It was some little time after the Kaiser’s reinstatement that a British sailor, who was quite unable to control his feelings, after glowering for several minutes at the figure, made a run at it and knocked it over. The head was smashed and the figure badly damaged.
The tar’s friends, who were much concerned at their companion’s escapade, strove to pacify him, and contrived to get him out of the building without further trouble; but the Kaiser had to go into hospital for repairs.
The sailor was carried away by an impulse thousands have with difficulty controlled out of respect for the Exhibition and the law which makes it an offence to destroy other people’s property.
Two days after the incident a little boy inquired of an Exhibition attendant where he could see the pieces of the Kaiser, as he would like to take a bit away.
A party of twenty-eight American soldiers happened to be passing the curtained room where the dismembered model of the Kaiser lay, and one of them made the request that they should be shown the “All-Highest” lying in state.
“And a very bad state, too,” replied the attendant, who could not oblige.
The second serious attack upon the Kaiser’s effigy took place two or three months after the first.
On this occasion it was a Colonial soldier who, seeing the restored monarch gazing at him in a supercilious fashion, as he imagined, drew from its scabbard the sword of the defunct Austrian Emperor, whose model sits close by, and stabbed the Kaiser’s figure in the face.
The force with which the thrust was delivered was such that off came the monarch’s head, and again the model had to be taken to hospital for the surgical operation of restoring the head and refixing it to its trunk.
Count Zeppelin, whose name will for ever be associated with the introduction of aerial warships and the dropping of bombs upon defenceless people, has had many a clenched fist shaken at him standing there beside the portraits of Roger Casement and Tribich Lincoln.