MEMOIRS OF THE CROWN PRINCE OF GERMANY.• ONE would have

to know the Ex-German Crown Prince inti- mately—which the writer of this review does not profess to do— to be able to say with what degree of sincerity these Memoirs have been written. If we accept them at their face value we

must admit that they contain several excellent sentiments, and that the author is capable of writing engagingly about life and friendship and sport, and of dreaming dreams about the moral advancement of his country. But in all this do we see the real Crown Prince ? If we do we can only say that he utterly failed to make his will felt through the thick screen of German intrigue and intolerable traditions and that he has been blamed for being malign when he was only miserably weak.

There is, however, another possible explanation which critical justice requires us to set down, though we do not assert that it is

the true one. The Crown Prince, of course, wants to return to Germany. He probably thinks that though the bureaucratic autocracy is dead for ever the German people may become tired of their bourgeois Republican rulers and desire to establish a

Constitutional Monarchy. If they should, would not he be the very man for the throne as well as being the legitimate claimant ?

Possibly he said to himself, in effect : " Happy thought ! My book shall be my testimonial for the appointment. I will add attractive Constitutional patter to my good title." We will not attempt to decide which is the true explanation of the author's motives ; one makes him weak, the other makes him dishonest.

All we will do is to take the book as we find it, and to declare that it is a more agreeable book than we had expected him to write.

The unconventional and sporting side of the Crown Princes character always made him dislike formality. At his father's Court he was continually being buried under avalanches of ceremony. He kicked his way out of them whenever he could. He gives us a curious picture of Bismarck at work in his study towards the end of the great Chancellor's rule. Perhaps the young Princes dimly understood that Bismarck was the enemy of their father ; at all events, they had a wholesome dread of the old man :—

" Accidentally, I stumbled into a small room in which the old Prince sat poring over the papers on his writing-desk. To my dismay, he at once turned his eyes full upon me. My previous experience of such matters led me to believe that should bo promptly and pitilessly expelled. Indeed, I had already started a precipitate retreat, when the old Prince called me back. He laid down his pen, gripped my shoulder with his giant palm and looked straight into my face with his penetrating eyes. Then he nodded his head several times and said : Little Prince, I like the look of you, keep your fresh naturalness.' He gave me a kiss and I dashed out of the room. I was so proud of the occurrence that I treated my brothers for several days as totally inferior beings. It was incredible ! I had blundered into a study and had not been thrown out— not even reprimanded."

The Crown Prince writes of his father with much frankness, but also with sympathy and not without respect. He blames his father for the kind of education he himself received. At a very early stage he came under military discipline and all communications between himself and the Kaiser were conducted through a military third party. But he tells us that it was not only he and his brothers who suffered from being subject to official control instead of being directly under a father's care— the Kaiser himself suffered in a comparable way. Headstrong and self-sufficing though the Kaiser was in the earlier years of his reign, he completely lost his self-confidence--so the Crown

Prince says—during the crisis of 1908 and never recovered it. From that time onwards he wavered and was without nerve.

He was led by his advisers. The Crown Prince remarks that his father often injured himself and his cause by his theatricality of

• Memoirs of the Crown Prince of Germany. London: Thornton Butterworth MA. nett manner. But he declares, nevertheless, that the Kaiser in all his thoughts and purposes was pure and noble (edel). We

learn that the Kaiser after the crisis of 1908 never forgave Prince Billow. He felt, as it were, that when the tiger had charged Prince Billow had shinned up the nearest tree.

The Crown Prince certainly pays a pretty tribute to his wife, and says that gossip was never more malicious than when it told stories of their domestic unhappiness. He invites us to believe that he always understood and admired King Edward.

The misunderstanding came from the Kaiser. The Crown Prince's praise of King Edward leads him on to express his admiration for the Constitutional methods of Great Britain :-

" Both by nature and by lessons learnt from history and experience, I always possessed a leaning towards the British constitutional system, and I have thought much about the possibility of its being adapted to our form of State. As I have pointed out before, I was not spared a good many rebuffs and criticisms whenever, in pre-war years, I expounded and defended my opinions on this subject."

Although, according to himself, he was always at heart a Constitutionalist, he evidently shared the carefully prepared doctrine of the inner circle of the German Government that Germany was being " ringed in " by her enemies. All the author's arguments on this subject seem to us to be hopelessly confused. He talks about the purely defensive purpose of the German Navy and of the unpleasant duty of having to increase that Navy ; and yet the whole world knows that Great Britain tried on several occasions to bring about a " holiday " from competitive shipbuilding and that in each case Germany refused. One piece of evidence he can, of course, quote with natural

effect to support his point of view. He recalls the fact that Lord Fisher put it on record in his ^reminiscences that in 1908 he had proposed to King Edward that we should " Copenhagen the German Navy." It only shows how much mischief may be done by a foolish flippancy. Those who used to under- stand Lord Fisher's ways would very likely say that he did not mean it seriously. We do not know ; all we do know is that King Edward cannot have taken it seriously and that nobody else did. The Crown Prince, however, is candid enough to admit that his countrymen did both repel and provoke other nations by their bluster and offensive political tactics. But, really, he asks too much of our credulity when he explains that in seeming to support the militarists in the Agadir and Zabem affairs he was really taking the other side !

We must come now to the War. The Crown Prince attributes a good deal of the ineffectiveness of German action to the character of the Chancellor, Herr von Bethmann Hollweg :-

" In the post for which we ought to have sought for the best, the boldest, the most far-sighted and the wisest of statesmen, there stood a bureaucrat of sluggish and irresolute character, his mind in a reverie of weary and resigned cosmopolitanism and tranquil acceptance of unalterable developments. People liked to call him the Philosopher of Hohensloow.' I never succeeded in discovering a trace of philosophic wisdom in the languid nature of this man, who dropped so easily into tactless fatalism and who qualified even every upward flight with the parrot cry of divinely ordained dependency.' His hesitating heart had no wings, his will was joyless, his resolve was lame. This man, eternally vacillating in his decisions and overborne by any contact with natures of a fresher hue, was certainly not the pepper person, in the years prior to the war—least of all in the three that immediately preceded its outbreak—to represent German policy against the energetic, resolute, quick- witted and inexorable men whom England and France had selected as exponents of their power."

The Crown Prince says that the German order to retire given at the first battle of the Marne was to him quite inexplicable. He believes that Germany had already won the battle—a state- ment which makes us think that his comprehension of the battle is, to say the least of it, incomplete. More important is his statement that in December, 1915, and in July, 1917, he earnestly advised that the way should be prepared for peace by compromise, and he says that his memoranda on these occasions were only two of many similar efforts which he made in the same direction. The chief objects of his admiration among the German leaders are Hindenburg and Ludendorff. He describes how perfectly complementary to one another these two men were. Among all the German soldiers no one comes in for more severe condemnation than Moltke. The Crown Prince compares 'aim with Benedek (whose name he spells wrong), the pnbsppy commander of the Austrian army at the battle of Sadowa in 1886. Benedek was required to assume the command in oppo- sition to his own wishes and in spite of his own declared sense of infitneae—ao it had been with Moltke when he was made Chief of the Staff. Writing of Moltke's failure and of the retreat from the Marne the Crown Prince says :-

" With the retreat from the Marne, Schlieffen's great plan was frustrated. It was based on the rapid subjection of France. I shall never forget the terrible impression made upon me on September 11 by the sudden appearance in my Varennes and Argonne Headquarters of General von Moltke accompanied by Lieutenant-Colonel Tappan. The general was completely broken down, and was literally struggling to repress his tears. According to his impressions, the entire German army had been defeated and was being rapidly and unceasingly rolled back. He explained that he did not yet know where this retreat could be brought to a standstill. How he had formed such a senseless conception was for us, at that time, beyond comprehension."

Schlieffen's " great plan" to which the author refers was, of course, the scheme for marching through Belgium, ignoring her

neutrality. Strategic railways had been laid some years before the War up to the Belgian frontier. At first there had been some pretence on the part of the German Government of not sanction- ing Schlieffen's cynical and perfidious plan ; but within a year or two it was formally approved by the Kaiser. All this, of course, was known to our soldiers at the time and it makes it the more amazing that the Liberal Government should have put their money on the triumph of the peace party in Germany, which for all practical purposes did not exist. We should greatly like to know how the Crown Prince would reconcile Schlieffen's abominable plan with his own professions of amity and good faith. He is quite silent on this subject. He speaks as though he had a right to a quiet conscience as he always told his troops that God was with them.

His account of the last seenes when the oraah came for Ger- many is new and strange. We should like to allow the credit of historical accuracy to these pages, but there are unfortunate contradictions. He tells us in one place that the stamina of the German army had broken down, that there was, in fact, demorali-

zation ; but in another place he says that if only there had been unity at the centre the situation might have been retrieved as the troops could be depended upon. Until we know which the Crown Prince means we are not very ready to believe his story of a sort of coup d'itat by Prince Max of Baden and others, for this story has no point if the army had really collapsed, as we

believe it had.