William II was charming as a boy. As a child he was an amiable playfellow. We have plundered the strawberry beds of Laeken together--a sacrilege which was pardoned solely on his account.
I have followed his career as far as it was possible. I believed him to be great. I have heard much of his power not only from his own people, but from all people. He had a wonderful part to play. He did not know how to play it; he could not; he lacked the means to do so, and perhaps, first of all, a clever and good wife. He had no depth of soul. A different wife might perhaps have supplied him with this quality.
Francis Joseph at the beginning of his active career as an Emperor was almost brilliant; he certainly appeared distinguished. Thirty years after, his face assumed an expression of vulgarity of which his first portraits gave no forecast, although at a distance he still gave the impression of being "somebody." But the high _morale_ of the Empress was somewhat reflected in him.
Less blessed in a wife, the longer William II has lived the worse his looks, his speech and his bearing have become. Two men--the late King Edward VII and my father, the King of the Belgians--took his exact measure and augured nothing good for his future.
The intimate opinion of him expressed by my father has often recurred to me, but this would entail a separate chapter and it would lead us far. I will confine myself to stating that the King had always foreseen that Germany, intoxicated with the warlike perorations of William II, who was a preacher of the old Prussian regime, would end by throwing herself upon Belgium, upon France and upon the whole world.
The defences of the Meuse were a convincing indication of the King's forethought. But we shall never know all that the King said, what he did, and what he desired to do in this matter.
Unfortunately certain parties and certain influential men in Belgium wrongly countered his plans instead of acting upon them. The country has suffered cruelly for this mistake.
By what means did William II arrive at those false conclusions which swept away the thrones of Central Europe and which have caused so many calamities? It was not, as has been thought by the Entente, the result of a fatal environment created alike by the ambitions of Germany and her barbaric instincts. The German Emperor wielded immense power. He was in truth an absolute monarch, and in consequence the Reichstag, the Bundesrath, or the various State Parliaments never interfered with him. The Emperor's Cabinet ruled the army, which in its turn ruled the nation. Thus everything was centred in the person of the Emperor, this magnificent fruit of Prussian discipline and force.