William was now Crown Prince, and he knew that he would soon be Emperor. His poor father was a doomed man. He reigned eighty-four days, and bore his sufferings with the greatest fortitude. He once wrote to the Crown Prince: "Learn to suffer without complaint, for that is all that I can teach you." With his broken-hearted wife and some of his devoted servants kneeling round him, he breathed his last on June 15, 1888, and the Crown Prince in his twenty-ninth year became Kaiser as William II. How he received the news of his father's death we do not know, but in less than half an hour he called out a squadron of Hussars in their red jackets, and sent them clattering to the Palace where the dead Emperor lay. They surrounded the building, and behind them came a company of infantry at the double. The place was thus sealed up, and no one was allowed to go in or come out. Before his poor mother had recovered from her first transports of grief the home in which her dead husband lay was in a state of siege. [Illustration: The Emperor Frederick III. (_From the picture by Heinrich von Angeli._)] The late Emperor had issued his first proclamation to his people, and his second to his Army, but the new Emperor reversed the order. On the day of his father's death he sent messages to the Army and Navy, and kept his people waiting three days before they received their proclamation. To the Army he wrote as follows:-- "I and the army belong to one another; we are born for one another, and we will stand together in an indissoluble bond in peace or storm, as God may will. I swear always to remember that the eyes of my ancestors look down upon me from the other world, and that one day I shall have to give an account to them of the honour and glory of the army." Then he proceeded to bury his father, but there was none of the military pomp which had been seen at the Emperor William's funeral. It looked as though the new sovereign thought lightly of his own father because he was a peace-loving monarch, and had determined to follow the example of the "War Lord" who had brought France to her knees, and by doing so had created the German Empire. In the passage quoted above the Emperor spoke of the bond which united him with the Army. Let us see what this bond is. As King of Prussia he is supreme over the Prussian army; he can declare peace or war as he pleases, though, of course, his people must vote him "the sinews of war"--that is, money, before he can set his armies in motion. In ordinary times the Prussian army forms about two-thirds of the whole German army, so you see that as King of Prussia the Kaiser is a very powerful "war lord" indeed.