The Schemes of the Kaiser Part 1

The Schemes of the Kaiser.

by Juliette Adam.

INTRODUCTION

More fortunate than the majority of the prophets who cannot speak smooth things, Madame Adam has lived to find honour in her own country: _La grande Francaise_ has come into her own. G.o.d willing, she should live to see that _revanche_ for which, through good and evil report, she has laboured unceasingly these forty-five years, to see the arrogant Prussian humbled to the dust and Alsace-Lorraine restored to France. 1917, she firmly believes will revenge and reverse the tragedy of 1871. More fortunate than the great British soldier who spent his veteran days in warning his countrymen of the ordeal to come, Madame Adam, now in her eighty-first year, may yet hope to see the banners of the Allies crowned with victory, the black wreaths on the statue of Strasburg in the Place de la Concorde changed to garlands of rejoicing.

There have been dark days in these forty-five years, times when, even to herself, the struggle for _la patrie_ seemed almost a forlorn hope.

It was so at the time of the Berlin Congress in 1878, when, after his visit to Germany, Gambetta abandoned the idea of _la revanche_. It was so in 1891, when she realised that the influence of Paul Deroulede's Ligue des Patriotes had ceased to be a living force in public opinion, when France had become impregnated with false doctrines of international pacifism and homeless cosmopolitanism, when (as she wrote at the time) there were left of the faithful to wear the forget-me-not of Alsace-Lorraine only "a few mothers, a few widows, a few old soldiers, and your humble servant." But never, even in the darkest of dark days, was the flame of her ardent patriotism dimmed. After her breach with Gambetta, determined not to be defeated by the Government's abandonment of a vigorous anti-German policy of preparation, she founded the _Nouvelle Revue_, to wage war with her brain and pen against Bismarck and the ruler of Germany. The objects with which she created that brilliant magazine, as explained by herself to Mr.

Gladstone in 1879, were threefold--"to oppose Bismarck, to demand the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, and to lift from the minds of young French writers the shadow of depression cast on them by national defeat." The fortnightly "Letters on Foreign Politics" which she contributed regularly to the _Nouvelle Revue_, for twenty years were not only persistently and violently anti-Teuton: they became a powerful force in educating public opinion in France to the necessity for an effective alliance with Russia, and to the cause of nationalism, in the Balkans, in Egypt, and wherever the liberties of the smaller nations were endangered by the earth-hunger of the great. She disliked and feared the policy of colonial expansion inaugurated by Gambetta and pursued by Jules Ferry, because she felt that it must weaken France in preparing for the great and final struggle with Teutonism which she knew to be inevitable. Thus, when Ferry requested her to cease from attacking Germany, she defied him, a.s.suring him that nothing less than imprisonment would stop her, and that no honour could be greater than to be imprisoned for attacking Bismarck.

Juliette Adam has always been intensely sure of herself and her opinions. She has the virile fighting spirit of a super-suffragette.

"Always out of rank," as Gambetta described her, "Madame Integrale" has displayed throughout her political and literary work a contempt for compromise of every kind, which occasionally leads her into untenable positions and exaggerations. Like her friend George Sand, she has ever been an inveterate optimist and in the clouds, and this defect of her very qualities has tended to make her proficient in the gentle art of making enemies. Thus she broke with Anatole France for espousing the cause of Dreyfus, because, in spite of her keen sense of justice, she identified the Army with France and was instinctively opposed to Jews, because she regarded their "cosmopolitan" influence as incompatible with patriotism. For her, all things and all men have been subordinate to the sacred cause, to her watch-word and battle-cry of _Vive la France_! n.o.bly has she laboured for France, confident ever in the _renaissance_ of _la Grande Nation_, and of her country's final triumph. And to-day her unswerving faith is justified, and her life work has been recognised and crowned with honour in her own land.

With one exception, all the articles collected in this book have been taken from Madame Adam's "Letters on Foreign Politics" in _La Nouvelle Revue_. Together they const.i.tute a remarkable testimony to the political foresight and courage of _la grande Francaise_, and an equally remarkable a.n.a.lysis of the policy and character of Germany's ruler.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

Modesty is out of fas.h.i.+on nowadays: what is wanted is the glorification of every kind of courage. That being so, I hold myself ent.i.tled to claim a Military Cross, for my forty-five years of hand-to-hand fighting with Bismarck and with William the Second, and to be mentioned in despatches for the past.

JULIETTE ADAM.

CHAPTER I

1890

William II, the "Social Monarch"--What lies beneath his declared pacifism--His journey to Russia--The German Press invites us to forget our defeat and become reconciled while Germany is adding to her army every day.

April 12, 1890. [1]

What an all-pervading nuisance is William!

To think of the burden that this one man has imposed upon the intelligence of humanity and the world's Press! The machiavelism of Bismarck was bad enough, with its constant demands on our vigilance, but this new omniscient German Emperor is worse; he reminds one of some infant prodigy, the pride of the family. Yet his ways are anything but kingly; they resemble rather those of a shopkeeper. He literally fills the earth with his circulars on the art of government, spreads before us the wealth of his intentions, and puffs his own magnanimity. He struggles to get the widest possible market for his ideas: 'tis a petty dealer in imperial sovereignty.

There is nothing fresh about his wares, but he does his best to persuade us that they are new; one feels instinctively that some day he will throw the whole lot at our heads. I am quite prepared to admit that, if he had any rare or really superior goods to offer, his advertising methods might be profitable, but William's stock-in-trade has for many years been imported, and exported under two labels, namely the principles of '89 and Christian Socialism.

The German Emperor has mixed the two, after the manner of a prentice-hand. His organ, the _Cologne Gazette_, with all the honeyed adulation of a suddenly converted opponent, [2] has called this mixture "Social Monarchism." Therefore, it seems, the German Emperor is neither a const.i.tutional sovereign nor a monarch by divine right. He has restored Caesarism of the Roman type, clinging at the same time to the principle of divine right--and the result is our "Social Monarch"!

Rus.h.i.+ng headlong on the path of reform--full steam ahead, as he puts it--he is prepared to change the past, present and future in order to give happiness to his own subjects. But France is likely to pay for all this; sooner or later some new rescript will tell us that the valley of tribulation is our portion and inheritance.

It is one of his ambitions to put an end to cla.s.s warfare in Germany.

To this end he begins, with his usual tact, by denouncing the capitalists (that is to say; the wealth of the middle cla.s.s) to the workers, and then holds up the scandalous luxury of the aristocracy in the army to the contempt of the bourgeois.

One of his most brilliant and at the same time most futile efforts, is his rescript on the subject of the shortage of officers for the army.

As the army itself is steadily increasing every day, it should have been easy in each regiment for him, gradually and quite quietly, to increase the number of officers drawn from the middle-cla.s.s; indeed, the change would have practically effected itself, for the Minister of War had a hundred-and-one means of bringing it about. But this rescript has put a check on what might otherwise have been a natural process of change, and unless William now settles matters with a high hand, it will cease. In every regiment the aristocracy provides the great majority of officers; bourgeois candidates for admission to the service are liable to be black-balled, just as they might be at any club; it is now safe to predict that they will henceforward be regarded with less favour than ever, and that generals, colonels, majors and the rest will form up into a solid phalanx, to prevent the Emperor's platonic _proteges_ from getting in.

William II appeals to the higher ranks of officers, who are tradition personified, to put an end to tradition. It is really wonderful what a genius he has for exciting cupidity in one cla.s.s and resistance in the other. And he has done the same thing with the working cla.s.s as with the army.

What a strange riddle his character presents--this quietist, this wors.h.i.+pper of an angry and a jealous G.o.d, with a mania for achieving the happiness of his people in the twinkling of an eye! A strange figure, this Emperor of country squires, who despises the bourgeois and who threatens to despoil the aristocracy of the very privileges which have been the safeguard of the Hohenzollerns' throne for centuries.

These peculiarities are due to an occult influence which weighs on the mind of William II, an influence which, while it points the way to action, blinds him to its consequences. The dead hand is upon him!

Frederick III, that liberal, bourgeois monarch, compels his reactionary, Old-Prussian-school son, to do those things which he would have done himself, had he not been victimised by Bismarck and his pupil.

I wonder whether the ever-mystical William II sometimes reflects on the ways by which G.o.d leads men into His appointed ways? Such thoughts might do more to enlighten him than his way of gazing at the heavens in the belief that all the stars are his.

There is one piece of advice that William's friends should give him--not to restore the sixty millions of Guelph money to the Duke of c.u.mberland. This ultra-modern young Emperor will very soon have greater need of the services of the reptile Press than even Bismarck himself; for every one of his latest rescripts adds new public difficulties to the number of those secret ones which the ex-Chancellor, with his infinite capacity for intrigue, will hatch for him.

Bismarck, of the biting wit, who accepts the t.i.tle of Duke of Lauenburg, because, as he says, "it will enable him to travel incognito," sends forth from Friedrichsruhe winged words which sink deep into the mind of the people. This phrase, for example, which sums up the whole of William's policy: "The Emperor has selected his best general to be Chancellor and made of his Chancellor a field marshal."

And Bismarck begs his readers to insert the adjectives, good and bad, where they rightly belong.

April 28, 1890. [3]

Emperor William continues to increase the list of his excursions into every field of mental activity. Intellectually divided between the Middle Ages and the late nineteenth century, it would seem as if he were trying to forget the infirmity of his one useless arm by a.s.suming a prominent role modelled on men of action. He tries to combine in his person the effects of extreme modernism with those of the days of Charlemagne. Because of his very impotence, his desire to grasp and clasp all history is the fiercer, and this emphasises and aggravates the cruelty he showed in relegating Bismarck to compulsory inaction.

Just imagine if some power stronger than himself were to compel this ever restless monarch to quiescence! What would be the c.u.mulative effect of want of exercise at the end of a year?

And just because the German Emperor is pleased, amongst the innumerable costumes of his wardrobe, to don that of a socialist sovereign, the same people who before 1870 believed in the liberalism of Bismarck, now believe in the socialism of William II. They go on saying the same old things. In different words they ask: "Isn't the young Emperor amusing?" (tis' a great word with us French people), and before long, they will be appealing to the gullible weaklings among us by suggesting "After all, why shouldn't he give us back Alsace-Lorraine?" And thus are being sown the seeds of our national enervation.

The dangers that threaten us from the hatred that the Prussian bears us are all the greater now that Germany is ruled by this man-chameleon.

Let William do what he will, let him change colour as he likes, our hatred for Prussia remains unshaken and immutable. But acquiescence in his performances will draw us into his...o...b..t and expose us to those same dangers which he incurs, dangers which, were we wise, we should know how to turn to our own profit.

May 12, 1890. [4]

Amidst the ruins of his fallen fortunes, Bismarck can still erect a magnificent monument to his pride. If the results pursued by his once-beloved pupil stultify the old man's immediate intentions, they const.i.tute nevertheless a testimonial to the Bismarckian doctrine in its purest form, to those immortal principles based on lies and the exploitation of "human stupidity," which the ex-Chancellor raised to such heights in German policy, from the commencement of his career to the date of his fall.

Let us, in the first place, inquire how it has come to pa.s.s that William II has been able to convince a certain number of people, either through their "human stupidity" or their cowardice, that he is striving for and towards peace, when every single act of his proves the opposite. Is it enough that, because he declares himself a pacifist, men should go about saying "Thank G.o.d that he, who seemed most eager for war, now sings the praises of peace"? And there are others who earnestly implore us to think no more or war "now that William of Germany no longer dreams of it."

Now I ask, is there a single reason to be found, either in the tradition of his race, or in his own character, or in the logic of Prussian militarism, which can justify any clear-thinking mind in believing that William is a pacifist?

During the past fortnight a pamphlet has been published in Germany under the t.i.tle _Videant Consules_ (a pamphlet having all the appearance of a Berlin semi-official, or officious, doc.u.ment) which gives us the key (my readers will agree that I have already placed it in the lock) of William II's sudden affection for paths of peace.

The illuminating pages of this work are written with the object of preparing the honorable members of the Reichstag to vote an annual credit of twenty millions (it is said that the Minister of War and the Chief of the General Staff originally asked for fifty). This money will be asked for to provide 474 new batteries, to bring up to 700 the number of the German battalions on the Vosges frontier and to increase the peace footing strength of the army. According to a statement made by William II, in his speech at the opening of the Reichstag, the special object of those twenty millions is to strengthen the defences of the eastern and western frontiers.

_Videant Consules_ tells us that Bismarck created the Empire by war, but that his later policy threatened to destroy it by peace; for this reason the young Emperor deprived him of power. According to this pamphlet, the ex-chancellor allowed France to recover and Russia to prepare her defences, whereas he should have crushed us a second time in order to have only one enemy--Russia--to deal with later on.