The irony was that there was a huge role for the kaiser, had he been able to fill it. The state and the military needed a coordinating figure to hold the balance between the two, someone who could make major political decisions. In the constitution the government had no authority over the armed forces, only the kaiser did—a situation Wilhelm had encouraged throughout his reign. But totally out of his depth and in thrall to the glamour of the army, he was incapable. His failure would have a devastating effect on the war effort and Germany’s future. The army and the government slid further and further apart, utterly disagreeing on the war’s basic goals, whether the territories invaded should be annexed, what the criteria for peace should be. It would not be the civilian authorities who would fill the vacuum Wilhelm left, but the army, the most focused, single-minded institution in Germany, which Wilhelm himself had deliberately kept beyond parliamentary control.
As for the German navy, the war exposed it as the vanity project it had always been. After all the bitterness and expense it was immediately clear that naval power would not win the war. The navy was deployed only once, at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, and then never came out of port again. It was trapped by the British naval blockade, which gradually starved the civilian population of Germany, and Wilhelm was reluctant to sacrifice even one of his beautiful shiny ships to try to break it. The ships rusted and the sailors became disaffected. When at the end of the war, in November 1918, the naval chiefs tried to organize a last “death ride,” the sailors mutinied. “The Navy has35 deserted me,” Wilhelm sniffed as he boarded his train out of Germany. “I no longer have a Navy.”
Like George and Wilhelm, Nicholas became a reviewer of troops, a pinner-on of medals, a visitor of munitions factories and hospitals—sometimes he saw as many as 3,000 wounded a day. Like Wilhelm, he had fantasized about leading his armies, a less unrealistic prospect in Russia, where the supreme army command had gone to his largely decorative, popular, six-foot-six cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich. Just like Wilhelm, the tsar installed himself in the peculiar, unreal atmosphere of Russian army headquarters, a grand officers’ mess under spreading pines and birches in Baranovichi in Poland, packed with the aristocratic officer elite of the cavalry regiments, with whom Nicholas had always loved to mix. There he persuaded himself he was in the thick of it, surrounded by officers who mostly owed their promotions to court connections. He took long walks, ate hearty lunches, lingered over cigars and conversation, organized boat races and charmed foreign visitors. Stavka, as it was called, bore as much relation to the front commands, where the men were dying in droves, as Mount Olympus to a pile of stones, and it was almost functionless, proving quite unable either to supply the various fronts properly or to coordinate them.
Nicholas’s flight was perhaps understandable. The Russian war effort went disastrously wrong within three months. Vast sums had been poured into the army, but it was still run by courtiers. War planning had been minimal. No one had expected a prolonged conflict and the state’s creaking mechanisms simply weren’t up to running a long war. Several devastating defeats—the result both of German effectiveness and the hopelessly archaic ideas of the Russian top brass—were followed by the call-up of barely trained reserves, and a supply crisis. The Ministry of War had made no provision for winter uniforms and boots; ammunition began to run out. By early 1915 soldiers were told to limit themselves to ten bullets a day.36 Losses were huge and pointless. One British observer37 saw 1,800 new recruits arrive at the front without a single rifle. They waited until casualties made guns available. He then watched as 1,600 of them died. Nicholas’s sister Olga, working as a nurse on the Austrian front, was told that Russian soldiers were going to meet German machine guns “with sticks in38 their hands.” Surgeons came to her begging her to intervene with the tsar for medical supplies, and generals came pleading for reinforcements. As with Wilhelm, the worst news was kept from Nicholas. One soldier recalled the tsar’s visit39 to his unit. The most presentable bits of uniform were scavenged piecemeal from all the other regiments to dress one company, while the rest of the men shivered in trenches without trousers, boots or anything much else. At Warsaw train station the president of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, was horrified to find 17,000 wounded soldiers40 left lying in the rain. There was nowhere for them to go.
As the losses mounted and morale collapsed, the army was, as one historian has vividly put it, “gradually turned into41 one vast revolutionary mob.” Nine million men were called up in the war’s first year. Officer casualties were enormously high—not least because of their habit of leading charges dressed in their brightest uniforms. The soldiers who survived found themselves divested of their traditional aristocratic leaders, alienated and very angry at the vast, pointless losses, and began to ask themselves why they were fighting at all. The new Russian officer corps of 1915—those below the rank of captain who actually fought with the men—were soon the biggest meritocracy Russia had ever seen: young men from peasant backgrounds with a talent for survival and leadership, all too aware of the army elite’s lack of interest in the men’s conditions and their losses.
In Russia, as in Germany, there would have been a role for Nicholas as civilian leader, coordinating the government, ensuring the army was supplied, the wounded cared for, the refugees provided for, and that the country worked. But Nicholas, like Wilhelm, was in thrall to the romance of the army, looked down on the civilian administration and was too overwhelmed by government failures to know even where to start. Instead the Zemstvo Union sorted out supplies and relief, turning itself in the process into a formidable machine, and the Duma, working quietly with a number of government ministers, got industry mobilized again. Unable to get beyond the old autocratic orthodoxies, Nicholas refused to see these initiatives as anything other than challenges to his own increasingly compromised authority. When in mid-1915 the Duma demanded a coalition between the government and itself to restore the nation’s confidence and run the war, Nicholas closed it down.
His solution to the crisis was to assume supreme command of the army in September 1915. In a piece of desperate wishful thinking, he had convinced himself that it would be the cure-all for Russia’s ills: if he took charge God would save Russia, and the devoted peasants would fight all the harder. He loved the thought of fighting alongside his soldiers, and escaping the intrigues and cabals and “low personal interests” of St. Petersburg—now renamed Petrograd in order to denude it of its German connotations. “At the front,” he told his son’s tutor, Pierre Gilliard, confidently, “there is only one thought—the determination to conquer.”42 Alix had been urging him to do it for months, telling him he was Russia’s saviour and God would protect him. It was so clearly a bad idea that when Nicholas announced it his entire Council of Ministers fell silent. “This is so43 terrible,” Sazonov wrote in his diary, “that my mind is in chaos.” It was a decision, another minister noted drily, “fully in tune44 with his spiritual frame of mind and his mystical understanding of his imperial calling.” The Council of Ministers, after years of endemic infighting, took the unprecedented action of writing a collective letter begging him not to do it. Even Goremykin, the ultimate yes-man, signed it. Even Nicholas’s mother, even his sister Olga, thought it was a “catastrophe.”45 He went ahead anyway. Entirely inexperienced in strategy or battle, at headquarters Nicholas was quickly regarded as an irrelevance. The decision had the predicted effect of making him look more than ever directly responsible for Russia’s deepening military disaster.
Nicholas’s departure from Petrograd and civilian government left a hole which Alix felt herself obliged to fill. Raising herself from her sickbed, she decided to give Russia what she clearly believed would be a master class in autocracy. Within four days of Nicholas’s departure she began dismissing ministers with bewildering speed. As even her own household could see, she “made politics a matter of sentiment and personalities.” The entire government war effort was transformed into a personal struggle between those she reg
arded as for and those she regarded as against her. The ministers who had asked the tsar not to make himself head of the army were systematically weeded out and sacked. Anyone who suggested that it might actually be sensible to work with the Duma was dismissed. Anyone she disliked or felt had opposed her or criticized Rasputin—whose advice on politics she now actively canvassed, and who, as Pierre Gilliard observed, simply confirmed her “secret wishes46”—was sacked. Even old Goremykin fell out of favour. Her letters to Nicholas—still written in English—were saturated with references to “Our Friend” and demands that ministers should be removed. “How I wish47 one cld. hang Rodzianko [the Duma’s president],” she wrote, “awful man, & such an insolent fellow.” She urged him to be assertive and autocratic. She ran through ministers with almost comic speed, getting through four chief ministers—each more right-wing and less effective than the one before—in sixteen months, desperate to find that one “loyal” minister, the man who would show sufficient hatred of the Duma and sufficient respect for Rasputin. Her favourite minister was Alexander Protopopov, a former Duma representative who had attached himself to Rasputin’s coat tails, who was widely regarded as mentally unstable, if not actually mad. The empress promoted him, even though she acknowledged that he was “extremely nervous48 and often loses the thread,” because he “listened” to Rasputin and was, as she put it, “so devoted to us!” Protopopov appears to have been in the last stages of tertiary syphilis.
Pierre Gilliard, who entirely sympathized with Alix’s agony over her son’s illness, thought she might have gone slightly mad: “She often had49 periods of mystic ecstasy in which she lost all sense of reality.” Meanwhile, her obsessively polarized view of the world caused her to publicly favour Rasputin and turn a blind eye to his increasingly open exploitation of his privileged position. Long-serving court figures such as Mossolov, head of the imperial chancellery, watched helplessly while the government descended into chaos. Appointments and sinecures were suddenly filled by Rasputin’s toadies and clients, and there seemed nothing to be done but accept it. The government, already in seizure, became even more ineffectual, ridiculous and corrupt. Beside it the Duma and the zemstvo movement appeared effective and appealing. Combined with Nicholas’s assumption of army command, the effect on the imperial couple’s reputation was devastating. Alexandra, long disliked by the Russian upper classes, was soon actively hated. Nicholas looked a weak failure. Resentment at the strains and disasters of the war began to combine with stories about corruption and chaos and even treachery at the top. Given the disasters at the front and the government’s apparent indifference and inability to solve the most basic problems, it was perhaps unsurprising that wild rumours about Alix’s alleged German sympathies and her bizarre relationship with Rasputin began to spread ever more widely beyond the elite into the country and the disaffected army. By 1916 it was widely believed that Rasputin and his cronies were German agents, planning to deliver Russia into German hands, and that the German-born empress was working with them.
Rumour and suspicion blighted Russia’s relationships with Britain and France. From early in the campaign the Russians complained that their huge sacrifices were not appreciated by their allies. They accused the British of using them to take the brunt of the German attack. Lloyd George wrote worriedly that the Russians said “We are not50 doing enough, and are ‘on the make.’” (It was a centuries-old complaint in continental wars that island Britain sat back safe while in Europe they slugged it out.) The Russian government accused the British of holding back much-needed supplies, and on the streets of western Russia it was said that Britain had dragged Russia into the war—from which it had nothing to gain. The British in turn were exasperated by the Russian collapse in the East, Russia’s incapacity to coordinate with the Entente, and the incessant grumbling and demands for money and supplies; by 1915 Britain had effectively become Russia’s banker and main supplier of munitions. It lent £40 million51 over 1914 and 1915, backed a further loan of £100 million, and sent millions of pounds of supplies. When in 1916 Alix took the reins, the British watched the government move ever further to the Right, and every liberal-minded minister purged. They heard the stories about Rasputin, and wondered disgruntledly whether their money was going to hold up a regime that stood for everything they claimed to be fighting against.
Relations between the two royal families were one of the few bright spots—that and the warm relationship Nicholas seemed to enjoy with the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. Several grand duchesses had taken up residence in England for the duration, and telegrams bounced between the families, for all the world giving the war an air of a family outing: “Aunt Alix wires52 to say they know for certain that the Germans intend to attack Warsaw this week and she hopes we are aware of it … Does Nikolasha [Grand Duke Nicholas] know?;” “I have just53 had a telegram from aunt Alix who wires in despair that they have lost six battleships. But I do hope the German losses are even heavier.”
“It is such54 a good thing to keep in touch with one another now that the communication between our two countries is so difficult,” Nicholas wrote to George in early 1916. “We all highly admire the wonderful manner in which the allied troops left Gallipoly [sic].” (The whole Gallipolli campaign had been a disaster—though one conceived in part to take the strain off the Eastern Front.) After the naval battle of Jutland, George wrote to Nicholas, “William’s speech at55 Kiel about the great navy victory of the German fleet made me laugh. I am quite convinced that they lost more ships and more men than we did and we drove them back to their ports.”
Their relationship, however, became gradually infused with the wider politics and suspicions of the war. Their letters were thick with unsaid things and unasked-for explanations. “I was very busy56 about some changements [sic] among the ministers, which you have probably heard of,” Nicholas wrote after the disastrous Russian retreats of mid-1915. “… That retreat in Galicia … had to be effectuated to save our army—solely on account of the lack of ammunition and of rifles. And this reason is a most painful one. But my country has well understood it and everywhere the people are setting to work for the needs of the army with redoubled energy … it will soon be a year that this terrible war is raging and goodness knows how long it may last—but we shall fight to the end!” George’s answer picked up on another implied criticism: “I can assure you57 that in England, we are now straining every nerve to produce the required ammunition and guns and also rifles and are sending the troops of our new armies to the front as fast as we possibly can.” Meanwhile, Minny, whose relationship with Alix had degenerated badly since the tsarina had started sacking ministers—“she is ruining58 both the dynasty and herself,” she told Kokovtsov—passed stories of her excesses on to her sister. “I am sure she59 thinks herself like their Empress Catherine,” Alexandra told George. Attitudes to Alix started perceptibly to harden in the British family.
Succumbing to old Foreign Office fears, Sir George Buchanan began to take the gossip about Alix and her German sympathies seriously. He was convinced that she was rooting out pro-English moderates such as Sazonov, whom she sacked in 1915, in order to replace them with right-wing pro-Germans who would detach Russia from the Entente. He wondered if she was a conspirator, but decided she was more likely Rasputin’s dupe. His anxieties found their way into the heart of the British government. “The pro-Germans in60 the Russian government have succeeded in turning out General Alexaeff [sic], the one hope of the Russian Army,” Lloyd George told his secretary towards the end of 1916. “They are one by one getting rid of all the good men in Russia and putting in rotters or Pro-Germans.” Buchanan was utterly wrong. The imperial couple were completely committed to the war. It was the nation which was turning violently against it. Nicholas couldn’t bear the thought of another defeat. Alexandra had abjured the country of her birth. Germany, she told her son’s tutor, had become “a country I did not61 know and had never known.” She now presented herself, the French ambassador remarked, as
an Englishwoman “in her outward62 appearance, her deportment, a certain inflexibility and Puritanism.” No one followed the British armies’ fortunes more devotedly. When her brother Ernst tried to contact her through an old servant living in Austria, she rebuffed him.
The British, however, continued to worry that Russia would leave them in the lurch. In August 1916, almost certainly encouraged by the government, George wrote to warn and express his anxiety to Nicholas. “German agents in Russia have recently been making great efforts to sow division between your country and mine by exciting distrust and spreading false reports … I hear it is repeated and in some quarters believed in Russia that England means to oppose the possession or retention of Constantinople by Russia [which Grey had promised in 1915]. No suspicion of this sort can be entertained by your government.” He begged Nicholas if he had the slightest concerns that “you will at any time instruct your ministers to enter into the frankest explanations with my Government or will yourself communicate direct with me. You know, my dear Nicky, how devoted I am to you and I can assure you that my Government regards your Country with equally strong feelings of friendship.”63 In October he wrote again asking for reassurance: the Germans believed they could “‘detach Russia and64 are working hard to this end.’ What nonsense, they little know you and your people.”
The Three Emperors Page 53