The hatred of Manteuffel and his policy was the secret of Bismarck’s admiration for the brothers Von der Goltz; for in the handsome courtier, Count Karl, he recognized an ally almost, if not quite, as powerful as the statesman and diplomatist Count Robert. It would be difficult to imagine two men more different than the polished guardsman and the rough, unkempt man-of-affairs, but they were both, to use Bismarck’s own expression “_Stock-Preussen_.” Olmütz was to both a haunting memory, and, the wiping out of that stain a sacred duty which united the two. By the side of Count Von der Goltz the two other gentlemen-in-waiting were less conspicuous figures. He was always in the foreground, and remained the faithful friend and servant of his old master all through the glorious campaigns of 1866 and 1870, in both of which he earned great honour as a cavalry general, and having resigned his high military commands in 1888, remained attached as General aide-de-camp to the Emperor William until the old warrior’s death in the same year. He himself died thirteen years later at Nice, at the age of eighty-six. His colleagues at the Court of Coblenz as I knew it were Major Schimmelmann, a handsome giant, who was very good to me, and another officer, Herr Von Steinäcker, a rather melancholy man who worshipped the ground upon which Countess Oriolla’s pretty foot trod; it used to be said that he proposed to her once a month, and on being once a month refused, would take to his bed love-sick, disconsolate, emerging at the end of twenty-four hours to resume his duties. But his story belongs to the small-beer chronicles of the Court, whereas that of Count Von der Goltz, like that of the glorious Prince, King, Emperor, whom he loved and served, belongs to the old October ale of German politics and history, a heady brew if ever there was one. We paid several visits to Coblenz during my Eton days—and in 1857, when I was already twenty years old, I went back there with a reading-party from Oxford. We stayed there for some five or six weeks and then went on to that wicked Paradise, Baden Baden. It was in the old days of the gaming tables—needless to say, we, like the other moths, had our wings singed, and when we had little more than enough to pay for third-class tickets, fled, and landed in Paris with just about a hundred francs between us. I managed to get three rooms in some obscure back street in the Quartier Latin for thirty francs the week—we breakfasted in a _crèmerie_ for a few sous—dined at the two-francs dinner in the Palais Royal—lived the _vie de Bohème_ with the students and _rapins_, who gave a warm welcome to Oxford, and when replenishment of our purses came from England, left our church-mouse poverty and wild cheery life with the greatest regret.