Blood and Iron Part 34

-- Do not believe it! It is only a poetic fancy, not human life. Plans such as Bismarck met and carried forth, empires such as Napoleon founded are not placed constructively before one in a vision, nor are the complex ramifications attendant upon their ultimate achievement a matter of pre-vision.

It is only the small mind that plans down to the hair's breadth. Your truly great man, like Bismarck or Napoleon, takes up life as he finds it, and little by little learns the business of compelling other men to do his bidding; and always in this there is a large element left to the hazard of the die; or to use Bismarck's own phrase just before Sadowa, "Now we shall see how the G.o.d of battle rolls the iron dice!"

Your great man rides forth to the battle, prepared to take instant advantage of circ.u.mstances as they may rise.

-- Bismarck's idea of United Germany, at least the idea he always gave to the public, was that the thing might be done, with and through the power of G.o.d.

The word G.o.d appears and reappears in connection with his plan; in his messages, speeches, dispatches, and in his private letters, he calls on G.o.d. I am not here to say that Bismarck had religious visions. I take it that he never heard mysterious voices or saw ghostly forms, but instead was an intensely human man who fought out his life even as you fight out yours--with the powers with which you are endowed, and for such ends as seem worth the price, to you. The religious faith learned at his mother's knee, made Bismarck's life-work a sacred vocation. He believed that he was chosen by G.o.d to educate, guide and discipline the German people.

53

"My dear professor, whoever has once looked into the breaking eye of a dying warrior on the battlefield, will pause ere he begins war."

-- And now we meet Bismarck back in Berlin wearing his Koeniggraetz military cross, suspended by a ribbon around the collar of his plain blue Prussian uniform. But the great strain of the years is beginning to show. For one thing Bismarck's eyes are failing; he uses a gla.s.s as he muses over his mounds of state papers; his face is lined with deep marks; care has done its work; our Otto is now bald, obese and stiff-jointed, much more so than his 54 years might seem to call for.

In making speeches he does not speak as boldly, as directly as in days of yore. He stops, hesitates, stammers, but manages to hold the crowd.

-- You see he has a world of things on his mind; the under-play of the great political game absorbs his very life. What, pray, about this subconscious impression, that everybody has about an impending war with France? Bismarck, as deep as the sea, is still seemingly as open as a child.

One day, a famous professor made the fateful inquiry as had hundreds of journalists--and this time Bismarck replied, "My dear professor, whoever has once looked into the breaking eye of a dying warrior on the battlefield, will pause ere he begins a war."

-- So much for the astuteness of the man with the iron cross. He is indeed no longer learning the game.

-- Already Bismarck was thinking of great armaments against France; for she was now demanding territorial compensations, as between Prussia and Austria. We find in the "Revue Modern," August, 1865, this striking interview with Bismarck, by the French writer, Vilbort:

-- "About 10 p. m. we were in the study of the Premier, when M.

Benedette, the French Amba.s.sador, is announced. 'Will you take a cup of tea in the salon?' M. de Bismarck said to me, 'I will be yours in a moment.' Two hours pa.s.sed away; midnight struck; one o'clock. Some twenty persons, his family and intimate friends, awaited their host.

-- "The tiny cloud on the horizon as yet had no name, but this cloud hung to the west across the Rhine.

-- "At last he appeared, with a cheerful face and a smile upon his lips. Tea was taken; there was smoking and beer, in German fashion.

Conversation turned, pleasantly or seriously, on Germany, Italy and France. Rumors of a war with France were then current for the tenth time in Berlin. At the moment of my departure, I said: 'M. le Ministre, will you pardon me a very indiscreet question? Do I take war or peace with me back to Paris?' M. de Bismarck replied, with animation: 'Friendship, a lasting friendship with France! I entertain the firmest hope that France and Prussia, in the future, will represent the dualism of intelligence and progress.' Nevertheless, it seemed to us that at these words we surprised a singular smile on the lips of a man who is destined to play a distinguished part in Prussian politics, the Privy Councillor Baron von ----. We visited him the next morning, and admitted to him how much reflection this smile had caused us. 'You leave for France tonight,' he replied; 'well, give me your word of honor to preserve the secret I am about to confide to you until you reach Paris? Ere a fortnight is past we shall have war on the Rhine, if France insists upon her territorial demands. She asks of us what we neither will nor can give. Prussia will not cede an inch of German soil; we cannot do so without raising the whole of Germany against us, and, if it be necessary, let it rise against France rather than ourselves.'"

-- The treasonable speech of the Baron did not, however, bear fruit "in a fortnight," but Bismarck knew the great political game well, and everything served him in his German undertakings. We shall see.

54

The curtain falls in triumph on another spirited act in the great drama "Germania."

-- The political fruits of Sadowa may be summed up in a few sentences.

We clear the air for the grand finale, at the palace of the French kings at Versailles, four years later.

-- By the Prague treaty, August 23, 1866, Austria consented to the reconstruction of the Federation and retired from the scene.

Bismarck saw that the large states beyond the River Main,--Bavaria, Wuertemberg, Baden and South-Hesse, were not yet ready for his new North German Confederation; but he would bring them in--somehow--later!

As for Hanover, Hesse-Ca.s.sel, Frankfort, and Schleswig-Holstein, they were now mapped with Prussia, their crime being this, that they had opposed Prussia in a half-hearted way, before Sadowa.

-- Bismarck now set up his popular Prussian Const.i.tution. Wonder of wonders! Really, it differed not in essentials from the hated Liberal Const.i.tution that he had a.s.sailed so vigorously in 1848. Also, up to 1866, the Unifier of Germany had as we have seen always appeared as an opponent of the National German party. When, however, he had become its leader, through the great politico-military struggle, he brought about the results vainly fought for by the patriots in the revolution of 1848. The distinction was that in the Revolutionary days, the King would have been obliged to stoop to the gutter for a "people's crown,"

whereas now he need do no such humiliating thing. The two wars had proven William monarch "by Divine right."

-- However, a blaze of aristocratic honors at the hands of King William pleased Bismarck more than he was willing to admit. Count Bismarck, one night, when the people came with the torchlights, sounded the old German keynote in a new way, as follows:

-- "We have always belonged to each other as Germans--we have ever been brothers--but we were unconscious of it. In this country, too, there were different races: Schleswigers, Holsteiners, and Lauenburgers; as, also, Mecklenburgers, Hanoverians, Luebeckers, and Hamburgers exist, and they are free to remain what they are, in the knowledge that they are Germans--that they are brothers. And here in the North we should be doubly aware of it, with our Platt Deutsch, which stretches from Holland to the Polish frontier; we were also conscious of it, but have not proclaimed it until now. But that we have again so joyfully and vividly been able to recognize our German descent and solidarity--for that we must thank the man whose wisdom and energy have rendered this consciousness a truth and a fact, in bringing our King and Lord a hearty cheer. Long live His Majesty, our most gracious King and Sovereign, William the First!"

-- A cheer resounded throughout the castle-yard.

-- The new Const.i.tution gave to the people manhood suffrage and a popular a.s.sembly. The King of Prussia was made President of the new Federation, but not its sovereign. Prussia ruled in her own way, henceforth, but the fiction of the King, as President, served to steady the minor disgruntled German princelings, who were led to believe that their councils were still reckoned with in great affairs.

However, the voting was so arranged that Prussia controlled, off-hand, 17 out of 48 units in the new political Confederation--and in a pinch Bismarck could rely on having the desired majority.

-- Some say that Bismarck was influenced by the socialist Lasalle to make concessions to the people, of a piece with the concessions which in '48 Bismarck had fought because they sprang from revolutionists; but the liberal aspects of the new Const.i.tution served to place the great dream of German Unity on a firmer basis than would otherwise have been possible. Bismarck was learning this: To try to choke the current of public opinion is folly; the wise man, instead, aims to direct the waters to his own advantage.

-- The North German Confederation comprised 22 states and Bismarck was made Chancellor. The Const.i.tution was adopted February 24th, 1867.

For all practical purposes, the German Empire was now a fact.

-- But more work was still to be done, by way of b.l.o.o.d.y Gravelotte, Metz, Mar-la-Tour, St. Privat, Woerth, Spichern Heights, Sedan, and the Siege of Paris.

-- Corpses, corpses everywhere, lying in windrows miles long!

55

The master uses the ma.s.ses as the gardener utilizes manure--fertilizing the soil with blood and bones!

-- Bismarck knows that to demand in an emphatic way is the surest way of receiving. He is always studying men, looking ahead to the time of the inevitable French war. He is asking himself, concerning various monarchs of adjacent nations, opposed to Prussia: "On which side will he be?" "Is he weak?" "Can he be relied on to stand on my side?" "Is he dangerous?" "Will he take a bribe?" "At any rate, give him what he wants--but let me do it in such a way that he thinks he is forcing us to do what he wants, whereas we know how to make him actually demand our own terms!"

-- Thus Bismarck without histronic talent, with his piping voice and his prohibitory bulk for heroic theater-roles, is at heart the great actor-manager of his time. Instead of creating parts, he deals them out.

-- He goes through this world during these trying times finding the best men to do his own bidding in the coming war. And when he is hissed down by those who will not acknowledge his right he breaks their power by defying them--as the hurricane scatters the clouds, nor asks permission.

-- They say that had he lost the Austrian war, he would have gone to the gallows. Can a Man of Destiny lose?

-- A new era is dawning. The old worn-out system for a disunited Germany of 39 jealous states is to be swept away.

-- For thirty years he dreamed of the inevitable German Union, had his visions of that glory. He was greater than himself in those black hours before the Parliament, for four long years thundering for his side;--with public opinion flat against him, and with mutterings on part of angry mobs that would bring the rope and hang Bismarck to the highest tree.

-- Throughout Germany, distressed as her people had been for years past by political and social miseries, a growing consciousness of brotherhood, blood and language was at last about to be politically realized.

Even Napoleon the Little, political fool that he was in many respects, at least had one idea that showed his common sense. However, in his day he was laughed out of court for his "theory of nationality," that is to say, he believed that people speaking a common language and living in contiguous territory, have an inalienable right to a common flag.

-- Now that is precisely what German poets had in mind, in their romantic way, when for well-nigh 100 years past they had been dreaming of a united Fatherland--

Fuer Heim und Herd, fuer Weib und Kind Fuer jedes treue Gut--

Or, in other words, a man's house is his castle and if men will not fight for their hearthstones, then they will soon have no hearthstones.

For home and hearth, for wife and child-- These things we prize the most; And fight to keep them undefiled By foreign ruffian host.

For German Right, for German Speech, For German household ways, For German homesteads, all and each Strike men, through battle's blaze!