"'Some of the ordnance we are sending to China to-day may kill my unborn child,'" she writes, "and things have come to such a pass that Krupp had to instruct the coachman to avoid certain roads where Bertha's carriage might meet with ammunition and other transports.
"And ever since, all day long and half the night, she accuses Krupp of using her money to forge guns and bullets that, by and by, may seek the heart or limbs of his own son.
"'Don't I know when war will break out?' he retorted angrily the other day. 'Long before that our boy will be on a journey round the world.' Think of a Prussian officer forced to indulge in such damnable stuff!" cried the War Lord.
"I submit, Your Majesty, that one has to temporise with women, especially with a young mother," suggested Prince Bülow.
"Silly sentimentalities," sneered the War Lord; "I want none of them. Bertha has to be broken of her freak—broken," he repeated, gritting his teeth. "Why," he continued, "she even refuses to take joy in her charities now, because, she says, 'money made out of armaments is tainted and no good can come from it.'
"If I allow that sort of thing to go on there will be a Kladderadatsch" (fatal dénouement), "one fine day. She may attempt to wrest from Krupp the power of attorney under which he acts as my agent, and there is such an abomination as divorce, you know—oh, mille pardons, you do know. And, worse luck, my courts deal in it as well as the Vatican." (The War Lord referred to Princess Bülow, whose first marriage to Count von Donhoff was dissolved by the Holy See in 1881.)
Bülow reddened under the insult. "I am wholly unsuited to interfere in other people's family affairs," he blurted. Then, frightened at losing his temper, added: "I beg Your Majesty's pardon."
"My ward's affairs are my own," declared the War Lord haughtily. "I'll settle with Bertha myself, make her eat out of my hand—take my word for it—and this will help."
He showed the Chancellor a long, handwritten letter, with the imprint of Carlton House Terrace, marked "Private and Confidential," and asked him to read it aloud. The address was that of the German Embassy at the Court of St. James's, and Count Wolff von Metternich, His Majesty's Ambassador, was the correspondent. He had been permanently in London since 1901, previously serving his diplomatic apprenticeship there, off and on, between 1885 and 1890. His naïve complaint in the Joseph Chamberlain affair has been noted. As he was the War Lord's confidant while in the service of the Berlin Foreign Office, Count Metternich could not have been altogether without knowledge of Wilhelm's treacherous conduct in and toward England. The War Lord claimed British hospitality time and again to combine espionage with all too successful attempts to hoodwink the English Sovereign and his statesmen about his real intention toward Great Britain. King Edward was not too blind, though, to what was going on; he is credited with the remark that the War Lord was not a gentleman.
"Important, if true," said Prince Bülow, handing back the letter.