by Barrie Pitt
Thus it was necessary to wait and hope, watching all the time for a system which could give again to Germany the control and discipline exercised in the past by the House of Hohenzollern. Many indeed, were the regretful dreams of what Germany’s position in the world could have been, had the last Hohenzollern to occupy the Prussian throne possessed some of the qualities of the first – or better still, of his most illustrious ancestor, Frederick the Great.
In the early hours of November 10th, 1918, nine motor-cars had left the German GHQ at Spa and driven north for forty miles. The convoy reached the Dutch frontier not far from the village of Eysden just before seven o’clock, and as it was a Sunday morning, repeated hootings were necessary before a sleepy police sergeant made his appearance. At the sight of the bemedalled and braided German officers, the sergeant resolutely refused to remove the barrier and allow them entry into Holland, but in due course he was persuaded to telephone for an officer, who arrived shortly after eight o’clock.
Major van Dyl was possessed of a sense of responsibility and initiative, and he was sufficiently well aware of world personalities and events for him to recognize the Kaiser and the situation which had brought him to Holland so early on that particular morning. Drawing aside the chains which barred the road, the Dutch major invited the German officers to descend from their motor-cars and enter Holland, and he then accompanied them to the small railway station nearby. In due course, as a result of the last piece of administrative duty which the Staff of the Supreme Command was to perform for its War Lord, the royal train arrived from Spa and the Kaiser and his suite entered it to take up residence for what might have been an extended period.
However, once Major van Dyl had informed the Dutch Government of the arrival in their country of one of the most controversial figures of recent history, its officials set about endeavouring to arrange accommodation for him, earnestly hoping that his presence would not prove such an embarrassment as they feared. Upon inquiry, the Kaiser intimated that he would appeal first of all for hospitality to Count Godard Bentinck at his home in Amerongen, some fifteen miles south of Utrecht; and upon the Count’s return in the early evening after a day’s hunting, he was informed of the royal wish by his own Government.
Count Bentinck’s first question was not unnaturally with the regard to the size of the suite for which he was asked to provide shelter, and being informed that in due course it would rise to as many as thirty persons, he tendered his regrets that his establishment was not large enough to provide adequate accommodation for so large a party. The following day, however, a letter arrived from the Kaiser, calling upon his fellow Knight of the Order of St. John to remember the vows of their order, and to provide him with sanctuary. Upon this, the Count acquiesced, and the royal train arrived at Maarn railway station nearby during the afternoon of November 11th, in damp foggy weather which added nothing to the pleasure of the occasion.
It was the first time that the Count and the Kaiser had met, and the preliminary exchanges between them included an inquiry from the Kaiser as to whether his host was a Freemason. Upon being assured that the Count was not, the Kaiser expressed his pleasure and then called, rather surprisingly, for a ‘cup of tea, hot English tea!’
During the days which followed, the Kaiser settled in to the four rooms which Count Bentinck had set aside for him, while the rest of his Staff found themselves what accommodation they could. The Kaiserin arrived, some members of the Staff were compelled by financial considerations to beg leave to return to Germany, and as day followed day, a fixed routine was established which enabled the Kaiser to enjoy some feeling that his life was still running upon smooth and well-ordered lines.
At seven o’clock each morning, he rose and walked in the gardens – wearing, we are told, a plain blue suit such as he used to wear during the yachting seasons at Kiel or Cowes – and at a quarter to nine there would be a short religious service at which he would read the lesson. After breakfast he would open and read his mail, a considerable part of which during the first weeks consisted of insulting and threatening letters from all over the world. He would then occupy himself for the rest of the day learning Dutch or taking exercise by sawing or chopping wood in the grounds of Amerongen House, in silent contemplation, or in conversation with some chosen and appointed member of his retinue. Tea was at half-past four, dinner at eight.
This routine was disturbed on November 28th by the arrival of several men dressed in black, visiting him at the request of the German Council of the People’s Delegates. The leader of the delegation was Count Ernst zu Rantzau, who produced from his brief-case a large white document headed with the Imperial Eagle, It read:
I herewith renounce for all time my right to the Crown of Prussia, and to the German Imperial Crown connected therewith. In doing so I release all officials of the German Reich and Prussia, all officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the Navy, the Prussian Army and the troops of Federal contingents from their oath of allegiance which they have sworn to me as their Emperor, King and Supreme Commander. Until the institution of a new order in the German Reich, I expect them to assist the holders of the actual power in Germany to protect the German people from the dangers threatening through anarchy, famine and foreign rule.
This was surprisingly short and concise for so momentous a document, but it had the advantage that there were few points over which doubt or argument could arise. After a few moments’ deliberation, the Kaiser drew it towards him, wrote ‘Signed and sealed by our hand and the affixed Imperial Seal. Given at Amerongen, the 28th November, 1918’.
He then signed it, largely and vigorously – Wilhelm; and became from that moment a private citizen, living in exile.
His quarters were comfortable at Amerongen, indeed splendid, for Count Bentinck was a wealthy man and properly conscious of the treatment the aristocratic world expected him to extend to one of their number in distress. The rooms were hung with Flanders tapestries and furnished superbly, and if they were alien in atmosphere, they were far better than the accommodation in which the Kaiser’s cousins ‘Nicky’ and ‘Alix’ had spent their last days, in far-off Siberia.
Christmas came and went, the year drew to its close. It had been one of epochal events. The whole of the Kaiser’s life had been a cavalcade of stirring enterprise and national – and indeed personal – triumphs: now, in twelve brief months, all its glories and achievements had been brought to nought. Defeat, exile, and then the abdication ending the long rule of his House; truly he had food for thought.
As the New Year began, the last Hohenzollern to occupy a throne pondered the past.
* * *
Just over four hundred miles south-east of Amerongen, between Munich and Salzburg and only fifteen miles from the Austrian border, lay the small town of Traunstein. Unlike the greater part of rural Germany, Traunstein did show some external sign that the country of which it was a tiny part had been engaged in war. Not, of course, that the sign was one of war’s devastation, for no shattered roads or causeways, no burnt-out shells of barns or homesteads disfigured Traunstein’s Christmas-card beauty. It was an addition to, not a subtraction from, Traunstein’s accommodation facilities which signified Germany’s prosecution of the war – for some two miles east of the town’s outskirts sprawled the barrack-blocks and barbed-wire compounds of a large prison-camp, its harsh outlines blanketed during the closing hours of 1918 under two feet of snow.
Despite the ending of hostilities, German sentries still guarded the camp, and its administration by the German Kommandatur had not been relaxed one iota with the signing of any of the armistices – for the vast majority of the inhabitants of the camp were Russians, and none of the Fatherland’s rolling stock had been spared as yet to transport them back to a homeland which was as uninterested in receiving them as most of the prisoners seemed to be in returning to. As the local authorities had no wish to add to their problems by releasing thirty thousand uncouth and possibly vengeful moujiks to terrorize the area, these therefo
re remained penned behind barbed wire, fed when food could be found for them, singing during the evenings vast rolling choruses of doleful incomprehensibility, trudging for exercise in swaying columns around the compounds, fighting amongst themselves for scraps of food; starving, and dying.
During the last hour of the year, silence lay upon the camp, for the prisoners had been shepherded into their blocks shortly after dusk and now lay on the thin, filthy straw which covered the floor, huddled together for warmth in dark, snoring, mephitic squalor.
Outside, the air was cold but clear, frost sparkling in the moonlight. At midnight, the guards changed. Files of men behind the guard NCOs trudged along the slushy paths between the high double fences which surrounded the whole camp area, and at each sentry box the last men in the files dropped off, perfunctorily performed the doll-like ceremony of relieving the previous sentries, after which each pair stood in muttering commiseration until the NCOs returned, trailing behind them other files, this time of the thankful, stumbling, bone-cold men going off duty.
By half-past twelve, all was silent and still again. The new guard sheltered inside their wooden boxes, cursed the cold, stamped their feet, bemoaned their lot in solitary communion, and wondered if the cold and the guard commander’s sense of duty would be sufficient to keep them awake during their entire stag, or whether they would be able to snatch a doze and thus pass a few of the interminable minutes less conscious of their discomfort.
One of the sentries, however, had no intention of sleeping, for there was too much to think about, and too much dissatisfaction, corroding disappointment, thwarted longing and potential hatred seething in his soul to give him rest. He stood in his box, unaware of his present discomfort, his mind busy with a hundred half-formed, shadowy ambitions, his pallid, nervous face twitching with cold and concentration.
Obergefreiter Adolf Hitler was pondering the future.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
From some of the publications listed below I have quoted short extracts in my own text. I would like to thank the publishers and copyright owners for allowing me to do so. For those quotations where there is not in my text a direct reference to the author or the title of his particular book, I have provided after the Bibliography a list of sources.
ALBERT I: The War Diaries of Albert I, King of the Belgians (Kimber, 1954).
ALLEN, Arthur B.: Twentieth Century Britain (Barrie and Rockliff, 1958).
ASQUITH, Hon. Herbert: Moments of Memory (Hutchinson, 1937).
ASTON, Sir George: Foch (Hutchinson, 1929).
BEAVERBROOK, Lord: Men and Power, 1917–18 (Hutchinson, 1956).
BINDING, Rudolf: A Fatalist at War (Allen and Unwin, 1929).
BIRNIE, Arthur: The Art of War (Nelson, 1942).
BLUMENTRITT, Gunther: Von Rundstedt (Odhams, 1952).
BLUNDEN, Edmund: Undertones of War (Cobden-Sanderson, 1928).
BULOW, Prince Von: Memoirs (Putnam, 1932).
BYRON, R. (Editor): King’s Royal Rifle Corps Chronicle, 1918 (Wykenham, 1919).
CHAPMAN, Guy (Editor): Vain Glory (Cassell, 1937).
CHURCHILL, Winston S.: The World Crisis, 1916–18 (Thornton Butterworth, 1927).
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CLEMENCEAU, George: Grandeur and Misery of Victory (Harrap, 1930).
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COOPER, Duff: Haig (Faber, 1935).
CRUTTWELL, C. R. M. F.: The War Service of the ¼ Royal Berkshire Regiment (Oxford, 1922).
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FALLS, Cyril: The First World War (Longmans, 1960).
FREDERICKS, Pierce G.: The Great Adventure (Dutton, 1958).
FRISCHAUER, Willi: Goering (Odhams, 1951).
GARDNER, R. B.: The Big Push (Cassell, 1961).
GAULLE, Charles de: France and her Army (Hutchinson, 1945).
GOUGH, Sir Hubert: Fifth Army (Hodder and Stoughton, 1931).
GRAVES, Robert: Goodbye to All That (Cassell, 1957).
GUEDELLA, Philip: The Two Marshals (Hodder and Stoughton, 1943).
HAIG, Sir Douglas: Despatches, 1915–1919 (Dent, 1919).
Private Papers, 1914–1919 (Editor: R. Blake) (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1952).
HANKEY, Lord: The Supreme Command, 1914–1918 (Allen and Unwin, 1961).
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JÜNGER, Ernst: Storm of Steel (Chatto and Windus, 1929).
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KURENBERG, Joachim von: The Kaiser (Cassell, 1954).
KUTZ, C. R.: War on Wheels (Lane, 1941).
LAWRENCE, T. E.: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Cape, 1935).
LIDDELL HART, Captain B. H.: Reputations (Murray, 1928).
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LUTZ, R. H.: The Causes of the German Collapse in 1918 (Stanford University Press, 1934).
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MAURICE, Sir Frederick (Editor): The Life of General Lord Rawlinson (Cassell, 1928).
The Last Four Months (Cassell, 1919).
MILLIN, Sara G.: General Smuts (Faber, 1936).
MONTGOMERY, Sir Archibald: The Story of the Fourth Army (Hodder and Stoughton, 1926).
NEWMAN, Bernard: Spy (Gollancz, 1935).
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NICHOLLS, T. B.: Army Medical Service at War (Baillière, Tindall and COX, 1940).
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PANKHURST, Sylvia: The Home Front (Hutchinson, 1932).
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SOURCES
(Full details of the publications noted here can be found in the Bibliography)
Chapter 1
Page
12. ‘The Western Front was known’: Robert Graves, article in The Observer, ‘What Was the First War Like Sir?’, November 9th, 1958. Quoted by permission of Roturman S.A.
20. ‘ “Jerry’s got a gun” ’: Robert Graves, idem.
Chapter 2
33. ‘His mind opened’: Churchill, Great Contemporaries.
Chapter 3
56. ‘The P.M’s house’: Haig, Private Papers.
57. ‘I think I can fairly claim’: ‘The usual statement’: Haig, idem.
68. ‘I was much struck’: Haig, idem.
Chapter 4
84. ‘I had given strict orders’: Major R. Ogier Ward, article in the ‘Journal of the Honourable Artillery Company’, quoted in Chapman: Vain Glory.
89–90. ‘Again that morning’ et seq.: Herbert Read, In Retreat, quoted in Chapman, Vain Glory.
91. ‘I must say’: Lt.-Col. R. Feilding in ‘War Letters to a Wife’, quoted in Chapman, Vain Glory.
95. ‘Pétain struck me’: Haig, idem. ‘“If you withdraw” ’: quoted in Liddell Hart, Foch.
100. Conversation at Douellens Conference: quoted in Liddell Hart, Foch.
Chapter 5
111. ‘The King said’: Haig, idem.
112. ‘Generals Bliss and Pershing’: Haig, idem.
113. ‘ “I come to tell you” ’: quoted in Liddell Hart, Foch.
124. ‘I found Foch selfish’: Haig, idem.
126. ‘The operation would immobilize’: quoted in Liddell Hart, Foch.
Chapter 6
145. ‘In our opinion’: quoted in Liddell Hart, Fog of War.