The rain writes ghostly characters on my window as well as on the panes of the house opposite. That is all; nothing else happens.
Nothing? I must be mad to write such a thing. Does not every day bring with it the collapse of something which had always existed, ever since I was born, and before that, long before that?... It is incomprehensible. One reads only the news, and when one has read that it seems impossible, and one half expects somebody will laugh, or a voice will tell us that it is not true and that everything is really as it used to be. Yet we wait in vain.... And again we believe that nothing will happen.
Meanwhile loyal Bavaria has driven King Louis out of the country. The Soldiers’ and Workers’ Council in Saxony has made a proclamation to the people: “The King has been deprived of his throne, the Wettin dynasty has ceased to exist.” Baden has expelled its ruler, and the Grand Duke of Hesse is a prisoner of the mob. Wurtemburg, Brunswick, Weimar.... Ancient thrones, legendary old courts, centres of culture, art-loving little residences, all collapse in a few minutes. It is as if some giant Hatred roams abroad, demolishing everything it finds standing, from east to west.
All the faithful German princes have lost their thrones. The only one who still wears a crown is the one who has shown himself faithless—the Hohenzollern down there in Roumania. And the Kaiser has fled to Holland from his unhappy Empire.
Kaiser Wilhelm has resigned his throne! As the news spreads this fresh token of the mutability of human affairs causes a shudder even in those who worked for it with hatred and received it with shouts of triumph.
Since Napoleon, nobody has been so violently hated on this globe as he. Doubtless this will be the measure of his importance in history. It will judge his power by the fact that against Napoleon England had allied only a fraction of Europe, while against the Hohenzollern the whole world was forced to rise in arms.
The cause of the two Emperors’ downfall is the same. Napoleon wanted to make France the first power of the world, and Kaiser Wilhelm dreamt the same dream for the German Empire. Neither of them could stop half-way.
Is it a Saint Helena that fate has in store for Kaiser Wilhelm? Will the Dutch castle that has received him turn out to be a replica of the Bellerophon?
The Kaiser was a friend of the Hungarians. Once in the royal castle of Buda he proposed the health of the Hungarian nation. Since the rule of the Hapsburgs no crowned head has ever spoken to us like that. His speech was printed in school books, the children learned it by heart, and the memory of the Kaiser stayed with us. But he never came again to our midst. During the war he went to Vienna, to Sophia and to Constantinople. He never stopped at Budapest. And while the Hungarian people waited for him whose soldiers had bled with ours at three gates of our country, he was forced to bear in mind the jealousy of Vienna. His picture was in the shop-windows, Budapest had named its finest boulevard after him, the colours of his Empire floated everywhere and if his train touched the country’s soil the newspapers wrote in his homage.
In 1916 Tisza went to the German General Headquarters. The Roumanians had just invaded Transylvania and he asked for troops and help for his hard-pressed country.