Spain.  The king answered that he could not guarantee this, for he was merely the head of the Hohenzollern family.  Prince Leopold, whose lands lay outside of Prussia, was not even one of his subjects.  The interview between the king and the French ambassador had been a friendly one.  The ambassador had been very courteous to the king, and the king had been very polite to the ambassador.  They had parted on good terms.

[Illustration:  An Attack on a Convoy in the Franco-Prussian War.]

In the meanwhile, Bismarck had been hoping that an excuse for war would come from this incident.  He was at dinner with General von Moltke and Count von Roon when a long telegram came from the king, telling of his interview with the French ambassador.  In the story of his life written by himself, Bismarck tells how, as he read the telegram both Roon and Moltke groaned in disappointment.  He says that Moltke seemed to have grown older in a minute.  Both had earnestly hoped that war would come.  Bismarck took the dispatch, sat down at a table, and began striking out the message polite words and the phrases that showed that the meeting had been a friendly one.  He cut down the original telegram of two hundred words to one of twenty.  When he had finished, the message sounded as if the French ambassador had bullied and threatened the king of Prussia, while the latter had snubbed and insulted the Frenchman.  Bismarck read the altered telegram to Roon and Moltke.  Instantly, they brightened up and felt better.  “How is that?” he asked.  “That will do it,” they answered.  “War is assured.”

The telegram was given to the newspapers, and within twenty-four hours, the people of Paris and Berlin were shouting for war.  Napoleon III hesitated, but he finally gave in to his generals and his wife who urged him to “avenge the insult to the French nation.”

[Illustration:  The Proclamation at Versailles of William I as Emperor of Germany]

We give this story of the starting of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 just to show the tricks of European diplomats.  What Bismarck did was no worse than what the Frenchman, Talleyrand, would have done, or the Austrian, Metternich, or several of the Turkish or Russian diplomats.  It simply proves how helpless the people of European countries are, when the military class which rules them has decided, for its own power and glory, on war with some other nation.

The war was short.  The forces of France were miserably unprepared.  The first great defeat of the French army resulted in the capture of the emperor by the Prussians and the overthrowing of the government in Paris, where a third republic was started.  One of the French generals turned traitor, thinking that if he surrendered his army and cut short the war the Prussians would force the French to take Napoleon III back as emperor.  Paris was besieged for a long time.  The people lived on mule meat and even on rats and mice rather than surrender to the Germans, but at last they were starved out, and peace was made.