WHAT THE KAISER LOOKS LIKE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3327, 19 December 1917, Page 68

WHAT THE KAISER LOOKS LIKE.

"LIKE AN AUTUMN DAY." (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, October 5. In a country where everything worth har» ing is 'the gift of a beneficent State, Herr Max Bewer is to-day a candidate for the chair -at Munich University lately occupied by Professor Brentano. Professor Max Weber, of Heidelberg, is another candidate, and they have gone through the preliminaries of belauding the Kaiser and Germany in the press. What Professor Weber says really does not matter, for he is engaged with WeFfcpolitik, but there are a few references to Mr Bernard Shaw and others which are instructive—e.g.: "At the head of some of the enemy Powers are coarse rascals and adventurers, who cannot speak of us except in terms of undignified abuse, and who make demands of us which no people with a sense of honour can even discuss; meanwhile, they speak of the war in the language of a circus boxer (sic), and, above all, they crush \down by violence tho longing for peace of their own peoples and of the allied peoples whose freedom they violate. The enemy armies are composed to an increasing extent of barbarians. On the western front there is to-day a scum of African and Asiatio savages, and all the robbers and rascals of the earth are there together under arms, ready to lay waste German land the first moment when there is a falling off in the adequate supply of our army with munitions. The bestial atrocities which were practised by the undisciplined Russian hordes in tneir temporary penetration of country in part inhabited by comrades of their own race recall the medieval Mongolian Age. A part of the governing classes in enemy countries seems to have gone entirely mad with hatred. In France some of the university classes have the habit of spitting_ at defenceless enemies, which elsewhere is only conceivable among prostitutes." Now for the " German poet," Bewar, who visited Great Headquarters, and came away uplifted. He weeps that Goethe, who realised so well " that Prussia would be tl*3 vase in which the German rose would develop in its full beauty," did not write up Frederick the Great as he (Bewer) is about to depict William the Great, surrounded by "an ever-growing circle of heroes." And he proceeds: " Hindenburg and Ludendorff, Mackensen, and the Bavarian lion df Arras, the heroes in the air and on the sea, ascended like a wreath qf stars about our Kaiser's head; When I saw at the Great Headquarters he was encircled by iron crosses, and airmen's crosses, flashing and scintillating on uniforms of field-grey and sea-blue. "To look upon the Kaiser is like looking 1 upon a wonderful autumn day. Think of fields and woods in all their brown fullness, while up above on the tops* of the mountains, there is the first bright, clean, white snow, and above the snow the flashing-, blue, sunny sky of a wonderful day, There, from the hand of Nature, you have the faithful picture of the Kaiser, as he looks with his great, blue, flashing, but still goodnatured, eyes upon a life that has ripened in fullness of work, and looks blameless into the mists of the war. "The full snowy hair is parted boyishly; in freely curling waves it moves as if the sea wind from the Kaiser's cruises on the seas and at regattas were still playing with it. The forehead is broad, free, and high, and burnt in the field up to a line wherei helmet and field cap have left the lighter shading. Through the brown cheeks often passes a healthy rosy colour. The lips are fine and firm, not too full and not too thin, and the moustache is clipped somewhat shorter than in time of peace. The powerful cut of the cheeks and an energetic chin, adorned, however, with an attractive dimple, complete this Kaiser head, beautiful as a picture, which, side by side with the patriarchial heads of Charles the Great and Barbarossa, will preserve for ever in German Kaiser-history its Young-Germanio The table-talk of Kaiser. Chancellor, and Bewer. is faithfully . recorded. They discussed the superior "distinction" of the German as compared with the British aristocracy, how among the alleged beautiful women of England were "no Saint Elizabeth and no Queen Louise." Then they scoffed at the characteristic indifference of the English to the pronunciation of foreign names. The Kaiser mentioned that a British naval officer at the review at Kiel had asked him whether a certain battlecruiser—since sunk chiefly by the New Zealand, was the " Blutscher," and he had replied imperially—" humorously," the " poet'* says—the " Blucher." (The pronunciation is really almost " Blickar," with a strongly aspirated "h" of "k.") Then came the Imperial Chancellor's turn, and he made the Kaiser " laugh heartily" by recalling that on an English ship he was onco called "Mr Meikeles."