Blood and Iron

litical genius, combined with his personal foibles, mark hi

as been as much misinterpreted through the carping need of envious polit

, side by side with his strange fits of irritability, his t

d, there floated an ironic derision of the littleness

very human and ofttimes crying frailties; the biographic truth is to be found somewhere between these two extremes; but even with thi

ch remindful of that Rabelaisian hero whose enormous capacity could only be quenched by draining the river dry. To tell Bismarck's inner life-

of Destiny, stands forth vividly against a background of intrigue, superstition, personal follies, the

nows, tried for forty years to get rid of him by intrigue, often by assassination; yet until his great duty is done

to a profound sense of this giant's will and his massive knowledge of human life

s it really seems that, as Bismarck himself of

the Circle of Stendal with its little town of Bismarck, on the Biese, where s

ck power, in those far-off times, helps us in the year 1915 to grasp certain

superstitious peasants of the district brought huge quantities of meat and drink, for the monster's food. It is needless to add that these visits were encou

n, as a French canard. It was so easy for "Figaro" to libel the Bismarck of 1871,

at, reviled, depicted a

eft bank of the Rhine; and to General Sheridan, who chanced to be at Sedan and Gravelotte on official busine

who had brought the downfall of the Empire, at Sedan; the man who at Versailles was arranging th

per's daughter was safe;" "once he became enamored of a nun and hired ruffians to kidnap her and bear her away to his castle;" "he is the father of many illegitimate children, in Berlin some say as many as fifty;" "he once lashed

me details of average human life, and what a boon to biographers this grand wickedness

he repaid them in his own splendid coin; and certainly he was pa

those terrible Frankish women-warriors, stemming from barbarian times, could under stress exercise a barbarian's stark freedom of speech; and w

iss a little!

e same. We shall see at times as we sketch for you the life portrait of Otto von Bismarck a mysterious atavism; the self-same

ll-and the Bismarck

PTE

Will