THE WILES OF WILHELM

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 443, 27 August 1928, Page 8

THE WILES OF WILHELM

IT is rather amusing, and not without piquancy, that the signing of the pact outlawing war should synchronise, more or less, with a Dutch rebuke to the man who started the greatest war in history. For ten years now, the ex-Kaiser, thanks to the courtesy of the Government of the Netherlands, has been living in comfort and maintaining a small court at Doom. So far as the outside world is concerned, tbe only authentic news received of Wilhelm tells of his ability as a woodchopper. But, of course, his gifts as a logroller could not be kept in check indefinitely, and apparently his patient hosts are tiring of the incessant plot-hatching of an arrogant old man. An Amsterdam newspaper has demanded editorially that Holland, once and for all, should end the intrigues that emanate constantly from Doom. We are left to guess the nature of the plots, hut anyone who chooses to read Herr Emil Ludwig’s indictment of Wilhelm 11. will not be long in doubt. The man who spread horror over the world, and who is largely responsible for much of the present generation’s knowledge of misery, dreams ever of re-establishing the Hohenzollern brood in Berlin. Berliners, however, do not seem to be yearning for a return of “Pots-dam silliness,” as Sir Owen Seaman has termed it, and the megalomaniac Wilhelm stands little chance of being allowed to emerge from exile. Indeed, when he recalls some of the dire punishments that threatened him at one time, he should consider himself the luckiest man in Europe that he is permitted to stay in exile, wearing a pastiche crown and ruling a pinchbeck kingdom within the borders of the Doom Estate.