Crowns in Conflict

by Theo Aronson

  'My heart bleeds', protested the Kaiser in a telegram to the United States President, Woodrow Wilson, for the sufferings of Belgium, caused 'as a result of the criminal and barbarous action of the Belgians'. Their resistance, he claims, had been 'openly incited' and 'carefully organised'1 by the Belgian government.

  But the rest of the world knew better. If there had hitherto been any doubts as to why the war was being fought, the German rape of Belgium removed them. Not only had Belgian neutrality been violated but her stubborn stand against a powerful and merciless invader had won her widespread sympathy and adulation. A cartoon, published in Punch, captured this spirit of Belgian resistance. On the ruins of a devastated Belgium, the Kaiser and King Albert stand face to face.

  'You see,' the Kaiser is saying, 'you've lost everything.'

  'Not my soul,' replies Albert.

  By this time, Wilhelm II was established in the German legation in Luxembourg. It had at first been assumed that, like his fellow monarchs George V, Nicholas II and Franz Joseph I, the Kaiser would remain in his capital; from there, acting as a national focal point, he would handle political and diplomatic affairs. But, for the Supreme War Lord, any such notion was out of the question: his place was with his army. In any case he – and almost every other sovereign in Europe – assumed that the war would last a matter of weeks only. Had he not assured his departing troops that they would be home before the leaves had fallen?

  Wilhelm's intention was to remain on the western front until France had been defeated (the Schlieffen Plan reckoned on complete victory by 9 September) and then to travel to the eastern front for the last stages of the Russian campaign. 'Lunch in Paris, dinner in St Petersburg' was the Kaiser's neat summing-up of his plan.

  And so, surrounded by a numerous suite, Wilhelm II set up his headquarters, first in Coblenz and then, with his troops swinging through Belgium, in Luxembourg.

  If it had ever been assumed that Wilhelm II would become a supreme commander in the mould of Albert I, the assumption was short-lived. Living so close to the Kaiser, his entourage soon came to an appreciation of his military, and temperamental, inadequacies. Equally disillusioned about the Kaiser's qualities of leadership was his Chief of the General Staff, Field Marshal von Moltke. For all the belligerence of his peacetime attitudes, Wilhelm II was revealed as having no more understanding of military strategy than did the majority of his fellow sovereigns. 'Bloodthirsty details from the front he finds interesting,' noted Admiral von Muller, 'but he shows little comprehension of the gravity of the whole situation.'

  Nor did he have any of the qualities essential in a military commander: he was too indecisive, too lacking in self-confidence, too unrealistic. He see-sawed between heady optimism and deep depression; between great generosity of spirit and savage vindictiveness. One moment he would be predicting imminent victory, the next humiliating defeat.

  He was extraordinarily sensitive. Once, when he was strolling in the garden with two of his officers at a time when the news from the eastern front was bad, one of the men fetched a chair rather than sit beside him on a bench that was too short for the three of them. 'Am I already such a figure of contempt that no one wants to sit next to me?'2 sighed Wilhelm.

  But the news from the eastern front did not remain bad for long. To halt the unexpected Russian advance, Moltke appointed the retired General Paul von Hindenburg in overall command on the Russian front and, to serve under him, General Erich Ludendorff. Within a matter of days of their appointment, the two generals had won a resounding victory over the Russians at the Battle of Tannenberg. From that time on, Hindenburg and Ludendorff became progressively more powerful until, in the end, they would overshadow the irresolute Kaiser almost completely.

  Victory in the east was counterbalanced by defeat in the west. By 9 September, the date which should have seen the final triumph of the Schlieffen Plan, the German army was in retreat. German muddling, combined with stiffening French resistance – typified by the celebrated shuttle service of the 'taxis of the Marne' – put paid to the Schlieffen Plan. Moltke, his spirit broken by the Allied victory on the Marne, delegated responsibility to a subordinate. It fell to the Kaiser to exercise his prerogative and appoint a new chief of staff. It was to be his last military decision of any significance. Wilhelm chose a court favourite, General von Falkenhayn. Under this new command, the German line steadied and the army dug in. The conflict on the western front now developed into what the Schlieffen Plan had been especially designed to avoid: a long war of attrition.

  With the war bogged down in the trenches, the Kaiser moved again: this time to a rich industrialist's home in Charleville. But, for all the contact he had with military operations, he might just as well have been in Berlin. Occasionally, in his royal train, its blue, cream and gold glories disguised by a coat of khaki-green paint, or in his armoured motor car, Wilhelm would visit the front line. More often he remained at Charleville, all but ignored.

  'If people in Germany think I am the Supreme Commander, they are grossly mistaken,' he once complained. 'The General Staff tells me nothing and never asks my advice. I drink tea, go for walks and saw wood . . .'3

  While the war lord of the Second Reich was being kept well away from any fighting, the peace-loving Albert of the Belgians was covering himself in military glory.

  The Allied victory on the Marne had brought no relief to King Albert, still holding out in fortified Antwerp. With the French and British forces remaining firmly in France, the Germans concentrated their attack on Antwerp; they could not risk leaving the entrenched Belgian army on their right flank. For three weeks, in the face of merciless German bombardment, Albert held out, but by 5 October he realised that if he did not soon evacuate his army, his line of retreat would be cut off and all hope of joining up with the Allied forces would be gone. Two days later his army quit Antwerp and fled southwards. It looked as if the two-month-long Belgian resistance, which had so impressed the world, had come to an end. Except that it had gained a little time for the Allies, the sacrifice had apparently been in vain.

  In the midst of the confused and demoralised army, King Albert and Queen Elisabeth headed for France. It had become a sauve qui peut. The King, usually so unemotional, was deeply depressed; the Queen, always so vivacious, was at one stage discovered in a rose garden near Ostend, sobbing her heart out. Both realised that their kingdom would have to be abandoned and that the Belgian army, stripped of its independence, would become an anonymous part of that great host massed on the western front.

  But by 13 October Albert's mood had changed. He had decided to retreat no further. He was resolved to remain, with his army, on Belgian soil.

  A few miles south of Ostend, the river Yser flowed into the sea; some miles inland it was linked to the Ypres Canal. Together, these two waterways formed a natural barrier. Between them and the French frontier lay a few square miles of Belgian territory. On this last enclave of his country's soil, wedged in the far southwestern corner of Belgium, King Albert was determined to dig himself in.

  Having made his decision, the King issued a resounding proclamation to his troops. They were to fall back no further. From this moment on, he seemed like a different man. 'This leader,' wrote one contemporary, 'who had always been ready to take advice, who preferred to persuade rather than to command, was transformed into a dominating personality, following his own counsel, acting with the utmost determination and speaking in such a stern voice that even those who were intimate with him wondered at the change.'4

  Albert's new-found resolution was soon put to the test. On 18 October and for the following twelve days, the Germans launched a massive attack on the Belgian position along the Yser. The depleted and exhausted Belgian army fought magnificently. The Battle of the Yser, by which the Belgian army halted the German advance along the Channel coast, thus saving the French ports, was a superb achievement. It allowed the Belgian army, with its prestige restored and its independence guaranteed, to link up with, and form the extreme left wi
ng of, the Allied front stretching all the way from Switzerland to the Channel. And it established King Albert's reputation as one of the wisest and most tenacious military leaders of the First World War.

  When, after more than a week of almost superhuman effort, the Belgians were forced off the left bank of the Yser, Albert made yet another masterly decision. On the night of 29 October, he ordered the opening of the sluice gates at Nieuport, on the Channel, and the flooding of the valley of the Yser. From now on his army was to be separated from the enemy by an immense sheet of water.

  With the battle of the Yser won, the Belgian army and the Belgian King were to remain, for the next four years, on twenty square miles of Belgian soil.

  If the close family relationship between Europe's reigning houses had not been able to prevent the war, it might still, they imagined, prove useful in making the peace. The neutral monarchs – the three Scandinavian kings, King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands–were only too ready to act as mediators. The first one to do so was King Christian X of Denmark. First cousin to Britain's George V, Russia's Nicholas II and Greece's Constantine I, the Danish King could, as a neutral sovereign, maintain direct contact with Germany's Wilhelm II and Austria's Franz Joseph I. He often acted as an intermediary for the exchange of letters between these opposing families.

  In November 1914, he offered to initiate talks on a mediated peace between George V, Nicholas II and Wilhelm II. Although, at that stage, the Kaiser was not interested in coming to terms with Britain, he let Christian X know that he might consider an approach to Russia. He had always set a high value on his friendship with the Tsar, explained Wilhelm.

  When the Danish King's emissary visited Nicholas II at Tsarskoe Selo he found the Tsar equally sympathetic, if characteristically hesitant. Taking things a stage further, Christian X then proposed that the Kaiser and the Tsar each send representatives to Copenhagen to open negotiations.

  But the plan never materialised. By the spring of 1915, with Britain and Russia harbouring hopes of a victory at Gallipoli, Nicholas II had once again been mesmerised by that perennial Near-Eastern chimera – the taking of Constantinople. So he turned down the Danish King's offer.

  But Wilhelm remained optimistic. He was convinced that, sooner or later, the Tsar would change his mind. He was also convinced – and this in spite of the fact that he was being cold-shouldered by the politicians and the generals – that peace was something to be made by kings and emperors. When an emissary of President Woodrow Wilson arrived at the Kaiser's headquarters with an offer of mediation, Wilhelm was dismissive. This really was not the business of republicans.

  'I and my cousins George and Nicholas shall make peace when the proper time has come,' he declared.

  By the time that Nicholas II finally turned down Christian X's offer of mediation, he had assumed personal command of the Russian army. Until then – August 1915 – the Tsar had remained at home to control affairs of state. The army had been under the command of one of Nicholas's relations, the efficient, popular and physically impressive Grand Duke Nicholas. The Tsar had confined his military involvement to prolonged stays at headquarters (always known as Stavka), where he was careful not to undermine the Grand Duke's authority. Nicholas, who was often accompanied by the eleven-year-old Tsarevich Alexis, enjoyed these visits immensely. After the claustrophobic, intensely feminine atmosphere of Tsarskoe Selo, there was something invigoratingly masculine about military headquarters. These visits also allowed him to forget, for a while, the pressures of political life in the capital.

  General Sir John Hanbury-Williams, the British military attaché, meeting the Tsar for the first time at Stavka, was particularly impressed by his relaxed air. 'The Emperor received me alone,' he wrote. 'He was dressed in perfectly plain khaki uniform, the coat being more of a blouse than ours, with blue breeches and long black riding boots, and was standing at a high writing desk. As I saluted, he came forward at once and shook me warmly by the hand. I was at once struck by his extraordinary likeness to our own King, and the way he smiled, his face lighting up, as if it were a real pleasure for him to receive one. His first question was one of inquiry after our King and Queen and the Royal Family . . . I had always pictured him to myself as a somewhat sad and anxious-looking monarch, with cares of state and other things hanging heavily over him. Instead of that I found a bright, keen, happy face, plenty of humour and a fresh-air man.'

  But Nicholas was not quite as satisfied with things as he appeared. In fact, he was very unhappy about his position. He would far rather have been in personal command of the army than a mere visitor to Stavka. He felt that his role should be that of warrior-tsar, not tame head of state.

  In his dissatisfaction, Nicholas was being egged on by Alexandra. Even more than he, did this impassioned woman feel that the place for the Autocrat was at the head of his troops. It was surely quite wrong for the more masterful-looking Grand Duke Nicholas to be holding this all-powerful position. Might he not, in time, come to overshadow the small and mild-mannered Tsar? Already, by her unstinting work among the wounded, Alexandra felt that she had become the Mutushka – the mother – of the loyal and simple Russian soldiers; only by placing himself at the head of his men could Nicholas truly become their Batiushka – their father.

  Encouraging the Tsaritsa in her thinking was Rasputin. In those tense days before the outbreak of war, the starets had tried to talk the Tsar out of committing Russia to the conflict. 'Let Papa not plan war,' he had telegraphed, 'for with the war will come the end of Russia and yourselves.' Nicholas had reacted angrily to what had seemed to him like unpatriotic sentiments and, since then, he had treated Rasputin's advice with a certain amount of scepticism. But Alexandra remained as besotted with the starets as ever. And as Rasputin shared her distrust of Grand Duke Nicholas (who had once threatened to hang him) he worked up the Empress's feelings against him.

  While the Russian army was successful (if it was only just holding its own against the Germans, it was winning resounding victories against the Austro-Hungarians) there was very little that the Empress and Rasputin could do about getting rid of Grand Duke Nicholas. But when, in the spring of 1915, the Russian forces began to fall back in the face of a determined German onslaught, their position was strengthened. In letter after letter to her husband, Alexandra begged him to follow the advice of 'Our Friend' to dismiss Grand Duke Nicholas and assume supreme command himself. After the fall of Warsaw to the Germans in August 1915, Nicholas finally made up his mind to take their advice. Grand Duke Nicholas was dismissed and, against the pleas of his ministers and the example of most of his fellow sovereigns, the Tsar took personal command of the army.

  The Tsaritsa was overjoyed. 'You have fought this great fight for your country and throne – alone and with bravery and decision,' ran her hectoring phrases. 'Never have they seen such firmness in you before . . . God anointed you at your coronation, he placed you where you stand and you have done your duty, be sure, quite sure of that and He forsaketh not His anointed. Our Friend's prayers arise day and night for you to Heaven and God will hear them . . . It is the beginning of the great glory of your reign. He said so and I absolutely believe it.'

  But by no means everyone believed in this great glory lying just around the corner. With control of the army having passed from the resolute hands of Grand Duke Nicholas into the vacillating hands of Tsar Nicholas II, victory seemed less likely than ever. And with the disappearance of the autocratic head of state from the capital to the battlefield, a dangerous vacuum remained. It was a vacuum which the Tsaritsa felt increasingly confident of filling. While the Tsar managed the army, she would manage the government. Together, they would save Holy Russia and the Autocracy for their son.

  And in case her weak-willed husband proved unequal to his great task, Alexandra chivvied him into being firmer, bolder, more autocratic. 'Be the master and lord, you are an autocrat,' she insisted. 'Never forget that you are and must remain autocratic Emperor.'

&n
bsp; That she would prove equal to what she considered her divine mission, Alexandra never doubted. In this, she was being backed up by the wily Rasputin. Confidently, and with disastrous results, the Tsaritsa and the starets began to manage the affairs of the empire. And, in the unlikely event of her ever developing any reservations about him, Rasputin would remind her of his importance in her life.

  'I need neither the Tsar nor yourself,' he would say. 'If you abandon me to my enemies, it will not worry me. I am quite able to cope with them. But neither the Tsar nor you can do without me. If I am not here to protect you, you will lose your son and your crown in six months.'5

  12

  Taking Sides

  ONLY GRADUALLY were the monarchs of southeastern Europe drawn into the conflict. Some were prepared to wait and see which of the rival contestants came up with the more attractive territorial offer; others faced agonising personal decisions. At the opening of hostilities, only those three venerable sovereigns – Franz Joseph of Austria–Hungary on the one side, and Peter of Serbia and Nicholas of Montenegro on the other – were involved. And of the three, King Peter alone was to be found in the field with his troops.

  Just before the outbreak of war, the seventy-one-year-old King Peter, whose health had been steadily declining ('an old broken man on the edge of the grave' is how he described himself) had appointed his son, Crown Prince Alexander, as Regent. Yet this did not stop him from playing as active as possible a part in the fighting. In the opening weeks of the war, his army fought magnificently. Twice they repulsed the invading Austro-Hungarian forces, and by the end of September 1914, a combined Serbian and Montenegrin force had actually penetrated Austrian territory. But a third invasion by the Austrians forced the Serbs back and, at the end of October, Belgrade had to be evacuated.