SECRETS OF WINDSOR.

Hokitika Guardian, 23 January 1926, Page 4

SECRETS OF WINDSOR.

“1870” REVELATIONS. “With permission of Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Empress of India, I have to-dav given into Dr Muther’s (Secretary to the Queen) keeping three wooden boxes, bound with iron, which are my personal property. The said boxes were deposited in my presence in a secret fireproof safe under the state staircase at Windsor Castle.” That is the account of a strango incident written by the German Crown Prince, afterwards tho Emperor Frederick, in July, 1887. The boxes which he hid contained his private papers. “Unhappily, he could not deposit them in Berlin with security,” wrote the Empress Frederick after her husband’s death, “and. as he thought that he would, possibly be ordered abroad in the coining winter, he held that his papers would be better hidden at mamma’s than at our home in Berlin.”

Part of these papers, the dairy kept by the Prince during the war with France in 1870-71, have just been published in Germany, and to read them is to understand the Prince’s reason for hiding them. He did not want them to lull into the hands of the. “Iron Chancellor,” whom be condemns.

The boxes were brought back to Germany after the Emperor’s death in 1888, and, with the. permission of tin Empress, most of the papers were placed in the Hohenzollem archives.

One packet of papers contained the amplified war diary, and on it was written ail order that it .should not he opened for 50 years. This period expired three years ago, and the dairy, edited by Dr Meisnor, is now given to tho world.

In reading these memoirs it is difficult to bear in mind that the war which it described broke out no years ago. Frederick might, it would seem, he describing a war 50'd years ago, so different was it from the war which this generation lias seen. He describes the fearful hour ol leaving wife and children for the war, and goes on to tell of a round of pleasant visits to the South German States, whose soldiers he was to command. At last the Prince found himself at his headquarters, and heard the sound of cannon. War was waged politely in those days. On August 6th, 18il), the Prince records that he met a French officer who had been taken prisoner.

“HATE DOGS US.” “Nous avoirs tout perdu 1” cried tbe Frenchman. The Prince tried to camfort him; “Yous n’avea pas perdu l’honneur,” lie said. The most striking passages of the diary arc those in which Frederick condemns Bismarck. He sees that the sympathy of Europe, which at first had been with Germany, is now with France, and lie blames the “Iron Chancellor.” In words which a prophet might have used, lie shows his love of old Germany mid his fear of the new:— “In the nation of thinkers and philosophers, of poets and artists, of idealists and enthuskustis, people see no more than a race of conquerors and destroyers to whom no pledge and no treatv is holy. “We arc certainly, without contradiction, the foremost civilised race of the world; but at present it appears that we are neither loved nor respected, but onlv feared. . . So far Ims the theory of blood and iron invented by Bismarck brought us. “What use to us is might, warlike fame and glory, it hate and mistiust dog us everywhere, it every step uldeal, we take in our progress forward is regarded with suspicion? “Bismarck has made us great and mighty, but he has robbed us of our friends, of the sympathy of the world and of our good conscience.”