Memoirs of the Crown Prince of Germany

New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1922. 8vo, viii + 375 pp. $5.00.

KING RICHARD II has gathered many recruits from our own time for that immemorial and ghostly company who sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the passing and the death of kings. The Crown Prince has elected to think upon these things. Three hundred days out of every year, fog and rain and storm drive across the little island in the Zuyder Zee where his memories and meditations have taken form. The stage-setting could not be bettered.

Two years and a half were spent in getting the story down. Each added chapter is prefaced by a soliloquy which finds its interpretation in the light of final event. The writer is his own Greek Chorus announcing in advance the tragic note and destiny.

The tale is either very naive or subtly sophisticated. One hundred per cent advocates of the Versailles Treaty will find here a shrewd bid for the restoration of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and will be inclined to insist upon doubling the guards on the dock at Wieringen. Those who are interest oil to reread the story of the War from the other side of No Man’s Land will find much that is interesting and illuminating and, in the record of events at Spa, the authentic note of tragedy.

The key to the whole is found in the writer’s unwavering and impenitent devotion to a single human type and ideal — the Prussian officer. The Crown Prince tacitly assumes for himself, from the first, the white flower of this blameless life. And he confers it upon only two other figures in his tale — Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

For the rest, the case was foredoomed from the first. The All-Highest appears here as a remote, ineffectual, impotent figure - a caricature of what a Kaiser ought to be; for this Absalom does not hesitate to say what he would have done had he been king. The Various chancellors and civil officials pass as a muddle-headed and muddled phantasmagoria of compromisers. Troops that entered the war shining in the reflected light of the Prussian tradition turn out to be ‘muddy shirkers’ when contaminated by the revolution.

Here is a picture of an economically unprepared Germany, drawn helpless into the maelstrom in the wake of Austria, opposed by the nations who incarnated those Prussian principles of unified and remorseless militarism — ‘my country right or wrong’ — that Germany herself failed to achieve. The perspective of events is always foreshortened. And the squint of the eye contracted at Potsdam has not yet been corrected by a Dutch parsonage. The major premise of the Prussian officer is unchallenged and uncriticized. The minor premises of the argument introduce much historical material that is thought-provoking. And so this soldier chant, bitter and yet unconverted, goes up from a little sea-girt island, while the mainlands of the world are in danger of being seduced by the siren ‘melodies of those rogues or madmen who sing the alluring lay of universal brotherhood in the paradise of internationalism.’ Which of these songs the morning stars sing together for joy is yet to be discovered.

WILLARD L. SPERRY.