For there on that gun in the wretched little, absurd little, squalid little station square of a little port, with no one to pay it the honour even of curiosity, I remarked graven things slavishly copied from Louis XIV. First, just above the trunnion, there was a crown and under it, in exactly the same flourishing script of the seventeenth century, the two letters "W. R." interlaced, and between them an eagle looking fiercely to its right.... So I take it that this gun was worked for the King of Prussia.
Then at the breach there was a scroll, and in the scroll was a similar script just like that of Louis XIV. And the motto ran: "_Ultima ratio regis_"--"_regis_" mind you, not "_regum_."
We all have the defects of our qualities, and there does go with the German, even with the Prussian, simplicity, an astonishing lack of critical power. "_Ultima ratio regum_" is one thing: "_Ultima ratio regis_" is quite another. It reminded me of the famous quotation: "Frailty, thy name is lady."
Now why was that script ever engraven? (The date was 1909.) Against whom was this ephemeral Prussian king going to use his argument--his last argument? I carry back my mind to 1909, and I can remember no one against whom at that moment he was preparing to argue in such a fashion. It was a quiet time. There was no worry within the Prussian state; Agadir had not been heard of. Yet that was the date and that was the motto. And there was the eagle and there was the inscribed flourishing initial, and there was the crown.
I know very well that some, perhaps most, of my readers--of those who do me the honour to read this rambling--will think me a fool for what I am next to say. But I confess a sentimentality towards that gun. When I was a boy and they were teaching me to drive in the artillery school at Toul they used to give us a sort of vile body on which to experiment our horses and ourselves: old guns of '48--old bronze guns. And these the French had made with great art. They were beautiful things. What touched me most about them was that each of them had a name. One was called "Liberty," another "The Voice of the People," another "Equality," and so on. It is a human instinct and a just one to give names to things. It is part of the truth that we ourselves are made in the image of God. Why, even my boat, which is but a material, inanimate body (may She forgive me), has a name. I must tell you, though you ridicule me, that when I saw that German gun I wished it also had a name.