Blood and Iron Part 2

-- Behind the name Bismarck is a story extraordinary, compounded of the intrigues, blood and pa.s.sions of Austria, Russia, Italy, France, Belgium, Bavaria, Spain, and England.

Volumes would not suffice to give you the bewildering details; mountains of diplomatic letters, orders, telegrams, truths, half-truths, shuffling, cutting and stacking; you go confusedly from palace to people, prince to pauper, university to prison pen--all the way from Waterloo to Versailles, where William I received at last his great glory, German Emperor.

-- Bismarck's story is best told in flashes of lightning--as you try to picture a bolt from the black skies.

By the patience of the methodical historian who laboriously examines each doc.u.ment in the National archives, one fills soon enough a ten-volume account--with a swamp of cross-references, footnotes to each paragraph, and with notes to the footnotes.

-- Yet this Bismarck is not inaccessible if we get at his inner side, grasp the man's essence.

Strong arm and tireless brain Time asked;--a man who could neither be bent, broken nor brow-beaten; a man who would for 40 years follow a plan by no means clear; often had to go out in the dark and find his way, all old landmarks lost, and no pole-star in sight.

-- I dwell on one outstanding fact, all down through his career: I mean Bismarck's power to conceal pain. Hurricanes of insulting criticisms swept around his head, year after year, but on the whole Otto's att.i.tude was that of the mountain that defies the storm. He would never give in that, as it seemed to onlookers, a shaft of disagreeable truth had struck home; that a soft-nosed bullet, well aimed, had torn his flesh or broken a bone; or that a dagger-thrust, going directly through his coat of the White Cuira.s.sier had pierced his heart.

-- Even in his bitter defeats, he had a peculiar idiomatic way of making out that the result was exactly what he desired. It was of course only an adroit explanation to protect his pride; the brazen invention of a nature that would not acknowledge itself in error. Here is Bismarck, to the core.

-- For a long and turbulent life-time Bismarck's soul was tried by the very tortures of the d.a.m.ned!

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Wherein it is set forth that Otto von Bismarck's ma.s.sive political genius, combined with his personal foibles, mark him as a heroic figure, side by side with Frederick the Great.

-- In attempting to depict a consistent Bismarck, we find that his life has been as much misinterpreted through the carping need of envious political critics as through the bad art of historically well-disposed friends.

The perplexing problem is to blend his ma.s.sive mental grasp, side by side with his strange fits of irritability, his turbulence, his deep-drinking, his gluttony, his wild pranks.

About him at all times, whether expressed or concealed, there floated an ironic derision of the littleness of the average man, whom at heart Bismarck despised.

While the eyes of detractors are everywhere, the voice of hero-wors.h.i.+p has likewise conspired to make an impossible idol of a man with very human and ofttimes crying frailties; the biographic truth is to be found somewhere between these two extremes; but even with this clear clue in mind, it is often difficult to reconcile amazing personal and diplomatic inconsistencies with which his career abounds.

-- Then, too, there is something that strikes like the irony of Socrates, only bitter instead of light; and Bismarck reveals now and then a touch remindful of that Rabelaisian hero whose enormous capacity could only be quenched by draining the river dry. To tell Bismarck's inner life-story, in a large way, one must often deal with a series of pictures akin to the G.o.ds and devils in Dore's delineations for Dante's "Inferno."

It often seems as though every important act of this great man's life was charged with the significance of Destiny, stands forth vividly against a background of intrigue, superst.i.tion, personal follies, the smoke and flame of battle--a heroic figure side by side with such master-spirits as Frederick the Great.

Like Frederick the Severe, this Bismarck is very human indeed, and has his crying weaknesses, and his enemies, G.o.d knows, tried for forty years to get rid of him by intrigue, often by a.s.sa.s.sination; yet until his great duty is done he must hold firmly to his place, must do the work which brings him no peace, or rest, only trouble year after year.

-- Throughout the amazing story, no matter which way we travel, we always return to a profound sense of this giant's will and his ma.s.sive knowledge of human life, expressed in his ability to force the shrewdest men in Europe to do his bidding.

His sense of power is so supreme that sometimes it really seems that, as Bismarck himself often sets forth, his authority fell from heaven.

Here, there is a direct harking back to the ancient days in the Alt Mark, to the Circle of Stendal with its little town of Bismarck, on the Biese, where stands the ancient masonry dating from 1203, and known as the "Bismarck Louse."

-- The strange legend of the Bismarck Louse tells worlds of the ancient Bismarck power, in those far-off times, helps us in the year 1915 to grasp certain obscure phases of the Bismarck racial strength, inherited by Otto von Bismarck.

-- This medieval Bismarck Tower received its name from a gigantic louse which inhabited this place, and had to be fed and appeased; therefore, every day the superst.i.tious peasants of the district brought huge quant.i.ties of meat and drink, for the monster's food. It is needless to add that these visits were encouraged by the Bismarck lord of the soil, in Alt Mark;--and here you see already the cunning in managing human nature so characteristic of the Bismarck genius.

-- The purely social application of this gossip may, however, be eyed with suspicion, as a French canard. It was so easy for "Figaro" to libel the Bismarck of 1871, whereupon the whole French press followed and barked at the Iron Chancellor's heels.

He was caricatured, spit at, reviled, depicted as the beast-man in Europe.

-- For one thing, Bismarck knew France was the richest nation in Europe, also that she had ambition for the left bank of the Rhine; and to General Sheridan, who chanced to be at Sedan and Gravelotte on official business, Bismarck said, "The only way to keep France from waging war in the near future is to empty her pockets."

-- French newspaper editors lashed themselves into insanity trying to invent new names for the man who had brought the downfall of the Empire, at Sedan; the man who at Versailles was arranging the hardest terms of peace ever conceived by a diplomatic Shylock, bent on having his pound of flesh.

-- Paris journalists called him "the incarnation of the evil spirit,"

"the Antichrist," "the shrewd barbarian," "crime-stained ogre, who was always thras.h.i.+ng his wife with a dog-whip," "he kept a harem, from which no Berlin shopkeeper's daughter was safe;" "once he became enamored of a nun and hired ruffians to kidnap her and bear her away to his castle;" "he is the father of many illegitimate children, in Berlin some say as many as fifty;" "he once lashed one of his Russian mistresses over the bare shoulders because he suspected her of looking at another admirer;" "he uses his confidential diplomatic knowledge to add to his huge private fortune by gambling on every Bourse in Europe."

-- How magnificent--if it were indeed only true! What a relief that would be over the tame details of average human life, and what a boon to biographers this grand wickedness! Alas, the tales are only important as specimens of French drawing room gossip of 1871!

-- The fables never bothered Bismarck a moment. When he was ready, he repaid them in his own splendid coin; and certainly he was past-master of the gentle art of putting a razor-edge on an insult!

-- Bismarck had his vituperative side. Egged on by his wife and his son, Bismarck became at times verbally ferocious. His wife, a descendant of those terrible Frankish women-warriors, stemming from barbarian times, could under stress exercise a barbarian's stark freedom of speech; and when Bismarck, furious at some insult, was replying with a political cannonade, she would infuriate him to still greater exertions by suggesting:

-- "Bismarck, hiss a little! Hiss a little!"

-- And after seven hundred years, the Bismarck psychology behind the old Tower's superst.i.tious appeal remains substantially the same. We shall see at times as we sketch for you the life portrait of Otto von Bismarck a mysterious atavism; the self-same mental astuteness that stood his ancestors in such good stead, enabling them to frighten the peasants into providing the corn.

-- Yes, blood will tell--and the Bismarck blood is rare juice!

CHAPTER II

Blood Will Tell

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Battle-born, Bismarck's genius springs from the very fire and sword of human nature--resembling definitely his iron-headed barbarian ancestry, whose freedom remained unconquered through the centuries.

-- We cannot hope to trace Bismarck to any complete legal basis--any more than we can defend the complete legitimacy of France, Belgium, or the United States, countries avowedly harking back to revolutionary origin. Bismarck's life, likewise, presents unquestioned elements of anarchistic root. Inherited from battle-born Bismarcks are forces peculiar to himself, free, and individualistic, profoundly expressive wherein Mother Nature summoning her ultimate powers endows a colossal courage in a colossal mind and body.

-- As far as the Thirteenth Century, the name Bismarck, then styled Bishofsmarck or Biscopesmarck, is a.s.sociated with the little river Biese; but whence the original stock is for antiquarians to debate.

Believe the Bismarcks to be of Bohemian, of Frankish or of Jewish origin, or of Slavic if you will, you find bespectacled, scholastic authorities who will open the musty pages and display to you the truth.

-- Herbort of Biese became in due course Herbort von Bismarck. The "von" was unquestionably a mark of geographical origin, rather than a sign of n.o.bility. The name is borne by other families from Biese; but the important part is not the name but the men behind that name, what that name stood for.

-- Herbort von Bismarck's name is enrolled in the guild papers as master of the merchant tailors of Stendal, in the old Mark of Brandenburg; a "Mark" being somewhat equivalent to an English "s.h.i.+re."

-- But this fact about the tailor-ancestor must not be pressed too far. Some antiquarian of the year 2700 A. D., let us say, might argue that President Taft was a steam-shoveler, because the name is found recorded among the laborers who helped dig the Panama Ca.n.a.l; whereas, the fact is that the President was enrolled as an honorary member of one of the labor unions.