“Leader of what?”
“That I do not know,” said Bernhardi. “Our intelligence office has not yet heard what he leads. But as soon as he leads anything we shall know it. Meantime we can see from his speeches that he has read my book. Ach! if only your other leaders in Canada,—Sir Robert Laurier, Sir Osler Sifton, Sir Williams Borden,—you smile, you do not realize that in Germany we have exact information of everything: all that happens, we know it.”
Meantime I had been looking over the leaves of the book.
“Here at least,” I said, “is some splendidly humorous stuff,—this about the navy. ‘The completion of the Kiel Canal,’ you write in Chapter XII, ‘is of great importance as it will enable our largest battleships to appear unexpectedly in the Baltic and in the North Sea!’ Appear unexpectedly! If they only would! How exquisitely absurd—”
“Sir!” said the General. “That is not to laugh. You err yourself. That is Furchtbarkeit. I did not say the book is all humour. That would be false art. Part of it is humour and part is Furchbarkeit. That passage is specially designed to frighten Admiral Jellicoe. And he won’t read it! Potztausand, he won’t read it!”—repeated the general, his eyes flashing and his clenched fist striking in the air—“What sort of combatants are these of the British Navy who refuse to read our war-books? The Kaiser’s Heligoland speech! They never read a word of it. The Furchtbarkeit-Proklamation of August,—they never looked at it. The Reichstags-Rede with the printed picture of the Kaiser shaking hands with everybody,—they used it to wrap up sandwiches! What are they, then, Jellicoe and his men? They sit there in their ships and they read nothing! How can we get at them if they refuse to read? How can we frighten them away if they haven’t culture enough to get frightened. Beim Himmel,” shouted the General in great excitement—
But what more he said can never be known. For at this second a sudden catastrophe happened.
In his frenzy of excitement the General struck with his fist at the table, missed it, lost his balance and fell over sideways right on the point of his Pickelhaube which he had laid on the sofa. There was a sudden sound as of the ripping of cloth and the bursting of pneumatic cushions and to my amazement the General collapsed on the sofa, his uniform suddenly punctured in a dozen places.
“Schnapps,” he cried, “fetch brandy.”
“Great Heavens! General,” I said, “what has happened?”
“My uniform!” he moaned, “it has burst! Give me Schnapps!”