare.