The Crown Prince and Princess returned to Berlin on the morning of the New Year, 1870. The next time the Crown Prince met Napoleon III was on the morning after the capitulation of Sedan. CHAPTER XIII THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR The year 1870 opened with no premonition of the tremendous events it was to bring forth. Princess Victoria had been born on the eve of the Austrian War in 1866, and now, on the eve of this yet greater struggle, on June 14, 1870, the Crown Princess gave birth to her third daughter, Princess Sophia Dorothea Ulrica Alice, who was destined to become Queen of the Hellenes. The candidature of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen for the throne of Spain was announced on July 4, and after fruitless attempts at intervention by the Crown Princess's old friend, Lord Granville, then the British Foreign Minister, war was declared between France and Prussia on July 15. At the time of the little Princess's christening, which took place at the New Palace on July 25, there were few present at the ceremony who were not under orders for the front, and most of the men were already in their campaigning uniform. Emotion, anxiety, and excitement made the even then old King William feel unequal to the task of holding his little granddaughter at the baptismal font according to his wont, and this duty was performed for him by Queen Augusta. The fact that the Kings of Würtemberg and Bavaria were the child's godfathers marked the decision of those States, with Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt, to throw in their lot with Prussia in the war, as the deputies of the North-German Confederation had also done. The christening was one of special splendour and solemnity, the two outstanding figures in the congregation being Bismarck, in his uniform of major of dragoons, and Field-Marshal Wrangel, now in his eighty-ninth year. Among the guests at the christening were Lord Ronald Gower and "Billy" Russell, the famous war correspondent. Two or three days before, they had been received by the Crown Princess at the New Palace, and Lord Ronald writes: "The Princess expressed almost terror at the idea of the war, and was deeply affected at the sufferings it must bring with it. She feared the brutality of Bazaine and his soldiers, should they invade Germany." After the christening, King William and Queen Augusta held a kind of informal court in the curious hall known as the Hall of the Shells, full of memories of Frederick the Great. Early the next morning the Crown Prince slipped away out of the palace to spare his wife the agony of parting. Even at such a moment as this, the Crown Princess's private and personal anxieties were embittered by circumstances which she was unable to modify or affect. Although England was not only ignorant, but was to remain, like the rest of the world, in ignorance for many years, of the falsification of the famous Ems telegram, sympathy with Germany as the supposed injured party in the quarrel was by no means universal.