Crowns in Conflict

by Theo Aronson

  But, to the end, the old Emperor kept himself busy. On the last day of his life, 21 November 1916, he rose before dawn as always, was rubbed down in cold water and dressed in his uniform. All day long, and in spite of not feeling well, he sat at his desk, reading, writing and signing. When his heir, his great-nephew the young Archduke Karl, came with his wife, Archduchess Zita, to see him, the Emperor told them that he had to get well, this was no time for being ill. Soon after six that evening his daughter, Archduchess Marie Valerie, finding him looking flushed, made him go to bed. When his valet asked for instructions, Franz Joseph asked to be wakened, as usual, at half past three the following morning.

  Franz Joseph died just after nine that evening. The new Emperor, Karl, brought the old Emperor's long-standing companion, Katherina Schratt, in to see his body. She laid two white roses on his breast.

  The funeral was conducted with all the baroque pomp and pageantry of the Habsburg court. Everything – the slowly-pacing troops, the black-plumed horses, the elaborately draped hearse, the massive coffin under its embroidered pall – was in accordance with long-established tradition. But where, in pre-war days, every monarch in Europe would have followed the remains through the streets of Vienna, the Tsar of Bulgaria and the King of Bavaria were the only rulers of any importance – other, of course, than the new Emperor and Empress – to take part in the procession. Not even Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had spoken of Franz Joseph as 'my sole surviving friend in the world', attended. Although in Vienna, it was decided for 'security reasons' that he should not take part in any public ceremonial. It was just as well. Jubilant about the recent victory in Romania, Wilhelm could hardly have matched his mood to the occasion.

  For the funeral of the old Emperor was a particularly poignant occasion. Among the tens of thousands of spectators who lined the hushed and wintry streets, few would have remembered the time when Franz Joseph had not reigned over them. And how many of them would have imagined that, in two years time, they would be witnessing the death of his six-hundred-year-old empire?

  13

  Uneasy Heads

  BY THE END OF 1916 Europe's leading monarchs were coming to a fuller realisation of the nature of the conflict in which they had become embroiled. The war had not been the swift, glorious campaign of their early imaginings. Instead of being home by Christmas 1914, their troops were about to face a third winter in the trenches. Any dreams they might have had of spectacular advances, lightning strikes and swashbuckling victory parades had long since faded: the embattled monarchs now found themselves all but powerless witnesses of the most horrific struggle the world had ever experienced.

  The days when war had simply been an extension of diplomacy, a sure means of redressing the balance between conflicting claims and interests, had gone forever. Kings would no longer be able to offer up their swords to a fellow monarch after one major defeat, nor wars end with some minor territorial adjustment. The concept of total war, of unconditional surrender, of a fight to the finish, had taken hold. It had become a war of annihilation.

  With the conflict deadlocked on all fronts, tens of thousands of lives were being lost in titanic battles, usually for the gain, or loss, of a couple of hundred yards. The casualty lists at such murderous encounters as Verdun, the Somme and on the Russian front were appalling; equally desperate were the lesser-known battles being fought on the Balkan hillsides or the Italian mountains or the plains of Galicia. Millions upon millions of men were being slaughtered. By the end of 1916 the outcome of the war was as uncertain as it had been two years before. 'This war', admitted the Kaiser privately, 'will not end in a great victory.'

  The sovereigns were deeply conscious of the mounting death-toll. Misguided and unimaginative they might sometimes have been, but these kings and emperors were none of them heartless men. George V was often on the verge of tears as he read the casualty lists or visited the wounded. 'When I think', wrote the Tsaritsa Alexandra to the Tsar, 'what the losses of lives mean to your heart.' Wilhelm II could sometimes not sleep, it was said, for worrying about the dead and the wounded. 'I never wanted this, I never wanted this,' he was heard to mutter on one occasion.

  A royal awareness that things had got out of hand, that monarchy must reassert itself, that kings must resume control before it was too late, led to several royal peace feelers being put out during this period.

  The first such move, in the spring of 1916, was shrouded in mystery. In conditions of the utmost secrecy, the Grand Duke of Hesse, brother of the Tsaritsa Alexandra of Russia, travelled to Tsarskoe Selo to see Tsar Nicholas II. The step seems to have been taken with the knowledge of the Kaiser but in defiance of the German High Command. This would explain why the Grand Duke never afterwards admitted to it. To this day, the visit is denied by the Hessian archives. But both the Kaiser's daughter, the Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and his daughter-in-law, Crown Princess Cecilie, referred to it in later years.

  'My nephew Prince Friedrich Ernst of Saxony-Altenburg . . .' writes the Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg, 'maintained that the Grand Duke of Hesse, with my father's consent, had personally sought out the Tsar in order to get a separate peace, and had gone to Russia under the pseudonym of Thurn-und-Taxis. The Tsar had given his brother-in-law an escort who had been sworn to absolute secrecy. At the transit point which the Grand Duke had to pass through the lines, he was recognised by one of his escort's acquaintances and he, too, was sworn to complete silence.'

  But nothing came of this meeting. Today, the chief interest lies in the fact that, years later, Anna Anderson, in her claim to be the Tsar's daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia, mentioned having seen her 'Uncle Ernest', Grand Duke of Hesse, at Tsarskoe Selo in 1916. As the visit was such a closely guarded secret, known only to a few members of the German and Russian imperial families, Anna Anderson's claim caused a considerable stir.

  In later years the Kaiser's family was always to maintain that both Wilhelm II and Nicholas II had been anxious to negotiate a separate peace but that their efforts had been repeatedly foiled by the French and British authorities.

  Wilhelm II's next peace feeler, put out in December 1916, was a more overt gesture. He agreed to a proposal by his chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, that Germany make a peace offer. With the Romanian capital having fallen to the Germans earlier that month, the Kaiser considered the situation of the Central Powers just good enough for the offer to be made from a position of strength.

  But there was more to it than this. The German civilian population, feeling the strain of the British blockade, was becoming increasingly hungry and discontented. Only by allowing unrestricted submarine warfare – which Wilhelm II was anxious to avoid – could the blockade be broken. Peace would avoid the need for this. In addition, President Wilson was about to come up with a peace initiative of his own, and Germany was anxious to beat him to it.

  The German Peace Note, issued on 12 December 1916, was purposely vague in tone. Because of this George V, anxious for peace, was afraid that his new prime minister, the impulsive Lloyd George, might reject it out of hand, 'so putting ourselves in the wrong' and 'alienating the sympathy of the moderate party in America'. He begged him to give it most careful consideration.

  While the German Peace Note was being considered, President Wilson issued an invitation to the opposing powers to state their peace terms. Neither move achieved anything. The Allies – as the Entente Powers and their co-belligerents were by now being called – saw the German initiative as little more than an empty gesture and rejected it. Yet their own peace terms, drawn up in response to Wilson's request, were so unrealistic that the President found himself unable to discuss them. In any case, the Germans had by then turned down Wilson's invitation. 'I go to no conference,' declared the Kaiser. 'Certainly not to one presided over by him.'

  Wilhelm's reaction to the Allies' rejection of the German peace offer was equally high-handed. Switching, with characteristic abruptness, from peacemaker to war lord, the Kaiser announced that Germany's war aims would now
have to be extended. 'No concessions to France, King Albert not to be allowed to stay in Belgium, the Flemish coast must be ours,'1 he thundered.

  All this bold talk might have been more impressive had the Kaiser not, by now, been completely subservient to that duo-dictatorship of Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Not only did Wilhelm II have very little say in military matters but the control of civilian affairs was also passing into their hands. In the long run, their brand of authoritarianism was to be disastrous for the monarchy.

  The next in the series of peace moves came from Europe's newest monarch – the Emperor Karl of Austria–Hungary.

  Twenty-nine in the year that he succeeded his great-uncle the Emperor Franz Joseph, Karl was in many ways an admirable man: honest, good-natured and well-intentioned. A spell at the Vienna Schotten-gymnasium and two years in various garrison towns and on the Italian and Russian fronts had given him some understanding of the aspirations of ordinary men. They, in turn, had been attracted by his approachability and his simplicity. It was as much for this as for his subsequent efforts at democratising his court and regime, that Karl became known as 'the People's Emperor'.

  If some cynics considered the young ruler to be a little naïve and a little too trusting, he was undoubtedly capable of inspiring great loyalty and affection. With his good looks, his boyish smile and his charming manners, the Emperor Karl brought a humanity to the Austro-Hungarian throne; a humanity notably lacking during the last arid years of Franz Joseph's long reign. He also, despite his almost knightly idealism (and the medievalism of his coronation in Budapest) brought an air of modernity to the hidebound Habsburg court. Unlike Franz Joseph, Karl had a taste for such modern inventions as fast cars and telephones.

  The new Emperor's aura of youth and decency was greatly enhanced by the presence of his wife, the twenty-five-year-old Empress Zita. One of the no less than twenty-four children (by two wives) of Duke Robert of Bourbon-Parma – head of Europe's most illustrious non-reigning royal family – the Empress Zita was a beautiful, intelligent and accomplished figure. The couple had been married in 1911 and were to have eight children. Although the Empress in some ways resembled those other strong-minded consorts, Alexandra of Russia, Sophie of Greece and Marie of Romania, she by no means ruled her husband to the extent suggested by Entente propagandists. Being more vivacious, more assertive and more outspoken than Karl, Zita gave the impression of being the dominant partner but, in truth, she was quite ready to follow her husband's lead. Her political interests had a strongly dynastic bias: her Bourbon blood, of which she was inordinately proud, ensured that she favoured France above Prussia.

  Together, this young couple exemplified all the cosmopolitanism, courtliness and self-discipline of Europe's royal brotherhood at its best.

  If the new Habsburg Emperor was neither iron-willed nor intellectual, he did have a strong sense of vocation. Karl's dedication to the dynasty and the empire was unquestioned. He was also intelligent enough to appreciate that his realm was in need of radical reform; that some sort of federal remedy would be necessary to save the empire. Indeed, his ideas for reform were considerably in advance of his time. Not only was he anxious to reject the latent absolutism of the old Habsburg order and rule as a true constitutional monarch but he was quite prepared to countenance the existence of republics within a federated state.

  But as any such scheme would be impossible to implement in wartime and as, in any case, the empire was in grave danger of being torn apart by the war, Karl began to think in terms of ending hostilities. A pious and peace-loving man he wanted, as he made clear in his first public pronouncement, 'to banish, in the shortest possible time, the horrors and sacrifices of war'.

  It would not be easy. Karl appreciated that any open peace move would be scotched by his German allies. And so he, the most open of men, was obliged to resort to conspiratorial methods. Within days of his accession, Karl set in train the famous peace move for which he was later to become known, not only as the 'People's Emperor', but as the 'Peace Emperor'.

  In a way, the Emperor Karl's peace plot was a reversion to Old World diplomacy. It was a quintessentially royal gesture: the last attempt of twentieth-century monarchy to influence international events to any significant degree. To the horror and hopelessness of war-weary Europe, Karl's peace plot brought a whiff of the ancien régime.

  The dramatis personae were all royal: the Emperor Karl, the Empress Zita, Zita's mother the Duchess of Bourbon-Parma and two of Zita's many brothers, Prince Sixtus and Prince Xavier. In pre-war Paris these two Bourbon-Parma princes, who considered themselves French, had been well-known figures in social and diplomatic circles. Prince Sixtus, whose name was to be particularly associated with the Peace Plan, was a politically conscious young man. Alive to the obligations of his Bourbon ancestry ('a Bourbon is always a Frenchman', he would say) Sixtus had always favoured an Austro-French alliance; in common with his sister Zita, he had very little love for a Prussian-dominated Germany. As the law of the Third Republic debarred any members of a French royal family from serving in the country's army, the Bourbon-Parma princes had joined the army of the King of the Belgians, where they were serving as lieutenants in the artillery.

  But early in 1917 their brother-in-law, the new Habsburg Emperor, entrusted them with a far more important job. They were to sound out the French authorities on the possibility of a negotiated peace. Although Karl did not really favour a separate peace, he would consider one if forced to do so. In the meantime, he planned to keep all knowledge of the negotiations from the Kaiser until a later date. As, technically, they were his enemies, Karl was obliged to make use of a complicated network of royal connections in order to contact his brothers-in-law. His mother-in-law, the Duchess of Bourbon-Parma, acting through the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, made contact with Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians who, in turn, arranged for King Albert to ask the two Bourbon-Parma princes to go and meet their mother, incognito, in Switzerland.

  There now followed several weeks of highly secret diplomacy. Trailing an aura of romantic conspiracy – false papers, confidential letters, clandestine meetings, journeys in and out of neutral Switzerland – the Bourbon-Parma princes acted as negotiators between the Emperor Karl and his foreign minister on the one hand, and the French president and his prime minister on the other. At one stage President Poincaré even suggested that they go and see Tsar Nicholas II: as princes they would have immediate access to and considerable influence on the Tsar.

  Climax to all this frenzied activity came with a secret meeting between the Habsburg Emperor and the Bourbon-Parma princes. The meeting took place, on a snowy day in March 1917, in the old Habsburg castle of Laxenburg, just south of Vienna. The princes found their brother-in-law looking pale and worried: his hair was already touched with grey. 'It is absolutely essential to make peace, I want it at any price,' announced Karl. If his German allies proved unco-operative, then Austria could not 'continue to fight for the King of Prussia'.2

  The family greetings over, Karl, Zita and the two princes were joined by Count Czernin, the Austrian foreign minister. While agreeing that all knowledge of the negotiations should be kept from their German allies, Czernin, unlike Karl, would not even consider the possibility of a separate Austro-Hungarian peace. At the end of their talks, the following day, Karl handed the princes a letter written in his own hand. In it he agreed, among other things, to the restoration of the sovereignty of enemy-occupied Belgium and Serbia and, more important, to what he called the 'just claims' of France to Alsace-Lorraine. This Kaiserbrief, which Czernin was afterwards to claim he had not seen or sanctioned, was to cause poor Karl considerable distress in due course.

  The reaction of both the French and British authorities to the Emperor Karl's overtures was reassuring. Lloyd-George, who was particularly taken with Karl's proposals, suggested a meeting between the three Allied heads of state – George V, Victor Emmanuel III and President Poincaré – and their prime ministers, to discuss the matter. He also arranged fo
r Prince Sixtus to see George V. The meeting went very well. 'It would be a great thing if [the peace negotiations] could be brought about,' noted the King in his diary.

  There was less progress in the opposition camp. In fact, there was no progress at all. On 3 April 1917, Karl and Zita travelled to the Kaiser's headquarters at Homburg on the pretext of introducing the two empresses. Karl had already referred, obliquely, to his peace proposal during the Kaiser's visit to Vienna a few weeks before; now he hoped to discuss it more fully. He never did. Somehow the opportune moment never presented itself; Wilhelm seemed reluctant to enter into any serious discussion. Perhaps he had been warned not to. 'If we had a friend in Germany it was the Emperor William,' the Empress Zita afterwards said, 'but he was completely under the thumb of his generals.'3

  King Victor Emmanuel, too, was at the mercy of others. Although he was in favour of talks, his prime minister, Baron Sonnino, was not. The Italian government was simply not prepared to negotiate with Austria, other than after an Italian victory. Having been enticed away from the Central Powers by Entente promises of vast spoils from the Habsburg Empire, Italy was not prepared to settle for anything less. And whereas the Emperor Karl was quite happy to hand over German-occupied territory to France, he was not quite so ready to give up any of his own inheritance to Italy. Italy, after all, was Austria–Hungary's chief enemy; the Italian campaign was the only 'popular' campaign of the war.

  None the less, appreciating that some sacrifice would have to be made, Karl agreed to meet certain Italian demands. He wrote a second letter, in which he offered to give up Trentino. But, for Italy, this was not enough. She wanted all her terre irredente. And so, whatever King Victor Emmanuel's thoughts on the Emperor Karl's offer might have been, he was obliged, as a constitutional monarch, to accede to the wishes of his prime minister.