LIVELY MEMORY

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3447, 19 November 1932, Page 2

LIVELY MEMORY

VOIM BULOW’S STORY. WITTY AND MALEVOLENT. EUROPEAN DIPLOMACY. If any reader of the late Prince von Bulow’s first three volumes of memoirs should suppose that the fourth and last volume is in any way inferior to its predecessors, he is greatly mistaken (writes Edward Hawke in the London Daily Telegraph.) The witty and malevolent old gentleman who dictated his book after the war, when he was living at the Villa Malta in Rome, knew very well how to attract the maximum amount of publicity for his posthumus Apologia. Von Bulow, therefore, began with his long terms of office as German Foreign Minister and then as Chancellor, defending himself and his policy, and heaping ridicule on his Imperial master and his political opponents, so as to stir up the violent controversy that is still raging in Germany. He poured oil on the flames in his third volume, which subjects his successors to the sharpest censure for their folly in starting the World War and their incompetence in the conduct of it. His main object being thus achieved, Bulow reverts to the days of his youth, and recounts how he was trained under Bismarck, whose fall, as he believed, portended ill of his country. The Bismarck age is the subject of this new volume, and all the leading figures in that troubled half a century of European history are sketched by a brilliant and venomous pen. Bulow spared no one outside his own family: he did not spare himself. Scratched a Queen. Young Bulow was taken as a child by his parents to the castle of Rumpenheim, to visit the Prince Christian, who became King of Denmark, and whose daughters are remembered as the Queen of England and the Empress of Russia. “I used then to play with the pretty daughters of King Christian. The elder Alexandra, the future consort of King Edward VII. of England, was a beautiful slim girl. She retained her wonderful waist and her light, airy, swinging gait to an advanced age. “Later on, when I had the honour of meeting her, she teased me with having cuffed and even scratched her

when she played tops, hoops, and ‘rooms to let.’ Truthfulness compelled me to reply that I also had the honour of having been treated somewhat urge'ntly now and again by the delightful Princess herself.” It is well known that at the Foreign Office in the summer of 1870 the political sky was thought to be cloudless. According to Bulow, the German Foreign Office, where his father was then engaged, was under a similar delusion. The Ems dispatch, skilfully doctored by Bismarck, caused France injury and precipitated the war that the Chancellor desired, and Bulow served through the short Franco-Prussian campaign with a Hussar regiment.

Mobilised Opinion. He shows how skilfully Bismarck mobilised European opinion against France, and how completely Napoleon Ill’s, projected anti-Prussian alliance broke down when Austria dared not move in face of Russian ill-will, and Italy would not act alone. Bulow pointedly compares the French resistance after Sedan with the German collapse in 1918. But he knew well enough that the comparison was misleading. In recalling his days with the Hussars Bulow brings out some of those lively anecdotes of which he had an inexhaustible store —whether true or well invented. For example, there was a certain Guido von Nimptsch, whom the Empress Frederick regarded as ‘the bestlooking man in Berlin.” While in America he had married an American music-hall singer named Lola, and he brought her to Berlin. One fine day she eloped with a Russian, Jeaving a letter to explain that Nimptsch was not rich enough to keep her in luxury. “Count Nistitz was Military Attache to the Russian Embassy in Berlin. He married Lola, the lady he had run away with, and was transferred to Paris as Military Attache after his marriage. The wife of his new chief, the Russian Ambassador, Nelidov, declared that she would not receive Countess Lola on account of her vivid past. The moment Guido von Nimptsch heard of this he travelled to Paris and demanded satisfaction of the Ambassador, Nelidov, because his wife had dared to insult the former Frau von Nimptsch. “Nelidov, who showed no inclination to stand in front of Nimptsch’s pistols, promised that the Countess Nistitz would be well received in his house.” Scandalous Stories. Bulow was most carefully coached by his father in the art of pleasing

Bismarck; the leading maxim was that he must be given plenty of facts and few opinions—not a bad rule for juniors in any profession. As an Attache from 1873 Bulow was moved about Europe, and from Rome, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Athens, Paris, and then St. Petersburg again, watched the playing of the great diplomatic game by Bismarck’s master hand. At St. Petersburg in 1875 he saw the Tsar Alexander 11., whom he described as tall and good-looking, a man of culture, interest and full of humour. “He was not as gifted as William 11., but he had better taste and more tact.” The author characteristically goes on to give particulars of the Tsar’s mistress, Princess Catherine Dolgoruki, to relate how Court ladies who made spiteful remarks about her were promptly banished to the country, and to affirm that the Tsar broke off the campaign against the Turks in 1877 because he wanted to return to the Princess. His stories of Gutshakov, Saburov, and other Russian statesmen are all too scandalous. He credits the late Duke of Edinburgh, during the Russian war scare of 1877-78, with asking the officers on his flagship to remember that his wife was the Tsar’s daughter —to which a'n officer is said, apocryphally no doubt, to have replied, “I know, sir; I would not like to be married to a Russian lady.”

Bismarck’s Fall. Most of Bulow’s victims are no longer here to reply to him. It is consoling to find that he usually speaks well of Englishmen, always excepting Sir Robert Morier, who knew Germany too well to be popular there. But he goes out of his way to argue, quite without warrant, that King Edward VIII. was anti-German’. Bismarck himself was Bulow’s hero, as far as such a cynical man could be a hero-worshipper. He describes with sly humour Bismarck’s Press campaign of 1879 in support of the Dual Alliance; the Foreign Office Attaches were kept busy writing letters from imaginary citizens and rustics to the provincial newspapers, in commendation of the Chancellor’s policy. For all that, he admired the old man, and remained on terms of close intimacy with him and his family while most of Bismarck’s proteges, including Holstein, tur'ned against him. Bismarck’s dismissal in 1890 is described in moving terms. It seems, if we may credit Bulow, to have been discourteous in the extreme. But Bulow, though he professes to quote Count Herbert Bismarck, is not a very

safe witness; he hates the Kaiser too bitterly. There is, perhaps, more truth in his story of Queen Victoria meeting Bismarck during her visit to Berlin in 1888, when the Emperor Frederick was dying. The Queen said to Sir Edward Malet: “I don’t understand why my daughter could not get on with Prince Bismarck. I think him a very amiable man, and we had a most charming conversation.” Despite their bias, their spite, and their inaccuracy, they are the most fascinating volumes that any statesman has written since Bismarck.