The Kaiser, on the other hand, soon regained his composure, and waited with courage for the outcome of the Paris peace talks. He flung himself into dealing with the enormous correspondence which had opened up — much of it unflattering. He read the London Times every morning (always four days late) and sent for all the English books which had any first-hand bearing on the events leading up to the war, or the war itself. Although the members of his entourage bade him farewell one by one and returned to Germany, he did not seem to mind. He was left with only four gentlemen. His youngest aide, the vigorous, ebullient, Captain Ilsemann, was the one on whom he depended most, and Ilsemann had no intention of leaving. Indeed, the gay Captain finally married Count Godard Bentinck’s daughter, Elizabeth, and remained with the ex-sovereign for the rest of his days.
Ilsemann encouraged William II to take up wood-cutting again as a form of exercise, and soon it had become a regular routine. At eleven there was always a break for coffee which was served in the playhouse built for the Bentinck children. The Emperor liked to spread army maps on the table and go over the battles and victories with his aides. The most brilliant strategical conception of the war, he said, was Winston Churchill’s Gallipoli. (“You don’t know how nearly you were through,” Captain Ilsemann once commented to Count Bentinck’s English niece.) The figure in the dark blue serge suit with the long white beard and the black homburg hat, that wended its way back to the house for luncheon, did not seem to have any resemblance to the former ruler of Germany; it was only when the military greatcoat was flung over his shoulders that a flash of the past came back. Yet in truth William II was not very different. He was still impulsive and unpredictable; he still grasped at fantastic straws; still fitted events into patterns which pleased him; still blamed everyone but himself for the world catastrophe. He eagerly devoured any piece of information or any book which opened up a new channel of escape for him. He claimed that the Socialists had worked for years to undermine German morale, and that mothers had been paid a weekly sum to write distressing letters to their sons at the front in an attempt to break their morale. He was fascinated and perturbed by the scurrilous anti-Semitic book The Protocols of Zion which his brother, Prince Henry, gave to him to read, and which attributed to the Jews the outbreak of the world war, and the subsequent spread of Bolshevism.
Every night he sat up with his host and his aides talking until the small hours of the morning. At first he avoided political questions and entertained Count Bentinck by vivacious reminiscences. But as the weeks passed he lost his reserve and poured out his heart, claiming that no man had been so badly deceived or so ill-used as himself. The question that baffled him most was how the German people had been able to discard him so easily. Although he still accused Prince Max of treachery, his most bitter hatred now centred on von Hindenburg. He told his host that if the Field Marshal had defended the Emperor’s flight to Holland, his former subjects would not have accused him of running away, but would have understood that he had sacrificed himself in their interests. He felt that Hindenburg, more than any other person, had destroyed the people’s faith in him; but for the Field Marshal he believed that he might have been recalled to Germany within a few weeks.
But not only Prince Max and von Hindenburg received the backlash of his tongue. Prince Bülow was condemned for his duplicity, Bethmann-Hollweg for his stupidity, Ludendorff for his insolence, and George V and Nicholas II for their failure to defend the monarchical principle. Gradually, William II found explanations for every happening which left his ego intact. Why had a man so well intentioned been so cruelly treated? The answer lay with the Deity. God had placed him upon the throne and God, for some mysterious reason, had removed it. Perhaps to test his faith; perhaps to prepare him for further responsibilities, perhaps, who could say, even greater glories. “I bear my personal fate with resignation,” he wrote in his memoirs, “for the Lord knows what He does and what He wishes. He knows why He subjects me to this test. I shall bear everything with patience and await whatever God still holds in store for me.”[459] Every morning at 8.45 he attended the family prayers conducted by Count Bentinck; and with imperial habitude commanded all the members of his entourage to do likewise.
The Kaiser would not have been human if he had not derived a certain grim satisfaction from the Versailles Peace Treaty: his subjects had cast him aside for a favourable peace, and now they had reaped a fitting reward for their disloyalty. The German people were utterly stunned by the terms. They had expected to lose Alsace-Lorraine to the French; they knew that their fleet would be scuppered; and they were not surprised to find that the British had appropriated their colonies. But what they did not expect was to be treated as a pariah nation. They had established a democracy for the first time in their history and their government was composed of men who had nothing to do with the events leading to the war; yet they were not even to be allowed to take part in the League of Nations. Furthermore, some of their richest areas were to be torn from them and given away or loaned to Poland, Belgium, and France; and on top of all this they were to pay fantastic and impossible reparations. “Now that we see the terms as a whole,” wrote young Harold Nicolson, one of the members of the British Foreign Office team, to his father, “we realise that they are much too stiff. They are not stern merely but actually punitive, and they abound with what Smuts calls ‘pin-pricks’ as well as dagger-thrusts… Yet the real crime is the reparations and indemnity chapter, which is immoral and senseless. There is not a single person among the younger people here who is not unhappy and disappointed at the terms. The only people who approve are the old fire-eaters.”[460]
After the first shock the German people were enraged. All parties and all shades of opinion united in monster demonstrations. President Ebert ordered every place of amusement closed for a week, while his government sent passionate letters of protest to Paris. But it was to no avail. A few alterations were made, but the treaty stood as designed. Finally, under bitter protest, Germany agreed to sign if the clauses so dear to the heart of Mr. Lloyd George were deleted; these were the demand that Germany admit sole responsibility for the war, and surrender her Kaiser and most of her leading citizens to trial before Allied tribunals. But the Allies remained firm.[461] Ebert rang up the High Command and begged the generals to offer some hope if hostilities were re-opened. Germany would be trampled underfoot, that he knew, but it would be better to fight to the last ditch than to submit to such unbearable humiliation and such monstrous injustice. The High Command, however, replied sadly that no resistance was possible. So at Versailles, on June 28th, 1919, Germany signed. But the signature was tantamount to a new declaration of war, for in the breast of every German burned a resolve to arm again, secretly if necessary, until the day came when Germany could avenge herself. William II’s Second Punic War had ceased to be a fancy. “The war to end wars,” the Kaiser is said to have remarked, “has resulted in a peace to end peace.”
The Kaiser now waited grimly to see how the clauses dealing with his trial, and the trial of Germany’s most prominent men, would be implemented. The first salvo was fired on November 1, 1919, when the Allied Powers addressed a note to Berlin (sent by special messenger because the German Ambassador in Paris refused to transmit it) demanding the surrender of 830 German citizens accused of having committed “acts of violation of the laws and customs of war” or “morally responsible” for crimes committed by their subordinates. The lists included nearly every leading figure in German life: all the princes, ex-Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg, Field Marshals von Hindenburg and von Falkenhayn, and so on down the line. Von Hindenburg was not impressed. “If they want to shoot an old man like myself who has only done his duty and nothing more let them come and take me.” However, he exerted himself on behalf of his Emperor. He wrote General Foch a letter begging him “as the supreme head of an army which through centuries has upheld the tradition of true soldier’s honour and knightly sentiments as to its highest ideal” not to press for the surrender of the Kaise
r. “I put myself entirely at the Allied Powers’ disposal in place of my royal master,” he concluded.[462] The Crown Prince also stepped forward and offered himself for trial as a scapegoat for the rest.
No notice was taken, however, either of Hindenburg’s offer or that of the Prince, and on the 10th of January 1920 the Dutch Government received a demand from the Allies for the extradition of the Kaiser. The Dutch Government, however, refused to oblige. William II had been accorded exile by the Netherlands, said the Dutch Foreign Minister; and since Holland was not a signatory to the Versailles Treaty she was not bound by its articles, and would not give him up.
The French and the Americans had never liked the idea of the war criminal clauses; nor had the British Foreign Office. The diplomats told Mr. Lloyd George that he was making a laughing stock of the country, and it was high time that Britain seized the excuse afforded by the Dutch to drop the whole matter. “Mr. Lloyd George was genuinely indignant,” wrote Mr. Churchill, “but by this time among responsible people in England he was alone. The victorious Allies therefore submitted to the Dutch refusal…”[463]
In the early spring of 1920 the Kaiser bought Doom House, a small schloss standing in a park of 60 acres, four miles from Amerongen in the province of Utrecht. He was able to equip it with his own possessions as the German Government allowed him to remove furniture, pictures, and silver from the palaces at Potsdam and Berlin. As the residence was not big enough for guests the Kaiser built lodge houses near the main gate with suites for visitors, and offices for the Master of the Household; he also enlarged the Orangerie, a building near the main house.
The Empress was deeply relieved that her husband no longer was in danger, but she was homesick for Germany and the companionship of her children. Furthermore, she was distressed by the new rift which had sprung up between the Kaiser and the Crown Prince. Her hopeless, feckless, dissolute first-born son represented almost everything of which she disapproved, yet she adored him. The Kaiser was angry because the Prince had followed him into exile. He argued that while he, the Emperor, had left Germany because the High Command had implored him to do so, the Prince had done the opposite. Despite the generals’ exhortation for him to remain, he had fled to Holland two days after his father. Queen Wilhelmina had assigned him a parsonage on the desolate island of Wieringen on the Zuyder Zee. There he lived, accompanied by one aide, for the next four years.
In May 1920 the Queen allowed the Crown Prince to visit his parents at Doom. His youngest brother, Prince Joachim, was also present, but it was not a happy meeting. Joachim also had left Germany at the time of the revolution, and had bought a villa in Switzerland. He spent most of his time carousing with women and gambling across the border in Italy. The Kaiser blamed the Crown Prince for the boy’s demoralisation. The family reunion had a tragic climax, for a few weeks after the gathering at Doom Joachim shot himself.
The shock undermined the Empress, who declined steadily and died in April 1921. Her body was sent back to Potsdam for burial. All her children were present except for the Crown Prince who was not allowed to return to Germany; thousands of people lined the route in the park of the New Palace along which the funeral procession passed.
The Kaiser was deeply afflicted. He had grown closer to his wife during the awful years of the war than at any time in his marriage, and now in his exile he was desolate. “It was heart-rending,” said a member of his suite, “to see the man who once was the most powerful ruler in Christendom slowly ascend, a grey and lonely figure, the steep stairs to his room. His little court was unable to make him forget his unutterable grief for the loss of his helpmate.” Just as his mother had done in the case of a family bereavement, he ordered the Empress’s room to be locked, and kept exactly as she had left it, with the toilet articles on the tables, and the intimate photographs and books in their places. Every morning for the rest of his life he visited the room, and bowed his head in silent prayer.
However the loneliness that hung over Doom was soon to be dispelled. A year after the Empress’s death the ex-Kaiser received a letter from a small boy who declared that when he grew up he intended to fight for the fallen monarch. The signature was familiar. The Kaiser recalled the boy’s father, Prince Schoenaich-Carolath, who had been killed in the war; and his mother, born the Princess Hermine of Reuss. William was so touched by the letter that he invited the child and his mother to visit him at Doom. The mother came by herself and within a week she was engaged to the Kaiser; they were married six months later on November 5th, 1922. It was not a love match, but a mariage de convenance. The Princess Hermine was twenty-eight years younger than William and very different from the first Empress. She was argumentative, lively, tactless, and aggressive. No one in the Kaiser’s household liked her; they said she was hard and ambitious and trouble-making; that she had prompted her child to write the Kaiser in order to trap him; that she had proposed to the Emperor herself, and married him because she believed that the Hohenzollerns would one day be restored to the throne. On the other hand, George Viereck, the American-born German propagandist, who acted as the Kaiser’s literary agent and often visited Doom (and who later became an ardent Nazi supporter), declared that the Kaiser confided to him that the Princess Hermine “saved my reason if not my life.” He told Viereck that he discussed everything with her, did not write a line without her approval, and had great faith in her ability to see through people, referring proudly to her “X-ray eyes.” And when Daisy, Princess of Pless, sent him a letter of congratulation he replied with touching simplicity: “I have found peace and happiness again after such terrible years of loss and trials, through the affection of this winning lady who has consented to be my wife and to bring sunshine into this house of darkness, sorrow and mourning.”[464] The household, despite their resentment of the new mistress of Doom, admitted that whatever her shortcomings she brought the Kaiser happiness.
For fifteen years William II lived in the dream that one day God might recall him to the throne of his forbears. His faith in the Almighty not only afforded him deep solace but gave him hope which, although always illusory, enabled him to bear his exile with courage and dignity. Now that he was no longer subjected to the torment and strain of political responsibility, his character mellowed and he became more calm and considerate. “A great gentleman,” the Dutch said; while his household — perhaps for the first time in his life — became genuinely attached to him. He followed a clockwork routine: 9 a.m. Prayers; 9.15 Newspapers; 10.30 Exercise (wood-cutting); 12.00 Correspondence; 1.00 Luncheon; 2 to 4 Sleep; 4 to 8 Work and Reading; 8.00 Dinner. When he was alone with his household he liked to read aloud after dinner, and despite the imperfect knowledge of his attendants often chose English books. He was fond of P. G. Wodehouse but he sometimes was irritated by the fact that his listeners only laughed when he laughed. Occasionally, he told a friend, he laughed when there was no joke at all; then when the merriment of his entourage had died away he fixed them with his steely blue eyes and asked them to explain the joke.
The Kaiser, however, was not often alone. The guest houses at Doom nearly always were full, sometimes with his children and relations, sometimes with eminent men from Germany who kept him abreast of current affairs. He still was very much the Emperor; and although he read widely he gained little understanding of political affairs or human psychology. He was incapable of learning from facts, for he simply altered them to fit the patterns his imagination conjured up, or to satisfy his emotional desires. He continued to view the world in the same fanciful and distorted light as when he had been on the throne.
As he believed that God had subjected him to cruel adversity to test his faith and resolve, he worked remorselessly to clear his name of war-guilt. He made no verbal pronouncements, for he had promised the Queen of Holland to remain aloof from political issues, but he authorised the publication of many articles (not under his own name but through agents) attacking “the infamous Treaty of Versailles.” And in 1922 he published an apologia in the form of an a
utobiographical work entitled My Memoirs. The theme was familiar. “Not Germany, but the alliance of her foes, prepared the war according to a definite plan, and intentionally caused it.” The book is not interesting historically because of its glaring omissions and half-truths, but it is a striking revelation of the author’s character. William II wrote throughout as though he merely had played the role of a constitutional monarch, fastening the blame for Germany’s mistakes on his advisers, with not so much as a mention of the fact that these counsellors came and went at his bidding. “The menace of the war was not realised,” he wrote with Olympian detachment, “because the Foreign Office… completely eliminated from its calculations war as a possible instrument of entente statesmanship.” The only person for whom he had a good word to say was Admiral Tirpitz who, probably more than any other single person, was responsible for Germany’s downfall by his antagonism of Britain.
The memoirs did little to enhance William II’s reputation. “No more disarming revelation of inherent triviality, lack of understanding and sense of proportion, and, incidentally, of literary talent, can be imagined,” wrote Mr. Winston Churchill gloomily.
“It is shocking to reflect that upon the word or nod of a being so limited there stood attentive and obedient for thirty years the forces which, whenever released, could devastate the world.”[465]
However, the scholars came to the Kaiser’s rescue. Throughout the twenties all the great powers — Germany, Austria, Russia, France, and Britain — allowed their diplomatic exchanges leading to the conflict to be assembled and published, and a score of historians produced analytical studies of the period. Gradually it became clear that whatever the failings of the Kaiser he had not, as was commonly supposed, planned or plotted or even desired a big war — only a little war! No longer was he an evil or cruel despot, but just a blunderer; a “careless tourist” who, in the words of Churchill, “flung down his cigarette in the ante-room of the magazine which Europe had become,” then went yachting and returned, “to find the building impenetrable with smoke.” “His undeniable cleverness and versatility,” wrote Churchill, “his personal grace and vivacity, only aggravated his dangers by concealing his inadequacy… but underneath all this posing and its trappings was a very ordinary, a vain, but on the whole well-meaning man, hoping to pass himself off as Frederick the Great”[466] Mr. Lloyd George, however, declared that there were other blunderers as well. He overlooked the fact that he once had led a campaign to hang the Kaiser and declared that all the Foreign Secretaries of the period were guilty of gross incompetence. “War could and should have been avoided,” he wrote in memoirs published in the thirties. “I am convinced after a careful perusal of all the documents available on all sides that the Kaiser never had the remotest idea that he was plunging — or being plunged — into a European war… He was not anticipating a costly war but a cheap diplomatic triumph.”[467]
The Kaiser Page 48