Crowns in Conflict

by Theo Aronson

  It was throughout this period, too, that George V was having to contend, not only with that whispering campaign against his own German ancestry and rumoured pro-German sympathies, but with a revival of republicanism. This was really not the time for a constitutional monarch, feeling apprehensive about his own throne, to be seen extending the hand of friendship to an autocratic Tsar and his allegedly pro-German Empress who had just been overthrown by their own subjects. George V's first duty was to survive. Set against this, all other considerations – compassion, personal loyalty, blood relations, monarchical solidarity – counted for almost nothing.

  Yet, allowing for all this, could George V not have done something to save his relations? Two years later a British warship was to rescue his aunt – the Tsar's mother, the Dowager Tsaritsa Marie – from the Crimea; could the King, in the days immediately after the Tsar's fall, not have urged his government to take advantage of the Kaiser's offer of safe passage through the Baltic to send a similar warship to rescue the imperial family? Could the family not then have found sanctuary in some neutral country, such as Denmark or Switzerland?

  But the Russian Provisional Government, loath to antagonise the more extreme elements in the Soviet, might not have been able to carry out their plan. And the longer they left it, the less chance they had of carrying it out. With each passing week the government's grip on affairs was becoming shakier (Lenin had by now arrived back from exile); once that grip was lost, the imperial family were to be in grave danger.

  If, in the early days of the revolution, the Tsar had enjoyed the protection of the Provisional Government because they had considered vengeance unworthy of the new Russian regime, many of its members had by now come to respect him as a man. Alexander Kerensky, the new minister of justice, was especially impressed by him. It had not taken Kerensky long to appreciate that the accusations of treason made against Nicholas – which he, as minister of justice, had been delegated to investigate – were absurd. Nicholas was an unequivocal nationalist and patriot. Moreover the Tsar's behaviour, in captivity, was exemplary. In spite of the humiliating conditions of his imprisonment at Tsarskoe Selo, Nicholas remained uncomplaining and courteous. Those – Kerensky among them – who had expected to find either a hard-hearted autocrat or a simple-minded weakling, were astonished to find an unassuming and sensible gentleman.

  Even the Tsaritsa had surprised them by her simplicity and her resignation. She was far from being the virago of popular legend. 'Did you know, Alexandra Fedorovna,' admitted a common soldier after speaking to her in the garden one day, 'I had a quite different idea of you. I was mistaken about you. '

  By August 1917, having failed to get the family out of Russia, Kerensky decided that they must be moved away from the capital as soon as possible. He no longer felt able to guarantee their safety. He chose the provincial town of Tobolsk, in western Siberia, as their place of refuge. Perhaps from here, by way of the trans-Siberian railway, they could eventually be moved eastwards, to Japan. On 14 August, with considerable relief, Kerensky got the family safely aboard a train bound for Tobolsk.

  His relief was not shared by everyone. 'News has reached us that the Tsar and his family have been transported to Tobolsk, no one knows why,' wrote Queen Marie of Romania. 'What are they going to do with my poor Nicky? I am so anxious . . .'

  15

  The Gathering Storm

  THE NEXT MONARCH to lose his throne was King Constantine of the Hellenes.

  Ever since the autumn of 1916, when Venizelos, with Entente encouragement, had set up a rival government in Salonika, the Allies had been unremitting in their efforts to force the Greek King to abandon his neutrality. They had systematically slandered both King Constantine and Queen Sophie. They had first marched on and then bombarded Athens. When what Constantine's cousin, George V, called these 'bullying' tactics had failed, the Entente powers had enforced a rigid blockade of the country. They were determined to starve the Greeks into submission.

  On Constantine, the effect of all this was disastrous. The masterful sovereign, the Victor of the Balkan Wars, the 'Son of the Eagle' had disappeared; Constantine was now an unhappy, disheartened, thoroughly disillusioned man. For a monarch whose chief characteristic was his honesty, the Greek King was sickened by the atmosphere of intrigue and duplicity in which he was being forced to live.

  Sophie was equally disillusioned. But being by nature more spirited than her husband, she was not nearly so resigned. If, at the outbreak of the war, there had been no substance in the rumours of her German sympathies, the same was not quite true by the summer of 1917. By this time Sophie had become, if not exactly pro-German, certainly anti-Entente. She was ready to forget past disagreements with her brother, the Kaiser, and to call on him for help.

  The only thing to sustain the royal couple during this time of trial was the affection and loyalty of the majority of their subjects. In spite of all the Allied propaganda, Constantine remained a hero in the eyes of most of his people. When, during his illness the year before, the King was thought to be dying, the crowds stood for days in anguished silence outside the palace. As a last hope, the miraculous ikon of the Madonna from the island of Tinos was brought to Athens. As it was borne through the streets, the people fell to their knees to pray for the King's life. Many believed that his recovery dated from the moment that the Madonna was placed in his sickroom.

  But, quite clearly, the division of the country between Constantine and Venizelos could not continue indefinitely. Already the Entente governments had recognised Venizelos and appointed diplomatic representatives to his Provisional Government. It would not take much more, they reckoned, for Constantine's hungry and dispirited supporters to give in. 'The Greeks', as the Russian minister informed his government in April 1917, 'are ready for any capitulation, provided that the King is left untouched.'

  But the Entente Powers had no intention of leaving Constantine untouched. They were determined that both the King and his allegedly pro-German eldest son, Crown Prince George, must go. In June 1917 a French warship, carrying Senator Charles Jonnart, the fancifully titled High Commissioner of the Protecting Powers of Greece, arrived off Athens. Summoning the Greek prime minister aboard, Jonnart presented him with an ultimatum. Either King Constantine abdicated or Athens would be bombarded and Greece subjected to a full-scale military occupation. But, as the Allies planned to retain the monarchy, the King would be allowed to choose a successor from among his younger sons.

  Looking, according to Constantine's brother Christopher, 'white-faced and haggard', the prime minister came to the palace to deliver the ultimatum. The King had no choice. He was afraid that any Allied attempt to land their troops would again be resisted by the Greeks. Constantine was determined that no more blood should be spilt for his sake. To one of his daughters, who begged him not to give way, the King answered quietly, 'It is out of the question that I should cause more bloodshed. Don't you understand the meaning of sacrifice?'

  So ingrained, though, was Constantine's belief in the sanctity of monarchy that he was determined to find a way whereby he could give up his throne without actually abdicating. He finally decided that neither he nor his eldest son would sign any act of abdication: they would merely leave the country, with royal power passing pro tern to the King's second son, the twenty-three-year-old Prince Alexander. Constantine knew his countrymen well enough to appreciate that, at some future date, they might well want to recall him.

  That same afternoon, at a sad little ceremony attended by only four people – Constantine, Alexander, the prime minister and the Archbishop of Athens, who had been smuggled in by the back door of the palace – the new King took the oath of allegiance. Just over four years had passed since Constantine, at the height of his popularity and surrounded by gorgeously robed clergy and beaming ministers, had taken his oath. Where, Prince Christopher asked himself, 'were those crowds who had cheered the King so frenziedly' on that occasion?

  They were nearer than he imagined. And they were no
less frenzied. Although the news of the King's imminent departure was meant to have been secret, it had spread rapidly through the city. Already a small crowd had gathered outside the palace. Their keening, 'that age-old lament in a minor key with which Greeks proclaim death and disaster', brought yet more people hurrying through the streets. By nightfall a vast multitude had collected outside the building, all shouting, 'He shall not go! He shall not go!' Nothing would disperse them. Any attempt to get the royal family away was thwarted by the vociferous mob. People simply flung themselves to the road to prevent the cars from moving forward. In desperation Constantine issued a proclamation. 'Bowing to necessity, and fulfilling my duty towards Greece, I am leaving my beloved country . . .' he explained. 'I appeal to you, if you love God, your country and myself, to submit without disturbance.'

  He could have saved himself the trouble. The crowd refused to move. All night they surged about the palace. In the morning they were still there, their lamentations louder than ever. But by now, in the blazing sunshine, their grief was turning to hysteria: there were cries that it would be better to kill the King than to let him leave Greece.

  In the end, the family decided on a ruse to get away. A rumour was spread among the crowd that the King was to slip out of a little-used back gate. While several cars were being drawn up outside the gate, others were driven into the wooded grounds of the Old Palace, which stood alongside. With the mob surging to the back of the palace, the royal family dashed out of the front entrance, crossed a road, pushed through a gate in the railings surrounding the Old Palace and flung themselves into the waiting cars. They were just able to drive off before the crowd, realising what had happened, came streaming back.

  The family were driven to Tatoi, their country place. Here, if the atmosphere was less menacing, it was hardly less emotional. A stream of people – 'smart cars bearing ministers and society people, lorries laden with workmen, peasants in their rough country carts, farmers on horseback, city workers on bicycles' – made their way to Tatoi. Many brought gifts of fruit or flowers; all begged the King not to leave.

  But he had to go. On the following day, 12 June 1917, the royal family left Greece. Jonnart's suggestion, that the King, the Queen and the Crown Prince be granted asylum on the Isle of Wight, had aroused George V's 'strong disapproval'. Having just weathered the storm about the Tsar's projected place of refuge, King George was not prepared to face another for the sake of King Constantine. So Switzerland was chosen as the place of exile. Despite the fact that the royal family set sail from a small fishing port, the scenes were hardly less frenzied than they had been in Athens. Again the royal party had to fight their way through a lamenting crowd to the boat that was to ferry them to their yacht, Sphakteria. Some of them, in their eagerness to catch a last glimpse of the King, waded shoulder-deep into the water. 'The whole bank', says Prince Christopher, 'was lined with men and women waving frantically to that solitary figure standing alone in the stern of the boat with his eyes fixed on the shores of his beloved Greece.'

  'You will come back!' cried the crowd.

  'Yes,' shouted the King in return, 'be sure I shall come.'

  While King Constantine of the Hellenes was tasting the bitterness of dethronement and exile, King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy was basking in a sudden sunburst of glory.

  For year after year the King had remained with his army. It had proved a dispiriting experience. In common with their Entente allies, the Italians were bogged down in a war of attrition. Conditions in the Dolomites – the South Tyrolese Alps dividing Italy from Austria – were appalling. Murderous battles were being fought in sub-zero temperatures, in ice and snow, in clinging mud, and in damp, impenetrable mists. The line was held at the cost of tens of thousands of lives; such trifling advances as were made were never worth the loss of men and material. The King could only look helplessly on while disillusion and defeatism spread through the ranks. Shouts of 'Down with the war!' and, even more chillingly, 'Long live the Revolution!' were heard more and more frequently.

  The King's lot was not made any easier by his realisation that the Commander-in-Chief, General Cadorna, was a tyrannical and unimaginative man, apparently oblivious to the sufferings of his men. 'Cadorna', wrote one observer, 'was a seventeenth-century general, who understood war as nothing more than a gigantic siege operation – those sieges where the soldier was kept at his post by the whip.'1 Il Re Soldato did what he could to counteract this harshness by his obvious concern for the men's welfare. Quite often, though, his activities were reduced to the taking of photographs. By his recording of the scenes at the battlefront on his bulky, plate-back camera, Victor Emmanuel became known as 'the Photographer King'.

  It took a humiliating defeat to reveal Victor Emmanuel III at his most heroic. Towards the end of October 1917 the Italians were soundly beaten by a combined German and Austro-Hungarian force at Caporetto. Nearly 600,000 men were lost and, as the enemy came pouring down from the mountains, Venice and Milan were in danger of being overrun. Everywhere the Italians fell back in confusion; there were wholesale desertions. The rout was stopped only by the re-establishment of the line along the River Piave, less than twenty miles from Venice, and by the arrival of French and British reinforcements. Caporetto was the worst single military disaster in Italian history; the Italian army was never to recover from the accusations of cowardice and incompetence.

  Victor Emmanuel was mortified. 'What caused it all?' he asked in an English-language entry in his diary. So profound was his sense of shame that he thought of abdicating.

  Yet out of the blackness of his despair was born the King's most glorious hour. The British and French, no less appalled by the magnitude of the defeat of their Italian allies held a conference at Peschiera on Lake Garda to establish the causes. The conference was attended by, among others, the French, British and Italian prime ministers, and General Foch. To state Italy's case came King Victor Emmanuel.

  The King received the delegates in a gloomy building beside that symbol of the days of the Austrian occupation, the fortress of the Quadrilateral. 'Physically,' wrote Lloyd George, 'he is not a commanding figure, but I was impressed by the calm fortitude he showed on an occasion when his country and his throne were in jeopardy.' As the conference progressed, so did Lloyd George find himself struck by the Italian King's exceptional qualities: his courage, his cheerfulness, his determination to defend the honour of his soldiers. 'His sole anxiety seemed to be to remove any impression that his Army had run away. He was full of excuses but not of apologies for this retreat.'

  With great plausibility the King explained the reasons for the defeat; he was able to convince his sceptical listeners that his country would continue to fight on beside its French and British allies until final victory. He undercut their insistence that General Cadorna be replaced by assuring them that this had already been decided upon. Indeed, throughout the conference, Victor Emmanuel proved himself to be articulate, adroit, well-informed and, above all, a supreme patriot. When the reputation of the Italian army was at its lowest, the King was able, almost single-handed, to save it.

  If, to his allies, Victor Emmanuel had emerged from the Peschiera conference as an exceptionally impressive figure, to his countrymen he had emerged as a hero. 'It is well', wrote the Italian prime minister, 'that the Italian people know that the humble and anonymous Italian fighting man . . . had in his King a stirring and tenacious defender, at a time when it was fashionable to blame [the fighting man] for the causes of the military upset. '2

  In time, the King's stand at Peschiera was to become legendary, played up for considerably more than it was worth. Victor Emmanuel, who was a modest man, appreciated this. 'Peschiera?' he would say. 'What I did? Much exaggerated . . . It was nothing.'

  But if Victor Emmanuel was a modest man, he was also an astute one. He had consciously made full use of his kingly office, both to plead his country's cause and to enhance his own reputation. By presenting himself as the champion of the Italian fighting man, Victo
r Emmanuel had saved, not only the honour of his army, but his own throne.

  The Austro-German victory over the Italians at Caporetto enabled the Kaiser to pay one of his triumphant visits to a theatre of war. He travelled to the Austrian seaport of Trieste, from where he went on to inspect various military and naval installations. His journey also allowed him to see the Emperor Karl and the Empress Zita of Austria–Hungary. This coming together of the sovereigns was hardly a success. 'The atmosphere', says a member of the Kaiser's suite, 'was very unpleasant throughout the meeting.' The young couple found the Kaiser insufferably bombastic and patronising ('Who', Wilhelm II had once asked of Karl, 'does this young man think he is?'); nor could they share the Kaiser's exhilaration over the recent victory. To the Austrian Emperor, Caporetto had merely set back any chances of a speedy negotiated peace. But, not wishing to appear defeatist in the eyes of their exultant guest, the imperial couple limited their conversation to polite generalities.

  From Austria the Kaiser's green-painted train continued on its round of apparently endless journeys through Central Europe. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, anxious to keep Wilhelm out of the way, encouraged him to undertake extensive tours. Once again, Wilhelm II had become der Reise Kaiser, travelling from Flanders in the southwest to Riga in the northeast, from Heligoland in the icy North Sea to the sun-baked frontiers of Greece. He laid a wreath on the tomb of King Carol of Romania in German-occupied Bucharest; he had a meeting, against a fiery sunset sky, with Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria beside the Czernavoda Bridge over the Danube; he drove in state to the Yildiz Palace in Constantinople. Sometimes he was to be found in the castle of Pless in Upper Silesia, at others he was at Homburg in the Taunus Mountains, occasionally he spent a few weeks at Potsdam.

  To the members of his entourage, the Kaiser seemed to be living in a fantasy world. More and more did he see-saw between spells of black depression and heady optimism. At one moment he would be obsessed with trivialities; at another he would be expounding grandiose theories for the future of Europe. He had aged considerably. His face, wrote one observer at this time, 'is that of a tired and broken man. His hair is white, though his moustache is still suspiciously dark. There was an absence of the old activity of gesture, a quick, nervous wheeling about and unstable manner of the man . . . He held in his hand a handkerchief which he was perpetually using, and I noticed later he seemed to require it to assuage his continual coughing . . .'3