Well, anyhow, there it was, all lifted up, absurdly, like a dog baying.
Then, when I got nearer to the gun, and looked closely at it, I saw something which I have seen so often in a million German things that it has become a commonplace for them in my mind, but I know it is perilous to whisper it on this side of the Channel. The thing that has become a commonplace in my mind is the fact that Germans cannot _make_, but can only _copy_. They have many negative virtues, very unsuited to their vast aberrations. They are fairly industrious, very simple, normally kind and domestic, and in their dreamy way, they half catch now and then what the older civilisation of Europe expresses in strong and positive beauty. But they copy. They are impressed. They are a soft metal and ancient Europe is the die. What made me think of this commonplace was the seeing on that gun--actually engraved upon a modern gun!--a poor little copy of Louis XIV. Think of it! After now much more than two hundred years! There it was before my astonished eyes, and I could hardly believe it; the motto of the great king copied upon a Hohenzollern gun! It was like reading the "_Honi soit qui mal y pense_" of the Plantagenets on the Menu of a Cosmopolitan Hotel....
For Louis XIV in his proudest moment had engraved upon his cannon, just above the middle point where cannons turn upon their trunnions, a great "L" written in a flourishing script, with a crown above it, and then along the breach, just above the touch-hole, he had had engraved upon a sort of scroll the phrase "_Ultima ratio regum_." It was a famous phrase in Europe then. The greatest of English writers made good fun of it when he said: "It seems that his arguments have been turned against himself."
That was Louis XIV's manner; and, I say, I thought everybody had forgotten it. I thought that no one remembered that motto except a few miserable people like myself who potter about doing useless things. But I was wrong. The last King of Prussia, the last of the Hohenzollerns, the man upon whom the famous oracle of the thirteenth century has fallen, _he_ remembered it--William II, last and most grotesque German Emperor, was responsible for this silly thing.