John Hubert Greusel

“ The longer the French Assembly hesitates to call an election the more we will starve the city into submission. Live on horseflesh, stale bread, cats and dogs!—die of fever and pestilence!—the sooner it is over! Our siege guns will continue to bark night and day, Paris will be reduced to ashes, crumble to ruins, but the demands of the Prussian King must be obeyed. No power on this earth can turn me from my project. ”

“ Hesekiel, the German historian.
¶ Bismarck, who was now to receive his first experience in handling men in political alignments, had inherited a country estate from the old family domains and was living the life of a squire; hunting foxes, with dogs and gay companions, passing nights in taverns, drinking heavily, eating like a glutton, amusing himself as he pleased; a giant in intellect and in stomach; turbulent, tempestuous, rough, a bad man to cross, believe me, but among his cronies voted a prince of good fellows. Such is our German hero as he comes upon the great stage of affairs. ”

“ He knew too that despite the old German family and tribal feuds, the Germans are brothers; standing apart it is true at this hour, fighting each other; yet the day is to come when Bismarck will triumph in his Germany, one and united. It mattered not, he would make friends with his deadly enemy, if such a step seemed advisable to carry out that cherished plan for a free and united Germany.
If he could not bend men to his will by logic, he tried flattery, and if that failed he threatened war, and the war came, too, but not till Bismarck was good and ready. ”

“ To a man of Bismarck’s iron mold, the exercise of power is the breath of life; this made it a tragedy for the aged Bismarck to withdraw.
It was but natural for him, as time passed and his ambition grew, that he should believe himself the sole founder of the German Empire. His constant utterances after his downfall bear out this idea. The composite victory of scores of minds merged in his imagination and now crystallized in his own soul victory. Such is human nature, and so we say “Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo,” but is this strictly true? ”

“ The giant’s ponderous hammer rings on the anvil of destiny. Enter, thou massive figure, Bismarck, and in deadly earnest take thy place before Time’s forge.
¶ It is, it must be, a large story—big with destiny! The details often bore with their monotony; they do not at all times march on; they drag, but they do indeed never halt permanently; ahead always is the great German glory.
¶ Forward march, under Prince Bismarck. He is our grim blacksmith, looming through the encircling dark, massive figure before Time’s forge. ”

“ He should have a torrent of cutting words, his eyes should flash and his blood should boil, yet he should be able to wage [148] a secret war, masked under compliments, or draw his dagger and strike for the heart.
He should have thousands of enemies and prevail over them all.
He should have boundless ambition; action should be the zest of his life, and at crucial times he should display an uncontrollable temper.
He should seek the path of glory; a man of fiery enthusiasm, who never forgives an enemy; has fits of rage; is jealous; a great swordsman, fights duels ”

“ Thus in some senses Bismarck appears in the figure of the superman; for there is absolutely no question that on many occasions he forced strong men to do his bidding, squarely against their individual preferences!
¶ This huge bulk, this deep-drinking, gluttonous Bismarck, this world-defying voice, raged and stormed through his eighty-three years of life—making little men’s souls shrink in fear—and ever the essence of his genius was for alignments with men, or against them, using this human clay ultimately for his own peculiar ends, as the potter molds the mud. ”

“ Like Frederick the Severe, this Bismarck is very human indeed, and has his crying weaknesses, and his enemies, God knows, tried for forty years to get rid of him by intrigue, often by assassination; 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 massive knowledge of human life, expressed in his ability to force the shrewdest men in Europe to do his bidding. ”

“ Hence, from Bismarck’s point of view, it was time to be done with the bursting of blood vessels in a frenzy about equality, and to come down to the essential facts of human nature; or if you like the words better, human ways.
It is not necessarily a mark of wisdom to issue “manifestoes against special privileges” and to set up that “all” the people are fit to rule an empire. ”

“ One must be willing to sacrifice brothers, mother, sister, father to the guillotine—for the good of one’s country.
The Robespierre idea is that the supreme duty of a Nation is to repress “crime,” as well as to uphold “virtue” and “crime” consists largely in not agreeing with the great central authority. He has had many followers since that day.
¶ Robespierre was really a great man gone wrong; he had in many respects a brilliant mind; he was a profound orator; a born leader; but he was unsound at the core, like a rotten apple; taught bloodshed and violence, as expressions of National honor. ”

“ With pugnacious Prussia on the North, with rapacious Austria on the South, with insolent Bavaria hanging off on the Southwest, and the others fighting tooth and nail for the land, that will eventually fall to the strongest—the German problem became an exhibition over many years of the noblest, likewise of the darkest, passions of the human breast. ”

“ He did not pass under the yoke of defeat by revealing any of those soft virtues that writers who make a wax doll of this mighty man would have us believe.
He raged and stormed impotently in his retirement at Friedrichsruh, and by every loud and insulting means in his power—by voice, pen, by special interviews, in his private letters, in his telegraphic dispatches, in his talks with the old friends or new callers, and to the last scratch of his Memoirs—Bismarck remains unrepentant, turbulent, to the end fighting bitterly against the Fate to which he could not and would not submit. ”

“ Here, the mental attitude of the German people passes beyond the dogmas of politics or social intercourse whatsoever; it merges into a mysterious world of reality, close and near yet baffling to describe; expressing itself in an invincible National faith, now about to burst forth, at last, and sweep all before it! ”

“ She had sunk so low that her very children were brought up to despise the language of the Fatherland; the children scoffing at the parents, aped foreign ways rather than support German originality, strength and national genius; young men coming of age preferred to leave the land of their birth, mocked the simple German virtues, and occupied themselves in idle dalliance in Paris, or failing in this, set up imitations of French courts in the petty German monarchies. ”

“ Some call it ambition; others will power; others destiny. Certainly, in his long and adventurous career Bismarck was often close to death.
¶ Now Bismarck himself always had his own peculiar ikon. He called it God. His speeches for many years before Sadowa, his protests in behalf of his King, as against the rising tide of Liberalism, always contained amidst thunders of political consequence, the name God as the one explanation of Bismarck’s history and Bismarck’s ultimate victory. ”

“ In your own life’s conquests, do you do any more, and often do you not do less? Is it not true in your own life that you have to fight for what you achieve? Truly, the world belongs to him who seizes it. William knew this; Bismarck certainly knew it; and in this respect the two great men were agreed. So far, good. In broad outline the plan was to make the Prussian dynastic government rule over territorial United Germany; but it must come with the consent of the rulers of the independent German states and not through decrees of people’s parliaments or the howlings of mobs. ”

“ It is only the small mind that plans down to the hair’s breadth. Your truly great man, like Bismarck or Napoleon, takes up life as he finds it, and little by little learns the business of compelling other men to do his bidding; and always in this there is a large element left to the hazard of the die; or to use Bismarck’s own phrase just before Sadowa, “Now we shall see how the god of battle rolls the iron dice!” Your great man rides forth to the battle, prepared to take instant advantage of circumstances as they may rise. ”

“ A careful reading of Bismarck’s speeches, letters, dispatches, will show that whatever political expediency he may at various times have followed, and however often he may have changed front, there is still in his great labor a tireless repetition of ideas commanding respect for vested authority, for ancestry, for a ruling class as against the ruled, and always for absolute dog-like obedience to some central commanding power. ”

“ Bismarck thundered. “Germany considers not the Liberalists of Prussia, but her own power. Bavaria, Wuertemberg and Baden may flirt with liberalism, but no German would think on that account of asking them to assume the rôle of Prussia. Prussia must brace herself, for the fitter moment. Prussia’s borders are not favorable to the development of a healthy state.” ”

“ In America, where the “Divine-right” of kings is a subject of political ridicule, it is a fact that in the courts we raise our right hand and swear to tell the whole truth; our marriage ceremonies are consecrated; and the last word at the grave is that God is our refuge; we have our chaplains who speak of God on our battleships, and in our armies; in the Autumn the President of the United States invokes a blessing for bountiful crops, and returns the Nation’s thanks to God for these favors. ”

“ No sovereign or minister, no government, can win the favor of Prussian individualism. Yet all cry from the depths of their hearts, ‘God save the King!’ And they obey when the King commands.”
¶ With this clue from the master before us, the thing to do is, clearly, to reach out after this German Unity idea in a broad way.
¶ Napoleon’s armies had marched everywhere, during all those victorious years, and each soldier had been a living exemplar of the power of National glory.
This National spirit in his armies had helped Napoleon amazingly, despite his genius as a soldier. ”

“ He was a strong man himself and he was guilty of gross ambitions in his rise to power, but on the whole Bismarck stood for self-possession and for manly audacity, certainly not the French Revolution type of audacity. It is a fact that Bismarck, as a human [104] being, was a vast egotist, and had his own, ofttimes unscrupulous, way of gaining his ends, but his conception of Militarism, the force he did eventually use, was at bottom a virtuous effort to support, liberate and unify the Fatherland, not drag it into the mire of idolatry and bestiality. ”

“ The difficulty is that with the average American National faith is dead.
He has come to the conclusion that he has no stake in the Government, that in short he is a victim to the machinations of plutocrats.
To read the American point of view, (1915) we, today, no less than the Prussians and the Austrians, in Bismarck’s time, are also about to spring at each other’s throats! There is little sentiment for National unity; it is the East against the West, in Congress, and in the newspapers it is the people against the plutocrats. ”

“ What, pray, about this subconscious impression, that everybody has about an impending war with France? Bismarck, as deep as the sea, is still seemingly as open as a child.
One day, a famous professor made the fateful inquiry as had hundreds of journalists—and this time Bismarck replied, “My dear professor, whoever has once looked into the breaking eye of a dying warrior on the battlefield, will pause ere he begins a war.”
¶ So much for the astuteness of the man with the iron cross. ”

“ When all intriguing, all card-stacking, all smiling, all smooth speeches no longer serve to conceal the real end of this amazing game of international politics, as between Prussia and Austria, then the thing to do is to bring on “blood and iron.” The very human end that Bismarck always had in mind was German liberation and Unity, by driving the Nation’s enemies beyond the borders. ”

“ Charlotte Corday struck down Marat with a dagger; and her act has been generally condoned by men with a sense of fair-play. It was indeed a bloody murder; but when a mad-dog is running wild, a beast fattening on human blood, one passion feeds on another—and Corday is no exception. (Henderson, Symbol and Satire of the French Revolution) .
Heroine or monster, take your choice; at least in her time such was the frenzy of the alleged political Millennium that Marat was soon worshipped as a martyr. ”

“ The perplexing problem is to blend his massive 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-worship has likewise conspired to make an impossible idol of a man with very human and ofttimes crying frailties ”

“ This 1789-93 return to National paganism, both political and social, is the mockery that Bismarck decided with all his almighty strength, nay his supreme rage, to set aside; and for him Prussian Militarism, which he so jealously set his heart on, against the rising tides of French constitutionalism, otherwise mob-rule, was at once to prove the sharp cure and the dreadful counter-blow. ”

“ Shakespeare dealt with men, on paper, making them march this way or that at the behest of his immortal genius.
Bismarck dealt with men in the open arena of life, had no way of controlling their actions except by the inspiration of his own practical, constructive genius.
It is one thing to control a man’s actions, on paper; wholly another—and a greater triumph, is it not?—to master man’s ways in the market place, making those around you do not necessarily what they think they ought, but do what you wish. ”

“ The master knew enough of human nature to see clearly one great central fact. The fire-breathing Democrats would, at the hour of Prussia’s peril, join with the hated system of Bismarck and march to glory. In defense of Prussia, Liberals, Socialists and political nonconformists of every description, would be carried off their feet. ”