The plenitude of Iron Crosses appealed to the risibilities of the superficial observer. But in this, too, there was system. An officer who had been in several battles without winning one must feel a trifle declassed and that it was time for him to make amends to his pride. If many were given to privates then the average soldier would not think the Cross a prize for the few who had luck, but something that he, too, might win by courage and prompt obedience to orders.
The masterful calculation, the splendid pretence and magnificent offence, could not hide the suspense and suffering. Nowhere were you able to forget the war or to escape the all-pervading influence of the Kaiser. The empty royal box at the opera, his opera, called him to mind. What would happen before he reappeared there for a gala performance? When again in the shuffle of European politics would the audience see the Czar of Russia or the King of England by his side?
It was his Berlin, the heart of his Berlin, that was before you when you left the opera—the new Berlin, taking few pages of a guide book compared to Paris, which he had fathered in its boom growth. In front of his palace Russian field guns taken by von Hindenburg at Tannenberg were exhibited as the spoils of his war; while the Never-to-be-Forgotten Grandfather in bronze rode home in triumph from Paris not far away.
One wondered what all the people in the ocean of Berlin flats were thinking as one walked past the statue of Frederick the Great, with his sharp nose pointing the way for future conquerors, and on along Unter den Linden, with its broad pavements gleaming in a characteristic, misty winter night, through the Brandenburg Gate of his Brandenburg dynasty, or to the statue of the blood-and-iron Bismarck, with his strong jaw and pugnacious nose—the statesman militant in uniform with a helmet over his bushy brow—who had made the German Empire, that young empire which had not yet known defeat because of the system which makes ready and chooses the hour for its blow.
Not far away one had glimpses of the white statues of My Ancestors of the Sièges Allée, or avenue of victory,—the present Kaiser’s own idea,—with the great men of the time on their right and left hands. People whose sense of taste, not to say of humour, may limit their statecraft had smiled at this monotonous and grandiose row of all the dead bones of distinguished and mediocre royalty immortalised in marble to the exact number of thirty-two. But they were My Ancestors, O Germans, who made you what you are! Right dress and keep that line of royalty in mind! It is your royal line, older than the trees in the garden, firm as the rocks, Germany itself. The last is not the least in might nor the least advertised in the age of publicity. He is to make the next step in advance for Germany and bring more tribute home, if all Germans will be loyal to him.
One paused to look at the photograph of the Kaiser in a shop window; a big photograph of that man whose photograph is everywhere in Germany. It is a stern face, this face, as the leader wishes his people to see him, with its erectile moustache, the lips firm set, the eyes challenging and the chin held so as to make it symbolic of strength: a face that strives to say in that pose: “Onward! I lead!” Germans have seen it every day for a quarter of a century. They have lived with it and the character of it has grown into their natures.
In the same window was a smaller photograph of the Crown Prince, with his cap rakishly on the side of his head, as if to give himself a distinctive characteristic in the German eye; but his is the face of a man who is not mature for his years and a trifle dissipated. For a while after the war began he, as leader of the war party, knew the joy of being more popular than the Kaiser. But the tide turned soon in favour of a father, who appeared to be drawn reluctantly into the ordeal of death and wounds for his people in “defence of the Fatherland,” and against a son who had clamoured for the horror which his people had begun to realise, particularly as his promised entry into Paris had failed. There can be no question which of the two has the wiser head.
The Crown Prince had passed into the background. He was marooned with ennui in the face of the French trenches in the West, while all the glory was being won in the East. Indeed, father had put son in his place. One day, the gossips said, son might have to ask father, in the name of the Hohenzollerns, to help him recover his popularity. His photograph had been taken down from shop windows and in its place, on the right hand of the Kaiser in the Sièges Allée of contemporary fame, was the bull-dog face of von Hindenburg, victor of Tannenberg. The Kaiser shared von Hindenburg’s glory; he has shared the glory of all victorious generals; such is his histrionic gift in the age of the spotlight.
Make no mistake—his people, deluded or not, love him not only because he is Kaiser but also for himself. He is a clever man, who began his career with the enormous capital of being emperor and made the most of his position to amaze the world with a more versatile and also a more inscrutable personality than most people realise. Poseur, perhaps, but an emperor these days may need to be a poseur in order to wear the ermine of Divine Right convincingly to most of his subjects.
His pose is always that of the anointed King of My People. He has never given down on that point, however much he has applied State Socialism to appease the Socialistic agitation. He has personified Germany and German ambition with an adroit egoism and the sentiment of his inheritance. Those critics who see the machinery of the throne may say that he has the mind of a journalist, quick of perception, ready of assimilation, knowing many things in their essentials but no one thing thoroughly. But this is the kind of mind that a ruler requires, plus the craft of the politician.