He may be described as the best son in the world, for he was not wicked; he was worse--he was weak. It was Chamfort, if my memory serve me rightly, who wrote: "The weak are the advance guard of the army of the wicked." William II was the scout of the advance guard; his Staff was the army. He who was so afraid of thunder usurped the place of Jupiter, the Thunderer, but this amateur soldier was far too nervous to endure even the noise of battle. When his officers for their own advancement persuaded him that he possessed military and naval talent, he dreamt of the rôle of "Welt Kaiser," and prepared for the conquest of the earth. Caught in their own trap, his faithful adherents were intoxicated by the intoxication which they had provoked. The Emperor's Cabinet was the theatre of a continuous orgy of gigantic schemes. At Vienna men's imaginations were inflamed. The Berlin-Bagdad Railway of Central Europe revived the earlier Near-East scheme. And a whole camarilla interested in the advantages to be derived from these splendid enterprises praised them extravagantly. If in 1914 the Emperor Francis Joseph had possessed any glimmer of reason and good sense, he would have taken notice of the formidable uncertainties of the Berlin problems, and maintained peace while refusing to die at the cries of the victims of a war. Left to himself, William II let loose the worst and most barbarous powers on the nations who were dragged into the horrors of war. I have said that he lacked depth. He was in reality inconsistent. Although playing a thousand parts, he had no personality. A man is only "someone" by reason of his personality. Many fools and dishonest men reach their goals in life through intrigue, chance, favouritism and human folly. But they are none the less foolish and dishonest for all that, and this is why the world is so evil. William II assumed chivalrous airs, but he still remained coarse in his outlook. This was often apparent in his jokes with the officers of the Guards. He had no tact or judgment. His lack of tact was due to his bad Prussian education; to his student days at Bonn, which were given up to drinking bouts; and as a young man, to his taste for frequenting the Berlin casinos. As for his lack of judgment, this was the result of inherent vanity, which everything tended to develop to his own injury and that of Germany. The vain man is the being who is deceived by everyone, because he has begun by deceiving himself. And he is usually a hopeless idiot. William II once said to me, under the impression that he was paying me a compliment: "You would make a fine Prussian grenadier." The compliment seemed to me "Pomeranian." If William II had possessed tact and judgment he would have known how to adopt a policy other than threats and violence, and a diplomacy utterly opposed to the trickery with which Germany was so affected during his reign.