Kaiser's Playmate.

Observer, Volume XXXVI, Issue 38, 27 May 1916, Page 23

Kaiser's Playmate.

IN Ms recently published "Prussian Memories," Mr Poultney Bigelow gives his ripened estimate, based on various visits to Germany and on the impressions of his childhood, gained while at school there during the years that his father, the late John Bigelow, served as United States Minister to France. His father's friends and position gave young Bigelow the entree into many high places. Through his father's connection with Berlin Court officials he became a playfellow of the present Emperor, then a boy of eight or ten. Hβ seems to have been popular with the young scion of royalty, and to have laid the basis of a friendship which lasted for many years after. Although he is keenly critical of Prussianised Germany, and of affairs which William 11. controls, Mr Bigelow says that he tells nothing which he would not wish to reach the ears of his former friend, and in fact feels that some good might be accomplished by the happening of this very thing/ OFFICER—THEN GENTLEMAN. At boarding school at Bonn, on. the Rhine, he first discovered that the Prussian schoolboy was alien to his American taste: "I carried away warm affection for my English and American schoolmates, but for some reason or other the Prussian boys who came only for the day classes seemed to be of another species in the human family. Yet the German walks on two legs like ourselves; he wears clothes, he passes examinations, he is chock-full of book knowledge, and trained to conventional forms of social intercourse. Reason argues that his Kultur is magnificent, but we boys could not reason, and I was drawn to those who would play fair and fight fair. If I know an Englishman at all, I know him through and through, and can trust him in fair weather or foul. I have known hundreds of admirable Germans in the fifty years that have elapsed since the days of Dr. Kbrtegan. These have been peasants and princes, priests and professors, editors, members of Parliament, poets and painters, and chiefly, of course, officers of the army and navy. I have enjoyed their society, for I have asked little in return.- Much I have learned from them, and have tried to pay back a part of my debt by speaking the truth when called upon. In the British or American service a man is first a gentleman and then an officer; on the Elbe and the Havel it is otherwise. There my friend is first an officer, and as an officer his honour constrains him to do things which would not harmonise with the conception of gentleman as framed at West Point or Woolwich. VATER UNSER AND THE PRUSSIAN WAY. "The second night at Kortegan's all the boys before retiring stood up in two long lines for inspection and prayers. Never before having been called upon to say my praj r ers otherwise than on my knees, I was embarrassed when the Herr Doktor loudly intoned the German Vater Unser; and, innocently imagining that the most respectful attitude would be that of one gazing toward Our Father's celestial home, I raised my homesick eyes ecstatically towards a bunch of flies on the ceiling, wishing that I had their wings and si knowledge of the road to Paris, when whack! came a heavy blow on one side of my head which would have floored me had not my juvenile neighbour acted as buttress. The teacher sharply rebuked me for gazing upward, and I suppose this also went to the ' throne of the merciful Father along with the rest of Dr. Kortegan's Vater TJnser. To-day that blow on the head seems a brutal if Hot stupid exercise of power, nor cm I recall amongst the many educators I have known in the English speaking world anyone who could Jmve so disturbed ' in cold blood a

religious exercise. It was my first appearance at the roll call; I was only eight, ignorant of the language and presumably of the customs, and yet for the simple mistake of gazing upward instead of downward during the Lord's Prayer my most conscientious and efficient master struck me a blow hard! enough to fell a bullock, and no doubt glowed with inner satisfaction at one more duty done, cne more step onward in the march that was spreading Prussian educational methods to the ends of the earth. A PROFESSOR'S FAMILY LIFE. "The family of Professor Schillbach in Potsdam offered an interesting picture of Prussian academic life. We had one big, strong, broad-in-the-beam, and ever-cheerful servant who blacked the boots, cooked the food, scrubbed the floors, waited at table, did the family wash, and in her leisure moments mended clothes and wheeled the perambulator. The five children were all chubby, flaxenhaired, blue-eyed specimens, ranging from the babe in arms to the biggest boy of about ten, who subsequently became a naval officer and went down with his ship. Children and parents all slept in one room, and there was a general family scrub every Saturday evening, when the main room, where we dined and where the children romped, resounded to the clatter of tin pans or other equivalents for tubs. That my father insisted upon my having a room to myself was pardoned as the eccentricity of an exotic, but that on top of this I should have a bath of my own every morning was nothing short of scandalous and symbolic of latter-day American decadence. However, I soon became very fond of the Schillbach family and they of me —a friendship which has extended over more than forty years, during which never a birthday has passed that we have not exchanged long letters on our respective domestic fortunes. Being ambitious of passing my examinations, the good professor had more concern in checking than stimulating my thirst for knowledge, and I was always at my desk an hour or two before breakfast in winter by lamplight, and always went over my task in the evening before going to bed. At home my parents encouraged a diet such as we associate with the diary rather than with the beer garden, but at Professor S'chillbach's the food was overwhelmingly of the kind that goes well with beer, which was forbidden to me. I have often marvelled at the rugged health of German soldiers and wondered how they survived their rations. Perhaps I saw only the survivors. The German diet is a severe strain on stomachs accustomed to the French and American kitchen, for I have tested it many times since and have always succumbed—and fled to Paris or Carlsbad for relief. There can be but one explanation—the Prussian army is nearer to ancestral barbarism, and his insides can stand a treatment under which those of a civilised man would writhe in torture." KAISER AS RED INDIAN. Bigelow was too young and active to appreciate that he was being overwhelmingly honoured in being taken to play with the young princes, and was merely pleased at the discovery of a kindred spirit in the elder of them. The young William (destined to be the Kaiser) had already developed one of his present tastes. "No game interested him much that did not suggest war. Myself being fresh from America, I was credited, if not with Indian blood, at least with intimate knowledge of redskin tactics; consequently we talked much of Fenimore Cooper, the Deerslayer, and - Ch'ingachgook at our first meeting, and at our second I gave Prince William an Indian bow with gaudy tassels at each end and a bunch of arrows with blunt heads. These warlike reminders of America's first families had been a

present from my mother, purchased probably from an alleged Mohawk chief who invariably presided in those days over the souvenir shops at Niagara Falls. But this is an afterthought. The moment William 11. had these precious implements in his possession he radiantly suggested a war game, on the Iroquois plan— and our victims were not far to seek. We elected ourselves exclusive members of the Ancient and Honourable Order of Red Men, and declared all others to be palefaces; and as the outcasts were mainly of the much- . drilled and veiy correct Prussian aristocracy we took youthful pleasure in chasing them through the bushes of the great park, seizing them by the hair, lashing them to trees, and then metaphorically shooting them full of arrows." The following story, told without comment among others of similar character, throws a light not wholly flattering on the "friendship of kings." The Queen of Hanover had given to Bigelow a copy of a rare portrait of Queen Louise that he might have it reproduced as a frontispiece for his forthcoming work. "Of course, I boasted much to the Emperor that in all his galleries he hag nothing comparable to the portrait of Queen Louise in my possession, and, of course ; he also clamoured for a sight of it, and of course I brought it myself to the palace in Berlin, and entrusted it to his principal aide-de-camp, reminding him that it was my property and must be returned. I did not see the Emperor personally, he being at a council. But what was my dismay when at the next Court function the Emperor strenuously wrung my hand, and.said he could not find words to express his gratitude at my magnificent present. I behaved like a coward, got red in the face, tried to mumble something, but the Emperor talked so rapidly, addressing not only me, but his family within hearing, that I could not find the heart to tell him that he was robbing me of the thing I prized above all others."