This time, standing, he watched carefully as the American soldiers stood aside and let loose their allies the Indians. The images were smudged and vague, and when he asked that the projector stop entirely, he could not see them clearly. Every frame was a blur. With a sinking heart, he could tell from their riding styles that these were not actors. These were his beloved Red Men. Their outfits were wrong, their headdresses ridiculous, their reins and tomahawks entirely inappropriate to their tribes. As with the cavalry-campaign outfits, might not the inappropriate be accurate now? Their backs were ramrod-straight, their understanding of how to take a gallop across the potholes and tree stumps of a battlefield indefatigable.

This had been done for his benefit. He understood this. He also understood that the propagandists were playing on his alleged childlike fear of Indians. But he saw more, much more. And what he saw made him sink down on his slipper couch and clutch a pillow to his chest. A low moan escaped him. Dona came in from the next room to ask what was wrong, and he just shook his head.

For the first time, he understood his enemy. The Americans were not just relentless, not just clownish and insulting without a shred of respect for three thousand years of continental history. How could he explain what was wrong? They had grabbed on to something sacred and had determined how exactly to pervert and diminish it in a way that broke him. Once, he had seen Indians paid to re-create their glorious battles for sport, and that had hardened him. But now, in front of him, onscreen, there were Indians, not re-enacting their lives but pretending to be Indians for the golden calf that was the motion-picture camera. In a month, they would be in Photoplay magazine with commentary on what color they thought President Wilson would be, if he were a color.

This was the future. It was inescapable.

He ordered the household packed, the automobiles readied, the roads cleared for his departure from Spa.

He had dreams so terrible that night that he confessed them to Princess Cecilie, who told her astrologer, who told the newspapers. And that game of telephone simplified his fears and prognostications: Indians were coming to kill the sons of the fatherland. The American newsreels had survived a 360-degree revolution in how they were understood. The next day, all Germany read the illegally printed broadsheets announcing his visions of half-nude savages moving soundlessly in the moonlight, through trenches, floating over barbed wire, immune to the gas and the bayonet, scalps draped over the infantry’s now useless helmets, arrow shafts poking through the roofs of staff cars.