In the afternoon of Black Saturday, General von FÜchter, the Commander-in-Chief of the German Army in England, took up his quarters, with his staff, in the residence of the German Ambassador to the Court of St. James in Carlton House Terrace, and, so men said, enjoyed the first sleep he had had for a week. (The German Ambassador had handed in his credentials, and been escorted out of England on the previous Monday.)

Throughout the small hours of Saturday morning I was at work near Romford as one of the volunteer bearers attached to Constance Grey's nursing corps. That is one reason why the memory of the north of London massacre will never leave me. One may assume that the German Army had no wish to kill nurses, but, as evidence of the terrible character of the onslaught on the poor defences of London, I may recall the fact that three of our portable nursing shelters were blown to pieces; while of Constance Grey's nurses alone five were killed and fourteen were badly wounded.

Myself, I had much to be thankful for, my only wound being the ploughing of a little furrow over the biceps of my right arm by a bullet that passed out through the back of my coat. But a circumstance for which my gratitude was more deeply moved was the fact that Constance Grey, despite a number of wonderfully narrow escapes, was entirely uninjured.

The actual entry of General von FÜchter and his troops into London has been so often described that nothing remains for me to say about that. Also, I am unable to speak as an eye witness, since Constance Grey and myself were among those who returned to London, in the rear of the German troops, with the ambulances. The enemy's line of communications stretched now from the Wash to London, and between Brentwood and London there were more Germans than English. I believe the actual number of troops which entered London behind General von FÜchter was under forty-eight thousand; but to the northward, northeast, and northwest the huge force which really invested the capital was spread in careful formation, and amply provided with heavy artillery, then trained upon central London from all such points as the Hampstead heights.

Although a formal note of surrender had been conveyed to General von FÜchter at Romford, after the annihilation of our entrenched troops, occasional shots were fired upon the enemy as they entered London. Indeed, in the Whitechapel Road, one of the General's aides-de-camp, riding within a few yards of his chief, was killed by a shot from the upper windows of a provision shop. But the German reprisals were sharp. It is said that fifty-seven lives paid the penalty for the shooting of that aide-de-camp. Several streets of houses in northeast London were burned.

By this time the Lord Mayor of London had been notified that serious results would accrue if any further opposition were offered to the German acceptance of London's surrender; and proclamations to that effect were posted everywhere. But the great bulk of London's inhabitants were completely cowed by hunger and terror. Practically, it may be said that, throughout, the only resistance offered to the Army of the invaders was that which ended so tragically in the trenches beyond Epping and Romford, with the equally tragical defence of Colchester, and some of the northern towns captured by the eighth German Army Corps.

In London the people's demand from the first had been for unconditional surrender. It was this demand which had culminated in the Westminster Riot. The populace was so entirely undisciplined, so completely lacking in the sort of training which makes for self-restraint, that even if the Government had been possessed of an efficient striking force for defensive purposes, the public would not have permitted its proper utilization. The roar of German artillery during Friday night and Saturday morning, with the news of the awful massacre in the northern entrenchments, had combined to extinguish the last vestige of desire for resistance which remained in London.

Almost all the people with money had left the capital. Those remaining—the poor, the refugees from northward, irresponsibles, people without a stake of any kind; these desired but the one thing: food and safety. The German Commander-in-Chief was wise. He knew that if time had been allowed, resistance would have been organized, even though the British regular Army had, by continuous reductions in the name of "economy," practically ceased to exist as a striking force. And therefore time was the one thing he had been most determined to deny England.

It is said that fatigue killed more German soldiers than fell to British bullets; and the fact may well be believed when we consider the herculean task General von FÜchter had accomplished in one week. His plan of campaign was to strike his hardest, and to keep on striking his hardest, without pause, till he had the British Government on its knees before him; till he had the British public—maddened by sudden fear, and the panic which blows of this sort must bring to a people with no defensive organization, and no disciplinary training—cowed and crying for quarter.

The German Commander has been called inhuman, a monster, a creature without bowels. All that is really of small importance. He was a soldier who carried out orders. His orders were ruthless orders. The instrument he used was a very perfect one. He carried out his orders with the utmost precision and thoroughness; and his method was the surest, quickest, and, perhaps, the only way of taking possession of England.

At noon precisely, the Lord Mayor of London was brought before the German Commander-in-Chief in the audience chamber of the Mansion House, and formally placed under arrest. A triple cordon of sentries and two machine-gun parties were placed in charge of the Bank of England, and quarters were allotted for two German regiments in the immediate vicinity. Two machine-guns were brought into position in front of the Stock Exchange, and all avenues leading from the heart of the City were occupied by mixed details of cavalry and infantry, each party having one machine-gun.

My acquaintance, Wardle, of the Sunday News, was in the audience chamber of the Mansion House at this time, and he says that he never saw a man look more exhausted than General von FÜchter, who, according to report, had not had an hour's sleep during the week. But though the General's cheeks were sunken, his chin unshaven, and his eyes blood-red, his demeanour was that of an iron man—stern, brusque, taciturn, erect, and singularly immobile.

Food was served to this man of blood and iron in the Mansion House, while the Lord Mayor's secretary proceeded to Whitehall, with word to the effect that the Commander-in-Chief of the German forces in England awaited the sword and formal surrender of the British Commander, before proceeding to take up quarters in which he would deal with peace negotiations.

Forster's great work, "The Surrender," gives the finest description we have of the scene that followed. The Field Marshal in command of the British forces had that morning been sent for by a Cabinet Council then being held in the Prime Minister's room at the House of Commons. With nine members of his staff, the white-haired Field Marshal rode slowly into the City, in full uniform. His instructions were for unconditional surrender, and a request for the immediate consideration of the details of peace negotiations.

The Field Marshal had once been the most popular idol of the British people, whom he had served nobly in a hundred fights. Of late years he himself had been as completely disregarded, as the grave warnings, the earnest appeals, which he had bravely continued to urge upon a neglectful people. The very Government which now despatched him upon the hardest task of his whole career, the tendering of his sword to his country's enemy, had for long treated him with cold disfavour. The general public, in its anti-national madness, had sneered at this great little man, their one-time hero, as a Jingo crank.

(As an instance of the lengths to which the public madness went in this matter, the curious will find in the British Museum copies of at least one farcical work of fiction written and published with considerable success, as burlesques of that very invasion which had now occurred, of the possibility of which this loyal servant in particular had so earnestly and so unavailingly warned his countrymen.)

Now, the blow he had so often foreshadowed had fallen; the capital of the British Empire was actually in possession of an enemy; and the British leader knew himself for a Commander without an Army.

He had long since given his only son to the cause of Britain's defence. The whole of his own strenuous life had been devoted to the same cause. His declining years had known no ease by reason of his unceasing and thankless striving to awaken his fellow countrymen to a sense of their military responsibilities. Now he felt that the end of all things had come for him, in the carrying out of an order which snapped his life's work in two, and flung it down at the feet of England's almost unopposed conqueror.

The understanding Englishman has forgiven General von FÜchter much, by virtue of his treatment of the noble old soldier, who with tear-blinded eyes and twitching lips tendered him the surrender of the almost non-existent British Army. No man ever heard a speech from General von FÜchter, but the remark with which he returned our Field Marshal's sword to him will never be forgotten in England. He said, in rather laboured English, with a stiff, low bow:

"Keep it, my lord. If your countrymen had not forgotten how to recognize a great soldier, I could never have demanded it of you."

And the man of iron saluted the heart-broken Chief of the shattered British Army.

We prefer not to believe the report that this, the German Commander's one act of gentleness and magnanimity in England, was subsequently paid for by the loss of a certain Imperial decoration. But, if the story was true, then the decoration it concerned was well lost.

It was a grim, war-stained procession that followed General von FÜchter when, between two and three o'clock, he rode with his staff by way of Ludgate Hill and the Strand to Carlton House Terrace. But the cavalry rode with drawn sabres, the infantry marched with fixed bayonets, and, though weariness showed in every line of the men's faces, there was as yet no sign of relaxed tension.

Throughout that evening and night the baggage wagons rumbled through London, without cessation, to the two main western encampments in Hyde Park. The whole of Pall Mall and Park Lane were occupied by German officers that night, few of the usual occupants of the clubs in the one thoroughfare, or the residences in the other, being then in London.

By four o'clock General von FÜchter's terms were in the hands of the Government which had now completed its earning of the title of "The Destroyers." The Chief Commissioner of Police and the principal municipal authorities of greater London had all been examined during the day at the House of Commons, and were unanimous in their verdict that any delay in the arrangement of peace and the resumption of trade, ashore and afloat, could mean only revolution. Whole streets of shops had been sacked and looted already by hungry mobs, who gave no thought to the invasion or to any other matter than the question of food supply. A great, lowering crowd of hungry men and women occupied Westminster Bridge and the southern embankment (no German soldiers had been seen south of the Thames) waiting for the news of the promised conclusion of peace terms.

There is not wanting evidence that certain members of the Government had already bitterly repented of their suicidal retrenchment and anti-defensive attitude in the past. But repentance had come too late. The Government stood between a hungry, terrified populace demanding peace and food, and a mighty and victorious army whose commander, acting upon the orders of his Government, offered peace at a terrible price, or the absolute destruction of London. For General von FÜchter's brief memorandum of terms alluded threateningly to the fact that his heavy artillery was so placed that he could blow the House of Commons into the river in an hour.

At six o'clock the German terms were accepted, a provisional declaration of peace was signed, and public proclamations to that effect, embodying reference to the deadly perils which would be incurred by those taking part in any kind of street disorder, were issued to the public. As to the nature of the German terms, it must be admitted that they were as pitiless as the German tactics throughout the invasion, and as surely designed to accomplish their end and object. Berlin had not forgotten the wonderful recuperative powers which enabled France to rise so swiftly from out of the ashes of 1870. Britain was to be far more effectually crippled.

The money indemnity demanded by General von FÜchter was the largest ever known: one thousand million pounds sterling. But it must be remembered that the enemy already held the Bank of England. One hundred millions, or securities representing that amount, were to be handed over within twenty-four hours. The remaining nine hundred millions were to be paid in nine annual instalments of one hundred millions each, the first of which must be paid within three months. Until the last payment was made, German troops were to occupy Glasgow, Cardiff, Portsmouth, Devonport, Chatham, Yarmouth, Harwich, Hull, and Newcastle. The Transvaal was to be ceded to the Boers under a German Protectorate. Britain was to withdraw all pretensions regarding Egypt and Morocco, and to cede to Germany, Gibraltar, Malta, Ceylon, and British West Africa.

It is not necessary for me to quote the few further details of the most exacting demands a victor ever made upon a defeated enemy. There can be no doubt that, in the disastrous circumstances they had been so largely instrumental in bringing about, "The Destroyers" had no choice, no alternative from their acceptance of these crushing terms.

And thus it was that—not at the end of a long and hard-fought war, as the result of vast misfortunes or overwhelming valour on the enemy's side, but simply as the result of the condition of utter and lamentable defencelessness into which a truckling Government and an undisciplined, blindly selfish people had allowed England to lapse—the greatest, wealthiest Power in civilization was brought to its knees in the incredibly short space of one week, by the sudden but scientifically devised onslaught of a single ambitious nation, ruled by a monarch whose lack of scruples was more than balanced by his strength of purpose.