The Kaiser’s only daughter paraded in the uniform of a Hussar, while her august father talked of “keeping the powder dry.” One day, on his own domains at harvest time, he was seized by mad admiration at the sight of the millions of ears of golden corn.
“They remind me,” he said, “of the ocean of lances of my Uhlans.”
On another occasion, during a hunt near the French frontier, when the Kaiser was surrounded as usual by sycophants and toadies attired in all the resplendence of their military uniforms, the then Most Highest allowed a mysterious word to escape his lips. Having half drawn his sword, he snapped it back into its scabbard and exclaimed:
“They tremble in Europe.”
Then he burst out laughing.
And now came the decade which preceded the world war. Germany rejected Great Britain’s proposal that each side should limit its naval armament and halt for a while. Convinced at this time that her tremendous military machine was not only invincible, but irresistible, Germany applied herself feverishly to a mad rush of naval construction with the object of making her shores intangible. The idea was that in this way Britain would be kept quiet and Germany would be able to proceed to crush the Franco-Russian entente and obtain continental domination. From this to universal control only one step was required.
This was what the German military caste had in mind–that is to say, the Kaiser, the Crown Prince, and the 40,000 or 50,000 officers and civilians recruited from the nobility, high society, from the professions and the educated officials. And the crowd–the masses–would go to sleep each evening blinded to the facts, but convinced that numberless enemies were preparing to pounce covertly on their Fatherland.
The great hope of the German Government from 1908 to 1914 was to get the war started without it being apparent that Germany provoked it.
But as so often repeated to us by that fine Swiss fellow, Hinterman, who was interned with us, the artifices of the Germans are easily seen through. And all the scheming of the events which preceded the invasion of Belgium, however clever it was, will not prevent history from bringing against William Hohenzollern and his entourage a verdict of guilty.