I
Their Kaiser
April, 1916.
There are certain faces of the accursed, which reveal in the end with the coming of old age the accumulated horror and darkness that has been seething in the depths of the soul. The features are by no means always ignoble, but on these faces something is imprinted which is a thousand times worse than ugliness, and none can bear to look upon them. Thus it is with their Kaiser. The sight of his sinister presentment alone, a mere glimpse of the smallest portrait of him reproduced in a newspaper, is sufficient to make the blood run cold. Oh that viperine eye of his, shaded by flaccid lids, that smile twisted awry by all his secret vices, his utter hypocrisy, morbid brutality, added to cold ferocity, and overweening arrogance which in itself is enough to provoke a horsewhip to lash him of its own accord. Once in an old temple in Japan I saw a gruesome work of art, which was considered a masterpiece of genre painting, and had been preserved for centuries, wrapped in a veil, in one of the coffers containing temple treasures.
It is well known how highly the Japanese esteem gruesome works of art, and what masters their artists are in the cult of the horrible. It was a mask of a human face, with features, if anything, rather regular and refined, but if you looked at it attentively its appalling expression, at the same time cruel and lifeless, haunted you for days and nights. From out the cadaverous flesh, livid and lined, gleamed its two eyes, partly closed, but one more so than the other, and they seemed to wink, as if to say:
"For a long time, while I lay waiting there in my box, I meditated some ghastly surprise for you, and at last you have come; you are in my power, and here it is."
Well, for those who have eyes to see, the face of their Kaiser is as shocking as that mask, hidden away in the old temple over there; it matters not in what kind of helmet, more or less savage in design, he may choose to trick himself out, whether it have a spike or a death's head. In all the years during which the terrible expression of this man has haunted me, I not only shared the presentiment common to everyone else that he was "meditating some surprise for us," but I had a foreboding that his plot would be laid with diabolical wickedness and would prove more terrible than all the crimes of old, uncivilised times. And I said to myself:
"It is of vital importance for the safeguard of humanity to kill that thing."
Indeed he should have been killed, the hyena slain, before his latent rabidness had completely developed, or at least he should have been chained up, muzzled, imprisoned behind close set and solid bars.
What could have possessed the anarchists, to whom such an opportunity presented itself of redeeming their character, of deserving the gratitude of the world, what could have possessed them? When there is question of killing a sovereign they attempt the life of the charming young King of Spain. From the Austrian court, which held a far more suitable victim, they select and stab the mysterious and lovely Empress, who never harmed a soul. And of the quartet of kings in the Balkans, their choice fell upon the King of Greece, when there was that monster Coburg close at hand, an opportunity truly unique.
Their Kaiser, their unspeakable, Protean Kaiser, whenever it seems that everything possible has been said about him, bewilders one by breaking out in some new direction which no one could ever have foreseen. After his almost doltish obstinacy in persistently posing his Germany as the victim who was attacked, in spite of most blinding evidence to the contrary, most formal written proofs, most crushing confessions which escaped the lips of his accomplices, did he not just recently feel a need to "swear before God" that his conscience was pure and that he had not wished for war? Before what God? Obviously before his own, "his old God," proper to himself, whom in private he must assuredly call, "my old Beelzebub." What excellent taste, moreover, to couple that epithet "old" with such a name!
This Kaiser of theirs seems to have received from his old Beelzebub not only a mission to spread abroad the uttermost mourning, to cause the most abundant outpouring of blood and tears, but also a mission to shoot down all forms of beauty, all religious memorials; a mission to profane everything, defile everything, and disfigure everything that he should fail to destroy. He has succeeded even in bringing dishonour on science, by degrading it to play the part of accomplice in his crimes. Moreover it is not merely that this war of his, this war which he forced upon us with such damnable deliberation, will have been a thousand times more destructive of human life than all the wars of the past collectively, but he must needs likewise attack with vindictive fury, he and his rabble of followers, all those treasures of art which should have remained an inviolable heritage of civilised Europe. And if ever he had succeeded in realising his dream of morbid vanity and becoming absolute tyrant of the world, not by means of explosives and scrap-iron alone would he have achieved the ruin of all art, but through the incurably bad taste of his Germany. It is sufficient to have visited Berlin, the capital city of pinchbeck, of the gilded decorations of the parvenu, to form an idea of what our towns would have become. And with a shudder one contemplates the rapid and final decadence of those wonderful Eastern towns, Stamboul, Damascus, Bagdad, upon the day when they should submit to his law.
This unspeakable Kaiser of theirs, how cunningly sometimes he adds to dishonour a touch of the grotesque. For instance, did he not lately offer as a pledge to that insignificant King of Greece his word of a Hohenzollern? The day after the violation of Belgium to dare to offer his word was admirable enough, but to add that his word was that of a Hohenzollern, what a happy conceit! Is it the result of dense unconsciousness or of the insolent irony with which he regards his timid brother-in-law, at whose little army, on the occasion of a visit to Athens, he scoffed so disdainfully? Who that has some slight tincture of history is ignorant of the fact that during the five hundred years of its notoriety the accursed line of the Hohenzollern has never produced anything but shameless liars, kites that prey on flesh. As early as 1762 did not the great Empress Maria Theresa write of them in these terms:
"All the world knows what value to attach to the King of Prussia and his word. There is no sovereign in Europe who has not suffered from his perfidy. And such a king as this would impose himself upon Germany as dictator and protector! Under a despotism which repudiates every principle, the Prussian monarchy will one day be the source of infinite calamity, not only to Germany, but likewise to the whole of Europe."
Unhappy King of Greece, who approached too near to the glare of the Gorgon, and lies to-day annihilated almost by its baleful influence! Should not his example be as much an object lesson—though without the heroism and the glory—for sovereigns of neutral nations who have still been spared, as the examples of the King of Belgium and the King of Serbia?
Their Kaiser, whose mere glance is ominous of death, baffles reason and common sense. The morbid degeneracy of his brain is undeniable, and yet in certain respects it is nevertheless a brain excellently ordered for planning evil, and it has made a special study of the art of slaughter. For the honour of humanity let us grant that he is mad, as a certain prince of Saxony has just publicly declared.
Agreed; he is mad. His case may actually be classified as teratological, and in any other country but Germany this war of his would have resulted for him in a strait-waistcoat and a cell. But alas for Europe! the accident of his birth has made him Kaiser of the one nation capable of tolerating him and of obeying him—a people cruel by nature and rendered ferocious by civilisation, as Goethe avers; a people of infinite stupidity, as Schopenhauer confesses in his last solemn testament.
In some respects this infinite stupidity he himself shares. Otherwise would he have failed so irremediably in his first outset in 1914 as to imagine up to the very last moment that England would not stir, even in face of Belgium's great sacrifice.[3] And is there not at least as much folly as ferocity in his massacres of civilians, his torpedoing of ships belonging to neutral countries, his outrages in America, his Zeppelins, his asphyxiating gas; all those odious crimes which he personally instigated, and which have had merely the result of concentrating upon himself and his German Empire universal hatred and disgust?
After forty years of feverish preparation, with such formidable resources at his disposal, shrinking from no measures however atrocious and vile, trammelled by no law of humanity, by no pang of conscience, to wallow thus in blood, and yet after all to achieve nothing but failure—there is no other explanation possible; some essential quality must be lacking in his murderous brain. And the nation must indeed be German in character still to suffer itself to be led onwards to its downfall by an unbalanced lunatic responsible for such blunders. They are led onwards to downfall and butchery. And is there never a limit to the sheepish submission of a people who at this very moment are suffering themselves to be slaughtered like mere cattle in attacks directed with imbecile fury by a microcephalous youth, equally devoid of intelligence and soul?