ent that day and the following night. Arrangements had eanwhile been made, apparently through the Dutch authorities, with Count Godard Bentinck, who with some reluctance con- sented to receive him as a guest " for a few days " in his castle at Amerongen. The Imperial train left Eysden at 9 A.M. and at
r 3 P.M. reached Maarn where Count Bentinck and Count Lynden, overnor of the province of Utrecht, were awaiting the ex- aiser on the platform. There was a considerable suite in the ain, who remained to unpack large quantities of food and wine arhich they had brought with them. Count Bentinck arrived at Amerongen in his motor-car with the Emperor as evening was falling, and, as the guest entered the house, his first words were " now give me a cup of real good English tea." On Nov. 28 William II. signed his formal abdication at Amerongen, re-
- nouncing his rights to the Crown of Prussia and his conse-
I quential rights to the German Imperial Crown. On the same
| day the Empress Augusta Victoria arrived from Wilhelmshohe Castle to join her husband. His personal suite, which had been
I a burden to his host, was soon reduced to two officials, a master ceremonies and an aide-de-camp, but he retained a number
[ of his servants. He seldom ventured, save for motor-car drives, beyond the precincts of the castle, which is surrounded by a moat. He spent most of his time in sawing logs of wood, an occupation
I in which he was so diligent that he provided the castle with fire- wood for the whole winter. As souvenirs, instead of autographs, he used to give away small blocks of wood on which he had inscribed his monogram. In June 1920 the ex-Kaiser and the ex-Kaiserin left Amerongen for Doom, a property which the ex- Kaiser had just purchased, and which is situated near the main road between Utrecht and Arnheim. The house and grounds were henceforth watched by Dutch soldiers. Up to March 1920
j the Allies' demand for his extradition was an open question, and notes were exchanged on the subject with the Dutch Gov- ernment, which officially regarded him as a German refugee but undertook to prevent any political activities on his part. He
I was believed to have ample means, although it was reported toward the close of 1921 that he had been compelled further to reduce his establishment. In the autumn he managed to send a rhetorical message to a royalist demonstration in Berlin
! at which Ludendorff was present.
The prevailing German verdict upon William II. after the
' war was that he had been entirely unequal, by temperament,
i by capacity and by education, to the task of guiding the desti- nies of the German nation. His training before his accession had
| been almost entirely in the school of Prussian militarism, and, notwithstanding his subsequent travels and his intercourse with statesmen and men of affairs in his own and other countries, he retained in many matters the narrow outlook and the modes of expression of the average Prussian officer. In his cosmogony sovereigns and dynasties occupied a place entirely apart, and he regarded himself and a certain number of other sovereigns as occupying their positions by the grace of God, and as endowed with something like infallibility in home affairs. In his public speeches he affected the rhetoric of the Prussian officers' mess- room banquets and seemed quite unable to measure the effect of his words upon international relations. He aspired to guide the art, the intellect, the industry and commerce and even the
1 theology of his country. He never realized that the age had moved beyond him in spheres in which he was essentially a dilettante. He had a lax conception of truth and honour in his personal diplomacy, and was accustomed to shift his standpoint in foreign affairs according to the nationality of the person with whom he was conversing. Dr. Hammann, 1 however, testifies that there were almost inexplicable lacunae in the Kaiser's
I memory. One of the German verdicts upon him, which docs
i not appear to be far from the truth, was that his intellect and
i character had never matured.
The Empress AUGUSTA VICTORIA (see 28.669), who was at the castle of Wilhelmshohe (the place of Napoleon III.'s intern-
[ment in 1870-71) at the time of the Emperor's flight, joined him at Amerongen on Nov. 28 1918. She was already suffering from 1 Um den Kaiser (1921).
1015
a heart complaint, and anxiety with regard to her husband and the possibility of his extradition weighed upon her more than upon him. She died at Doom Castle on April u 1921. Her remains were conveyed to Potsdam and placed in a temporary mausoleum in the park of the New Palace. The funeral fur- nished an occasion for some royalist demonstrations in Berlin. The Empress, although she accompanied William II. on many of his political journeys, confined her interests mainly to her family duties and to works of charity. She had been active in promoting Christian enterprises, particularly the building of churches in Berlin. She was regarded as the model of a German housewife and of a Landesmutler, as the Germans used to call the consorts of their sovereigns.
Interesting sidelights on the ex-Kaiser's character, reign and edu- cation may be found in such books as Bismarck's Reflections and Reminiscences (English ed. 2 vols., 1898). The third vol. of these Gedanken and Erinnerungen appeared in Germany in 1921, though it is dated 1919, having long been held up by an interdict given in favour of the ex-Kaiser on the ground that the volume contained the text of confidential letters written by him. In 1921 he withdrew the interdict, as most of the obnoxious material had found its way into the newspapers. See also Prince Hohenlohe's Memoirs (1906). Recently published books bearing on the subject are Dr. Otto Ham- mann's Der Neue Kurs (1918), Um den Kaiser (1919), which con- tains perhaps the best character sketch of William II., and Der Missverstandene Bismarck (1921), also Baron von Eckhardstein's Lebenserinnerungen, 3 vols. (1919-21). For the last phase Scheide- mann's Der Zusammenbruch (1921) and Die Deutsche Revolution by Ferdinand Runkel (1919) are useful, and there is a remarkable, if rather highly coloured, short character sketch by Walter Rathenau, Der Kaiser (1919). Lady Nprah Bentinck wrote a book of some interest, The ex-Kaiser in Exile (1921). (G. S.)
WILLIAM, German Crown Prince up to 1918 (1882- ), eldest child of William II. of Germany, was born at the Marble Palace, Potsdam, on May 6 1882. He was educated at the Military Cadets School at Ploen in Holstein and at the university of Bonn. After visits to the courts of Vienna and St. Peters- burg and an unofficial visit to Scotland he went on a tour with his brother Prince Eitel Friedrich to Constantinople and to the Nile. On his return to Germany he began his military career by serving in the ist Foot Guards, and accompanied the Kaiser to England (Jan. lo-Feb. 5 1901) on the occasion of the funeral of Queen Victoria. On June 6 1903 he married the Duchess Cecilia, sister of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. There were five children, four sons and one daughter, of the marriage. His political and personal interventions in public affairs gave some trouble in the years preceding the war. He was credited with pan-German sympathies, and on one occasion (Nov. 9 1911) he appeared in the royal box in the Reichstag during the debate on the Morocco settlement and demonstratively applauded speakers who were attacking Great Britain and the Imperial Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg. He was afterward compelled by the Emperor to make amends to the Chancellor. Other ill- advised interventions were in connexion with the Brunswick settlement, in regard to which he questioned (1914) the ade- quacy of his brother-in-law Prince Ernest Augustus of Cumber- land's renunciation of all claim to the throne of Hanover, and again, on the occasion of the conflict in Dec. 1913 at Zabern in Alsace between officers of the garrison and the civilian population, when he despatched telegrams encouraging the officers in their truculent attitude. He had, nevertheless, done a public service in 1907 by calling the attention of the Emperor to the disrepu- table morals of the court camerilla, headed by Prince Philip Eulenburg, which was being denounced in the Zukunfl by Maximilian Harden. In 1910-1 he paid a visit to Ceylon, India and Egypt, and he published some account of his experiences in his Jagdlagebuch. On the outbreak of the World War he was promoted to the rank of Lt. -General and appointed to the com- mand of the V. Army in the west, where his troops were success- ful in the battles of Longwy and Longuyon on Aug. 22 and 24 1914. In Sept. 1915 he received the command of an army group, and he was nominally in charge of the German operations against Verdun. After the Armistice he represented himself in newspaper interviews as having been sceptical, since the battle of the Marne, regarding the possibility of the ultimate success of
