"You heard of Lord Dundonald?" he asked abruptly.
"The father of Baron Cochrane, who announced the death of Gordon and the fall of Khartoum," replied Bertha. "Gustav met him at Brooks's, I believe."
"The desert rider doesn't interest us now," retorted Wilhelm, "though I would love to have him on my staff—just the man to lead my African forces and to help in the Boer uprising. I am talking of Thomas Cochrane, the tenth Earl. Surely you learned about his good work against Napoleon and his exploits in South American waters? For a time he was admiral of the Chilian Fleet, re-entering the British naval service in the last years of William IV.'s reign."
"I recollect now," said Bertha.
"Well, the two elder Dundonalds were scientists, like your father and grandfather. Indeed, Dundonald grand-père made several epoch-making chemical discoveries—I suspect Heydebrand is stealing his ideas on every hand" (Dr. Ernst von Heydebrand, leader of the Agrarian party and a husbandman of note), "for Earl Archie enlarged on the relations between agriculture and chemistry even during the French Revolution; but Thomas Dundonald, his son, the same who defeated the Corsican at sea, was, or rather is, the man who threatens the Fatherland, even though buried these fifty years and more. Industry is indebted to him for discoveries in the line of compressed air, improvements in engines and propellers, but his chef d'oeuvre was a war machine.
"I tell you, Bertha, it looms up larger and larger as the struggle that is sure to come approaches—a perpetual threat menacing the stability of my Empire.
"The enemy—I mean the British War Office—has wrapt that thing of horror in darkest mystery ever since its inception a hundred years ago, and Haldane is as secretive about it as the Prince Regent was in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
"During my every visit to England I have tried to find out from princes, statesmen and military men on the Dundonald plan, only to meet with patriotic objections in one place, with bluff in another. Lord Roberts went so far as to say there was no such thing. But King Edward, when Prince of Wales, contradicted Roberts, without suspecting, of course, that I had quizzed the Field Marshal. He had seen the document, he said; it rested in a secret drawer of the War Minister's safe. 'No other War Office official has access to it,' he told me, 'and it's the only copy in existence.'
"His word notwithstanding, there was a possibility, of course, that the plans of the great war machine might be concealed somewhere about Lord Dundonald's town residence in Portman Square, or in the archives of Gwyrch Castle, his seat in Wales, and Wedell has spent ten thousands upon ten thousands, bribing confidential servants, librarians and secretaries and what not? I had half made up my mind to approach the present Earl, when Metternich, by the merest accident, came upon some of the information sought after.
"Bertha," continued Wilhelm, "though we don't know its exact nature yet, the last doubt as to its limitless efficacy as a destroyer is removed—hence, the famous secret of the London War Office constitutes a peril to the German Empire that only war preparations on the largest possible scale can hope to check."