A soldier came with another story. After a sham fight conducted by the Kaiser the generals of the German army had been summoned to say what they thought of the Royal manoeuvres. All had formed an unfavourable opinion, yet one after another, with some insincere compliment, had wriggled out of the difficulty of candid criticism. But at length came an officer, who said:
“Sir, if it had been real warfare to-day there wouldn’t be enough wood in Germany to make coffins for the men who would be dead.”
The general lived through it, too—at first in a certain disfavour, but afterwards in recovered honour.
Such was the Kaiser, who a year ago had to meet the mighty wind of War. He was in Norway for his usual summer holiday in July 1914 when affairs were reaching their crisis. Rumour has it that he was not satisfied with the measure of the information that was reaching him, therefore he returned to Berlin, somewhat to the discomfiture of his ministers, intending, it is said, for various reasons (not necessarily humanitarian) to stop or at least postpone the war. If so, he arrived too late. He was told that matters had gone too far. They must go on now. “Very well, if they must, they must,” he is reported to have said. And there is the familiar story that after he had signed his name on the first of August to the document that plunged Europe into the conflict that has since shaken it to its foundations, he flung down his pen and cried, “You’ll live to regret this, gentlemen.”
PEN-PORTRAIT OF THE CROWN PRINCE
And then the Crown Prince. In August of last year nine out of every ten of us would have said that not the father, but the son, of the Royal family of Germany had been the chief provocative cause of the war. Subsequent events have lessened the weight of that opinion. But the young man’s known popularity among an active section of the officers of the army; their subterranean schemes to set him off against his father; a vague suspicion of the Kaiser’s jealousy of his eldest son—all these facts and shadows of facts give colour to the impression that not least among the forces which led the Emperor on that fateful first of August to declare war against Russia was the presence and the importunity of the Crown Prince. What kind of man was it, then, whom the invisible powers of evil were employing to precipitate this insensate struggle?
Hundreds of persons in England, France, Russia, and Italy must have met the Crown Prince of Germany at more or less close quarters, and formed their own estimates of his character. The barbed-wire fence of protective ceremony which usually surrounds Royal personages, concealing their little human foibles, was periodically broken down in the case of the Heir-Apparent to the German Throne by his incursion every winter into a small cosmopolitan community which repaired to the snows of the Engadine for health or pleasure. In that stark environment I myself, in common with many others, saw the descendant of the Fredericks every day, for several weeks of several years, at a distance that called for no intellectual field-glasses. And now I venture to say, for whatever it may be worth, that the result was an entirely unfavourable impression.
I saw a young man without a particle of natural distinction, whether physical, moral, or mental. The figure, long rather than tall; the hatchet face, the selfish eyes, the meaningless mouth, the retreating forehead, the vanishing chin, the energy that expressed itself merely in restless movement, achieving little, and often aiming at nothing at all; the uncultivated intellect, the narrow views of life and the world; the morbid craving for change, for excitement of any sort; the indifference to other people’s feelings, the shockingly bad manners, the assumption of a right to disregard and even to outrage the common conventions on which social intercourse depends—all this was, so far as my observation enabled me to judge, only too plainly apparent in the person of the Crown Prince. 21
Outside the narrow group that gathered about him (a group hailing, ironically enough, from the land of a great Republic) I cannot remember to have heard in any winter one really warm word about him, one story of an act of kindness, or even generous condescension, such as it is easy for a royal personage to perform. On the contrary, I was constantly hearing tales of silly fooleries, of overbearing behaviour, of deliberate rudeness, such as irresistibly recalled, in spirit if not in form, the conduct of the common barrator in the guise of a king, who, if Macaulay’s stories are to be credited, used to kick a lady in the open streets and tell her to go home and mind her brats.
SOME SALUTARY LESSONS
Only it was not Prussia we were living in, and it was not the year 1720, so the air tingled occasionally with other tales of little salutary lessons administered to our Royal upstart on his style of pursuing the pleasures considered suitable to a Prince. One day it was told of him that, having given a cup to be raced for on the Bob-run, he was wroth to find on the notice-board of entries the names of a team of highly respectable little Englishmen who are familiar on the racecourse; and, taking out his pencil-case, he scored them off, saying, “My cup is for gentlemen, not jockeys,” whereupon a young English soldier standing by had said: “We’re not jockeys here, sir, and we’re not princes; we are only sportsmen.”
I cannot vouch for that story, but I can certainly say that, after a particularly flagrant and deliberate act of rudeness, imperilling the safety of several persons in the village street, the Crown Prince of Germany was told to his foolish face by an Englishman, who need not be named, that he was a fool, and a damned fool, and deserved to be kicked off the road.
And this is the mindless, but mischievous, person, the ridiculous buccaneer, born out of his century, who was permitted to interfere in the destinies of Europe; to help to determine the fate of tens of millions of men on the battlefields, and the welfare of hundreds of millions of women and children in their homes. What wild revel the invisible powers of evil must have held in Berlin on that night of August 1, 1914, after the Kaiser had thrown down his pen!
PEN-PORTRAIT OF THE ARCHDUKE FERDINAND
Then the Archduke Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary, whose assassination was the ostensible cause of this devastating war—what kind of man was he? Quite a different person from the Crown Prince, and yet, so far as I could judge, just as little worthy of the appalling sacrifice of human life which his death has occasioned. Not long before his tragic end I spent a month under the same roof with him, and though the house was only an hotel, it was situated in a remote place, and though I was not in any sense of the Archduke’s party, I walked and talked frequently with most of the members of it, and so, with the added help of daily observation, came to certain conclusions about the character of the principal personage.
A middle-aged man, stiff-set, heavy-jawed, with a strong step, and a short manner; obviously proud, reserved, silent, slightly imperious, self-centred, self-opinionated, well-educated in the kind of knowledge all such men must possess, but narrow in intellect, retrograde in sympathy, a stickler for social conventions, an almost unyielding upholder of royal rights, prerogatives, customs, and usages (although by his own marriage he had violated one of the first of the laws of his class, and by his unfailing fidelity to his wife continued to resist it), superstitious rather than religious, an immense admirer of the Kaiser, and a decidedly hostile critic of our own country—such was the general