THECORNHILL MAGAZINE.SEPTEMBER 1916.THE KAISER AS HIS FRIENDS KNEW HIM.BY A NEUTRAL DIPLOMAT.Amongthe high German officials whose opinion of William the Second’s foreign policies I quoted in my previous article, I do not recall a single one whose loyalty or sense of propriety did not prevent his offering any personal criticisms of the Emperor to whose service his best efforts were being devoted. An apprehensiveness, bordering on positive dread in many instances, of the ultimate consequences of the Kaiser’s impetuosities was often apparent in the observations of their franker moments, but personal aspersions were never cast. This was, of course, no more than could have been expected from the well-bred men-of-the-world that they were. And in this connection it may be in point to add that not even among the rather gay and not always discreetly reserved officers of the Crown Prince’s suite (with whom I was thrown not a little during their visit to India in 1911) was loose criticism of the Emperor ever heard, either by myself or by others who enjoyed still fuller opportunities than I had for meeting them on intimate and confidential terms.Frederick William himself was, I regret to record, far less discreet than those about him in his references to his imperial progenitor, and I recall very clearly that quick-tongued youth’s sarcastic allusions to certain rulings of the Kaiser in the matter of the treatment of the natives of some of the islands of German Melanesia. The Crown Prince, I should explain, I had found consumed with interest concerning the progress his people were making in several of their Pacific island colonies I had recently visited, and it was to his very palpable desire to ‘pump me dry’ of any information I might have picked up regarding these incipient ‘places in the sun’ that I owed a number of hours of conversation with him the edification of which would hardly otherwise have fallen to my lot.The outburst I had in mind was led up to by my royal inquisitor’s asking me for my views concerning the comparative progress of the three political divisions of the island of New Guinea, and by my replying that, if the criterion of judgment was to be the contentment, physical well-being, and economic usefulness of the native, I should rate British New Guinea first, Dutch New Guinea an indifferent second, and German New Guinea a very poor third. It was anything but a courtier-like speech on my part, but I was not meeting Frederick William in my official capacity, and, moreover, he had made a point of asking that I should give him perfectly frank answers to his questions. (‘None of the “bull con’,” as the Yankees say,’ was the way he put it; ‘give me the “straight goods.”’ Both expressions, as he confessed with a grin, he had picked up from a ‘neat little filly from Kentucky’ he had ‘seen a bit of’ at Ostend the previous summer.)The Crown Prince, in spite of his undeniable personal courage, of which I saw several striking instances in the course of his Indian visit, is far from being what the Anglo-Saxons call a ‘good sport,’ and on this occasion he made no pretence of hiding his annoyance. Because, however, as transpired later, there were several other matters which he had in mind ‘pumping’ me on, he evidently thought it best not to vent his spleen for the moment on one whose usefulness was not quite exhausted. This befell subsequently, I may add, though under circumstances which have no especial bearing on my present subject.Tapping his boot with his riding-whip—he had been playing polo—the Prince sat in a sort of spoiled-child pout of petulance for a minute or two, before bursting out with: ‘Doubtless you’re right. I’ve had hints of the same thing myself from private reports. It’s all due to the pater’s unwarranted interference in something he knows nothing about. Old X——’ (mentioning the previous Governor of German New Guinea by name) ‘has forgotten more about handling Papuans than the pater ever knew. The pater has put his foot in it every time he has moved in our Pacific colonies.’ (It may be in order to explain that not only does the Crown Prince speak excellent English, but that on this Indian visit he made a point of resorting to English idioms, colloquialisms, and slang to an extent which at times became positively ridiculous. I have quoted here almost his exact language.)Frederick William went on to give me a spirited and approving account of the manner in which a German colonist near Herbertshöhehad put an end to raids on his yam patch by planting on each corner-post of the enclosure the ‘frizzly’ head of a Papuan who had been shot in the act of making off with the succulent tubers, concluding with the dogmatic assertion that the only way to handle the black man was to ‘bleed him white.’I had the temerity to reply that, from what I had seen, the more ‘old X——’ continued to forget of what he thought he knew about handling Papuans, the better it would be for German colonial prospects in New Guinea, and as a consequence threw my royal interrogator into another fit of sulks. It is only fair to say that the ‘interference’ of which the Crown Prince waxed so unfilially censorious really consisted of measures calculated slightly—but only slightly—to mitigate the brutal repressiveness toward the natives which had characterised the German administration of New Guinea from the outset. The one bright spot in the brief but bloody annals of German overseas colonisation was the six or eight years’ régime of the broad-minded and humane Dr. Solf—the present Colonial Secretary—in Samoa. This tiny and comparatively unimportant Pacific outpost was the single Teutonic colony in which I found the natives treated with anything approaching the humanitarian consideration extended to them so universally by the English and the French. Dr. Solf may well be, as has been occasionally hinted from Holland, the hope of those conservative and intelligent Germans who are known to be silently working for a reborn and ‘de-Prussified’ Fatherland after the war.As I have said, the Crown Prince was the only highly placed German whom I ever heard speak slightingly in a personal way of the Kaiser, and that impetuous youth was—as he still is—a law unto himself. Such loyalty and discretion, however, did not characterize all prominent Germans in private life, and it is to several of these I am indebted for the illuminating sidelights their observations and anecdotes threw on the human side of William II. Of such, I fancy the Baron Y——, who voyaged on the same steamer with me from Zanzibar to Port Said several years ago, had enjoyed perhaps the most intimate opportunities for an intelligent appraisal of his Emperor.The Baron was a scion of one of the oldest and wealthiest of Bavarian noble families, a graduate of the École des Beaux Arts as well as Heidelberg, and to the fact that several years of his boyhood were spent at Harrow owed an English accent in speaking that language which betrayed no trace of Teutonic gutturality. He was returningfrom an extended hunting trip in British and German East Africa at the time I made his acquaintance, and was nursing a light grievance against his own Government from the fact that he had been rather better treated in the former than the latter. His attitude toward the Kaiser was somewhat different from that of any other German I have ever met, this, doubtless, being due to his own great wealth and assured position. There was little of the ‘loyal and devoted subject’ in this attitude, to which no better comparison suggests itself to me than that of a very heavy stock-holder in a corporation toward a general manager who is in no respect his social superior.‘The Kaiser’s most pronounced characteristic,’ said Baron Y—— one evening as we paced the promenade, ‘is his overweening vanity. His “ego” dwarfs his every other attribute, natural or acquired, and it is idle to try to understand what he is, what he does, what he stands for—and, incidentally, what the German people, in quite another sense, have to stand for—without taking that fact into consideration. It is the obsession of his own importance—I might even say his belief in his own omnipotence—that is responsible for his taking the so-called Divine Right of the Hohenzollerns more seriously, interpreting the term more literally, than any of his ancestors since Frederick the Great. It is his vanity that is responsible for his incessant shiftings of uniforms, for his posturings, his obvious attempts to conceal or distract attention from his shrunken arm. He is the most consummate master of stagecraft; indeed, the Fates spoiled a great producer of spectacles—one who would have eclipsed Reinhardt—to make, not an indifferent Emperor, but——’ The Baron checked himself and concluded with: ‘Perhaps I had best not say what I had in mind. Everything considered, however, I am convinced that it would have been better for Germany if William the Second had been stage-manager rather than Kaiser.’Specific and intimate instance of the pettiness with which the Kaiser’s vanity occasionally expressed itself Baron Y—— gave me the following evening. I had been turning the pages of some of his German illustrated papers, and was unable to refrain from commenting, not only on the frequency with which the portrait of the Kaiser appeared, but also of the defiant ‘come-one-come-all’ attitude of all of those in which the War Lord appeared in uniform. The Baron laughed good-naturedly. ‘The Kaiser’s attitudinizings,’ he said, ‘never seem to strike the Prussians as in the least funny (they haven’t much of a sense of humour, anyhow):but we Bavarians have always taken them as quite as much of a joke as has the rest of Europe. Now this picture’ (he began turning the pages of ‘Ueber Land und Meer’ in search of it), ‘which is one of the most popular with the Prussians, we of Bavaria have always called “Ajax Defying the Lightning,” and I am going to tell you the history of it.‘This picture is reproduced from one of several dozen almost identical photographs which have been taken of the Kaiser glowering into the emptiness of the upper empyrean from the vantage of a little basaltic crag which crops up at the forks of a road in one of the Imperial game preserves. I have always taken a sort of paternal interest in this apparently “to-be-continued-indefinitely” series of photographs, for it chanced that I was in the company of their central figure on the occasion when he discovered this now famous pedestal, and it was due to a suggestion of mine that he was enabled to turn his find to what he no doubt considers a most felicitous use.‘It was on one of the early days of an imperial hunting party—just the ordinary affair of its kind, with no one in particular from the outside on hand, and nothing especial in the way of sport offered—and the Kaiser, not being in very good fettle, had bidden me remain in the lodge with him to discuss some experiments I had been conducting on my estates with some drought-resisting barleys and lucernes, the seed of which had been sent to Germany by one of our “agricultural explorers” in Central Asia. The Kaiser’s keenness for skimming the cream of the world and bringing it home for the German people is only exceeded by his vanity,’ the Baron added parenthetically.‘Having heard all I had to report, my imperial host suggested a stroll in the forest, and it was while pushing on from tree to tree to study the efficacy of a new kind of chemically treated cement the foresters had been using to arrest the progress of decay that we wandered out upon the jutting crag shown in this picture. It was late in the afternoon, and by both of the two converging roads, several hundred metres of vista of each of which were commanded from our lofty eyrie, men were drifting back toward the lodge from the hunt. The dramatic possibilities of the unexpected vantage point—the manner in which one was able to step from behind the drop-curtain of the forest undergrowth to the front of the stage at the tip of the jutting crag—kindled the fire of the Kaiser’s imagination instantly.‘“What a place from which to review my hunting guests!”he exclaimed, stepping forward and throwing out his chest in his best “reviewing” manner. “Strange I have never noticed it from the road. It must be because the light is so bad here. Yes, that is what the trouble is. They cannot see us even as clearly as we can see them.” (He frowned his palpable disappointment that all eyes from below were not centred upon him where he stood in fine defiance in the middle of his new-found stage.)‘“If I may venture a suggestion, Your Majesty,” I said, “I think it is the dense shadow from that big tree on the next point that makes it so dark here. Do you not see that the sun is directly behind it at this hour? The removal of that out-reaching limb on the right would give this crag at least an hour of sunshine, but, as a practical forester, I should warn you that doing so would destroy the ‘balance’ of the tree so much that the next heavy storm would probably topple it over to the left. It already inclines that way, and——”‘“There are several hundred thousand more trees like that in the Black Forest,” cut in the Kaiser, “but not one other look-out to compare with this. My sincere thanks for the suggestion. I will have it carried out.”‘And so,’ continued Baron Y——, ‘the obscuring limb was removed, and the mutilated tree, as I knew it must, went down the following winter. “My look-out now will have three hours of sunlight instead of one,” the Kaiser observed gleefully when he told me about it; “I was glad to see it go.”‘It was a case of one monarch against another, and as the Kaiser is resolved to brook no rival, especially where the question of his “sunlight” is concerned, I suppose the sequel was inevitable. All the same I am sorry that—that it was the monarch of the forest that had to go down. But though the tree went down,’ he concluded with a grimace, tossing the magazine into my lap, ‘the “Ajax” pictures still continue.’‘Wouldn’t “His Place in the Sun” be even an apter title than “Ajax Defying the Lightning”?’ I ventured.‘Unquestionably,’ was the reply. ‘I had thought of that myself. But, you see, even we Bavarians are very keen in the matter of the extension of Germany’s “übersee” colonies, and it wouldn’t do to make light of our own ambitions.’I have set down this little story just as it was told to me, and it is only since the outbreak of the war, when the mainsprings ofGerman motives are revealed at Armageddon, that it has occurred to me how perfectly it resolves itself into allegory. To the world at large, but to the Briton especially, is there no suggestion in what the Kaiserdidto the tree, which for a hundred years or more had shadowed his tardily stumbled-upon look-out, of what heplanned to doto the Empire which he had so often intimated had crowded him out of his ‘place in the sun’? With the tree he hewed off a sun-obscuring limb, and the unbalanced, mutilated remnant succumbed to the first storm that assailed it. Was not this the procedure that he reckoned upon following with the ‘obscuring limbs’ of the British Empire?The foregoing instance of the extravagant vanity of the Kaiser Baron Y—— told more in amusement than in censoriousness, but I recall another little story to much the same point that he related with hard eyes and the shade of a frown, as one man speaks of another who has not quite ‘played the game’ in sport or business. It, also, had to do with an imperial hunt.‘As you doubtless know,’ he said, after telling me something of how creditably the Kaiser shot, considering his infirmity, ‘a strenuous endeavour is always made on these occasions that the best game be driven up to the rifles of royalty, a custom which none of the Hohenzollerns have ever had the sporting instinct to modify in favour of even the most distinguished visitors. By some chance on the day in question, a remarkably fine boar ran unscathed the gauntlet of the imperial batteries and fell—an easy shot—to my own bullet. It was a really magnificent trophy—the brute was as high at the shoulder as a good-sized pony, and his tusks curved through fully ninety degrees more than a complete circle—and it had occurred to me at once that it was in order that I should at leastofferto make a present of the head to my royal host. Frankly, however, I really wanted it very badly for my own hall, and I can still recall hoping that the Kaiser would “touch and remit, after the manner of kings,” as Kipling puts it.’The Baron was silent for a few moments, staring hard in front of him with the look of a man who ponders something that has rankled in his mind for years. ‘Well,’ he resumed presently, ‘the Kaiserdid“touch” (in the sense the Yankees use the term, I mean), but he did not “remit.” When we came to group for the inevitable after-the-hunt photograph, I was dumbfounded to see a couple of the imperial huntsmen drag up my prize, not in front of me, where immemorial custom decreed it should go, but tothe feet of the Kaiser. He even had the nerve to have the photograph taken with his foot on its head. You have shot big game yourself, and you will know, therefore, that this would convey to any hunter exactly the same thing as his writing under the photograph, “I shot this boar myself.”’The Baron took a long breath before resuming. ‘I need not tell you how surprised and angry I was, and I will not tell you what it took all the self-control I had to keep from doing. What Ididdo, I flatter myself, would have been thoroughly efficacious in bringing home to any other man in this world the consummate meanness of the thing he had done. The moment the photograph was finished I stepped up to the Kaiser and, controlling my voice as best I could, said: “Your Majesty, I beg you will deign to accept as a humble token of my admiration of your prowess as a hunter and your courtesy as a host the fine boar which my poor rifle was fortunate to bring down to-day.”‘I still think that my polite sarcasm would have cut through the armour of any other man on earth. It was impossible to mistake my meaning, and he must have known that every man there knew it wasmyboar that he had had his picture taken with and was still coolly keeping his boot upon. Possibly he decided in his own mind, then and there, that the time had come to extend the “Divine Right of the Hohenzollerns” to the hunting field. At any rate, he bowed graciously, thanked me warmly, and, pointing down to where I had stood in the picture, said he presumed it was “that little fellow with the deformed tusk.”‘My head was humming from the shock of the effrontery, but I still have distinct recollection of the deliberatesang-froidof the Kaiser’s manner as he directed someone to “mark that little boar with a twisted tusk, a gift from my good friend, Baron Y——, for mounting as a trophy.” I was a potential regicide for the next week or two, but my sense of humour pulled me up in the end. For, after all, what is the use of taking seriously a man who, for the sake of tickling his insatiate vanity by having his photograph taken with his foot on the head of a bigger pig than those in front of his hunting guests, commits an act that, were he anything less than an Emperor, would stamp him with every one of them as an out-and-out bounder? The memory of the thing makes me “see red” a bit even to-day if I let my mind dwell on it at all, but mingling with my resentment and mortification there is always a sort of sneaking admiration for the way the Kaiser (as the Yankeessay) “got away with the goods.” The Hohenzollern—the trait is as evident in the Crown Prince as it is in his father—will always go forward instead of backward when it comes to being confronted with the consequences of either their bluffs or their breaks, and it is about time that the people in Germany, as well as the people outside of Germany, got this fact well in mind when dealing with them.’These words were spoken before the Kaiser backed down when his Agadir bluff was called, but, generally speaking, I think the action of both father and son since then has been eloquent vindication of their truth.Another noble German of my acquaintance who had at one time been on terms of exceptional intimacy with the Kaiser was the wealthy and distinguished Baron von K——, who, in the two decades previous to the outbreak of the war, had divided his time about equally between his ancestral castle on the Rhine and a great Northern California ranch brought him by his wealthy American wife. I met him first at a house-party in Honolulu about ten years ago, and at that time he appeared to take considerable pride in his friendship with the Kaiser, of whom he was wont to speak often and sympathetically. Since then I have encountered him, now in America, now in Europe, on an average of once a year, and on each succeeding occasion I noticed a decreasing warmth on his part, not so much for Germany and the Germans, for whom he still expressed great affection, but rather toward the Kaiser and his policies. It must have been fully seven years ago that he told me, at the Lotus Club in New York, that the mad race of armaments in which Germany was setting the pace for the rest of Europe could only end in one way—a great war in which his country would run a risk of losing far more than it had any chance of winning.It was not long after this that I heard that Baron von K—— had returned hurriedly and unexpectedly from Germany to America, taking with him his two sons who had been at school there. I never learned exactly what the trouble was, but a friend of his told me that it had some connection with an effort that had been made to induce the youngsters to become German subjects and join the army, flattering prospects in which were held out to them. Von K—— is said to have declared that the boys should never be allowed to set foot in Germany again. Whether this latter statement is true or not, it is a fact that neither of the lads has ever since crossed the Atlantic, and that both are now at Harvard.In the spring of 1911 von K—— cut short what was to have been a fortnight’s business trip to Germany to one of four days, the change in plan, as I have since learned, being due to an ‘invitation’ (an euphemism for a command) from the Kaiser to invest a huge sum of money in one of his armament concerns, great extensions in which were contemplated. Von K—— refused point-blank, rushed through his business, and took the first boat for New York. I did not see him until the following year, but friends told me that for a couple of months after his return to California he absolutely refused to talk of Germany or of German affairs even with his intimates.This silence was dramatically broken in the smoking-room of the Union League Club, San Francisco, on the evening when the news came that the Kaiser had sent the gunboat ‘Panther’ to Agadir as a trump card for the game he was playing for the control of Morocco. Von K—— was frowning over his paper when an American friend came up, clapped him on the shoulder, and exclaimed: ‘The Baron is in close touch with the Kaiser; perhaps he can tell us what “The Mailed Fist” is punching at in North Africa.’What von K—— said regarding the allegation that he was in close touch with the Kaiser was not stated in words that even the San Francisco papers (whose ‘news vultures’ had pounced upon the incident within an hour) felt able to report verbatim the following morning, but his ‘Mailed Fist’motwent from California to Maine in the next twelve hours, and even to-day is still freely quoted whenever the question of the War Lord’s mentality is the subject of discussion.‘Mailed vist!’ snorted the Baron, whose English has never climbed entirely out of his throat; ‘Vell, berhabst dey haas mailed his vist, but, by Gott, dey haas neffer mailed his prain.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘Or maype, if dey haas mailed his prain, der bostmann haas forgodt it to deliffer.’I saw Baron von K—— in San Francisco—encountered him beaming over the sculptures in the Italian Building at the Panama-Pacific Exposition—but was unable to draw him into any discussion of Germany and the war. He did, however, tell me that his German estates were for sale, that he never expected to return there again, and that—the day after Belgium was invaded—he had applied for his first papers of American citizenship.
SEPTEMBER 1916.
BY A NEUTRAL DIPLOMAT.
Amongthe high German officials whose opinion of William the Second’s foreign policies I quoted in my previous article, I do not recall a single one whose loyalty or sense of propriety did not prevent his offering any personal criticisms of the Emperor to whose service his best efforts were being devoted. An apprehensiveness, bordering on positive dread in many instances, of the ultimate consequences of the Kaiser’s impetuosities was often apparent in the observations of their franker moments, but personal aspersions were never cast. This was, of course, no more than could have been expected from the well-bred men-of-the-world that they were. And in this connection it may be in point to add that not even among the rather gay and not always discreetly reserved officers of the Crown Prince’s suite (with whom I was thrown not a little during their visit to India in 1911) was loose criticism of the Emperor ever heard, either by myself or by others who enjoyed still fuller opportunities than I had for meeting them on intimate and confidential terms.
Frederick William himself was, I regret to record, far less discreet than those about him in his references to his imperial progenitor, and I recall very clearly that quick-tongued youth’s sarcastic allusions to certain rulings of the Kaiser in the matter of the treatment of the natives of some of the islands of German Melanesia. The Crown Prince, I should explain, I had found consumed with interest concerning the progress his people were making in several of their Pacific island colonies I had recently visited, and it was to his very palpable desire to ‘pump me dry’ of any information I might have picked up regarding these incipient ‘places in the sun’ that I owed a number of hours of conversation with him the edification of which would hardly otherwise have fallen to my lot.
The outburst I had in mind was led up to by my royal inquisitor’s asking me for my views concerning the comparative progress of the three political divisions of the island of New Guinea, and by my replying that, if the criterion of judgment was to be the contentment, physical well-being, and economic usefulness of the native, I should rate British New Guinea first, Dutch New Guinea an indifferent second, and German New Guinea a very poor third. It was anything but a courtier-like speech on my part, but I was not meeting Frederick William in my official capacity, and, moreover, he had made a point of asking that I should give him perfectly frank answers to his questions. (‘None of the “bull con’,” as the Yankees say,’ was the way he put it; ‘give me the “straight goods.”’ Both expressions, as he confessed with a grin, he had picked up from a ‘neat little filly from Kentucky’ he had ‘seen a bit of’ at Ostend the previous summer.)
The Crown Prince, in spite of his undeniable personal courage, of which I saw several striking instances in the course of his Indian visit, is far from being what the Anglo-Saxons call a ‘good sport,’ and on this occasion he made no pretence of hiding his annoyance. Because, however, as transpired later, there were several other matters which he had in mind ‘pumping’ me on, he evidently thought it best not to vent his spleen for the moment on one whose usefulness was not quite exhausted. This befell subsequently, I may add, though under circumstances which have no especial bearing on my present subject.
Tapping his boot with his riding-whip—he had been playing polo—the Prince sat in a sort of spoiled-child pout of petulance for a minute or two, before bursting out with: ‘Doubtless you’re right. I’ve had hints of the same thing myself from private reports. It’s all due to the pater’s unwarranted interference in something he knows nothing about. Old X——’ (mentioning the previous Governor of German New Guinea by name) ‘has forgotten more about handling Papuans than the pater ever knew. The pater has put his foot in it every time he has moved in our Pacific colonies.’ (It may be in order to explain that not only does the Crown Prince speak excellent English, but that on this Indian visit he made a point of resorting to English idioms, colloquialisms, and slang to an extent which at times became positively ridiculous. I have quoted here almost his exact language.)
Frederick William went on to give me a spirited and approving account of the manner in which a German colonist near Herbertshöhehad put an end to raids on his yam patch by planting on each corner-post of the enclosure the ‘frizzly’ head of a Papuan who had been shot in the act of making off with the succulent tubers, concluding with the dogmatic assertion that the only way to handle the black man was to ‘bleed him white.’
I had the temerity to reply that, from what I had seen, the more ‘old X——’ continued to forget of what he thought he knew about handling Papuans, the better it would be for German colonial prospects in New Guinea, and as a consequence threw my royal interrogator into another fit of sulks. It is only fair to say that the ‘interference’ of which the Crown Prince waxed so unfilially censorious really consisted of measures calculated slightly—but only slightly—to mitigate the brutal repressiveness toward the natives which had characterised the German administration of New Guinea from the outset. The one bright spot in the brief but bloody annals of German overseas colonisation was the six or eight years’ régime of the broad-minded and humane Dr. Solf—the present Colonial Secretary—in Samoa. This tiny and comparatively unimportant Pacific outpost was the single Teutonic colony in which I found the natives treated with anything approaching the humanitarian consideration extended to them so universally by the English and the French. Dr. Solf may well be, as has been occasionally hinted from Holland, the hope of those conservative and intelligent Germans who are known to be silently working for a reborn and ‘de-Prussified’ Fatherland after the war.
As I have said, the Crown Prince was the only highly placed German whom I ever heard speak slightingly in a personal way of the Kaiser, and that impetuous youth was—as he still is—a law unto himself. Such loyalty and discretion, however, did not characterize all prominent Germans in private life, and it is to several of these I am indebted for the illuminating sidelights their observations and anecdotes threw on the human side of William II. Of such, I fancy the Baron Y——, who voyaged on the same steamer with me from Zanzibar to Port Said several years ago, had enjoyed perhaps the most intimate opportunities for an intelligent appraisal of his Emperor.
The Baron was a scion of one of the oldest and wealthiest of Bavarian noble families, a graduate of the École des Beaux Arts as well as Heidelberg, and to the fact that several years of his boyhood were spent at Harrow owed an English accent in speaking that language which betrayed no trace of Teutonic gutturality. He was returningfrom an extended hunting trip in British and German East Africa at the time I made his acquaintance, and was nursing a light grievance against his own Government from the fact that he had been rather better treated in the former than the latter. His attitude toward the Kaiser was somewhat different from that of any other German I have ever met, this, doubtless, being due to his own great wealth and assured position. There was little of the ‘loyal and devoted subject’ in this attitude, to which no better comparison suggests itself to me than that of a very heavy stock-holder in a corporation toward a general manager who is in no respect his social superior.
‘The Kaiser’s most pronounced characteristic,’ said Baron Y—— one evening as we paced the promenade, ‘is his overweening vanity. His “ego” dwarfs his every other attribute, natural or acquired, and it is idle to try to understand what he is, what he does, what he stands for—and, incidentally, what the German people, in quite another sense, have to stand for—without taking that fact into consideration. It is the obsession of his own importance—I might even say his belief in his own omnipotence—that is responsible for his taking the so-called Divine Right of the Hohenzollerns more seriously, interpreting the term more literally, than any of his ancestors since Frederick the Great. It is his vanity that is responsible for his incessant shiftings of uniforms, for his posturings, his obvious attempts to conceal or distract attention from his shrunken arm. He is the most consummate master of stagecraft; indeed, the Fates spoiled a great producer of spectacles—one who would have eclipsed Reinhardt—to make, not an indifferent Emperor, but——’ The Baron checked himself and concluded with: ‘Perhaps I had best not say what I had in mind. Everything considered, however, I am convinced that it would have been better for Germany if William the Second had been stage-manager rather than Kaiser.’
Specific and intimate instance of the pettiness with which the Kaiser’s vanity occasionally expressed itself Baron Y—— gave me the following evening. I had been turning the pages of some of his German illustrated papers, and was unable to refrain from commenting, not only on the frequency with which the portrait of the Kaiser appeared, but also of the defiant ‘come-one-come-all’ attitude of all of those in which the War Lord appeared in uniform. The Baron laughed good-naturedly. ‘The Kaiser’s attitudinizings,’ he said, ‘never seem to strike the Prussians as in the least funny (they haven’t much of a sense of humour, anyhow):but we Bavarians have always taken them as quite as much of a joke as has the rest of Europe. Now this picture’ (he began turning the pages of ‘Ueber Land und Meer’ in search of it), ‘which is one of the most popular with the Prussians, we of Bavaria have always called “Ajax Defying the Lightning,” and I am going to tell you the history of it.
‘This picture is reproduced from one of several dozen almost identical photographs which have been taken of the Kaiser glowering into the emptiness of the upper empyrean from the vantage of a little basaltic crag which crops up at the forks of a road in one of the Imperial game preserves. I have always taken a sort of paternal interest in this apparently “to-be-continued-indefinitely” series of photographs, for it chanced that I was in the company of their central figure on the occasion when he discovered this now famous pedestal, and it was due to a suggestion of mine that he was enabled to turn his find to what he no doubt considers a most felicitous use.
‘It was on one of the early days of an imperial hunting party—just the ordinary affair of its kind, with no one in particular from the outside on hand, and nothing especial in the way of sport offered—and the Kaiser, not being in very good fettle, had bidden me remain in the lodge with him to discuss some experiments I had been conducting on my estates with some drought-resisting barleys and lucernes, the seed of which had been sent to Germany by one of our “agricultural explorers” in Central Asia. The Kaiser’s keenness for skimming the cream of the world and bringing it home for the German people is only exceeded by his vanity,’ the Baron added parenthetically.
‘Having heard all I had to report, my imperial host suggested a stroll in the forest, and it was while pushing on from tree to tree to study the efficacy of a new kind of chemically treated cement the foresters had been using to arrest the progress of decay that we wandered out upon the jutting crag shown in this picture. It was late in the afternoon, and by both of the two converging roads, several hundred metres of vista of each of which were commanded from our lofty eyrie, men were drifting back toward the lodge from the hunt. The dramatic possibilities of the unexpected vantage point—the manner in which one was able to step from behind the drop-curtain of the forest undergrowth to the front of the stage at the tip of the jutting crag—kindled the fire of the Kaiser’s imagination instantly.
‘“What a place from which to review my hunting guests!”he exclaimed, stepping forward and throwing out his chest in his best “reviewing” manner. “Strange I have never noticed it from the road. It must be because the light is so bad here. Yes, that is what the trouble is. They cannot see us even as clearly as we can see them.” (He frowned his palpable disappointment that all eyes from below were not centred upon him where he stood in fine defiance in the middle of his new-found stage.)
‘“If I may venture a suggestion, Your Majesty,” I said, “I think it is the dense shadow from that big tree on the next point that makes it so dark here. Do you not see that the sun is directly behind it at this hour? The removal of that out-reaching limb on the right would give this crag at least an hour of sunshine, but, as a practical forester, I should warn you that doing so would destroy the ‘balance’ of the tree so much that the next heavy storm would probably topple it over to the left. It already inclines that way, and——”
‘“There are several hundred thousand more trees like that in the Black Forest,” cut in the Kaiser, “but not one other look-out to compare with this. My sincere thanks for the suggestion. I will have it carried out.”
‘And so,’ continued Baron Y——, ‘the obscuring limb was removed, and the mutilated tree, as I knew it must, went down the following winter. “My look-out now will have three hours of sunlight instead of one,” the Kaiser observed gleefully when he told me about it; “I was glad to see it go.”
‘It was a case of one monarch against another, and as the Kaiser is resolved to brook no rival, especially where the question of his “sunlight” is concerned, I suppose the sequel was inevitable. All the same I am sorry that—that it was the monarch of the forest that had to go down. But though the tree went down,’ he concluded with a grimace, tossing the magazine into my lap, ‘the “Ajax” pictures still continue.’
‘Wouldn’t “His Place in the Sun” be even an apter title than “Ajax Defying the Lightning”?’ I ventured.
‘Unquestionably,’ was the reply. ‘I had thought of that myself. But, you see, even we Bavarians are very keen in the matter of the extension of Germany’s “übersee” colonies, and it wouldn’t do to make light of our own ambitions.’
I have set down this little story just as it was told to me, and it is only since the outbreak of the war, when the mainsprings ofGerman motives are revealed at Armageddon, that it has occurred to me how perfectly it resolves itself into allegory. To the world at large, but to the Briton especially, is there no suggestion in what the Kaiserdidto the tree, which for a hundred years or more had shadowed his tardily stumbled-upon look-out, of what heplanned to doto the Empire which he had so often intimated had crowded him out of his ‘place in the sun’? With the tree he hewed off a sun-obscuring limb, and the unbalanced, mutilated remnant succumbed to the first storm that assailed it. Was not this the procedure that he reckoned upon following with the ‘obscuring limbs’ of the British Empire?
The foregoing instance of the extravagant vanity of the Kaiser Baron Y—— told more in amusement than in censoriousness, but I recall another little story to much the same point that he related with hard eyes and the shade of a frown, as one man speaks of another who has not quite ‘played the game’ in sport or business. It, also, had to do with an imperial hunt.
‘As you doubtless know,’ he said, after telling me something of how creditably the Kaiser shot, considering his infirmity, ‘a strenuous endeavour is always made on these occasions that the best game be driven up to the rifles of royalty, a custom which none of the Hohenzollerns have ever had the sporting instinct to modify in favour of even the most distinguished visitors. By some chance on the day in question, a remarkably fine boar ran unscathed the gauntlet of the imperial batteries and fell—an easy shot—to my own bullet. It was a really magnificent trophy—the brute was as high at the shoulder as a good-sized pony, and his tusks curved through fully ninety degrees more than a complete circle—and it had occurred to me at once that it was in order that I should at leastofferto make a present of the head to my royal host. Frankly, however, I really wanted it very badly for my own hall, and I can still recall hoping that the Kaiser would “touch and remit, after the manner of kings,” as Kipling puts it.’
The Baron was silent for a few moments, staring hard in front of him with the look of a man who ponders something that has rankled in his mind for years. ‘Well,’ he resumed presently, ‘the Kaiserdid“touch” (in the sense the Yankees use the term, I mean), but he did not “remit.” When we came to group for the inevitable after-the-hunt photograph, I was dumbfounded to see a couple of the imperial huntsmen drag up my prize, not in front of me, where immemorial custom decreed it should go, but tothe feet of the Kaiser. He even had the nerve to have the photograph taken with his foot on its head. You have shot big game yourself, and you will know, therefore, that this would convey to any hunter exactly the same thing as his writing under the photograph, “I shot this boar myself.”’
The Baron took a long breath before resuming. ‘I need not tell you how surprised and angry I was, and I will not tell you what it took all the self-control I had to keep from doing. What Ididdo, I flatter myself, would have been thoroughly efficacious in bringing home to any other man in this world the consummate meanness of the thing he had done. The moment the photograph was finished I stepped up to the Kaiser and, controlling my voice as best I could, said: “Your Majesty, I beg you will deign to accept as a humble token of my admiration of your prowess as a hunter and your courtesy as a host the fine boar which my poor rifle was fortunate to bring down to-day.”
‘I still think that my polite sarcasm would have cut through the armour of any other man on earth. It was impossible to mistake my meaning, and he must have known that every man there knew it wasmyboar that he had had his picture taken with and was still coolly keeping his boot upon. Possibly he decided in his own mind, then and there, that the time had come to extend the “Divine Right of the Hohenzollerns” to the hunting field. At any rate, he bowed graciously, thanked me warmly, and, pointing down to where I had stood in the picture, said he presumed it was “that little fellow with the deformed tusk.”
‘My head was humming from the shock of the effrontery, but I still have distinct recollection of the deliberatesang-froidof the Kaiser’s manner as he directed someone to “mark that little boar with a twisted tusk, a gift from my good friend, Baron Y——, for mounting as a trophy.” I was a potential regicide for the next week or two, but my sense of humour pulled me up in the end. For, after all, what is the use of taking seriously a man who, for the sake of tickling his insatiate vanity by having his photograph taken with his foot on the head of a bigger pig than those in front of his hunting guests, commits an act that, were he anything less than an Emperor, would stamp him with every one of them as an out-and-out bounder? The memory of the thing makes me “see red” a bit even to-day if I let my mind dwell on it at all, but mingling with my resentment and mortification there is always a sort of sneaking admiration for the way the Kaiser (as the Yankeessay) “got away with the goods.” The Hohenzollern—the trait is as evident in the Crown Prince as it is in his father—will always go forward instead of backward when it comes to being confronted with the consequences of either their bluffs or their breaks, and it is about time that the people in Germany, as well as the people outside of Germany, got this fact well in mind when dealing with them.’
These words were spoken before the Kaiser backed down when his Agadir bluff was called, but, generally speaking, I think the action of both father and son since then has been eloquent vindication of their truth.
Another noble German of my acquaintance who had at one time been on terms of exceptional intimacy with the Kaiser was the wealthy and distinguished Baron von K——, who, in the two decades previous to the outbreak of the war, had divided his time about equally between his ancestral castle on the Rhine and a great Northern California ranch brought him by his wealthy American wife. I met him first at a house-party in Honolulu about ten years ago, and at that time he appeared to take considerable pride in his friendship with the Kaiser, of whom he was wont to speak often and sympathetically. Since then I have encountered him, now in America, now in Europe, on an average of once a year, and on each succeeding occasion I noticed a decreasing warmth on his part, not so much for Germany and the Germans, for whom he still expressed great affection, but rather toward the Kaiser and his policies. It must have been fully seven years ago that he told me, at the Lotus Club in New York, that the mad race of armaments in which Germany was setting the pace for the rest of Europe could only end in one way—a great war in which his country would run a risk of losing far more than it had any chance of winning.
It was not long after this that I heard that Baron von K—— had returned hurriedly and unexpectedly from Germany to America, taking with him his two sons who had been at school there. I never learned exactly what the trouble was, but a friend of his told me that it had some connection with an effort that had been made to induce the youngsters to become German subjects and join the army, flattering prospects in which were held out to them. Von K—— is said to have declared that the boys should never be allowed to set foot in Germany again. Whether this latter statement is true or not, it is a fact that neither of the lads has ever since crossed the Atlantic, and that both are now at Harvard.
In the spring of 1911 von K—— cut short what was to have been a fortnight’s business trip to Germany to one of four days, the change in plan, as I have since learned, being due to an ‘invitation’ (an euphemism for a command) from the Kaiser to invest a huge sum of money in one of his armament concerns, great extensions in which were contemplated. Von K—— refused point-blank, rushed through his business, and took the first boat for New York. I did not see him until the following year, but friends told me that for a couple of months after his return to California he absolutely refused to talk of Germany or of German affairs even with his intimates.
This silence was dramatically broken in the smoking-room of the Union League Club, San Francisco, on the evening when the news came that the Kaiser had sent the gunboat ‘Panther’ to Agadir as a trump card for the game he was playing for the control of Morocco. Von K—— was frowning over his paper when an American friend came up, clapped him on the shoulder, and exclaimed: ‘The Baron is in close touch with the Kaiser; perhaps he can tell us what “The Mailed Fist” is punching at in North Africa.’
What von K—— said regarding the allegation that he was in close touch with the Kaiser was not stated in words that even the San Francisco papers (whose ‘news vultures’ had pounced upon the incident within an hour) felt able to report verbatim the following morning, but his ‘Mailed Fist’motwent from California to Maine in the next twelve hours, and even to-day is still freely quoted whenever the question of the War Lord’s mentality is the subject of discussion.
‘Mailed vist!’ snorted the Baron, whose English has never climbed entirely out of his throat; ‘Vell, berhabst dey haas mailed his vist, but, by Gott, dey haas neffer mailed his prain.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘Or maype, if dey haas mailed his prain, der bostmann haas forgodt it to deliffer.’
I saw Baron von K—— in San Francisco—encountered him beaming over the sculptures in the Italian Building at the Panama-Pacific Exposition—but was unable to draw him into any discussion of Germany and the war. He did, however, tell me that his German estates were for sale, that he never expected to return there again, and that—the day after Belgium was invaded—he had applied for his first papers of American citizenship.