KAISER WILHELM 11.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20006, 25 January 1927, Page 13

KAISER WILHELM 11.

AN INTIMATE STUDY. RUTHLESS ANALYSIS. It is not so long since most of us (says John o’ London’s Weekly) were all for “hanging, the Kaiser.” The wish wits natural enough, but hardly politic; and one feels that Wilhelm 11. is amply punished by the tedium of exile—which has given him time to produce “My Early Life”—and by the publication in his own country of such a book as “Kaiser Wilhelm II.,” by Emil Ludwig, a fierce study which strips the once colossal figure and leaves it an object, partly of scorn, partly of pity. A BAD UPBRINGING. As has been said, he leaves his victim naked and ludicrous in the end, but he is just enough to realise that Wilhelm's lunacies were the outcome of birth and environment. It will be news to most people that this first child of the English Princess Victoria was slapped and swung about for an hour and a-half before it took the first gasp of breath! “At last it stirred; but in the confusion and anxiety about mother and child, in the excitement borne on the thunder of salvoes into the hushed sick room, nobody thought to examine closely the person of this royal heir. Not until the third day was it perceived that the left arm was paralysed, the shoulder socket torn away, and the surrounding muscles so severely injured that in the then state of surgical knowledge no doctor would venture to attempt the readjustment of the limb.” It was the beginning of the modern world's troubles. Doctors feared that the brain was affected. And the mother did not love her misshapen son. “You can scarcely imagine,” she said to an Austrian nobleman, “how I admire your handsome, intelligent, and graceful Crown Prince when I see him beside by uncouth, lumpish son, William.” Later on she was to say: “Don’t for a moment imagine that my son .ever does anything from any motive but vanity.” MORAL VICTORY. The brilliant woman did not realise what ought to have been realised in his favour, that William’s neurotic effect to overcome the physical disability, to survive the dislike of his parents, and to prove himself a man according to Prussian military ideas was the whole cause of that meglomania for which Europe was to suffer so much. “The moral victory over his physique,” says Herr Ludwig, “was his destruction.” The modern psychologist would call it “the inferiority complex.” Wilhelm knew himself a coward and a weakling, he envied the calm England of his English mother—it was only natural that in a vain man it should all turn sour and brutal. In his swift summary of Wilhelm’s career, Herr Ludwig covers ground now familiar to all—the costly dismissal of old Bismarck, the Kruger telegram, the Daily Telegraph interview, the entry into Jerusalem, the famous speech likening the German to the conquering Huns. And so, after the lanse of a thousand years, that reckless demoniac, savage rob-ber-chieftain among kings was insulted by being likened to William the Second. In the dual fallacy of this parallel lies the explanation of the dual misunderstanding all over the world, of Germany. A great and peaceful people, conscious of its subjection to a boastful little monarch, was obliged to pay for the claptrap of .its vainglorious sovereign, who only degraded them with the title of Huns that he might ape an Attila.” GRUEL AND CRUDE. The picture is built up cunningly, remorselessly. We are told how he would preach sermons—“speech was the bad fairy’s gift to this neurotic, with his morbid craving for the deed from which Ho shrank.” He was cruel, with people and animals alike. His slaughter of game was 'on a colossal scale, and in his forty-third year he had placed in a German forest a block of granite with a gold-lettered inscription :—Here his Majesty William II brought down His Most High’s fifty thou : sandth animal, a white cock pheasant.” '' One© a doctor; sympathised with him about a “little cough” he had. The Emperor drew himself up and thundered: “A great -cough. I am great in everything!” You could hardly say that such a man was sane. THE BITTER END. This, however, was the mountebank who, backed by sycophants w'ith axes to grind against the sense of reasonable Germans, alienated Britain and brought her in against Germany in the Great War. Herr Ludwig has it that Wilhelm had passed the zenith of his powers five vears before . war actually broke out. and his account of the man’s behaviour during the struggle makes sordid reading. He went to pieces. Very dismal was his behaviour when all at length was lost. “He stood helpess before reality,” writes Herr Ludwig passionately. “A bad exit or death — those were the alternatives.” He chose the bad exit. Herr Ludwig makes a fine job of the last scene in the drama. The car containing the ox-Emperor and his suite was held up for six hours at the Dutch frontier, while the officer in charge of the post telephoned to The Hague. And “the Emperor had never befoi'e had to wait six minutes.” “At last! The officei, saluting, comes into the waiting room. ‘The gentleman may pass.’ With leaden heart the Emperor goes to his car; he even forgets to-day to hide his withered arm under his cape. A soldier sits in front, escorting the distinguished pn- I soners. The engine throbs —the car drives on into the alien land, from which there will be no home-coming. Fainter, ever fainter. . . . Soon .the Emperor can scarcely hear, the groaning of his land.” THOUGHTS IN EXILE. Now he broods in exile in Holland and has written “My Early Life,” a pathetic book in its way, in which he. seeks to x-ationalisc his tendencies. Curious that the ex-Kaiser should join with Ludwig in blaming his parents, the harsh military upbringing ! And now—“ With deep emotion I take my pe.n in hand to recapture the figures and events of the years that passed over me. In many lonely hours of reflection I have seen my whole life unrolled bofore me. I have bestowed anxious thought on finding an answer to the many questions which Fate put oefore me. And if. indeed, many a riddle was solved onlv for many another to take its place, that is but the common lot of man kind. We do not solve the ultimate questions in this world. The Almighty Guide knows its course of our destiny: let that suffice !”