by Theo Aronson
In May 1913 Wilhelm II played host to the last of the great royal family gatherings which had been such a feature of the European scene. To Berlin, for the marriage of the Kaiser's only daughter, Princess Victoria Louise, to the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, came a galaxy of royal guests headed by George V and Nicholas II.
Although George V had been on the throne for three years, this was his first Continental visit. And even this was a private, not a state, one. In a letter to the apprehensive French government, Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, made it abundantly clear that the royal visit to Berlin was a purely family affair.
It was as a member of the family, too, that Nicholas II came to Berlin. And if, by now, the Tsar always felt slightly uneasy in the company of the Kaiser, he was delighted to see his cousin Georgie once more. As their mothers – the Dowager Tsaritsa Marie and Queen Alexandra – were sisters, the two men looked very alike. 'Only their uniforms', wrote the Kaiser's daughter, 'told the difference between them.'
The two monarchs were alike in other ways as well. Both were modest, well-intentioned men. In Britain, as one of the Tsar's biographers has put it, 'where a sovereign needed only to be a good man in order to be a good king, Nicholas II would have made an admirable monarch'.3
This great royal gathering in Berlin was a splendid example of what one observer has called 'those dynastic madrigals once thought to breathe harmony over discordant Europe'. For once the Kaiser refrained from giving his fellow sovereigns the benefit of his advice on international affairs (although their staffs were not similarly spared) and concentrated on impressing them with the brilliance of his court.
'The arrival of all the wedding guests turned Berlin into a magnificent showcase, a display of royalty rarely seen before,' enthused the bride-to-be. 'Masses of people gathered in the streets of the capital to witness the parade of princes. They had come from everywhere to line the route the wedding guests would pass, and the sight of the tremendous throng in Unter den Linden Opera Platz, and in front of the castle was indescribable.'
The Kaiser saw to it that everything – the colossal banquets, the military parades, the gala performance at the opera and the wedding itself – was superbly done.
Most memorable of all was the Fackeltanz, the Torch Dance traditional at German royal weddings, in which no one below the rank of royal highness was allowed to take part. It was danced in the Weisse Saal of the Old Palace in Berlin, a splendid hall in which the decoration was entirely white and silver. An inlay, in the shape of a crowned Prussian eagle, decorated the centre of the dance floor and was kept in a state of high polish, making it as slippery as ice. If, in his exuberance, an officer set foot on it and crashed to the floor, he would be barred from all court balls for a year. But no such boisterousness marred this occasion: the royal dancers behaved with exemplary dignity. Never before, writes one witness as these emperors and empresses, kings and queens, princes and princesses performed the elaborate ritual in the flickering torchlight, had royals been 'woven into so many family permutations, symbolic of regal accord'.
But it was not quite all accord. The neurotic Kaiser, always imagining that plots were being hatched behind his back, resented any time spent together by George V and Nicholas II. On the one occasion that the cousins did manage to have a private conversation ('Had a long and satisfactory talk with dear Nicky; he is just the same as always', runs the King's typically laconic report of the meeting) the Kaiser was greatly alarmed. George V suspected that 'William's ear was glued to the keyhole'4 throughout the meeting.
For even at this late stage the Kaiser was hoping that Britain might be enticed out of the arms of Russia and France. Just a few years before, in one of his more than usually indiscreet conversations, held while on a visit to England and subsequently published in the Daily Telegraph, Wilhelm had claimed to be Britain's best friend. And as recently as 1912, with the naval race between the two countries at its height, the Kaiser was still hoping for a rapprochement. How, he demanded of George V's secretary, could Britain imagine that he – the grandson of Queen Victoria – could ever allow Britain to be threatened at sea? Surely it would be more sensible of Britain to ally herself to Teutonic Germany than to Latin France?
But it was not to be. Whatever the Kaiser's inclinations might have been (and, in truth, they changed from day to day) Germany's politicians and diplomats remained averse to any talk of an Anglo-German understanding.
In no way, though, did this affect the success of the British King's visit to Berlin. On the contrary, King George and Queen Mary enjoyed their stay immensely. The Queen, in gold and with pearls and diamonds sparkling at every turn, was far and away the most impressive figure at the wedding ceremony. She even, this most self-controlled of queens, indulged in a little traditional weeping as the bridal couple exchanged their vows.
'Later', wrote the bride, 'they used to say that she had sobbed because she had at that moment foreseen the forthcoming disaster of war the following year breaking over us. That is really out of the question. Queen Mary was very attached to the [bridegroom's] family and it was understandable that the ceremony should affect her.'
The King seemed equally oblivious to any 'forthcoming disasters'. 'Our visit to Berlin has, I think, been a great success in every way . . .' he wrote. 'Nothing could have exceeded the kindness of the [German] Emperor and Empress. He went out of his way to entertain us and to do everything in his power to make our visit a pleasant one.'
He trusted, he went on to say, that the visit would 'improve the relations between the two countries'.
A more cynical note was struck by Frederick Ponsonby, one of the King's private secretaries. 'On the whole the visit was a great success, but whether any real good is done, I have my doubts. The feeling in the two countries is too strong for a visit of this sort to alter.'
Where the German diplomats were doing precious little towards safeguarding the Reich against some future war, the generals were doing a great deal towards launching such a war. The Kaiser might confine himself to striking warlike attitudes and making bellicose speeches but his General Staff was treating it all far more seriously. Time and again they assured the Kaiser that a war against France and Russia was inevitable and that it would be as well for Germany to decide on the timing of it. Always the weathercock, Wilhelm II would sometimes agree with their calculations, sometimes not. Afraid of being accused of cowardice, he none the less shrank from giving the generals their heads.
German strategy for the envisaged war was contained in the Schlieffen Plan, drawn up by an earlier chief of staff and modified by the present chief, General Helmuth von Moltke. This involved a war on two fronts: a massive German offensive through Belgium against France (thus avoiding the fortified Franco-German frontier) and, once France had been defeated in a lightning campaign, a concentration of both the Germans and the Austro-Hungarian armies in the east to destroy the more lumberingly mobilised Russian army.
The success of this plan depended, very much, on the attitude of Belgium. The fact that Prussia had been one of the guarantors of Belgian neutrality in perpetuity was regarded as nothing more than a technicality. What was important for Germany was that Belgium should allow German troops to pass through her territory unhindered. At most, Germany expected Belgium to make some sort of token resistance and then fall back, leaving the German army to roll across Belgium, into northern France and on to Paris.
To judge Belgium's reaction to the plan, the Kaiser invited King Albert of the Belgians to visit Potsdam in November 1913. Moving awkwardly among the superbly uniformed German officers, King Albert very quickly realised what they were up to. On the occasion of a court ball the Kaiser pointed out General von Kluck as the man who was to 'lead the march on Paris'. On another evening, before a state dinner, Wilhelm launched into an impassioned harangue against France: because of continual French provocation, he ranted, war had become inevitable. After dinner, General von Moltke returned to the subject. He had a great deal to say about the invinci
bility of the German army and the aggressive spirit of the German people.
'This time we must make an end of it,' he told the discomforted King Albert. 'Your Majesty cannot imagine the irresistible enthusiasm which will permeate the entire German nation on "The Day".'
King Albert could imagine it only too well. And to dispel any doubts about Belgium's attitude, he assured his hosts, in his quiet but emphatic way, that his country would remain neutral unless attacked. But if she were attacked, she would fight back. On returning to Brussels, Albert backed this up with an unequivocal statement to the effect that Belgium would declare war on any power that violated her territory.
If Wilhelm II found it necessary to strike terror into the hearts of his potential enemies, his tone was hardly less aggressive when reassuring his friends. In one of his verbose speeches at a banquet in Vienna, he assured his audience that he stood 'shoulder to shoulder . . . in shining armour' beside the 'august and venerable' Emperor Franz Joseph. And to his other ally, Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, he made a solemn if characteristically carping declaration. 'All the long years of my reign my colleagues, the monarchs of Europe, have paid no attention to what I have to say. Soon, with my great Navy to endorse my words, they will be more respectful. '5
Yet under all the bravado lurked a terrible apprehension. In the year 1913, the Kaiser celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession. The occasion was marked by nationwide celebrations. All summer long Berlin was en fête. Along the new processional ways, transformed by flags, swags, banners and triumphal arches, tramped military parades or tradesmen's guilds. Kings and princes, rulers of the twenty-five states that went to make up the empire, flocked to the capital to pay homage to the Kaiser. At Leipzig Wilhelm unveiled a massive monument on 'the battlefield of the nations' to celebrate the centenary of the war against the French. The gesture was not lost on France. At a banquet in the Weisse Saal of his Berlin palace, he spoke of the confederation of the German states as 'an eternal union for the protection of the realm'.
To the perspicacious, though, the Kaiser was not quite as confident as he pretended. Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, in Berlin to offer congratulations on behalf of the British Council of Churches, sensed something very like despair behind that resolute façade.
'He was quite cordial,' wrote the Bishop, 'but he spoke with a note that was new to me . . . He seemed apprehensive; he spoke of the dangerous position in which Germany was placed, between two powers which understood one another and might prove hostile. When I left him, I felt he was under the influence of a great fear.'
7
His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty
'YOU SEE IN ME', the Emperor Franz Joseph once told Theodore Roosevelt, 'the last monarch of the old school.' This was true. By the year 1910 there was no crowned head in Europe who could match the courtliness, punctiliousness and self-confident majesty of the eighty-year-old Habsburg Emperor.
There was certainly no living monarch who had reigned longer. Having ascended the throne, at the age of eighteen, in 1848, Franz Joseph had been Emperor for over sixty years. At the time of his death, in 1916, he would have reigned for sixty-eight years; longer even than Queen Victoria. By now few of Franz Joseph's subjects could remember a time when this luxuriantly bewhiskered and impeccably uniformed old gentleman had not been their Emperor. Renowned for his unyielding standards and rigid self-discipline, he had become the very symbol of the old-fashioned values. On the ever-changing European scene, Franz Joseph remained the one constant feature.
His daily life functioned with all the precision of a well-oiled machine. In spite of being the representative of one of the grandest and oldest-established royal houses in Europe (the Habsburgs had reigned since the thirteenth century) the Emperor Franz Joseph was a man of modest manners and simple tastes. His private life was spartan in the extreme. He lived in two simply furnished rooms; he slept in an iron cot. When he wanted a bath, a tub was carried into his quarters. Rising at four, he would put on his uniform and be at his desk by five. That desk was a plain field-army table. His working day was divided between a mountain of paperwork, to which he gave meticulous attention, and the granting of audiences, conducted with stultifying formality.
With such new-fangled inventions as the typewriter and the telephone he would have no truck. At the age of eighty-four he climbed six flights of stairs rather than take the lift. Only once did he ride in a motor car; and then solely on the insistence of the more adventurous Edward VII.
Lunch would be eaten off a tray and washed down with a glass of beer. Dinner was served at six in the evening and, in spite of the splendour of the scene – the rococo rooms, the gilt furniture, the glittering chandeliers, the liveried servants, the gold plate, the showy uniforms – the atmosphere was singularly cheerless. The Emperor ate fast and sparingly, hardly noticing what was put before him. No one ever addressed him first. In answer to his occasional questioning, guests were expected to reply as briefly as possible. The cercle after dinner, with the Emperor saying a word or two to each guest as he shuffled past, was tedious in the extreme. He always retired early.
Franz Joseph carried out his public duties faultlessly, conscientiously and, above all, punctually. Whether it be a court ball in the Hofburg Palace, a state visit to the opera, a diplomatic reception amid the glories of the country palace of Schönbrunn, or one of those military parades in which he took such a delight, Franz Joseph insisted that everything be done according to long-established tradition. Of the frivolous, decadent atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Vienna, there was no trace. Rules were there to be obeyed.
One night, for instance, the Emperor suffered a terrible choking fit and rang for help. His worried doctor, flinging on a dressing gown, hurried to his master's bedside. But the old Emperor was not quite so ill, apparently, as not to be able to choke out one word. It was 'Frack!' – 'Tail coat!' Even in extremis he demanded that the formalities be observed.
The Emperor's one relaxation was hunting. The mornings of those summer days spent in his undistinguished villa at Bad Ischl were devoted, almost entirely, to clambering about the mountainside in lederhosen in search of game. But by afternoon he was back at his desk. Work for him was more than a duty; it was a necessity.
His life had been a sad one, beset with personal and political problems. His marriage, to the beautiful Princess Elizabeth, a member of the unconventional Wittelsbach family of Bavaria (of whom Belgium's Queen Elisabeth was also a member) had been doomed from the start. As much as he adored her, this lack-lustre monarch could not long hold the interest of his capricious, temperamental, self-obsessed wife. Her absences from his stuffy court became progressively longer and in 1898, while on one of her restless wanderings, she was assassinated, for purely symbolic reasons, by an anarchist.
Their only son, the equally romantic and unstable Crown Prince Rudolph, had shot himself and his mistress at Mayerling, ten years earlier. Franz Joseph's brother, the Archduke Maximilian, having allowed himself misguidedly to be crowned Emperor of Mexico, was overthrown by revolutionaries and executed by a firing squad at Querètaro.
The only flame to warm this winter of Franz Joseph's life was his long-standing relationship with a retired actress, Katherina Schratt. More like a middle-aged, middle-class wife than a mistress, she suited her unexciting Emperor beautifully. They gave each other little gifts, they wrote each other affectionate letters, they sat side by side drinking coffee and exchanging small-talk. Yet for all the gemütlichkeit of this relationship, the Emperor remained an arid, disillusioned, curiously luckless man. 'I am a pechvogel' – a bird of misfortune – he would sometimes sigh.
Never a man of much intellect or curiosity, Franz Joseph had become more mentally ossified with each passing year. Humourless, blinkered, conservative, obsessed with detail, he had the mind of a bureaucrat. 'For him', claimed one of the late Empress Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting, 'only primitive concepts exist. Beautiful, ugly, dead, living, healthy, young, old, clever, stupid – these are all s
eparate notions to him and he is unable to form a bridge leading from one to the other . . . His ideas know no nuances.'1
Oblivious to, indeed dismissive of, the extraordinary flowering of the cultural, intellectual and scientific life of turn-of-the-century Vienna, Franz Joseph presided over the most hidebound, parochial and fossilised court in Europe.
'In Vienna', said Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria to the French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, 'one breathes in an atmosphere of death and decrepitude . . . I don't know if you have ever visited the Imperial necropolis, the Kaisergruft at the Capucin Church. It is airless, mouldy and decomposing. Well! The entire Austrian court is impregnated with this noisome smell . . . a smell which has spread from the court to all official circles . . . I know of nothing more lugubrious than dining at the Emperor's table: there one only comes across archaic countenances, shrivelled intellects, trembling heads, worn-out bladders. It is the exact image of Austria-Hungary.'
Distrusting the world of ideas, Franz Joseph felt deeply about only two things: his army and his dynasty. He delighted in parades, reviews and uniforms. These serried ranks, with their strict discipline and clockwork precision, were like some gigantic reflection of his own orderly lifestyle. The Emperor might not know much about modern strategy or modern weaponry, and might dislike too much talk of military reform, but he felt that the only institution on which his dynasty could depend was the army. And he was right. The Habsburg monarchy, as the historian A.J.P. Taylor has pointed out, 'lived only in the Austro-Hungarian army'. For the sad truth was that there was no such thing as an Austro-Hungarian Empire loyal to its Emperor.