Infanta of Spain Eulalia

After hearing King Edward’s opinion of his nephew, I was eager to meet the Kaiser. I was never more eager to meet any sovereign. And there was none who ever made such an impression on me. One felt at once the vibration of a strong personality, an incessantly active mind, a dynamic nervous energy, a Latin temperament intellectual and gay. He has the kind of hard grey-blue eye that is usually called piercing. And he uses it, I think, with some knowledge of its effect when he wishes to be disconcerting. But the wrinkles on his face come from smiling, not from scowls; and in his private life he is altogether charming and unaffected and delightful.

When I first visited at the Schloss, in Berlin, I was struck by the perfect household management. I was told that the Kaiser personally supervised all the details of the establishment. The next time I was there, I found on my arrival a little library of my favourite authors waiting in the apartment that had been prepared for me; and I discovered that the Kaiser had selected and provided the books. The charming thoughtfulness of the attention is as characteristic of him as the thoroughness of the superintendence. He seems to be as thorough in all he does. His activities are, of course, enormous. His mind appears untiring. He accomplishes an incredible amount of routine labour and comes to his recreation eager and not fagged.

The quality that makes him most misunderstood, both in Germany and abroad, is his religiosity. He has an intimate sense of the constant direction of a personal God—how intimate no one will believe who has not seen the expression of his face when he is silently praying. Since he believes that God directs every incident of the life of the world, he believes that he has been divinely appointed to rule over Germany, as every one else has been divinely appointed to the station he occupies and the work he has to do. He rules, therefore, under God, responsible only to God, and going chiefly to prayer for direction. This conviction is so profound and moving in him that I believe if he had not been born a king, he would have become a religious leader whose energy would have made him as compelling as one of the old prophets. And it is a conviction that governs him in the most unexpected ways. For example, he has often spoken publicly of the responsibility of the ruler who involves his people in a war in which so many men may be killed, when he cannot be sure that their consciences will be in a state to meet death.

Hitherto the intelligence of his rule in many directions has been beyond all question. The immense industrial expansion of the country has not been made at the expense of the lower classes. During the Boer War a shameful percentage of the recruits in England had to be rejected as physically unfit for service; the recruits for the German army have always been healthy. The foundations of the nation have not been rotted away by poverty and exploitation. It has not been wealth that has ruled here.

The German royal family is of the blood of the nation; it always had the picturesque qualities of military leadership; and it represented, even more than in England, the magnificence of national success and the new unity of German patriotism. Although the growth of the Socialist party has gone on surely, inside these very evident aspects of loyalty, it would seem that so long as Germany had to be organised on a war basis it would accept a dictatorship that is intelligent. Only when the Throne became stupid, the trouble would begin.

Meanwhile, the German Emperor was the boast and the model of certain sections of modern royalty. Many of the young kings who should be attending to the arts of peace were imagining themselves little “War Lords” and strutting about in uniforms that made them ridiculous. The lesser royalties saw themselves as divinely ordained to their conspicuous idleness as he to his work. Those qualities in the Kaiser which King Edward quarrelled with—because they appeared mediÆval to a man of his type of mind—were parodied in imitation by princelings who had not the Kaiser’s brains and force of personality. I once had such a sovereign send an aide to order me to put down my parasol in a royal procession, for no reason except to exercise a petty authority; and I started a warm enmity by sending back word, through the aide, that the control of my parasol was not within the power of the Crown.

I think it was these imitations of the Kaiser that exasperated King Edward more than their original. The Kaiser’s antipathy to King Edward was another matter. As the father of his people, the German Emperor sets an example of personal virtue and austerity such as a parent might set his sons; and King Edward enjoyed his life to the full. The King practised all the diplomacies of silence; the Kaiser always had an impulsiveness in private and public utterance that was the despair of his ministers. The two men were personally antipathetical. They misunderstood each other and underrated each other. But, as I have said before, they did each other a lot of good.

When to-day I think of William II., I always recall a scene which seemed symbolical of the German Sovereign and his people.

A great crowd filled an immense hall of the grey castle which the past has left in the heart of modern Berlin. People of every rank stood shoulder to shoulder, for it was the one day of the year when the Imperial Court sets courage and faithful service before birth and noble ancestry, the day of the Ordensfest.

I was quite young and I felt joyous and happy as

Eulalia

I passed up the hall in the Imperial procession, with a page bearing my long manteau de cour. And each time that I turned from side to side to bow to the people, I caught a glimpse of the Kaiser at the head of the procession, a silver figure, like Lohengrin, on whose cuirass and helmet the light flashed. Before him walked four heralds in mediÆval dress, sounding silver trumpets, and when he reached the dais and stood before the throne, looking down the castle hall, I saw in his steel-blue eyes that look of exaltation which his profound and unshakable belief in the divinity of kings gives him.

Was I a princess born in a democratic age? Or was I living in the age of chivalry, or at the vanished Court of Versailles? Before me, as I went to the dais, stood an Emperor as unshaken in the belief that he possessed godlike qualities as Charlemagne when a Pope set the unexpected crown upon his brow, or, as the Roi Soleil, unflattered by worship he believed to be his due. It seemed that I should have been one of those Infantas of Velasquez in a brocade dress and fluttering a little fan.

The impression the Kaiser made on me that morning of the Ordensfest was not new, though it came with fresh, almost startling, force. I had known him years before as Prince Wilhelm—a simple and unaffected youth. Then he became Crown Prince, and I noted a change. His manner became more imperious, less spontaneous. I felt that he was schooling himself, holding himself in check, conscious of the burden of coming responsibilities, fearing, yet longing for, the golden irksomeness of the Imperial crown. Since he has ascended the throne, I have never met him without realising that he is dominated by the belief that he is an instrument in the hands of the Almighty, divinely appointed to reign.

As he conferred orders and decorations on the stream of men who humbly approached his throne at the Ordensfest, I could see from their reverence and from the look of awe on their faces that his manner, his regal pose, his glance, had forced them to accept his own belief in the majesty and righteousness of kingship. But when we had passed to the great banqueting-hall he forgot for a moment to be godlike, and became the unpretentious Prince Wilhelm of the past.

We sat at a table on a dais, looking down on the great company invited to enjoy the Emperor’s hospitality, and we were served by young nobles. The page who had carried my train—a handsome boy who looked about twenty—stood behind my chair and handed dishes or filled my glass with the skill of a practised footman. It was the first time that a foreign princess had been present at the Ordensfest, and I had received a hint that it was customary to send the page who served one a present the following day, and I had learnt that there was an unwritten law that the present should be a watch. I was sitting next the Emperor and suddenly he turned to my page with an almost roguish smile.

“You are a happy boy,” he said, “to have the privilege to serve the beautiful Infanta.” Sovereigns always know how to flatter. “What present would you like her to give you?”

“Sire,” answered the page, “there is nothing I should like Her Royal Highness to give me so much as the flower that caresses her neck.”

It was a courtly and charming reply.

“You must give it him,” said the Emperor gaily, and of course I did.

And the page kept the flower.

“The deity has come down from its pedestal,” I said to the Emperor, when I had given the boy the flower, and we both laughed.

That was a little incident that relieved the tedium of a visit to the Schloss at Berlin; for, in spite of the courtesies of host and hostess, I felt then, as I do in all palaces, that I was in a prison. Indeed, to me the palace life is so irksome that when I hear the sentry pacing up and down outside my windows, I always feel that he is there to prevent me from going out more than to prevent other people from coming in. Whenever I have stayed with the Kaiser and Kaiserin I have been given a beautiful suite of rooms; but a prison is still a prison, however thick the gilding on the bars. Everything one does or says is noticed and talked about, and criticised and spread abroad. All day long my Spanish lady-in-waiting sat in an ante-chamber with the German lady-in-waiting and the German chamberlain appointed to attend me. It was intolerable to think that these three persons were sitting there with nothing whatever to do but to speculate on what I should take it into my head to do next and to exchange Court gossip. In an outer chamber was another group of idlers, servants whose chief duty was to conduct me processionally from one part of the castle to another.

Madame la Princesse appears in the antechamber, and the ladies make profound curtsies and the gentlemen profound bows. She smiles—princesses must always appear to be radiantly happy—and she tries to find something agreeable to say to each, and not to make bad blood by being more agreeable to one than to another. She announces her desire to go to the Kaiserin’s apartments. The chamberlain passes on that interesting information to the footman in the outer ante-chamber. A procession is formed, and Madame la Princesse is conducted, with the pomp of a bishop entering a cathedral to say Mass, to the other side of the castle. The procession passes through the Kaiserin’s ante-chamber, where another army of servants is idling, and the ladies-in-waiting who make profound curtsies and the gentlemen-in-waiting who make profound bows expect Madame la Princesse to smile and to repeat the gracious remarks about the state of the weather she has already made to the members of her own suite. The doors of the Kaiserin’s apartments are thrown open with becoming reverence, and Madame la Princesse disappears, leaving her suite to gossip with the Kaiserin’s, and probably to speculate on the nature of the royal conversation across the sacred threshold they may not pass unless bidden. A quarter of an hour elapses, and Madame la Princesse emerges, smiles at the bowing courtiers and curtsying ladies, and, feeling more like an idol than a human being, is solemnly conducted back and enshrined in her own apartments.

The etiquette of Versailles in the time of Louis XVI. could hardly be more exasperating to a modern woman than that of Berlin in the twentieth century. Before luncheon and dinner processions converge from all parts of the castle, conducting members of the Imperial family and royal guests to the drawing-room.

“The Kaiser will be in the drawing-room in ten minutes,” was the regular warning I used to receive from a lady-in-waiting, fearful that I should be late, and knowing the value the Kaiser sets on punctuality. In point of fact, I never was late, and, indeed, punctuality almost ceases to be a virtue at the Schloss, where one lives under a hard-and-fast code of rules.

On the way from the drawing-room to the dining-room the Kaiser and Kaiserin and their guests pass through the apartment in which the ladies and gentlemen in attendance have been discarded. They stand in a great circle, and it is the invariable custom to make the tour of the circle with the usual smile and the usual banal remarks. That duty performed, the royal personages go into the dining-room, and the suites retire to eat in another room. In Madrid the persons in attendance on the royal family dine with them. When I first went to Berlin the Kaiser’s children were young, and, although they lunched with us, they were not permitted to speak unless first spoken to. After the meal the royal party returns to the drawing-room, but it must not be thought that when alone royal persons unbend and behave naturally. The daily discipline of relentless etiquette has its effect on them; they cannot forget that they are royal, and therefore obliged to mask their feelings more rigorously than is necessary for ordinary people; indeed, most princesses I know are reduced by this inexorable discipline to nonentities whose mouths are twisted in an eternal smile. At Berlin we conversed politely for the regulation time, and, after making the circle of the suites again, were conducted back to our apartments in half a dozen processions.

Back in one’s rooms, it is impossible to emerge without a repetition of wearisome ceremonies. To go out for half an hour’s walk by oneself is a relaxation the poorest can enjoy; it is forbidden to a palace prisoner. The etiquette of Berlin requires a princess to be accompanied by a lady-in-waiting. And usually the lady-in-waiting cannot walk fast, so that the enjoyment of a little vigorous exercise in the open air is impossible. Moreover, people about courts are usually uninteresting companions. Obviously, intelligent persons would not consent to lead such aimless lives and to conform to such an inexorable code. How inexorable is that code may be judged from the fact that one of the Court ladies in Berlin was confined to her room for three days as a punishment for walking across the courtyard in an indecorous manner, that is to say with one hand ungloved.

The Emperor William’s insistence on law and order even extends to details of house-keeping. For instance, he knows that I like to begin the day with something more substantial than the coffee and rolls most Continentals take in the morning. Accordingly, whenever I have stayed at the Schloss he has himself given orders that an English breakfast should be served in my apartments, and I have always been indulged with the eggs and bacon and marmalade I am accustomed to. At first sight it may seem a little odd that an Emperor should be at the pains to arrange the menu of a guest’s breakfast. The Kaiser evidently knows as well as I do that a princess in a palace is less happily situated than a visitor in an English country-house, who gives his orders and gets what he likes served in his room. It would never occur to me to ask for a boiled egg at breakfast in a palace where people are not accustomed to have boiled eggs for breakfast, because the order would pass through so many persons before it reached the kitchen that my egg would probably be an omelette au surprise or a terrine of foie-gras before it arrived in my dining-room.

Above and beyond the Kaiser’s love of seeing that things work smoothly in his home is his love of his capital. To him Berlin is a daughter, whom he likes to see beautiful and well turned-out, just as he likes to see the Kaiserin and the Duchess of Brunswick charmingly dressed.

“It has been raining hard,” he said, coming into my room one morning, “and it has just stopped. I want you to come out with me, because I have something interesting to show you.”

I put on my hat at once and we went down to a carriage which was waiting and drove away. I was wondering what interesting sight I was going to see and what surprise the Kaiser had in store for me.

“Look!” he cried suddenly, “look at the streets! There have been torrents of rain and the weather only cleared up a few minutes ago, but do you see that there is not a speck of mud on the road?”

It was true. The streets were surprisingly and absolutely clean.

“You appear to dry as well as to sweep them,” I said.

“I have an army of road-sweepers,” he said. “Here they are,” and he pointed to a group of men energetically plying their brooms. “I wanted you to see how clean I keep Berlin.”

“And is that all you have brought me out to see?” I said teasingly.

“Yes, all,” he said, and we both laughed.

The Kaiser knows that I am passionately fond of dancing, and he used to make a point of arranging small dances when I was at the castle, so that I could enjoy myself without the restraint imposed on Royal personages at the formal Court balls. They used to call these small dances: Les Bals de l’Infanta. At Court balls we walked round the circle of guests—at all Courts people seem eternally standing in smiling circles—and the foreign ladies, penned behind their ambassadors, used to afford me considerable amusement, especially the Americans, who used to appear in larger numbers than they have done recently. There they stood in the glory of expensive court trains, which could be no possible use to them afterwards, and curtsied to the ground when the ambassadors had recited their names to each of us. I often wondered why they came and what pleasure they could possibly derive from seeing us smile and from curtsying to us. Obviously sensible and representative women would not be among them, unless, indeed, their husbands held official positions which necessitated their presence.

After circling the circle, we went to the dais and sat for a few moments in gilt armchairs, facing the general company, before descending to dance the quadrille d’honneur. When that ceremony was ended, one’s partner, a prince or an ambassador, handed one back to the dais, made a low bow and retired. At Courts etiquette does not allow a princess to choose a partner because he happens to waltz well or to be amusing. At Berlin chamberlains had lists of partners for princesses, and one of them would bring me the card on which their names were inscribed, just as a waiter brings one a bill-of-fare in a restaurant, and I gave my orders. Each partner came to the dais, made a very low bow, and, when the dance was over, consigned me to my golden arm-chair with another low bow. The Kaiser has caused the minuet to be revived at his Court, and, when I watched that stately dance from the dais, I used to feel certain that I was at the Court of the Roi Soleil. But the Bals de l’Infanta were far more charming, for then I could dance with whom I liked and waltz to my heart’s content.

These informal dances are just an instance of the personal consideration which the Kaiser has always shown me. “Madame, vos desirs sont les ordres pour Guillaume,” he telegraphed to me once, and that was in answer to a letter I had sent, begging him to ask the Sultan Abdul Hamid not to chop off the head of Izzet Pasha, who was lying in prison under sentence of death. A Turkish lady, whom I knew in Paris, had been to see me and had begged me to ask the Kaiser, who was about to visit Constantinople, to intercede with the Sultan for the unfortunate man. I knew nothing about Izzet Pasha, but my friend was so distressed and so confident that I would help her, that I was very much touched, and immediately wrote to the Kaiser. The lady was overjoyed when I showed her the courtly reply I had received, and the Sultan, of course, granted the Kaiser’s request.

The matter did not end there. Two years later, when I had entirely forgotten it, I arrived one day in Madrid, and the instant I had got out of the train, the Queen Mother and my sister, the Infanta Isabella, who were waiting on the platform to receive me, began to question me about some mysterious Turk in whom they evidently supposed I was deeply interested.

“Who is this Turk you have sent us, Eulalia?” asked the Queen.

“But I do not know a single Turk,” I said.

“But this Turk who has arrived in Madrid, because you want to have him near you,” said my sister.

“What crazy nonsense!” I cried. “Are you both out of your minds?”

“Certainly not,” said the Queen, “seeing that I have a letter from the Sultan, saying that he has sent the man here as Turkish Minister entirely to please you.”

Then the truth dawned on me. Abdul Hamid must have asked the German Emperor why he desired the prisoner he had pleaded for to be pardoned, and the Kaiser must have told him that it was the wish of the Infanta Eulalia. Mohammedan ideas of feminine psychology made the Sultan see a tale of the Arabian Nights, and, determining to humour me to the top of my bent, he sent the hero of the imaginary romance to Madrid where, as he expressly stated in the letter the Queen Mother showed me at the palace, he hoped he would remain as permanent Minister, to be for long years an ornament of the Court of the Infanta Eulalia.

French people, who think of the Kaiser as a Teuton to the backbone caring only for German ideals and achievements, would be surprised at the genuine taste he has for French literature, which he has cultivated by an exhaustive reading of French classics. Realising that I am au fond of French in spite of my Spanish name and title, the Emperor often showed me that side of his character which makes him an admirer of French literature, French art and French drama. One day he took me to the old palace of Sans-Souci at Potsdam to show me the apartments of Frederick the Great and the relics of the King’s friend, Voltaire, which are preserved there. We went into Frederick’s library, and when the door was closed, I found myself in a circle of book-shelves from which there seemed no exit. All the books were French.

The Kaiser smiled.

“Here you are again in your dear France,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered; “I am very proud of my French ancestry, and you yourself are very proud to let me see that Frederick lived in a French atmosphere, and to show me all these French books with which he surrounded himself.”

Of course, as may be imagined, the Kaiser’s interest in French culture is more in the way of relaxation than anything else. As I have intimated, his dominant characteristic is his deep-rooted belief in the divinity of his office. Why the ruler of a modern state, which has been so progressive in its scientific and commercial achievements, should be so imbued with mediÆval ideas of kingship is a problem to puzzle psychologists; but it is a factor that cannot be neglected, if one is to form any proper appreciation of governmental conditions in Germany.

The origin of the Kaiser’s belief in the divinity of kings is one thing; but the acceptance of this belief by the whole nation is quite another. Probably the only explanation lies in the docility of the Teutonic temperament. An average citizen who does not revolt at a system of police control so irksome as to be unbearable to the Anglo-Saxon, who does not balk at addressing even minor officials with high-sounding titles, is certainly more ready to believe that absolute power is vested in his Emperor than a man of more independent habits of thought and action.

No matter how distasteful such a form of government may be to citizens of a freer state, or how unsound in theory, it has had its good points. Because the Emperor William has believed in law and order, and has had power to enforce his conceptions on his people, German cities are clean, well cared for, and are freer from the curse of corruption in local governments than in some more democratic countries.

But because the Kaiser’s ideas of proper government included mighty armaments, the military party, always the dominant class, was encouraged to grow stronger and more powerful each year. His very enthusiasm over his efficient army and navy no doubt had a very great influence on the nation at large. Trained to venerate their ruler, naturally they were willing to uphold what he upheld. He had always fostered the growth of trade, and his people had seen how this policy had benefited them. The Kaiser believed in increasing his army and navy, and the people, never questioning his judgment, did not rebel when the tax-collector took a little more of their earnings each year.

Whether the Kaiser ever realised that his encouragement of the military caste had loosed a force that might sweep everything before it is hard to say. If it ever occurred to him that the party was growing too strong, surely his mystic belief in his own divinely derived power reassured him with the argument that his personal authority could always hold these turbulent elements in check. Accustomed to rule as absolutely as any mediÆval potentate, the Kaiser had unconsciously called into being vast forces which in turn were to dominate him, to engulf him, and to make him the foremost figure in the most gigantic cataclysm of human history.