A DAY AT DOORN

Greymouth Evening Star, 25 August 1928, Page 3

A DAY AT DOORN

EX-KAISER’S HOPE OF RETURN.

I have lately seen and spoken with William IL, and his wife, in their exile at Doorn (writes a German correspondent of the Manchester Guardian). I am no royalist, but the impression was painful. Imagine a man who has lived from birth.at the height of worldly eminence, the Emperor of a great people, the commander of the greatest army in the world, the centre of? a crowd of bended backs—imagine him in shabby-genteel surroundings in a strange country, with only a few of the faithful about him. This man is the cause, or at least the foremost cause, of our misery, and I have suffered myself on his account, having been imprisoned for lese-majeste for a very mild newspaper crticism of his political pronouncements; nevertheless it shocked me to see him ’in his humiliation.

We reached Doorn at half-past eight, and morning prayers were about to begin as we arrived. The Kaiser himself, wearing knickerbockers, his wife and her children, an old general and some other officers, all in mufti, the servants, and our two selves made up the party. I was placed in the front row. The Kaiser read some passages from the Bible expressing his misery and downfall, and afterwards the Lord’s Prayer and another short prayer. When it was over he at once strode over to me. He knew nothing, of course, of my past, but soon seemed to perceive that I was hardly his man, though my deficiencies were supplied by deep bows and protestations of everlasting fidelity and submission from my companion, an officer in the army.

The ex-Kaiser exchanged some talk about England with me, but his questions and answers were quite superficial and commonplace. All went to show that he is still convinced that the whole world is and was wrong and he alone is and was right. He refered to Hindenburg in speaking of “people who have seated themselves upon my throne,” and expressed his conviction that one day “his people” would call him back to reign gloriously over Germany once more. He is what he has always been. He 'is political factor he is as dead as a doornail, and the more I heard from him and his wife, who speaks in the same way about the future, the more I felt as if I were in a lunatic asylum. Our talk ended, he went off with two or three of his officers to his daily occupation of felling trees. He is now nearly seventy, but looks the picture of health.

His second wife is quite intelligent. She seemed to me to be the leader of propaganda—what there is of it—at Doorn House. She took me up to her boudoir and had a long talk with me in the presence of her youngest daughter, a beautiful child of five or six. She compalined bitterly of the “treason” of the Nationalists, who as the price of a share in the Government had consented to the clause in the Act for the safeguard of the Republic forbidding the Kaiser to return to Germany. Doorn House has now no political connection but with the extreme Right wing, the tiny “Racist” or Fascist party. She also complained bitterly that the commemoration of the Battle of Tannenberg, where Hindenburg threw back the Russians, took place without the Kaiser’s presence. “He cannot get over it.” she said, “and he the author of the victory!” The whole visit was a sony, if an interesting, experience.