A Spectator ' s Notebook S TRANGE reflections the birthday of one of
the living dead inspires. I have often thought of writing an article or two on them—the men who once were something and now arc nothing, stranded, forgotten, living in the flesh but so dead that the world, if their names are men; tioned, exclaims in astonishment " Heavens, is he alive still ? " That is not exactly true, of course, of the Kaiser. The papers still give us occasional glimpses of the exile of Doom, and we are beginning to get references to his seventy-fifth birthday on Saturday. But it is doing violence to the imagination to link up this forgotten old man with the impetuous monarch who for a genera- tion kept Europe in a fever—the monarch who " dropped the pilot " in 1890, the hero of the spectacular folly of the Tangier landing in 1905, the self-appointed protector of Islam, the ally who stood by Austria in shining armour in 1908. That monarch has woven his life into the texture of European history—down to 1918. Since then he has been as much the dead husk of authority as Lenin's corpse in Moscow. And on Saturday he celebrates his birthday. There is pathos in it, but though Wilhelm II had his good qualities, the published documents have thrown too sinister a light on the part he played in pre-War diplomacy to inspire pity for an undeserved fate.
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