by Theo Aronson
It was now, with his armies on the defensive, that old King Peter came into his own. Almost overnight, he developed into the symbol of Serbian resistance. Rifle in hand, he would scramble into the trenches to fight beside his men. On one occasion, hobbling up to some troops who were wavering under sustained enemy artillery fire, he exhorted them, 'in the manner of a Homeric general', to hold firm.
'Heroes,' he shouted, 'you have taken two oaths: one to me, your King, and one to your country. From the first I release you, from the second no man can release you.'1 Yet, always aware of the untameable temperament of his peasant subjects, the King went on to assure them that if they did decide to go back to their homes, they would not be punished.
They did not go back. Instead, by an almost superhuman effort, the fought their way back to Belgrade. In the midst of them, as they battled forward in the swirling dust, went their King. Seated in a ramshackle old car, he would urge on the driver with shouts of 'Faster! Faster!' By the middle of December 1914, the Serbs had retaken their capital. The Hungarian flag, which had been floating above the palace, was torn down and laid on the steps of the cathedral. Over it, as he went to celebrate a great victory mass, trod the triumphant King Peter.
And if, in his heart of hearts, the old monarch knew that his country's successes could only be temporary, he never publicly admitted it. Instead, he behaved with all the assurance of a victor. To his subjects, King Peter of Serbia was now wholly, says one chronicler, the Warrior King.
Also being hailed as a warrior king was the far more unlikely figure of little Victor Emmanuel III of Italy. On the outbreak of war, and in spite of a request from the Emperor Franz Joseph that the Italian King honour his treaty obligations, Victor Emmanuel and his government opted for neutrality. Although realising that, if Italy were to live up to her boast of being a great power, she would have to enter the war sooner or later, Victor Emmanuel decided to bide his time.
The King's main ambition remained the completion of the Risorgimento. So not only was he prepared to ally his country to whoever promised him the terre irredente – those Italian-speaking lands still held by Austria – but he had to be certain that the promise would be kept; that, to put it at its crudest, Italy would choose the winning side. 'The little thief', exclaimed Wilhelm II on hearing of Victor Emmanuel's decision of neutrality, 'always wants to swallow something more.'2
The Allied victory on the Marne helped make up his mind. Quite clearly the Kaiser's troops were not going to be marching home in triumph before the leaves had fallen. Victor Emmanuel would be wiser to opt for the Triple Entente rather than the Central Powers. So, by the Pact of London, signed on 26 April 1915, in which Italy was promised not only Trentino and Trieste but great tracts of Austrian-owned land on the Adriatic coast, the King allied his country to the Entente Powers. A month later Italy declared war on Austria; or, as Franz Joseph more grandiloquently put it, 'The King of Italy has declared war on Me.' Not until August did Victor Emmanuel pluck up the courage to declare war on Germany.
The Kaiser's reaction was predictable. When someone suggested that Victor Emmanuel's hand might have been forced by his politicians, Wilhelm refused to believe it. Kings' hands were never forced by politicians. When the Day of Judgement came, declared the Kaiser, the King of Italy would not be able to evade his responsibilities by blaming his government. God would say to him, 'No, no, my little man, that won't wash with me. Who made you a King? Your Ministers? Your Parliament? No, I placed you in that exalted position and you are responsible to me alone. Go to Hell, or at least to Purgatory.'3
By the year 1915, such robustly autocratic sentiments were sounding very strange indeed. And coming from Wilhelm II, who was by now little more than a puppet in the hands of others, they sounded stranger still.
Victor Emmanuel remained with his troops throughout the war. The government was presided over by his cousin, the Duke of Genoa, whom he had appointed as Regent. Although hailed as Il Re Soldato, Victor Emmanuel very wisely left the actual waging of the war to the generals. But, like his fellow sovereigns, Albert of the Belgians and Peter of Serbia, he became closely identified with the fighting men. Among the soldiers at the front – that mountainous terrain where Italy and Austria met – Victor Emmanuel earned the reputation of being a conscientious, courageous and deeply concerned monarch. From his quarters – most often the Villa Linussa in the Friuli valley – he emerged each day to make his rounds. The little figure, in his ankle-length greatcoat and tall peaked cap, was everywhere: inspecting installations, asking questions, handing out cigars, eating from a mess tin, murmuring words of encouragement, tending to the sick and comforting the dying. In all weathers and in all conditions, Victor Emmanuel carried out his self-imposed duties. Il Fante dei Fanti – the Foot Soldier of the Foot Soldiers – the men called him. Anecdotes about his bravery and his kindness were legion.
'It was a pleasure to see the King among his troops, encouraging them with a genial word and a friendly smile,' wrote the visiting British ambassador. 'One felt that when the war was over he would have friends in every village.' Il Re Soldato had not quite eclipsed the Liberal King.
'The King', declared the peasant recruits in wonderment at their monarch's daily appearance among them, 'is like the presence of God.'4
With the passing years, as the war on the Austrian front dragged inconclusively and murderously on, at the cost of Italian lives and morale, King Victor Emmanuel III developed into an almost legendary figure: a monarch who, no matter what his innermost feelings might be, appeared always calm, confident and defiant. His reputation had never stood higher. And it was never to stand so high again.
Another monarch who had been prepared to play a waiting game before committing himself to either side was that arch-intriguer, Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria. His position had been almost identical to that of Victor Emmanuel III. He was ready to link his country to whichever side promised better spoils, always provided that they were, or would one day be, in a position to deliver these spoils.
Ferdinand's overriding aim was to regain those areas of Macedonia lost to Serbia after the Second Balkan War. 'The purpose of my life', he remarked with great bitterness, 'is the destruction of Serbia.' For the Entente Powers, this created a considerable problem. Serbia was their ally, and nothing, it seemed, would convince the Serbs of the advisability of ceding even an inch of their recently won territory to their enemy, Bulgaria. The Central Powers, on the other hand, were in the happy position of being able to offer Ferdinand as much of Macedonia as he liked, for the very good reason that it was not theirs to give away.
Yet Ferdinand was not really enamoured of either Germany or Austria-Hungary. His relations with Wilhelm II had always been strained, and the Habsburg Emperor he described, after a recent visit to Vienna, as 'that idiot, that old dotard of a Francis Joseph'.
Appreciating that the vain Bulgarian sovereign enjoyed being courted, both sides made a point of sending important emissaries to Sophia to try and win him round. (If the emissary happened to be accompanied by a good-looking young blond adjutant, his chances of a sympathetic hearing would be immeasurably improved.) To help entice the Bulgarian Tsar into the Entente camp, the French foreign ministry sent one of Ferdinand's relations, the Due de Guise. As a prince of Bourbon–Orleans and future pretender to the French throne, the Due de Guise was regarded as admirably equipped for his task. Who better to persuade Ferdinand, always so proud of his Bourbon blood, of his duty to France?
The mission raised the whole question of royal obligations and loyalties. Over a century before, when Louis XVI had lost his throne in the French Revolution, there was no doubt that he regarded himself – and was regarded – as a king first and a Frenchman second. But by now things had changed. The loyalty of all monarchs was to country before caste. The sympathy of the deposed French Bourbons, for instance, was with France, which happened to be a republic, rather than with Germany or Austria, which happened to be monarchies.
So it was with every justificati
on that Tsar Ferdinand could protest that his first duty was to the country over which he reigned, Bulgaria, and not to the country of his maternal ancestry, France. To the accusation that it would be treasonable for a French Bourbon to join the enemies of France, he could rightly reply by asking if George V of Great Britain and the Tsaritsa Alexandra of Russia were to be blamed for 'betraying' their German blood. In any case, was he not as much his father's son as his mother's – as much German Coburg as French Bourbon? And were there not Coburgs fighting on both sides?
With his sharp sense of irony, Ferdinand would have appreciated the fact that the French republic had felt it necessary to send a prince to win him round; a prince, moreover, who like Ferdinand himself, was a descendant of the very King Louis Philippe whom France had overthrown in 1848. Ferdinand, having heard the Due de Guise out, refused to commit himself.
'And now that you have discharged your mission,' he said blandly, 'you must again become my nephew.'
Ferdinand's vacillation, or rather, his hesitation in joining the Central Powers, infuriated Wilhelm II. 'If he doesn't come to his senses,' threatened the Kaiser, 'I'll strike him off the rolls as Honorary Colonel of the Regiment. '
'That would, of course,' noted one member of the Kaiser's suite wryly, 'make him see reason.'5
Ferdinand's mind was made up for him by the successes of the Central Powers during the summer of 1915, in the same way that Victor Emmanuel's decision to join the Entente had been influenced by the earlier Allied victory on the Marne. A spectacular German breakthrough on the Russian front, coinciding with an Allied defeat at the hands of the Turks (who had joined the Central Powers in 1914) at Gallipoli, made a great impression on Ferdinand. On 6 September 1915 Bulgaria joined the Central Powers. He hoped, said Tsar Ferdinand to the astonished British minister, about to leave Sofia, that the war would not affect his good personal relations with King George V.
In October the Bulgarians launched their offensive against the Serbs in Macedonia. This time the campaign was glorious. With the combined German and Austrian armies attacking from the north, and the Bulgarians from the east, the Serbs were soundly beaten. By the end of December the whole of Serbian Macedonia was in the hands of Bulgaria. The humiliations of the Second Balkan War had been avenged. Tsar Ferdinand had been vindicated.
Ferdinand's finest hour was rendered finer still by his ceremonial meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm II in the Serbian town of Nish in January 1916. The Kaiser arrived in the new German Balkan Express, that luxurious symbol of the ascendancy of the Central Powers, that ran twice weekly from Berlin to Constantinople. Meeting on the station platform, the two sovereigns made an incongruous-looking pair: the German Kaiser much shorter and squatter than had been imagined, the Bulgarian Tsar tall and hawk-nosed but walking with 'a curious duck-like waddle'. Both were festooned with medals. Forgetting, in this moment of victory, their mutual antipathy, the two men walked arm-in-arm towards the waiting cars.
This new-found harmony pervaded that evening's banquet, when Wilhelm made Ferdinand a field marshal in the Prussian army. Only for a second was there a suspicion that the sly. Ferdinand might be having a private joke at his fellow sovereign's expense.
'Ave Imperator, Caesar et Rex, Victor et Gloriosus . . .' intoned the Bulgarian Tsar to the serenely smiling Kaiser. Was Ferdinand's Latin really so uncertain that he did not know that the generally accepted meaning of the word gloriosus was braggart?6
While Ferdinand of Bulgaria was basking in the sunshine of victory, Peter of Serbia was suffering the darkest days of defeat. Faced by the combined force of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian armies, the Serbs had been forced to abandon their recently recaptured capital. Although they fought as magnificently as ever, there was little that they could do to halt the enemy advance. The promised help from their French and British allies never materialised. After the battle of the 'Field of the Blackbirds' in November 1915, the Serbs were obliged to admit defeat. But determined to keep what remained of their army intact to fight another day, they decided to retreat westwards towards the Adriatic.
The retreat of the Serbian army formed one of the great heroic episodes of the First World War. This seemingly endless file of ragged men made, as they staggered along the rutted roads, an extraordinary spectacle: a spectacle rendered more extraordinary because of what they carried with them. To prevent the sacred bodies of their long-dead kings falling into the hands of the enemy, they had brought the royal coffins out of monasteries and had loaded them on to bullock-carts or, if the roads were too bad, on to the shoulders of the accompanying monks. Nor was it only the bodies of their dead kings that were being jolted along the tracks. King Peter, too old and rheumatic to walk, had to be borne, sometimes on an ox-cart, sometimes on a litter; and so did his son, the Regent Prince Alexander, who had been operated on for appendicitis in a wayside cottage.
'It is like some fantastic detail in a Byzantine fresco,' writes Rebecca West, 'improbable, nearly impossible, yet a valid symbol of a truth, that a country which was about to die should bear with it on its journey to death, its kings, living and dead, all prostrate, immobile.'
The most gruelling part of the retreat was across the mountain range that lay between Serbia and the Adriatic, on whose shores the Serbian army hoped to reorganise with French and British help. In appalling conditions, in mud, snow and piercing December winds, hungry, exhausted and dispirited, they battled across the jagged peaks. Almost half of them died on this epic journey.
Their desperate plight was worsened by the behaviour of King Peter's ally and father-in-law, the brigandly old Nicholas of Montenegro. At the beginning of the war, Nicholas had telegraphed Peter, promising him that he would stand by him until death. Serbian and Montenegrin troops had fought side by side during the first few weeks but then, inexplicably, Nicholas had withdrawn his army. It was assumed that, true to form, the old fox had made a secret deal with the Austrians.
When, late the following year, the Serbian army was battling across the mountains of Montenegro on their way to the sea, a royal order went out to the Montenegrin army and police, forbidding them to give or sell food to the starving Serbs. And although Nicholas's army did fight one more battle against the Austrians – at Mount Lovćen – the sudden Montenegrin capitulation merely strengthened Serbian suspicions that Nicholas had betrayed their cause. By January 1916, at the time when Wilhelm II and Tsar Ferdinand were meeting in triumph at Nish, King Nicholas had abandoned his army and fled the country.
Nicholas went to France where, in the fashionable Parisian suburb of Neuilly, he set up a court-in-exile. Living on handsome subsidies from the French, British and Russian governments and invariably sporting his country's colourful national dress, Nicholas was treated with all the deference due to an Allied sovereign. He was taken on an official tour of inspection of the western front; his views on the Balkan situation were listened to with flattering attention.
But as Nicholas had always been one to hedge his bets, he was careful not to sever all relations with the victorious Austrians. His second son, Prince Mirko, was in Vienna. Living on equally generous subsidies, Mirko was being hardly less assiduously courted. Nicholas's explanation – that his son was in the Austrian capital to receive treatment for tuberculosis – fooled very few. The old brigand was simply ensuring that, whatever the outcome of the war, the dynasty would be saved. Self-preservation, after all, was monarchy's first duty.
In the meantime, the tattered Serbian army, with old King Peter on his litter in its midst, reached the Adriatic. From here Prince Alexander appealed to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia for help. 'With feelings of anguish,' answered the Tsar, 'I have followed the retreat of the brave Serb troops across Albania and Montenegro. I would like to express to Your Royal Highness my sincere astonishment at the skill with which, under your leadership, and in face of such hardships and being greatly outnumbered by the enemy, attacks have been repelled and the army withdrawn.'7
The Tsar went on to promise that he would repeat
his appeals to the French and British to ship the Serbian army to safety.
Help eventually came, and the Serbs were transported, in French and British ships, to the island of Corfu. While the men built up their strength for a counterblow, Prince Alexander, to whom old King Peter had by now delegated all effective power, took control of the situation. The Serbs could hardly have done better. With the look of an alert bantam cock and his air of quiet resolution, Prince Alexander made the ideal wartime leader. Travelling to Rome, Paris and London, he begged the Entente Powers to launch a determined reconquest of his country.
King Peter, meanwhile, moved on to the Greek mainland. He was to remain there for the rest of the war. Looking, in his long white beard, like an Orthodox priest, he survived to see the dream of a Greater Serbia – the creation of Yugoslavia – come true after the war, and to know that he had been proclaimed King of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. But by then he was living the life of a recluse.
King Ferdinand of Romania was the next monarch to join the conflict.
His uncle, the steely old King Carol of Romania, had died in October 1914. While this Hohenzollern-born monarch had been alive, there had not been much hope of Romania joining the Entente Powers. Nor would a council of ministers, specially convened by King Carol, permit him to honour his alliance with the Central Powers. Romania was to remain neutral.
But now that Carol had been succeeded by his weak-willed nephew Ferdinand, and, more importantly, by Ferdinand's strong-willed and pro-British wife Marie, the situation was more fluid. The Romanian prime minister, the astute Ion Bratianu, was certainly prepared to take advantage of the conflict for his country's benefit. The result was that both sides immediately began flooding Bucharest with emissaries (as Queen Marie had an eye for a handsome man, the Germans sent as many good-looking officers to the Romanian court as they had to the Bulgarian court of Tsar Ferdinand) and with promises of vast territorial rewards.