THE LATH THAT LOOKED LIKE IRON

Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 141, 11 December 1918, Page 6

THE LATH THAT LOOKED LIKE IRON

Probably no one has done more to kill Kaiserism than Wilhelm Hohenzollem.' History records many tragic failures, and the fall of many despots, but few falls have been so squalid, so devoid of true courage, as that of the loftiest War-lord the world has seen. After the soaring pretentiousness and the capacious boasting of the last twenty-five years, the ignominious flight to Holland comes as a pitiful anti-climax—" unkingly, unsoldierly, and unmanly," and likely to " give the death-blow to monarchical ideas in Germany." The quoted words come, not from an enemy, but from a' German Professor of Law, Dr. Steinager; and they understate, rather than overstate, the degradation to which dynastic despotism has been • reduced by the cowardice of its leading exponent. "A monarch!" writes Stqinager, "cannot run away like a schoolboy," and the Kaiser should have accepted the opportunity, offered by the battle-front, of "at least making a kingly and dignified exit." But if this revelation of Wilhelm's true nature—of the unstable sand beneath the marble exterior—has astonished the outside -world; there are many in Germany to whom it will occasion no surprise. " Foreigners," - writes Maxk v milian Harden, "saw only the facade, not the interior." Behind the disguise was not merely a physical cripple but a moral one. Hence arises the extraordinary spectacle of the flight from his own domains of the master of at least two million mobilised troops; hence also his apparent inability to fully estimate the ignominy of his past pretensions and his present position.