BISMARCK

BEFORE AND DURING THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR

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.