by Theo Aronson
When he felt that words were inadequate, or rather, that they needed additional embellishment, he would design vast allegorical paintings in which avenging angels with flaming swords encouraged buxom, helmeted and fiercy-eyed matrons towards deeds of national valour.
That foreign policy was the business of monarchs rather than of diplomats he had no doubts whatsoever. The peace of Europe, he firmly believed, was best kept in the hands of reigning sovereigns. When a German ambassador assured the Kaiser that one would need the gift of second sight to predict a certain result, Wilhelm was by no means put out. 'There is such a gift!' he exclaimed. 'Sovereigns often have it, statesmen seldom, diplomats never!' Always overestimating the ability of dynastic ties to influence power politics, he dashed off countless letters to his royal relations – Nicky in St Petersburg, Georgie in London, Sophie in Athens, Ferdy in Sofia, Missy in Bucharest – drenching them with unsolicited advice. That many of them were in no position to put his advice into effect even had they wanted to, bothered him not at all.
There was no diplomatic pie into which the Kaiser was not ready to plunge a finger; no area of the world free from his dramatic intervention; no subject on which he was not ready to air his views. Much given to snap decisions, changes of mind and unconsidered statements, he could ruin, in a moment, weeks of carefully constructed diplomatic policy. 'The other sovereigns', sighed one long-suffering politician, 'are so much quieter.' It was small wonder that Wilhelm II was the despair of his ministers; or that they so often jotted 'Not to be put before the Kaiser' on more controversial documents.
That Wilhelm II felt a need to exercise what he considered to be his diplomatic gifts is understandable. By now the Second Reich was in a dangerously isolated position. For during the course of Wilhelm II's reign there had been a momentous shift in the European balance of power.
One of Bismarck's chief boasts had been that, by a series of judicious alliances, he had kept the German empire safe and at peace for almost twenty years. To preserve the Continental status quo, to prevent what he called a nightmare of enemy coalitions and, above all, to avoid ever having to fight a war on two fronts, Bismarck had allied the Reich to the Russian, Austrian and Italian monarchies, leaving Germany's traditional enemy, republican France, out in the cold. For if one thing was certain, it was that France would never rest until she had avenged her defeat by Germany in 1870.
But Wilhelm II had seen all this change. On dismissing Bismarck in 1890, he and Bismarck's successor, Caprivi, had decided that Germany could no longer be allied to both Russia and Austria. With these two countries always at loggerheads in the Balkans, an alliance with both of them was not really practical politics. Germany must choose between them. Naturally, she chose Austria. The Russian alliance – the somewhat shaky cornerstone of Bismarck's foreign policy – was finished. Russia was henceforth obliged to look elsewhere for friends.
She looked, therefore, to France. An association between autocratic Russia and republican France seemed, on the face of it, unlikely, but the two countries had one very powerful factor in common: a fear of Wilhelm II's Germany. So, in the year 1893, an alliance was signed between them. Bismarck's great fear had been realised: Germany now faced the possibility of war on two fronts.
To counteract this threat, Wilhelm II had begun looking towards Britain. The Kaiser's attitude towards his mother's country had always been ambivalent: rather in the nature of a love–hate relationship. He admired Britain, he envied her, he was attracted to her, he feared her. He criticised her with characteristic vigour yet his criticism had never quite rung true. Although often seeming to go out of his way to antagonise Britain, the Kaiser appeared just as often to be thinking in terms of an alliance between these two great Teutonic nations. 'Not a mouse could stir in Europe without our permission' was how he at one stage visualised an Anglo-German agreement.
Yet as soon as Britain indicated that she, too, might be interested in some sort of closer co-operation, Germany backed off. Neither the Kaiser nor his ministers could quite bring themselves to respond to British overtures. Several times between the years 1898 and 1902, Britain had approached Germany; each time she had been rebuffed. Germany, assuming that Britain needed her more than she needed Britain, wanted her to offer something more concrete than just an understanding. Every British advance was met by a German evasion.
So Britain turned elsewhere. With the active encouragement of King Edward VII, she reached a series of understandings with several other Continental countries. Edward VII's celebrated state visit to Paris in 1903 paved the way for the Entente Cordiale between Britain and France. His meeting with his nephew-by-marriage, Alfonso XIII of Spain, in 1907 led to an agreement between their two countries. His 1908 visit to another nephew-by-marriage, Nicholas II, set the seal on the Anglo-Russian Convention, signed the year before. Indeed, the Triple Entente, by which Britain became loosely allied to France and Russia, was generally regarded as 'the triumph of King Edward's policy'.
The claim might have been exaggerated but it was certainly being taken seriously by Wilhelm II. The British King's main purpose, imagined his nephew, was the isolating of the Second Reich in a hostile Europe. That Germany had only itself to blame for this relative isolation was something that Wilhelm II refused to countenance. Yet the truth was that, as the most powerful nation on the Continent, Germany had become too self-confident and too militant for her own good. Fed on a diet of Nietzsche and Treitschke, the Germans felt themselves superior to 'lesser breeds'. No less than the Kaiser, did the politicians and diplomats behave in a manner guaranteed to insult and un-nerve their neighbours. The result was that while the other three great European nations – Britain, France and Russia – drew progressively closer, Germany was left with only decaying Austria–Hungary and second-rate Italy as friends.
By the year 1910, the great nations of Europe were ranged in two opposing camps. On the one hand was the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia; on the other the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria–Hungary and Italy.
'Nations and Empires, crowned with princes and potentates,' reads Winston Churchill's honeyed view of Europe before the First World War, 'rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace. All were fitted and fastened, it seemed securely, into an immense cantilever. The two mighty European systems faced each other glittering and clanking in their panoply, but with a tranquil gaze . . . the old world, in its sunset, was fair to see.'
Although not nearly as fair, or tranquil, as Churchill suggests, the old world was certainly locked in a system of alliances. And however much Wilhelm II might try to unlock this rigid system – at one stage he tried to revive the alliance with Russia, and he never ceased his flirtation with Britain – he found himself facing what Bismarck had always done his utmost to avoid: a nightmare of coalitions.
2
Constitutional King
FEW MONARCHS could have been less like the showy Kaiser Wilhelm II than his neighbour Albert I, King of the Belgians. Among Europe's more grandiose monarchs, King Albert was very much the odd-man-out.
Born in 1875, Albert was thirty-tour when he succeeded to the throne on the death of his uncle, King Leopold II, in 1909. Abnormally tall, with a heavy body, a shambling walk, poor eyesight and unruly hair, he seemed more like an absent-minded professor than a king. He looked uncomfortable in uniform and untidy in civilian clothes. His faraway, abstracted air gave him the appearance, it was said, of someone who wanted to build something. By nature introvert and self-conscious, the King had no aptitude for the showier aspects of his calling. Embarrassed in crowds and tongue-tied with strangers, he could make neither rousing speeches nor interesting small talk. He seldom smiled. When he did, it was a wry, self-deprecating grin. Awkward himself, he was incapable of putting others at their ease. His preoccupied expression, magnified by his thick glasses, tended to make people even more inarticulate than he was. Excessive deference disconcerted him. 'My friend,' he said good-naturedly to a palace gar
dener who would not stop bowing, 'I am only a man like yourself.'
And not only did King Albert have very little taste or talent for courting popularity but he tended to regard it with some cynicism. A delighted equerry once remarked on the size of the crowds that had flocked to see the new King. They would be just as large, commented Albert drily, if he were being led to the scaffold.
It was away from the glare of public scrutiny that King Albert's qualities showed to better advantage. His compassion, his intelligence, his devotion to duty, his quiet strength, his capacity for leadership were far more apparent in the study or the council chamber than on the platform or in a procession. His ponderous manner and halting speech masked an astute mind. King Albert, his ministers were soon to learn, was no fool.
As King, Albert faced a formidable task. His uncle, Leopold II, from whom he had inherited the throne, had done nothing to enhance the popularity of the ruling Coburg dynasty. Indeed, by his licentiousness, avarice, hard-heartedness and ruthless exploitation in Central Africa which had earned him the title of 'Butcher of the Congo', Leopold II had stood condemned by all the world. Obsessed with the aggrandisement of his country and the enrichment of his dynasty, the autocratic old monarch had never set out to win the hearts of his subjects. If the monarchy were to survive the various pressures threatening the country, it would be up to King Albert to re-establish the popularity and respectability of the crown.
Fortunately, and in spite of his uninspiring appearance and manner, Albert had already won a certain amount of popular admiration. During his years as heir apparent (old King Leopold II's only son had predeceased him, and Albert's father, the studious Count of Flanders, had died in 1905) Albert had impressed his Belgian countrymen by his simple tastes and philanthropic activities. They had approved of his recreations: all that bicycling along the flat roads of Flanders and all that scaling of the jagged cliffs of the Ardennes. They had been no less approving of the seriousness with which he had devoted himself to social reform.
But what had impressed them most of all, perhaps, was the decorum of his private life. In 1900, at the age of twenty-five, Albert had married the twenty-three-year-old Princess Elisabeth, daughter of Charles Theodore, Duke in Bavaria (the dukes of Bavaria were the reigning branch of the dynasty), a member of the unconventional Wittelsbach family. In this warm-hearted and vivacious young woman, Albert, the dynasty and the country gained a personality of exceptional qualities.
The couple suited each other perfectly. Where he was solemn and self-doubting, she was extrovert and assured; where he was cynical and pessimistic, she was trusting and enthusiastic. What his character lacked, hers supplied. Unobtrusively and with great tact, Elisabeth smoothed his way and helped bring his complex personality to full flower.
During the closing years of Leopold II's reign, the couple had filled the ever-widening gap between king and people. At the birth of each of their three children – two boys and a girl – between the years 1901 and 1906, their popularity increased. After the depravity of Leopold II's private life (on his deathbed, the old King married the mistress whom he had first bedded when she was sixteen) the respectability of their home life made a refreshing change. There was something very touching in the unashamed devotion of the parents to their three children.
But it was for his impeccable constitutional behaviour that Albert was to win the most respect. Whereas Leopold II had often chaffed against, and on occasions circumvented, the restrictions imposed by the constitution, Albert's behaviour was always above reproach. 'Je suis un Roi con-sti-tu-tion-nel,' he would often remind his ministers in his slow, emphatic fashion.
In the struggle between the Catholic Party and its liberal and socialist opponents, he remained strictly neutral. Those who, because of the King's apparent diffidence, assumed that he would be a tool in the hands of the conservatives were to be proved as wrong as those who, because of his sympathy with the underprivileged, imagined that he would become a socialist king. Tolerant, adaptable and progressive, Albert steered a careful course between capital and labour.
'In the ministerial council', testifies one minister, 'he exerted the influence of a chief. This influence did not impose itself through the expression of some decisive and dictatorial opinion; it insinuated itself through his words, uttered somewhat slowly, as if he were in search of a more precise form, and accentuated by a few constructive gestures.'1
For in spite of constitutional limitations, Albert was in a far more influential position than some of his fellow constitutional monarchs. Sitting in on ministerial meetings, he was at least able to air his opinions. But he was also more vulnerable. For one thing, Belgium housed a strongly republican element. For another, the Belgian population was made up of two mutually antagonistic groups – the Flemings and the French-speaking Walloons. It was up to King Albert, almost entirely, to counteract the growing republican threat and to ensure that the crown remained the chief symbol uniting Flemings and Walloons.
These early years of Albert's reign saw an intensification of both the republican and the Flemish movements. An extension of the franchise, some fifteen years before, had greatly benefited the socialists. Now, by way of strikes and demonstrations, they were pressing for universal suffrage. And hand-in-hand with this spread of socialism went the spread of republicanism. 'Between Socialism and Monarchy', declared the chilling Socialist Manifesto published on the eve of the King's accession, 'there is no possible reconciliation, and when Belgium prepares itself to acclaim Albert I, a loud clamour of hope and defiance will rise from all the workers' breasts: Vive la République Sociale!'
King Albert would need all his skill to divorce this creed of republicanism from that of socialism.
The struggle between the Flemings and the Walloons – the Flemish-speaking, largely peasant population of the northwest and the French-speaking, more industrial population of the southeast – was causing King Albert equal concern. A late nineteenth–century movement, by a group of Flemish writers, to resurrect and champion the Flemish language, had by now been transformed into a political crusade. Hitherto confined to Flanders, this crusade had spread across the entire country: the flamingants were determined on nothing less than equal language rights.
King Albert, sympathetic to the Flemish struggle, gave his full support to linguistic reform. He encouraged the growth of Flemish culture, he used Flemish (which he spoke fluently) when addressing Flemish audiences, he was the first Belgian sovereign to take the oath of office in both languages. In speech after speech he would beg the Belgian people to cultivate the feelings which united them, rather than those which divided them.
This was easier said than done. An important section of the Flemish population remained discontented. It was a discontent which plagues Belgium to this day.
If Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians made the ideal wife and mother, she did not, at first glance, make the ideal queen. No more than King Albert did she seem fitted for her great task. She had neither beauty nor natural dignity. The calm, the hauteur, the commanding air of someone like the Kaiserin or Queen Mary, she lacked almost completely. She did not, in these early years, even dress particularly well. But when set against her remarkable force of character, these shortcomings were unimportant.
She had an alert face; her nose was sharp, her eyes bright, her smile dazzling. She was small and slender, with a quick, bird-like quality and boundless energy. Unlike her husband, she enjoyed her public duties. She delighted in her growing popularity and responded warmly to admiration and applause. Her manner, both in public and in private, was relaxed and confident; only in the company of the pretentious, the arrogant or the ostentatious was she ever less than charming. With empty ceremonial, with excessive protocol, with the activities of so-called society, she had very little patience. Rows of pompous dignitaries would often be held up while Queen Elisabeth chatted, with unfeigned vivacity, to some poet or musician or social worker. Her interests were wide-ranging and she brought to them an unflagging enthusiasm and
a real intelligence. There was a professionalism, a complete absence of royal dilettantism, about everything she touched.
She shared, to the full, King Albert's concern for the health and well-being of their subjects. The knowledge gained, when Crown Princess, by tramping through working-class districts to acquaint herself with such matters as wages, amenities and living conditions, was now put to practical use. She founded various trusts, societies and associations to help the sick and needy.
Bohemian, rather than bourgeois, would be the word to describe the royal couple, wrote Charles d'Ydewalle. 'They were Bohemian in their unprejudiced outlook, their absolute lack of snobbishness, their unique position, their love of adventure, their indifference to danger, etiquette and criticism. They were nowise confined within the conventional limits of the bourgeois conception of life.'
Yet they could be regal when occasion demanded it. The state visits, the balls, the receptions, the banquets were magnificently staged affairs: the Queen could always be relied upon to bring a touch of theatricality to these occasions. Each May she held a garden party at Laeken, their elegant palace on the outskirts of Brussels. As there are few days in Belgium on which it does not rain, the reception would be held in those great conservatories in which the late Leopold II had taken so much pride. Dressed in white or pale blue, the Queen would move through these exotic, heavily scented glass galleries, impressing all with her case and vivacity.