Crowns in Conflict

by Theo Aronson

  By now the Kaiser was existing in an almost complete political vacuum. In Russia the October Revolution – Lenin's overthrow of the Provisional Government and the assumption of power by the Bolsheviks – led directly to the fulfilment of Wilhelm's long-standing ambition: a separate peace with Russia. Lenin, to consolidate his still precarious hold on the country, needed peace at almost any price. But Wilhelm was not involved in the complex details of the negotiations. Any attempt on his part to intervene was invariably slapped down by the High Command. Even his family seemed to be deserting him. More often than not, the Empress and the Crown Prince supported Hindenburg and Ludendorff against him. Indeed, throughout much of this negotiating period, the Kaiser remained at Homburg, far away from any centre of activity.

  He was still there when the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending the war between Germany and Russia, was signed on 3 March 1918. By its terms, Germany gained considerably in territory, population and resources. The Kaiser hailed the treaty as 'one of the greatest victories in history, the significance of which will only properly be appreciated by our grandchildren'. What German grandchildren probably appreciated more was being given a day off school by their delighted Kaiser.

  How much understanding did Wilhelm II have of the true significance of the Russian Revolution? He certainly did not regard it as the dawn of a new age, as the start of a new order of society. At one stage he even thought that once peace had been signed between them, Germany might be able to form some sort of alliance with Russia. Neither the overthrow of Tsardom, nor the publication of Woodrow Wilson's famous 'Fourteen Points' by which the United States President made clear that he would like to see the overthrow of Kaiserdom as well, could convince Wilhelm II that the days of monarchy in Central Europe were numbered. He was still capable of declaring that if a British emissary came to ask for peace, he would have to kneel down before the German imperial standards, since what would be happening would be a victory of monarchy over democracy.

  The Kaiser was not alone in his blindness. Although by now the various monarchs appreciated that democracy would have to be spread more widely if they hoped to safeguard their thrones, they could not really envisage a Europe in which the monarchical system was not the natural order of things. On the contrary, and even at this eleventh hour, some of them were thinking in terms of extending the system.

  The Kaiser, in positively Napoleonic fashion, was giving a great deal of thought to the creation of new kingdoms out of recently conquered territories. He would pontificate on the setting up of kings in Courland, Finland, Poland and Lithuania; or on replacing the kings of Belgium and Romania. Wilhelm was particularly interested in getting rid of Ferdinand of Romania, whom he denounced as 'the traitor Hohenzollern'. After what one of Wilhelm's entourage calls 'some discussion with the ladies of the court', the Kaiser proposed that his youngest son, Prince Joachim, ascend the Romanian throne. When it was tentatively suggested that Joachim might not have quite the right qualities, Wilhelm gave a brusque answer.

  'Qualities', he announced grandly, 'are not really necessary.'

  It needed the Austrian foreign minister, Count Czernin, to bring a little realism to these imperial daydreams. With the fall of the Tsar and with the flight of the kings of Greece, Serbia and Montenegro from their countries, this was not the time for further dethronements. 'At this time', he says, 'there was a certain decline in the value of kings on the European market, and I was afraid that it might develop into a panic, if we put more kings off their thrones.' So Ferdinand was allowed to keep his.

  However, this argument did not affect the creation of new thrones or the resurrection of old ones. With Poland now freed of Russian domination, both the Kaiser and the Emperor Karl were anxious to revive the old Polish kingdom. The most promising of the rival candidates was thought to be the fifty-six-year-old Archduke Charles Stephen of Austria. Central Europe was flooded with Austrian propaganda in an effort to secure the Archduke's nomination. 'Sheaves of printed matter have been circulated,' runs one report, 'declaring that he has the blood of sixteen Polish kings in his veins, is a Catholic, speaks Polish perfectly, and has given his elder children a Polish education . . .'4

  But perhaps the most bizarre suggestion concerning the restoration of thrones came from George V. The British King's belief in the efficacy of monarchy had already been illustrated by his conviction that India's problems would best be solved by a strengthening of the rule of the hereditary princes. When the war was over, he now ventured, the German empire should be dismantled and the various kings, princes, grand dukes and dukes restored to the positions of prestigious independence which they had enjoyed before Bismarck's wars had united Germany under Prussia half a century before.

  It was a splendidly impractical notion. At the very time that Woodrow Wilson was advocating republicanism as the New World's cure for the Old World's ills, the Old World – in the person of King George V – was recommending the renaissance of no less than twenty-five monarchs.

  16

  The Beginning of the End

  THE PEACE of Brest-Litovsk, signed between Russia and Germany on 3 March 1918, finally extinguished any hopes of victory for King Ferdinand and Queen Marie of Romania.

  Ever since the fall of the Tsar, a year before, Russian support, on which the embattled Romanian army depended utterly, had been increasingly unreliable. With the collapse of the Russian Provisional Government and the triumph of Lenin's Bolsheviks, it had ceased almost entirely. In their hundreds of thousands, Russian troops had deserted the Romanian front; by the middle of December 1917, an armistice had been signed between Russia and Germany. With the Germans occupying most of the country, the Romanian army could not possibly hang on to their remaining territory much longer.

  The turn of events depressed King Ferdinand greatly. Only reluctantly had he joined the Entente Powers; he had no taste for war; he was too much of a realist to imagine that his troops were any match for the Germans. There was little point, he reckoned, in carrying on. 'I understand the King's despair,' wrote Queen Marie; 'the strain has been too awful, never any good news, all hopes crushed again and again and again. The situation is getting more and more impossible and nowhere to turn.'

  The impossibility of the situation was emphasised by a telegram from Marie's cousin, George V, offering asylum in Britain for the Romanian royal family (the Romanian sovereigns, unlike the Russian or Greek, were very popular in Britain). It was emphasised more vividly still by the official visit of the Queen's other cousin, Wilhelm II, to German-occupied Romania. How ironic, thought Ferdinand, after the Kaiser had laid a wreath on the grave of King Carol, that the late King, who had always longed for a visit from the illustrious German Kaiser, should receive one only after he was dead and his country occupied.

  If Ferdinand's spirit was broken, Marie's was characteristically defiant. She simply could not bring herself to believe in the inevitability of a German victory. Although it would be too much to claim that she was actually enjoying the war, there is no doubt that it had given her a tremendous sense of achievement. Time and again, as she carried out her many duties, as she visited the hospital wards, the soup kitchens, the parade grounds, even the trenches and battlefields, the Queen felt that she was fulfilling a great destiny, that she was making a significant contribution to the life of the nation.

  The soldiers idolised her. 'Looking into the eyes of their Queen', she wrote in her self-congratulatory but strangely moving fashion, 'they had sworn to stand up like a wall to defend the last scrap of Romanian territory which was still ours. Many a dying soldier whispered to me with his last breath that it was for me that he was fighting, for was I not his home, his mother, his belief and his hope?'

  This was why she refused to listen to any talk of giving up. 'I do not know how to accept defeat, not this kind of defeat!' she cried. Anyone mentioning the hopelessness of continued resistance would be treated to a flood of frenzied counter-argument. While King Ferdinand sat silently by, his beautiful Queen would hold forth
on the necessity for la grande aventure, le grand geste, some heroic last effort. With part of the army, the sovereigns must cut their way through the Russian 'traitors' to link up with the 'still faithful Cossacks' in the south of Russia. 'To sit still and die,' she exclaimed, 'suffocated between Russian traitors and German haters, is really too poor a death!' Or what about la guerre à outrance, with the King and Queen, encircled by their loyal troops, fighting to the very last. Alone, if necessary, like some ancient or medieval heroine, she would face the oncoming hordes: 'fantastic, I know, hardly belonging to our days, but honourable, brave and free!'

  'Oh God, if only I were a man, with a man's rights and the spirit I have in a woman's body!' she exclaimed. 'I would fire them to desperate, glorious resistance, coûte que coûte!'

  This was all very well in its way but it was having no real effect on the course of events. Queen Marie was like some great tragedienne playing to an empty house. The fate of Romania was being decided elsewhere. In January 1918 the Germans sent King Ferdinand an ultimatum. He was to send a deputation to treat with them. The King was given four days in which to reply. His government promptly resigned and a new government, headed by one of the generals, decided to sue for peace. There was little else that they could do. The German peace terms, thrashed out during the following weeks, were harsh. Yet if Ferdinand did not accept them, warned Czernin, the Austrian foreign minister, the Central Powers would carry out their threat to replace him on the throne with another German prince. This was 'the dynasty's last chance'. Ferdinand took the hint.

  Facing the German demands was one thing; facing Queen Marie quite another. The war might have brought husband and wife together in some ways ('we have become the firmest possible friends,' claimed Marie at one stage) but in others it had emphasised the differences between them. The King realised that, in the Queen's eyes, he was far too phlegmatic, too resigned, too defeatist. So who can blame poor Ferdinand if, during these agonising days of decision, he avoided his wife as much as possible? He simply could not stomach another of her impassioned harangues. 'I feel that I can terrify him because of my passionate attitude,' she admitted. 'I can never be luke-warm.'

  Yet he could hardly avoid her altogether. Things came to a head between husband and wife on the morning that the King was due to accept or reject the final peace terms. On his way to the fateful crown council, she tackled him. 'Woman-like,' says Marie, 'I had my say.' She certainly did. Yet even she was too embarrassed by her tirade to repeat it word for word. Her paraphrasing of it strikes a suitably heroic note. 'If we are to die, let us die with our heads high, without soiling our souls, by putting our names to our death warrant. Let us die protesting, crying out to the whole world our indignation against the infamy which is expected of us.'

  She even sent Crown Prince Carol into the crown council to deliver one last, hectoring protest 'in my name and in the name of all the women of Romania against the horror of peace in such a form'. Perhaps it would be uncharitable to suggest that, as much as anything, Queen Marie was ensuring her place in history.

  She could have saved her breath. Influenced, no doubt, by the fact that the Peace of Brest-Litovsk was being signed on the very day that he was holding his crown council, Ferdinand agreed to the peace terms. ('He whimpered', as the Kaiser put it, 'like a lap dog' during the negotiations.) To Marie, the capitulation marked one of the bitterest, most tragic hours of her life: 'dark', she wails, 'as death'.

  'The King and I could hardly face each other,' she afterwards admits, 'he was a completely broken man. I did not try to argue any more: I knew that all was over; I knew that I was defeated.'

  But not quite so defeated as to cause her to neglect to write a letter to her cousin, George V. In it Marie was careful to draw his attention to the hopelessness of the Romanian situation, to the sacrifices of the Romanian army, to Romania's unshakable fidelity to the Allied cause and, not least of all, to her own willingness to have fought on. 'Rather would I have died with our army to the last man, than confess myself beaten, for have I not English blood in my veins?'

  She ended with the earnest hope – and here lay the heart of her letter – that her cousin George would not forget Romania in the final hour of victory.

  Cousin Georgie's answer was laconic. 'You may be confident', ended his telegram, 'that we and our Allies will do our utmost to redress the grievous wrongs Romania has suffered in the great cause for which we went to war. '

  What the Queen histrionically described as 'a fate almost too dark to be conceived' turned out to be not quite as dark as she had imagined. A new government, sympathetic to Germany, managed the country's affairs and the royal family remained at Jassy.

  As that dedicated monarchist Count Czernin had said, this was not the time 'for putting kings off thrones', even if they were one's enemies.

  There were times, though, when kings proved to be their own worst enemies. In the spring of 1918 the image of monarchy was seriously debased by that hitherto irreproachable sovereign, the Emperor Karl of Austria–Hungary.

  Things, at that stage, were looking more promising for the Habsburg empire. Both Serbia and Montenegro had been conquered, Italy had been dealt a severe blow at Caporetto, peace had been made with Russia and Romania, and a great new German offensive on the western front – the so-called 'Kaiser's Battle' – was going well. To improve this shining hour, Count Czernin made a speech in Vienna designed to show that a battered France was anxious to end the war. He had recently rejected a French peace offer, boasted Czernin, because their proposals had included the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France.

  Georges Clemenceau, the new and dynamic prime minister of France, promptly denied this. France, he declared, had received no such rebuff from Austria. But Czernin, refusing to be silenced, blustered on. He met each French claim with a counter-claim. When Clemenceau, playing his trump card, mentioned the hitherto secret Kaiserbrief, in which the Emperor Karl had alluded to France's 'just claims' to Alsace-Lorraine, Czernin denied that the Emperor had written any such thing.

  It was at this stage that Karl himself plunged into the increasingly murky and dangerous waters. Not only did he send the Kaiser a telegram denying that he had ever recognised France's claims to Alsace-Lorraine (Wilhelm's answer was that he had never doubted his ally's loyalty) but, pressed by the almost hysterical Czernin, foolishly signed what he assumed to be a confidential document to that effect. One can only suppose that the guileless Karl, having been assured by both the French authorities and Czernin that his secret peace negotiations would remain so, believed them. He should have known better. Czernin promptly published the Emperor's signed denial, and Clemenceau, just as promptly, published a photographic copy of the Kaiserbrief.

  The whole affair, although more complex than many supposed, revealed an indisputable fact: the Emperor Karl of Austria–Hungary had lied.

  Equally indisputable, to Karl's indignant German allies, was the fact that, behind their backs, he had pledged himself to the return of Alsace-Lorraine. In an effort to patch things up, Karl hurried to German headquarters, now in the Belgian town of Spa. The price of Karl's pardon was the loss of almost all independence of action. From now on the Habsburg empire was to be firmly shackled to the Hohenzollern empire. Politically, economically and militarily, Austria–Hungary was to be subservient to Germany: she was to become little more than a German satellite.

  This, in turn, destroyed any possibility, not only of a separate Austrian peace with the Allies, but of the Allies preserving the Habsburg empire after the war. The champions of the sort of nationalism advocated in President Wilson's famous Fourteen Points – of self-government for the various national minorities – were able to out-argue those who wished to maintain the multi-national Habsburg empire. From now on the determination to dismember the empire was all but universal in the Allied camp.

  For the Emperor Karl, the affair of the Kaiserbrief had a deeply personal significance as well. It showed that he was simply not equipped to play a Machiavellian role
. So honourable, so trusting, he should never have become involved in this sort of diplomatic double-dealing. It was both foolish and unworthy. Monarchs should not lie – or, at least, should not be caught lying – to each other. 'In those days Europe, even in its death throes,' writes Edmond Taylor, 'was not hardened to such violations of the gentleman's code.'

  Indeed, everything that poor Karl touched seemed to be turning to ashes. Having ascended the throne with the best of intentions, he had inherited an extraordinarily difficult situation. An accumulation of problems, built up during the long reign of the Emperor Franz Joseph, had had to be tackled in the worst possible circumstances. A man of peace, he had been obliged to wage war; a democrat, he was allied to one of the most authoritarian states in Europe; a reformer, he was surrounded by some of the most hidebound, bureaucratic and conservative politicians on the Continent; a straightforward and deeply moral man, he ruled over one of the most complex and corrupt empires in the world. 'Everything failed', as his biographer Gordon Brook-Shepherd has put it, 'because everything was interlocked.'1

  And it was the affair of the Kaiserbrief that dealt the coup de grâce. Not only was it a fatal blow to Karl's personal prestige; it somehow 'tarnished the fading magic that still surrounded the Habsburg throne itself, the only remaining link between the peoples of the empire'.2