"I congratulate you most sincerely on having succeeded, with your people, without calling on the help of foreign powers, by opposing your own force to an armed band which broke into your country to disturb the peace, in restoring quiet and in maintaining the independence of your country against external attack."
On January 6th, in conversation with Sir Frank Lascelles, Baron von Marschall protested against the view of the English press that it was an act of hostility against England and an encroachment on English rights for the German Emperor to congratulate the head of a friendly state on his victory over an armed band that had invaded his land in defiance of international law, and had been declared to be outside the pale of the law by the English Government itself. But it was not recorded that he disavowed the Kaiser's responsibility for it.
[6] One of the most startling incidents of the Kaiser's reign was the interview with him printed in the London Daily Telegraph of Oct. 28, 1908. In it he said that "Englishmen, in giving rein to suspicions unworthy of a great nation," were "mad as March hares"; and that "the prevailing sentiment among large sections of the middle and lower classes of my own people is not friendly to England. I am, therefore, so to speak, in a minority in my own land, but it is a minority of the best elements, just as it is in England with respect to Germany." German opinion was, he admitted, "bitterly hostile" to England during the Boer War, and, that the German people, if he had permitted Boer delegates in Berlin, "would have crowned them with flowers." He asserted that he had formulated a plan of campaign in South Africa which Lord Roberts adopted in substance.
The Kaiser was quoted in this interview as declaring Germany needed a large fleet chiefly on account of the Far Eastern situation.
The interview was republished in official German organs, and caused as great a stir in Germany as in England. There were many debates on it in the Reichstag and one or two "investigations."
[7] A German philologist who compiled a well-known book of quotations.
[8] His recent death, which snatched him away in the midst of beneficial labors, is a serious loss to the fatherland.
[9] Concerning the course of events up to the fateful 9th of November and this day itself there are authentic statements by an eyewitness in the book (well worth reading) of Major Niemann, who was sent by the Chief Army Command to me, entitled War and Revolution (Krieg und Revolution), Berlin, 1922.
[10] This letter and the letter from the Field Marshal which preceded it are reprinted herewith. The parts which are most important in relation to the matter in question are underscored in the text.
[11] This has meanwhile been done. The Comparative Historical Tables from 1878 to the Outbreak of the War in 1914 were published in December, 1921, by K. F. Koehler, Leipsic.