Her impressions of her week in London, a city she had expected to find wrapt in impenetrable fog, but which remained, with the exception of a few showers, bathed in sunshine all the time of her visit, were joyous in the extreme.
The soldiers, especially the Highlanders walking with that peculiarly characteristic, proud, delightful swagger, the rhythmic swing of their kilts, the skirl of their bagpipes, thrilled her with delight.
“Your soldiers are wonderful,” she said; “I never thought they were like that. Every private walks like an officer.”
She thought the “Military Tournament” the most delightful entertainment she had ever seen, and was intensely amused at “Arthur’s Arabs,” the soldiers of the regiment of Prince Arthur of Connaught, who, disguised in burnous and appropriate head-gear and jabbering a jargon of their own invention, interspersed with weird shrieks and gestures, imposed themselves on a portion of the unsuspecting British public as “the real article” from somewhere in the neighbourhood of Algiers, and accomplished their tent-pegging to the accompaniment of blood-curdling and ear-piercing yells.
When the Emperor and Empress went with the King and Queen to spend the afternoon at Windsor Castle, King George sent all the German servants and footmen, under the guidance of some of his own English servants, to see this same Military Tournament, at which they were much delighted—for, as a rule, it is very difficult for people in attendance on travelling royalties to get any but a very cursory glimpse of the countries where they are staying. They returned glowing with enthusiasm and full of interest in what they had seen.
“So etwas haben wir nicht in Deutschland” (We have nothing like that in Germany), said one Diener to me with a certain quaint surprise; “it is very amusing, very interesting; but what is the use of it? We should not let our army waste its time dancing quadrilles with four-horse guns.”
I explained to the best of my ability that the tournament was a charitable affair and helped to get money for soldiers’ orphans, also that the gun evolutions were really only a modification of real military tactics. He seemed hardly convinced, however, and, in spite of his loudly expressed pleasure in the spectacle, still continued doubtful as to its relative utility.
If one may judge from the occasional bits of gossip which float upwards from “below stairs,” rather humorous situations sometimes arise between the servants of royalty belonging to different nationalities. When King George and Queen Mary paid their last visit to Berlin, on the occasion of the marriage of the Emperor’s daughter, two English waiting-maids were taken for a drive in Potsdam by a kindly German maid anxious to show some polite attention to the visitors. She, however, complained bitterly on her return of the severely patriotic attitude of the two British ladies, who, whatever they were shown, compared it detrimentally to something else in England; and when the German pointed out, as a possible object of interest, the large hangar built for the accommodation of Zeppelin’s air-ship, ostentatiously turned away their heads and looked in another direction, finding nothing more gracious to say than that they were “very pleased that the air-ship had descended by mistake into French territory!” Happily such rigidly uncompromising souls are rarely found at Court.
From her earliest years, projects for the marriage of the Kaiser’s daughter had been continually discussed, and as she grew older every eligible prince in Europe—with the exception of the one she eventually married—was cited as a possible husband. The Kings of Spain and Portugal were for some time hot favourites; and when the former young monarch, before his marriage, paid a visit of several days to the New Palace, all the newspapers, taking no account of differences of age and religion, were naturally quite certain that they had run to ground the future bridegroom of the Princess, then only fourteen years of age.
The King was, in spite of the fact that he has no pretensions to beauty, an extremely attractive personality, and he and the Princess were the best of friends, having a similarity of tastes in jokes and a mutual passion for horses. When the King shot his first stag in the Wildpark he gallantly presented her with his Spruch or trophy of leaves, which remained as an ornament of her sitting-room until the announcement of his engagement to Princess Ena of Battenberg, when the Spruch, which had been disintegrating leaf by leaf, finally disappeared.