The prince paused with a masterful smile and played with a large signet ring on his third finger.
“Surely Your Imperial Highness does not think that Germany can conquer the whole of America?”
“Of course not, at least not for many years. We are content with your Atlantic seaboard, the garden spot of the earth in climate and resources. We shall hold this region and develop it along broad lines of German efficiency and German kultur. What wonderful improvements we will make! How we will use the opportunities you have wasted!
“Ha! Let me give you one instance among many of your incredible inefficiency. Those disappearing carriages of your coast defence guns! I suppose they were the pet hobby of some politician with an interest in their manufacture, but Gott in Himmel! what foolishness! The guns themselves are good enough, but the carriages allow them an elevation of only ten percent against a thirty percent elevation that is possible for guns of equal calibre on our battleships, which means that our twelve-inch guns outrange yours by a couple of miles simply because we can fire them at a higher angle.”
“You mean that one of your super-dreadnoughts—”
“Exactly. One of our super-dreadnoughts can lie off Rockaway Beach and drop shells from her twelve-inch guns into Union Square, and the twelve-inch guns of your harbour forts, handicapped by their stupid carriages, could never touch her.”
The conversation now turned to other subjects and presently the prince was led by enthusiasm or arrogance to make a series of statements that gave extraordinary importance to my interview, since they enraged the whole Anglo-Saxon world, particularly our Western and Middle Western states. Fortunately I submitted my manuscript to Frederick William before cabling the interview to London, so there was no danger of his repudiating my words.
With brutal frankness this future ruler of a nation maintained that against German arms America must now go down to defeat just as England went down to partial defeat in 1917 and for the same unchangeable reason that the fittest among nations inevitably survive.
“Ask your readers in the London Times, Mr. Langston, why it was that in the fall of 1915 Germany had been able to put into the field nine million fully equipped, highly efficient soldiers, whereas England, with nearly the same population, counting her white colonies, had been able to send out only two and a half million, a third of these being physically defective? Why was that?
“Was it lack of guns and ammunition? Lack of officers and training? Partly so, but something else was lacking, I mean patriotism among the English masses that would give them the desire to fight for England, also a high standard of physical excellence that would make them able to fight effectively and to endure the hardships of the trenches.