The Kaiser followed the trial with equal horror. His concern, however, did not spring from the travesty of justice or the anguish of his friends, but for fear that his own probity might be questioned — and just as he was about to depart on a state visit to England. “Suddenly,” wrote Prince Bülow, “the Emperor telephoned to tell me that he had met with an accident. A sudden fit of giddiness had caused him to lie down on the sofa; there he had fainted, and rolled off his sofa to the floor. ‘My head hit the ground so hard that my wife was alarmed by the noise, and came rushing in to me, quite terrified.’ At present, His Majesty added, he felt too ill to think of undertaking the exhausting journey to England, and had wired King Edward to that effect. A few minutes later,” Bülow continued, “the Marshal of the Court, Count August Eulenburg, arrived from the Empress to tell me that, after all, the accident had not been really so serious. The fainting fit and the bumping of the head against the floor had happened in His Majesty’s fancy.”[253]
The Count went on to explain that the trial had upset the Kaiser and he felt it too painful to meet his English relations at the present time. Meanwhile an indignant telegram had arrived from King Edward saying that all the preparations for the visit had been made, and demanding an explanation. Bülow wrote the Emperor begging him to reconsider, and an hour later received an invitation to accompany him to the theatre that evening. “I found him very brisk and unembarrassed: his really was an exceptionally mercurial nature! He declared that his indisposition had quite passed off; he had been able to take a refreshing gallop and had eaten a hearty meal, so that now he felt perfectly fit again… ready for anything… to go anywhere I chose to send him in the interests of our Foreign Policy.”[254]
The Moltke lawsuit had been so mishandled that the Government felt obliged to step in, and ordered the Solicitor-General to hear an appeal. This time the case was conducted behind closed doors. Eulenburg testified for Moltke and declared on oath that he had never practised any abominations. Moltke’s divorced wife was shown to be a liar and the other witnesses who had testified in the previous case were torn to shreds. The hearing ended with Harden being sentenced to four months’ imprisonment, but it was a hollow victory. Just as the lawyers had predicted, Count Moltke, despite a verdict of not guilty, was a ruined man; so many unpleasant accusations had been made that, although they were not proved, he was regarded as beyond the pale, and retired to his country estates.
Prince Eulenburg knew that he was the real target and that the matter would not be allowed to drop. “Harden’s and Bernstein’s ideal would be to have me arrested for perjury… Moltke’s was only the sauce for the dish… Bülow has no interest in getting me out of it; he will not feel himself stronger than ‘headquarters’ and a short-sighted monarch, prey to utterly futile Generals. The case will last a long time and stir up endless dirt. I am to be victimised, and so are all who have stood by me. If I do not appear at the bar, I am condemned from the first day; if I do, they will unharness Bernstein and all his wild horses, and slay me in the gutter. So the matter stands, and yet God will not suffer me to die.”[255]
The horses were unharnessed in the spring of 1908 when Bernstein found two witnesses who were willing to take the stand against the Prince. They appeared in a libel case in Munich, brought by Harden against a local paper; they testified that Eulenburg had committed acts of indecency with them when he was Ambassador in Munich nearly twenty-five years previously. Now the attack could begin again. On May 8th, the Royal Prussian Ministry, at the instigation of Prince Bülow, ordered the arrest of Eulenburg on grounds of perjury. He was so ill, partly from arthritis and partly from nerves, that he had to be carried from his house on a stretcher. It was decided to imprison him in the public hospital of the Charite in Berlin and to transport him every day to court.
Harden and Bernstein had gathered 145 witnesses. Most of them were men of the lowest class, thieves, blackmailers, perverts, and mental defectives. Dozens were brought into Eulenburg’s hospital room to peer at him for identification. However, before the case opened, the witnesses had dwindled to twelve, and after the first week the twelve were reduced to two. Both of these men had been boatmen in Munich. One of them, a man called Reidl, had had thirty-two convictions; he was disqualified when it was learned that he had been convicted of accepting bribes, and had even tried to blackmail Eulenburg after the case had opened. This left only Jacob Ernst, who had been in Eulenburg’s employ for many years as a general factotum. He was a middle-aged man with a family of eight. He was addicted to drink and gave his evidence haltingly. What was the truth about him? Eulenburg contended that he was a neurotic, simple-minded man who had been “worked on” by Bernstein, and, by a mixture of persuasiveness and threat, had finally become convinced that he had done something wrong. After the newspaper attacks in the spring, and before Bernstein had come into his life, he had written the Prince a letter. “Could you ever have believed, my lord Prince, that any people in this world could behave like that to such a good man as you are? I couldn’t. I would have hoped the contrary. I have known you for a long time, my lord Prince. You have never shown me or my family anything but kindness, and never been the slightest trouble to any of us. Don’t be afraid — it will be all right. I made someone explain the paragraph to me — it is simply shocking to say such things about you. Such a normal healthy man as you are. I will close now, hoping you will get the better of the scandal, which is not worth powder and shot, etc.”[256]
Bernstein claimed that the letter had been written at the Prince’s instigation. If this was so, what sort of a witness was Ernst, first supporting Eulenburg and then Harden with contradictory statements? When Ernst came into the Berlin court he began by denying what he had said in Munich and swore that he had never had indecent relations with Eulenburg; but when Bernstein cross-examined him for an hour, and threatened to send him to prison for perjury, he returned to his original story. In 1883, when the Prince was Ambassador in Munich, he was fond of going on the lake to compose his music and poetry and frequently employed Ernst as a boatman. On one occasion he had made advances to Ernst which the latter had reciprocated.
Bernstein made great play of a letter written by Eulenburg to Ernst on December 22, 1907 — the day after the latter had testified against him in the Munich court — in which the Prince upbraided him for his allegations, and ended: “Besides, if anything of the kind ever had taken place it was such an old story that there could no longer be any question of punishment.” Taken out of context the words appeared damaging, but Eulenburg pointed out that if he had intended them to carry a guilty connotation he scarcely would have put them on paper in the middle of the trial. He believed that Ernst was deranged, and was merely trying to impress on him that there was no reason to allow Bernstein to terrorise him.
Whatever the truth of the incident, alleged to have taken place twenty-five years earlier, it was obvious that Prince Eulenburg was not a homosexual in the accepted sense of the word. Despite months of investigation, Bernstein could bring no evidence against him apart from this one, doubtful episode. No one can read Eulenburg’s letter without pity for his suffering. Repeatedly he declared his innocence and prayed God to relieve him from his anguish. “If only He would let me not awake!” “Oh if God would but grant me release but not in the most terrible way of all, by losing my reason.” “What can be God’s purpose in this? I suppose I shall understand it some day, but not here, for I am a broken man.”[257]
Princess Eulenburg stood by her husband with passionate fervour, utterly convinced of his innocence. “I declare on my honour as a wife and mother that the accusations put forward are from A to Z lies invented by envious enemies and false friends; and that in the long period of the thirty-four years comprising our married life I have never perceived the smallest sign of anything but a perfectly normal emotional life or even manner of life. Nor can I understand how any reasonable person can venture to speak of abnormality in face of the fact that in the first ten years of our marriage [1876 to 1
886] eight healthy children were born to us. But in Germany people have sunk so low that even the most normal and the happiest of marriages are not safe from such ‘modern’ suspicions… It is a convenient way of ridding one’s self of a man of honour whom it is desired to ruin, and who cannot be attacked in any less decent fashion…”[258]
This was part of the testimony which the Princess prepared, and waited day after day, to read out in court. But on July 13th Eulenburg was so ill that he fainted. His leg had swollen so badly that the doctors diagnosed thrombosis and refused to allow him to be moved to court. So the court moved to the hospital. Never has there been such a bizarre scene as this shameless frenzy to destroy the Emperor’s favourite. Eulenburg grew steadily worse and the court adjourned; in September he was no better and the case finally was suspended indefinitely. It was believed that the jury would have returned a verdict of not guilty; but Eulenburg knew that it would not alter his position. His fall was complete. He retired to Liebenberg where he lived as a semi-invalid until his death fourteen years later.
“Rominten knew him no more,” wrote the English governess employed to look after the Kaiser’s daughter. “Yet probably no one was more missed than he whose name was never afterwards mentioned there.”[259]
Chapter 11. The German Fleet
“He’s a Satan. You can hardly believe what a Satan he is!” exclaimed the Kaiser about Edward VII to a startled dinner party on March 19, 1907. The outburst was caused by the knowledge that the British Government was negotiating in St. Petersburg for an agreement which would put an end to outstanding disputes between the two countries, and secondly by the announcement that King Edward, on his annual spring cruise, would meet the King of Italy at Gaeta and the King of Spain off Cartagena. The Kaiser was convinced that his uncle’s main purpose was to do mischief to Germany. He was rather silent at the beginning of dinner due to indigestion, Count Zedlitz related, “but about eleven o’clock he began to talk freely about the policy of England and grew rather excited. He complained bitterly of the intrigues that his uncle, the King of England, was carrying on about him. He said he knew all about them from private letters from France, and King Edward was equally hard at work in every other country. The whole press of the world, including that of America, had already been mobilised against him by English money, and it was extraordinary how much personal animosity his uncle’s attitude revealed.”[260]
The truth was that the King of England was beating the Kaiser at his own game. Two years earlier, at Bjorko, William I had preached a continental combine against Britain. In the flush of triumph following his departure he had written to the Czar: “Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden will all be attracted to this new centre of gravity… They will revolve in the orbit of the great block of Powers (Russia, Germany, France, Austria, Italy) and feel confidence in leaning on and revolving around this mass.” He had gone on to predict that even America would join, and thus John Bull would be prevented from setting “the rest of the civilised nations by each other’s ears for his own personal benefit.”[261]
But Bjorko had been stillborn and Algeciras, far from prising apart England and France, had strengthened the entente. And now it looked as though Britain was making a bid for Russian friendship. It was too much. It was a sinister plot. The Fatherland was being encircled. William II’s grievances found their way into the German press and soon many newspapers were attacking Edward VII and his “sinister” activities. On April 15th the Neue Freie Presse declared: “Who can fail to receive the impression that a diplomatic duel is being fought out between England and Germany under the eyes of the world. The King of England… is no longer afraid of appearing to throw the whole influence of his personality into the scales whenever it is a question of thwarting the aims of German policy. The meeting at Gaeta [with the King of Italy] is another fact connected with the burning jealousy between England and Germany. Already people are asking themselves everywhere: ‘What is the meaning of this continual political labour, carried on with open recklessness, whose object is to put a close ring around Germany?’” This phrase “the ring around Germany” was picked up, and in the coming years became diplomatic jargon in the form of “encirclement.”
The personality of Germany as a nation was almost perfectly represented by the personality of the Kaiser as a man. Germany was threatening and blustering one moment, pained and reproachful the next. Germany was able, tempestuous, and unwise, a country with a chip on its shoulder, longing for prestige and acclamation, prone to dark moods of dejection that turned overnight into menacing arrogance. “The majority of us Germans,” explained a diplomat to his English colleague, “cannot shake off the feeling that we belong to a parvenu nation, and therefore we are always on the look-out to see if any other country is offering us a slight.”[262] That was the Kaiser; touchy, envious, boastful, and uncertain all at the same time. Even after his triumph over Tangiers — before the defeat at Algeciras — he was bathed in self-pity because of the hostility of the British press, and nearly wept when he talked to the Princess of Pless. “…he got very excited and during our conversation about England he had tears in his eyes,” she wrote in her diary. “…The two countries are of the same race, yet absolutely different in every way… A nephew on one Throne, the uncle on the other; both countries believing themselves to be in the right and both sincerely believing that each wishes to dominate the other in the eyes of the world To the Emperor it is a bitter disappointment to be misjudged and to be disliked — and he wants always to be first. He is apt to rise to a pitch of excitement so difficult for his Ministers to control, that they do not tell him everything for fear of what he might do. The King simply dislikes the Emperor. I am sure he has no real and dangerous intentions towards Germany; but he just shows his teeth when a German approaches him. There are great mistakes on both sides.”[263]
The “mistakes on both sides” were often ridiculous and childish and by no means only due to the Kaiser. Edward VII was so annoyed by Tangiers he refused to allow his son, Prince George, to attend the wedding of the Crown Prince in Berlin, on the grounds that he must remain at home for the visit of the King of Spain. Three months later Edward sent a letter to the Crown Prince and invited him and his bride to England. William II was furious and complained to the Czar: “He goes and invites my son behind my back to come and visit him in England. I have of course stopped that business.”[264] He not only stopped it but sent a refusal on the grounds that the King of Spain would be visiting Germany! Then, to make matters worse, he informed the British Ambassador that it was usual to address such invitations to “the Head of the House of Hohenzollern,” and that after the Crown Prince’s last visit which had resulted “in unseemly romping in unlighted corridors” he doubted the benefits of English influences; and finally, that he suspected that the King wished “to get hold of the Crown Prince” for some abstruse purpose of his own. “The real truth,” declared Edward hotly to Lord Knollys, “was that he was jealous of my asking his son at all. Of course I knew that the young man could not come over without his father’s permission.”[265]
The King was not as innocent as he sounded. It was not merely “jealousy.” The Crown Prince was weak-minded and impressionable and whenever the King saw him he laid himself out to be as agreeable as possible, bringing the young man completely under the spell of his personality. There was nothing more annoying he could do than to send him back to Berlin full of Edward’s praises. “He was, as long as I can remember, extremely friendly to me,” wrote the Crown Prince in his memoirs, “and took a most active interest in my development Often have we sat talking for hours in the most unconstrained fashion while he lay back in a great easy chair and smoked an enormous cigar… I have scarcely ever met with any other person who understood as he did how to charm people with whom he came into contact.”[266]
The Crown Prince was only one source of trouble: far more serious was the tittle-tattle which the courtiers of both monarchs picked up and reported back to their masters. The King made joke
s about the Kaiser. After Algeciras he called him “the most brilliant failure in history” and the Kaiser retaliated by talking loudly on board the Hohenzollern in front of several Americans about the looseness of English morals and the King’s relations with Mrs. Keppel. The last shaft infuriated Edward and he was determined to let his nephew know that his remarks had been reported. He instructed his secretary to write to the British Ambassador in Berlin to tell William that “His Majesty… does not know whether the Emperor retains any affection for him, but from one or two things which he has heard recently, he should say not…”
However by 1906 Edward VII felt that the breach was growing too wide and took the initiative in restoring harmony. In January he wrote the Kaiser a birthday letter saying: “We are, my dear William, such old friends and near relations that I feel sure that the affectionate feelings which have always existed may invariably continue.” William responded gratefully. “The whole letter,” he wrote from Berlin, “breathed such an atmosphere of kindness and warm sympathetic friendship that it constitutes the most cherished gift among my presents.” But four months later when Count Metternich wrote from London suggesting that a meeting between the two monarchs would improve Anglo-German relations the Kaiser scribbled on the margin: “I don’t believe it… Meetings with Edward have no lasting value, because he is too envious, propter invidiam.”[267]
Nevertheless uncle and nephew met in Germany in August, and spent three days in amiable conversation, scrupulously avoiding politics. There were no incidents and on the surface cordial relations were restored again; but underneath the rancour persisted. Nineteen hundred and six was the year of Algeciras and in private the Emperor fulminated against Edward’s “mischief-making,” attributing all Germany’s troubles to this one source. “He is furious at the machinations of his uncle, the King of England, against him…” wrote Count Zedlitz. “It was unpardonable, he says, of Russia to have ranged herself recklessly on the side of the powers hostile to Germany at Algeciras… and he is particularly incensed by the attitude Italy took up. He said: ‘It has always been a habit of theirs to betray German Emperors and leave them in the lurch.’ The explanation of it all is that the unanimous opposition of all the Powers to Germany is considered by him as a personal insult…”[268]
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