After forty years of feverish preparation, with such formidable resources at his disposal, shrinking from no measures however atrocious and vile, trammelled by no law of humanity, by no pang of conscience, to wallow thus in blood, and yet after all to achieve nothing but failure—there is no other explanation possible; some essential quality must be lacking in his murderous brain. And the nation must indeed be German in character still to suffer itself to be led onwards to its downfall by an unbalanced lunatic responsible for such blunders. They are led onwards to downfall and butchery. And is there never a limit to the sheepish submission of a people who at this very moment are suffering themselves to be slaughtered like mere cattle in attacks directed with imbecile fury by a microcephalous youth, equally devoid of intelligence and soul?
II
Ferdinand of Coburg
But recently it would have seemed an impossible wager to undertake to find an even more abominable monster than their Kaiser and their Crown Prince. Nevertheless the wager has been made and won; this Coburg has been found.
And to think that in his time he aroused the enthusiasm of the majority of our women of France! About the year 1913, when I alone was beginning to nail him to the pillory, they were exalting his name and flaunting his colours. "Paladin of the Cross"—as such he was popularly known among us. Oh, a sincere paladin he was, to be sure, wearing the scapular, steeped in Masses, after the fashion of Louis XI., yet one fine morning secretly forcing apostasy upon his son. Moreover we know that to-day, for our entertainment, he is making preparations for a second comedy of conversion to the Catholic faith, which he recently renounced for political reasons, and over there he will find priests ready to bless the operation and to keep a straight face the while.
He, too, has a Gorgon's head, and his face, like the Kaiser's, is marked with the stigmata of knavery and crime. Twenty-five years ago, at the railway station of Sofia, when for the first time I came under the malevolent glance of his small eyes, I felt my nerves vibrate with that shudder of disgust which is an instinctive warning of the proximity of a monster, and I asked:
"Who is that vampire?"
Someone replied in a low, apprehensive voice:
"It is our prince; you should bow to him."