MR. ALFRED AUSTIN
(POET LAUREATE)
was Special Correspondent of the Standard during the Franco-German War in 1870-71. His accounts of his interviews with Bismarck were everywhere read. Mr. Austin is one of the two English survivors of the campaign. His sonnet on the Prince Imperial, written a few days after the news of the tragedy in Zululand was received, is reproduced by the Poet Laureate’s special permission. The photograph of Mr. Austin, taken in 1870, was kindly lent by Mrs. Austin.
did not once take off his General’s plumed tricorne, but contented himself with acknowledging the salutations of the crowd by occasionally touching his hat. By his own orders he rode alone; the escort, separated from his own by a considerable space, front and rear. This was an example of the pluck which he invariably displayed both as President and as Emperor.
During his four years’ Presidency of the Republic he had been surrounded by open foes in France and by opponents who lay in ambush awaiting opportunities to strike. Foreign opinion, however, was less hostile prior to than it became after the coup d’état, which was the signal for an outburst of almost universal execration. Even Queen Victoria, who, some three years later, was entertaining, and was entertained by, the Emperor and Empress, condemned the act of December, 1851. Early in 1852 the Queen, in a letter to King Frederick William of Prussia, wrote:[113]
The political stratagem in Paris will have taken your Majesty back to the days of your youth.... Louis Napoleon had tried to freshen up the memories of all European Governments by the reintroduction of the eagle on the standards of the French army, and by allusions to changes of the boundaries, etc. In spite of this, I firmly believe in the maintenance of peace. But I am made much more anxious by the thought that those Continental Governments which have gone too far in their blind reaction, led astray by the Paris example, are of the erroneous opinion that a State is likely to last eternally which has been raised on the ruins of civil liberty with the blood of the middle classes of France, and that they may be encouraged to widen the breach between them and their peoples, and completely destroy the belief in the political morality of Governments in general.