'And who will fight, the Slavs and Teutons?'
'You have said it! It will come.'
I knew a Russian who, while a nobleman, was not an official. In fact, he hated bureaucrats. He could endure no one in the Russian court circle except the Empress Dowager, Marie, because she was sympathetic, and the late Grand Duke Constantine, because he had translated Shakespeare.
'If Prince Valdemar of Denmark had been the son instead of the brother of the Dowager Empress, Russia would have a future. As it is, I will quote from Father Gapon for you. You know his Life?'
'No,' I said.
'Well, he has attempted to give the working-men in Russia a chance; he has tried to gain for them one-tenth of the place which working-men in your country have, and, in 1905, he was answered by the massacre of the Narva gate. The Tsar is a fool, with an imperialistic hausfrau for a wife. If you will read the last words of Father Gapon's Life, you will find these words:
'"I may say, with certainty, that the struggle is quickly approaching its inevitable climax: that Nicholas II. is preparing for himself the fate which befell a certain English King and a certain French King long ago, and that such members of his dynasty as escape unhurt from the throes of the Revolution, will some day, in a not very distant future, find themselves exiles upon some Western shore." I may live to see this; but I hope that the Empress Marie may not. She knows where the policy of her daughter-in-law, who has all the stupidity of Marie Antoinette, without her charm, would lead; she says of her son,—"he was on the right road before he married that narrow-minded woman!"'
This, remember, was in 1908. It was whispered even then in Copenhagen that Russia was beginning to break up. The Dean of the Diplomatic Corps was Count Calvi di Bergolo, honest, brave, opinionated, who would teach you everything, from how to jump a hurdle to the gaseous compositions in the moon. He was of the haute école at the riding school and of the vielle école of diplomacy. He was very frank. He had a great social vogue because of a charming wife and a most exquisite daughter, now the Princess Aage. He would never speak English; French was the diplomatic language; it gave a diplomatist too much of an advantage, if one spoke in his native tongue. He believed in the protocol to the letter; he was a martinet of a Dean.
'Public opinion,' he said scornfully, 'public opinion in the United States is for peace. In Europe, if we could all have what we want, we should all keep the peace; but what chance of peace can there be until Italy has the Trentino or France Alsace-Lorraine, or until Germany gets to her place by controlling the Slavs. You are of a new country, where they believe things because they are impossible.'
He was a wise gentleman and he, too, watched Germany. It was plain that he disliked the Triple Alliance. Suddenly it dawned on me 'like thunder' that we had an interest in watching Germany, too.