KAISER AND POET

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXII, Issue LXXII, 26 May 1917, Page 4

KAISER AND POET

BOMBAST AND BATHOS

A recent despatch to the New York World from Berlin reports an interview given by the Kaiser to the Austrian poet and playwright^ Hans Mueller. The account of this interview, which (says the New York correspondent of London Daily Telegraph) is written in the most approved subservient^ lickspittle style acceptable to the German censors, states: "It is a well-spring of clarification and confidence to hear the Kaiser Wilhelm speak about the sharpest of all our weapons, the new submarine war, whose results, military, political, and psychological, he already now appraises as very considerable. 'Look at the European neutrals,' the Kaiser exclaimed. 'Read the Swedish answer. It is a document which is written as if for all eternity. Now neutrals know right well how they have to estimate our strength, but likewise our will to peace. For the first time in a certain sense the declared will of small neutral States stands against the AngloSaxon world, and Napoleon's Continental blockade from a phantom is becoming a reality, one which will hit England harder than everything else heretofore.' "

There is other balderdash similar to the foregoing which would not justify the expense of cabling. Meuller winds up by saying: "If I could but reproduce the high moral tone and the knowledge with which the Kaiser speaks everyone would feel as if the sun were shining upon them after the clouds had lifted."

Kaiser told Mueller all about his occupations and recreations, and modestly admitted he had inherited from his mother his "wonderful understanding for dramatic art."