SOPHIE'S PLEA.

Taranaki Daily News, 31 December 1920, Page 6

SOPHIE'S PLEA.

WIIjHELM IXVITED TO GREECE. PREPARING CORFU PALACE. London, Dee. 27. Le Matin states that the former Queen Sophie has invited the former Kaiser to Greece, and workmen are already preparing his palace at Corfu. The correspondent of the Times at Lucerne interviewed Queen Sophie, who protested that site was always strongly pro-British. Her mother was English, and spent much of her time in England with Queen Victoria. "You must not forget that we always talk English to each other and the children," she added.

It is reported from Athens that the Cabinet intends to follow Venizelos' foreign policy and to continue the offensive against Mustaplia Kemal. Tino declares that he will not withdraw the army from Asia Minor.

Early this'year Willi ejm expressed a wish to be allowed to live privately at "his" castle of the Achilleion, in Corfu. The Achilleion up till quite recently used as a hospital. It is a beautiful place, surrounded by magnificent terraces—places to dream in—and it has been said that it is too gorgeous and too peaceful a part of the world to be suitable as a retiring place for the man who made the war. It is a great white villa overlooking the sea, and is fronted with grey-green olive trees and a wonderful' avenue of pines down and down to the deep blue, motionless sea. Every turn of the terraces brings one to a new view of beauty. Their deep shade, their pools, their unfamiliar" foliage have no parallel.

Nor has the interior of the castle. Its decoration is the Munich school at its worst, Teutonism unashamed. On a pseudo-Pompeirem there has been superimposed art of the kind that raged in the German. Empire and Austria when the Kaiser was a. younger and more foolish man. Nothing was altered, by the French authorities. They even left that crowning folly—the chair in the form of a saddle on which the Kaiser sat when at his desk, There is the secret little terrace on to which give the windows of his private apartments —the little terrace where he held conclaves with his agents in the Mediterranean.

There is furniture and hangings calculated to make any but a Prussian shudder. The decoration of that wonderful site by such a building is one more crime in Wilhelm's catalogue. Out in the grounds, too, there is the former Kaiser's favourite piece of statuary—a colossal figure of Achilles staring out to sea. It is impressive, if only for its size and appearance of strength. A guide who showed a party around the castle grounds picked up a stone and hurled it at. the statue. The mass emitted a hollow clatter. It was made of tin.