Sunday, December 18th.—At 2 o’clock the Chief drove off to the Prefecture for the purpose of introducing the deputation of the Reichstag to the King. The Princes residing in Versailles were in attendance upon his Majesty. After 2 o’clock the King, accompanied by the Heir Apparent and Princes Charles and Adalbert, entered the reception room where the other Princes, the Chancellor of the Confederation, and the Generals grouped themselves around him. Among those present were the Grand Dukes of Baden, Oldenburg and Weimar, the Dukes of Coburg and Meiningen, the three Hereditary Grand Dukes, Prince William of Würtemberg and a number of other princely personages. Simson delivered his address to the King, who answered very much in the sense that had been anticipated. A dinner of eighty covers, which was given at 5 o’clock, brought the ceremony to a close.
On our way back from the park Wollmann told me that the Chief had recently written to the King requesting to be permitted to take part in the councils of war. The answer, however, was that he had always been called to join in councils of a political nature, as in 1866, that a similar course would also be followed in future, and that he ought to be satisfied with that. (This story is probably not quite correct, for Wollmann is incapable of being absolutely accurate.)
Monday, December 19th.—I again wrote calling attention to the international revolution which arrays its guerilla bands and heroes of the barricades against us. The article was to the following effect. We understood at first that we were only fighting with France, and that was actually the case up to Sedan. After the 4th of September another power rose up against us, namely the universal Republic, an international association of cosmopolitan enthusiasts who dream of the United States of Europe, &c.
In the afternoon I took a walk in the park, in the course of which I twice met the Chief driving with Simson, the President of the Reichstag. The Minister was invited to dine with the Crown Prince at 7 o’clock, but first joined our table for half an hour. He spoke of his drive with Simson: “The last time he was here was after the July Revolution in 1830. I thought he would be interested in the park and the beautiful views, but he showed no sign of it. It would appear that he has no feeling for landscape beauty. There are many people of that kind. So far as I am aware, there are no Jewish landscape painters, indeed no Jewish painters at all.” Some one mentioned the names of Meyerheim and Bendemann. “Yes,” the Chief replied, “Meyerheim; but Bendemann had only Jewish grandparents. There are plenty of Jewish composers—Mendelssohn, Halevy—but painters! It is true that the Jew paints, but only when he is not obliged to earn his bread thereby.”
Abeken alluded to the sermon which Rogge preached yesterday in the palace church, and said that he had made too much of the Reichstag deputation. He then added some slighting remarks about the Reichstag in general. The Chief replied: “I am not at all of that opinion—not in the least. They have just voted us another hundred millions, and in spite of their doctrinaire views they have adopted the Versailles treaties, which must have cost many of them a hard struggle. We ought to place that, at least, to their credit.”
Abeken then talked about the events at Ems which preceded the outbreak of the war, and related that on one occasion, after a certain despatch had been sent off, the King said, “Well, he” (Bismarck) “will be satisfied with us now!” And Abeken added, “I believe you were.” “Well,” replied the Chancellor, laughing, “you may easily be mistaken. That is to say I was quite satisfied with you. But not quite as much with our Most Gracious, or rather not at all. He ought to have acted in a more dignified way—and more resolutely.” “I remember,” he continued, “how I received the news at Varzin. I had gone out, and on my return the first telegram had been delivered. As I started on my journey I had to pass our pastor’s house at Wussow. He was standing at his gate and saluted me. I said nothing, but made a thrust in the air—thus” (as if he were making a thrust with a sword). “He understood me, and I drove on.” The Minister then gave some particulars of the wavering and hesitation that went on up to a certain incident, which altered the complexion of things, and was followed by the declaration of war. “I expected to find another telegram in Berlin answering mine, but it had not arrived. In the meantime I invited Moltke and Roon to dine with me that evening, and to talk over the situation, which seemed to me to be growing more and more unsatisfactory. Whilst we were dining, another long telegram was brought in. As I read it to them—it must have been about two hundred words—they were both actually terrified, and Moltke’s whole being suddenly changed. He seemed to be quite old and infirm. It looked as if our Most Gracious might knuckle under after all. I asked him (Moltke) if, as things stood, we might hope to be victorious. On his replying in the affirmative, I said, ‘Wait a minute!’ and seating myself at a small table I boiled down those two hundred words to about twenty, but without otherwise altering or adding anything. It was Abeken’s telegram, yet something different—shorter, more determined, less dubious. I then handed it over to them, and asked, ‘Well, how does that do now?’ ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘it will do in that form.’ And Moltke immediately became quite young and fresh again. He had got his war, his trade. And the thing really succeeded. The French were fearfully angry at the condensed telegram as it appeared in the newspapers, and a couple of days later they declared war against us.”
The conversation then wandered back to Pomerania, and if I am not mistaken to Varzin, where the Chief had, he said, taken much interest in a Piedmontese who had remained behind after the great French wars. This man had raised himself to a position of consequence, and although originally a Catholic, had actually become a vestryman. The Minister mentioned other people who had settled and prospered in places where they had been accidentally left behind. There were also Italians taken as prisoners of war to a district in Further Pomerania, where they remained and founded families whose marked features still distinguish them from their neighbours.
The Minister did not return from the Crown Prince’s until past ten o’clock, and we then heard that the Crown Prince was coming to dine with us on the following evening.
Tuesday, December 20th.—On the instructions of the Chief I wrote two articles for circulation in Germany.
The first was as follows: “We have already found it necessary on several occasions to correct a misunderstanding or an intentional garbling of the words addressed by King William to the French people on the 11th of August last. We are now once more confronted with the same attempt to falsify history, and to our surprise in a publication by an otherwise respectable French historian. In a pamphlet entitled La France et la Prusse devant l’Europe, M. d’Haussonville puts forward an assertion which does little credit to his love of truth, or let us say his scientific accuracy. The whole pamphlet is shallow and superficial. It is full of exaggerations and errors, and of assertions that have no more value than mere baseless rumours. Of the gross blunders of the writer, who is obviously blinded by patriotic passion, we will only mention that, according to him, King William was on the throne during the Crimean War. But apart from this and other mistakes, we have here only to deal with his attempt to garble the proclamation issued to the French in August last, which, it may be observed, was written in French as well as in German, so that a misunderstanding would appear to be out of the question. According to M. d’Haussonville the King said: ‘I am only waging war against the Emperor and not at all against France.’ (Je ne fais la guerre qu’à l’Empereur, et nullement à la France.) As a matter of fact, however, the document in question says: ‘The German nation, which desired and still desires to live in peace with France, having been attacked at sea and on land by the Emperor Napoleon, I have taken the command of the German armies for the purpose of repelling this aggression. Owing to the course taken by the military operations, I have been led to cross the French frontier. I wage war against the soldiers and not against the citizens of France.’ (L’Empereur Napoléon ayant attaqué par terre et par mer la nation allemande, qui désirait et désire encore vivre en paix avec le peuple français, j’ai pris le commandement des armées allemandes pour repousser l’agression, et j’ai été amené par les événements militaires à passer les frontières de la France. Je fais la guerre aux soldats, et non aux citoyens français.) The next sentence excludes all possibility of mistake as to the meaning of the foregoing statement: ‘They (the French citizens) will accordingly continue to enjoy complete security of person and property so long as they themselves do not deprive me of the right to accord them my protection by acts of hostility against the German troops.’ (Ceux-ci continueront, par conséquent, à jouir d’une complète sécurité pour leur personnes et leur biens, aussi longtemps qu’ils ne me priveront eux-mêmes par des entreprises hostiles contre les troupes allemandes du droit de leur accorder ma protection.) There is, in our opinion, a very obvious difference between d’Haussonville’s quotation and the original proclamation, and no obscurity can possibly be discovered in the latter to excuse a mistake.”