Six years of married and semi-independent life went by, and left Prince
William of Prussia but little changed. He worked diligently up through
the grades of military training and responsibility, fulfilling all the
public duties of his position with exactness, but showing no inclination
to create a separate _rôle_ in the State for himself. The young men
of the German upper and middle classes, alive with the new spirit of
absolutism and lust for conquest with which boyish memories of 1870
imbued their minds, looked toward him and spoke of him as their leader
that was to be when their generation should come into its own--but
that seemed something an indefinite way ahead. He could afford to wait
silently.
His summer home at Marmorpalais, charmingly situated on the shore of the
Heiligen Sea at Potsdam, did not in any obvious sense become a political
centre. The men who came to it were chiefly hard-working officers, and
the talk of their scant leisure, over wine and cigars, was of military
tasks, hunting experiences, and personal gossip rather than of graver
matters. The library, which was William’s workroom in these days, has
most of its walls covered with racks arranged to hold maps, presumably
for strategic studies and _Kriegspiel_ work. The next most important
piece of furniture in the room is a tall cabinet for cigars. The
bookcase is much smaller.
When winter came Prince William and his family returned to their
apartments in the Schloss at Berlin. Nurses clad in the picturesque
Wendish dress of the Spreewald bore an increasing prominent part in this
annual exodus from Potsdam--for almost every year brought its new male
Hohenzollern.
Thus the early spring of 1887 found William, now past his twenty-eighth
year, a major, commanding a battalion of Foot guards, the father of four
handsome, sturdy boys, and two lives removed from the throne.
Then came, without warning, one of those terrible, world-changing
moments wherein destiny reveals her face to the awed beholder--moments
about which the imagination of the outside public lingers with curiosity
forever unsatisfied. No one will ever tell what happens in that
soul-trying instant of time, We shall never know, for example, just what
William felt and thought one March day in 1887, when somebody--identity
unknown to us as well--whispered in his ear that the Crown Prince, his
father, had a cancer in the throat.
The world heard this sinister news some weeks later, and was so grieved
at the intelligence that for over a year thereafter it fostered the
hope of its falsity, and was even grateful to courtier physicians and
interested flatterers who encouraged this hope. Civilization had elected
Frederic to a place among its heroes, and clung despairingly to the
belief that his life might, after all, be saved.
But in the inner family circle of the Hohenzollerns there was from the
first no illusion on this point. The old Emperor and his Chancellor and
the Prince William knew that the malady was cancerous. Their information
came from Ems, whither Frederic went upon medical advice in the spring
of 1887, to be treated for “a bad cold with bronchial complications.”
Later a strenuous and determined attempt was made to represent the
disease as something else, and out of this grew one of the most painful
and cruel domestic tragedies known to history. At this point it is
enough to say that the Emperor and his grandson knew about the cancer
before even rumours of it reached the general public, and that their
belief in its fatal character remained unshaken throughout.
To comprehend fully and fairly what followed, it will be necessary to
try to look at Frederic through the eyes of the Court party. The view
of him which we of England and America take has been, beyond doubt, of
great and lasting service to the human race--in much the same sense that
the world has been benefited by the idealized purities and sweetnesses
of the Arthurian legend. We are helped by our heroes in this practical,
work-a-day, modern world as truly as were our pagan fathers who followed
the sons of Woden. Every one of us is the richer and stronger for this
image of Frederic the Noble which the English-speaking peoples have
erected in their Valhalla.
But it is fair to reflect, on the other hand, that this fine, handsome,
able, and good-hearted Prince could not have created for himself such
hosts of hostile critics in his own country, could not have continually
found himself year by year losing his hold upon even the minority of his
fellow-countrymen, without reason. It is certain that in 1886--the
year before his illness befell--he had come to a minimum of usefulness,
influence, and popularity in the Empire. Deplore this as we may, it
would be unintelligent to refuse to inquire into its causes.
Moreover, we are engaged upon the study of a living man, holding a great
position, possibly destined to do great things. All our thoughts of
this living man are instinctively coloured by prejudices based upon his
relations with his father, who is dead. Justice to William demands that
we shall strive fairly to get at the opinions and feelings which swayed
him and his advisers in their attitude of antagonism to our hero, his
father.
[Illustration: 0076]
His critics say that Frederic was an actor. They do not insist upon
his insincerity--in fact, for the most part credit him with honesty and
candour--but regard him as the victim of hereditary histrionism. His
mother, the late Empress Augusta, had always impressed Berliners in
the same way--as playing in the _rôle_ of an exiled Princess, with
her little property Court accessories, her little tea-party circle
of imitation French _littérateurs_, and her “Mrs. Haller” sighs and
headshakings over the coarseness and cruelty of the big roaring world
outside. And her grandfather was that play-actor gone mad, Czar Paul of
Russia, who tore the passion so into tatters that his own sons rose and
killed him.
Once given the key to this view of Frederic’s character, a strange cloud
of corroborative witnesses are at hand. Take one example. Most of the
pictures of him drawn at the period of his greatest popularity--during
and just after the Franco-German war--pourtray him with a long-bowled
porcelain pipe in his hand. The artists in the field made much of this:
every war correspondent wrote about it. The effect upon the public
mind was that of a kindly, unostentatious, pipe-loving burgher--and
so lasting was it that when, seventeen years later, he was attacked by
cancer, many good people hastened to ascribe it to excessive smoking.
I had this same notion, too, and therefore was vastly surprised, in
Berlin, years after, when a General Staff officer told me that Frederic
rather disliked tobacco. I instanced the familiar pictures of him with
his pipe. The instant reply was: “Ah, yes, that was like him. He
always carried a pipe about at headquarters to produce an impression of
comradeship on the soldiers, although it often made him sick.”
It was hard work to credit this theory--until it was confirmed by a
passage in Sir Morell Mackenzie’s book. In response to the physician’s
question, Frederic said the report of his being a great smoker was
“quite untrue, and that for many years he had hardly smoked at all.” He
added that probably this report, coming from soldiers who had seen him
sometimes solacing himself after a hard-fought battle with a pipe, had
given him his “perfectly undeserved reputation” as a devotee of tobacco.*
* “The Fatal Illness of Frederic the Noble,” p. 20.
But the most striking illustrations of this trait, which Germans
suspected in Frederic, are given in Gustav Freytag’s interesting book,
“The Crown Prince and the Imperial Crown.” It may be said in passing
that even among Conservatives in Berlin there is a feeling that Freytag
should not have published this book. No doubt it tells the truth, but
then Freytag owed very much to the tender friendship and liking of
Frederic, who conspicuously favoured him above other German writers, and
wrote kindly things about him in his diary--and, if the truth had to be
told, some other than Freytag should have told it. Coupled as it is in
the public mind with Dr. Friedberg’s desertion, heretofore spoken of,
this behaviour of another of the dead Prince’s friends is felt to
help justify the low opinion of German gratitude held among scoffing
neighbours. As a Berlin official said in comment to the writer: “When
men like Friedberg and Freytag do these things to the memory of their
dead patron, it is no wonder that foreigners call us Prussians a pack of
wolves, ready always to leap upon and devour any comrade who is down.”
Freytag was the foremost correspondent attached to Frederic’s
headquarters in 1870-71, and enjoyed the confidence of the Crown Prince
in extraordinary measure. Thus he is able to give us a detailed picture
of the man’s moods and mental workings, day by day, during that eventful
time. And this picture is a perfect panorama of varying phases of
histrionism.
The Crown Prince was sedulously cultivating the popular impression of
himself as a plain, hail-fellow-well-met, friendly Prince. But
Freytag says: “The traditional conception of rank and position dwelt
ineradicably in his soul; when he had occasion to remember his own
claims, he stood more vehemently on his dignity than others of his
class.... Had destiny allowed him a real reign, this peculiarity would
probably have shown itself in a manner unpleasantly surprising to his
contemporaries.” *
* “The Crown Prince and the German Imperial Crown,” by
Gustav Freytag, p. 27.
More important still is this remark on the following page: “The idea of
the German Empire grew out of princely pride in his soul; it became an
ardent wish, and I think he was the originator and motive power of this
innovation.”
The fact that it was Frederic who conceived the idea of the Empire first
came to the world when Dr. Geffcken printed that famous portion of the
Crown Prince’s diary which led to prosecutions and infinite scandal.
Freytag’s subsequent publication surrounds the fact with most curious
minutiae of detail.
As early as August 1st, before his Third Army had even crossed the
Rhine, Frederic had broached the idea of an empire, with Prussia at its
head. All through the campaign which followed his head was full of it.
He busied his mind with questions of titles, precedence, &c., to grow
out of the new creation. One afternoon--August 11th--he strolled on the
hillside with Freytag for a talk. “He had put on his general’s cloak so
that it fell around his tall figure like a king’s mantle, and had thrown
around his neck the gold chain of the Hohenzollern order, which he was
not wont to wear in the quiet of the camp--and paced elated along the
village green. Filled with the importance which the emperor idea had for
him, he evidently adapted his external appearance to the conversation.”
During this talk he asked what the new title of the King of Prussia
should be, and the anti-imperialist Freytag suggested Duke of Germany.
Then “the Crown Prince broke out with emphasis, his eyes flashing: ‘No!
he must be Emperor!’” * To create this empire Frederic was quite ready
to forcibly coerce the Southern German States. Bismarck and William
I., whom we think of as rough, hard, arbitrary men, shrank from even
considering such a course. To the enthusiastic and slightly unreal
Frederic it seemed the most natural thing in the world. The account in
his diary of the long interview of Nov. 16, 1870, with Bismarck makes
all this curiously clear. “What about the South Germans? Would you
threaten them, then?” asks the Chancellor. “Yes, indeed!” answers our
ideal constitutional Frederic, with a light heart. The interview was
protracted and stormy, Bismarck ending it by resort to his accustomed
trick of threatening to resign, a well-worn device which twenty years
later was to be used just once too often.
* Freytag, p. 20.
In this same diary, under date of the following March (1871), Frederic
writes: “I doubt whether the necessary uprightness exists for the free
development of the Empire, and think that only a new epoch, which shall
one day come to terms with me, will see that.... More especially I shall
be the first Prince who has to appear before his people after having
honourably declared for constitutional methods without any reserve.”
One feels that these two passages from his own diary--the utterances of
November and the reflections of March--show distinctly why the practical
rulers, soldiers, and statesmen of Prussia distrusted Frederic. They saw
him more eager and strenuous about grasping the imperial dignity than
any one else--willing even to break treaties and force Bavaria, Saxony,
and Würtemberg into the empire at the cannon’s mouth, and then they
heard him lamenting that until he came to the throne there would not
be enough “uprightness” to insure The Empress Frederic “constitutional
methods.” Candidly, it is impossible to wonder at their failure to
reconcile the two.
[Illustration: 0084]
An even more acute reason for this suspicion and dislike lay in
Frederic’s relations with the English Court. To begin with, there was
a sensational and fantastic uxoriousness about his attitude toward his
wife which could not command sympathy in Germany. Freytag tells of his
lying on his camp bed watching the photographs of his wife and children
on the table before him, with tears in his eyes, and rhapsodizing
about his wife’s qualities of heart and intellect to the newspaper
correspondent, until Freytag promised to dedicate his next book to her.
“He gave me a look of assent and lay back satisfied.” This in itself
would rather pall on the German taste.
Worse still, Frederic used to write long letters home to his wife every
day--often the work of striking the camp would be delayed until these
epistles could be finished--and then the Crown Princess at Berlin would
as regularly send the purport of these to her royal relatives in England
and thence it would be telegraphed to France. Bismarck always believed,
or professed to believe, that there was concerted treachery in this
business. No one else is likely to credit this assumption. But at
all events the fact is that this embarrassing diffusion of news was
discovered and complained of at the time, and charged against Frederic,
and was the reason, as Bismarck bluntly declared during the discussion
over the diary, why the Crown Prince was not trusted by his father or
allowed to share state secrets.
As for the Empire itself, though the original idea of it was his,
Frederic suffered the fate of many other inventors in having very
little to do with it after it was put into working order. He presented a
magnificently heroic figure on horseback in out-of-door spectacles, and
his cultured tastes made the task of presiding over museums and learned
societies congenial. But there his participation in public affairs
ended.
The Empire he had dreamed of was of a wholly different sort from
this prosaic, machine-like, departmental structure which Bismarck
and Delbruck made. Frederic’s vision had been of some splendid,
picturesque, richly-decorated revival of the Holy Roman Empire. There
are a number of delightful pages in Freytag’s book giving the Crown
Prince’s romantic views on this point. * When the first Reichstag met in
1871, to acclaim the new Emperor in his own capital, Frederic introduced
into the ceremony the ancient throne chair of the Saxon Emperors, which
may now be seen in Henry’s palace at Goslar, and which, having lain
unknown for centuries in a Harz village, was discovered by being offered
for sale by a peasant as old metal some seventy years ago.
* Fryetag, pp. 115-130.
Among practical Germans this attempt to link their new Empire with the
discredited and disreputable old fabric, which had been too rotten for
even the Hapsburgs to hold together, was extremely distasteful. Yet
Frederic clung to this pseudo-mediævalism to the last. When he came to
the throne as Kaiser his first proclamation spoke of “the re-established
Empire.” And those who were in Berlin at the time know how a whole day’s
delay was caused by the dissension over what title the new ruler should
assume--the secret of which was that he desired to call himself Kaiser
Friedrich IV, thus going back for imperial continuity to that Friedrich
III who died while Martin Luther was a boy, and who is remembered
only because he was the father of the great Max and was the original
possessor of the Austrian under lip.
Freytag indeed says that to that first proclamation Frederic did affix a
signature with an IV--the assumption being that Bismarck altered it.
The reader has been shown this less satisfying aspect of Frederic, as
his associates saw him, because without understanding it the attitude of
both his father and his son towards him would be flatly unintelligible.
They did not believe that he would make a safe Emperor for Germany.
The old William all the same loved his son deeply, and manifested an
almost extravagant delight at the creditable way in which he carried
himself through the Bohemian and French campaigns. In the succeeding
years of peace it is obvious enough that the venerable Kaiser grew
despondent about his son’s association with Radicals and their
dreams--and it is equally clear that there were plenty of advisers at
hand to confirm the old man in these gloomy doubts. Hence, though he
cherished a sincere affection for “Unser Fritz” and his English wife,
and would gladly have had them much about him, he could not help being
of the party opposed to them--the party which lost no opportunity of
exalting young William in his grandfather’s eyes as the real hope of
the Hohenzollerns. Thus there was a growing, though tacit, estrangement
between the father and son.
When Frederic was stricken with disease, however, the kindly old father
suffered keenly. There was great sweetness of nature in the tough
martial frame of William I, and there is an abiding pathos in the
picture we have of his last moments--the stout nonogenarian who fought
death so valiantly even to his last breath that it seemed as if he could
not die, rolling his white head on the pillow, and moaning piteously,
“Poor Fritz! Poor Fritz!” with his rambling thoughts beyond the
snow-clad Alps, where his son was also in the destroyer’s grasp.
As for young William, his estrangement from his father, if less noted,
had been more complete. He belonged openly to another party, and
moreover smarted under the reproach of being unfilial, which the friends
of his parents, largely of the writing and printing class, publicly
levelled at him.
Placed in this position, the shock of the news that his father had an
incurable disease must have come upon him with peculiar force. We can
only dimly imagine to ourselves the great struggles fought out in
his breast between grief for the father, who had really been an ideal
parent, loving, gentle, solicitous, and tenderly proud, and concern for
the Empire, which might be doomed to have a wasting invalid at its head
for years. On the one side was the repellent thought that this father’s
death would mean his own swift advancement, for the grandfather could
clearly live but little longer. On the other side, if his father’s life
was prolonged, it meant the elevation to the throne of a sick man, whose
fitness for the crown of this armed and beleaguered nation would at all
times have been doubtful, and who, in his enfeebled state, at the mercy
of the radical agitators and adventurers about him, might jeopardize the
fortunes of Empire and dynasty alike.
Torn between these conflicting views, it is not strange that William
welcomed a middle course, suggested, I am authoritatively informed, by
Frederic himself.
The Crown Prince returned to Berlin from Ems thoroughly frightened. He
had no doubt whatever that he was suffering from cancer and expected
to die within the year. Like all men of an expansive and impressionable
temperament, he was subject to fits of profound melancholia--as Freytag
puts it, “fond of indulging in gloomy thoughts and pessimistic humours;”
so much so that he “sometimes cherished the idea of renouncing the
throne, in case of its being vacant, and leaving the government to his
son.” * He had grown lethargic and dispirited through years of inaction
and systematic exclusion from governmental labours and interests. He
returned from Ems now, in this April of 1887, in a state of complete
depression.
* Freytag, p. 78,
The evident affection and sympathy with which both his father and son
received him, gave an added impulse to the despairing ideas which
had conquered his mind since his sentence of death by cancer had been
uttered.
In the course of a touching interview between the three Hohenzollerns,
Frederic with tears in his eyes declared that he did not desire to
reign, and that if by chance he survived his father he would waive his
rights of succession in favour of his elder son. This declaration
was within a brief space of time repeated in the presence of Prince
Bismarck, and was by him reduced to writing. The paper was deposited
among the official private archives of the Crown at Berlin, and
presumably is still in existence there.