A Garden of Peace: A Medley in Quietude

by Frank Frankfort Moore

CHAPTER THE TENTH

But there is in my mind one garden In which I should like to see the tallest and most truculent of Englishmen. It is the Tiergarten at Berlin. I recollect very vividly the first time that I passed through the Brandenburger Gate to visit some friends who occupied a flat in the block of buildings known as “In den Zelten.” I had just come within sight of the sentry at the gate-house when I saw him rush to the door of the guard-room and in a few seconds the whole guard had turned out with a trumpet and a drum. I was surprised, for I had not written to say that I was coming, and I was quite unused to such courtesy either in Berlin br any other city where there is a German population.

Before the incident went further I became aware of the fact that all the vehicles leaving “Unter den Linden” had become motionless, and that the officers who were in some of them were standing up at the salute. The only carriage in motion was a landau drawn by a pair of gray horses, with a handsome man in a plain uniform and the ordinary helmet of an infantry soldier sitting alone with his face to the horses. I knew him in a moment, though I had never seen him before—the Crown Prince Frederick, the husband of our Princess Royal—the “Fritz” of the intimate devotional telegrams to “Augusta” from the battlefields of France in 1870.

That Crown Prince was the very opposite to his truculent son and that contemptible blackguard, his son's son. Genial, considerate, and unassuming, disliking all display and theatrical posing, he was much more of an English gentleman than a German Prince. His son Wilhelm had even then begun to hate him—so I heard from a high personage of the Court.

I am certain that it was his reading of the campaign of 1870-1 that set this precious Wilhelm—this Emperor of the penny gaff—on his last enterprise. If one hunts up the old newspapers of 1870 one will read in every telegram from the German front of the King of Prussia and the Crown Prince marching to Victory, in the campaign started by a forgery and a lie, by that fine type of German trickery, unscrupulousness, brutality, and astuteness, Bismarck. Wilhelm could not endure the thought of the glory of his house being centred in those who had gone before him, and he chafed at the years that were passing without history repeating itself. He could with difficulty restrain himself from his attempt to dominate the world until his first-begotten was old enough to dominate the demi-monde of Paris—“Wilhelm to-day successfully stormed Le Chemin des Dames,” was the telegram that he sent to the Empress, in imitation of those sent by his grandfather to his Augusta. Le Chemin des Dames!—beyond a doubt his dream was to give France to his eldest, England to his second, and Russia to the third of the litter. After that, as he said to Mr. Gerard, he would turn his attention to America.

That was the dream of this Bonaparte done in German silver, and now his house is left unto him desolate—unto him whose criminality, sustained by the criminal conceit of his subjects, left thousands of houses desolate for evermore.

But we are now in the Garden of Peace, whose sweet savour should not be allowed to become rank by the mention of the name of the instigator of the German butcheries.

There is little under my eyes in this garden to remind me of one on the Rhine where I spent a summer a good many years ago. Its situation was ideal. The island of legends, Nonnenworth, was all that could be seen from one of the garden-houses; and one of the windows in the front was arranged in small squares of glass stained, but retaining their transparency, in various colours—crimson, pink, dark blue, ultramarine, and two degrees yellow. Through these theatrical mediums we were exhorted to view the romantic island, so that we had the rare chance of seeing Nonnenworth bathed in blood, or in flames of fire. It was undoubtedly a great privilege, but I only availed myself of it once; though our host, who must have looked through those glasses thousands of times, was always to be found gazing through the flaming yellow at the unhappy isle.

From the vineyard nearer the house we had the finest view of the ruins of the Drachenfels, and, on the other side of the Rhine, of Rolandseck. Godesburg was farther away, but we used to drive through the lovely avenue of cherry-trees and take the ferry to the hotel gardens where we lunched.

Another of the features of the great garden of our villa was a fountain whose chief charm was found in an arrangement by which, on treading on a certain slab of stone at the invitation of our host, the uninitiated were met by a deluging squirt of water.