Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

by Robert K. Massie

  Vicky, eager for William's education to fit him for leading his country along the liberal path laid out by Prince Albert, did what she could to steer him away from the provincialism of the Prussian court In 1874, William and Henry, fifteen and twelve, accompanied by Hinzpeter, were entered in a high school in Kassel where, for two and a half years, they mixed with other boys of good German families. In January 1877, William finished school and, on his eighteenth birthday, received as a present from his grandmother the Order of the Garter. (Queen Victoria originally had planned to send him the lesser Grand Companionship of the Bath. Vicky urged that the highest order be given. "Willy would be satisfied with the Bath, but the nation would not," she wrote to her mother.) After Kassel, William spent four terms at Bonn University, where he studied law and politics," He joined the exclusive Borussia student society, although he refused its traditional heavy drinking and was not permitted to duel. During his years in Bonn, William, then nineteen, spent many weekends with his aunt, Grand Duchess Alice of Hesse-Darmstadt (Queen Victoria's second daughter), and her children in Darmstadt, becoming almost a member of the family. His attention centered on his cousin Elizabeth, who was fourteen.* Ella, as she was called, found her Prussian cousin overbearing. He would ask to ride, then

  * Elizabeth's younger sister Irene, twelve in 1878, would marry William's brother, Henry. Another sister, Alix, who was six in 1878, was to marry Tsar Nicholas II and become the Empress Alexandra of Russia.

  demand to shoot, or row, or play tennis. When he was bored, he would climb off his horse, or throw down his racket, and announce that everyone should sit around while he read aloud from the Bible. Whatever he was doing, he always wanted Ella next to him. His infatuation received no encouragement and later, when he was German Emperor and she was the wife of Grand Duke Sergei of Russia, he stubbornly refused to see her. As an old man, he admitted that he had spent much of his time in Bonn writing love poetry to his cousin Elizabeth.

  When William finished his studies in Bonn, his mother wanted him to travel widely to broaden his mind and experience. A trip to Paris while still at the university had produced mixed results. William visited the Louvre, Notre Dame, and Sainte-Chapelle, and he went up in a balloon launched from the Tuileries Gardens. But, he said, "the feverish haste and restlessness of Parisian life repelled me. I… never wanted to see the French capital again"-and although he lived for sixty-three years after this visit, he never did. William, on leaving Bonn, was "passionately interested… to go to Egypt." But his grandfather, William I, King of Prussia and German Emperor, intervened. Prince William was second in line, after his father, to both those titles. It was time, according to his grandfather, for his Prussian qualities to be emphasized. The years during which Vicky had primary influence over the education and guidance of her son ended.

  When Vicky arrived in Berlin in 1858, King Frederick William IV of Prussia was mentally ill; his brother William was Regent and Heir to the Throne. In 1861, Frederick William died and William, sixty-three, became King William I. William's son and daughter-in-law, Fritz, thirty, and Vicky, twenty, became Crown Prince and Crown Princess, expecting within a decade or so to mount the throne. Nine months later, King William summoned the conservative politician Otto von Bismarck to administer his government. Bismarck began a twenty-eight-year tenure as Minister-President of Prussia and Chancellor of the German Empire. King William I lived past ninety. Bismarck, ruling in the King's name, united Germany and made his elderly master an emperor, but it was not the liberal Germany desired by Prince Albert or by Fritz and Vicky.

  Vicky was shocked and heartbroken by her father's death. As with her mother, grief gave Prince Albert's precepts the force of heavenly command and the young Englishwoman obediently set herself to influence the course of Prussian affairs through her tall, good-natured husband, who was devoted to his wife, admitted her intellectual superiority, and was willing to be guided by her vigorous opinions. Frederick, although trained as a soldier, was both a liberal and a nationalist. He longed for the re-creation of the medieval German Empire under a monarch like Charlemagne. His son Prince William remembered as a boy studying with his father a book titled German Treasures of the Holy Roman Empire. "It was so big that I had to; spread it out on the floor, and I was never tired of looking at the pictures which my father would explain as he squatted beside me on the: ground," said William. Thoroughly sympathetic with the hopes of his father-in-law, Prince Albert, Fritz was quickly estranged from his father's chief minister, Bismarck.

  The breach between the King and Bismarck on the one hand, and Fritz and Vicky on the other, opened wide only nine months after Bismarck took office. Most Prussian newspapers in the 1860s were liberal and their editorial freedom was guaranteed by the constitution. They were critical of Bismarck's conservative policies. During the spring of 1863, the Crown Prince warned his father that Bismarck's encroachment on the constitution was opening a gap between the monarchy and the people. On June 1, at a Crown Council from which Frederick was absent on a military inspection tour, Bismarck retaliated by issuing a decree establishing censorship of press articles that might "jeopardize the public welfare." The Crown Prince, with Vicky's encouragement, protested publicly on June 5 "I knew nothing [about this order beforehand]," he told a political meeting in Danzig. "I was absent. I have had no part in the deliberations which have produced this result." King William, who in fact had signed the decree reluctantly, was enraged by his son's open opposition, characterizing it as military insubordination. He wrote to "Fritz a furious letter," Vicky wrote to her mother, "treating him quite like a little child, telling him instantly to retract in the newspapers the words he had spoken at Danzig." Frederick refused and offered to retire from the Army and politics and live in seclusion with his family. Bismarck, wishing to avoid creating a martyr in the Heir to the Throne, calmed King William and the threat of a court-martial was reduced to a military reprimand. Five months later, when the press decree was rescinded, Frederick wrote to Bismarck declaring his general opposition to the Minister-President's policies: "A loyal administration of the laws and of the constitution, respect and goodwill towards an easily led, intelligent, and capable people-these are the principles which, in my opinion, should guide every government… I will tell you what results I anticipate from your policy. You will go on quibbling with the constitution until it loses all value in the eyes of the people… I regard those who lead His Majesty the King, my most gracious father, into such courses as the most dangerous advisers for the Crown and the country." Vicky was pleased and apprehensive about what had happened. "Fritz… has for the first time in his life taken up a position decidedly in opposition to his father," she wrote her mother. But, she added, "we are dreadfully alone, having not a soul from whom to ask advice… Thank God I was born in England where people are not slaves and [are] too good to allow themselves to be treated as such."

  Bismarck did not forgive and the extended duel between the Bismarck party and what Bismarck deprecatingly referred to as the "Anglo-Coburg" party, was begun. The Crown Prince and Crown Princess, visiting Prussian towns, were received with ceremonies so minimal as to border on rudeness; Vicky assumed that instructions had come from Berlin. During the war with Denmark, Vicky loyally supported Prussia, and during the wars with Austria and France in which Fritz became a military hero she became enthusiastic. "I feel that I am now every bit as proud of being a Prussian as I am of being an Englishwoman and that is saying a very great deal as you know what a 'John Bull' I am," she told her mother. "I must say the Prussians are a superior race as regards intelligence and humanity, education, and kind-heartedness." But Vicky's enthusiasm never extended to Bismarck. "To us and to many quiet and reflecting Germans, it is very sad and appears very hard to be made an object of universal distrust and suspicion, which we naturally are as long as Prince Bismarck remains the sole and omnipotent ruler of our destinies. His will alone is law here," she wrote to Queen Victoria in 1875. "I wonder," she said in 1881, "why Bismarck does not say str
aight out, 'As long as I live, both the constitution and the crown are suspended' because that is the exact state of the matter."

  The German Emperor, William I, watched from afar as his grandson Prince William, guided principally by Crown Princess Victoria, grew to manhood. Occasionally, when his parents were not in Berlin, Prince William was invited to dinner alone with his grandfather. The meal was served on a small, shaky, green card table in a drawing room of the royal palace on the Unter den Linden. "A bottle of champagne was put on the table," Prince William remembered, "which the Emperor himself uncorked and with his own hands always filled two glasses, for himself and for me. After the second glass he would hold the bottle up to the light and make a pencil mark on the label at the height of the contents for he was very economical…" The Emperor decided that his grandson should begin the military phase of his preparation for the throne, and William, nearing twenty-one, was assigned as a lieutenant to the First Regiment of Foot Guards, stationed in Potsdam. William embraced regimental life. In the officers' mess, he was universally praised. In the Guards, William said, "I really found my family, my friends, my interests-everything of which I had up to that time had to do without… Before I entered the regiment, I had lived through such fearful years of unappreciation of my nature, of ridicule of that which was to me highest and most holy: Prussia, the Army, and all of tht fulfilling duties that I first encountered in this officer corps and that have provided me with joy and happiness and contentment on earth." The regimental atmosphere affected William's personality. As a boy and a student, his manner had been polite and agreeable; as an officer, he began to strut and speak brusquely in the tone he deemed appropriate for a Prussian officer. William's hardness distressed his parents; Crown Prince Frederick, a successful soldier, ruefully described William in the 1880s as "my son, the complete Guards officer." William made plain that he no longer much cared about his parents' opinions; he had the Guards and his grandfather. The Emperor, he said, was the only member of his family who appreciated his deep feelings for the army and for Prussia.

  During his Potsdam years another formidable influence strengthened William's growing rejection of his mother. He married. William had met Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein in 1868, when he was nine. Her father's principality, sandwiched between Prussia and Denmark at the base of the Jutland peninsula, had been annexed by Denmark, then conquered and annexed by Prussia in the war of 1864. Many Schleswigers and Holsteiners were aggrieved by their absorption by Prussia; Princess Augusta's father had decided to adjust to circumstances. William's suit for the Princess's; hand (her family name was Dona) was his own decision; Dona's family was of minimal distinction, scarcely suitable for an heir to the throne of Prussia. Nevertheless, Vicky, Fritz, and King William I approved and on February 27, 1881, William and Dona were married in the Berlin Castle.

  Dona, then twenty-three, a year older than her husband, was a tall, robust young woman with a rosy-pink complexion. Brought up amidst- the rural nobility, she shared all its limitations and prejudices. She had been given a meager education and had developed few intellectual abilities or interests. She read neither newspapers nor books and had a simplistic understanding of politics. Her manners were conventional, her morality puritanical. The Prince of Wales once said that her only interests were "Kinder, Kirche, Kuche" (children, church, kitchen). An Englishwoman, living in Germany, added "clothes," and described the future Empress as "nice but silly." "For a woman in that position, I have never met anyone so devoid of any individual quality of thought or agility of brain and understanding," said another. "She is just like a good, quiet, soft cow that has calves and eats grass slowly and ruminates. I looked right into her eyes to see if I could see anything behind them, even pleasure or sadness, but they might have been glass."

  It was suggested that Dona's purpose was to breed some sturdy stock into the Hohenzollern line. Dona produced seven children- six sons and a daughter-within ten years (1882-1892), but her personality was more significant to William than her good health. William needed sympathy and warm emotional support; Dona supplied him with unquestioning adoration. He was in revolt against his mother, and the woman he chose was entirely unlike his mother. On two subjects, however, Dona had strong views which delighted William: Dona was inflexibly opposed to liberalism in all areas and she hated England. Liberalism, political, cultural, artistic, she equated with license; Englishmen, whom she thought of as liberals, were hypocrites, dangerously given to license. After her marriage, Dona treated her mother-in-law with icy formality; Vicky scornfully referred to her daughter-in-law's rigidly Protestant ladies-in-waiting as the "Hallelujah Aunts" or "a blessed set of donkeys." William supported his wife and referred to his parents and his three younger sisters, who were close to his parents, as "the English Colony."

  The division in the royal family was widely known in Berlin, and Bismarck turned it to his purpose. The Chancellor, relying solely for his power on the mandate given him by Kaiser William I, needed a buttress against the liberal forces which looked for leadership to the Crown Prince. Prince William, at odds with his parents, suited admirably. In 1884, Bismarck encouraged the Kaiser to delegate certain diplomatic missions, denied to the Crown Prince, to the younger William. William was sent to St. Petersburg as the Kaiser's representative at the coming-of-age ceremonies of the sixteen-year-old Tsarevich Nicholas, the future Tsar Nicholas II. While there, William became friendly with Bismarck's son, Herbert, who was acting as Counselor of the German Embassy in the Russian capital. William enjoyed the attention he received as his grandfather's envoy; on returning home, he wrote to his host, Tsar Alexander III, that he would always take care to guard Russia's interests, especially against the wiles of the Prince of Wales, who possessed "a false and intriguing character." Tsar Alexander, who was Bertie's brother-in-law, considered William's letter rude and presumptuous. In August 1886, the Kaiser ignored his son and invited his grandson to accompany him to a meeting at Gastein with Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. He then sent William to Russia to report on the meeting to Tsar Alexander.

  In the autumn of 1886, Bismarck appointed Herbert State Secretary: for Foreign Affairs, the senior post in the German Foreign Ministry. Herbert suggested to his father that the connection with William be strengthened by bringing the Prince into the Foreign Ministry for training. The Kaiser, as pleased by the deferential attention of his grandson as he was dismayed by the disapproving manner of his son, agreed. William came twice a week to the Foreign Ministry building in the Wilhelmstrasse, where he was equipped with an office of his own and given lectures which explained the workings of the department, Germany's obligations under the Triple Alliance, and the nature of the Empire's overseas commercial and colonial policies. William also was informed, he said, elf "our state of dependence on England which was principally due to the fact that we had no navy." Crown Prince Frederick objected to his son's indoctrination at the Wilhelmstrasse. "Considering the unripeness and inexperience of my eldest son, together with his leaning towards vanity and presumption, and his overweening estimate of himself, I must frankly express my opinion that it is dangerous as yet to bring him into touch with foreign affairs," he wrote jto Bismarck. The protests did no good; the Chancellor had the support of the Kaiser; he ignored the Crown Prince. William, in his memoirs, suggests the flavor of his early relationship with the Chancellor: "My service in the Foreign Office brought me… into closer contact with the great statesman, so ardently revered, who moved through the days of my youth almost like some warrior figure out of heroic legend… I was frequently invited to breakfast with the Prince [Bismarck]… the Princess, [and] Count Herbert Bismarck… After the meal… [Bismarck] used to lie down on a couch and smoke his long pipe which I have often been allowed to light for him."

  Against this coalition-the Kaiser, the Chancellor, and Prince William-Crown Prince Frederick could make no headway. Frederick, wfto had commanded armies in the wars against Austria and France; had wished to prove to Prussia, Germany, and Europe t
hat a Hohenzollern prince who had played a major role in unifying Germany by victory in battle also could be a liberal and constitutional sovereign. In 1886, Crown Princess Victoria declared that many things would change when her husband succeeded his father. "Now Bismarck governs not only the German Reich but also the eighty-eight-year-old Kaiser," she said. "But how will it be when Bismarck is faced with a real Kaiser?"

  The imminence of Frederick's reign drew increasing criticism of his character and abilities from those who would have most to lose from his succession. He was devoted to his wife and greatly respected her intellectual talents. "Have you asked the Crown Princess?" "We must see what the Crown Princess says about this," Frederick said frequently. His enemies underscored this deference and painted a picture of a weak, uncertain man, overshadowed by, dependent on, even dominated by his strong-willed, English wife. "Everyone agrees that the Crown Prince's character grows weaker year by year," Friederich von Holstein, a Foreign Ministry protege of Bismarck, wrote in his diary in 1884. "His wife's influence is increasing every year." Even Frederick's private secretary scorned his master's apparent submissiveness to his wife. "You have only to look at what she's made of him," he declared. "But for her, he'd be the average man, very arrogant, good-tempered, of mediocre gifts and with a good deal of common sense. But now he's not a man at all; he has no ideas of his own, unless she allows him. He's a mere cipher." Vicky, the supposed cause of Fritz's emasculation, was unpopular. In a nation where wives remained in the background, her tactless and sometimes strident advocacy of political causes, as well as her indiscreet trumpeting of Britain's superior virtues, had alienated powerful sections of German society. No story denigrating the Crown Princess was too petty. Holstein, accusing her of prodigality, carped in his diary that her chef, "knowing her liking for stewed peaches, cooks a dozen peaches a day at three marks apiece throughout the summer and autumn on the chance she would ask for one."