* The German war plan known as the Schlieffen Plan was once thought to have been formulated in 1905–6, and was therefore named after the then incumbent chief of staff Schlieffen. It is now known that the plan was adopted as the sole German war plan only in 1913, during Moltke’s time as chief of staff.
* The German Socialist Party had gradually become infected by the fear and antipathy towards Britain and Russia that had taken hold of almost every class in Germany. In 1907, at an International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart, their delegation had voted against the idea of using a general strike to try to prevent a European war. In subsequent years senior members, such as August Bebel, had begun to say that patriotism was not incompatible with Socialism: that if war came, they would pick up a gun and fight for the fatherland.
* Moltke later wrote, “Something in me55 broke and I was never the same again.” Unable to take the strain of running the war, he had a breakdown almost immediately after it started and resigned his commission.
PART IV
ARMAGEDDON
17
A WAR
1914–18
In London, Berlin and St. Petersburg, the three monarchs were cheered uproariously by the people; at that moment all three seemed the epitome of nationhood and unity. “May and I1 went for a short drive in the Russian carriage down the Mall to Trafalgar Square through the Park and back by Constitution Hill,” George wrote on 3 August 1914. “Large crowds all the way who cheered tremendously … We were forced to show ourselves on the balcony three different times.” When Nicholas appeared on the balcony of the Winter Palace on 2 August the vast crowd2 fell on their knees. “Russia seemed to have3 been completely transformed,” the British ambassador marvelled. The Duma proclaimed its undying support and passed a massive war budget. The barricades disappeared and the revolutionaries melted away. The country, everyone agreed, had not felt so vibrantly alive, nor been so united, since Napoleon’s invasion of 1812. And in Germany the Berlin crowds cheered Wilhelm at the Brandenburg Gate. In a gush of enthusiasm the Reichstag voted to devolve its power to the Bundesrat, the council of German princes, effectively giving Wilhelm and the army the power to do whatever they liked, including levy taxes. Even the Socialists voted for it. The Russian revolutionary Bukharin called the “betrayal of the4 Germans … the greatest tragedy of our lives.” The war promised, one German paper wrote, “a resurrection,5 a rebirth of a nation. Suddenly shocked out of the troubles and pleasures of everyday life, Germany stands united in the strength of moral duty.”
In Moscow Nicholas told an audience at the Kremlin, “A magnificent6 impulse has gripped all Russia, without distinction for tribe or nationality.” Utro Rossii, the newspaper of the Russian Centre-Left, wrote “There are now7 neither Rights nor Lefts, neither government nor society, but only one United Russian Nation.” Wilhelm used almost the same words when he told the Reichstag on 4 August, “In the struggle8 that lies before us I recognize no more parties among my people. There are only Germans.” He called on all the party leaders to come and take his hand, and as they walked away he raised a clenched fist and brought it down, as if swiping with a sword. The kaiser, one paper breathed, was “today truly a People’s Kaiser.” As for George, though he wasn’t required to say anything, he put on a military uniform, gave his civilian clothes away and presented himself to his people as the incarnation of the values for which they were fighting: “a good sportsman,9 a hard worker, and a thoroughly good man.”
The great extended royal family of Europe, however, was anything but united—national divisions had broken it. In Russia Alix was cut off from her sister Irene and her beloved brother Ernst. George and Nicky’s cousin Ernest of Cumberland, now Duke of Brunswick, who had married Willy’s daughter Victoria, took the German side. So did Charles Edward, the British cousin who had inherited the dukedom of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha after Affie’s death in 1900, and had taken a commission in the German army. The German-born Louis of Battenberg, a naturalized Englishman since the age of fourteen, with a German wife (Alix’s sister Victoria), was forced to resign as the most senior admiral in the British navy by a xenophobic campaign by the right-wing press. (He would also change his name to Mountbatten.) The British government would force George to withdraw British peerages and titles from all his German relations. When he met a couple of Greek cousins there was outrage—though Greece was neutral, cousin Constantine’s twenty-five-year marriage to Wilhelm’s sister Sophie raised British hackles.
Within a short space of time each emperor had become almost completely irrelevant.
George and Mary threw themselves into the war effort, but their endeavours only emphasized George’s inability to distinguish between the trivial and the important and in the main the results were negligible. The king forswore the theatre, closed Balmoral, put the gardens at Frogmore to potatoes, turned the lights and heating off at Buckingham Palace, used the napkins more than once to save on washing, insisted on boiling fowl and mutton instead of poussin and lamb, and at Lloyd George’s request took a pledge in April 1915 to forswear alcohol for the duration of the war, in order to provide an example to the working classes. Prime Minister Asquith privately complained of having to listen to “those infinitesimal10 problems which perplex and perturb the Court mind—whether he should drive to Westminster in the old gingerbread coach … or … ride on his charger with the streets lined with Khaki-men. Isn’t it marvellous that such things should be read as worth 5 minutes discussion? I am to go to him [the King] early tomorrow to settle this and other equally momentous issues.” When a visitor to York Cottage came to breakfast late and asked for a boiled egg, the king “accused him11 of being a slave to his inside, of unpatriotic behaviour and even went so far as to hint that we should lose the war on account of his gluttony.” The country at large wasn’t experiencing rationing—and wouldn’t until the last year of the war. As for Lloyd George’s initiative, it was a total failure; virtually no other public figures agreed to take the pledge and the working classes remained unimpressed.
There were admirable gestures—the austerity drive allowed George to hand back £100,000 in savings to the Treasury; convalescing officers and their families were invited to use the grounds of Buckingham Palace—but the palace was oddly reluctant to publicize them, taking its cue from the king who called the press “filthy rags.”12 The king was left alcohol-less—though the Duke of Windsor claimed that after dinner his father would retire to his study “to attend to13 a small matter of business,” which everyone assumed was a glass of port.
George’s war work quickly came down to a carefully logged relentless trudge: 7 inspections14 of naval bases, 5 visits to the French front, 450 military inspections, 300 hospital visits, and 50,000 decorations and medals personally pinned on, along with an uncounted number of trips to munitions factories and bombed areas. It was a job he performed with great and gloomy diligence. “The King came15 to see us this morning,” the prime minister’s son, Raymond Asquith, wrote from France, “looking as glum and dyspeptic as ever.”
In December 1916 George’s secretary, Stamfordham, asked the cabinet secretary if the king “ought to take16 a more active share in the government of the country.” The answer was a resounding no. George, however, longed to be more than a figurehead. “I am quite ready17 to sacrifice myself if necessary, as long as we win this war,” he told his mother in 1917. Quite apart from his constitutional position, the king, while sincere, decent and honest, was well known to be almost obsessively resistant to all change and ruled by his own prejudices. He opposed the reappointment of Admiral Fisher in 1915 because he disliked and mistrusted him. He stayed loyal to Asquith long after everyone else in government had lost faith in the prime minister’s casual, hands-off style, because he had become used to him and couldn’t bear to see him go. Unable to see Lloyd George’s qualities and offended by his cheerfully ruthless methods, he criticized him publicly. (Lloyd George was no less quietly dismissive: describing a memo from George in 1915 as “about as futile18 a
document as I have seen … everything that comes from the Court is like that. But then, as Balfour said to me once, ‘Whatever would you do if you had a ruler with brains?’”) He fought Lloyd George’s efforts to dislodge Asquith and take control of the war effort in December 1916, regarding them as an iniquitous betrayal. He ended up in a blazing row with Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, when he insisted that Lloyd George was the only man for the moment. “The King expressed19 his entire disagreement with these views,” Stamfordham minuted euphemistically. But there was nothing he could do. Lloyd George ousted Asquith in what was essentially a coup; Asquith helped himself into the wilderness by refusing to serve under another prime minister. Lloyd George’s new government—a new six-man war cabinet—effectively amounted to what Beatrice Webb called “a dictatorship by20 one, or possibly three, men.” He can’t have been unaware of the irony that as prime minister he had more power than any British monarch had wielded for 250 years.
Where the king was able to exercise some influence, it was to potentially tragic effect. He consistently supported General Haig, chief of the General Staff, against Lloyd George. Haig and his colleague General Robertson’s commitment to trench warfare—in the belief that conscripted soldiers were too untrained to do anything other than stand in a line and walk forward—had a devastating effect on the casualty lists. Lloyd George believed there must be another way to use the men Haig seemed almost blithely to pour onto the stalemated battlefields. The king, in an echo of his cousins’ deference to the military, believed the professionals knew best. He liked Haig, whose wife had been lady-in-waiting to Mary. Haig energetically exploited the connection—he had used it to dislodge his predecessor, General French. When Lloyd George tried to get rid of Haig, the king explicitly told the general not to resign, and asked him to write secretly to him whenever he liked. In other circumstances George’s support would have had little force, but the Conservative press and Party also supported Haig, and Lloyd George—now in a coalition of largely Conservative ministers—needed their support. George’s intervention added ballast to Haig’s position. Through 1916 and 1917 in the Somme and at Passchendaele, Haig sent hundreds of thousands of men into the trenches and over the top. At Passchendaele there were between 240,000 and 260,000 British casualties and barely a foot of territory was won to justify them. Haig complained he hadn’t succeeded because he hadn’t had enough men. The king, who believed one did not question military men, wrote to Nicholas, “The French and21 ourselves have made good progress on the Somme and we hope to continue to do so.” Lloyd George never got rid of Haig and it took him several years to sideline him.
In Russia and Germany, however, the aristocratic officer class showed even less concern for their cannon fodder. The German crown prince, Little Willy, expended a million men trying to take the fortress at Verdun. After the terrible Russian defeats of Tannenburg and the Masurian Lakes in 1914, which cost 250,000 lives, Grand Duke Nicholas told the French, “We are happy22 to make such sacrifices for our allies.”
Where George didn’t follow his people was in his repulsion at the surge of xenophobia expressed in Britain—due not least to the extraordinarily effective anti-German propaganda purveyed in posters and the mass-market press. The invasion of Belgium produced monstrous stories in newspapers such as the Daily Mail of women raped, children’s hands cut off, priests murdered, libraries burned, and even a Canadian soldier crucified by German troops. None of the accounts were verified. Wilhelm, who had so longed for the British to love him, was turned into a hate figure, portrayed as the incarnation of the evils of German militarism and widely regarded as responsible for the war. Propaganda posters showed him blood-soaked and hunched over the corpses of Belgian women, or goose-stepping in front of burning libraries. In 1900 he’d made an over-excited, ill-advised speech as he saw off a squadron of German soldiers going to quell the Boxer rebellion in China, telling them to put the rebels to the sword, “like the Huns23 under their King Attila a thousand years ago … pardon will not be given, prisoners will not be taken. Whoever falls into your hands will fall to your sword.” The speech was disinterred by British war propagandists who characterized the Germans as “dirty Huns,” the barbaric enemies of civilization—a historic nonsense; it was the Germanic tribes who had beaten back the Huns.
George tried to resist when the War Office—responding to a campaign by the Daily Mail—asked him to deprive Wilhelm and the German relatives of their honorary military commands, and remove their banners from St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. When Sir Richard Haldane, former war minister, founder of the London School of Economics and well-known Germanophile, was hounded out of office by a hysterical campaign in the right-wing press, George awarded him the Order of Merit. He was offended by the mistreatment of German prisoners of war and the internment of alleged enemy “aliens.” And when, on a visit to the front, Ponsonby regretted the sympathy he’d shown for a gassed soldier who turned out to be German, the king rebuked him, “after all he was24 only a poor dying human being.” As the war went on, however, George found it hard not to hate the Germans. “These zeppelin raids,”25 he wrote to Nicholas, “… murder women and children and have done no harm to any workshop or military establishment; they show that they are simply brutes and barbarians.”
Wilhelm’s eclipse was more dramatic. Within days of the war’s beginning, he joined the army at military headquarters, as his grandfather had in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, then promptly collapsed and took to his bed. For years he had let rip teeth-baring rhetoric, and claimed that in a war he would be his own chief of staff. He had talked of leading his troops into battle as if it were a genuine possibility. A week after the war started, the Supreme Warlord, the Oberster Kriegsherr, told the German General Staff that the war was their responsibility, not his, and handed over to Moltke permission to issue orders in his name, while promising not to interfere in operations. He seemed entirely unable to cope. What must it look like, wondered Admiral Müller, who ran his naval cabinet, “inside the head26 of this man to whom war is, at base, repulsive.” From German army HQ, the Prince of Pless wrote to his English wife, Daisy, in October 1914, “He is extremely nervous27 and it gets worse, the longer the war drags on. It is difficult to find another topic of conversation, because he seldom listens to anything else. If we could only persuade him to play Bridge …”
He veered between euphoria, fury and dramatic lows. One moment he would demand that his soldiers take no prisoners; the next he would declaim with his old grandiosity that if one German family starved as a result of the British naval blockade, he would “send a Zeppelin28 over Windsor castle and blow up the whole royal family of England.” Then he would be plunged into depression and knock back sleeping pills. The entourage and Dona, committed to protecting the kaiser and the senior generals, determined to stop him interfering and colluded to shield him from bad news and keep his faux pas to a minimum. Generals briefed him each day but, as the war minister, Falkenhayn, observed only weeks after the war started, “Now he is no29 longer told about anything that is at the planning stage, all he hears about is what had already happened, and only the favourable events.” By 1916 the war was barely mentioned at government meetings when he was present: “the Conference30 … was confined to stories of the harvesting at Pless, the birth of a zebra calf at Cadinen and the instructions he had given to Hindenburg,” Müller observed. His entourage shuffled him between the fronts and army headquarters to assuage his endless restlessness, and let him stride before the troops in his splendid uniforms and make encouraging speeches. He pinned on medals and shook hands. He was found pointless projects to occupy him—the building of an extravagant fountain at Homburg for which a war contractor gave the money—and was scolded for fraternizing too warmly with British prisoners of war. In moments of self-pitying clarity, Wilhelm grumbled about his position. “The General Staff tells me nothing and never asks my advice. If people in Germany think that I am Supreme Commander, then they are grossly mistaken,”
he said in November 1914. “I drink tea and cut wood and go for walks, which pleases the gentlemen.”31 In 1916 he complained he’d found out about the latest Verdun attack only from the newspapers. It was vitally important to him, however, that he appear to be in charge: “I put my32 oar in as little as possible, but for the outside world Falkenhayn must maintain the fiction that I personally order everything.”
He was needed to sign orders and issue decrees, so the generals kept him close and isolated from his civilian staff in order to get what they wanted from him, which they almost invariably did, even if he initially disagreed. Seeing him at army headquarters, the Austrian foreign minister thought he was “living an illusion” and described him as “the prisoner of his generals.”33 As the war progressed, he was deprived gradually of a war minister he liked, Falkenhayn, a chancellor he wanted to keep, Bethmann-Hollweg—who he felt had been loyal and whom he supported for months—and kept away from peace plans he might have favoured. He was eventually talked into agreeing to a policy of submarine warfare against neutral shipping of which he personally and profoundly disapproved, a policy which directly brought America into the war. “No gentleman34 would kill so many women and children,” he told the American ambassador embarrassedly after a German submarine sank the Lusitania in 1915, killing over 1,000 civilians.
The Three Emperors Page 52