the Dutch authorities were generally scrupulous in maintaining their impartiality, even looking the other way when German forces passed briefly through Dutch territory on their way to invade Belgium. When the First World War ended, it was to the peaceful Netherlands that the defeated German Kaiser was exiled, billeted in a manor house in Doorn until his death in 1941. Rising at seven every morning, he spent much of his time tending the extensive gardens – in 1929, he told a visiting interviewer he had felled his 20,000th tree, but asked that this not be reported lest critics ask: ‘What are
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