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I also contrasted it later with the greeting given to the Kaiser by a group of English people at Hamburg, not a year before the war, in which England and Germany devoted all their strength to each other’s destruction. I was on a voyage in one of the Castle Line boats, and we put off at Hamburg to be entertained by the Mayor in his palace of the Town Hall. The Kaiser was expected, and we lined up to await his arrival. It was heralded by the three familiar notes of his motor horn, and when he appeared there was a loud “Hip, hip, horrah!” from the English party. The Emperor acknowledged the greeting with a grim salute. He had no love for England then in his heart, and believed, I think, in that “unvermeidlicher Krieg”—that “unavoidable war”—which was already the text of German newspapers, though in England the warnings of a few men like Lord Roberts seemed to be the foolishness of old age, and popular imagination refused to believe in a world gone mad and tearing itself in pieces for no apparent cause.


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