The Man Who Failed

Yes, the big things in the world are always done by just a man--one man--one strong personality. History in its times of crisis cried out for a man. . . . You may gather all the wisdom in the world in a Parliament chamber, but you will never get action out of a Parliament chamber. One man has got to lead.

Last week the man who spoke these words was dead, having given up the job of leading almost 23 years ago. For the speaker was Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. The man who heard the Kaiser's words was a U.S. journalist, William Bayard Hale of the New York Times. They were aboard the imperial yacht Hohenzollern, at anchor in the fjord of Bergen, Norway, one July evening in 1908, and the Kaiser stalked the deck in the gold braid of an Admiral of the German High Seas Fleet. He spoke English, in which he was fluent, and sometimes he leaned close to his interviewer and lowered his voice confidentially, sometimes he raised his one good arm and shook his forefinger under Hale's nose. Hale suppressed that interview, which was one of the Kaiser's most famed indiscretions. Reporter Hale's son, William Harlan Hale, printed it in 1934. It was of historical interest last week.

Of Warlords and Statesmen. The tide of Teutonic conquest had flowed and ebbed for 2,000 years before it caught up with Wilhelm Hohenzollern and left him stranded when it briefly receded. The Warlord of Potsdam, as he talked of history's cry for leaders, must have thought of other German warlords who had ridden the tide of conquest when it flowed. He must have thought, as Adolf Hitler so often thinks, of the fear which has caused other peoples to fight against the tide for 2,000 years of history.

Even before Julius Caesar's time, the Germans were pushing against their western boundaries, and although Caesar drove them across the Rhine, the Romans never felt secure against them. The Kaiser must have thought of Germany's first warlord, whom the Romans called Arminius and the Germans Hermann der Cherusker, who in the First Century ambushed three legions of Romans in the Teutoburg Forest and ended Roman efforts to conquer Germany. Later on the Romans built an early Maginot Line, Limes Germanicus, between the Rhine and the Danube. But the Ro mans made the mistake of recruiting Germans for their legions, and the leader of one of these fifth columns, Odovacar the Goth, overthrew the Roman Empire in 476.

As he paced the deck of the imperial yacht that summer evening in 1908, the Kaiser must have recalled Clovis the Frank, who carved a kingdom out of Gaul and South Germany in the 5th Century; and of Pepin the Young and his bastard son Charles Martel, statesmen rather than warlords, who founded the Carolingian Dynasty, the greatest ever to rule Germany. And of Charles the Great Carolingian, whose Empire stretched from the Elbe to the Ebro.

He must have thought of the Knights of the Sword and the Teutonic Knights, who Germanized the shores of the Baltic, where the Hohenzollerns were to found their Kingdom, and of Friedrich Wilhelm, the Elector of Brandenburg, who helped bring about the Treaty of Westphalia after the Thirty Years' War that reduced Germany to ruin. It was Friedrich Wilhelm who started the Hohenzollerns on the road to the leadership of Germany, and his son, Friedrich I, who persuaded the Holy Roman Emperor to style him King in Prussia. Of Friedrich's grandson, Frederick the Great, the Kaiser must have thought, because it was Frederick the Great who built Europe's first modern army and challenged the power of the Habsburgs. Certainly his thoughts turned to his own grandfather, Wilhelm I, who under the guidance of Bismarck humbled Austria. took Alsace-Lorraine from France, and at Versailles in 1871 was proclaimed Kaiser of a united Germany.

Of Power and Glory. Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert, son of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Germany, was born in 1859, three and one-half years before Bismarck became Chancellor. Bismarck soon weaned him away from his none-too-doting parents, persuaded his Emperor-Grandfather to make him a Lieutenant of Infantry at the age of ten. Bismarck had him riding a horse at twelve in the victory parade when Wilhelm I celebrated the conquest of France.

Young Wilhelm had two infirmities that profoundly affected his life: a withered left arm, injured by forceps at his birth, for which he compensated by showing great physical daring; and otorrhea, an ear infection, which made him irritable and increased a natural tendency to avoid mental exertion. Throughout his life he loved pomp and the physical trappings of power. Throughout his life his brilliance was marred by mental shallowness and arrogance.

He became Kaiser at 29, after his ailing father had ruled for 99 days. Determined to rule in his own right, he dismissed Bismarck two years later, in 1890. Historians blame his dropping of the canny old Chancellor for the fate that ultimately humbled Germany, and certainly Wilhelm's arrogance and indiscretion made him many enemies. He got huffy with his Uncle Bertie (Edward VII of Great Britain) after his father's funeral, and in 1896 enraged all Britain by sending a telegram of sympathy to the Boer leader, Oom Paul Kruger. He refused to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, through which Bismarck had protected Germany's rear for adventures in Western Europe, and further alienated Russia by supporting Austria's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. He blocked French seizure of Morocco for a while, rattled his sword at France.

On such acts historians blame the creation of the Triple Entente, giving Germany enemies on both sides. Yet history has shown that a deeper, more instinctive fear of the Germans had led Europe always to oppose them. Under the Kaiser, Germany once more swelled with power and pride; once more she threatened to burst her boundaries. Under Wilhelm, Germany built a mighty Navy to threaten Britain, a mightier Army to threaten France and Russia, a mighty economy which threatened to follow the Kaiser's pet Berlin-Bagdad Railway to domination of the Middle East (see p. 22). The Triple Entente was born of this fear. Cried the Kaiser to Reporter Hale in the Bergen fjord in 1908:

What is England's grievance against Germany? In part the grievance of a people which sees another outstripping her in every one of her cherished activities. . . . But it is not so much the direct rivalry that begets for Germany the hostility of England, as it is an historical principle of British diplomacy. Ever since the day of Wolsey, consistently, without ever departing from it, England has founded her foreign policy on the leading principle that she must single out and oppose the Power at the moment paramount on the Continent. . . . This principle has become so firmly a part of British policy that it is nowadays scarcely deliberate. It is instinctive.

Of War and Peace. Wilhelm told Hale, too, that it was Japan at the head of a united Asia which the world ought really to fear. He proposed that Germany and the U.S. act together against Japan. That was the chief theme of the interview. Theodore Roosevelt almost hit the ceiling when it was shown to him. Yet President Roosevelt and the Kaiser had a mutual regard for each other. Two years later Roosevelt visited Berlin, reviewed crack Prussian troops while the Kaiser's cameramen snapped pictures. On the back of one of them Wilhelm wrote: "Kaiser and Rough Rider review German Army--Old Peace-Bore Carnegie go way back and sit down."

Wilhelm did not want World War I, did his belated best to avoid it. The forces of German expansionism behind him, of European fear around him, were too strong for him to stay. The incident that brought it on seemed so slight that after Sarajevo he went off on a three-week cruise. He could not be bothered by Sir Edward Grey's proposal for a conference to avert war. Later he tried to avert Russian mobilization, but by then it was too late.

He failed as a warlord because he would not take advice. In 1916 he dismissed Admiral von Tirpitz, who advocated total submarine warfare. He persisted in believing that the U.S. would stay out; he was ignorant of the realities of U.S. foreign policy, or of how far across the world fear of the forces behind him extended. When he reversed his stand on the U-boat policy the U.S. was as good as in. Yet as late as January 1917 he was uttering a statement which, except for one phrase, would have been less a boast than a prophecy: "Ultimately all Europe, under my leadership, will begin the real war with England--the Second Punic War."

Before the next year was out his Imperial German High Seas Fleet had mutinied and revolution was spreading through Germany. The army was still loyal to him, and he might have turned it against the revolutionaries. As to why he did not, Winston Churchill has given the most charitable answer: he did not want to sacrifice any more lives to make a setting for his own exit. Wilhelm abdicated, fled to The Netherlands, there to live for nearly 23 more years.

An actor always, he grew a beard for the new part he was to play: that of a nice old country squire. He got up and walked before breakfast, read the Bible to his household, chopped wood for two hours, then went up to a little tower study, mounted a hobby horse with an old cavalry saddle and wrote manuscripts vindicating himself of war guilt. After lunch he napped, wrote some more, took a walk. At dinner everybody turned out in full regalia, and Wilhelm never wore the same uniform two successive nights.

After the Kaiserin died he married Princess Hermine of Reuss, who persistently plotted to restore his family to power. Wilhelm kept out of her intrigues, knowing that for himself there would be no return. Five of his six sons joined the Nazis (the sixth committed suicide), but the end of the monarchy had meant the end of monarchism in Germany. To the Nazis his "betrayal" of Germany had been little less than that of the Republic that signed the Versailles Treaty. When the German Army marched through The Netherlands it skirted Doom by special orders; a guard of honor appeared at his gate; but that was all. The Master of Doom went on reading war dispatches, sticking little pins in maps--with God knows what emotions.

Two weeks ago he fell ill of an intestinal ailment. His sons hurried to Doom. But the old man rallied and most of the family started back to Germany, leaving only his daughter, the Duchess of Brunswick, his favorite grandson, Prince Louis Ferdinand, and Hermine, who had been there always. One afternoon last week he twitched in his sleep. A clot of blood entered his lungs. "I am sinking," he said to his wife, and a few hours later he was dead. Adolf Hitler ordered him a Field Marshal's funeral, but the soil he was buried in was not German.

For the exile who died at 82 the world had little bitterness to spare. That was reserved for the man who was succeeding where Wilhelm had failed; who, the world feared, would succeed beyond Wilhelm's greatest dreams. But Wilhelm had also dreamed greatly. In closing that famed suppressed interview, late at night when darkness had come at last to the fjord of Bergen, the Kaiser had raised his head, squared his shoulders, and with a ring in his voice had cried:

The future belongs to the White Race, never fear! It belongs to the Anglo-Teuton, the man who came from Northern Europe . . . the home of the German. . . . We are the only people who can save it. There is no power in any other civilization or any other religion that can save humanity ; and the future--belongs--to--us."

The echo returned a generation later.

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