Читать книгу Boche and Bolshevik. Experiences of an Englishman in the German Army and in Russian Prisons онлайн

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This is, perhaps, the best place to state what I learned of the character of Prince Oskar and his associates. He had been very strictly brought up, in seclusion, somewhere in the country. So well had he been looked after that till he was twenty-one he had never been in Berlin alone. He had all the traditional piety of the Prussian Junker, the piety that made Bismarck, in applying for the hand of his future wife, write a long letter stating his religious beliefs in full. I can best illustrate his character by repeating his argument in favour of the existence of ghosts. “What I say is, with God everything is possible. If He wanted to make ghosts, He could. What is the difficulty, then? Of course there are such things as ghosts!” The ingenuous youth failed to see that by the same reasoning one could prove the existence of griffins, dragons, the unicorn, winged horses, sea-serpents, and Mrs. Harris. He was generally considered by the professors at Bonn the most intelligent Hohenzollern that had visited the University. His conversation was about country life and sport, and, above all, the army. He was a soldier through and through, and the army was his life. He often expressed a wish to die on the battlefield, shot through the heart. This wish has not been gratified. His health broke down in the first year of the war, and he was invalided. Afterwards he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces. He has distinguished himself in this position by starving his soldiers and then telling them to go to the front if they wanted anything to eat. His God was “our good old German God,” a Being as horrible as Moloch and as stupid as Mumbo-Jumbo. But at any rate Oskar was sincere, and there are no scandals about him as there are about the Crown Prince, who, to quote the German phrase, departed from Bonn like the devil, leaving a smell behind him.