CHAPTER XI

William II and the Court of Berlin--The Emperor of Illusion

I wish to speak of William II as of one dead. He does not belong to this world; he belongs to another.

I must be excused if I am sparing of anecdotes. It would be painful to me to recall to life and movement one who has passed. My desire is to limit myself to explaining effects of which I know the cause.

It was puerile to wish under high-sounding vain words such a petty thing as the arrest and trial of a Government sunk in shame.

Society cannot recognize any Divine law in crimes against civilization, since they place man below the level of the beast.

William II fell from the throne and was arrested by a more powerful hand than that of earthly justice. He has known the severest prison of all--exile; the most frightful regime--fear; the most terrible sentence--that of conscience. Who will know the secret of the nights of this fugitive traitor to his people whom he fed with deceptions and lies, and whom he has led to ruin, civil war and dishonour? For not only did he dishonour himself, but he dishonoured Germany in dishonouring her arms.

Where is the honest German who has recovered from the intoxication of war who can hear the name of Louvain, of the _Lusitania_, of poison gas and other horrors without shuddering? But the responsibility of all these crimes must rest on William II.

The passing of centuries will be necessary to wipe out the stain of his murderous folly. This constitutes the shadow over the unfortunate Empire which makes it appear monstrous to the nations of the Entente.

But I wish to say at once, because I am certain of it, Germany is what Imperial Prussia has made her, and would again make of her.

The victim of her confidence and candour, she accepted as gospel all that her Sovereign, the heir of victorious ancestors, declared, professed and taught her.

It is harder to inherit a kingdom than people think, and I say this without irony. William II was not human like his grandfather, who cried out when he saw the sacrifice of the cuirassiers of Reisdroffen: "Ah, my brave men!" William II possessed nothing of his father, who earned the name of Frederick the Noble, and who died of two maladies, that of his throat and that of his feverish impatience to reign.

William II was charming as a boy. As a child he was an amiable playfellow. We have plundered the strawberry beds of Laeken together--a sacrilege which was pardoned solely on his account.

I have followed his career as far as it was possible. I believed him to be great. I have heard much of his power not only from his own people, but from all people. He had a wonderful part to play. He did not know how to play it; he could not; he lacked the means to do so, and perhaps, first of all, a clever and good wife. He had no depth of soul. A different wife might perhaps have supplied him with this quality.

Francis Joseph at the beginning of his active career as an Emperor was almost brilliant; he certainly appeared distinguished. Thirty years after, his face assumed an expression of vulgarity of which his first portraits gave no forecast, although at a distance he still gave the impression of being "somebody." But the high _morale_ of the Empress was somewhat reflected in him.

Less blessed in a wife, the longer William II has lived the worse his looks, his speech and his bearing have become. Two men--the late King Edward VII and my father, the King of the Belgians--took his exact measure and augured nothing good for his future.

The intimate opinion of him expressed by my father has often recurred to me, but this would entail a separate chapter and it would lead us far. I will confine myself to stating that the King had always foreseen that Germany, intoxicated with the warlike perorations of William II, who was a preacher of the old Prussian regime, would end by throwing herself upon Belgium, upon France and upon the whole world.

The defences of the Meuse were a convincing indication of the King's forethought. But we shall never know all that the King said, what he did, and what he desired to do in this matter.

Unfortunately certain parties and certain influential men in Belgium wrongly countered his plans instead of acting upon them. The country has suffered cruelly for this mistake.

By what means did William II arrive at those false conclusions which swept away the thrones of Central Europe and which have caused so many calamities? It was not, as has been thought by the Entente, the result of a fatal environment created alike by the ambitions of Germany and her barbaric instincts. The German Emperor wielded immense power. He was in truth an absolute monarch, and in consequence the Reichstag, the Bundesrath, or the various State Parliaments never interfered with him. The Emperor's Cabinet ruled the army, which in its turn ruled the nation. Thus everything was centred in the person of the Emperor, this magnificent fruit of Prussian discipline and force.

But in this fruit which made such an impression when seen on its wall, there was a hidden worm. William II was a liar; he lied to others and to himself without knowing that he was a liar. He lived continually in a world of fiction. In short, he was an actor.

But he was the worst of actors; he was the amateur, the man of the world who plays comedy--and drama--who is so taken up with his own small talent that he becomes more of an actor than an actor, and in consequence is always acting in everything and everywhere.

This passion for the theatre is alike William II's excuse and his condemnation. It is his excuse because he entered so well into the "skin" of the various characters which he played, that in each of them he was sincere. It is his condemnation, because a king and an emperor should be a Reality, a Will, a Wisdom; but he was none of these.

Personally he was hollow and sonorous. He did not know much. He did not at close quarters, like Francis Joseph, give one the impression of being the concièrge at an embassy, but he always gave one the impression that is best illustrated by a saying which I remember having seen in the _Figaro_: "Have you seen me in the part of Charlemagne, or as a Lutheran bishop?"--(for he was _summus episcopus_)--"or as an admiral, or as the leader of an orchestra?" His many talents have been recounted. They may all be reduced to one--the art of self-deception in order to deceive others. Under this veneer of self-deception there existed an empty soul, without a standard of honour, without poise, at the mercy of any kind of flattery, impressions, or circumstances. No sooner did he hear a speech than he gave his opinion, and assumed an attitude according to the rôle of the character to be represented.

He may be described as the best son in the world, for he was not wicked; he was worse--he was weak. It was Chamfort, if my memory serve me rightly, who wrote: "The weak are the advance guard of the army of the wicked." William II was the scout of the advance guard; his Staff was the army. He who was so afraid of thunder usurped the place of Jupiter, the Thunderer, but this amateur soldier was far too nervous to endure even the noise of battle. When his officers for their own advancement persuaded him that he possessed military and naval talent, he dreamt of the rôle of "Welt Kaiser," and prepared for the conquest of the earth.

Caught in their own trap, his faithful adherents were intoxicated by the intoxication which they had provoked. The Emperor's Cabinet was the theatre of a continuous orgy of gigantic schemes. At Vienna men's imaginations were inflamed. The Berlin-Bagdad Railway of Central Europe revived the earlier Near-East scheme. And a whole camarilla interested in the advantages to be derived from these splendid enterprises praised them extravagantly.

If in 1914 the Emperor Francis Joseph had possessed any glimmer of reason and good sense, he would have taken notice of the formidable uncertainties of the Berlin problems, and maintained peace while refusing to die at the cries of the victims of a war.

Left to himself, William II let loose the worst and most barbarous powers on the nations who were dragged into the horrors of war.

I have said that he lacked depth. He was in reality inconsistent. Although playing a thousand parts, he had no personality.

A man is only "someone" by reason of his personality. Many fools and dishonest men reach their goals in life through intrigue, chance, favouritism and human folly. But they are none the less foolish and dishonest for all that, and this is why the world is so evil.

William II assumed chivalrous airs, but he still remained coarse in his outlook. This was often apparent in his jokes with the officers of the Guards. He had no tact or judgment. His lack of tact was due to his bad Prussian education; to his student days at Bonn, which were given up to drinking bouts; and as a young man, to his taste for frequenting the Berlin casinos. As for his lack of judgment, this was the result of inherent vanity, which everything tended to develop to his own injury and that of Germany. The vain man is the being who is deceived by everyone, because he has begun by deceiving himself. And he is usually a hopeless idiot.

William II once said to me, under the impression that he was paying me a compliment: "You would make a fine Prussian grenadier." The compliment seemed to me "Pomeranian."

If William II had possessed tact and judgment he would have known how to adopt a policy other than threats and violence, and a diplomacy utterly opposed to the trickery with which Germany was so affected during his reign.

Incapable of judging the times in which he lived, weighed down by Prussian tradition, and full of zeal as titular chief of the House of Prussia, descended from a Suabian family which had emigrated to Brandenburg, he persuaded the upper classes of Germany that he had consolidated his prestige. The Middle Ages have had a disastrous effect on him and, through him, on all Germany.

In addition to battlemented railway stations and post offices fortified by machiolated galleries, the influence of mediævalism led the Emperor-King and his people back to the old hates, the old struggles and the old ideas, just as if the world had not changed with the passing of centuries. The result was that science, inventions, and discoveries were first made to serve the industry of war, the continuation of conquests, the mailed fist, and all the follies which soldiers, writers and military journalists applied themselves to serve, finding therein their daily bread.

However, those nations brought into closer contact by means of intercommunication and by exchange of ideas have commenced to find solutions of difficulties in pacific ways--solutions which until now have only been dragged from the path of war. By this I mean the preservation and the development of the human species, its better distribution on the earth, and its rights to greater happiness and justice.

William II lacked depth (I again mention the fact) because he lacked moral strength. Not that he was immoral. Without being a saint, he admirably fulfilled the rôle of husband and father. He was in everything a zealous amateur. Yet he lacked moral strength because his Lutheran attitude, which allowed him to play the part of a Protestant preacher, was not a religious rôle. His sermons as Head of the Church did not teach him to be humble, charitable and just before God.

Contrary to what is generally believed, especially if the religious problem has not been studied, neither Lutheranism nor Calvinism is a religion. The beautiful souls one meets who have held, and who hold these religious beliefs would be beautiful no matter what belief they held, or even in the absence of any belief. They possess an innate beauty which touches the Divine. But a phase of religious belief cannot be a religion. Schisms are the accidents of the life of the Church. A tear in a costume is not a costume--on the contrary! Lutheranism was not originally a form of worship; it was a revolt, and this species of revolt will always make more rebels than believers. A revolt against Rome--_Los von Rome!_ Impious cry! This is not only a case of "Deliver us from Rome," it is also a case of "Deliver us from the Christian religion, from the unity of the Catholic Church, otherwise called the Universal Church, which is our only chance of peace on earth." It is a denial of Latinity and of Hellenism; it is the retrogression of Central Europe to the Scandinavian Valhalla; it is not a world which expands, it is a world which confines. It does not represent the free harmony of the actions and the thoughts of men; it is the enforced uniformity of the parade step, and the silence on parade, in the ranks of the Prussian Guard.

If William II, who is responsible for the violation of the neutrality of Belgium, the burning of Louvain, the massacres of Dinant and so many other atrocities, were not, so far as I am concerned, dead, and if I were to see him again, I would say to him:

"You miserable man! Have you read Goethe? Can you imagine what he who wrote 'Man is only great according to the Heaven which is within himself' would think of you? You do not possess Heaven. You have driven away God with the Luther of hate and negation which was your God; you are a mere nullity."