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Paris. Twelve years of unrest, political squabbles, unemployment and riots had convinced him, a soldier since the age of puberty, that there could be neither peace nor security in Germany unless some way was found to re-establish the old German army and return to the form of government that Germans of his generation understand best: a monarchy. Smarter than most of the German military, he realized that neither of these things could come to pass unless France with her army of a half-million men was mollified. He assembled a little camarilla of army officers and aristocrats and last winter began making secret trips to Paris.
Sly von Schleicher knew that he could expect nothing from the French Rightists of the Poincaré-Tardieu-Laval group. He made his overtures to all the French opposition leaders, especially to Radical Edouard Herriot, Socialist Leon Blum. He offered them two definite concessions. If France did not openly oppose his plans he would smother the German propaganda campaign against Poland, France's ally, and he would break Germany's close business and financial arrangements with Russia. Also he would hold down Hitler. The rest is open news. Von Schleicher returned to Berlin, set his cabal against republican Chancellor Briining in motion, won over President von Hindenburg and set up his Junker "Cabinet of Monocles" under smartly groomed Lieut. Colonel Franz von Papen, his military subordinate.
Monocles? Junker Cabinet of Monocles is too apt a phrase to discard. The members all act like Junkers; they look as if they should wear monocles. Actually none of them do, and only one member is a true Junker in the narrowest sense: a Protestant landowner from East Prussia, Minister of the Interior Baron Wilhelm von Gayl.
Relations. Sly General von Schleicher had reasons for selecting Baron von Gayl and Lieut. Colonel von Papen. The smooth von Papen married the niece of a French Marquis. He speaks almost perfect French. He has many French friends and much money invested in French concerns. Baron von Gayl is descended from an Andreas Gail of Cologne, ennobled about 1390, one branch of whose descend ants went to France, while the others moved east to Prussia and the Polish border. The French branch of the family still exists; the French army contains a General Baron Jean de Gail who as a colonel served on the Interallied Rhineland Commission. The von Gayls and de Gails remain on the best of terms, a fact which saved the life of one of them during the War.* When the von Papen Cabinet seized control of Germany and effectively doubled the army by taking over the Prussian state police, no French newspaper could approve, but they did publish human interest stories explaining what beautiful French von Papen speaks, how much more Latin than Teuton he looks.