“Yes, in one sense Germany did want war. She had to have it or die, for the steel wall England had been forging about her for twenty years was crushing our life out and had to be broken. Then, too, there was one party, the ‘Old Germans’—what you call the Junkers—that was not averse to such a contest. The munition-makers wanted war, of course; they always do. Some of our generals”—Ludendorff was the name most frequently heard in this connection; Hindenburg never—“wanted it. But it is absurd to accuse the Kaiser of starting it, simply because he was the figurehead, the most prominent bugaboo, a catchword for the mob. The Hohenzollerns did us much damage; but they also brought us much good. The Kaiser loved peace and did all in his power to keep it. He was the only emperor—we were the only large nation that had waged no war or stolen no territory since 1871. But the English-French-Russian combination drove us into a corner. We had to have the best army in the world, just as England has to have the best navy. We had no world-conquering ambitions; we had no ‘_Drang nach Osten_’ which our enemies have so often charged against us, except for trade. Our diplomats were not what they should have been; Bethmann-Hollweg has as much guilt as any one in the whole affair, on our side. We have had no real diplomats, except von Bülow, since Bismarck. But the Germans as a nation never wanted war. The Kaiser would not have declared it even when he did had he not feared that the Social Democrats would desert him in the crisis if it were put off longer. We had only self-protection as our war aim from the beginning, but we did not dare openly say so for fear the enemy, which had decided on our annihilation, would take it as an admission of weakness.” This whitewashing of the Kaiser was universal in Germany, as far as my personal experience goes. No one, whatever his age, sex, caste, place of residence, or political complexion, accused him of being more than an accessory before the fact. The most rabid—pardon, I never heard a German speak rabidly on any subject, unless it was perhaps the lack of food and tobacco—the most decidedly monarchical always softened any criticism of the ex-emperor with the footnote that he, after all, was not chiefly to blame. His bad counselors, the force of circumstances over which he had little control ... and so on. Then there were those, particularly, though not entirely, in the backwaters of Prussia, the women especially, who gazed after his retreated figure pityingly, almost tearfully, as if he had been the principal sufferer from the catastrophe.