Читать книгу Blood and Iron - John Hubert Greusel - Страница 8

Despite vast areas of political bogs, quaking under foot, that one must traverse, our Otto is not inaccessible!

¶ For many years they hate him like hell-fire itself, this Otto von Bismarck. The Prussians hate him, the Austrians, the Bavarians, to say nothing of the intervening rabble; but our tyrant is strong enough, in the end, to win foreign wars, and then the haters veer about, almost in a night, come up on bended knees and kiss the hand that smites—that hand of Bismarck, at once the best-beloved and the most-hated hand of his time. What more pray do you ask of human nature?

¶ Now here is a strange reality: If you look at the general outlines of the German map in 1815, you will see that the frontiers trace in a startling way the scowling outlines of Frederick the Great, “Old Fritz,” who first dreamed this German unity idea.

But mighty Frederick is in the royal tomb these many years; and a new Frederick in spirit is rapidly learning the business of king-maker and empire-builder.

¶ Behind the name Bismarck is a story extraordinary, compounded of the intrigues, blood and passions of Austria, Russia, Italy, France, Belgium, Bavaria, Spain, and England.

Volumes would not suffice to give you the bewildering details; mountains of diplomatic letters, orders, telegrams, truths, half-truths, shuffling, cutting and stacking; you go confusedly from palace to people, prince to pauper, university to prison pen—all the way from Waterloo to Versailles, where William I received at last his great glory, German Emperor.

¶ Bismarck’s story is best told in flashes of lightning—as you try to picture a bolt from the black skies.

By the patience of the methodical historian who laboriously examines each document in the National archives, one fills soon enough a ten-volume account—with a swamp of cross-references, footnotes to each paragraph, and with notes to the footnotes.

¶ Yet this Bismarck is not inaccessible if we get at his inner side, grasp the man’s essence.

Strong arm and tireless brain Time asked;—a man who could neither be bent, broken nor brow-beaten; a man who would for 40 years follow a plan by no means clear; often had to go out in the dark and find his way, all old landmarks lost, and no pole-star in sight.

¶ I dwell on one outstanding fact, all down through his career: I mean Bismarck’s power to conceal pain. Hurricanes of insulting criticisms swept around his head, year after year, but on the whole Otto’s attitude was that of the mountain that defies the storm. He would never give in that, as it seemed to onlookers, a shaft of disagreeable truth had struck home; that a soft-nosed bullet, well aimed, had torn his flesh or broken a bone; or that a dagger-thrust, going directly through his coat of the White Cuirassier had pierced his heart.

¶ Even in his bitter defeats, he had a peculiar idiomatic way of making out that the result was exactly what he desired. It was of course only an adroit explanation to protect his pride; the brazen invention of a nature that would not acknowledge itself in error. Here is Bismarck, to the core.

¶ For a long and turbulent life-time Bismarck’s soul was tried by the very tortures of the damned!