A tweed suit and a bowler hat are doubtless more practical for everyday wear than a doublet and trunk-hose. They are, however, possibly less picturesque.
Since, owing to various circumstances, I happen from my very early days to have seen more of this brave show than has fallen to the lot of most people, some extracts from my diaries, and a few personal reminiscences of the three great Courts of Eastern Europe, may prove of interest.
Up to my twentieth year I was familiar only with our own Court. I was then sent to Rome with a Special Mission. As King Victor Emmanuel had but recently died, there were naturally no Court entertainments.
The Quirinal is a fine palace with great stately rooms, but it struck me then, no doubt erroneously, that the Italian Court did not yet seem quite at home in their new surroundings, and that there was a subtle feeling in the air of a lack of continuity somewhere. In the "'seventies" the House of Savoy had only been established for a very few years in their new capital. The conditions in Rome had changed radically, and somehow one felt conscious of this.
Some ten months later, the ordeal of a competitive examination being successfully surmounted, I was sent to Berlin as Attaché, at the age of twenty.
The Berlin of the "'seventies" was still in a state of transition. The well-built, prim, dull and somewhat provincial Residenz was endeavouring with feverish energy to transform itself into a World-City, a Welt-Stadt. The people were still flushed and intoxicated with victory after victory. In the seven years between 1864 and 1871 Prussia had waged three successful campaigns. The first, in conjunction with Austria, against unhappy little Denmark in 1864; then followed, in 1866, the "Seven Weeks' War," in which Austria was speedily brought to her knees by the crushing defeat of Königgrätz, or Sadowa, as it is variously called, by which Prussia not only wrested the hegemony of the German Confederation from her hundred-year-old rival, but definitely excluded Austria from the Confederation itself. The Hohenzollerns had at length supplanted the proud House of Hapsburg. Prussia had further virtually conquered France in the first six weeks of the 1870 campaign, and on the conclusion of peace found herself the richer by Alsace, half of Lorraine, and the gigantic war indemnity wrung from France. As a climax the King of Prussia had, with the consent of the feudatory princes, been proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles on January 18, 1871, for Bismarck, with all his diplomacy, was unable to persuade the feudatory kings and princes to acquiesce in the title of Emperor of Germany for the Prussian King.
The new Emperor was nominally only primus Inter Pares; he was not to be over-lord. Theoretically the crown of Charlemagne was merely revived, but the result was that henceforth Prussia would dominate Germany. This was a sufficient rise for the little State which had started so modestly in the sandy Mark of Brandenburg (the "sand-box," as South Germans contemptuously termed it) in the fifteenth century. To understand the mentality of Prussians, one must realise that Prussia is the only country that always made war pay. She had risen with marvellous rapidity from her humble beginnings entirely by the power of the sword. Every campaign had increased her territory, her wealth, and her influence, and the entire energies of the Hohenzollern dynasty had been centred on increasing the might of her army. The Teutonic Knights had wrested East Prussia from the Wends by the Power of the sword only. They had converted the Wends to Christianity by annihilating them, and the Prussians inherited the traditions of the Teutonic Knights. Napoleon, it is true, had crushed Prussia at Jena, but the latter half of the nineteenth century was one uninterrupted triumphal progress for her. No wonder then that every Prussian looked upon warfare as a business proposition, and an exceedingly paying one at that. Everything about them had been carefully arranged to foster the same idea. All the monuments in the Berlin streets were to military heroes. The marble groups on the Schloss-Brücke represented episodes in the life of a warrior. The very songs taught the children in the schools were all militarist in tone: "The Good Comrade," "The Soldier," "The Young Recruit," "The Prayer during Battle," all familiar to every German child. When William II, ex-Emperor, found the stately "White Hall" of the Palace insufficiently gorgeous to accord with his megalomania, he called in the architect Ihne, and gave directions for a new frieze round the hall representing "victorious warfare fostering art, science, trade and industry." I imagine that William in his Dutch retreat at Amerongen may occasionally reflect on the consequences of warfare when it is not victorious. Trained in such an atmosphere from their childhood, drinking in militarism with their earliest breath, can it be wondered at that Prussians worshipped brute-force, and brute-force alone?
Such a nation of heroes must clearly have a capital worthy of them, a capital second to none, a capital eclipsing Paris and Vienna. Berliners had always been jealous of Vienna, the traditional "Kaiser-Stadt." Now Berlin was also a "Kaiser-Stadt," and by the magnificence of its buildings must throw its older rival completely into the shade. Paris, too, was the acknowledged centre of European art, literature, and fashion. Why? The French had proved themselves a nation of decadents, utterly unable to cope with German might. The sceptre of Paris should be transferred to Berlin. So building and renovation began at a feverish rate.
The open drains which formerly ran down every street in Berlin, screaming aloud to Heaven during the summer months, were abolished, and an admirable system of main drainage inaugurated. The appalling rough cobble-stones, which made it painful even to cross a Berlin street, were torn up and hastily replaced with asphalte. A French colleague of mine used to pretend that the cobble-stones had been designedly chosen as pavement. Berliners were somewhat touchy about the very sparse traffic in their wide streets. Now one solitary droschke, rumbling heavily over these cobble-stones, produced such a deafening din that the foreigner was deluded into thinking that the Berlin traffic rivalled that of London or Paris in its density.
Berlin is of too recent growth to have any elements of the picturesque about it. It stands on perfectly flat ground, and its long, straight streets are terribly wearisome to the eye. Miles and miles of ornate stucco are apt to become monotonous, even if decorated with porcelain plaques, glass mosaics, and other incongruous details dear to the garish soul of the Berliner. In their rage for modernity, the Municipality destroyed the one architectural feature of the town. Some remaining eighteenth century houses had a local peculiarity. The front doors were on the first floor, and were approached by two steeply inclined planes, locally known as die Rampe. A carriage (with, I imagine, infinite discomfort to the horses) could just struggle up one of these Rampe, deposit its load, and crawl down again to the street-level. These inclined planes were nearly all swept away. The Rampe may have been inconvenient, but they were individual, local and picturesque.