The ex-Chancellor of the German Empire owed nothing of his unique
career to adventitious advantages. Otto von Bismarck-Schoenhausen, who
for more than a generation was the most prominent and most powerful
personality of Europe, was essentially a self-made man. He was a
younger son of a cadet family of a knightly and ancient but somewhat
decayed house, ranking among the lesser nobility of the Alt Mark of
Brandenburg. The square solid mansion in which he was born, embowered
among its trees in the region between the Elbe and the Havel, might be
taken by an Englishman for the country residence of a Norfolk or
Somersetshire squire of moderate fortune. But memories cling around the
massive old family place of Schoenhausen, such as can belong to no
English residence of equal date. In the library door of the Brandenburg
mansion are seen to this day three deep fissures made by the bayonet
points of French soldiers fresh from the battlefield of Jena, who in
their brutal lawlessness pursued the young and beautiful chatelaine of
the house and strove to crush in the door which the fugitive had locked
behind her. The lady thus terrified and outraged was the mother of
Bismarck; and the story told him in boyhood of his loved mother's
narrow escape from worse than death, and of his father's having to
conceal her in the depth of the adjoining forest, may well have
inspired their son with the ill-feeling against the French nation which
he never cared to disguise.
The Bismarcks had been fighting men from time immemorial, and the
combatant nature of the great scion of their race displayed itself in
frequent duels during his university career at Göttingen. In the series
of some eight-and-twenty duels in which he engaged during his first
three terms, he was wounded but twice--once in the leg and again on the
cheek, the mark of which latter wound he bears to this day. At one time
he seems to have all but decided to embrace the military career but for
family reasons he became a country gentleman, and if Europe had
remained undisturbed by revolution he might have lived and died a
bucolic squire, "Dyke Captain" of his district, with a seat in the
Provincial Diet, a liking for history and philosophy, a propensity to
rowdyism and drinking bouts of champagne and porter, and a character
which defined itself in his local appellation of "Mad Bismarck." _Dis
aliter visum_. The Revolution of 1848 swept over Europe and Bismarck
rallied to the support of his sovereign. When in 1851 the young
Landwehr lieutenant was sent to Frankfort by that sovereign as the
representative of Prussia in the German Diet, he carried with him a
reputation for unflinching devotion to the Crown, for a conservatism
which had been styled not only "mediaeval" but "antediluvian," and for
startling originality in his views as well as fearlessness in
expressing them. The latter attribute he displayed when, in reply to a
remark of a French diplomat on a question of policy, "_Cette politique
va vous conduire à Jena_," Bismarck significantly retorted, "_Pourquoi
pas à Leipsic ou à Waterloo?_" During his tenure of office at Frankfort
his conviction steadfastly strengthened that Prussia could become a
great nation only by shaking herself free from the Austrian supremacy
in Germany. "It is my conviction," he placed on record in a despatch
soon after the Crimean War, "that at no distant time we shall have to
fight with Austria for our very existence;" and he was yet more
emphatic when he wrote just before leaving Frankfort to take up his new
position as German Ambassador to Russia in the beginning of 1859: "I
recognise in our relations with the Bund a certain weakness affecting
Prussia, which, sooner or later, we shall have to cure _ferro et
igni_"--with fire and sword--words which embodied the first distinct
enunciation of that policy of "blood and iron" which was destined
ultimately to bring about the unification of Germany. His disgust was
so strong that Prussia did not assert herself against Austria in 1858
when the latter's hands were full in Italy, that his continued presence
at Frankfort was considered unadvisable. He remained "in ice"--to use
his own expression--at St. Petersburg until early in 1862; and in
September of that year, after a few months of service as Prussian
Ambassador at Paris, he was appointed by King Wilhelm to the high and
onerous post of Minister-President with the portfolio of Foreign
Secretary. It was then that his great career as a European statesman
really began.
The impression is all but universal that King Wilhelm throughout the
eventful years which followed was but the figure-head of the ship at
the helm of which stood Bismarck, strong, shrewd, subtle, cynical, and
unscrupulous. This conception I believe to be utterly wrong. I hold
Wilhelm to have been the virtual maker of the united Germany and the
creator of the German Empire; and that the accomplishment of both those
objects, the former leading up to the latter, was already quietly in
his mind long before he mounted the throne. I consider him to have
possessed the shrewdest insight into character. I believe him to have
been quite unscrupulous, when once he had brought himself to cross the
threshold of a line of action. I discern in him this curious, although
not very rare, phase of character, that although resolutely bent on a
purpose he was apt to be irresolute and even reluctant in bringing
himself to consent to measures whereby that purpose was to be
accomplished. He was that apparent contradiction in terms, a bold
hesitator; he habitually needed, and knew that he needed, to have his
hand apparently forced for the achievement of the end he was most bent
upon. He knew full well that his aspirations could be fulfilled only at
the bayonet point; and recognising the defects of the army, he had
while still Regent set himself energetically to the task of making
Prussia the greatest military power of Europe. He it was who had put
into the hands of Prussian soldiers the weapon that won Königgrätz.
With his clear eye for the right man he had found Moltke and placed the
premier strategist of his day at the head of the General Staff. Roon he
picked out as if by intuition from comparative obscurity, and assigned
to him the work of preparing and carrying out that scheme of army
reform which all continental Europe has copied.
And then, constant in the furtherance of his purposes, Wilhelm
deliberately invented Bismarck. He had steadfastly taken note of the
man whom he chose to be his minister from the big Landwehr lieutenant's
first commission to the Frankfort Diet in 1851; probably, indeed,
earlier, when Bismarck was a rare but forcible speaker in Frederick
Wilhelm's "quasi-Parliament." In Bismarck Wilhelm saw precisely the man
he wanted--the complement of himself; arbitrary as he was, unscrupulous
as he was, but bolder and at the same time more wise. Knowing where he
himself was lacking, he recognised the man who, when he himself should
have the impulse to balk and hesitate, was of that hardier
nature--"grit" the Americans call it--to take him hard by the head and
force him over the fence which all the while he had been longing to be
on the other side of. To a monarch of this character Bismarck was
simply the ideal guide and support--the man to urge him on when
hesitating, to restrain him when over-ardent. Wilhelm had all along
thoroughly realised that war with Austria was among the inevitables
between him and the accomplishment of his aims, and had accepted it as
such when it was yet afar off; but when confronted full with it his
nerve failed him, and Bismarck--engaged among other things for just
such an emergency--had to act as the spur to prick the side of his
master's intent. The spur having done its work Wilhelm was himself
again; he really enjoyed Königgrätz and would fain have dictated peace
to Austria from the Hofburg of Vienna. In his zeal for promoting German
unity at Prussia's bayonet point he lost his head a little, and on
Bismarck devolved, in his own words, "the ungrateful duty of diluting
the wine of victory with the water of moderation." One of the beads on
the surface of the former fluid was certainly thus early the Imperial
idea; but the time for its fulfilment Bismarck wisely judged not yet
ripe. As it approached four years later, the diary of the Crown Prince
depicts with unconscious humour the amusing progress of the "weakening"
of Wilhelm's opposition to the Kaisership; it weakened in good time
quite out of the sort of existence it had ever had, and Wilhelm was
ready for the Kaisership before the Kaisership was ready for him.
Bismarck as Premier began as he meant to go on, with uncompromising
masterfulness. The Chamber and the nation might probably have fallen in
willingly with Wilhelm's scheme for the reorganisation and
reinforcement of the army, had it been possible to divulge the intent
in furtherance of which the increased armament was being created. But
since neither monarch nor minister could even hint at the objects in
view, the nation was set against that increased armament for which it
could discern no apparent use. So the Chamber, session after session,
went through the accustomed formula of rejecting the military
reorganisation bill as well as the military expenditure estimates. "No
surrender" was the steadfast motto of Bismarck and his royal master.
The constitution, such as it was, in effect was suspended. The Upper
House voted everything it was asked to vote; loans were duly effected,
the revenues were collected and the military disbursements were made,
right in the teeth of the popular will and the veto of the
representatives of the nation. Bismarck became the best-hated man in
Prussia. He was compared to Catiline and Strafford; he was threatened
with impeachment; the House and the nation clamoured to the King for
his dismissal and for the sovereign's return to the path of
constitutional government.
But the long "conflict-time" was drawing near its close, and the
triumph of the monarch and his minister over the constitution was
approaching. The policy of doing political evil that national advantage
might come was, for once at least, to stand vindicated. War with
Austria as the outcome of Bismarck's astute if unscrupulous statecraft
was imminent when the hostile parliament was dissolved; and a general
election took place amidst the fervid outburst of enthusiasm which the
earlier victories of the Prussian arms in the "Seven Weeks' War"
stirred throughout the nation. The prospect of war had been unpopular
in the extreme, but the tidings of the first success kindled the flame
of patriotism. Bismarck lost for ever the title of the "best-hated man
in Prussia" in the loud volume of the enthusiastic greetings of the
populace, and on the day of Münchengrätz and Skalitz Prussia now
rejoiced to put her stubborn neck under the great minister's foot.
The mingled truculence and tortuousness of the diplomacy by which
Bismarck sapped up to the short but decisive war, the issue of which
gave to Prussia the virtual headship of Germany and contributed so
greatly toward the unification of the Fatherland, constitute a striking
illustration of his methods in statecraft. He was fairly entitled to
say, "_Ego qui feci_." He had achieved his aim in defiance of the
nation. The Court threw its weight into the scale against the war; to
the Crown Prince the strife with Austria was notoriously repugnant. The
King himself, as the crisis approached, evinced marked hesitation. How
triumphantly the event vindicated the policy of the great Premier, is a
matter of history. He has frankly owned that if the decisive battle
should have resulted in a Prussian defeat, he had resolved not to
survive the shipwreck of his hopes and schemes. And there was a period
in the course of the colossal struggle of Königgrätz, when to many men
it seemed that the wielders of the needle-gun were having the worst of
the battle. An awful hour for Bismarck, conscious of the load of
responsibility which he carried. With great effort he could indeed
maintain a calm visage, but his heart was beating and every pulse of
him throbbing. In his torture of suspense he caught at straws. Moltke
asked him for a cigar. As Bismarck handed him his cigar case he
snatched a shred of comfort from the inference that if matters were
very bad Moltke could hardly care to smoke. But Moltke was not only in
a frame for tobacco but Bismarck watched with what deliberate coolness
the great strategist inspected and smelt at cigar after cigar before
making his final selection; and he dared to infer that the man who best
understood the situation was in no perturbation as to the ultimate
outcome. The opportune arrival of the Crown Prince's army on the
Austrian right flank decided the business, and that arrival Bismarck
was the first to discern. Lines were dimly visible on the hither slope
of the Chlum heights; but they were pronounced to be ploughed ridges.
Bismarck closed his field-glasses with a snap and exclaimed, "No, these
are not plough furrows; the spaces are not equal; they are marching
lines!" And he was right.
Eighteen days after the victory of Königgrätz the Prussian hosts were
in line on the historic Marchfeld whence the spires of Vienna could be
dimly seen through the heat-haze. The soldiers were eager for the storm
of the famous lines of Florisdorf and King Wilhelm was keen to enter
the Austrian capital. But now the practical wisdom of Bismarck stepped
in and his arguments for moderation prevailed. The peace which ended
the Seven Weeks' War revolutionised the face of Germany. Austria
accepted her utter exile from Germany, recognised the dissolution of
the old Bund, and consented to non-participation in the new North
German Confederation of which Prussia was to have the unquestioned
military and diplomatic leadership. Prussia annexed Hanover, Electoral
Hesse, Nassau, Sleswig and Holstein, Frankfort-on-Main, and portions of
Hesse-Darmstadt and Bavaria. Her territorial acquisitions amounted to
over 6500 square miles with a population exceeding 4,000,000, and the
states with which she had been in conflict paid as war indemnity sums
reaching nearly to £10,000,000 sterling. In a material sense, it had
not been a bad seven weeks for Prussia; in a sense other than material,
she had profited incalculably more. She was now, in fact as in name,
one of the "Great Powers" of Europe. The nation realised at length what
manner of man this Bismarck was and what it owed to him. When the inner
history of the period comes to be written, it will be recognised that
at no time of his extraordinary career did Bismarck prove himself a
greater statesman than during the five days of armistice in July 1866,
when he fought his diplomatic Königgrätz in the Castle of Nikolsburg
and assuaged the wounds of the Austrian defeat by terms the moderation
of which went far to obliterate the memory of the rancour of the recent
strife.
He had been wily enough to secure by vague non-committal half-promises
the neutrality of France during the weeks while Prussia was crushing
the armed strength of Austria in Bohemia. But the issue of Königgrätz
startled Napoleon and set France in ferment. Bismarck dared to refuse
point-blank the demand which the French Emperor made for the fortress
of Mayence, made though that demand was under threat of war. The
Prussian commanders would have liked nothing better than a war with
France, and Roon indeed had warned for mobilisation 350,000 soldiers to
swell the ranks of the forces already in the field; but Bismarck was
wise and could wait. He allowed Napoleon to exercise some influence in
the negotiations in the character of a mediator; and to French
intervention was owing the stipulation that the South German States
should be at liberty to form themselves into a South German
Confederation of which Napoleon hoped to be the patron. But Bismarck
was a better diplomatist than Napoleon. While he formed and knit
together the North German Confederation in which Prussia was dominant,
he quietly negotiated an alliance offensive and defensive with each of
the Southern States separately. No Southern bund was ever formed, and
when the Franco-German War broke out in 1870 Napoleon saw the shipwreck
of his abortive devices in the spectacle of the troops of Bavaria and
Würtemberg marching on the Rhine in line with the battalions of Prussia.
The unity of Germany was not yet; that consummation and the
Kaisership--the two greatest triumphs of Bismarck's life--required
another and a greater war to bring about their accomplishment. During
the interval between 1866 and 1870, while the armed strength of
Northern Germany was being quietly but sedulously perfected, Bismarck
with dexterous caution was smoothing the rough path toward the ultimate
unification. He would not have his hand forced by the enthusiasts for
"the consummation of the national destiny." "No horseman can afford to
be always at a gallop" was the figure with which he met the clamourers
of the Customs Parliament. He invoked the terms of the treaty of Prague
against the spokesmen of the Pan-German party inveighing vehemently
against the policy of delay. He was staunch in his conviction that the
South for its own safety's sake would come into the union the moment
that the North should engage in war. He was a few weeks out in his
reckoning; the Southern States waited until Sedan had been fought, when
the prospect of the spoils of victory was assured; and this measured
delay on their part was the best justification of Bismarck's sagacious
deliberateness. The negotiations were tedious, but at length, on the
evening of 23rd November 1870 the Convention with Bavaria was signed,
and the unity of Germany was an accomplished fact. Busch vividly
depicts the great moment:--
The Chief came in from the salon, and sat down at the table. "Now," he
exclaimed excitedly, "the Bavarian business is settled and everything
is signed. _We have got our German Unity and our German Emperor_."
There was silence for a moment. "Bring a bottle of champagne," said the
Chief to a servant, "it is a great occasion." After musing a little, he
remarked, "The Convention has its defects, but it is all the stronger
on account of them. I count it the most important thing that we have
accomplished during recent years."
Notwithstanding that there was still before Bismarck a period of twenty
years of virtual omnipotence, it was in the memorable years of 1870 and
1871 that the apostle of blood and iron attained the zenith of his
extraordinary career. Germany was his wash-pot; over France had he cast
his shoe. The years of _Sturm und Drang_ were behind him, during which
he had wrought out the military supremacy of Prussia in spite of
herself; and in 1870 he had no misgivings as to the ultimate result. So
confident indeed was he that before he crossed the French frontier on
the second day after the twin victories of Wörth and Spicheren, he had
already resolved on annexing to the Fatherland the old German province
of Alsace which had been part of France for a couple of centuries.
Bismarck was at his best in 1870 in certain attributes; in others he
was at his worst, and a bitter bad worst that worst was. He was at his
best in clear swift insight, in firm masterful grasp of every phase of
every situation, in an instinctive prescience of events, in lucid
dominance over German and European policy. If patriotism consists in
earnest efforts to advantage and aggrandise one's native land _per fas
aut nefas_, than Bismarck during the Franco-German War there never was
a grander patriot. His hands were clean, he wanted nothing for himself
except, curiously enough, the only thing that his old master was strong
enough to deny him, the rank of Field Marshal when that military
distinction was conferred on Moltke. He was at his worst in many
respects. He had, or affected, a truculence which was simply brutal,
its savagery intensified rather than mitigated by a bluff, boisterous
bonhomie. Jules Favre complained to him that the German cannon in front
of Paris fired upon the sick and blind in the Blind Institute, Bismarck
in those days of swaggering prosperity had a fine turn of badinage. "I
don't know what you find so hard in that," he retorted, "you do far
worse; you shoot at our soldiers who are hale and useful fighting men."
It is to be hoped that Favre had a sense of humour; he needed it all to
relish the grim pleasantry.
I do not suppose, if he had had a free hand, that Bismarck would have
exhibited the courage of his opinions; but if his sentiments as
expressed count for anything he would fain have seen the methods of
warfare in the Dark Ages reverted to. "Prisoners! more prisoners!" he
once exclaimed at Versailles, after one of Prince Frederick Charles's
victories in the Loire country--"What the devil do we want with
prisoners? Why don't they make a battue of them?" His motto, especially
as regarded Francs-tireurs, was "No quarter," forgetful of the swarms
of free companions and volunteer bands whose gallant services in
Prussia's War of Liberation are commemorated to this day in song and
story. It was told him that among the French prisoners taken at Le
Bourget were a number of Francs-tireurs--by the way, they were the
volunteers _de la Presse_ and wore a uniform. "That they should ever
take Francs-tireurs prisoners!" roared Bismarck in disgust. "They ought
to have shot them down by files!" Again, when it was reported that
Garibaldi with his 13,000 "free companions" had been taken prisoners,
the Chancellor exclaimed, "Thirteen thousand Francs-tireurs, who are
not even Frenchmen, made prisoners! Why on earth were they not shot?"
And when he heard that Voights Rhetz having experienced some resistance
from the inhabitants of the open town of Tours, had shelled it into
submission, Bismarck waxed wrath because the General had ceased firing
when the white flag went up. "I would have gone on," said he, "throwing
shells into the town till they sent me out 400 hostages." The simple
truth is that in spite of his long pedigree and good blood Bismarck was
not quite a gentleman in our sense of the word; and as this accounts
for his ferocious bluster and truculent bloodthirsty utterances when he
was in power in the war time, so it was the keynote to his more recent
undignified attitude and howls of querulous impatience of his altered
situation. It must be said of him, however, that he was a man of cool
and undaunted courage. I have seen him perfectly impassive under heavy
fire. In Bar-le-Duc, in Rheims, and over and over again in Versailles,
I have met him walking alone and unarmed through streets thronged with
French people who recognised him by the pictures of him, and who glared
and spat and hissed in a cowed, furtive, malign fashion that was ugly
to see.
I vividly remember the first occasion on which I saw Bismarck. It was
on the little tree-shaded _Place_ of St. Johann, the suburb of
Saarbrücken, in the early evening of the 8th August, the next day but
one after the battle of the Spicheren. Saarbrücken was full to the
door-sills with the wounded of the battle and stretcher-parties were
continually tramping to the "warriors' trench" in the cemetery,
carrying to their graves soldiers who had died of their wounds. The
Royal Headquarters had arrived a couple of hours earlier, and I was
staring with all my eyes at a fresh-faced, white-haired old gentleman
who was sitting in one of the windows of Guepratt's Hotel and whom I
knew from the pictures to be King Wilhelm. Two officers in general's
undress uniform were walking up and down under the pollarded
lime-trees, talking as they walked. Presently from out a house opposite
the hotel there emerged a very tall burly man of singularly upright
carriage and with a certain air of swashbucklerism in his gait. A long
cavalry sabre trailed and clanked on the rough pavement as he advanced
to join the two sauntering officers under the trees. He wore the long
blue double-breasted frockcoat with yellow cuffs and facings and white
cap which I knew to be the undress uniform of the Bismarck Cuirassiers,
but he was only partially in undress since the long cuirassier
thigh-boots in which he strode were conventionally full uniform. The
wearer of this costume was Bismarck; nor did I ever see him otherwise
attired except on four occasions--at the Château Bellevue on the
morning after Sedan, in the Galerie des Glaces in the Château of
Versailles on 18th January, in the Place de la Concorde of capitulated
Paris, and in the triumphal entry into Berlin; when he appeared in full
uniform. Saluting His Majesty and then the two officers whom I
recognised as Moltke and Roon, he joined the pedestrian couple, taking
post between them and joining in their promenade and conversation. We
heard his voice and laugh above the rumble of the waggon wheels on the
causeway; the other two spoke little--Moltke, as he moved with bent
head and hands clasped behind his back, scarcely anything.
One would have imagined that those three men, the chief makers of that
empire which was soon to come to the grand but not brilliant old
gentleman in the window-seat, were on the most intimate and cordial
terms. In reality they were jealous of each other with an inconceivable
intensity. Bismarck had umbrage with Moltke because the great
strategist withheld from the great statesman the military information
which the latter held he ought to share. Moltke has roundly disclosed
in his posthumous book his conviction that Roon's place as Minister of
War was at home in Germany, not on campaign, embarrassing the former's
functions. Roon envied Moltke because of the latter's more elevated
military position, and disliked Bismarck because that outspoken man
made light of Roon's capacity. I have known the headquarter staff of a
British army whose members were on bad terms one with the other, and
the result, to put it mildly, was unsatisfactory. But those three high
functionaries, each with bitterness in his heart against his fellows,
nevertheless co-operated earnestly and loyally in the service of their
sovereign and for the advantage of their country. Their common
patriotism had the mastery in them of their mutual hatred and jealousy.
Ardt's line: _"Sein Vaterland muss grösser sein!"_ was the watchword
and inspiration of all three, and dominated their discordancies.
On the 17th August, the day of comparative quietude intervening between
the day of Mars-la-Tour and the day of Gravelotte I was wandering about
among the hamlets and farmsteads to the southward of Mars-la-Tour,
waiting the arrival in their appointed bivouacs about Puxieux of my
early friends of the Saxon Army Corps. Since in the battle of the
previous day some 32,000 men had fallen killed or wounded within a
comparatively small area, it may be imagined--or rather, without having
seen the horror of carnage it cannot be imagined--how shambles-like was
the aspect of this Aceldama. Scrambling up through the Bois la Dame
with intent to obtain a wider view from the plateau above it, I found
in a farmyard in the hamlet of Mariaville a number of wounded men under
the care of a single and rather helpless surgeon. The water supply was
very short and I volunteered to carry some bucketsful from the stream
below. The surgeon told me that among his patients was Count Herbert
Bismarck, the Chancellor's eldest son, who--as was also his younger
brother Count "Bill"--was a volunteer private in the 2nd Guard
Dragoons, and who had been shot in the thigh in the desperate charge
made by that fine regiment to extricate from annihilation the
Westphalian regiments which had suffered so severely near Bruville. A
little later I saw Bismarck who had left the King on the Flavigny
height, and who was riding about, as I assumed, in quest of his wounded
son's whereabouts. I ventured to inform him on this point and he
thanked me with some emotion. He was greatly moved at the meeting with
his son but their interview was short; then he addressed himself to
reproving the surgeon for not having had the Mariaville poultry killed
for the use of the wounded, and presently rode away to order up a
supply of water in barrels. I remember thinking him an exceedingly
practical man.
The English Warwick was styled the "King-maker"; but it was for the
Prussian Bismarck to be Emperor-breaker and Emperor-maker within the
same six months. The most wretched morning of Napoleon's life was that
following the fatal day of Sedan, spent in and before the weaver's
cottage on the Donchery road with Bismarck by his side, telling him in
stern if courteous terms that as a prisoner of war his power to
exercise the Imperial functions had fallen from him. It has been said
that "the egg from which was hatched the German Empire was laid on the
battlefield of Sedan." But, not to speak of the offer of the Imperial
Crown to King Frederick Wilhelm by the Frankfort Parliament in 1848,
Bismarck more than a year before the Austro-Prussian war had spoken to
Lord Augustus Loftus, then British Ambassador to Prussia, of his
ultimate intention that the King of Prussia should become the Emperor
of an united Germany. The _Kaiserthum_ permeated the air of Northern
Germany throughout the years from 1866 to 1870. But Bismarck had the
true statesman's sense of the proper sequence of things. He would move
no step toward the Kaisership until German unity was in near and clear
sight. Then, and not till then, in spite of the Crown Prince's ardour,
was the Imperial project brought forward, discussed, and finally
carried through by Bismarck's tact and diplomacy.
On the 18th January 1871, the anniversary of the coronation of the
first king of his house, Wilhelm was proclaimed German Emperor in the
Galerie des Glaces of the Château of Versailles. Behind the grand old
monarch on the dais were ranged the regimental colours which had been
borne to victory at Wörth and the Spicheren, at Mars-la-Tour,
Gravelotte, and Sedan. On Wilhelm's right was his handsome and princely
son; to right and to left stood potentates and princes and the leaders
of the hosts of United Germany. Stalwart and square, somewhat apart on
the extreme left of the great semicircle of which his sovereign was the
centre, with a face of deadly pallor--for he had risen from a
sick-bed--stood Bismarck in full cuirassier uniform leaning on his
great sword, the man of all others who might that day most truly say,
_"Finis Coronat Opus."_ His strong massive features were calm and
self-possessed, yet elevated as it were by some internal power which
drew all eyes to the great immobile figure with the indomitable
lineaments instinct with will--force and masterfulness. After the
solemn religious service His Majesty in a loud yet broken voice
proclaimed the re-establishment of the German Empire, and that the
Imperial dignity so revived was vested in him and his descendants for
all time in accordance with the unanimous will of the German people.
Bismarck then stood forward and read in sonorous tones the proclamation
which the Emperor addressed to the German nation. As his final words
rang through the hall the Grand Duke of Baden strode forward and
shouted with all his force, "Long live the Emperor Wilhelm!" With a
tempest of cheering, amidst waving of swords and of helmets the new
title was acclaimed, and the Emperor with streaming tears received the
homage of his liegemen. The first on bended knees to kiss his
sovereign's hand was the Crown Prince, the second was Bismarck. The
band struck up the National Anthem. Louder than the music, heard above
the clamour of the cheering, sounded the thunder of the French cannon
from Mont Valérien, the _Ave Caesar_ from the reluctant lips of worsted
France. Bismarck, impassive as he seemed, must have had his emotions as
he quitted this scene of triumph for the banquet-table of the Kaiser of
his own making. He knew himself for the most conspicuous man in Europe,
the greatest subject in the world. It was the proudest day of his life.
There were many proud days still to occur in his long life. One of
those was on the occasion of the German entry into Paris during the
armistice which resulted in peace. The war had been of his making, and
he chose to witness with his own eyes the actual triumph of his craft.
It was a strange spectacle. There, helmet on head and sword on thigh,
he sat in the shadow of the crape-shrouded statue of Strasburg on the
Place de la Concorde. About him had gathered a group of extremely
sinister French of the Belleville type. They had recognised him, and
their lurid upward glances at the massive form on the great war-horse
were charged with baleful meaning. Bismarck once or twice looked down
on them with a grim smile under his moustache. At length the most
daring of the "patriots" emitted a tentative hiss. With a little polite
wave of his gloved hand Bismarck bent over his holster and requested
"Monsieur" to oblige him with a light for his cigar. The man writhed as
he compelled himself to comply. Little doubt that in his heart he
wished the lucifer were a dagger and that he had the courage to use it.