Bismarck's Disciple
Memoirs, 1849-1897. By Prince von Billow. Translated by (Jaffrey Dunlop and F. A. Voigt. (Putnam. 25s.) nis late Prince von Billow's memoirs are at last completed in a fourth volume which covers the first half of his long life.
When, in the calm seclusion of his Roman villa after the War, he dictated the story of his life as he would like his countrymen and the world to view it, he began with his period of high Ace as Foreign Secretary and as Chancellor up to 1909, and went on to review with strong indignation the conduct of his successors in office before and during the War which, he thought, they could have avoided. Having disposed of these highly controversial matters in three stout volumes, he then devoted the fourth volume, now published, to his own early career, from his birth in 1849 to the close of his term as Ambassador at Rome in 1897. It is an able and witty, at time-; a very unpleasant and malicious, record of a half-century that saw great changes in Europe and that transformed the Ger- many of his youth. Billow had a prodigious memory for names and for the scandals connected with those names, and he seems to have amassed letters and papers, though he may not always have made the best use of them. He could recall vividly the many places that he had visited in Europe and the great men that he had known. And he delighted at every possible opportunity to rub in a moral—or what he thought to be a moral—especially if it reflected on the intelligence and conduct of his political adversaries and of the Emperor who had the bad taste, in his view, to dismiss him from the Chancellorship in 1909. And yet, with all its obvious faults, its unfairness, its inaccuracy, its occasional vulgarity and bad taste—as in the long digressions on his affairs with women— this volume, like the others, is extraordinarily readable and entertaining. No one who wishes to understand Bismarck's age can possibly ignore it.
Billow was fortunate in his father, an able and worthy man who in 1851 was sent to the Federal Diet 'at Frankfort as Danish Minister for Holstein, and who there became the close friend of Bismarck, the Prussian Minister to the Diet. The elder Billow left the Danish service in 1869 and, after ad- ministering the affairs of Mecklenburg Strelitz for the Grand Duke, a feudal autocrat of the old type, became Bismarck's trusted assistant at Berlin. Young Billow had an excellent and unusual education at Halle, Lausanne and Leipzig and, after serving as a volunteer in the Franco-Prussian War, finished his legal studies at Greifswald and entered the Foreign 011ice. He was a clever youth and could work hard when he liked, so that his progress, under the friendly eye of the Chancellor and with the help of his father, was rapid. lie served as attache in various capitals, acted as secretary at the Berlin Congress of 1878, and rose to be Minister first at Bucharest and then at Rome. Wherever he went he was popular and he met all the leading personalities of the time. Usually, it must be confessed, he has hard things to say about them, for he was a good hater and an arrant scandalmonger. One of his victims, who happily still survives, M. Camille Barrlre, the distinguished French diplomatist, has been able to secure the insertion of a sharp disclaimer of Billow's asser- tion that M. Barri-re during the Commune agitated, in the Pere Duchcsne, for the murder of the Archbishop of Paris. This shows that Billow was careless, to say the least of it, in verifying his references. But his anecdotes are generally amusing and not all ill-natured. It is curious, for instance, to be told that Queen Victoria, after receiving Bismarck at Berlin in 1888, said : " I don't understand why my daughter could not get on with Prince Bismarck. I think him a very amiable man and we had a most charming conversation."
It is amusing to be told how the celebrated Blowitz impressed his doubting proprietor by inviting all the ambassadors in Paris, with the Papal Nuncio, to meet Mr. Walter at lunch, and how Blowitz, being told that Billow would like to try journalism, offered to get him a post with a salary of 30,000 francs. The stories may not be literally true, but they are at any rate well invented. Blowitz, it is added, owed his position in Paris to Thiers, but Bismarck probably helped him still more. Billow hated Beust, the Austrian statesman who in the crisis of 1870 left France in the lurch—very wisely from the Austrian standpoint ; so that Billow's statement that Beust never washed is doubtful, if characteristic of the author. His pictures of the fantastic licence and corruption of the Russian Court under Alexander II and his son seem intrinsically more credible, -for he, like his chief, held most - firmly to the necessity for a good understanding. between Berlin and St. Petersburg, despite the failings of the Russian statesmen like Gortchakov. Billow's account of the famous meeting of the three Emperors—of Germany, Austria and Russia at Skiernewice in 1884 is vividly written. Bismarck did not trust to mere sentiment but made his so-called re- insurance treaty with Russia to balance his Triple Alliance.
• The repudiation of that Russian treaty by the young Emperor after Bismarck's fall seemed to the ex-Chancellor and to Billow to be a fatal error, as it probably was.
Billow was a man of wide culture, as his book shows. Few busy statesmen except a Gladstone could quote so freely and appositely from the great writers, ancient and modern, in- cluding Leopardi and Shakespeare as well as Goethe and Schiller, Virgil and Horace as well as Aristophanes. He describes the Germany of his boyhood in some admirable pages—the old Frankfort not yet modernized, the quiet little towns of Mecklenburg and Pomerania, the Saxon countryside, the half-grown Berlin. He writes with evident sincerity about Bismarck and, while criticising his May Laws and his anti-Socialist measures, makes out a strong case for his foreign policy, which at any rate kept the peace. His account of Bismarck's dismissal, ostensibly based on information from Count Herbert Bismarck, is painfully impressive. The young Emperor is charged with discourtesy, though it may be urged that the old Chancellor had not made things easy for him. If there is much in the book that might well have been omitted, the many spirited portraits outweigh the dross. Billow is revealed in his autobiography, and he will be remembered by it when his policy is forgotten. E. G. II.
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