Bismarck: some secret pages of his history (Vol. 3 of 3). Being a diary kept by Dr. Moritz Busch during twenty-five years' official and private intercourse with the great ChancellorBusch, Moritz
History
Bismarck: some secret pages of his history (Vol. 3 of 3). Being a diary kept by Dr. Moritz Busch during twenty-five years' official and private intercourse with the great Chancellor
Busch, Moritz
Bismarck, Otto, Fürst von, 1815-1898
I replied that I should have preferred to go the day after to-morrow,
but that as I was at liberty to name my own time, and was now engaged
in reading over papers, arranging and packing for my removal on the
16th of March, I would come on the 18th. I further requested him to
say by what train I should come, and called attention to the fine
cartoon and verses, “Dropping the Pilot,” in _Punch_, of the 29th of
March, 1890, which an acquaintance had sent me the previous day, and
which I should bring with me if they had not already seen it.
Bucher replied that they had the “Pilot” from _Punch_ at
Friedrichsruh; and that he himself had travelled by the slow train.
I arrived at Friedrichsruh at 3 P.M. on the 18th of March. The
Prince had gone out for a drive with Buhl, the member of Parliament,
who had come on a visit. A servant showed me upstairs to No. 4 as
my room, where Grant, Bancroft, and the busts of Washington and
Hamilton kept me company. I immediately visited Bucher, whose room
was opposite mine. He complained that the work of the “Memoirs”
stood exactly where it did before. In dictating, the Prince wandered
from one point to another, told many things several times, and
almost always differently, &c. A huge pile of dictated notes had
already been transcribed, he calculated some sixty printed sheets.
It would, however, have to be sifted and worked up, and the Chief
had not as yet looked through a line of it. Hardly anything would
come of it, and, in any case, he had not as yet decided whether it
should be published during his lifetime or after his death. Bucher
intends to leave again for a time at the end of the month, and is
very dissatisfied with his occupation hitherto. He showed me in
the pile on the chair a thick packet, endorsed, “Nikolsburg,” and
observed that it dealt less with the important events that took place
there than with a variety of other matters. He had seen few of the
papers arranged by me in 1888, none at all of those relating to the
alliance with Austria, only two or three letters from the Gerlach
correspondence, and he had also seen nothing of the correspondence
with Manteuffel and Schleinitz. He believes that the Chief has sent
all those that are missing to a bank in England for safety. But a few
days later he modified this surmise, and said he thought the papers
were in the keeping of some trusty friend.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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