I have already referred to the visit I paid to the Emperor at Berlin in the autumn of 1906.  He invited me to a review which he held of his troops there, and in the course of it rode up to the carriage in which I was seated and said, “A splendid machine I have in this army, Mr. Haldane; now isn’t it so?  And what could I do without it, situated as I am between the Russians and the French?  But the French are your allies—­are they not?  So I beg pardon.”

I shook my head and smiled deprecatingly, and replied that, were I in his Majesty’s place, I should in any case feel safe from attack with the possession of this machine, and that for my own part I enjoyed being behind it much more than if I had to be in front of it.

Next day, when at the Schloss, he talked to me fully and cordially.  What follows I extract from the record I made after the conversation in my diaries, which were kept by desire of King Edward, and which were printed by the Government on my return to London.

He spoke of the Anglo-French Entente.  He said that it would be wrong to infer that he had any critical thought about our entente with France.  On the contrary he believed that it might even facilitate good relations between France and Germany.  He wished for these good relations, and was taking steps through gentlemen of high position in France to obtain them.  Not one inch more of French territory would he ever covet.  Alsace and Lorraine originally had been German, and now even the least German of the two, Lorraine, because it preferred a monarchy to a republic, was welcoming him enthusiastically whenever he went there.  That he should have gone to Tangier, where both English and French welcomed him, was quite natural.  He desired no quarrel, and the whole fault was Delcasse’s, who had wanted to pick a quarrel and bring England into it.

I told the Emperor that, if he would allow me to speak my mind freely, I would do so.  He assented, and I said to him that his attitude had caused great uneasiness in England, and that this, and not any notion of forming a tripartite alliance of France, Russia, and England against him, was the reason of the feeling there had been.  We were bound by no military alliance.  As for our entente, some time since we had difficulties with France over Newfoundland and Egypt, and we had made a good business arrangement (gutes Geschaeft) about these complicated matters of detail, and had simply carried out our word to France.

He said that he had no criticism to make on this, except that if we had told him so early there would have been no misunderstanding.  Things were better now, but we had not always been pleasant to him and ready to meet him.  His army was for defense, not for offense.  As to Russia, he had no Himalayas between him and Russia, more was the pity.  Now what about our Two-Power standard.  All this was said with earnestness, but in a friendly way, the Emperor laying his finger on my shoulder as he spoke.  Sometimes the conversation was in German, but often in English.