Frederick William himself was, I regret to record, far less discreet than those about him in his references to his imperial progenitor, and I recall very clearly that quick-tongued youth’s sarcastic allusions to certain rulings of the Kaiser in the matter of the treatment of the natives of some of the islands of German Melanesia. The Crown Prince, I should explain, I had found consumed with interest concerning the progress his people were making in several of their Pacific island colonies I had recently visited, and it was to his very palpable desire to ‘pump me dry’ of any information I might have picked up regarding these incipient ‘places in the sun’ that I owed a number of hours of conversation with him the edification of which would hardly otherwise have fallen to my lot.
The outburst I had in mind was led up to by my royal inquisitor’s asking me for my views concerning the comparative progress of the three political divisions of the island of New Guinea, and by my replying that, if the criterion of judgment was to be the contentment, physical well-being, and economic usefulness of the native, I should rate British New Guinea first, Dutch New Guinea an indifferent second, and German New Guinea a very poor third. It was anything but a courtier-like speech on my part, but I was not meeting Frederick William in my official capacity, and, moreover, he had made a point of asking that I should give him perfectly frank answers to his questions. (‘None of the “bull con’,” as the Yankees say,’ was the way he put it; ‘give me the “straight goods.”’ Both expressions, as he confessed with a grin, he had picked up from a ‘neat little filly from Kentucky’ he had ‘seen a bit of’ at Ostend the previous summer.)
The Crown Prince, in spite of his undeniable personal courage, of which I saw several striking instances in the course of his Indian visit, is far from being what the Anglo-Saxons call a ‘good sport,’ and on this occasion he made no pretence of hiding his annoyance. Because, however, as transpired later, there were several other matters which he had in mind ‘pumping’ me on, he evidently thought it best not to vent his spleen for the moment on one whose usefulness was not quite exhausted. This befell subsequently, I may add, though under circumstances which have no especial bearing on my present subject.
Tapping his boot with his riding-whip—he had been playing polo—the Prince sat in a sort of spoiled-child pout of petulance for a minute or two, before bursting out with: ‘Doubtless you’re right. I’ve had hints of the same thing myself from private reports. It’s all due to the pater’s unwarranted interference in something he knows nothing about. Old X——’ (mentioning the previous Governor of German New Guinea by name) ‘has forgotten more about handling Papuans than the pater ever knew. The pater has put his foot in it every time he has moved in our Pacific colonies.’ (It may be in order to explain that not only does the Crown Prince speak excellent English, but that on this Indian visit he made a point of resorting to English idioms, colloquialisms, and slang to an extent which at times became positively ridiculous. I have quoted here almost his exact language.)
Frederick William went on to give me a spirited and approving account of the manner in which a German colonist near Herbertshöhe had put an end to raids on his yam patch by planting on each corner-post of the enclosure the ‘frizzly’ head of a Papuan who had been shot in the act of making off with the succulent tubers, concluding with the dogmatic assertion that the only way to handle the black man was to ‘bleed him white.’
I had the temerity to reply that, from what I had seen, the more ‘old X——’ continued to forget of what he thought he knew about handling Papuans, the better it would be for German colonial prospects in New Guinea, and as a consequence threw my royal interrogator into another fit of sulks. It is only fair to say that the ‘interference’ of which the Crown Prince waxed so unfilially censorious really consisted of measures calculated slightly—but only slightly—to mitigate the brutal repressiveness toward the natives which had characterised the German administration of New Guinea from the outset. The one bright spot in the brief but bloody annals of German overseas colonisation was the six or eight years’ régime of the broad-minded and humane Dr. Solf—the present Colonial Secretary—in Samoa. This tiny and comparatively unimportant Pacific outpost was the single Teutonic colony in which I found the natives treated with anything approaching the humanitarian consideration extended to them so universally by the English and the French. Dr. Solf may well be, as has been occasionally hinted from Holland, the hope of those conservative and intelligent Germans who are known to be silently working for a reborn and ‘de-Prussified’ Fatherland after the war.
As I have said, the Crown Prince was the only highly placed German whom I ever heard speak slightingly in a personal way of the Kaiser, and that impetuous youth was—as he still is—a law unto himself. Such loyalty and discretion, however, did not characterize all prominent Germans in private life, and it is to several of these I am indebted for the illuminating sidelights their observations and anecdotes threw on the human side of William II. Of such, I fancy the Baron Y——, who voyaged on the same steamer with me from Zanzibar to Port Said several years ago, had enjoyed perhaps the most intimate opportunities for an intelligent appraisal of his Emperor.
The Baron was a scion of one of the oldest and wealthiest of Bavarian noble families, a graduate of the École des Beaux Arts as well as Heidelberg, and to the fact that several years of his boyhood were spent at Harrow owed an English accent in speaking that language which betrayed no trace of Teutonic gutturality. He was returning from an extended hunting trip in British and German East Africa at the time I made his acquaintance, and was nursing a light grievance against his own Government from the fact that he had been rather better treated in the former than the latter. His attitude toward the Kaiser was somewhat different from that of any other German I have ever met, this, doubtless, being due to his own great wealth and assured position. There was little of the ‘loyal and devoted subject’ in this attitude, to which no better comparison suggests itself to me than that of a very heavy stock-holder in a corporation toward a general manager who is in no respect his social superior.
‘The Kaiser’s most pronounced characteristic,’ said Baron Y—— one evening as we paced the promenade, ‘is his overweening vanity. His “ego” dwarfs his every other attribute, natural or acquired, and it is idle to try to understand what he is, what he does, what he stands for—and, incidentally, what the German people, in quite another sense, have to stand for—without taking that fact into consideration. It is the obsession of his own importance—I might even say his belief in his own omnipotence—that is responsible for his taking the so-called Divine Right of the Hohenzollerns more seriously, interpreting the term more literally, than any of his ancestors since Frederick the Great. It is his vanity that is responsible for his incessant shiftings of uniforms, for his posturings, his obvious attempts to conceal or distract attention from his shrunken arm. He is the most consummate master of stagecraft; indeed, the Fates spoiled a great producer of spectacles—one who would have eclipsed Reinhardt—to make, not an indifferent Emperor, but——’ The Baron checked himself and concluded with: ‘Perhaps I had best not say what I had in mind. Everything considered, however, I am convinced that it would have been better for Germany if William the Second had been stage-manager rather than Kaiser.’
Specific and intimate instance of the pettiness with which the Kaiser’s vanity occasionally expressed itself Baron Y—— gave me the following evening. I had been turning the pages of some of his German illustrated papers, and was unable to refrain from commenting, not only on the frequency with which the portrait of the Kaiser appeared, but also of the defiant ‘come-one-come-all’ attitude of all of those in which the War Lord appeared in uniform. The Baron laughed good-naturedly. ‘The Kaiser’s attitudinizings,’ he said, ‘never seem to strike the Prussians as in the least funny (they haven’t much of a sense of humour, anyhow): but we Bavarians have always taken them as quite as much of a joke as has the rest of Europe. Now this picture’ (he began turning the pages of ‘Ueber Land und Meer’ in search of it), ‘which is one of the most popular with the Prussians, we of Bavaria have always called “Ajax Defying the Lightning,” and I am going to tell you the history of it.