by Theo Aronson
The Kaiser's answering telegram, received on the same day as the German ultimatum, was merely another attempt to get the Belgian King to accept the Kaiser's terms. 'As the conditions laid down made clear,' telegraphed Wilhelm blandly, 'the possibility of maintaining our former and present relations still lies in the hands of Your Majesty.' In other words, Albert was to agree to the passage of the German army through Belgium.
'What does he take me for?' exclaimed Albert in a rare show of anger. With that he gave orders for the blowing up of the bridges across the River Meuse.
And so, inexorably, the alliances locked into place. On 1 August Germany had declared war on Russia. On 3 August she declared war on France and Belgium. On 4 August, with the Germans having invaded Belgium, Britain honoured her long-standing commitment to defend Belgian neutrality and declared war on Germany. On 5 August Austria declared war on Russia. On 12 August Britain declared war on Austria. The third member of the Triple Alliance, Italy, remained for the moment uncommitted.
By the flood of martial elation which now surged through the German Reich, the Kaiser alone remained unaffected. All those warlike posturings, by which he had helped create a climate for war, were suddenly revealed for what they were. 'I have never seen a more tragic, a more ravaged face than that of our Emperor during those days,' declared Admiral von Tirpitz. On the day that he sat down in the Berlin Schloss to sign the order that would start his armies moving towards the frontiers, the Kaiser wore an almost doomed expression.
'Gentlemen,' he said to the military and naval chiefs gathered around his desk, 'you will live to regret this.'
And later, because in Wilhelm II pathos and bathos were always intertwined, he declared indignantly, 'To think that Georgie and Nicky should have played me false. If my grandmother [Queen Victoria] had been alive, she would never have allowed it.'2
Of the twelve monarchs who were to be buffeted by the winds of the First World War, only three could be claimed to have borne some responsibility for it. They were Franz Joseph I, Nicholas II and Wilhelm II. But to what extent were they responsible?
In theory, they might have been able to prevent it. Franz Joseph could have accepted the conciliatory Serbian answer to his ultimatum. Nicholas II could have stuck to his order of only partial mobilisation in the hope of confining the war to the Austrian front. Even Wilhelm II could have refused to order general mobilisation. But in practice, there was very little they could do. Autocratic or semi-autocratic sovereigns they might have been, but they were very much at the mercy of the military cliques within their countries. They had become the servants rather than the masters of the generals, the politicians and the armaments manufacturers.
Perhaps, if the three emperors had been more resolute or more astute characters, they might – given the strength of their constitutional positions – have been able to shape or control matters more effectively. But, in their different ways, all three were ineffectual men: Franz Joseph too hidebound, Nicholas II too vacillating, Wilhelm II too insecure.
In all three empires there was a feeling that internal problems – political, social and economic – could be solved by a victorious war; that this was the only way to rally the entire populace behind the monarchy. For the survival of their dynasties, for the prestige of their countries, these monarchs allowed themselves to be convinced that war was not only necessary but imperative. In the face of the urgings of their general staffs, who were determined not to be caught at a military disadvantage, the sovereigns were all but helpless.
Most anxious for war was Germany. Alarmed by the growing might of Russia and, to a lesser extent, France, German statesmen and generals were set on fighting a war sooner rather than later. The murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had given them exactly the sort of excuse they were waiting for: while appearing to be the aggrieved party they could launch their attack. 'If I hadn't done it,' said Franz Ferdinand's assassin in his prison cell, 'the Germans would have found another excuse.'
So while the Kaiser, in his erratic way, was trying his best to prevent or at least contain the war, his politicians and generals were busily fostering it. All his frantic efforts, all his emphatic instructions and scrawled marginalia, all those wordy telegrams to Nicky and Georgie counted for nothing. What the Kaiser thought or did was largely immaterial. His mind was being made up for him; not least by his more tenacious Empress and by his fear of being accused of cowardice by his bellicose heir, Crown Prince Wilhelm.
'I don't believe the Kaiser wanted war,' confided George V to the departing German ambassador, 'but he was afraid of his son's popularity. His son and his party made the war.' It might have been simplistic reasoning but it did contain a grain of truth.
Immaterial, too, was the fact that the Kaiser was related to both Nicholas II and George V. When set against the forces of nationalism and militarism, these dynastic relationships counted for nothing.
The truth was that by 1914 Europe had developed into a series of rival power blocs, all competing with each other, all striving to be larger, stronger, more magnificent than each other. Each wanted a bigger navy, a stronger army, a more lucrative market, a greater empire than the others; each was anxious to score diplomatic victories over its neighbours. An explosion had become almost inevitable.
On such giant waves, on such mountainous seas, the sovereigns could only bob about like so many corks. As the historian, Golo Mann, has put it, 'The men who to the world appeared as the ruthless authors of the war did not know what had happened to them.'
But what they did know, or rather, what they were coming to suspect, was that they had helped unleash something which would, in the end, overwhelm them. All three emperors seemed to sense that their days were numbered. 'If the monarchy is doomed,' said Franz Joseph quietly to his chief of staff, 'let it at least go down honourably.'3
And Count Czernin, later Austria's foreign minister, had an even more trenchant comment to make on the downfall of the monarchic order of Central Europe. 'We were bound to die,' he afterwards said. 'We were at liberty to choose the manner of our death, and we chose the most terrible.'
Part Three
THE CROWNS
AND THE CANNON
11
Divided Houses
THE OUTBREAK of the First World War proved, once and for all, the irrelevance of the family ties between the various reigning houses of Europe. That the majority of Europe's leading sovereigns were closely related had made not the slightest difference to the course of events. Indeed, it was ironic that when the direct descendants of Queen Victoria sat on no less than seven European thrones, and her Coburg relations on two more, the Continent should have been ravaged by the greatest war that it had ever known.
Far from benefiting from this close relationship, they suffered because of it. For the royal cousinhood, these were to be heartbreaking days. Overnight, their world was split in two.
In the last hours before the outbreak of hostilities, there was a frantic scramble as holidaying royals hurried back to their countries. The Kaiser's brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, had to cut short his stay at Cowes; their sister, Queen Sophie of the Hellenes, had to quit Eastbourne, leaving two of her children in the care of her cousin, George V. Tsar Nicholas II's mother, the Dowager Tsaritsa Marie, who had been visiting her sister, Queen Alexandra, tried to cross hostile Germany by train, only to be turned back in Berlin, from where she had to make her way back to St Petersburg via Copenhagen. In every court in Europe, French governesses, English nannies and German maids packed their portmanteaux and headed for the railway station.
Once home, the majority of these royal relations did not see each other again for four years. Those mammoth pre-war gatherings – for christenings in Darmstadt, house parties in Copenhagen and weddings in Berlin – came to a sudden end. So, too, did any private visits. And not only could they no longer see each other but members of the same family were often completely alienated from one another. Cousins found themselves fighting cousins; brothers and sisters were
on opposite sides. Few of them escaped the agony of divided loyalties.
The three Hesse sisters – the Tsaritsa Alexandra, the Grand Duchess Ella and Princess Louis of Battenberg – were cut off from their brother the Grand Duke of Hesse, and from their fourth sister Irene, who was married to the Kaiser's brother Prince Henry. (Princess Louis and Princess Henry did have the foresight, though, to exchange maids on the outbreak of war; Princess Louis's German maid went to Kiel while Princess Henry's English maid went to the Isle of Wight.)
Princess Alexander of Teck, born Princess Alice of Albany, had a British-born brother, the Duke of Coburg, fighting with the German army on the Russian front, while her husband, who was Queen Mary's brother, was attached to the British Mission to King Albert of the Belgians. The war, claims Princess Alice, quite shattered her brother's life. The Duke of Coburg was denounced in Germany for being English and in England for being German. Also with King Albert's army were Prince Sixtus and Prince Xavier of Bourbon-Parma, French princes whose sister was married to the heir of their Austrian enemy, the Emperor Franz Joseph.
Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians, born a member of the Bavarian royal house, had a brother-in-law, Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, in command of the German Sixth and Seventh armies, fighting Belgium's ally, France. When, before the war, the Kaiser had tried to break down King Albert's meticulous impartiality by appealing to Elisabeth's native loyalties, her answer had been discouragingly succinct. 'My husband and I are one,' she declared. 'I abide by his decisions.' It had proved to be the one occasion on which Wilhelm II had not given whole-hearted approval to wifely subservience. Now that Belgium and Germany were at war, Elisabeth identified herself unequivocally with her husband's country. 'It is finished between me and them,' she said of her German relations: 'henceforth an iron curtain has descended between us.'
King George V, although somewhat uneasy about his own ancestry, usually resisted the rabidly anti-German excesses of so many of his subjects. Yet he was compelled to deprive several of his German relations – among them the Kaiser, the German Crown Prince and Queen Alexandra's brother-in-law, the Duke of Cumberland – of their honorary British commands and to have their names dropped from the Army List. He also reluctantly agreed to the removal, from St George's Chapel at Windsor, of the banners of the various enemy Knights of the Garter and to the striking of their names off the roll of the Order. And – against his better judgement – he was obliged to accept the forced resignation of his close kinsman, Prince Louis of Battenberg, as First Sea Lord, for no better reason than that he had a German name. Queen Mary, too, had to play down her own interest in and affection for the members of her late father's family, the Württembergs.
The Kaiser made a point of returning to George V, by way of the departing British ambassador, his insignia of a British Field Marshal and Admiral of the Fleet. Wilhelm could hardly contain his disgust for what he regarded as Britain's perfidy. This was the thanks, he said bitterly, for Prussia's help to the British at Waterloo.
But it would take more than gestures of this sort to still the widespread suspicions that royals with foreign blood secretly sympathised with the enemy. When the Kaiser, in his expansive fashion, was seen chatting in English to British prisoners-of-war, he was accused of being pro-British. In Russia, where the Tsaritsa Alexandra was German-born, rumours were rife about her supposed sympathy for her native land. The story would be told of a general who, one day in the Winter Palace, comes across the Tsarevich, weeping bitterly.
'What is wrong, my little man?' asks the general.
'When the Russians are beaten, Papa cries. When the Germans are beaten, Mama cries. When am I to cry?' answers the boy.
The story was nonsense but the fact that it was so widely repeated was significant.
Yet the Tsaritsa would have been less than human had she not worried about the fate of her brother, the Grand Duke of Hesse, who was in the German army. 'I have no news of my brother,' she once wrote to the Tsar. 'I shiver to think that the Emperor William may avenge himself against me by sending him to the Russian front. He is quite capable of such monstrous behaviour.'
And some sympathies were more robustly expressed than this. From her deathbed, the redoubtable old Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, British-born Princess Augusta of Cambridge, was able to get a word through to George V.
'Tell the King,' came her message from Germany, 'it is a stout old English heart that is ceasing to beat.'
By the year 1914, kings no longer led their armies into battle. Along with their divine right had gone their right to command their country's armed forces. It was just as well. Kings were no more guaranteed to be good soldiers, or military strategists, than they were to be good rulers. In theory, sovereigns remained supreme commanders, but the actual waging of the war was entrusted to the generals. Not since the days of Napoleon had a leading monarch personally commanded a battle. By now sovereigns either remained firmly in their palaces, paying an occasional, morale-boosting visit to their troops, or else established themselves in some country house behind the front from where, surrounded by their equerries, secretaries, attachés, valets, footmen and cooks, they could follow day-to-day events. Either way, contemporary monarchs had very little say in the conduct of the war.
A shining exception to this rule was provided by Albert of the Belgians. Within days of the outbreak of the war, he proved that he was the Commander-in-Chief of the Belgian army in practice as well as in rank. This was in accordance with the Belgian constitution. 'Soldiers,' ran his first rousing Order of the Day, 'I am leaving Brussels to place myself at your head.'
And in the course of the three months of August, September and October 1914, King Albert was transformed from an apparently colourless, if well-intentioned, sovereign into a bold and resolute leader of men, the symbol of little Belgium's stand against a powerful and ruthless invader. While his allies, Britain and France, floundered about in a swamp of indecision, his country was to bear the brunt of the German attack and he to earn for himself the title of Albert the Brave.
As soon as it was certain that the Germans had crossed the border, Albert felt free to abandon his country's strictly observed neutrality and to appeal to France and Britain for help. Confident that the Allies would hurry to his aid, the King prepared to hold up the enemy advance until the arrival of reinforcements. But, unsuspected by Albert, no such reinforcements were planned. France, obsessed with regaining the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lost to the Germans in 1870, was determined to make its thrust across the Franco-German frontier. Britain, after a period of uncertainty, sent four divisions to support, not the Belgians, but the French. And so, for over a fortnight, King Albert's forces faced the tremendous onslaught alone.
During the fortnight, the King was forced to make a series of momentous decisions. That they had to be made in the face of hostile criticism from his allies, his general staff, his troops and the civilian population, rendered them all the more significant. Two factors influenced his actions: he had to conserve his little army, and he had to keep it on Belgian soil as long as possible.
The first of these decisions was to prevent his army, which had early on repulsed the enemy before Liège, from launching an immediate counter-attack. The level-headed Albert realised that any such offensive would be suicidal. Another decision was to reject the Kaiser's suggestion that, as Belgium had 'upheld its honour' by this heroic resistance, she now allow the German army to pass through the country. His rejection of this tempting suggestion led to the bombardment of Liège into submission, and to a pouring of German troops across the River Meuse.
Again Albert made a sensible, if unpopular, move. He ordered his army to retreat to the fortified city of Antwerp, thus leaving central Belgium, including Brussels, to be overrun by the enemy.
'It isn't a question of shutting ourselves up in an entrenched camp,' explained Albert to the French, who had hoped that his army would fall back into France to join their left wing, 'but of taking breath before an eventual c
ounterblow.'
So while he, with Queen Elisabeth and their three children, as well as his government, remained in Antwerp, the Germans occupied Brussels and, in accordance with the Schlieffen Plan, swung southwards in a massive curve towards France. All that the King could do as he waited – in vain, as it turned out – for Allied relief, was to harry the enemy's flank.
During these harrying attacks, Albert was always to be seen in the thick of the fighting. He moved openly among the men, encouraging them and sharing their dangers. Although never sparing himself, he was extremely sparing of his troops. His calm, his common sense and, above all, his unostentatious courage earned him the trust and then the whole-hearted devotion of his soldiers. 'The attitude of the King and Queen through these tense and tragic days was magnificent,' wrote Winston Churchill, who visited beleaguered Antwerp at this time. 'The impression of the grave, calm Soldier-King presiding at Council, sustaining his troops and commanders, preserving an unconquerable majesty amidst the ruin of his Kingdom, will never pass from my mind.'
For that Albert's kingdom was being ruined, there was no doubt. The Germans, infuriated by the initial Belgian resistance, were carrying out a ruthless and systematic terrorisation of the country. Already the German advance had been delayed and the Schlieffen Plan disrupted; to prevent any further Belgian resistance, the civilian population would have to be intimidated. So while King Albert looked on in impotent horror, his country was subjected to a series of atrocities – looting, burning, mass executions, the destruction of the ancient city of Louvain – the like of which had never before been experienced in European warfare.