“THE CUP OF JUDGEMENT."

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXVII, Issue 45, 23 June 1915, Page 4

“THE CUP OF JUDGEMENT."

“The Man of Iron” is the title of a new novel by Richard Delian, and Bismarck is its central figure. A preface to the book describes it as having been written before the war now raging broke out, and the author says; “This being the case. I see no cause to blot a line that 1 have written. For

the Germany of 1870 was not the Germany of 1915. The I'Tanco-Prnssian War of 1870 was waged sternly and mercilessly, but not in defiance ot the rules that govern the great game. Things were done—as in the instances of Bazeilles and Chateaudun—that made the world shudder, hut nut with the sickness of mortal loathing. Kings and nobles made war like noblemen and kings. . . Yet that great Minister whose prodigious labours roared up, stone by stone, the German Empire was, unless biographers have lied, haunted and obsessed in his declining days by remorse of conscience and terrors of the soul. ‘But for me,’ he is reported to have said, ‘three great wars would not have been made, nor would 800,001) of my fellow-men have died by violence. Now, for all that I have to answer before Almighty God!’ . . Could the relentless ex-

ponent of the fierce gospel of blood and iron have foreseen the imminent, approaching disintegration of his colossal life-work, under the frenzied hands of the modern Attila—might he have known what the dead-sea fruit of ashes and bitterness his fatal creed, grafted upon the oak of Germany, was doomed to bring forth-—he would have drunk ere death of the crimson lees of the Cup of Judgment—he would have seen in the inhuman shape of his terrible pupil, the grotesque, distorted image of himself.”