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It is bitterly hard for us who have 1870 behind us." They feel that they should no longer be treated to such bumptiousness. I trust that I am no swashbuckler, but I have the greatest sympathy with the present Emperor in his capacity as war-lord, and in his insistent stiffening of Germany's martial backbone.
The Porsslanese are not a laughing people. They had never been known to laugh before except in the most feeble manner. The events of the past year had not been especially humorous, and the coming of the great war-lord was far from being a laughing matter. Yet with the perversity of heathen they had selected this impressive occasion for showing their incurable barbarism and bad taste.
Amen ought to have been a Tutonian soldier. He says the best imagery of religion comes from war. I told him I had an article written about a fight which said that our men 'fought like demons' and 'yelled like fiends, and I would change it to read that they fought like seraphs and yelled like cherubim, but he didn't think it was funny." The War-Lord
A perfect modern type is that fiery Freiherr von Oldenburg, who advised the Kaiser to send a troop of Uhlans, as in the old Cromwellian days, to clear out the politicians of a disloyal Reichstag. The Prussian Junkers are the lieges of the war-lord. They are all the more loyal to the throne as they are poor, and therefore dependent on the King for their very subsistence.
This ruler believes it to be essentially a part of his business to be a Lorenzo de Medici to his people in art; their high priest in religion; their envoy extraordinary to foreign peoples; their watchful father and friend in legislation dealing with their daily lives; their war-lord, and their best example in all that concerns domestic happiness and patriotic citizenship.
Wotan is hardly less dependent on them than Fafnir; the War-Lord visits their work, acclaims them in stirring speeches, and casts down their enemies; whilst Loki makes commercial treaties for them and subjects all his diplomacy to their approval. The end cannot come until Siegfried learns Alberic's trade and shoulders Alberic's burden.
The reader will understand how filial piety the domestic religion of obedience widens in range with social evolution, and eventually differentiates both into that political obedience required by the community, and that military obedience exacted by the war-lord, obedience implying not only submission, but affectionate submission, not merely the sense of obligation, but the sentiment of duty.
William II. has bewildered the world as a versatile and omniscient dilettante, war-lord and peacemaker, Mohammedan and Christian—always a comedian, yet always in earnest. And we all know how the heir to the throne is the reverse of the Kaiser, and how this Crown Prince, with the fancies of a degenerate, has deserved to be called the “Clown Prince.”
The people in control, in an increasingly intelligent control of their own lives and their own governments, will be governed by a higher degree of self-enlightenment and mutual self-interest than under the domination or even the leadership of any type of hereditary ruling class or war-lord.
The laugh from underground, the deeper gloom are they not all but omnipresent throughout his later and greatest work? The war could not deepen such pessimism. As a matter of fact, Mr. Hardy's war poetry is more cheerful, because more heroic, than his poetry about the normal world. Destiny was already crueller than any war-lord.
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