Chapter XXV A Royal Liar
High-Placed Plagiarists—Diplomatic Trickery—The Kaiser Whitewashes Himself—“What of the German Navy?”
—Clumsy Espionage
October 10th, 1905, 6 p.m.
The red disc betraying the War Lord’s presence at the other end of the wire thrust itself between the Chancellor’s eyes and the copy of Echo de Paris he was reading.
“I command Bohlen,” said Wilhelm’s impatient voice.
“I am afraid he is not available just now, Your Majesty. Gone shopping with his fiancée the last I heard.”
“Order Wedell to find him. He shall be at the Chancellery at nine sharp, when I expect to find you too, Prince.”
“Gracing my wife’s soirée?”
“Soirée to-night? Excellent! I will order all my boys to kiss Madame’s hand. It will put her into good humour, and she will the more readily allow you to attend to business.”
“And, Majesty,” said Bülow, hopefully, “the Princess Maria is counting on having the honour of Your Majesty’s presence.”
“I will send the insignia of dell’ Annunciata instead.”
“I beg Your Majesty, don’t. Maria might not remember that Charles XII. sent his boots to preside at the Swedish Council of State.”
As before remarked, it is one of Bülow’s tricks always to have on the tip of his tongue some historic bon mot suitable to the occasion.
There was an outburst of rough laughter. “He did, did he? And yet they called him the Madman of the North. Next time Herr Bebel has a congress, I will send the Reds a pair of my riding breeches, and no new ones either. But revenons à Bohlen. Devil of a chap! Made Bertha his goods, his chattel, his stuff, his field, his barn, his horse, his ox, his ass, his everything! That’s the way! Make them eat out of your hand, Prince!”
Bülow was a Prince since the 6th of June, and the War Lord never tired of calling him by the title of his own creation. He had just borrowed boldly from the Bard, and the theft being apparently undiscovered by his literary Chancellor, Wilhelm felt justified in relaxing his imperious mien some more.
“Can’t you prescribe a dose of sleeping sickness for that fool Liebert? His shouting about ‘our war’ to obtain supreme sea power is co-responsible for the Entente Cordiale. Of course I like to strike terror into the hearts of the enemy, but in his Navy League speech Liebert went too far. If he keeps it up, I shall put him on half-pay. Tell him so.” (The War Lord referred to General von Liebert, ex-Governor of German East Africa, who had made a speech threatening Great Britain and France.)
And more talk of that kind. The more gossipy, the better for Bülow, as there had been no time to digest the Echo de Paris article and to enter into its discussion before he had fully made up his mind what to say about the reported Anglo-Franco-Russo-Japanese Alliance. His comments might lead to serious dissension with Majesty, for Wilhelm was sure to fasten on to some supposed negligible point in the Chancellor’s argument to distort the whole tenor of his interpretation.
Tit for tat. Only when Bülow was the victim, there was no prearrangement like in the case of the repudiations of the Joseph Chamberlain and the London Daily Telegraph interviews.
When in England five years before, the War Lord had prompted Mr. Chamberlain to make his historic appeal in favour of co-operation between Great Britain, Germany and the United States, assuring him that Germany’s future policy would rest on such an understanding as on a roche de bronze.
Mr. Chamberlain, being under the impression that only gentlemen were invited to Sandringham House, thought His Majesty sincere and gave public utterance to the message, promising peace and mutual understanding.
But the Roi de Prusse had no sooner shaken the dust of England from his boots than Bülow was ordered to repudiate the whole thing (without directly impugning his Sovereign’s word, of course) and to ridicule Chamberlain’s “Utopian schemes.”
Notwithstanding, the then German Ambassador in London, Count Wolff-Metternich, later had the impudence to complain to Sir F. Lascelles, British representative in Berlin, that the state of English opinion toward Germany and the British Foreign Office’s coldness toward the Wilhelmstrasse gave him considerable uneasiness; whereupon Sir Lascelles demanded to know whether Germany expected British Secretaries of State, having been struck in the face, were to turn the other cheek for further castigation and insult?
Three years after the birth of the Quadruple Alliance, at which we are now assisting, the War Lord and his Chancellor had another repudiation game between them. Mr. Harcourt having prepared the way in his amazing Lancashire speech,1 Wilhelm strove to outdo the Father of Lies in the notorious Daily Telegraph interview, the general theme of which was:
“Our rivalries are only in trade and education, and though I should claim for us the supremacy of the former, I would yield to Germany the palm for perfection in the latter; but of personal animosity there is none between the rulers, the Governments, or the peoples. And if in either country there is a small class of publicists who, for selfish and unpatriotic ends, desire to set the nations at variance—well, they are the footpads of politics and the enemies of the human race.”
“You English are mad, mad—mad as March hares. What has come over you that you are so completely given over to suspicions quite unworthy of a great nation? What more can I do than I have done? I declared with all the emphasis at my command, in my speech at Guildhall, that my heart is set upon peace, and that it is one of my dearest wishes to live on the best of terms with England. Have I ever been false to my word? Falsehood and prevarication are alien to my nature.
“My actions ought to speak for themselves, but you listen, not to them, but to those who misinterpret and distort them. That is a personal insult which I feel and resent. To be for ever misjudged, to have my repeated offers of friendship weighed and scrutinised with jealous, mistrustful eyes, taxes my patience severely. I have said time after time that I am a friend of England, and your Press—or, at least, a considerable section of it—bids the people of England refuse my proffered hand, and insinuates that the other holds a dagger.
“I repeat that I am the friend of England, but you make things difficult for me. My task is not of the easiest. The prevailing sentiment of large sections of the middle and the lower classes of my country is not friendly to England. I am therefore, so to speak, in a minority in my own land.
“It is commonly believed in England that throughout the South African War Germany was hostile to her. German opinion undoubtedly was hostile—bitterly hostile. The Press was hostile; private opinion was hostile. But what of official Germany? Let my critics ask themselves what brought to a sudden stop, and indeed caused the absolute collapse of the European tour of the Boer delegates who were striving to obtain European intervention? They were fêted in Holland; France gave them a rapturous welcome. They wished to come to Berlin where the German people would have crowned them with flowers. But when they asked me to receive them I refused. The agitation immediately died away, and the delegation returned empty-handed. Was that, I ask, the action of a secret enemy?
“Again, when the struggle was at its height, the German Government was invited by the Governments of France and Russia to join with them in calling upon England to put an end to the war. The moment had come, they said, not only to save the Boer Republics, but also to humiliate England to the dust. What was my reply? I said that, so far from Germany joining in any concerted European action to put pressure upon England and bring about her downfall, Germany would always keep aloof from politics that could bring her into complications with a Sea Power like England.
“Posterity will one day read the exact terms of the telegram—now in the archives at Windsor Castle—in which I informed the Sovereign of England of the answer I had returned to the Powers which then sought to compass her fall. Englishmen who now insult me by doubting my word should know what were my actions in the hour of their adversity.
“Nor was that all. Just at the time of your Black Week, in December of 1899, when disasters followed one another in rapid succession, I received a letter from Queen Victoria, my revered grandmother, written in sorrow and affliction, and bearing manifest traces of the anxieties which were preying upon her mind and health. I at once returned a sympathetic reply. Nay, I did more. I bade one of my officers procure for me as exact an account as he could obtain of the number of combatants in South Africa on both sides, and of the actual position of the opposing forces.
“With the figures before me I worked out what I considered to be the best plan of campaign under the circumstances, and submitted it to my General Staff for their criticism. Then I dispatched it to England, and that document, likewise, is among the State papers at Windsor Castle, awaiting the serenely impartial verdict of history.
“And, as a matter of curious coincidence, let me add, that the plan which I formulated ran very much on the same lines as that which was actually adopted by Lord Roberts, and carried by him into successful operation. Was that, I repeat, the act of one who wished England ill? Let Englishmen be just.
“But you will say, what of the German Navy? Surely that is a menace to England. Against whom but England are my squadrons being prepared? If England is not in the minds of those Germans who are bent on creating a powerful fleet, why is Germany asked to consent to such new and heavy burdens of taxation? My answer is clear. Germany is a young and growing empire. She has a world-wide commerce, which is rapidly expanding and to which the legitimate ambition of patriotic Germans refuses to assign any bounds.
“Germany must have a powerful fleet to protect that commerce and her manifold interests in even the most distant seas. She expects those interests to go on growing, and she must be able to champion them manfully in any quarter of the globe. Germany looks ahead. Her horizons stretch far away. She must be prepared for any eventualities in the Far East. Who can foresee what may take place in the Pacific in the days to come, days not so distant as some believe, but days at any rate for which all European Powers with Far Eastern interests ought steadily to prepare?
“Look at the accomplished rise of Japan; think of the possible national awakening of China; and then judge of the vast problems of the Pacific. Only those Powers which have great navies will be listened to with respect, when the future of the Pacific comes to be solved; and if for that reason only, Germany must have a powerful fleet. It may be that even England herself will be glad that Germany has a fleet when they speak together on the same side in the momentous debates of the future.”
When the interview set the world guessing, disputing, imputing and passing the lie freely, Prince Bülow again disavowed his master, with His Majesty’s consent and at his instigation, of course, otherwise the fate of Bismarck would have seemed much too good for the obstreperous servant.
But to return to the 10th of October, 1905, 6 P.M. While the Chancelleries of all Europe were quaking with deliberations on the Anglo-Russian rapprochement in connection with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the War Lord’s chief minister spent an anxious quart d’heure trying to convince His Majesty that he was not intriguing against one of the numerous Eulenburg-maggots, fattening in the public cheese, Limburger brand.
Majesty, it seems, was deeply concerned about a certain titled member of the German Embassy in London who had befouled his record by spying. This pretty gentleman attended the Essex manoeuvres in the fall of 1904, notebook in hand, and sent elaborate reports, accompanied by sketches and diagrams, to the Berlin General Staff, acting the part of Secret Service agent no less treacherously, but rather more clumsily, than the German aristocrat who was convicted at Edinburgh in 1911.
Subsequently, of course, no British Army officer could afford to know this individual, and Mayfair, too, showed a decided inclination to cut dead the chevalier d’espionnage.
“Quite naturally!” Prince Bülow saved himself by adding: “From the English standpoint.”
The telephone fairly “zizzled” as the War Lord shouted back:
“What? Ostracise a man who has done nothing but his —— duty toward me and the Fatherland. Intolerable! ——!! He must be reinstated in clubs and Society. He must be able to hold up his head in Piccadilly as proudly as in Unter den Linden. I command it. Speak to Lascelles about it, and have this boycott ended at once.
Of course Bülow promised—with his left hand on his back, which, as explained, allows a good German to vow one thing and mean another.
Notes
1 Mr. Harcourt’s speech in Lancashire, October, 1908: “I wil not offer to other nations the temptation which would be afforded by a defenceless England, but let me assure you... there has not been any period in the last ten or fifteen years—and I speak with knowledge and a sense of deep responsibility—in which our relations with Germany—commercial, colonial, political, and dynastic—have been on a firmer and more friendly footing than they are to-day.