THE KAISER'S LETTER
House Doorn, April 5, 1921.
My Dear Field Marshal:
Accept my warmest thanks for your letter of March 30th, ult. You are right. The hardest thing of all for me is to be obliged to live in foreign parts, to follow, with burning anguish in my soul, the awful fate of our dear fatherland, to which I have devoted the labors of my entire life, and to be barred from co-operation.
You stood beside me during the dark, fatal days of November, 1918. As you know, I forced myself to the difficult, terrible decision to leave the country only upon the urgent declaration of yourself and the rest of my counselors who had been summoned that only by my so doing would it be possible to obtain more favorable armistice terms for our people and spare it a bloody civil war.
The sacrifice was in vain. Now, as well as before, the enemy wishes to make the German people expiate the alleged guilt of "Imperial Germany."