With implicit faith in the historians of his house, he had already come under the spell of dreams that took their rise in a remote past. Although heir to a modern empire, entirely different from the Germanic empire of Otto and Barbarossa, he had sedulously set himself to link up the creation of Bismarck and Moltke with that of the Middle Ages, to re-forge the chain of historic tradition, to proclaim himself the heir of the old elected Cæsars. It is obviously with this intention that the Siegesallee was laid out through the Thiergarten in Berlin, with its double row of marble statues, symmetrical and funereal, more suited to a royal family vault than to a public park. There, almost shoulder to shoulder, stand Emperors of Germany, ancient and modern, Electors of Brandenburg and Kings of Prussia—a significant Pantheon! At Vienna, the princes of the Hapsburg house avenged the defeats of 1866 by treating the Hohenzollerns as upstarts. At Berlin, however, the descendant of these upstarts aimed at nothing less than reviving the monarchy of Charlemagne. He set up in his capital a monument to the mythical Roland, as a symbol of the bond between past and present, and dreamed of re-establishing a Carlovingian hegemony over the Continent of Europe. III. I will deal later with those European events and those features of the internal situation in Germany which reacted upon the mind of William II. and helped to bring about his moral transformation. The point that must be emphasized here is that he fancied at first that he would only have to fight France, the old, implacable enemy. The coming war seemed to him nothing but a mere duel between the Empire and the Republic. For a long time he hoped to sow dissensions between his opponents, and to secure the inaction of Russia. At the Court of Berlin the Franco-Russian alliance was not regarded as a rock that nothing could shatter. The Potsdam agreement, concluded by M. Kokovtzow, and restricted in its scope (so far as we can tell) to Western Asia, seemed to open up a promising vista. Repeated advances were made to Tsar Nicholas; interviews took place, such as the one at Baltic Port, where William II. exercised all the seductive wiles at his command to cajole the Russian sovereign and win the confidence of his ministers. The Emperor himself remarked to me, only a few months before the war, that false ideas were current in France regarding the stability of the Dual Alliance; he was well informed as to the true feeling of the Tsar’s Court, for some exalted Russian personages, in passing through Berlin, had not scrupled to indicate the side on which their sympathies lay.