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 r?le 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.



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 r?le 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.



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-medi?valism 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.