Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

But style could not save him on this June morning. His people were on the verge of Bruderkrieg, civil war. He himself signed the order that precipitated the outbreak of hostilities. The All Highest commanded his ministers to transfer his Empire’s rights in Schleswig and Holstein to the German Confederation (old Prince Metternich’s Bund). Let the Bundestag in Frankfurt settle the vexed question. In transferring his rights to the Bund, Franz Josef formally breached his agreements with the Prussians: those agreements stipulated that Austria and Prussia would resolve, jointly and exclusively, all questions concerning the disposition of the duchies. By placing his interests in the duchies in the hands of the Bund, the Kaiser hoped to rally the German-speaking peoples to his cause. For war, he believed, was now inevitable. He was convinced that nothing he did—short of surrendering Holstein outright to Prussia and relinquishing Austria’s claims to leadership in Germany— could prevent violence. “How can one avoid war,” he asked, “when the other side wants it?”

  The Kaiser’s decision gave Bismarck the excuse he needed to implement the next phase of his revolution. His path to war was not hindered by the appearance of a gunman in Unter den Linden. One evening, as he was returning to his residence in the Wilhelmstrasse, three shots rang out. In the shadow of the blossoming lime trees, Bismarck grappled with his assailant, and seizing him by the arm and throat, held him until the 2nd Foot Guards arrived. The gunman, a student named Ferdinand Cohen, opposed Bismarck’s war policy; he was carried off to the police bureau, where he died after repeatedly stabbing himself in the throat with a pocket knife. Bismarck himself was not seriously hurt. One of the bullets passed through his garments and produced a slight contusion on his shoulder; the concussion of another blast bruised one of his ribs. “I consider it good fortune to give one’s life for our King and Country,” Bismarck said afterwards, “and I pray to God to grant me such a death. This time God has decided otherwise.” The incident only strengthened his reputation as a man of iron.

  A short-lived peace movement did no more to deter Bismarck from his revolutionary path. When peace meetings were held in a number of German cities, he professed to be undismayed. “Events change public opinion,” he told a group of diplomats in the Wilhelmstrasse, “and a battle won, or even a battle lost, strangely alters men’s minds.” Lord Loftus, the English diplomat who believed that Prussia represented the cause of European progress, attempted to impress upon him the virtues of pacific statesmanship. Bismarck brushed him aside. “Why, after all,” he said, “Attila was a greater man than your Mr. John Bright. He has left a greater name in history.”

  On June 12, Prussian troops stormed into Holstein. The single Austrian brigade withdrew without firing a shot. In the Bundestag in Frankfurt, members rose to accuse Prussia of taking the law into her own hands. Determined to resist Prussian coercion, they resolved to mobilize the Confederation’s feeble army. Prussia declared the Confederation dissolved and launched a lightning invasion of neighboring German states. Bismarck, sitting in his garden in the Wilhelmstrasse, gave General von Moltke the watchword.25 The Chief of the General Staff went off to the telegraph. The sun sank, and Bismarck sat there under the old elms chatting with Lord Loftus. The clock struck midnight. Bismarck rose from his chair. “The war has begun!” he announced. “At this hour troops are marching into Hanover, Saxony, and the Electorate of Hesse—long live the King.”

  Europe, Lord Loftus said gravely, would never tolerate an attempt by Prussia to subdue sovereign powers simply because they disapproved of Prussia’s policies.

  “Who is Europe?” Bismarck asked.

  Outwardly he projected an iron confidence; but inwardly all was turmoil. “When you start a war,” Bismarck said, “you know when the first shot is fired, but you can never tell when the last one will be.” He spoke of the consequences of a Prussian defeat. “The struggle will be severe. . . . If we are beaten, I shall not return here. I shall fall in the last charge. One can die but once; and if beaten, it is better to die.”

  Once again Europe heard the crunch of Prussian jackboots; but the swiftness of the advance took the Continent by surprise. Within hours of Bismarck’s announcement to Lord Loftus, the Prussian Army of the Elbe crossed the frontier and entered Saxony. Three infantry divisions (drawn principally from the Prussian VIII Corps) together with twenty-six squadrons of horse and more than a hundred field guns proceeded rapidly to Dresden, the capital of the Saxons. The Prussians entered the city unopposed. At the same moment a Prussian division entered and subdued the Electorate of Hesse. The Elector himself was made a prisoner. Only in the Kingdom of Hanover did the Prussians encounter resistance. The Prussian commander was slow in moving his divisions, and the Hanoverians repulsed the invader at Langensalza. But their valor yielded, at length, to the weight of numbers, and the King, George V, a scion of the Guelphs, was forced to flee his Kingdom.

  The Prussian war machine rolled on.

  The armies did not stop with the subjugation of Hanover, Saxony, and Electoral Hesse. Scarcely had Prussia’s enemies north of the River Main been subjugated when the invasion of Austria commenced. The first prong of the Prussian thrust, the Army of the Elbe, crossed the Austrian frontier and entered Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) on June 22. Leading the van were the 7th Regiment of King’s Hussars, the 8th Battalion of Rhenish Jaegers, and four battalions of fusiliers. The next day the second prong of the offensive, the Prussian First Army, descended on Bohemia from the north. At the head of this force, drawn from Prussian II, III, and IV Corps, was King Wilhelm’s nephew, Prince Friedrich Karl, the Red Prince. Among those under his command was Heros von Borcke, who had recrossed the Atlantic to draw his sword in the service of a more effectual romance. Now a second lieutenant in the 3rd Neumarkt Dragoons, he still carried within him the .58-caliber Minié ball that had lodged in his lung when he was aide-de-camp to Jeb Stuart in Virginia. In his quarters von Borcke kept two pictures, one of his old commander and the other of his present one. The Red Prince, visiting him one day, saw that his own portrait hung above that of General Stuart. “You must change the position of the pictures,” the Red Prince said, “and put mine below.”

  The third element in the Prussian thrust, the Second Army, crossed into Bohemia from its base at Fürstenstein in Prussian Silesia. This army, which encompassed V and VI Corps, was led by Crown Prince Friedrich, the son of King Wilhelm. “Fritz” was thirty-four years old when he took command of the Second Army. He and his wife, Crown Princess Vicky, lived in the New Palace at Potsdam. Their seven-year-old son, Wilhelm, was a true Prussian. A willful boy with a withered arm, he once referred to his maternal grandmother, Queen Victoria, as an “old hag,” and in a fit of temper he bit his uncle, Prince Arthur, in the leg. Friedrich and Vicky were pacific liberals; they disliked Bismarck’s militarism and opposed his war with Austria.

  But the Crown Prince was determined to do his duty.

  Chapter 25

  THE BLOODLETTING

  Saint Petersburg, May-September 1866

  THE GATES OF THE Fortress of Peter and Paul swung open, and a cart drove out. On it sat the culprit, Dmitri Karakozov, the revolutionist who had fired at the Tsar in the Summer Garden. He was a poor shot; Alexander had walked away unscathed.

  A young officer of the Cuirassiers watched as the cart made its way down the rough escarpment of the fortress. A large crowd had gathered. Some of the onlookers groaned. Others made the sign of the Cross. “Lord, forgive his sins and save his soul.” The wagon jolted on the stones, and its occupant quivered, as though made of jelly. The Cuirassier wondered whether they were not “bringing out an India-rubber doll to be hanged.” The thought flashed in his mind that Karakozov was already dead, and that for the sake of appearances the authorities had resolved to hang a corpse.

  In fact Karakozov was not dead, but he had, for many days, been in the hands of the Third Section. His head, his hands, his joints were entirely loose. “It was a terrible thing to see,” the Cuirassier said, “and to think what it meant.”

 
Two soldiers helped Karakozov to ascend the scaffold. Opinion was divided concerning the prisoner’s state of mind as he approached eternity. Some say that he had gone out of his mind and was now insane. Others say that he had, like the older brother of Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, experienced redemption, and that his last hours had been passed “on his knees in passionate prayer.”

  The period of reformation was coming to an end in Russia. The disenchantment that follows every revolutionary thrust was exacerbated by Karakozov’s pistol shot, and by the interval of reaction that followed. When, in the past, tsars had been assailed, the dark facts of treason and murder had been concealed from the masses. In the eyes of the people the monarchy continued to embody a remote and lofty perfection. When Karakozov fired at Alexander in broad daylight, a veil fell away.

  The Tsar himself emerged from the line of fire shaken and suspicious. Perhaps some awful curse did hang over the Romanovs. In his terror he raised one of his old boon companions, Peter Shuvalov, to the most powerful place in the government. The young courtier became head of the Third Section. He was descended from a family that had risen high in the eighteenth century, and he possessed gifts of wit and repartee reminiscent of the courts of that vanished age. The Shuvalovs aspired to a French ideal of culture, and they had helped to import, into Russia, the ideals of the French Enlightenment. That a scion of the luminaries should now become a policeman and a torturer might at first seem an historical irony; but the inquisitorial vocation comes easily to those who have embraced Voltaire’s faith in the virtues of enlightened despotism. Count Shuvalov organized the White Terror that followed Karakozov’s attempt on the life of the Tsar. Reformers were ousted from the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of the Interior, and hundreds of people were subjected to arbitrary arrest.

  No man, the Greeks said, is less free than the despot. He lives con-stantly with his fears, and falls victim to morbid suspicions. Alexander, who during the first ten years of his rule had retained his mental equanimity, succumbed at last to the afflictions of power. He trusted no one— not even Shuvalov, whom he placed under counter-surveillance. A man notably courageous when confronted by immediate physical danger, Alexander broke down under the lurking threat of assassination. In vain did he set out on fantastic hunting expeditions, accompanied by a train of huntsmen and dancing girls. A troupe of French performers was employed to divert him with renditions of scenes from the Marquis de Sade; but like bear-slaying, erotic indulgence provided only a momentary relief from the distresses of authority.

  Alexander’s earlier policy might be defended as a creative vacillation between reform and reaction, an approach that allowed for change, yet at the same time maintained the social equilibrium. In ten years he had done more than free the serfs and institute the rule of law. He had relaxed restrictions on the press, liberalized the universities, emancipated dissenting religious sects, and made it easier for Russians to travel beyond the borders of their country. The state budget, which had previously been shrouded in administrative secrecy, he had ordered to be published; and he had abolished the pernicious practice of tax farming. At his behest, the Minister of War, Dmitri Milyutin (Nicholas’s brother), reformed the army. The crueler forms of corporal punishment were abolished, and the term of service for conscripts was reduced. A new office, that of Chief of the General Staff, was created on the model Moltke had developed in Prussia. In what was perhaps his most daring measure, Alexander had, in 1864, signed a law creating local assemblies or zemstvos in parts of his Empire. These assemblies, elected by people of all classes, embodied, in a rudimentary form, the principle of a legislature.

  But if the Tsar at one moment acted the liberal, he at the next played the reactionary. He freed the serfs, and suppressed the Poles. He promoted education, and closed the Sunday Schools. He relaxed the censorship, and sentenced journalists to hard labor in Siberia. He eased religious restrictions, and persecuted Jews. He promoted the rule of law, and detained obnoxious subjects in lunatic asylums. He sanctioned local zemstvos, and refused to grant a national legislature. When the Tsarevitch lay dying at Nice, the nobility of Moscow petitioned him for a national assembly. He rejected the petition. What “he had already done in the past,” he said, “must remain a sufficient pledge for all his faithful subjects.” No one had the right to “anticipate him in his incessant aims for the good of Russia.” “The right of initiative . . . belongs exclusively to ME, and is indissolubly bound to the autocratic power entrusted to ME by God. ...”

  The apparent contradictions of his rule owed something to the astuteness of his policy. Those who criticized him, he said, did not understand the difficulties involved in implementing a program of reform in a country like Russia. A too rapid course of constitutional change would, he believed, fatally undermine authority and terminate in the dissolution of the Empire. He told Bismarck that in the eyes of the Russian people the monarch was an “all-powerful lord, the emissary of God. This feeling almost has the force of religious sentiment. ... If the people should lose this feeling for the power that my crown imparts to me, the nimbus that the nation possesses would be ruptured.” Russia would fall to pieces.

  But during the White Terror that followed Karakozov’s pistol shot, Alexander’s régime acquired a different complexion. He sensed this himself. He “would fall into a gloomy melancholy, and speak in a sad tone of the brilliant beginning of his reign, and of the reactionary character it was taking.” The revolution that stops in place, Mazzini said, is lost; but Alexander made no effort to re-create the earlier, revolutionary atmosphere.

  General Trepov, the Governor of Saint Petersburg, preyed upon the Tsar’s fears. If Trepov were a few minutes late for a briefing, Alexander would become anxious. “Is everything quiet at Saint Petersburg?” he would ask as soon as Trepov came in. (Trepov was later shot and gravely wounded by the Marxist terrorist Vera Zasulich.) The reactionary courtiers took advantage of their master’s terror to plunder the state. Stalled liberal revolutions often spawn forms of crony capitalism; the tyrant acquiesces in the pillage, not because he likes to be robbed, but because he regards the thieves as “his protectors from the revolution.”

  In one area alone did Alexander conduct affairs with his old vigor. He continued to enlarge the Empire. China recognized Russian claims to the Amur and the Ussuri. Vladivostok, the San Francisco of the Russians, rose on the Sea of Japan. The Caucasus was finally subdued; Turkestan and Tashkent were enrolled among the metropolises of the Empire; and General Kaufman was deputed to complete the subjugation of Central Asia.

  Each of the three powers that in the twentieth century would contend for leadership of the planet felt the allure of romantic nationalism; each, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, added to its dominions. Prussia, under Bismarck, had already dismembered Denmark, and was poised to take over Germany and portions of France. The United States continued, in the midst of the Civil War, to pursue its policy of Manifest Destiny. The Homestead and Pacific Railway acts of 1862 strengthened the country’s transcontinental grip. The Legal Tender Act of 1862 created a transcontinental currency. But although each of the three pivotal leaders of the decade flirted with romantic nationalism, they did so in different ways. Bismarck used the nationalist romance to crush the free state in Germany. Lincoln understood the dangers which the nationalist ideal posed to the principle that all men, wherever they come from, are created equal; but he at the same time believed that the United States, in becoming a transcontinental “empire of liberty,” would be better able to defend the principles of freedom in the world struggle against despotism. Alexander, for his part, proved to be the least imaginative of the empire builders; he failed to use Russia’s tradition of messianic imperialism to stir patriotic hearts and save his liberal revolution.

  The Tsar’s own heart was elsewhere.

  Alexander had known Princess Ekaterina Mikhailovna Dolgorukaya since she was a girl. Katya, as she was called, possessed a pedigree unsurpas
sed, in antiquity and splendor, by any in Russia. But her fortune had been squandered through the caprice and folly of her father, Prince Michael. After the death of the Prince in 1860, the Tsar himself took charge of her upbringing. Alexander enrolled her in the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, a finishing school for daughters of the aristocracy which Catherine the Great had founded in emulation of Mme de Maintenon’s Saint-Cyr. During the course of a visit to the institute, the Tsar discovered that Katya had become a young woman. She had “skin of ivory,” and magnificent chestnut hair. Her eyes, it was said, were like those of a startled gazelle. When he invited her to accompany him on his walks around Saint Petersburg, she dutifully complied. Alexander’s passions were always impetuous; and he soon found that he was in love.

  Vienna and Bohemia, June-July 1866

  IN THE RINGSTRASSE the Viennese gathered in little knots to read the imperial proclamation. The year before, Franz Josef, in another attempt to smother daylight with magic, had opened the first section of the boulevard, with its parks and public buildings. He was perpetually touching up his Empire—so many daubs of Habsburg paint. But the painting stopped when the proclamation appeared.

  A people lulled by aesthetic sedatives found itself roused from its slumbers and thrust into the world crisis. “Prussia,” Franz Josef declared, “now publicly places might before right,” and he had little choice, he said, but to order his Army of the North to march to Berlin to try to stop Bismarck’s revolution.

  On a hot day in June the Army of the North filed out of its base in Olmütz (Olomouc) in Bohemia in obedience to the Kaiser’s command. It was, to say the least, a handsome army. There were regiments of pink trousers and sky-blue coats, and regiments of blue trousers and snow-white coats. There were Hussars in scarlet, and Tyrol riflemen in green. The Cuirassiers wore crested helmets, while the blond Jaegers of Styria were adorned with the feathers of the capercaillie.