THE KAISER "UP AGAINST IT."

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 229, 24 November 1916, Page 6 (Supplement)

THE KAISER "UP AGAINST IT."

1 -V£ ICTI RE NOW IX BERLIN* A.VD , WHAf IT TELLS THE ARCH-HUX. By "DIPLOMAT." J Ido not suppose that in all the war there lias been a week so full of gool ' fighting news for the Allies as this la>~ ' week, says a writer in the Illustrated I Sunday Herald of September 17th. It began, remember, with the capture of Ginchy—an event so remote now that one thinks of it as if it were months ago. Then came the French advance to Bouchavesnes, which in the completeness of execution was probably the most perfect piece of tactics In ' the war. > LIKE A ROMAN "TESTI'DO." With armed cars which can creep up 1 to a machine-gun position like a Ro- * man "Testudo" creeping up under the ! arrows and bows of the cross-bowmen ' (those ancient machine-gunners), with aeroplanes that swoop down and skim ! scattering death along the ground, we are indeed teaching the enemy that the villainy he has taught us we can exe- • cute, and that ive are bettering the invention. EMBARRASSED MEN. [ And in the middle of all this, you . know, somewhere on the Eastern front a group of embarrassed men are sitting ' round a table. There is BethmannHollweg, benevolently bearded and spectacled, knowing that the militar}' ' game is up, and thinking gloomily no doubt of the task that awaits him, the civilian, when the armies are rolled up and someone has to go, hat in hand, and wait on the Allies wliile they confer what they will do to their beaten foes. There are some minor princes, no doubt, a little sullen, a little perplexed with private doubts about Prussia, but sullen or not, well aware that tlie.r destiny is bound up with the empire which has come to this after fifty years of prepartion and two years of war. THREE-CARD-TRICK MEN OF STATECRAFT. And then there are the newer Allies, the adventurers of high politics, the three-card-trick men of statecraft, Enver and Ferdinand. They joined what they thought was a promising scheme of plunder, and they find that they have invested in a concern in which there is no such thing as limited liability, and in which, though they go on paying, as long as land or men or money remains to them, their shares are never fullv paid up. BULGARIA A DESEIH. The prospect is not, we can agree, bright for them. Bulgaria is a desert, with starving women and children and old the men gone. Terror reigns in its capital, where ite King dare not go. Turkey is steadily losing its eastern provinces; it has lost Arabia and the holy plates, and it sees Constantinople itself threatened by its oldest and most persistent enemy. AT THE END OF THE TABLE. And then at the end of the table you can conceive the author of all this evil gloom, the gambler who has staked and lost, the criminal who attempted murder und is in process of committing suicide instead—the Kaiser himself. He is up against it nor.v. On all fronts his enemies press upon him. He is driven to desperate expedients. He has to ' all Turkish army corps to defend Catholic Austria against Orthodox Russia —the m;;n who once visited the holy places of Palestine as a new Cruj sader. calling in the infidel to an in verted crusade. He has had to humiliate himself and his dynasty by bringing in a popular idol to prop up its waning esteem, and when next week his Reichstag opens lie must needs take Hindenburg \ with him to the opening, not w:se, perhaps, Iteing very sure of his reception. And he lias to sit there at tliis anxious conference at his Eastern headquarters with resentful and hosti'e e.vi's round hmi and upbraiding and bitter questioning on the tip of each obsequious tongue. IF I WERE THE KAISER. I shouldn't much care about .t, would your 1 If I were the Kaiser I should be thinking of that great official painting in Berlin of the proclamation of the lirst Emperor in the Salle des Ulaces at Versailles. The first William stands very proudly there, the Kings ol Bavaria and Wurtemburg and Saxony round lum, and a little lower Moltke and Bismarck at his feet. It is a proud and pleasant picture, and it all happened only forty-four years ago. I wonder whether the Kaiser thinks much about it now. as ho gazes down the table and sees the gloomy faces of his Allies.