¶ Do not believe it! It is only a poetic fancy, not human life. Plans such as Bismarck met and carried forth, empires such as Napoleon founded are not placed constructively before one in a vision, nor are the complex ramifications attendant upon their ultimate achievement a matter of pre-vision.
It is only the small mind that plans down to the hair’s breadth. Your truly great man, like Bismarck or Napoleon, takes up life as he finds it, and little by little learns the business of compelling other men to do his bidding; and always in this there is a large element left to the hazard of the die; or to use Bismarck’s own phrase just before Sadowa, “Now we shall see how the god of battle rolls the iron dice!” Your great man rides forth to the battle, prepared to take instant advantage of circumstances as they may rise.
¶ Bismarck’s idea of United Germany, at least the idea he always gave to the public, was that the thing might be done, with and through the power of God.
The word God appears and reappears in connection with his plan; in his messages, speeches, dispatches, and in his private letters, he calls on God. I am not here to say that Bismarck had religious visions. I take it that he never heard mysterious voices or saw ghostly forms, but instead was an intensely human man who fought out his life even as you fight out yours—with the powers with which you are endowed, and for such ends as seem worth the price, to you. The religious faith learned at his mother’s knee, made Bismarck’s life-work a sacred vocation. He believed that he was chosen by God to educate, guide and discipline the German people.
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“My dear professor, whoever has once looked into the breaking eye of a dying warrior on the battlefield, will pause ere he begins war.”
¶ And now we meet Bismarck back in Berlin wearing his Koeniggraetz military cross, suspended by a ribbon around the collar of his plain blue Prussian uniform. But the great strain of the years is beginning to show. For one thing Bismarck’s eyes are failing; he uses a glass as he muses over his mounds of state papers; his face is lined with deep marks; care has done its work; our Otto is now bald, obese and stiff-jointed, much more so than his 54 years might seem to call for. In making speeches he does not speak as boldly, as directly as in days of yore. He stops, hesitates, stammers, but manages to hold the crowd.
¶ You see he has a world of things on his mind; the under-play of the great political game absorbs his very life. What, pray, about this subconscious impression, that everybody has about an impending war with France? Bismarck, as deep as the sea, is still seemingly as open as a child.
One day, a famous professor made the fateful inquiry as had hundreds of journalists—and this time Bismarck replied, “My dear professor, whoever has once looked into the breaking eye of a dying warrior on the battlefield, will pause ere he begins a war.”
¶ So much for the astuteness of the man with the iron cross. He is indeed no longer learning the game.