VISITS TO MILITARY ESTABLISHMENTS AND SOME IRONIC REMARKS
Graf Moltke, the military genius and learned man, is mentioned several times by Kume, who gives an
account of a speech by him at the Reichstag.16 On 16 March the mission was shown the Armoury, a
beautiful baroque building, finished about 1701 by Andreas Schlüter, which has survived WWII. Reflecting
on this visit, Kume may have been puzzled by the fact that, although European royalty was linked by
marriage, so many wars occurred between the states. He formulates an ironical conclusion, when he heard
the story of the huge brass lion monument in the inner court of the armoury. Remembering that Napoleon
took away the brass quadriga from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, that it was brought back from Paris after
Napoleon’s defeat, remembering that the lion on top of the Waterloo monument was taken away from the
French, and hearing that the lion in Berlin was originally cast by the Danish from weapons seized by them after
they defeated the Northern Germans in an uprising in 1854, and hearing that this lion was taken away from
Denmark, when Prussia won against that country in 1864, Kume wonders whether wars in Europe are
waged because it is a kind of sport: to seize the brass lions of other countries. Actually, the lion Kume saw
in Berlin was taken back to Denmark after WWII.17
While the armoury visited was already mainly used as a military museum, the mission visited two
modern military establishments in the southern part of Berlin on 18 March, the Franz Barracks in the
morning and the Dragoons’ Barracks at Belle-Alliance-Street in the afternoon, as is reported both by Kume
and the newspapers. The Franz Barracks were the most modern example of barracks, three large buildings
around a square. The older type of barracks, the Dragoons’ Barracks, still exist and are used as the bureau
of finance of a city ward. The horse stables, however, have been removed in the main.