Hail and Farewell
71
Prince Otto V. Bismarck receives his final and his one glorious decoration; and here we leave him, his fame secure among Germany’s immortals.
¶ The game is now all but played out. The last phase is to be the noblest expression.
In his prime, Bismarck was of massive proportions in mind and body; but of his moral nature both friends and enemies had often been in doubt for many years. Now, even that was revealed to be in concord with his herculean bulk.
¶ The old glory passed from him, like a dream. He committed his soul to his God; and he heard again voices of Nature that had been inaudible to him, during his many years of intriguing diplomacy.
These voices spoke to him of the vanity and emptiness of human life, of the worthless baubles for which men exchange all they have, that is to say, their immortal gift of time, which soon passes away and is no more.
The musings of the Prince on the follies, inconsistencies and ambitions of life conspire to create a heroic figure like King Solomon. All is vanity! The conqueror of a continent has so declared. He had held the world in his hand, and had found that the sphere is hollow.
So go the fates of men.
¶ The great Prince Bismarck has now become as a beggar at the city’s gates.
¶ Over his grand spectacle of human pomp and power, contrasted with his final self-abnegation, shining forth we see the heights and depths of human life; but in this case the end was greater than the beginning; the defeat than the victory; the downfall than the glory; and the disillusion than the dream.
¶ Prince Bismarck in his long career as friend and confidant of the kings of this earth, had been honored with forty-eight orders of distinction. It is needless to mention them all, but they included the Iron Cross and the Order of Merit, the one entitling him to sit with kings, the other to command an army corps.
¶ But the greatest decoration of all was the one he now wore, his high tide of glory gone.
It is the Decoration of the Order of the Disillusioned, bestowed upon himself by his own soul.
Soon or late, prince or pauper, and you and I, wear this Order as at last we sit and wonder at the years gone by.
¶ Let us silently pass on, leaving Bismarck here, in the one solemn moment of his life; when he attains to real grandeur, stamps himself as greater than when he sat before kings.
For now he possesses his own soul, in peace.
And in this last picture, the end is greater than the beginning; the defeat than the victory; the downfall than the glory; and the disillusion than the dream.
¶ His final consolation was the Book of Job; and he read therein these strange and solemn words:
¶ What is my strength, that I should hope? and what is mine end, that I should prolong my life?
Is my strength the strength of stones, or is my flesh of brass?
¶ So am I made to possess months of vanity, and wearisome nights are appointed to me.
When I lie down, I say, when shall I arise, and the night be gone? and I am full of tossings to and fro, unto the dawning of the day.
My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope.
¶ Yea, man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward. I would seek unto God and unto God would I commit my cause;
Which doeth great things and unsearchable; marvelous things without number;
Who giveth rain upon the earth, and sendeth waters upon the fields;
To set up on high those that be low; that those which mourn may be exalted to safety.
He disappointeth the devices of the crafty, so that their hands cannot perform their enterprise.
¶ Behold happy is the man whom God correcteth; therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty;
For he maketh sore and bindeth up; he woundeth and his hands make whole.
He shall deliver thee in six troubles; yea, in seven there shall be no evil touch thee.
In famine, he shall redeem thee from death; and in war from the power of the sword ... neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh.
72
“As One Asleep”
¶ On July 30, 1898, just before midnight, Otto Edward Leopold von Bismarck, Prince of Lauenburg and former Imperial Chancellor of the German Empire, died peacefully in the old homestead of his ancestors.
The immediate cause of death was congestion of the lungs.
¶ “Ich danke Dir, mein Kind,” were his last words, addressed to his daughter, who had stooped to wipe the moisture from his pale brow.
¶ As late as the day he died, he had read the newspapers and talked politics.
His final remarks were on the relations of Germany and Russia, at all times a subject of deep concern to him.
¶ Dr. Schweninger had promised to bring him to 90—and was seven years short.
But the Bismarck of retirement was not unhappy in the taking off; he had grown tired of it all; and it is pleasant to record that his last hours were without pain.
¶ A few days before, he had had his champagne, and had smoked five pipes in succession; also the day before he died, he had asked an attendant to “color” two new meerschaums, gifts of friends. Toward the last, he had used an invalid’s chair for breakfast, but otherwise he seemed as well as could be expected.
¶ The windows looking upon the garden were opened, early next morning, and the servants of the household gathered there to look at the master, at rest.
He was seemingly asleep in his four-poster bed, his head slightly inclined to the left; his expression was that of one gently dreaming; his arms were resting over the coverlet, and in his left hand he held one white and three red roses, a last love-token from an Austrian lady.
¶ The expression of his features was, at the end, proud and noble; but the face was as grey as ashes; for the fire of life was out at last!
¶ Later, came two Cuirassiers, in white, with drawn swords; and these massive figures stood there by the bedside, and by and by kept solemn guard beside the coffin; also, near by were two Foresters, in green.
¶ Books, papers, telegrams and a laurel wreath were in the death chamber, where the master had worked to the end.
Not far away was his favorite chessboard, also, within touch the Emperor’s last present, a fac-simile of Frederick the Great’s great crook-headed gold cane; a step the other way the globe of the earth that Bismarck used to roll over with his big hand, when he studied his endless foreign political combinations.
¶ Later, came the magnificent funeral with the high military, and all the rest; but we think we shall take leave of him in his old room with these simple objects around him, his tools of work, his big oak desk, his mounds of state papers, his writings, his quill pens, his box of blue sand, his pipes, steins and champagne glasses, his letters, his telegrams, his great heaps of books, his immense correspondence on the affairs of nations, his diplomas from universities, his degrees of law, philosophy and letters, and finally, his big Ulmar dogs.
¶ Here we leave him as one asleep, reminded of his final words, uttered when the master was breaking fast with the infirmities of his eighty-three years:
¶ “There is only one happy day left for me. It is the one on which I shall not wake again.”
¶ His son refused the request that a death-mask be made of the noble old face, but Lenbach’s famous painting will recall the stern head for years to come.
¶ Bismarck’s coffin was of polished dark oak, with eight silver handles in the shape of lion’s paws; candles burned around his coffin, the pale lights softened by veils of black and silver gauze that ornamented the silver candelabra. The floor was literally covered with wreaths, many bearing cards of sympathy in gold letters, from various eminent personages throughout the world.
¶ The Kaiser heard the funeral services.
¶ Bismarck’s mausoleum rests on a spot Bismarck selected for himself; a plain Romanesque House of Death against a background of trees; and to the right still may be seen his favorite bench where he used to sit, under the shade of spreading oaks.
The sarcophagus of yellow marble bears this inscription, selected by Bismarck himself:
Here Lies
PRINCE BISMARCK
A Faithful German Servant
of Emperor William I.
¶ Hostile critics of Germany, brought forth by the great war of 1914, profess to believe that this inscription on Bismarck’s tomb shows that Bismarck did not wish his work to be associated with the future of the Empire, but with its past.
Instead, it really proclaims the man’s great mind, his clairvoyant historical vision. He could have said many things about himself, touching the great part he played in sustaining the pomp and majesty of kings; but his simple acknowledgment of the rôle of faithful servant, is more eloquent than sermons in brass.
¶ Finally, a small altar to the right of the porch carries this text from Colossians iii:23, the motto given to Bismarck many, many years before by Rev. Schliermacher, the pastor who confirmed the boy Otto; and that motto became indeed Bismarck’s guiding star through life, as now well you do know, balancing his record with the solemn Biblical injunction you read here beside the master’s tomb:
¶ “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.”
THE END