1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [7]
Onward Christian Soldiers, on to heathen lands,
Prayerbooks in your pockets, rifles in your hands,
Take the glorious tidings where trade can be done,
Spread the peaceful gospel – with a Maxim gun.
But, as a weapon of conventional warfare, the machine-gun had not found favour with the hierarchy of the British Army. Some people in Germany had been quicker to appreciate its possibilities – and almost the first had been the Kaiser himself.
The Kaiser’s passion for his Army was equalled only by his obsession with his Navy, and his dearest desire was that both should match the Army and Navy of Great Britain, and even surpass them in strength and magnificence. Military matters occupied a large part of the Kaiser’s attention. Soon after he came to the throne in 1888 he had decreed that court dress would henceforth be military uniform, and heaven help the officer, even the long-retired officer approaching his dotage, who appeared in the Imperial Presence wearing mufti. Unless he was hunting, the Kaiser himself seldom wore civilian clothes, and he had once gone so far as to order that the officers of a Guards regiment should be confined to barracks for two weeks on hearing that they had dared to attend a private party in civilian evening dress.
The Kaiser himself had uniforms for every occasion, many designed by himself, and it was even whispered that he had a special uniform, based on that of an Admiral of the Fleet, for attending performances of The Flying Dutchman. The joke had a ring of truth. In the first seventeen years of his reign he had introduced no fewer than thirty-seven alterations to the uniform of the army until it was brought discreetly to his notice that, although military tailors were prospering, some officers were having serious difficulty keeping up with the expense.
The Kaiser was interested in everything, had opinions on everything, particularly on military subjects, and he never tired of expounding his views. His mouth seemed as large as the waxed moustaches that bristled across his face, and it seemed to some of his long-suffering ministers that the Kaiser’s mouth often appeared to be functioning independently of his brain. They had thought so at the time of the Boxer Rebellion when Germany proposed the dispatch of an international force to China after the seizure of foreign embassies in Peking. The Kaiser travelled to Wilhelmshaven to give his personal farewell to the German contingent and the manner in which he harangued the troops on the quayside had caused even the most loyal of his ministers to quail. The Kaiser wanted revenge. He wanted blood. He wanted Peking razed to the ground. He commanded his troops to show no mercy and to take no prisoners. He reminded them (inaccurately) of their forebears who had fought under Attila the Hun and urged them to follow their example. They must stamp the name ‘German’ so indelibly on the face of China that no Chinese would ever again dare to look a German in the face.
This bravura performance was unrehearsed and even though Germany had suffered a gross insult at the hands of the nationalists (the German ambassador had been murdered) the Kaiser’s language and demeanour caused his military entourage deep disquiet.*
The episode was disturbing, even allowing for the fact that this first whiff of military adventure in his twelve years’ peaceful reign had gone slightly to the Kaiser’s head. Now he was set on a mammoth programme of costly shipbuilding to quadruple the navy, was planning a huge expansion of the army, and had recently assumed the rank of Field Marshal, asserting that he had been begged by senior officers to do so. Now that he held this high-ranking position, he airily announced, he might easily dispense with the services