Crowns in Conflict

by Theo Aronson

  But King Ferdinand was not easily won round. He certainly did not share Queen Marie's whole-hearted enthusiasm for the Entente Powers. In truth, he did not even share his prime minister's less outspoken support for them. Like his late uncle, King Carol, Ferdinand was a Hohenzollern. Not only did he have brothers fighting on the German side but he had an unshakable belief in the invincibility of the German army. He realised, too, that his country was in a very bad strategic position for waging war against the Central Powers. Britain and France were far away, and with Austria–Hungary to the west and Bulgaria to the south, Romania would be almost completely surrounded by the enemy. As an ally, Russia, with whom Romania shared a northeastern border, would be too busily engaged elsewhere to give Romania much help.

  On the other hand, most of Ferdinand's subjects shared his Queen's eagerness to join the Entente Powers. For one thing, the Romanians felt a close affinity with their fellow Latins in France (was Bucharest not known as 'the Paris of the East'?); for another, a victory over the hated Austro-Hungarian empire would give them Transylvania – that Romanian heartland now occupied by Hungary. Neutrality might have looked like the more sensible course, but only by taking up arms against the Central Powers could the Romanians hope to realise their dream of Romania Mare – the aggrandisement of their country and the unification of all their people.

  But still, and very understandably, Ferdinand hesitated. In a letter to Wilhelm II, he outlined his dilemma. 'In spite of his personal feelings and sympatheties', he explained to the Kaiser, 'he was before all else one with his people, who were clamouring for the liberation of the Romanians living beneath Hungarian sway . . . notwithstanding his old [German] loyalties, he was first and foremost King of his country, and bound by oath to serve it through every sacrifice.'8

  Wilhelm remained unconvinced. His answer was to send telegrams, en clair, through Bucharest to his sister, Queen Sophie of the Hellenes (whose husband, King Constantine, was showing a similar disinclination to join the Central Powers) in which he threatened vengeance on any country who opposed his 'victorious armies and his Deutscher Gott'. To the astonishment of his entourage, the Kaiser even wondered whether Romania's hesitation in joining the Central Powers was due to the fact that he had not been pleasanter to Queen Marie during her pre-war visit to Berlin.

  While Ferdinand was writing to the Kaiser, Marie – at the request of Bratianu, the prime minister – was writing much more impassioned letters to her cousins, George V and Nicholas II. At great length she described her own impasse ('my position is delicate and all my tact is needed, my own sympathies and feelings must be kept well in hand' reads one of her effusions to cousin Georgie) and, at even greater length, put forward Romania's territorial expectations.

  Georgie's answers were characteristically terse. It was, thought Marie, more than likely that he simply did not understand the complexity of Romania's territorial ambitions: 'Geography had not been George's strong point,' she claims. But there was nothing wrong with Nicky's geography. 'I must frankly own that we are deeply amazed by your country's enormous demands,' he declared.

  But, in the end, with the Entente Powers ready to pay almost any price, in the way of eventual territorial rewards, for his support (they were still sore at having let the Bulgarian Tsar slip through their fingers) and with his subjects itching to invade Hungary, Ferdinand made up his mind. On 27 August 1916, Romania declared war on the Central Powers. 'I always knew that it would end like this,' wrote Marie to George V, 'indeed I was confident that it would not be otherwise, but the struggles were hard and poor [Ferdinand] has made a tremendous sacrifice – the greatest that can be asked of a King and of a man . . . '

  The decision finally made, the fifty-year-old King Ferdinand took nominal command of his country's armed forces. He did not cut much of a figure. His good qualities – his honesty, his unselfishness, his unswerving sense of duty – did not show to advantage in this particular situation. Nor were his interests suited to the times. Ferdinand enjoyed books, botany and a little quiet conversation. In war, as in peace, he remained diffident and self-effacing; ready to be guided by his government, by his general staff and, not least of all, by his wife.

  For, with the outbreak of hostilities, Queen Marie of Romania came into her own. Until now, she had been known chiefly for her theatricality and her decorativeness. Only too aware of her considerable beauty, Marie had done everything to enhance it. Her manner was expansive (her beauty and vivacity were such, remembered Britain's Queen Mother, that even in the most illustrious company 'all eyes immediately turned when Queen Marie entered a room',9) her clothes were stagey, her famous gold rooms were furnished in a quasi-Byzantine, self-consciously Bohemian fashion. The courts of Europe seethed with rumours of her love affairs; the Kaiser referred to her as 'that meddlesome little flirt' or 'that English harlot'.10 But all this she now put behind her. Self-dramatising Queen Marie might have remained, but to the changed situation she brought all her many great qualities: her courage, her compassion, her verve, her resilience and her conscientiousness.

  All this, and more, she was to need in the years ahead. From the start, the war was disastrous for Romania. A resolute advance, to liberate their brothers in Transylvania, was checked almost immediately. With their Russian ally slow in coming to their aid (and this in spite of the Queen's hectoring letters to the Tsar) the Romanians faced two invading forces – the Germans and Austro-Hungarians from the north and west, and the Bulgarians from the south. Everywhere the army fell back in confusion. Abandoning hospitals, weapons and stores, the Romanians retreated helter-skelter towards the northeast. On 6 December 1916, just over three months after the Romanian declaration of war, the Kaiser's troops entered Bucharest in triumph.

  By this time King Ferdinand had headquartered himself, with his family, his government and his ragged army, at Jassy, a provincial town not far from the Russian frontier. In a way, his position was similar to that of King Albert of the Belgians. For, once Russia had finally come to his aid (there was not really much love lost between the Russians and the Romanians) the German advance had been checked and the front line stabilised. This left the Romanian army in possession of only part of its country's soil.

  With the war bogged down in the trenches, life behind the front line settled down to a grim and demoralising routine. Conditions were appalling. The winter of 1916–1917 was the coldest for fifty years. There was mismanagement and inefficiency everywhere. Typhus raged through the army. There was too little food, too few doctors and too few hospital beds. It was feared that the Romanians might be forced to give up what was left to them of their country and retreat into Russia.

  The Queen remained the one bright flame in all the blackness of the Romanian situation. In her snowy nurse's uniform, with its vivid red cross on the armband, she was an inspiration to them all; the very symbol of fortitude. Never allowing herself to look anything other than optimistic, she was jolted along muddy roads to work in squalid hospitals and to bring solace to wounded men.

  Yet there were times when even her indomitable spirit seemed about to give way. 'Everything seems too hard, too difficult, too completely dreadful, as though no human strength could stand such pressure and not give way to despair,' she once confided to her diary. 'But I shall stand it, I have sworn to stand it to the bitter end, it may even be a glorious end; at the deepest depths of my soul, I still believe it will be a glorious end, though I must admit that nothing at the present time justifies this optimism.'

  There remained one uncommitted monarch in this turbulent corner of southeastern Europe: the bluff, realistic King Constantine of the Hellenes. And he had no intention of joining either side. Greece, Constantine believed, should remain neutral. Exhausted and depleted by the recent Balkan wars, Greece needed a period of peace to consolidate her gains. Conscious of a powerful bond between himself and his army, the King did not want to expose it to further dangers and privations. In any case, the conflict did not directly concern Greece; the country had no reas
on to side with any of the belligerents. It was true that Greece had agreed to come to the aid of Serbia, but only if Serbia were attacked by another Balkan state; the quarrel between Serbia and Austria–Hungary had nothing to do with Greece. Constantine's views were shared by his general staff and by many of the Greek people.

  So when, just before the outbreak of war, the Kaiser sent Constantine a telegram appealing to him on grounds of 'family ties, friendship and as a field marshal in the German army' to join the Central Powers, the Greek King refused. One of the reasons he gave for remaining neutral was that Greece, if allied to the Central Power, would be at the mercy of the Entente fleets.

  Dismissing Constantine's reasons as 'rubbish', the Kaiser sent him an altogether more forceful telegram. 'Things will go badly for anyone who opposes me,' threatened Wilhelm. But Constantine held firm.

  The King's neutralist views were not shared by his prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos. An astute, ambitious and patriotic man, who had held power since 1910, Venizelos had been largely responsible for forming the alliances which had resulted in Greece's spectacular gains during the Balkan wars. Anxious to achieve more spectacular gains still – to realise the 'Great Idea', the dream of an aggrandised Hellenic Empire – Venizelos was all for joining the Entente Powers. With Turkey now allied to Germany, there seemed no reason why Greece could not, by throwing in its lot with Britain and France, finally win Constantinople from the Turks.

  This divergence of views between King and prime minister split the country into two irreconcilable camps. It was a situation of which the Entente Powers, anxious for Greek support, took immediate advantage. With Venizelos's encouragement and despite the fact that Greece was neutral, a combined French and British force landed at Salonika, in northern Greece, in October 1915. From here they hoped to launch an attack on enemy-occupied Serbia. Their arrival led to yet another row between Constantine and Venizelos, and to the prime minister's resignation.

  An extraordinary political situation now developed. In Athens, and the south, the King was in control; in Salonika, and the north, the Entente Powers behaved as though the country were theirs. From their entrenched position in Salonika they attacked both the enemy forces along the Serbian and Bulgarian borders, and Constantine's stubbornly neutralist stance in Athens.

  Suspecting that Constantine was secretly in league with the Central Powers, Britain and France lost no opportunity of denouncing him. As the most obvious way of blackening his name was to accuse him of being pro-German, the Entente Powers raked up anything that might link the King to the Kaiser. His pre-war speech, for instance, delivered at the banquet at which Wilhelm II had made him a German field marshal, was now cited as 'irrefutable proof" of the King's pro-German leanings. The photograph of Constantine in his field marshal's uniform was used to back up the accusation.

  It was in vain that Constantine could protest that George V had often worn the uniform of a German field marshal, and that Wilhelm II had worn a British one. Or that his professed admiration for the German army made him no more a German sympathiser than to admire the British navy made him pro-British. And had he not held firm in the face of the Kaiser's threats? And were not Germany's allies, Turkey and Bulgaria, Greece's bitterest enemies?

  An undeniable link between the King and the Kaiser was, of course, Queen Sophie. As Wilhelm II's sister, she was in an invidious position. It was true that Sophie, forty-six years old in 1916, had what were generally considered to be 'Prussian' qualities: that she was efficient, thorough, unbending. With her erect carriage, high-piled hair and stern expression, she could look unapproachable. In lackadaisical Greece, Sophie was regarded as something of a martinet. 'I noticed', writes the celebrated hostess, Roma Lister, meeting Queen Sophie for the first time, 'a stronger personality than exists in most feminine royalties. She was friendly and gracious to all the party, but there was a latent power hidden in her, as in her brother [the Kaiser] – a reversion to the medieval type of sovereign that pierced through the banalties of life. '

  But none of this meant that Sophie was in sympathy with Wilhelm II. On the contrary, there had never been much rapport between brother and sister; they had quarrelled incessantly. In earlier days, when Wilhelm had been treating their British-born mother, Queen Victoria's daughter the Empress Frederick, so cruelly, Sophie had always sided with the Empress. In fact, Sophie considered Wilhelm to be insufferably ostentatious and ludicrously conceited. Her feelings towards her cousin George V, on the other hand, and for his country generally, were warm. Time and again Sophie voiced her admiration for British institutions and British ways. Britain, not Germany, had always been her second home. Her 'beloved England', she would explain, was the place she loved to be in most.

  All this, if it was ever known, was swept away in the flood of vituperation which now poured over Queen Sophie. In the eyes of her critics – the French and British press and those Greek newspapers sympathetic to Venizelos – she was presented as a fanatically pro-German, hard-hearted virago, determined to force her weak-willed husband into fighting for the Kaiser. No story against her was too bizarre to be believed. She would allow only those favourable to the German cause to see the King. She had a private cable installed at their country place, Tatoi, by which she would communicate with German submarines. Constantine's near-fatal illness in 1915 (it was pleurisy) was due to the fact that, during the course of a disagreement between them on the question of Greece joining Germany, Sophie had grabbed a dagger and stabbed him in the chest.

  The unhappy Greek situation came to a head in the autumn of 1916 when Venizelos, working hand-in-glove with the Entente Powers, openly defied the King. Following a pro-Entente uprising in Salonika, he quit Athens and made a public announcement of his support for the Entente cause. Arriving in Salonika, he formed a revolutionary Provisional Government in opposition to Constantine's government in Athens.

  At this insult to a fellow monarch, Constantine's cousins, George V and Nicholas II, became seriously alarmed. They suddenly found themselves torn between monarchial solidarity and national interests. 'It seems to me', wrote the worried Tsar to the British King, in customary English, 'the protecting powers [Britain and France] in trying to safeguard our interests concerning Greece's neutrality, are gradually immersing themselves too much in her internal home affairs to the detriment of the King.'11

  After two of Constantine's brothers, Prince George and Prince Andrew of Greece, had visited George V, the British King took the unusual step of approaching his prime minister on the subject. 'Are we justified in interfering to this extent in the internal government of a neutral and friendly country?' he asked. He could not help feeling that 'we have allowed France too much to dictate a policy, and that as a Republic she may be somewhat intolerant of, if not anxious to abolish, the monarchy in Greece.'12

  George V's apprehensions were justified. On 24 November 1916 Venizelos formally declared war on the Central Powers. With Constantine still stubbornly refusing to abandon his neutrality, the French attitude became more menacing. The French fleet had been anchored off Athens for some months; now a contingent of troops landed at Piraeus and marched on the capital. Much to their astonishment, they were resisted by Greek troops loyal to the King. This was not what Entente propaganda had led them to expect. After a short skirmish, they were forced back.

  Constantine's telegram to George V, justifying the action of his troops, received a coldly formal answer. Whatever the British King's personal feelings might have been, as a constitutional monarch he was bound to echo his government's defence of the French action.

  The French land attack having floundered, they resorted to bombarding Athens from their ships. When even these bullying tactics failed to coerce those Greeks loyal to the King into joining them, the Entente Powers applied another method. They imposed a strict blockade. For the following eight months, the Greeks all but starved.

  'Can Belgium have suffered more at German hands?' demanded the embittered Queen Sophie.

  By this sta
ge, Constantine was little better than a prisoner of the Entente. His every move was watched; he almost never left the palace. Convalescence from his attack of pleurisy the year before was slow. For three years after his illness he wore a tube in his back through which a poisonous discharge passed from an incision in his lung. Gradually, this suppurating wound weakened his once powerful physique. According to his brother, Prince Christopher, he 'lost much of his vigour and the capacity for crisp decision that had carried him through so many difficulties in the past. He was no longer master of the situation.' Once so dynamic and impatient, Constantine became dispirited and lethargic.

  To see all his work for Greece ruined and his people hounded and hungry depressed him deeply. 'How weary I am of these dirty politics!' wrote Constantine to a friend at the time. 'I have periods of disgust and lassitude which almost bring tears to my eyes . . .'

  The quiet centre of all these Balkan upheavals was Schönbrunn Palace outside Vienna where the long life of the eighty-six-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph was coming to an end. The old monarch, whose ultimatum to Serbia had unleashed the whole terrible struggle, had ceased to be in control of either military or civilian affairs. Everything was now being run by the generals and the politicians. His last days coincided with a curious calm in his empire: Serbia and Montenegro had been conquered, the Russian and Italian fronts were static, Romania had been overrun. With the Reichsrat – the Austrian parliament – having been prorogued in 1914, there was a political silence as well. News of the unrest being fomented among the various racial groups hardly penetrated the walls of the palace. In Vienna the populace was apathetic and war-weary.