The King and the Chancellor first rode to the field where the heavy artillery had been at work. I followed them after I had jotted down my notes. This field lies about 800 to 1000 paces to the right of the road that brought us here. In front of it towards the wood at the bottom of the valley were some fields surrounded by hedges in which lay about a thousand German dead, Thuringians of the 31st Regiment. The camp itself presented a horrible appearance, all blue and red from the French dead, most of them being killed by the shells of the 4th Corps, and fearfully disfigured.
The Chancellor, as he afterwards told me, noticed among some prisoners in a quarry a priest who was believed to have fired at our men. “On my charging him with having done so he denied it. ‘Take care,’ I said to him, ‘for if it is proved against you, you will certainly be hanged.’ In the meantime I gave instructions to remove his cassock.” Near the church the King saw a wounded musketeer, with whom he shook hands, although the man was rather tattered and dirty from the work of the previous day, doubtless to the surprise of the French officers who were present. The King asked him what his business was. He replied that he was a Doctor of Philosophy. “Well, then, you will have learnt to bear your wounds in a philosophical spirit,” said the King. “Yes,” answered the musketeer, “I have already made up my mind to do so.”
Near the second village we overtook some common soldiers, Bavarians, who had broken down on the march, and were dragging themselves slowly along in the burning sun. “Hullo, countryman!” called out the Minister to one of these, “will you have some brandy?” “Why, certainly;” and so would a second and a third, to judge from their looks. All three, and a few more, after they had had a pull at the Minister’s flask and at mine, received a decent cigar in addition. At the village of Crehanges, where the princely personages of the second section of the King’s suite were quartered, together with some gentlemen of the Crown Prince’s retinue, the King ordered a lunch, to which Bismarck was also invited. In the meantime I sat on a stone by the roadside and wrote up my diary, and afterwards assisted the Dutch Ambulance corps, who had erected a bright green tent for the wounded in the vicinity of the village. When the Minister returned he asked me what I had been doing, which I told him. “I would rather have been there than in the company I was in,” he said, breathing deeply, and then quoted the line from Schiller’s Diver, “Unter Larven die einzige fühlende Brust” (the only feeling heart amongst all those masks).
During the rest of the drive the conversation moved for a considerable time in exalted regions, and the Chief readily gave me full information in answer to my inquiries. I regret, however, that I cannot for various reasons publish all I heard.
A certain Thuringian Serene Highness appeared to be particularly objectionable to him. He spoke of his “stupid self-importance as a Prince, regarding me as his Chancellor also;” of his empty head, and his trivial conventional style of talk. “To some extent, however, that is due to his education, which trained him to the use of such empty phrases. Goethe is also partly to blame for that. The Queen has been brought up much in the same style. One of the chairs in the Palace would be taken to represent the Burgomaster of Apolda, who was coming to present his homage. ‘Ah!’ she was taught to say, ‘very pleased to see you, Herr Burgomaster!’ (Here the Chancellor leant his head a little to one side, pouted his lips, and assumed a most condescending smile.) ‘How are things going on in the good town of Apolda? In Apolda you make socks and tobacco and such things, which do not require much thinking or feeling.’”
I ventured to ask how he now stood with the Crown Prince? “Excellently,” he answered. “We are quite good friends since he has come to recognise that I am not on the side of the French, as he had previously fancied—I do not know on what grounds.” I remarked that the day before the Crown Prince had looked very pleased. “Why should he not be pleased?” replied the Count. “The Heir Apparent of one of the most powerful kingdoms in the world, and with the best prospects. He will be reasonable later on and allow his Ministers to govern more, and not put himself too much forward, and in general he will get rid of many bad habits that render old gentlemen of his trade sometimes rather troublesome. For the rest, he is unaffected and straightforward; but he does not care to work much, and is quite happy if he has plenty of money and amusements, and if the newspapers praise him.”
I took the liberty to ask further what sort of woman the Crown Princess was, and whether she had much influence over her husband. “I think not,” the Count said; “and as to her intelligence, she is a clever woman; clever in a womanly way. She is not able to disguise her feelings, or at least not always. I have cost her many tears, and she could not conceal how angry she was with me after the annexations (that is to say of Schleswig and Hanover). She could hardly bear the sight of me, but that feeling has now somewhat subsided. She once asked me to bring her a glass of water, and as I handed it to her she said to a lady-in-waiting who sat near and whose name I forget, ‘He has cost me as many tears as there is water in this glass.’ But that is all over now.”
Finally we descended from the sphere of the gods to that of ordinary humanity. After I had referred to the Coburg-Belgian-English clique, the conversation turned on the Augustenburger in his Bavarian uniform. “He’s an idiot,” said the Chancellor. “He might have secured much better terms. At first I did not want from him more than the smaller Princes were obliged to concede in 1866. Thanks, however, to Divine Providence and the pettifogging wisdom of Samwer, he would agree to nothing. I remember an interview I had with him in 1864, in the billiard-room near my study, which lasted until late in the night. I called him ‘Highness’ for the first time, and was altogether specially polite. When, however, I mentioned Kiel Harbour, which we wanted, he remarked that that might mean something like a square mile, or perhaps even several square miles, a remark to which I was of course obliged to assent; and when he also refused to listen to our demands with regard to the army, I assumed a different tone, and addressed him merely as ‘Prince.’ Finally, I told him quite coolly in Low German that we could wring the necks of the chickens we had hatched. At Ligny he basely tricked me the other day into shaking hands with him. I did not know who the Bavarian general was who held out his hand to me, or I should have gone out of his way.”
After an unusually long drive up hill and down dale, we arrived at 7 o’clock at the small town or market-place of Vendresse, there the Chancellor put up at the house of a Widow Baudelot, with the rest of his party, who had already taken possession of their quarters.