offence could not hide the suspense and suffering. Nowhere were
you able to forget the war or to escape the all-pervading influence of
the Kaiser. The empty royal box at the Opera, His Opera, called him
to mind. What would happen before he reappeared there for a gala
performance? When again, in the shuffle of European politics, would
the audience see the Tsar of Russia or the King of England by the
Kaiser's side?

It was his Berlin, the heart of his Berlin, that was before you when you
left the Opera--the new Berlin, which he had fathered in its boom
growth, taking few pages of a guidebook compared to Paris. In front
of his palace Russian field-guns taken by von Hindenburg at
Tannenberg were exhibited as the spoils of his war; while not far
away the never-to-be-forgotten grandfather in bronze rode home in
triumph from Paris.

One wondered what all the people in the ocean of Berlin flats were
thinking as one walked past the statue of Frederick the Great, with his
sharp nose pointing the way for future conquerors, and on along
Unter den Linden, with its broad pavements gleaming in a
characteristic misty winter night, through the Brandenburg Gate of his
Brandenburg dynasty, or to the statue of the blood-and-iron
Bismarck, with his strong jaw and pugnacious nose--the statesman
militant in uniform with a helmet over his bushy brow--who had made
the German Empire, that young empire which had not yet known
defeat because of the system which makes ready and chooses the
hour for its blow.

Not far away one had glimpses of the white statues of My Ancestors
of the Sieges Allée, or avenue of victory--the present Kaiser's own