A few days later came the death of the venerable Empress Augusta, and William wrote again to Bismarck at Friedrichsruh, affectionately enjoining him not to endanger his health by trying to make the winter journey to Berlin for the funeral.
This friendly attitude was, to the Kaiser’s mind, entirely compatible with the decision that a new Chancellor was needed to carry on the enlightened programme of the new reign. But Bismarck stubbornly refused to recognize this. When his obstinacy made peremptory measures necessary, he had even the bad taste to instance these recent amiable messages as proofs of the duplicity with which he had been treated.
The best authenticated story in Berlin, of all the legion grown up about this historic episode, is to the effect that one afternoon, in the course of an interview between Kaiser and Chancellor on the approaching Labour Conference, Bismarck was incautious enough to use the old familiar threat of resignation with which he had been wont to terrify and subdue the first Kaiser. Young William said nothing, but two or three hours later an imperial _aide-de-camp_ appeared at the Foreign Office in Wilhelmstrasse with the statement that he had come for that resignation. Bismarck, flushed and shaken, sent an evasive reply. The _aide-de-camp_ came again, with a reiterated demand. Bismarck stammered out that he had not had the time to write it as yet, but that he would himself wait upon the Emperor with it the next day. He made this visit to the Schloss, prepared to urge with all the powers at his command, in the stress of a personal appeal, that the demand be reconsidered. But at the palace he was met with that equivalent for the housemaid’s transparent “Not at home” which is used in the halls of kings; and on his return to Wilhelmstrasse he found the inexorable _aide-de-camp_ once more waiting for the resignation. Then only, in bitter mortification and wrath, did Bismarck write out his own official death-warrant, which a few days later was to be followed by his son Herbert’s resignation.
The widely circulated report that, in his extremity, the Chancellor appealed for aid to the Empress Frederic, seems to be apocryphal. It is certain, however, that he did, during the twenty-four hours in which that stolidly-waiting _aide-de-camp_ darkened his life, make strenuous efforts in other almost equally unlikely and hostile quarters to save himself. They availed nothing save to reveal in some dim fashion to his racked and despairing mind how deeply and implacably he was hated by the officials and magnates all about him. But to the general public, astonished and bewildered at this sudden necessity to imagine a Germany without Bismarck, the glamour about his name was still dazzling. When it came their turn to act, they made the fallen Chancellor’s departure from Berlin a great popular demonstration. It is well that they did so. With all his faults, Bismarck was _the_ chief German of his generation, and the spectacle of cold-blooded desertion which the official and journalistic classes of Berlin presented in their attitude toward him upon the instant of his tumble, offended human nature. Nothing could be more true than that he himself was responsible for this attitude. It was the only possible harvest to be expected from his sowing. He had done his best to make all preferment and power in Germany depend upon callous treachery and the calculation of self-interest. He had contemptuously thrust ideals and generous aspirations out of the domain of practical politics. He had systematically accustomed the German mind to the rule of force and cunning, to the savage crushing of political opponents, and the shameless use of slander and scandal as political weapons. That this official mind of his own moulding, inured to sacrificial horrors, familiar with the spectacle of statesmen destroyed and eminent politicians flung headlong from the “rock of bronze,” should have viewed his own prodigious downward crash without pity, was not at all unnatural. But for the credit of Germany with the outside world it is fortunate that the Berliners, as a whole, responded to the pathetic side of the episode.