Crowns in Conflict

by Theo Aronson

  The Romanian sovereigns were not the only ones to feel the effects of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. For the Russian imperial family the coming of peace was equally disturbing and, in the end, infinitely more tragic.

  Since late August the year before, the Tsar, the Tsaritsa, their five children and their little household had been living in comparative comfort in the house of the provincial governor of Tobolsk in Siberia. But not long after the signing of the peace, a new commissioner arrived at Tobolsk. His name was Yakovlev and he appears to have had orders to take the imperial prisoners to Moscow. The family could only speculate on the reason. Perhaps the Tsar was going to be forced to sign the peace treaty; Nicholas imagined that the Kaiser would much rather have dealings with a brother monarch than with a revolutionary government.

  The prospect appalled the Tsaritsa. Like her cousin Marie of Romania, Alexandra could not bear the thought of her husband debasing himself before the victorious enemy. She feared that without her to support him, he might agree to some shameful course of action. Yet there was a strong likelihood that she might not be in a position to support him. The thirteen-year-old Alexis, who had suffered a fall that spring, was still in bed. The boy was certainly in no condition to be moved. The Tsar, decided Yakovlev, would have to go to Moscow without his family. After an agonising period of indecision, Alexandra decided that she would accompany her husband. After all, Alexis was getting better and would be left in the devoted care of three of his sisters and his tutor Gilliard. The Empress and her daughter Marie would go with the Tsar.

  On 25 April 1918, the little party set out for Moscow. They never reached it. Near Omsk their train was stopped and diverted to the town of Ekaterinburg. Here Nicholas was delivered into the hands of the Ural Regional Soviet, a group of ruthless and hostile men with an almost pathological hatred of him. Whether it had all been part of a plan by the Bolshevik government to rid themselves of their embarrassing prisoner is uncertain. What is certain is that everyone, other than the Ural Regional Soviet, now washed their hands of any responsibility for the imperial family.

  Within a month the entire family had been reunited in a two-storied house in the centre of Ekaterinburg. Gilliard and some of the others were set free. Where the family's detention at Tobolsk had been relatively relaxed and conditions not uncomfortable, their imprisonment at Ekaterinburg was both severe and humiliating. The accommodation was cramped; the family was closely guarded; only short periods of exercise were allowed in the walled-in yard; they were subjected to petty cruelties and lewd indignities. Not even in the single lavatory were the young grand duchesses safe from the crudities of their captors: the door had to be left open and on the walls were scrawled obscene drawings of the Empress and Rasputin.

  Yet the behaviour of the family was never anything less than exemplary. It is a curious fact that adversity often brings out the best in crowned heads. Sovereigns, known for their cruelty, stupidity or authoritarianism when on the throne, quite often conduct themselves with extraordinary humility, dignity and resignation when they have lost them. There is very little harking back to past glories, or complaining about reduced circumstances, or railing against an unjust fate. On the contrary, these fallen sovereigns often reveal a real nobility of spirit. Rejected monarchs such as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, or Napoleon III, behaved with a stoicism not far removed from saintliness in their time of darkness.

  'Kings in exile', Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria was to explain after he, too, had lost his throne, 'are more philosophic under reverses than ordinary individuals; but our philosophy is primarily the result of tradition and breeding, and do not forget that pride is an important item in the making of a monarch. We are disciplined from the day of our birth and taught the avoidance of all outward signs of emotion. The skeleton sits forever with us at the feast. It may mean murder, it may mean abdication, but it serves always to remind us of the unexpected. Therefore we are prepared and nothing comes in the nature of a catastrophe. The main thing in life is to support any condition of bodily and spiritual exile with dignity. If one sups with sorrow, one need not invite the world to see you eat.'3

  This was certainly true of Nicholas and Alexandra. Sustained by their unquestioning faith in God and by their deep love for each other and for their children, they endured their long martyrdom uncomplainingly. They were greatly helped, of course, by the fact that neither of them had ever had much taste for the pomp and glitter of their position; their preference had always been for a tranquil, domesticated, bourgeois way of life. Nicholas remained the polite, simple, fatalistic man he had always been; even in his shabby clothes, expertly patched by the Tsaritsa, he managed to look neat and somehow dapper. Alexandra, with her piety, integrity and sincerity unaltered, achieved an almost sublime serenity.

  Quite naturally, they hoped that they might be released or rescued (and with the breaking out of civil war in Russia and with a strong anti-Bolshevik force already sweeping westwards towards Ekaterinburg, there was a strong likelihood of this) but their chief characteristic seems to have been their resignation. If, in their years of power, Nicholas and Alexandra had sometimes given the institution of monarchy a bad name, they were now adding considerably to its lustre.

  In recent years there have been conflicting theories about the date and manner in which the members of the Russian imperial family met their end. What is certain is that the rapid approach of the White forces convinced the Bolsheviks that the family must be got rid of before they could be rescued and so become a rallying point for the counter-revolutionary movement. Perhaps they were all shot in the cellar of the Ekaterinburg house on the night of 16 July 1918; perhaps the Empress and her daughters were moved elsewhere to be killed later; perhaps the Grand Duchess Anastasia did escape the slaughter. What is indisputable is that when, on 21 July 1918, Ekaterinburg fell to the Whites, there was no trace of the imperial family whom they had come to rescue.

  The crowned heads of Europe were horrified by the murder of Nicholas II. For a monarch to lose his throne was not so unusual; for him to fall to an assassin's bullet or an anarchist's bomb was one of the hazards of his vocation; even for him to be murdered in some political coup or torn apart by some frenzied mob was understandable; but for a sovereign to be killed in cold blood by his subjects in civilised, twentieth-century Europe struck Nicholas's fellow monarchs as the most dastardly of crimes. It had not been equalled since the guillotining of Louis XVI. The murder brought home to them, as nothing had done before, the dangers which they now faced from the forces of revolution. It would also help them to make up their minds about abdicating and getting out when their particular day of decision dawned.

  And the sovereigns mourned Nicholas to a man. The Kaiser could not sleep, claimed his daughter-in-law, Crown Princess Cecilie, for thinking of the slaughter of the Tsar and his family. 'It was a foul murder,' noted George V, conveniently forgetting that it was he who had denied the Tsar refuge. 'I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men and a thorough gentleman; loved his country and people.'4

  'Poor Nicky!' wrote Marie of Romania in her diary. 'I shudder to think of your end, you, who knew all of power and glory; and such a death! . . . Surely God recognises in you the good man you were. He alone will be the fair judge of the mistakes you made whilst on the throne, for all men are mistaken, and probably you had to die for sins not your own.'

  Only very rarely did Albert of the Belgians leave his patch of Belgian soil. Except for short visits to the French and Italian fronts, he remained among his troops. His decision was a wise one. Although some thought that he should have made more use of his royal status by paying formal visits to his brother monarchs or other heads of state, there is little doubt that, by remaining at La Panne, Albert kept intact that enormous prestige won during the early months of the war. 'The whole world felt his debtor', wrote on observer, 'because he behaved as if no debt were due to him.'5

  The only wartime royal visit paid by King Albert and Queen Elisabeth was in July 1918 when they we
nt to London to attend the Silver Wedding celebrations of King George and Queen Mary. They were given a tumultuous welcome; the royal couple were amazed by the warmth of their reception. 'In the King and Queen of the Belgians', enthused The Times, 'Great Britain salutes the very soul of loyalty to a word pledged, high minds not cast down by long misfortune, hope and confidence indomitable.' The couple stayed at Buckingham Palace; they attended a family luncheon where all available members of the British royal family were gathered to greet them; they went, with King George and Queen Mary, to a concert in the Albert Hall. As they entered the royal box, they were given an almost overwhelming ovation. Tactfully, the British sovereigns stood back so that their guests remained the centre of attention.

  'So very small she looked,' wrote the watching Lady Diana Cooper of Queen Elisabeth, 'and dressed in gleaming white from head to toe.' Beside her King Albert, his face ruddy and his hair bleached from long exposure to sun and wind, stood in bemused and embarrassed silence while the great hall echoed and re-echoed with applause. They cheered, claimed Lady Diana, 'as I have not heard cheering before'.

  The loudest cheers came when, in his speech, Lord Curzon revealed the hitherto carefully guarded secret that the Belgian sovereigns had arrived in England by seaplane.

  From the triumphs of London, the royal couple returned to the dreariness of life in the red-brick villa at La Panne. 'It is impossible', noted the Belgian writer Louis Dumont-Wilden, when he visited the villa, 'to imagine a sadder place of exile.' Its windows, he said, 'opened on a grey seascape veiled in thick mist: the sky seemed melting into water. The rain, which had already lasted several days, was still falling.'6 At that stage there was not even the excitement of battle to relieve the monotony of the days; nothing seemed able to break the murderous deadlock of trench warfare. It must have seemed to Albert, at times, as if the war would go on forever.

  But he never complained. His concern was for his army and his country, not for himself. Whatever his innermost feelings might have been, the King, like most of his brother sovereigns, never allowed himself to appear anything other than confident and steadfast.

  By this stage the Kaiser was also permanently headquartered in Belgium, in the little watering resort of Spa. His accommodation was infinitely superior to King Albert's. A mock-medieval chateau – all turrets and gables and arches – set in a hundred-acre park, had been requisitioned from a Belgian textile magnate. Much of its furnishings came from Albert's palace at Laeken; the highly polished floors resounded to the click of heels as the Kaiser's dashingly uniformed equerries and adjutants hurried about their sovereign's business. The exact nature of this business was becoming increasingly unclear. Photographs showing the Supreme War Lord, in Pickelhaube and greatcoat, inspecting the troops, were invariably taken in the park where a sandbagged trench had been especially constructed for the purpose. Military and political decisions were taken, just as invariably, at the headquarters of the High Command at the Hotel Brittanique.

  The 'Kaiser's Battle' – that great German offensive on the western front – which had started so gloriously in the spring of 1918, had petered out by the summer. Wilhelm II had never approved of his name being given to the offensive. In its early, successful phase, the title 'Kaiser's Battle' had somehow implied that Wilhelm had had nothing to do with any previous battles; now that it had failed, he tended to be too closely associated with this failure.

  The Kaiser took this latest check to his armies very badly. 'I am a defeated War Lord to whom you must show consideration,' he once said to his entourage. That same night he had a terrifying vision. Not only all the ministers and generals of his reign, but all his royal relations had filed before him, holding him up to scorn. Only Queen Maud of Norway, George V's youngest sister, had shown him any pity. This waking nightmare suggested to him that he was 'an outcast among the kings, a crowned reprobate spurned with revulsion by those whose friendship he had once enjoyed'.7 To a man of Wilhelm's sensitivity and conflicting loyalties, such a vision was a deeply disturbing experience. His companions could only sit in silence as, in the unlikely setting of the dining saloon of his train drawn up in a Belgian railway station, he recounted his night of horror.

  Things became worse when, on 8 August 1918, the Allied counter-offensive was successful and the British broke through the German lines. What Ludendorff called 'the Black Day of the German Army' was an even blacker one for the Kaiser. Although he behaved with commendable calm and dignity, he began to talk again in terms of ending the war. Less than two months before, when the new state secretary for foreign affairs, Richard von Kühlmann, had bravely hinted at the possibility of an approach to the Allies on the question of a negotiated peace, the Kaiser had been pressured by Hindenburg and Ludendorff into dismissing him. Now, to the dejected Ludendorff, Wilhelm admitted that 'things can't go on like this indefinitely and we must find a way to end it all.'

  But not quite yet. To get away from the tension of headquarters at Spa, Wilhelm went to Wilhelmshohe, one of the imperial seats, near Cassel. Here, almost half a century before, the defeated Napoleon III had been held captive by Wilhelm's grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I, during the Franco-Prussian War. An added reason for this move to Cassel was to enable Wilhelm to be with his ailing Empress: Dona's heart was giving cause for concern. Yet, as always and in spite of her own condition, it was she who had to bolster him. When Wilhelm took to his bed in a state of collapse, she forced him up. When his old friend, the Jewish shipping magnate Albert Ballin, came to see him, the Empress begged Ballin to treat the Kaiser gently. To ensure that he did, Dona saw to it that the two men were never left alone. She had never liked Ballin: she was afraid, not only that he might depress Wilhelm further, but that he might encourage his growing defeatism.

  Yet to Ballin, the Kaiser seemed curiously out of touch with reality. Wilhelm told his friend that he expected the front to be stabilised soon. He had received an offer of mediation from Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands but the time was not quite right for an acceptance of the offer. As always, he wanted the German approach to be made from a position of strength.

  That Germany would ever again be in a position of strength was becoming increasingly unlikely. And, in his heart of hearts, Wilhelm realised this. One evening, as the company was sitting on the terrace at Wilhelmshohe, someone brought out a picture and asked the Kaiser if he had painted it. No, he admitted, and went on to tell them whose work it was.

  17

  The Fall of Kings

  THE YEAR 1917 had marked the thirtieth anniversary of the reign of the flamboyant Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria. Yet for all his delight in ceremonial, Ferdinand had decided against any public celebrations. His second wife, the Tsaritsa Eleonore, had been seriously ill. For years this capable and kind-hearted woman, whom Ferdinand had always neglected so shamefully, had devoted herself to the welfare of the Bulgarian people. Her wartime work in the Clementine hospital in Sofia had been unstinting; she had, says one witness, 'a special gift for relieving suffering'. Eleonore had died in September 1917 and had been buried, at her own request, in the little twelfth-century church at Boynara near Sofia.

  But there had been another reason for dispensing with any anniversary celebrations. Ferdinand, and his people, were suffering from extreme war-weariness. Indeed, there seemed to be no good reason why they should still be fighting at all. Their war aim – the conquest of Macedonia – had been realised by the end of 1916. And President Wilson's Fourteen Points (later augmented by his Four Principles) which had been widely distributed throughout the country, had convinced the Bulgarians of the justness of their cause. As Macedonia was peopled largely by Bulgarians, its annexation confirmed Bulgaria's status as – in Wilson's phrase – a 'well-defined national element'.

  To wish to end the war was one thing, to achieve it another. Although Ferdinand, in his Byzantine fashion, had been involved in various secret negotiations with the Allies, he had never dared to defy the Kaiser openly. Any such move would have meant a German occupation of hi
s country and even more suffering for his nearly starving people. In fact, as late as August 1918, much to the gratification of the Kaiser, Ferdinand knelt beside Wilhelm before the high altar of the church in Homburg and swore undying loyalty to his ally 'whatever the outcome may be'.

  On the other hand, Germany was not giving Bulgaria anything like the military support she had once promised. By June 1918 it was apparent that the Allied forces, who had been building up their strength in Salonika in northern Greece, were preparing to launch an attack along the Bulgarian front. Yet repeated Bulgarian requests for German reinforcements were ignored.

  In spite of this threat, Ferdinand remained his usual, pleasure-loving self. Daily life within his palaces was still conducted with strict punctiliousness and lavish ceremonial. The gardens and conservatories of his country places were still tended with great care and affection. When he travelled by train, it was still in conditions of the utmost luxury. Not until after the war would monarchs begin to feel guilty about their vast wealth and sumptuous lifestyles.

  Nor, in his mid-fifties, had Ferdinand lost his sexual appetites. His penchant for blond, blue-eyed young men was as strong as ever; indeed, the war presented endless opportunities for spotting new ones. A young courier of the German military attaché was appointed – much to the consternation of Ferdinand's entourage – 'official reader of German newspapers'. To the even greater consternation of the commander-in-chief of the army, Ferdinand insisted that a certain cadet be promoted to full officer rank so that he might serve as the sovereign's orderly. On one occasion the Bulgarian war minister, anxious to discuss some urgent military matter with the Tsar, was astonished to hear that he had gone off with his chauffeur, in a car loaded with delicacies, in order to visit the young man's parents in their humble village home.