The War Lord gazed at the speaker for twenty or more seconds, then said in a tone of command: "You can go. Send in Moltke" (referring to his adjutant, later chief of the general staff).
With the latter he remained closeted a quarter of an hour—quite a long space of time for a person of the War Lord's character—and it is said that he tried to persuade the blond giant (Moltke was blond and blooming then) that Krupp was a madman, as crazy as the Mad Hatter. Otherwise he would never have dared oppose his plebeian will against that of the supreme master. Of course not!
Of Moltke's counter-arguments we know naught, but the War Lord's visit to Essen wound up with a grand banquet of sixty covers, and in the course of it host and Imperial guest toasted each other in honeyed words.
* * * * *
Less than two months later Frederick Krupp died by his own hand, and Bertha Krupp—sixteen, homely and already prone to embonpoint—mounted the throne of the Cannon Kings, as the War Lord had willed.
And, as he had insisted, she became automatically a pawn in his hand, his alter ego for destruction and misery.
Ever since his intimacy with Frederick, the War Lord had looked upon the Krupp plant as the power house for the realisation of his ambition—the conquest of the world; and to a very considerable extent Frederick had aided and abetted his plans by employing his genius for invention and business to commercialise war, and making it fit in with the general scheme of high finance.
"Want a loan?" the Cannon King used to ask governments. "May we fix it for you? But first contract for so many quick-firing guns."
The loan being amply secured, and the quick-firers paid for, then the suggestion would come along: "Have some more Bleichroder or Meyer funds on top of our latest devices in man-killers." And so on, and so on; an endless chain.
Yet, while so eager to provide death with new-fangled tools wholesale, Frederick could not, or would not, divest himself from the shackles of business honesty—and his inheritance.