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Crashing Eagle. At the peak of his success, Bismarck met his most humiliating defeat. Feckless young Wilhelm II, surrounded by sycophants and homosexuals, fired him. Wilhelm lived to regret it. Bismarck's policy of ingenious opportunism required men of Bismarck's stature to continue to bring it off. Bismarck could see what was coming. Shortly before he died in 1898, slowly and painfully of gangrene, the lonely old man predicted that Prussia's eagle would be brought to earth within 20 years. That is, by 1918.