Can you imagine why such "sweet affection for the All Highest" should make up for lack of military qualities in a general officer slated for supreme command in the field?
For his crusade Maximilian Harden won much praise from English writers, but if he had let it flourish in high places for a decade longer, Great Britain would be richer in blood and treasure.
Another of these coteries of men who dispensed high offices among themselves for their own ends existed in the Imperial Court—aye, it lodged there, not in the Schloss or Neues Palais exactly, but—oh, irony!—in the Princess’s Palace, the hideous _dependance_ of the Crown Prince Palais, Unter den Linden, the apartments granted for life to Royal Chamberlain Count von Wedell being its headquarters.
Oh, the jolly tea-parties they enjoyed in the great high-ceilinged rococo chambers, full of discarded furniture and appointments of the Frederick the Great and Watteau period; Louis Quatorze and Quinze, Boule and Chippendale, Empire, here and there—antique regularity and capricious _bizarrerie_, gems of Art some, also pieces chipped and disjointed.
Carlyle called Frederick "the last of the Kings"; he was certainly the last of Prussian kings possessed of an appreciation of the beautiful. The present War Lord kicked from his palaces—none were built since the eighteenth century—all _objets d’art_ that would please the eye of anybody not a German boor, substituting unmentionables of the goose-step type, square-jointed, clumsy, coarse, and wholly _mauvais goût_.
What the "majestic" chambers lack, then, those of the Excellencies _nolens volens_ boast. Wedell’s rooms in particular contained a variety of eighteenth century _chef d’oeuvres_ selected by the Count himself from heaps of "ancient rubbish" sent from the Neues Palais and Sans-Souci by order of Court Marshal von Liebenau, a corporal dignified by a gold stick.
No doubt the Knights of Wedell’s Round Table enjoyed what was "_caviare_ to the general." At any rate, their tea-parties seem to have been a delight to "high and low," for no one admitted to the charmed circle ever sent his regrets.
We find there General of Cavalry Count Wilhelm von Hohenau, son of the War Lord’s uncle, the late Prince Albrecht of Prussia, and Sailor Trost, of His Majesty’s yacht _Hohenzollern_; the gentleman already introduced, Count Kuno von Moltke, also Lord of the Cathedral and Private Riedel of the Uhlans; Count Lynar, brother-in-law of the Grand Duke of Hesse and Colonel of His Majesty’s Horse Guards, and Gus Steinhauer, midshipman; Count Frederick von Hohenau, brother of Wilhelm, and Court Councillor Kestler, who rose from the ranks to gentlemanly estate and high honours in His Majesty’s service; His Serene Highness Prince Philip of Eulenburg, Right Honourable Privy Councillor to the Prussian Crown, member of the House of Lords, etc., and Raymond Lecomte, French chargé d’affaires. These men were regular attendants, under the presidency of the noble-born host, of course, but there was a fair sprinkling of counts and barons and so on in this royal palace connected by a covered archway with the town residence of the Crown Prince and his family!