Chapter IV: The Stage Managers

Armageddon was plotted, prepared for and precipitated by the German War Party. It was not the work of the German people. What is the "War Party"? Let me begin by explaining what it is _not_. It is not a party in the sense of President Wilson's organization or Colonel Roosevelt's Bull Moosers. It maintains no permanent headquarters or National Committee, and holds no conventions. The only barbecue it ever organized is the one which plunged the world into gore and tears in August, 1914, though its attempts to drench Europe with blood are decade-old. You would search the German city directories in vain for the War Party's address or telephone number. No German would ever acknowledge that he belonged to Europe's largest Black Hand league. You could, indeed, hardly find anybody in Germany willing even to acknowledge that the War Party even existed. Yet, unseen and sinister, its grip was fastened so heavily upon the machinery of State that when it deemed the moment for its sanguinary purposes at length ripe, the War Party was able to tear the whole nation from its peaceful pursuits and fling it, armed to the teeth, against a Europe so flagrantly unready that more than a year of strife finds Germany not only unbeaten but at a zenith of fighting efficiency which her foes have only begun to approach.

When the German War Party pressed the button for the Great Massacre, the Fatherland had, roundly, sixty-seven million five hundred thousand inhabitants within its thriving walls. At a liberal estimate, no one can ever convince me that more than one million five hundred thousand Germans really wanted war. _They_ were the "War Party." Sixty-six millions of the Kaiser's subjects, immersed in the most abundant prosperity any European country of modern times had been vouchsafed, longed only for the continuance of the conditions which had brought about this state of unparalleled national weal. I do not believe that William II, deep down in his heart, craved for war. I can vouch for the literal accuracy of a hitherto unrecorded piece of ante-bellum history which bears out my doubts of the Kaiser's immediate responsibility for the war, though it does not acquit him of supine acquiescence in, and to that extent abetting, the War Party's plot.

On the afternoon of Saturday, August 1, 1914, the wife of Lieutenant-General Helmuth von Moltke, then Chief of the Great German General Staff, paid a visit to a certain home in Berlin, which shall be nameless. The _Frau Generalstabschef_ was in a state of obvious mental excitement.

"_Ach_, what a day I've been through, _Kinder_!" she began. "My husband came home just before I left. Dog-tired, he threw himself on to the couch, a total wreck, explaining to me that he had finally accomplished the three days' hardest work he had ever done in his whole life--he had helped to induce the Kaiser to sign the mobilization order!"

There is the evidence, disclosed in the homeliest, yet the most direct, fashion, of the German War Party's unescapable culpability for the supreme crime against humanity. The "sword" had, indeed, been "forced" into the Kaiser's hand. This is no brief for the Kaiser's innocence. No man did more than William II himself, during twenty-six years of explosive reign, to stimulate the military clique in the belief that when the dread hour came the Supreme War Lord would be "with my Army." Yet German officers, in those occasional moments when conviviality bred loquacity, were fond of averring, as more than one of them has averred to me, that "the Kaiser lacked the moral courage to sign a mobilization order." _Die Post_, a leading War Party organ, said as much during the Morocco imbroglio in 1911. Perhaps that is why General von Moltke had to force the pen, which for the nonce was mightier than the sword, into the reluctant hand of William II.

The Kaiser was constitutionally addicted to swaggering war talk, but, in my judgment, he preferred the bark to the bite. He likes his job. Like our Roosevelt, he has a "perfectly corking time" wielding the scepter. Raised in the belief that the Hohenzollerns were divinely appointed to their Royal estate, William II dearly loves his trade. He does not want to lose his throne. In peace there was little danger of its ever slipping from under him, thanks to a Socialist "movement" which was noisy but never really menacing. In war Hohenzollern rule is in perpetual peril. Hostile armies, if they ever battered their way to Potsdam, would almost surely wreck the dynasty, even if the mob had not already saved them that trouble. The Kaiser, sagacious like every man when his livelihood is at stake, always had these dread eventualities in mind. His personal interests, the fortunes of his House, all lay along the path of manifest safety--peace. Meantime his concessions to the War Party were generous and frequent. He rattled the saber on its demand. He donned his "shining armor" at Austria's side when the Germanic Powers coerced Russia into recognition of the Bosnian annexation in 1909. He sent the _Panther_ to Agadir harbor in 1911 because the War Party howled for "deeds" in Morocco. It hoped that history in Northwestern Africa would repeat itself--that the Triple Entente would yield to German bluff as it yielded in Southeastern Europe two years previous. It did not, and it was then that the German War Party swore a solemn vow of "Never Again!" The days of the Kaiser who merely threatened war were numbered. Next time the sword would be "forced" into his hand. "Before God and history my conscience is clear. _I did not will this war_. One year has elapsed since I was _obliged_ to call the German people to arms." Thus William of Hohenzollern's manifesto to his people from Main Headquarters on the first anniversary of the war, August 1, 1915. Herewith I place _Frau Generalstabschef_ von Moltke on the stand as chief witness in the Kaiser's defense.

I have said that sixty-six million Germans wanted peace and one million five hundred thousand demanded war. But in Germany _minority_ rules. It rules supreme when the issue is war or peace, and when the German War Party _insisted_ upon deeds instead of speeches the nation, Kaiser and all, Reichstag and Socialist, Prince and peasant, had but one alternative--to yield. In July, 1914, the War Party imperiously asked for war, and war ensued. That is the ineffaceable long and short of Armageddon. I am persuaded that William II on July 31 was confronted with something strangely like an abrupt alternative of mobilization or abdication.

Assertions of the German people's consecration to peace may strike the reader as incongruous in face of the magnificent unanimity with which the entire Fatherland has waged and is still waging the war. But such a view leaves wholly out of account the most prodigious and amazing of all the German War Party's preparations--the skilful manipulation of public opinion for "the Day." In ten brief days--those fateful hours between July 23, when Austria launched her brutal ultimatum at Serbia, and August 1, when mobilization of the German Army and Navy made a European conflagration a certainty--Germany's vast peace majority, by deception which I shall outline in a subsequent chapter, was converted into a multitudinous mob mad for war.

I count the merely material preparations of the War Party--the steady expansion of Krupps, the development of the Fleet, the invention of the forty-two centimeter gun, the vast secret storage of arms and ammunition, the 1913 increase of the Army, the accumulation of a war-chest of gold, the stealthy organization of every conceivable instrument and resource of war down to details too minute for the ordinary mind to grasp; all these, I count as nothing compared to the hypnotization of the German national mind extending over many years.

In England and America the name of Bernhardi was on everybody's lips as the archpriest of the war. I doubt if one man in ten thousand in Germany ever heard of Bernhardi before August, 1914. He became an international personality mainly through the graces of foreign newspaper correspondents in Berlin, who, recognizing his book, _Germany's Next War_, as classic proclamation of the War Party's designs on the world, dignified it with commensurate attention, not because of its authorship, but because of its innate _authoritativeness_. The result was the translation of _Germany's Next War_ into the English language, and subsequently, I suppose, into every other civilized language in the world. Perhaps I am myself to some extent responsible for Bernhardi's vogue in the United States. He was going to cross our country en route back to Europe from the Far East, and wrote to ask me to suggest to him the name of an American translator and publisher for his books. Bernhardi, a mere retired general of cavalry with a gift for incisive writing, woke up to find himself famous. But nothing could be more beyond the mark than to imagine that he was the pioneer of German war-aggression. He was merely its most plain-spoken prophet. The way had been blazed for decades before he appeared upon the scene. After Bernhardi had been successfully launched on the bookshelves of the world, the German War Party took him up, and it was not long before _Die Post_, the _Deutsche Tageszeitung_ and other organs of blood-and-iron were able to make "the highly gratifying" announcement that Bernhardi's manual had been compressed into a fifty-pfennig popular edition, so that the German masses might be educated in the inspiring doctrine of manifest Teuton destiny, as Bernhardi so unblushingly set it forth.

The German War Party's certificate of incorporation is dated Versailles, January 18, 1871, when, on the one hundred and seventieth anniversary of the creation of the Kingdom of Prussia, Bismarck and Moltke crowned victorious William I of Prussia German Emperor. Cradled in Prussianism, the German War Party has always been Prussian, rather than German. To the credit of Bavaria, Saxony, Baden and Wurttemberg be that forever remembered. Denmark and Austria, during the seven years preceding Versailles, had had their lessons. Now France lay prostrate, despoiled of her fairest provinces and financially bled white, as the conqueror imagined. From that moment the Prussian head began swelling with invincible self-esteem, to emerge in the succeeding generation in an insensate and megalomaniac conviction that to the race which had accomplished what the Germans had achieved nothing was impossible. "World Power"--Rule or Ruin--became the national slogan.

In the reconstruction years following the 1870-71 campaign non-military Germany was bent on laying the foundations of Teuton industrial greatness. The project was vouchsafed no support from the military hotspurs who, within ten years of Sedan and Paris, did their utmost to force Bismarck into giving humbled France a fresh drubbing, that her power to rise from the dust might be crushed for all time. Then the Prussian War Party demanded that the scalp of Russia be added to its insatiable belt. Bismarck propitiated the Bernhardis of that day by thundering in the Reichstag that "We Germans fear God, and nothing else in this world!" When the Chancellor of Iron burnt that piece of bombast into the German soul in 1887, a year before William the Speechmaker was enthroned, he wrote the German War Party's "platform." Since then it has had many planks added to it, but all of them have rested squarely and firmly on the concrete upon which they were imbedded, viz., that _Furor Teutonicus_ was a power which, when it went forth to slay and conquer, was invincible because it was filled with naught but the fear of God. _Nouveau riche_ Germany, with France's one billion two hundred and fifty million dollars of gold indemnity in its pocket, ceased to be the Fatherland of homely virtues, celebrated in song and story, and became the plethoric Fatherland, drunk with power and wealth won by arms, the Fatherland which was to adopt the gospel of political brutality as a new national _Leit-motif_. "We, not the Jews, are God's chosen people. Our military prowess and our intellectual superiority make German _Weltmacht_ manifest destiny. Full steam ahead!" Thus it was, a generation ago, that the German War Party was launched on its mad career.

During the war the English-reading world has heard much of Treitschke and Nietzsche, just as it has had its ears dinned full of Bernhardi. Germans with scars on their faces and other marks of a college education--a gentry numbering several millions--know and venerate their Treitschke and Nietzsche, and to their pernicious dogma is due in large degree the war lust of so-called cultured Germany; yet to the German masses these renowned apostles of Might is Right are little more than names. Of far more importance for the purpose of tracing the origin of the Armageddon are the living captains of the "War Party," not its deceased intellectual sponsors. Historians of the present era will gain the really illuminating perspective by relegating Nietzsche, "that half-inspired, half-crazy poet-philosopher," and Treitschke, his more modern kindred spirit, to the dead past and elevating Tirpitz and the Crown Prince, Koester of the German Navy League and Keim of the German Army League to their places. It is men like them, politicians like Heydebrand, literary firebrands like Reventlow and Frobenius, and press-pensioners like Hammann who were the real pioneers of Armageddon. These are names with which the English-reading world, enchanted by the myopic prominence given to the writings of Nietzsche, Treitschke and Bernhardi, are not familiar. But they are the real stage managers of the war tragedy, and it is with them I shall deal before narrating the culminating effects of their devilry.

Prince Buelow, fourth Imperial Chancellor and most urbane of statesmen, will live in German history as a man who resembled Bismarck in but one important particular--the gift of phrase-making. Bismarck's aphorisms are quoted by Germans with the awesome regard in which Anglo-Saxons cite Shakespeare. Buelow's name will be enshrined in Teuton memory for an epigram which had as direct a psychic influence on the German War Party's demand for the present war as any other one thing said, written or done in Germany in the last fifteen years. When he proclaimed that Germany demanded her "place in the sun," he flung into the fire fat which was to go sizzling down the age. It was worth its weight in precious gems to the blood-and-iron brigade. As Bismarck's blasphemous bluster in 1887 gave the War Party of that day its fillip, Buelow in 1907 supplied the spurred and helmeted zealots of his era with a flamboyancy no less vicious. They snatched it up with alacrity, and, being Germans, proceeded to exploit it with masterly efficiency and deadly thoroughness. A "place in the sun" forthwith inspired an entirely new German literature. It became the spiritual mother of this war.

Like all the War Party's dogma, the "place in the sun" doctrine is sheer cant. Germany has occupied an increasingly expansive "place in the sun" for forty-four years without interruption. In 1913, Doctor Karl Helfferich, a director of the Deutsche Bank, who is now Secretary of the Imperial Treasury, in a pamphlet spread broadcast throughout the world, thus summarized Germany's "place in the sun":

"The German National Income amounts today to ten thousand seven hundred fifty million dollars annually as against from five thousand seven hundred fifty to six thousand two hundred fifty million dollars in 1895. The annual increase in wealth is about two thousand five hundred million dollars, as against a sum of from one thousand one hundred twenty-five to one thousand two hundred fifty million dollars fifteen years ago.

"The wealth of the German people amounts today to more than seventy-five thousand million dollars, as against about fifty thousand million dollars toward the middle of the nineties. These solid figures summarize, expressed in money, the result of the enormous economic labor which Germany has achieved during the reign of our present Emperor."

Doctor Helfferich continued the story of the incessant widening of the Fatherland's "place in the sun." He told of the steady rise of the population at the rate of eight hundred thousand a year; of the development of German industry at so miraculous a pace that while Germany in the middle eighties was losing emigrated citizens at the rate of one hundred thirty-five thousand a year, the total had sunk in 1912 to eighteen thousand five hundred, and that Germany had become, many years before that date, an _importer_ of men, instead of an exporter; that the net tonnage of the German mercantile fleet increased from 1,240,182 in 1888 to 3,153,724 in 1913; that German imports and exports, during the rich years immediately prior to 1910, increased from one thousand five hundred million dollars to nearly four thousand million dollars, and in 1912 exceeded five thousand millions.

By a "place in the sun" Prince Buelow meant, primarily, territorial expansion for Germany's "surplus population." Yet even in this respect German aggrandizement kept pace with her fabulous economic development. When war broke out in 1914, the German colonial empire oversea was hundreds of thousands of square miles more extensive than Germany in Europe. It is true that the Germans went in for colonial land-grabbing late in the game, after England, particularly, had acquired the best territory in both hemispheres, and many years after the Monroe Doctrine had effectually checked European expansion in the Americas. As the result of "colonial empire" in inferior regions of the earth, the total white population of German colonies in 1913 was less than twenty-eight thousand, or roundly, three and one-half per cent. of the _annual_ growth of German population. Although acquired nominally for "trade," Germany's commerce with her colonies in imports and exports totaled in 1914 a fraction more than twenty-five million dollars, or about _one-half of one per cent._ of Germany's total trade of five thousand million dollars in 1912. Germany's lust for a larger "place in the sun," as it has been aptly described by the author of _J'Accuse_, is "square-mile greed," pure and simple, and as the same frank and brilliant writer points out, Germany not only demands a "place in the sun," but claims it for herself alone, insisting that the rest of the world shall content itself with "a place in the shade."

To popularize the "place in the sun" theory two great German national organizations went valiantly to work--the Pan-German League and the German Navy League. The Pan-Germans, whose efforts were seconded by a subsidiary society called the Association for the Perpetuation of Germanism Abroad, set themselves the task of educating German public opinion in regard to "the bitter need" of a "Greater Germany," to be achieved by hook or crook. The German Navy League dedicated itself to fomenting agitation designed to meet the Kaiser's expressed "bitter need" of vast German sea power. Ostensibly private in character, both of these militant propaganda organizations enjoyed more or less official countenance and support. On occasion, when their activities appeared too pernicious or threatened to obstruct the subtle machinations of German diplomacy, the Government would convincingly "disavow" the leagues. But all the time they were working for Germany's "place in the sun." Under their auspices, the country for years was drenched with belligerent and provocative literature, which harped ceaselessly on the theme that what Germany could not secure by diplomacy she must prepare to extort by the sword.

As the Pan-Germans and the Navy League cherished twin aspirations, it was not surprising that two men, General Keim, a retired officer of the army, and Count Ernst zu Reventlow, a retired officer of the navy, should be moving spirits in both organizations. General Keim, in his zeal to support Admiral von Tirpitz's big navy schemes, eventually went to such extremes in the pursuit of his duties as president of the Navy League that the organization's existence as a national association was momentarily threatened. It was giving the game away. Keim was thereupon removed from his position, to be succeeded by the Grand Old Man of the German Fleet, Grand-Admiral von Koester. Koester was _suaviter in modo_, but no less _fortiter in re_ than Keim. Entering the presidency of the Navy League in the midst of the Dreadnought era, when Germany's dream of her "future upon the water" was sweetest, his systematic fanning of the public temper, especially against England, left nothing to be desired.

General Keim, deposed from the leadership of the Navy League, was presently kicked up-stairs by the German War Party and made president of the newly-formed "German Defense League." This association was organized to launch a national agitation in favor of increasing the German military establishment.

The methods which had caused Keim's "downfall" from the presidency of the Navy League were promptly employed by him in the new army league. With a host of influential newspapers and "war industry" interests at their back, plus the benevolent patronage of the Imperial family and Government, Koester and Keim carried out for six years preceding August, 1914, the most prodigious and audacious propaganda crusade in European history. Germany's need for "a place in the sun," on whatever particular chord they harped, was always their keynote. The "Defense League" scored its crowning triumph in 1913 by accomplishing the passage of the celebrated Army Bill whereby the land forces of the Empire were augmented at an expense of two hundred fifty million dollars--the immediate preliminary step to the assault of Europe by the Kaiser's legions.

Count Reventlow, a Jingo of Jingoes, rendered both the navy and army leagues valiant support in the columns of his newspaper, the _Deutsche Tageszeitung_, and in a regular grist of pamphlets and books which his facile pen from time to time reeled off. Reventlow was one of the archpriests of the War Party. A champion hater of everything foreign, he was temperamentally fitted to advocate the doctrine of Force and Germany's right to world-conquest by fire and sword. Count Reventlow, whom it was my pleasure to know intimately, hated England, France and Russia with a ferocity delightful to behold. His Francophobism was little diminished by his marriage to a charming French noblewoman. He hated America, too. I could never quite divine the gallant Count's reason for eating an American alive, in his mind, every morning for breakfast, and for despising us as cordially as he detested Mr. Winston Churchill, Monsieur Delcasse or the Czar, until he confessed to me one day that he lost a fortune through unfortunate speculation in a Florida fruit plantation. Thenceforth, apparently, Reventlow's anti-Americanism knew no bounds. It was more explosive than usual during his discussion of the _Lusitania_ massacre, but it was pathological.

A pillar of the German War Party, whose name is almost entirely unknown abroad, is Doctor Hammann, chief of the notorious Press Bureau of the German Foreign Office and Imperial Chancellery. Hammann for twenty years, because one of the craftiest, has been one of the most powerful men in German politics. For two decades he survived the incessant vicissitudes and intrigues of the Foreign Office, which indeed were more than once of his own making. He was frequently credited with being "the real Chancellor" in Buelow's days because of his sinister influence over that suave statesman. Hammann's nominal duties were confined to manipulating the German press for the Government's purposes and to exercising such "control" over the Berlin correspondents of foreign newspapers as might from time to time appear feasible or possible. Himself a retired journalist of unsavory reputation--he was a few years ago under indictment for perjury in an unlovely domestic scandal--he seemed to his superiors an ideal personage to deal with the Fourth Estate, which Bismarck trained Germans to look upon as "the reptile press." Hammann's function, for the War Party's purposes, was to mislead public opinion, at home and abroad, as to the real intentions and machinations of _Weltpolitik_. Under his shrewd direction German newspapers, restlessly propagating the Fatherland's need for "a place in the sun," systematically distorted the international situation so as to represent Germany as the innocent lamb and all other nations as ravenous wolves howling for her immaculate blood. That Hammann is regarded as having rendered "our just cause" priceless service was proved only a few months ago by his promotion to a full division-directorship in the Foreign Office. He had hitherto ranked merely as a _Wirklicher Geheimrat_, or sub-official of the department, although as a matter of fact five Foreign Secretaries, "under" whom he nominally served, were mere putty in the hands of Germany's Imperial Press Agent-in-Chief.

Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz, of course, has for years been one of the super-pillars of the German War Party. The Kaiser's Fleet is the creation of von Tirpitz, though William II receives popular credit for the achievement, and von Tirpitz created it essentially for war. Von Tirpitz once honored me with a heart-to-heart confab on Anglo-German naval rivalry. He rebuked me in a paternal way for specializing in German naval news. Germany had no ulterior motive, he said. She was building a defensive fleet primarily, though one that would be strong enough, on occasion, to "throw into the balance of international politics a weight commensurate with Germany's status as a World Power." Von Tirpitz was the incarnation of the naval spirit which longed for the chance to show the world that Germany at sea was as "glorious" as centuries of martial history had proved her on land. German sailors chafed under the corroding restraint of peace. They hankered for laurels. They were tired of manning a dress-parade fleet, whose functions seemed to be confined to holding spectacular reviews for the Kaiser's glorification at Kiel. They hungered for "the Day." Von Tirpitz has denied passionately that they ever drank to "the Day" in their battleship messes. But it was the unspoken prayer which lulled them to well-earned sleep, for in consequence of the iron discipline and remorseless labor which von Tirpitz imposed on his officers and men in anticipation of "Germany's Trafalgar," the Kaiser's Fleet was the hardest worked navy in the world. No Armada in history was ever so perpetually "battle-ready" as the German High Seas Fleet. It was the Fleet which made its very own that other hypocritical German battle-cry, "The Freedom of the Sea," which means, of course, a German-ruled sea.

Von Tirpitz's task was not only to build the fleet but to agitate German public opinion uninterruptedly in favor of its constant expansion. To him and the Navy League, which he controlled, and to his Press Bureau and its swarm of journalistic and literary parasites, were due the remarkable Anglophobe campaigns which resulted in the desired periodical additions to the Fleet. A politician of consummate talent, von Tirpitz held successive Reichstags in the palm of his hand. No Imperial Chancellor, though nominally his chief, was ever able to override the imperious will of von Tirpitz the Eternal. Repeatedly in the years preceding the war England held out the hand of a naval _entente_. The War Party and von Tirpitz said "No!" And Armageddon became as inevitable as the setting sun.

I have enumerated only the outstanding figures of the German War Party. They could be supplemented at will--there are the men like Professor von Schmoller, of the University of Berlin, who foresees the day when "a nation of two hundred million Germans oversea would rise in Southern Brazil"; or Professor Adolf Lasson, also of Berlin, who proclaimed the doctrine that Germans' "cultural paramountcy over all other nations" entitles them to hegemony over the earth; or Professor Adolf Wagner, the Berlin economist, who excoriates compulsory arbitration as the refuge of the politically impotent and a dogma beneath the dignity of the Germany of the Hohenzollerns; or the whole dynasty of politician-professors like Delbrueck, Zorn, Liszt, Edward and Kuno Meyer, Eucken, Haeckel, Harnack, or minor theorists like Muensterberg, who year in and year out preached the doctrine of Teutonic superiority, Teutonic invincibility and Teutonic "world destiny." These intellectual auxiliaries of the War Party in their day have sent tens of thousands of young men out of German universities with politically polluted minds. Their class-rooms have been the real breeding ground and recruiting camps of the German War Party.

And then, of course, in addition to the admirals who wanted war, and the professors who glorified war, and the editors, pamphleteers, Navy and Army League leaders and paid agitators who wrote and talked war, there was the German Army, represented by its corps of fifty thousand or sixty thousand officers, which was the living, ineradicable incarnation of war and with every breath it drew sighed impatiently for its coming. I suppose armies in all countries more or less constitute "war parties." But never in our time has an army tingled and spoiled for battle as sleeplessly as the legions of the Kaiser. It was written in the stars that it was only a question of time when they would realize their aspiration to prove that the German war machine of the day was not only the peer, but incomparably the superior, of the Juggernauts with the aid of which Frederick the Great and Moltke remapped Europe.

But the Grand Mogul of the German War Party, its pet, darling and patron saint, was Crown Prince William, the Kaiser's ebullient heir who contributed so conspicuously to Germany's loss of Paris in September, 1914. For ten years he was the apple of the army's eye. William II's oratorical peace palaverings long ago convinced his military paladins that their hopes could no longer with safety be pinned on the monarch who would do nothing but _rattle_ his saber. "A place in the sun" could never be achieved by such tactics, they argued, so they transferred their affections and their expectations to the "young man" who cheered in the Reichstag when his father's Government was accused of cowardice in Morocco. They placed their destinies in the keeping of the Imperial hotspur who wrote in his book, _Germany in Arms_, that "visionary dreams of everlasting peace throughout the world are un-German." Their real allegiance was sworn henceforth to the swashbuckling young buffoon, who, taking leave of the Death's Head Hussars after two years' colonelcy, admonished them to "think of him whose most ardent desire it has always been to be allowed to share at your side the supreme moment of a soldier's happiness--when the King calls to arms and the bugle sounds the charge!" It was an open secret that when the Crown Prince was exiled to the command of a cavalry regiment in dreamy Danzig, far away from the frenzied plaudits of the multitude in Berlin, the Kaiser's action was inspired by the disquieting realisation that his heir was acquiring a popularity, both in and out of the army, which boded ill for the security of the monarch's own status with his subjects.

These, then, are the men, and these their principal methods, which provided the scenario for the impending clash. As with every great "production," preliminary plans were well and truly laid. Rehearsals, in the form of stupendous maneuvers on "a strictly warlike basis," had brought the chief actors, scene shifters and other accessories to first-night pitch. The stage managers' work was done. They had now only to take their appointed places in the flies and wings and let the tragedy proceed. The rest could be left to the puppets on both sides of the footlights. A month of slow music, and then the grand _finale_.