THE KAISER ON TRIAL By George Sylvester Viereck
There are many silly tasks a historian can undertake, and one of the silliest is to write a book of 518 pages (Duckworth, 21s.), proving that the Kaiser Wilhelm H was not the cause of the Great War. Mr. Viereck brings him before the "High Court of History" to answer the charges of "war guilt" made against him by the Allied and Associated Powers at Versailles, a mock trial is staged, counsel for the prosecution and defence state their cases, and witnesses living and dead are summoned to give evidence. In other hands than Mr. Viereck's the procedure might have had some value ; but he stage-manages the trial with such palpable prejudice that it turns into farce. Indeed, it soon becomes clear that Mr. Viereck only assumes the panoply of justice to give some faint appearance of impartiality to his mis- readings of history. For the defence of Wilhelm II, which by now could interest no one, not even Mr. Viereck, turns into the extravagant claim that he alone had the will and the ability, given the chance, to save Europe from the Great War. It cannot be said that Mr. Viereck succeeds in making this lunatic assertion even faintly convincing. Wilhelm H had intelligence and, according to many observers, great personal charm ; it is possible that Mr. Viereck's powers of historical judgement have been distorted by his visits to Doom. But the Kaiser was surrounded by the most incom- petent and personally repellent political advisers that have ever led a great Empire to defeat. One might forgive them their vanity, arrogance, brutality, their outbursts of hysteria ; what is impossible to forgive is their complete incapacity to see the facts of any situa- tion, and the air of spiritual squalor which surrounds them. The Kaiser hiniself, though lacking the worst faults of . a Holstein or a Billow, was not so different that he can have any claim to political genius. Proust somewhere says that the Kaiser had almost infallible artistic taste ; you could be sure that anything he admired wat execrable. Such connoisseurs have their uses ; despite all the excuses that cad be made for him, the Kaiser can still staid as a model of how not to be a ruler. It is only fair to add that Mr. Bernard Shaw thinks Mr. Viereck's book valuable.piece of work. .
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