And then the Crown Prince. In August of last year nine out of every ten
of us would have said that not the father, but the son, of the Royal
family of Germany had been the chief provocative cause of the war.
Subsequent events have lessened the weight of that opinion. But the
young man’s known popularity among an active section of the officers of
the army; their subterranean schemes to set him off against his father;
a vague suspicion of the Kaiser’s jealousy of his eldest son--all these
facts and shadows of facts give colour to the impression that not least
among the forces which led the Emperor on that fateful first of August
to declare war against Russia was the presence and the importunity of
the Crown Prince. What kind of man was it, then, whom the invisible
powers of evil were employing to precipitate this insensate struggle?
Hundreds of persons in England, France, Russia, and Italy must have met
the Crown Prince of Germany at more or less close quarters, and
formed their own estimates of his character. The barbed-wire fence of
protective ceremony which usually surrounds Royal personages, concealing
their little human foibles, was periodically broken down in the case
of the Heir-Apparent to the German Throne by his incursion every winter
into a small cosmopolitan community which repaired to the snows of the
Engadine for health or pleasure. In that stark environment I myself, in
common with many others, saw the descendant of the Fredericks every day,
for several weeks of several years, at a distance that called for no
intellectual field-glasses. And now I venture to say, for whatever it
may be worth, that the result was an entirely unfavourable impression.
I saw a young man without a particle of natural distinction, whether
physical, moral, or mental. The figure, long rather than tall; the
hatchet face, the selfish eyes, the meaningless mouth, the retreating
forehead, the vanishing chin, the energy that expressed itself merely in
restless movement, achieving little, and often aiming at nothing at all;
the uncultivated intellect, the narrow views of life and the world; the
morbid craving for change, for excitement of any sort; the indifference
to other people’s feelings, the shockingly bad manners, the assumption
of a right to disregard and even to outrage the common conventions on
which social intercourse depends--all this was, so far as my observation
enabled me to judge, only too plainly apparent in the person of the
Crown Prince. 21
Outside the narrow group that gathered about him (a group hailing,
ironically enough, from the land of a great Republic) I cannot remember
to have heard in any winter one really warm word about him, one story of
an act of kindness, or even generous condescension, such as it is easy
for a royal personage to perform. On the contrary, I was constantly
hearing tales of silly fooleries, of overbearing behaviour, of
deliberate rudeness, such as irresistibly recalled, in spirit if not in
form, the conduct of the common barrator in the guise of a king, who, if
Macaulay’s stories are to be credited, used to kick a lady in the open
streets and tell her to go home and mind her brats.