“General Lee has capitulated.”
Some wept when they heard the news. Others were incredulous.
“That is a lie,” Kate Hampton exclaimed.
“I do not believe it,” Buck Preston said.
“Now we belong to negroes and Yankees!” shrieked Buck’s sister Mary.
The belief that it was a mistake, perhaps a deliberate falsehood, was, for a time, strong. Lee, it was said, would never have allowed himself to be taken alive. Soon, however, the accumulated evidence was too strong to admit of doubt. Lee had surrendered his sword to Ulysses S. Grant in a little crossroads town in Virginia called Appomattox Court House.
The revelation was a blow to what little remained of the Fire Eaters’ fighting spirit. Already the strength of the most romantic partisans of the Cause was shattered. Edmund Ruffin, the prince of the Fire Eaters, prepared to commit suicide in Virginia. Other Fire Eaters set out for Mexico, where they hoped to find protection at the court of Maximilian. More gave way to despondency. Where once there had been defiance, there was now only “croaking and dismay, infirmity of purpose and irresolution.”
One of the broken spirits was Sam Hood. When he appeared, shorn of honors and prestige, at Mary Chesnut’s door, a friend counseled her not to receive him. “Send word you are not at home.”
“Never,” Mary Chesnut replied. “If he had come here, with Sherman dragging, a captive at his chariot wheels, I might say ‘not at home’—but now. . .”
She ran downstairs and greeted the unhappy man. She gave him a glass of what remained of the Chesnuts’ wine. But black care was upon his brow. Hood sat in silence, morosely staring into the fire, “going over some bitter hour” in his mind. Huge drops of perspiration stood on his forehead. He looked as though he were undergoing “the torture of the damned.” Everywhere he was reviled as the man who failed to stop Sherman. He ought, it was said, to have engaged Sherman’s army as it marched through Georgia. His decision to withdraw to Tennessee to obstruct Sherman’s communications was judged foolish and naïve. His generalship, indeed, seemed to confirm the truth of Robert E. Lee’s observation: the man was all lion and no fox. In December 1864 Union forces under General George Thomas had annihilated his army in desperate fighting south of Nashville. A month later he tendered his resignation. “Hood is dead,” Mary Chesnut’s friend Louis Wigfall said, “smashed, gone up forever.” Not literally dead, of course: fourteen years of physiological life remained to him. His was rather the living death of a defeated general.
The fall of Hood placed Buck Preston in a quandary. It was one thing to receive a fallen hero in one’s parlor. It was another to unite oneself for life to his miserable ruin. When Mary Chesnut informed her of Hood’s removal from command, Buck “turned as white as the wall.” She had now to look her “future in the face.” Her gaze was not soft. The girl sat for hours alone on Mary Chesnut’s piazza. “She rarely speaks now,” Mary Chesnut said. Her eyes were “devoid of all expression.” But her vision itself was mercilessly acute.
The throat settled the matter.
It was, Hood said, so soft, so white. It fairly demanded to be kissed. And the legs; for Buck was standing by the fire when he came in. She had lifted her petticoats to warm her limbs. On her legs were her best stockings—the “beautiful, beautiful silk stockings that fit so nicely.” Hood could not help himself. The legs were so shapely. In the Victorian age young ladies who did not want to be thought “fast” wore high collars, and they concealed their legs beneath an abundance of drapery. But Hood had caught his fiancée in déshabillé. He was driven wild by the sight. As “I stood by the fender, warming my feet,” Buck told Mary Chesnut, “he seized me round the waist and kissed my throat—to my horror—and when he saw how shocked I was, he was frightened in a minute and so humble and so full of apologies. ... I drew back and told him to go away, that I was offended. In a moment I felt a strong arm so tight around my waist I could not move. He said I should stay [there] until I forgave his rash presumption, and he held me fast.”
Buck told Hood that she could never forgive such conduct. But to Mary Chesnut she admitted that she had merely “pretended to be in a rage.” The unauthorized kiss gave her the excuse she needed to break off the engagement. She later claimed that she wished Hood had persevered in spite of this to all appearances definitive rebuff. If he had been persistent, she said, she would have married him despite the kiss, despite his diminished stature. If she could not marry him in Mary Chesnut’s house, “well, I would have gone down on the sidewalk. I would have married him on the pavement, if the parson could be found to do it. I was ready to leave all the world for him, to tie my clothes in a bundle and, like a soldier’s wife, trudge after him to the ends of the earth.”
Mary Chesnut raised her eyebrows.
“It was a shame,” Buck told her mentor. “Now, would you believe it, a sickening, almost an insane, longing comes over me, just to see him once more.” But “I know I never will. He is gone forever.”
Saint Petersburg, April 1866
IN THE AFTERMATH of Niks’s death, the Tsar’s day still followed its predictable course. In his bedroom-study in the Winter Palace, Alexander rose at eight and drank his coffee. After a brisk walk round the Palace, he went to see the Empress. He kissed her when he came in. She still called him Sasha. He still called her Masha. They ate breakfast together. The forms of domesticity were decently observed, but the marriage itself, many believed, was hollow. Husband and wife were still, it is true, united by their love for their children; in the autumn Grand Duke Alexander, their clumsy second son, was to wed Niks’s former fiancée, Dagmar of Denmark. But even that happy occasion would be tinged with regret; the Empress continued to mourn her firstborn son. Her principal consolation lay in the contemplation of God. Her rooms were filled with icons. She was obsessed by relics. She surrounded herself with monks and visionaries, holy men who, it was said, could fathom the whole of a man’s destiny in his gaze. The Tsar could not follow his wife in these pious pursuits; mysticism was not his cup of tea. Perhaps he did not want to know his destiny. Ever since his predecessor Tsar Peter ascended the throne of the Romanovs nearly two centuries before, the destiny of every Tsar had been dark.24
After breakfast the Tsar went to his bedroom-study and sat down at the desk from which he governed an empire. It was here that he received his ministers. The Minister of War and the head of the Third Section came every day; the Foreign Minister came every second day. After lunch, the Tsar went for another walk.
On a spring afternoon in 1866, he set out as usual for the Summer Garden to take his post-prandial stroll. He was accompanied by his niece and nephew, Mary and Nicholas, the children of his sister Mary. His favorite setter, Milord, came along. The day was sunny, the snow had melted, but there was a chill in the air, and the Tsar wore an overcoat. Some time after three o’clock he went back to his carriage. The crowd watched, white gloves flew up, a policeman came to attention. The Tsar was in the midst of donning a cloak for the ride back to the palace when the shot rang out.
Chapter 24
“BETTER TO DIE”
Berlin and Vienna, January-May 1866
BISMARCK OPENED HIS BIBLE. The Ninth Psalm: “When mine enemies are turned back, they shall fall and perish at thy presence.” “We have good confidence,” he wrote, “but we must not forget that Almighty God is very capricious.”
He was ready to roll the dice. He could, he believed, defray the charge of a war with Austria (or part of it) by selling Prussian railway interests. He could win the war because he had, through his diplomacy, taken care to secure his flanks. France he had disposed of in the Villa Eugénie, where he had received from Louis-Napoleon a pledge of neutrality. He now considered his southern front. In April 1866 he entered into a secret agreement with the Italians that would go far to relieving Prussia’s underbelly. The Italians were hungry for Venetia, still in the hands of the Habsburgs; and they promised that, if Prussia should go to war against Austria within three months,
Italy would join her in the fight. Franz Josef would be obliged to defend two fronts.
Every hour the animosity between Vienna and Berlin grew. Bismarck announced that Holstein, now a province of Austria, was “a nest of democrats, intriguers and revolutionary agents under the protection of the Austrian double eagle.” The Viennese saw the writing on the wall and prepared for the worst. They feared a Prussian descent on Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic. Austrian troops were rushed northward towards the frontier. The technical requirements of their army placed the Austrians in an unfortunate position; they could not mobilize their forces in less than seven weeks. Prussian mobilization, by contrast, required only three weeks—Moltke’s railway drills had resulted in an immense strategic advantage.
Bismarck seized on the intelligence of Austrian troop movements and at the end of March accused Vienna of “warlike activity” which compelled Prussia to take countermeasures. Austria “without any recognizable cause has been, since the thirteenth of March, moving considerable masses of troops in a threatening manner towards the Prussian frontier.” Vienna, Bismarck pretended, was the aggressive party; Berlin was merely attempting to defend itself. At the end of March, an order instructing the Prussian army to prepare for partial mobilization was handed down.
Vienna promptly denied the accusation that it possessed warlike intentions. Bismarck repeated his charges in a provocative communiqué. The Austrians replied with some warmth. It was almost beneath the dignity of Austria, they said, to deny again accusations that had been repeatedly denied in the past. Prussia was the true aggressor in the matter, as that Kingdom’s own extensive military preparations proved. Count Mensdorff, the Austrian Foreign Minister, pointed to Bismarck’s long record of militant rhetoric. Had not the Prussian leader said many times that war between Austria and Prussia was inevitable? Had he not openly evinced his desire to annex both Schleswig and Holstein for Prussia? “All this,” Count Mensdorff said, “must be mere delusion, and to the realm of reality must belong only those threatening masses of Austrian troops . . . moving to the Prussian frontier!” He categorically demanded that Berlin withdraw its mobilization order.
But the diplomats in the Ballhausplatz, the Austrian Foreign Ministry, were unequal to a mind as resourceful, penetrating, and unscrupulous as Bismarck’s. Conscious of the menacing character which Prussia had assumed in the eyes of Europe, the Minister-President judged it prudent to extend to his adversaries an olive branch. If, he said, Austria stood down from her military preparations, Prussia would do the same in respect of her own. Vienna at once embraced the specious offering, not comprehending how empty it really was. As Bismarck well knew, Prussia’s secret ally, Italy, was on the verge of mobilizing her forces. Intelligence of these preparations soon reached Vienna, and the Austrians naturally took steps to confront the threat to their southern frontier. On April 21 an order mobilizing the Austrian Army of Italy was handed down at Vienna.
Bismarck took care that his friends in the German press were kept abreast of the Austrian preparations. In a German paper known to enjoy the confidence of the Prussian ministry, it was claimed that Austria was mobilizing her southern army, not indeed to counter the Italians, but in order to attack Prussia. Ordinary Prussians were angered by what they took to be the duplicity of the Viennese. Bismarck withdrew his olive branch, and persuaded King Wilhelm to summon his people to arms.
Early in May Prussia mobilized six army corps and called up the reserves.
London, September 1865–June 1866
THOSE WHO FEARED the progress of Bismarck’s battalions still nursed the hope that England, France, and Russia would intervene to preserve the peace of the Continent. Amid rumors of war, there was talk of invoking the Concert of Europe and convening a Congress. But nothing came of it. England and the other powers, one diplomat observed, “contented themselves with moral lectures and appeals to Prussia with, I suppose, the usual effect.”
England was largely oblivious of the gathering world crisis. Bathed in the soft complacency of commercial prosperity—the British Empire was, at this time, at the zenith of its supremacy in trade—the English failed to perceive, in Prussia’s advancing columns, the outriders of a philosophy that would one day threaten their own freedom and greatness. In London, Bismarck observed, they “are much better informed about China and Turkey than about Prussia. Loftus [the English Ambassador in Berlin] must write to his Minister much more nonsense than I imagined.”
Insofar as the English were concerned by developments on the Continent, they continued to fear that any attempt by England to interpose herself in Germany would redound to the benefit of France, which in their minds was the most dangerous power in Europe. Certainly France was, the English believed, a more dangerous power than Prussia. Lord Loftus, writing from Berlin, “could not view with any dissatisfaction or fear of danger to England an increase of power to Prussia.” Prussia was “the great Protestant State of Continental Europe.” She represented “the intelligence, the progress, and the wealth of Germany. . . . We have nothing to fear from her. She will become a Power of great importance in maintaining the peace of Central Europe. She will gradually advance in a constitutional system of government, and she will play the part of a moderator in Europe.” And France? She was no moderator. She was not even Protestant. And she was (the English believed) very strong. Englishmen marveled at the “enormous armies of the French,” her “commanding territorial position,” her “instinctive readiness for war.” The French arms were “in a state of perfect preparation.” So dire was the threat of French power believed to be that a volunteer movement had sprung up in England to resist it, and wellborn young men engaged in shooting practice at Wimbledon and Scrubbs.
No less a figure than Palmerston himself spoke of the alarming power of France. Like many statesmen, the Prime Minister had learned, too well, the lessons of the last war. He remembered how, when he was a young man, the Continent had languished in the grip of a Bonaparte. He had himself played a part in the earlier volunteer movement which had been formed to resist the usurper who, in preparation for a descent upon England, had massed his barges at Boulogne. Almost with his dying breath Palmerston uttered a prophecy of French aggression. Prussia, the Prime Minister wrote to Earl Russell in September 1865, “is too weak as she now is.” It was, he said, “desirable that Germany, in the aggregate, should be strong, in order to control those two ambitious and aggressive powers, France and Russia, that press upon her east and west.”
Shortly after composing the letter, Palmerston went out for a drive at Brocket and caught a chill. The great Prime Minister died on October 18, two days before his eighty-first birthday.
Alone among the high figures of the government, Queen Victoria believed that England must intervene to stop Prussian aggression. She had changed her mind about Bismarck since the Danish War. Having been apprised by her daughter, Crown Princess Vicky, of the Minister-President’s tactics, the Queen was indignant, and she wrote to King Wilhelm beseeching him not to go to war on account of the “faults and recklessness ... of one man.” “The Missus,” Lord Clarendon, the new Foreign Secretary, wrote, “is in an awful state about German affairs.” But Earl Russell, who had kissed hands as Prime Minister after Palmerston’s death, curtly rejected his sovereign’s arguments. It “would be an injustice to the people of England,” Russell said, “to employ their military and pecuniary resources in a quarrel in which neither English honour nor English interests are involved.”
Vienna and Berlin, May-June 1866
IN THE HOFBURG, the vast palace of the Habsburgs, Franz Josef rose from his iron cot at four in the morning. His valet waited outside the imperial bedchamber, listening intently. When he heard the unmistakable sounds of awakening humanity, the servant entered the room. “I am at Your Majesty’s feet!” he intoned. “Good morning!” The valet was followed by the bath attendant, who, after making a low bow, gave the All Highest a sponge bath. By five o’clock, as the June sun penetrated the baroque plazas of his c
apital, Franz Josef, having washed, prayed, and donned a uniform, went through the door into his study.
Seated at his desk, the impresario of empire went to work. Thirty-five years old in June 1866, Franz Josef had little insight into the technical needs of his autocracy. His infantry was armed with inferior rifles, his bureaucracy was corrupt, his treasury was exhausted, his diplomatic initiatives were for the most part inept. But he had his strengths. People who knew the Kaiser personally thought him dull; but they failed to perceive the delicacy of his imperial choreography. Franz Josef’s happiest hours (other than those he spent hunting chamois or reviewing regiments) were passed in the Imperial Theater. There he developed an instinct for gesture. His soldiers might not have the best guns, but they wore the most beautiful uniforms. His capital possessed the most splendid palaces. He had married the most beautiful woman the nobility of that age could boast. The slim, neurotic Elisabeth was a work of highest Wittelsbach art. She had, by 1866, become estranged from her husband, and she was often abroad, in Madeira, in Spain, in Corfu, cultivating exquisite impressions. She was not at all the Emperor’s type; Franz Josef preferred banality to originality, and he had, besides, a love of pudgy legs and plump derrières. But his personal tastes did not matter. Elisabeth, slender, spiritual, ascetic, gave him something he needed more than the fleshy Viennese Topfenstrudels he favored—she supplied his régime with style.
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