Blood and Iron Part 42

64

And Bismarck was intensely human! "Who made United Germany?" is his question.

-- The women of his household did not take the news quietly.

-- The imperial messenger arrived with the Kaiser's portrait, as a farewell souvenir to Prince Bismarck. His wife exclaimed: "Take it to Friedrichsruh and let it be placed in the stable!"

-- At the depot, a great crowd came to see the old man depart for the country, but the Kaiser was not there.

Bismarck's h.o.a.ry age, his great dignity, his known services to Germany, were now dear to the heart of Germans; thousands gathered, in spontaneous farewell, crowding around the old man and kissing his hand.

-- Now let us face the facts.

To a man of Bismarck's iron mold, the exercise of power is the breath of life; this made it a tragedy for the aged Bismarck to withdraw.

It was but natural for him, as time pa.s.sed and his ambition grew, that he should believe himself the sole founder of the German Empire. His constant utterances after his downfall bear out this idea. The composite victory of scores of minds merged in his imagination and now crystallized in his own soul victory. Such is human nature, and so we say "Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo," but is this strictly true? True or false, such is human habit of thought, and Bismarck was also now shown to be human enough to claim it all for himself.

-- The story of Wolsey over again; our old counsellor of state thrown off in his declining years; and we can almost hear Bismarck in his great bitterness repeat the tragic words:

Had I but serv'd my G.o.d with half the zeal I serv'd my King, he would not in my age Have left me naked to mine enemies!

-- Bismarck's further official presence was irksome to the new master.

With the iron decision characteristic of Hohenzollern, William II ended the situation, with a stroke of his imperial will. In this att.i.tude William not only acted wisely, but showed himself every inch a Kaiser.

-- Besides, Bismarck was plotting in a very human way to support and advance the rising fortunes of the Bismarck family. Would you not have done as much, or even more?

In his princely office, Bismarck thought to found a diplomatic dynasty of his own, wherein the servant becomes the master; he made his son, young Count Herbert, Minister of Foreign Affairs, a rise in life prodigiously fast for one who used to fill the function of holding his father's dispatch bag in the Parliament, when the old man made speeches, supported by incessant drinking of brandy.

Bismarck, himself, was Chancellor, Minister-President, Foreign Minister; his cousin, Minister of the Interior; and there were many other Bismarcks in state service, trained to know the old man's policy. Constructive governmental work was all in Bismarck's power;--and he meant to keep it there.

-- These many acts of family favoritism, arousing the indignation of the new Emperor, played an important part in determining the old man's dismissal. The King was offended by Bismarck's many acts of nepotism, "the greatest," he secretly declared, "which politics have ever recorded."

-- A high official said to Bismarck after Koeniggraetz: "You should be well satisfied;--it made you a Prince!"

-- "It made me a Prince," mused Bismarck, with a sudden and unaccountable show of irony. Then, pointing to the map of United Germany, he replied with deep-rooted conviction that revealed how the fires of ambition were consuming his very soul: "A Prince, did you say? Yes, there is my princ.i.p.ality!"

-- From that hour, the suspicious and irrascible side of Bismarck's mind continued to expand. Some of us quarrel with our family, our partners, or our political party, asking who was responsible for the disaster, but the most deadly disputes are those called forth by ambition to decide not who was responsible for the loss, but who made the success.

-- Small cause; great effect.

-- And Bismarck was intensely human!

65

The elements of his greatness number three--Here read two, but the third and greatest is yet to come.

-- Now you ought to begin to understand the man in his naked reality; his elements of greatness compounded with crying frailties--but his very faults endear him to us the more, because they show him brother to the weak.

-- Threefold a great man, great in ambition and courage; greater in compelling victory through years of patient and moody planning; but greatest of all in his downfall, when turning his back upon the blaze of glory, he retires to the country to view the mighty forests, and to take long walks with his dogs over the fields, communing with himself, the winds of heaven, and the immortal stars.

-- His time is now very short; the sands have all but run out of the gla.s.s. For the first time in many, many years, he now belongs to himself once more--on the very edge of the tomb--before the sun is to go out forever--and the long night settles down.

-- Does he still believe in his old ikon? In the secret chamber of his heart does he still believe that G.o.d was behind it all, on the side of the needle-guns of Sadowa?

-- The justifications of earth ofttimes betray themselves in strange superst.i.tions, and there always was a large strain of superst.i.tion compounded in the great mind of this great man; not unlike the superst.i.tions of a brother conqueror, Julius Caesar, who was wont to crawl on his belly to the Temple, there to return thanks to the immortal G.o.ds for success in battle.

-- To his dying day, Otto von Bismarck held fast that he was the instrument of G.o.d, and that G.o.d did it all, through him. Flesh and blood needs some explanation for its ways--and it may be that one interpretation is on the whole as good as another. With Bismarck the ikon was G.o.d.

-- On his part, as a human being, for many years Bismarck nursed his seemingly impossible dream of expelling Austria from the German states and binding up thirty-nine princ.i.p.alities in one grand Empire.

This ambition he pursued incessantly, and ultimately succeeded in reaching by his genius in manipulating the human nature side of the men around him. He worked for himself, for his King and for his ideal of a United Germany. He gave to the seemingly hopeless cause all his time, strength, nay, his very soul.

-- His was also now the secret discontent of a man who thought himself the sole founder of the German Empire. It was so understood by Kaiser William. For the time being, then, the patient Kaiser, averse to wounding the pride of a true German servant of the Empire, permitted the overleaping ambition of his great Minister of State to have sway; but William knew that, soon or late, the break must come; and in his own mind had already decided on the man who was to take Bismarck's place.

-- Little by little threats came; men in high office secretly inveighed against Bismarck's new ambitions; it did not escape the attention of the Emperor's intriguers, who now worked against the old man's family aspirations; then came more resolute att.i.tudes on Bismarck's part, egged on by his wife and by his son, who each had grown prodigiously ambitious.

-- Enter General Caprivi!

-- Before the will of the Kaiser, Bismarck must bow; and now behold how the mighty has fallen! We must henceforth seek him not in the splendid halls of state, but among simple rural scenes in Schoenhausen, where he was born, where he lived as a child; and to these quiet shades under the oaks and elms he now returns at the last remove of life; a broken, world-weary man, full of honors it is true, but by the irony of fate come back to die stripped of worldly grandeur, and to ponder the vanity of all earthly ambitions.

66

Bismarck inveighs against the ingrat.i.tude of kings--A fighter to the end.

-- Did he take kindly to his enforced retirement? Far from it. With all the querulous impatience of an octogenarian, full of whims, sick in soul and body, suspicious, irritable, dying inch by inch, a prey to insomnia, his neuralgic pains, his swollen veins, in short, a crabbed old man, awaiting the call--behold now our great Otto von Bismarck, and mark well to what narrow limits his power has shrunk.

-- On one occasion he moodily replied to a question: "Who are the Hohenzollerns? My family is as good as theirs!" And the old man meant it, every word of it.

-- He began bombarding the newspapers with bitter reviews, criticising the Government, the affairs of the day. The African treaty he dissected, to Caprivi's disadvantage. "I never would have signed it!"

wrote Bismarck, and the press took up the cry. Any utterance from the old political sage was welcomed, the more caustic the criticism the better it read, all to the disadvantage of the Emperor and the new advisers.

-- Many newspaper reporters called at Bismarck's country retreat; the old man would tell them strong truths against the Government. Here and there, a newspaper came out as Bismarck's official spokesman!

-- It did seem as though nothing Caprivi did ever pleased the old man.