GENERAL VON BERNFIARDL
[To THE EDITOR 01 THE " STEOTATOR."] Sin,- -Your correspondent the Rev. T. B. A. Saunders is sadly at sea In identifying General Friedrich von Bernhardi with the distinguished soldier, diplomatist, and author of interesting Memoirs, Major Theodor von Bernhardi (1802-1887), who, I believe, was his father. In every case the mixing up of the two and the citing of Lord Acton in the matter have led your informant into a maze of fancy, not to say fiction. The General whose name as the authoritative exponent of Germany's war ambitions has been brought to our ken nearly every day since the beginning of the war was a plain Lieutenant of Hussars in 1870, who only entered the Army in the previous year. The story how ho came to incur the displeasure of Bismarck and to be distinguished by Moltke belongs to fable-land. Bernhardi passed through the usual routine of tho military career. The only noteworthy appointment he ever held was that of Military Attach6—may we not say official military spy ?- at Berne in 1891, and he was retired from the Army in 1809 at the age of sixty. As recently as the year 1912 his name is not mentioned in the German books of reference in connexion with any literary production whatsoever. As a boy I used to shoot partridges in the fields adjoining the village of Kunneredorf, in Silesia, near which the General's modest ancestral home is situated. Not far off, in the valley at the foot of the Giant Mountains, lies the old town of Hirschberg, whither of an evening men of his stamp—retired officers, bureaucrats, and local landowners—are apt to congregate around the Stanontisch (reserved table) at their favourite wineshop. I can well imagine the hilarious frame of mind of Bornhardi's envious and critical boon companions when they discuss the world-wide celebrity of ce brace troupler, who, however, it must be admitted, has shown a remarkable phonographic aptitude at middle age for committing to paper the yeasty, ill-digested ideas which for years past have floated about in the cloudy atmosphere at similar convivial gatherings through. out Germany. That Moltke never designated either father or son as the greatest of German military writers you may cheerfully accept on
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