He consulted the program he had long ago pleated with anxiousness. The Cossacks were the midpoint of the program, and were to perform trick riding, dzhigitovka, a form quite familiar to him. This was but a demonstration. It was not, he decided, an assassination attempt. Wilhelm raised a single finger, and an attendant associated with the treasury shimmered to his side. He asked how much gold was in reserve at the Julius Strum in Spandau. Then he frowned again at the riding ring before him.

“Cossacks!” Duncan called to the crowd. “Freemen and adventurers! These stalwart cowboys of the Russian steppes!” He was supposed to continue his patter, but the whiskey had finally begun to behave, and the next words, tricky in their alliteration, came forth thickly. “Independent as Americans, frontiersmen, freemen, the cowboys of the Caucasus, Plainsmen of St. Petersburg, the 7th Calvary of Siberia.”

Americans had once seen them as suppressors of uprisings, torturers of Jews. Then Buffalo Bill had gotten hold of them. It had taken months of newspaper accounts saluting their fierce independence, their love of Christ. There was no Cossack profession except warrior, an existence that reminded Americans of their own Indians, who were no longer dangerous.

The Kaiser folded his arms. When the sabers came out in Wild Duncan Cody’s Wild West show, they came with the harsh scrape and clatter of silverware falling from dinner plates.

“These are not Cossacks,” he hissed to Viktoria Luise.

“You think too much, Papa,” she responded. Wilhelm turned toward Dona, but knew better; she lacked his sense of poetry. He glared at the “Cossacks” until he intuited that they were actually Onondaga Indians.

Ah, the Red Men. The Kaiser—when he was still just five-year-old Little Willie of the withered arm—received strict tutelage under the skeletal Herr Hinzpeter, who had ordered him to treat all frivolity like an insidious disease. He was never praised, was taught to pursue perfection and to understand that he would never achieve it, and never to eat dessert, even when it was his turn to cut the cake at teatime. He was allowed to play, as long as his games involved diplomacy or, better, war. Hence his love for James Fenimore Cooper. The Last of the Mohicans, wholeheartedly approved by the pedant Hinzpeter, was about war, and yet it was also—a secret Wilhelm would take to his grave—-fun.

Upon learning that there were actual American children in Potsdam, he ordered them to play with him, to play Indians. Some days, he was the Deerslayer; on others, Chingachgook; but on every Saturday afternoon, Willie was no longer Friedrich Wilhelm Victor Albert Hohenzollern, but a savage who scalped servants and the more indulgent members of his family. Alas, just like a Cossack, his destiny awaited him: on his twelfth birthday, he was shown the royal fleet and told that from now on he was to like sailors, not Red Men.