Army and Navy
My close relations with the army are a matter of common knowledge. In
this direction I conformed to the tradition of my family. Prussia's
kings did not chase cosmopolitan mirages, but realized that the welfare
of their land could only be assured by means of a real power protecting
industry and commerce. If, in a number of utterances, I admonished my
people to "keep their powder dry" and "their swords sharp," the warning
was addressed alike to foe and friend. I wished our foes to pause and
think a long time before they dared to engage with us. I wished to
cultivate a manly spirit in the German people; I wished to make sure
that, when the hour struck for us to defend the fruits of our industry
against an enemy's lust of conquest, it should find a strong race.
In view of this I attached high value to the educational duty of the
army. General compulsory military service has a social influence upon
men in the mass equaled by nothing else. It brings together rich and
poor, sons of the soil and of the city; it brings acquaintanceship and
mutual understanding among young people whose roads, otherwise, would
lead them far apart; the feeling that they are serving one idea unites
them.
And think what we made out of our young men! Pale town boys were
transformed into erect, healthy, sport-hardened men; limbs grown stiff
through labor were made adroit and pliable.
I stepped direct from brigade commander to king--to repeat the
well-known words of King Frederick William III. Up to then I had
climbed the steps of an officer's career. I still think with pleasure
of my pride when, on the 2d of May, 1869, during the spring parade,
I first stood in the ranks before my grandfather. Relations with the
individual man have always seemed valuable to me, and, therefore, I
particularly treasured the assignments, during my military service,
where I could cultivate such relations. My activities as commander of a
company, a squadron, and a battery, likewise as head of a regiment, are
unforgettable to me.
I felt at home among my soldiers. In them I placed unlimited trust.
The painful experiences of the autumn of 1918 have not diminished this
trust. I do not forget that a part of the German people, after four
years of unprecedented achievements and privations, had become too ill
to withstand being corrupted by foes within and without. Moreover, the
best of the Germans lay under the green sod; the others were thrown
into such consternation by the events of the revolution which had been
held to be impossible that they could not spur themselves to act.
Compulsory military service was the best school for the physical and
moral toughening of our people. It created for us free men who knew
their own value. From these an excellent corps of noncommissioned
officers was formed; from the latter, in turn, we drew our Government
officials, the like of whom, in ability, incorruptibility and fidelity
to duty no other nation on earth can show.
BELIEVES OFFICERS STILL LOYAL
And it is from these very elements that I receive nowadays signs of
loyalty, every one of which does me good. My old Second Company of the
First Infantry Guard Regiment has shared, through good and evil days,
the vicissitudes of its old captain. I saw them for the last time in
1913, in close formation--still one hundred twenty-five strong--under
that excellent sergeant, Hartmann, on the occasion of the celebration
of the twenty-fifth anniversary of my accession to the throne.
In view of its proud duty as an educator and leader of the nation in
arms, the officer corps occupied a particularly important position in
the German Empire. The method of replacement, which, by adoption of
the officers' vote, had been lodged in the hands of the various bodies
of officers themselves, guaranteed the needed homogeneity. Harmful
outcroppings of the idea of caste were merely sporadic; wherever they
made themselves felt they were instantly rooted out.
I entered much and willingly into relations with the various officer
corps and felt like a comrade among them. The materialistic spirit of
our age, to be sure, had not passed over the officer corps without
leaving traces; but, on the whole, it must be admitted that nowhere
else were self-discipline, fidelity to duty, and simplicity cultivated
to such an extent as among the officers.
A process of weeding out such as existed in no other profession
allowed only the ablest and best to reach positions of influence. The
commanding generals were men of a high degree of attainment and ability
and--what is even more important--men of character. It is a difficult
matter to single out individuals from among them.
Though the man in the ranks at the front was always particularly
close to my heart, I must, nevertheless, give special prominence to
the General Staff as a school for the officer corps. I have already
remarked that Field Marshal Count Moltke had known how by careful
training to build up men who were not only up to requirements,
technically speaking, but also qualified for action demanding
willingness to assume responsibility, independence of judgment, and
far-sightedness. "To be more than you seem" is written in the preface
to the _Pocket Manual for the General Staff Officer_.
Field Marshal Count Moltke laid the foundations for this training; and
his successors--Count Waldersee, that great genius, Count Schlieffen,
and General von Moltke--built upon them. The result was the General
Staff, which accomplished unprecedented feats in the World War, and
aroused admiration throughout the world.
I soon realized that the greatest possible improvement of our highly
developed technical department was absolutely necessary and would save
precious blood. Wherever possible, I worked toward the perfection of
our armament and sought to place machinery in the service of our army.
Among new creations, the very first place is taken by the heavy
artillery of the army in the field. In bringing this into being I
was obliged to overcome much opposition--particularly, strange to
relate, in the ranks of the artillery itself. It is a source of
great satisfaction to me that I put this matter through. It laid the
foundation for the carrying out of operations on a large scale, and it
was long before our foes could catch up with us in this direction.
BETTER MILITARY EQUIPMENT
Mention must also be made of the machine gun, which developed from
modest beginnings to being the backbone of the infantry's fighting
powers; the replacement of the rifle by the machine gun multiplied the
firing power of the infantry while, at the same time, diminishing its
losses.
Nor can I pass over without mention the introduction of the movable
field kitchen, which I had seen for the first time at some maneuvers
of the Russian army. It was of the greatest value in maintaining the
fighting efficiency of the army, since the possibility of getting
sufficient nourishment kept our troops fresh and healthy.
All human work remains unfinished. Nevertheless, it may be said,
without exaggeration, that the German army which marched to battle in
1914 was an instrument of warfare without an equal.
Whereas, at my accession to the throne, I had found the army in a
condition which merely required development upon the foundations
already laid, the navy, on the other hand, was in the first stage of
development. After the failure of all the attempts of Admiral Hollmann
to move the recalcitrant Reichstag to adopt a slowly progressing,
systematic strengthening of German sea power--largely due to the cheap
catchwords of Deputy Richter and the lack of understanding of the
Liberals of the Left, who were fooled by them--the Admiral requested
me to retire him. Deeply moved, I acceded to his request; this plain,
loyal man, the son of a genuine Berlin bourgeois family, had become
dear to me through his upright character, his devotion to duty, and his
attachment to me. My friendship with him, based upon this estimate,
lasted for many years up to the moment of the Admiral's sudden death;
it often caused me to visit this faithful man, endowed with fine Berlin
wit, at his home, and there to associate with him as head of the German
Orient Society, as well as to see him, in a small circle of intimates,
at my own home, or to take him with me as a treasured traveling
companion. He was one of the most faithful of my faithful friends,
always remaining the same in his disinterestedness, never asking
anything for himself. Happy the city which can produce such citizens! I
preserve a grateful memory of this tried and trusted friend.
Admiral Tirpitz succeeded Hollmann. In his very first reports,
which laid the foundation of the first Naval law, he showed himself
thoroughly in accord with me in the belief that the sanction of the
Reichstag for the building of warships was not to be gained by the old
form of procedure. As I have already pointed out, the opposition was
not to be convinced; the tone of the debates conducted by Richter was
unworthy of the importance of the subject; for instance, the gunboat
obtained in the Reichstag by the Poles, under Herr von Koscielsky, was
jokingly dubbed _Koscielska_. Ridicule was the weapon used, though the
future of the fatherland was in question.
It was necessary that the representative of the navy should have a
solid phalanx behind him, both among the Ministers of State and in the
Reichstag, and that it should, from absolute conviction, energetically
support him and the cause. Therefore, there was need of communicating
to the Reichstag members, still rather ignorant in naval matters,
the details of the great work; moreover, a great movement must be
engineered among the people, among the "general public," indifferent
as yet, to arouse its interest and enthusiasm for the navy, in order
that pressure from the people itself might be brought to bear upon the
Reichstag members. To this end, an energetic propaganda was needed,
through a well-organized and well-directed press, as well as through
eminent men of science at the universities and technical high schools.
FIGHT IN THE REICHSTAG
There was need of a complete change in the whole method of handling
the matter in the Reichstag. There must be no more bickerings about
individual ships and docks. In making up the military budget, no
arguments arose over the strength of the army, unless it was a
matter of new formations. The makeup of the navy, like that of the
army, must be settled by law once for all, its right of existence
recognized and protected. The units composing it must no longer be a
matter for debate. Moreover, not only the officer corps but that of
noncommissioned officers must be strengthened and trained, in order to
be ready for service on the new ships. At the beginning of my reign,
sixty to eighty cadets, at the most, were enrolled every year; in the
last few years before the war several hundred asked admission. Twelve
precious years, never to be retrieved, were lost by the failure of the
Reichstag; it is even harder to create a navy overnight than an army.
The goal to be striven for was implied in the law, which expressed the
"idea of risk"; the aim was to cause even the strongest hostile fleet
to think seriously before it came to blows with the German fleet, in
view of the heavy losses that were to be feared in a battle, which put
the foe in danger of becoming too weak for other tasks. The "idea of
risk" was brilliantly vindicated in the Skager-Rak (Jutland) battle;
the enemy, in spite of his immense superiority, dared not risk a second
battle. Trafalgar was already dim; its laurels must not be completely
lost.
The total number of units (ships) on hand--it was principally a matter
of ships of the line--was taken as a basis for the Naval law, although
these, with the exception of the four ships of the _Brandenburg_ class,
were little better than old iron.
The Naval law was looked upon by many laymen, in view of the numbers
involved, as a naval increase. In reality, however, this was a false
view, since the so-called existing fleet was absolutely no longer
a fleet. It was slowly dying of old age--as Hollmann said when he
retired; included in it were almost the oldest ships still in service
in all Europe.
Now that the Naval law was gradually coming into force, lively building
operations set in, launchings were reported in the press, and there
was joy among those under the dominion of the "rage du nombre" at the
growing number of ships. But when it was made clear to them that as
soon as the new ships were ready the old ones must be eliminated, so
that, as a matter of fact, the total number of ships of fighting value
would, at first, not be increased, they were greatly disillusioned. Had
the necessary ships been built in time during the wasted twelve years
the Naval law would have found a quite different, usable basis already
in existence. But as matters now stood it was really a question of the
complete rebuilding of the entire German fleet.
The large number of ships, to which those which had to be eliminated
were added, was a fallacy. Therefore the English made a mistake when
they merely took account of the number of ships--since that fitted in
well with the propaganda against Germany--but paid no attention to age
or type, arriving thus at a total that was far too high, and, by such
misleading methods, artificially nourishing the so-called apprehension
at the growth of the German navy.
Admiral Tirpitz now went ahead with the program approved by me. With
iron energy and merciless sacrifice of his health and strength he
soon was able to inject efficiency and power into the handling of the
naval question. At my command he went, after the drafting of the Naval
law, to Friedrichsruh, the residence of Prince Bismarck, in order to
convince the latter of the necessity for having a German navy.
The press worked zealously toward the introduction of the Naval law,
and political economists, experts on commerce and politics and so
forth, placed their pens at the service of the great national cause,
the necessity for a navy having been by now widely realized.
In the meantime the English, too, helped--though quite
unconsciously--toward bettering the Naval law's chance of being
passed. The Boer War had broken out, and had aroused among the German
people much sympathy for the little country and much indignation on
account of England's violent assault upon it. Thereupon the news came
of the utterly unjustified capture of two German steamers on the East
African coast by English warships. Indignation was general.
The news of the stopping of the second steamer happened to be received
by the Secretary of State, von Bülow, at the very moment when Tirpitz
and I were with him. As soon as Bülow had read the dispatch aloud, I
quoted the old English proverb, "It's an ill wind that blows nobody
good," and Tirpitz exclaimed, "Now we have the wind we need for
bringing our ship into port. The Naval law will go through. Your
Majesty must present a medal to the captain of the English ship in
gratitude for having put it through."
The Imperial Chancellor ordered up champagne and the three of us drank
joyously to the new law, its acceptance, and the future German fleet,
not forgetting to express our thanks to the English navy, which had
proved so helpful to us.
Many years later, on my return from Lowther Castle, where I had been
hunting with Lord Lonsdale, I was invited to dine with Lord Rosebery,
the great Liberal statesman and former Minister of Foreign Affairs,
also known through his researches in the history of Napoleon, at his
beautiful country estate of Dalmeny Castle, situated close to the sea,
not far from the great Forth bridge. Among the guests was General Sir
Ian Hamilton, a Scotchman, well known on account of his part in the
Boer War, with whom I had become acquainted when he was a guest at the
Imperial German maneuvers, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, and a captain
of the English navy, who was commander of the naval station there.
The last sat next Admiral Freiherr von Senden, directly across the
table from me, and attracted my attention by the obvious embarrassment
which he manifested in his talk with the Admiral, which he conducted in
a low voice. After dinner Admiral von Senden introduced the captain to
me, whereat the Englishman's embarrassment caused him to behave even
more awkwardly than before, and aroused my attention because of the
worried look of his eyes and his pale face.
After the conversation, which turned on various maritime topics, had
come to an end, I asked Freiherr von Senden what the matter was with
the man; the Admiral laughed and replied that he had elicited from his
neighbor, during the meal, that he had been the commander of the ship
which had captured the two German steamers in the Boer War, and that
he had been afraid that I might find this out. Senden had thereupon
told him that he was entirely mistaken about this; that had His Majesty
learned who he was he could rest assured that he would have been very
well treated and thanked into the bargain.
"Thanked? What for?" queried the Englishman.
"For having made the passage of the Naval law so much easier for the
Emperor!"
One of the prime considerations in the passage of the Naval law--as
also for all later additions, and, in general, for the whole question
of warship construction--was the question whether the German
shipbuilding industry would be in a position to keep pace with the
naval program; whether, in fact, it would be able to carry it out
at all. Here, too, Admiral von Tirpitz worked with tireless energy.
Encouraged and fired with enthusiasm by him, the German shipbuilding
yards went at the great problem, filled with German audacity, and
solved it with positively brilliant results, greatly distancing their
foreign competitors. The admirable technical endowment of the German
engineers, as well as the better education of the German working
classes, contributed in full measure toward this achievement.
FEVERISH HASTE FOR NAVY
Consultations, conferences, reports to me, service trips to all
shipbuilding yards, were the daily bread of the indefatigable Tirpitz.
But the tremendous trouble and work were richly rewarded. The people
woke up, began to have a thought for the value of the colonies (raw
materials provided by ourselves without foreign middlemen!) and for
commercial relations, and to feel interest in commerce, navigation,
shipping, etc.
And, at last, the derisive opposition stopped cracking its jokes.
Tirpitz, always ready for battle, wielded a sharp blade in fighting,
never joked and allowed nobody to joke with him, so that his opponents
no longer felt like laughing. Things went particularly badly with
Deputy Richter when Tirpitz brilliantly snubbed and silenced him
by quoting a patriotic saying, dating from the 'forties, of old
Harkort--whose district Richter represented--concerning the need for a
German fleet. Now it was the turn of the other side of the Reichstag to
laugh.
And so the great day dawned. The law was passed, after much fighting
and talking, by a great majority. The strength of the German navy was
assured; naval construction was to be accomplished.
By means of construction and keeping an increased number of ships in
service a fleet soon sprang into being. In order to maneuver, lead,
and train its personnel a new book of regulations and signal code were
needed--at the beginning of my reign these had been worked out merely
for one division--four ships--since at that time a larger number of
units never navigated together in the German navy--_i. e._, a larger
number were not kept in service. And even these were out of service
in the autumn, so that, in winter, there was (with the exception of
cruisers in foreign waters) absolutely no German navy. All the care
expended during the summer season on training of crews, officers,
noncommissioned officers, engine-room crews, and stokers, as well as
on rigging and upkeep of ships, was as good as wasted when the ships
were retired from service in the autumn; and when spring came and they
were put back into commission things had to be started at the beginning
again. The result was that any degree of continuity in training and
of coherence among the crews with relation to each other and their
ships--of "ship spirit," in short--could not be maintained. This
was maintained only on board the ships stationed in foreign waters.
Therefore, after the necessary heating equipment, etc., had been put
in, I ordered that ships be kept in service also through the winter,
which was a veritable boon to the development of the fleet.
In order to obtain the necessary number of units needed by the new
regulations, Admiral von Tirpitz, in view of the shortage of ships of
the line, had already formed into divisions all the sorts of vessels
available, including gunboats and dispatch boats, and carried out
evolutions with them, so that when the replacement of line ships began
to take place the foundations for the new regulations had already been
laid. The latter were then constantly developed with the greatest
energy by all the officials concerned and kept pace with the growth of
the fleet.
Hard work was done on the development of that important weapon, the
torpedo boat. At that time we were filled with joyful pride that a
German torpedo-boat division was the first united torpedo squadron ever
to cross the North Sea. It sailed, under the command of my brother,
Prince Henry, to take part in the celebration of Queen Victoria's
Golden Jubilee (1887).
COLONEL GOETHAL'S VISIT
The development of Heligoland and its fortifications as a point of
support for small cruisers and torpedo boats--also, later on, for
U-boats--was also taken in hand, after the necessary protective work
for preserving the island had been constructed by the state--in
connection with which work the Empire and Prussia fought like cat and
dog.
On account of the growth of the fleet it became necessary to widen
the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal. After a hard struggle we caused the new
locks to be built of the largest possible size, capable of meeting
the development of dreadnaughts for a long time to come. There the
far-sighted policy of the Admiral was brilliantly vindicated.
This found unexpected corroboration by a foreigner. Colonel Goethals,
the builder of the Panama Canal, requested through the United States
Government permission to inspect the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal and its
new locks. Permission was most willingly granted. After a meal with
me, at which Admiral von Tirpitz was present, the Admiral questioned
the American engineer (who was enthusiastic over our construction
work) concerning the measurements of the Panama locks, whereupon it
transpired that the measurements of the locks of the Panama Canal were
much smaller than those of the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal. To my astonished
question as to how that could be possible, Goethals replied that the
Navy Department, upon inquiry by him, had given those measurements for
ships of the line. Admiral von Tirpitz then remarked that this size
would be far from adequate for the future, and that the newer type of
dreadnaughts and superdreadnaughts would not be able to go through
the locks, consequently the canal would soon be useless for American
and other big battleships. The Colonel agreed, and remarked that
this was already true of the newest ships under construction, and he
congratulated His Excellency upon having had the courage to demand and
put through the big locks of the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal, which he had
looked upon with admiration and envy.
In like manner the very backward and antiquated Imperial docks [the
old tinker's shops, as Tirpitz called them] were rebuilt and developed
into model modern plants and the arrangements for the workers were
developed so as to further the welfare of the latter along the most
approved lines. Only those who, like myself, have followed and seen
with their own eyes from the very beginning the origin and development
of all these factors necessary to the building up--nay, the creation
anew--of the fleet can form anything like a proper idea of the enormous
achievement of Admiral von Tirpitz and his entire corps of assistants.
The office of the Imperial Naval Department was also a new creation;
the old "Oberkommando" was eliminated when it was divided into the two
main branches of Admiralty Staff and Imperial Naval Department. Both of
these (as in the army) were directly under the supreme war commander
in chief--this meant that there was no longer any official between the
Emperor and his navy.
COMING OF THE DREADNAUGHT
When Admiral Fisher evolved an entirely new type of ship for England
in the shape of the "dreadnaught"--thereby surprising the world as
if he had launched a sudden assault upon it--and thought that he had
thus given England, once for all, an unapproachable naval superiority
which the rest of the powers could never meet, there was naturally
great excitement in all naval circles. The idea, to be sure, did
not originate with Fisher, but came--in the form of an appeal to
shipbuilders of the whole world--from the famous Italian engineer
Cuniberti, who had made public a sketch in Fred Jane's _Illustrated
Naval Atlas_.
At the first conference regarding the introduction of the "dreadnaught"
type of big fighting ship by England I at once agreed with Admiral
von Tirpitz that it had robbed all pre-dreadnaughts of their value
and consigned them to the scrap heap, especially the German ships,
which it had been necessary to keep considerably smaller, on account
of the measurements of our old locks, than the ships of other navies,
particularly the English.
Thereupon Admiral von Tirpitz remarked that this would also apply to
the English fleet itself as soon as the other nations had followed
Fisher's example; that England had robbed her enormous pre-dreadnaught
force, upon which her great superiority lasted, of its fighting value,
which would necessitate her building an entirely new fleet of big
fighting ships, in competition with the entire world, which would do
likewise; that this would be exceedingly costly; that England, in
order to maintain her notorious "two-Power standard," would have to
exert herself to such an extent that she would look with more disfavor
than ever on new warships built by other nations, toward whom she was
unfriendly, and begin to make objections; then this would be especially
true if we started building, but would be in vain, since, with the
existing types of ships in our fleet, we could not expect to fight
against big battleships, but were forced, "nolens volens," to follow
England along this road.
The war fully confirmed Admiral Tirpitz's opinion. Every one of our
ships not in the big fighting-ship class had to be retired from service.
When the first German big fighting ship was placed in service there
was a loud outcry in the land of the British. The conviction gradually
dawned that Fisher and his shipbuilders had counted absolutely on
the belief that Germany would not be able to build any big fighting
ships. Therefore the disappointment was all the greater. Why such an
assumption was made is beyond comprehension, since, even at that time,
German shipbuilders had already built the great ocean greyhounds, far
surpassing our warships of the line in tonnage, which had occasioned
painfully noticeable competition to the English steamship lines. Our
big fighting ships, despite their small number, showed themselves,
at the Skager-Rak (Jutland) battle, not only equal to their English
opponents, but superior to them both in seaworthiness and in standing
up under gunfire.
IMPATIENT FOR U-BOATS
The building of U-boats, unfortunately, could not be pushed forward
before the war to an extent commensurate with my desires. On the one
hand, it was necessary not to overburden the naval budget during the
carrying out of the Naval law; moreover, most important of all, it was
necessary to collect further data from experiments.
Tirpitz believed that the types with which other nations were
experimenting were too small and fit only for coast defense; that
Germany must build "seagoing" submarines capable of navigating in the
open sea; that this necessitated a larger type--which, however, must
first be systematically developed. This took a long time and required
careful experiments with models.
The result was that, at first, in 1914, there were only a small number
of seaworthy submarines in readiness. Even then more pressure might
have been brought to bear upon England with the available submarines
had not the Chancellor been so concerned lest England be provoked
thereby.
The number and efficiency of the submarines rose rapidly in the course
of the war; in considering numbers, however, one must always remember
that in wartime, U-boats are to be reckoned as follows: One third
of the total in active service, one third on the outward or return
journey, one third undergoing repairs. The achievements of the U-boats
aroused the admiration of the entire world and won the ardent gratitude
of the fatherland.
Admiral von Tirpitz's tremendous success in creating the commercial
colony of Tsing-tao must never be forgotten. Here he gave proof once
more of his brilliant talent for administration and organization in
all directions. Those talents of his created, out of a place that was
previously almost unknown and entirely without importance, a commercial
center which, within a few years, showed a turnover of between fifty
and sixty millions.
The dealings with Reichstag members, the press, and big industrial and
world-commercial elements gradually increased the Admiral's interest in
political matters, particularly in foreign affairs, which were always
bound up with the utilization of ships. The clear world-vision acquired
by him as a traveled sailor, well acquainted with foreign parts,
qualified Tirpitz to make quick decisions, which his fiery temperament
wished to see translated promptly into action.
The opposition and slowness of officialdom irritated him greatly.
A certain tendency to distrust, perhaps strengthened by many an
experience, often misled him to harbor suspicion--sometimes justified,
sometimes not--against individuals. This caused a strong tinge of
reserve in Tirpitz's character and "hampered the joyful workings of the
heart" in others. He was also capable of bringing to bear new views on
a matter with great decision, when, after renewed reflection or study
of new facts, he had altered his previous view. This made working with
him not always exactly agreeable or easy. The tremendous results of his
achievements, of which he was justly proud, gave him a consciousness of
the power of his personality, which sometimes made itself apparent even
to his friends.
During the war Tirpitz's tendency to mix in politics got the upper
hand with him so much that it eventually led to differences of
opinion which finally caused his retirement, since von Bethmann, the
Imperial Chancellor, demanded the dismissal of the Admiral-in-chief
with the observation that the Imperial Secretaries of State were his
subordinates and that the political policy must be conducted by himself
alone.
It was with a heavy heart that I acquiesced in the departure of this
energetic, strong-willed man, who had carried out my plans with genius
and who was indefatigable as a co-worker. Tirpitz may always rest
assured of my Imperial gratitude. If only this source of strength might
stand soon again by the side of the unfortunate German fatherland in
its misery and distress! Tirpitz can do and dares to do what many
others do not dare. The saying of the poet most certainly applies to
Admiral von Tirpitz: "The greatest blessing to the children of earth
is, after all, personality!"
The criticisms which the Admiral felt constrained to make of me, in his
book--which is well worth reading--cannot change, in the slightest, my
opinion of him.