Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  At the heart of the dispute was the question of the postwar settlement. Moltke maintained that the problems raised by the settlement were purely military in character and lay outside the sphere of a statesman’s competence. Bismarck argued that the narrow proficiency of a soldier was unequal to the task of concluding a durable peace; the postwar order must be fashioned by a man of more comprehensive vision.

  Moltke favored a Carthaginian peace. The security of Germany required not merely the defeat but the subjugation of France; only by breaking once and for all the will of the French nation could Germany “cap the volcano that has been shaking Europe for a century now with its wars and revolutions.” Paris must be captured and converted into a base for further operations. A series of fresh campaigns could then be launched, and German troops would march deep into the heart of France. Bismarck smiled. As if one could “draw the fangs” from a nation of forty million. The attempt to destroy France, he observed, would not only prove impracticable, it would also draw upon Germany the wrath of the other European powers. The rowdy vigor which had served Germany’s turn while her revolution was making would only complicate her existence now that her nationhood was virtually assured. Germany’s post-revolutionary security, Bismarck maintained, lay in her moderation, and in the ability of her people to persuade their neighbors that their nation’s immense power was not a threat to the civilization of the Continent.

  Yet Bismarck was himself partly to blame for the errors of Moltke and the Staff. In order to justify the earlier phases of his revolution, he had announced the theory of German vitalism; he had asserted the right of a nation to live and to breathe—and to nourish itself on the carcasses of its neighbors. The doctrine had been embraced by the General Staff and now formed an article of its creed. Here, surely, was the paradox of Bismarck’s revolution. To make it, he was compelled to unleash forces which, if not properly restrained, would eventually destroy it. Like the French Revolution, the German revolution, too, would in time devour its children.

  Bismarck failed to persuade the General Staff that discretion was the better part of valor, and throwing away the mask of Falstaff, he began to storm like Lear. He made violent scenes; he raved and ranted; he opened the sluice gates of his dark wit. Moltke he depicted as a vulture feasting on the entrails of his power. The General’s silhouette “gets more buzzardlike day by day,” he said. He ridiculed the Staff as a group of pompous “demi-gods” who after Sedan had bungled the war.

  Moltke was not to be moved by such antics. He had studied Bismarck’s tactics in the aftermath of Sadowa, and he was ready for them. Confronted with the Chancellor’s rage, the Chief of the General Staff fixed a cold eye on his adversary, and said nothing. Not even Bismarck’s sharpest darts pierced the armor of the General’s self-control. “What some day settles the value of a man’s life,” Moltke said, “is not the glamour of success but purity of purpose, loyal adherence to duty.” He knew where his duty lay.

  Metz, August-October 1870

  IN REVOLUTIONS, it has been said, men live fast. In a matter of days or hours, reputations, careers, fortunes—the slow laborious work of decades—are ruined irretrievably. Marshal Bazaine was said by some to have compiled the best record of his generation of French soldiers. He had joined the colors forty years before; had risen from the ranks; had demonstrated courage and ability in Africa and in the Crimea, in Italy and in Mexico. Then, in August 1870, he encountered an enemy unlike any he had previously known. He lost his nerve, and was shut up with his army in Metz.

  Conditions in the city swiftly deteriorated. Supplies were limited, and the troops were put on short rations. They were soon compelled to eat their horses; but there was no salt, and the flesh was unappetizing. The aqueducts having been broken up by the enemy, the besieged inhabitants dipped their buckets in the polluted waters of the Moselle. Disease was rife, and the air was heavy with the odor of death and the latrine. Apathy spread, and discipline deteriorated. When the rains came, the camps were transformed into pestilential swamps, and even strong men cracked. Bazaine retired to a suburban villa at Ban Saint-Martin; he was said to have sought relief from despondency in games of billiards.

  There was a glimmer of hope. Bismarck, frustrated by the intransigence of the new French government, and uncertain whether a peace concluded with so precarious an authority would be worth the parchment it was printed on, opened a curious negotiation with Bazaine. The Chancellor conceived the idea of restoring, with Prussian arms, the régime of the Bonapartes. Louis-Napoleon, who had been carried off to Germany and given a palace for a prison, would be seated again on his throne, and as he valued his life could be relied upon to sign a treaty satisfactory to Prussia. As part of this plan, the Germans would lift the siege of Metz, and Marshal Bazaine, having pledged himself to defend the restored régime, would use his army to prop up the revivified dynasty. Bazaine, for his part, seems to have conceived himself bound in honor to listen to any proposal that promised to restore to the Tuileries the master to whom he had sworn undying allegiance. But he listened in vain, for the scheme was little more than a figment of Bismarck’s imagination, and it came to nothing. Bazaine went back to billiards and despair.

  The prospect of starvation now loomed before him; and in a dark hour the Marshal resolved to surrender both himself and his army to the Germans. “Let us all be thankful,” says an historian in his account of the fall of another French warrior, that “we have never had to face the trials under which he broke.” At the end of October, 170,000 soldiers, the largest body of troops remaining to France, laid down their arms and marched into captivity.

  Versailles, October-November 1870

  BISMARCK WAS OFTEN SEEN, in the bright moonlit nights of the French autumn, pacing the garden of his house in the Rue de Provence. His anxiety was great. The longer the French, the Bavarians, and the General Staff resisted his will, the greater the likelihood that the rest of Europe, awakening to the meaning of his revolution, would intervene and demolish all his work.

  The French especially drove him into rages. Léon Gambetta was his bête noire. The young barrister was “almost certainly” a Jew, Bismarck said, “judging from his physiognomy.” Gambetta was the soul of France’s Government of National Defense. Casting a glance on the map of operations, he perceived the vulnerability to which the German army, like all armies of occupation, was subject. The French leader had little in the way of a regular army with which to oppose the gigantic battalions of Moltke, but he made good this deficiency in professional troops by organizing a guerrilla force, and by converting the war into a people’s struggle. Snipers known as francs-tireurs ambushed German patrols and instilled in the invader a fear he had not previously known.

  Gambetta’s efforts to field mass armies were no less disturbing to Bismarck, who sought an armistice with the defeated enemy in accordance with the precepts of conventional diplomacy. His antagonist declined to accommodate him. Gambetta threw convention to the winds; by sowing confusion and disorder, he intended to break the Germans’ will to fight. He was just thirty-three. His black hair was cut long, and he wore a beard that did not, however, conceal his under-lip, which was full and sensual. In his fervid oratory the defiance of France, and more especially of Paris, received its classic expression. The besieged capital possessed only a limited supply of food, but the patriotism of the people was intense. Those members of the French government who regarded as visionary Gambetta’s belief that he could expel the Germans without first submitting to their terms did not dare to defy him. For Gambetta was supported by the “red” arrondissements of the city, where the zealots of revolution yearned to punish all who sought to betray their romantic dream.

  In October, Gambetta escaped from Paris in a balloon in an effort to rally the French nation. His guerrillas continued to demoralize the German armies. Young Prussians who had once marched down French roads singing Luther’s Hymn or “Watch on the Rhine” now left a trail of broken wine bottles behind them. They swaggered into little towns s
houting, “Mademoiselle, voulez-vous baiser?” (“Miss, do you want to kiss?”). Bismarck vented his anger in wine and angry talk. He took a justifiable pride in his drinking abilities; at Versailles he boasted that he had once drunk off three quarters of a bottle of champagne “at a draught.” “Everybody,” Bismarck said, “was immensely surprised; but I said, ‘Give me another.’” Yet he was not Socrates, for wine had its effect on him. Some have supposed that his most objectionable words were spoken under its influence. “And their treacherous franctireurs,” he exclaimed one day, “who now stand in blouses with their hands in their pockets, and in the next moment when our soldiers have passed by take their rifles out of the ditch and fire at them. It will come to this, that we will shoot down every male inhabitant.”

  “Count Bismarck,” Vicky wrote to her mother, Queen Victoria, “may say the wildest things. But he never acts in a foolish way.” Bismarck was not a man to sacrifice his real interests to fanaticism; but in the autumn of 1870 he concluded that there are times fanaticism may further one’s real interests. Passion, he believed, drives revolutions; and the fuel must be heated to a sufficiently high temperature to produce the necessary explosion. The advice of Philip Sheridan, General Grant’s cavalry master, made a deep impression upon him. Sheridan had come to the Prussian camp as an observer. He urged the Germans to embrace the policy of total war to which Lincoln and Grant had been driven during the Civil War. “The proper strategy,” Sheridan told Bismarck over dinner at Rheims, “consists in the first place of inflicting as telling blows as possible on the enemy’s army, and then in causing the inhabitants so much suffering that they must long for peace, and force their Government to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war. ...” “You know how to hit an enemy as no other army does, but you have not yet learned how to annihilate him. One must see more smoke of burning villages, otherwise you will not finish with the French.”

  Bismarck had at first resisted calls for the bombardment of Paris. He now changed his mind. If he were to break the will of the French, he must, he believed, employ tactics of terror against civilians. “The more Frenchmen suffered from the war,” he said, “the greater would be the number who would long for peace, whatever our conditions might be.” Bismarck never accepted Moltke’s thesis that France must be subjugated and destroyed, but he was now convinced that the necessities of his revolution demanded that the Germans exercise cruelty. They must drink of the vinum daemonum. They need not drain the cup—if they did, they would invite European retribution. But if their revolution were to succeed, they could not suffer it to pass untasted.

  The Chancellor followed his usual practice of mounting a press campaign to prepare public opinion for the step he intended to take. The campaign was successful, and Germans everywhere were soon clamoring for the bombardment of Paris. Let fire devour the temples and palaces of the enemy, their theaters and museums, the Immortals of their Academy, the polluted altars of their Panthéon. Working herself into a pious rage, Bismarck’s wife, Johanna, urged that the entire French population be “shot and stabbed to death, down to the little babies.” Wagner was roused by newspaper feuilletons that appealed to two of his strongest instincts, the love of the pyre and the desire for revenge. Paris, he said, was the “femme entretenue” (kept woman) of the world and should be reduced to rubble. Cosima remembered how eager he was “to write to Bismarck and beg him to bombard” the city, though there is no evidence that the composer desired the Chancellor to train his batteries specifically on the Opéra.

  The guns were soon wheeled up.

  Bavaria, May 1867-December 1870

  THE STORY OF Bavaria’s capitulation to the German revolution begins with the appearance of a handsome young man at Schloss Berg, a castle of the Wittelsbachs shrouded in the shadows of the Bavarian Alps. The young man, with his well-proportioned body and blond and wavy hair, was a groom in Ludwig’s stables; his name was Richard Hornig. Dressed in a sky-blue Eton jacket, he was leading a mount when the King’s eye fell upon him.

  Ludwig swooned. An intimacy soon grew up between the two men, in spite of the difference of their stations, and together they set out on a sort of honeymoon journey to France, where Ludwig, traveling incognito as the Count of Berg, made a pilgrimage to Versailles, the Mecca of his cult of kingship. When he returned to Bavaria, he dismissed his fiancée, Sophie, the daughter of Duke Max of Bavaria. Ludwig had, a few months before, thrown himself enthusiastically into preparations for their wedding; he had studied the precedents of Versailles, and had ordered a special coach to be built, more splendid than that of the Sun King. But no amount of frippery could conceal the fact that he was not to be the bride, and that in embracing a woman he would be compelled to forsake his groom. “Sophie got rid of,” he wrote in his diary after the engagement was broken off. “The gloomy picture fades. I longed for, am athirst for, freedom. Now I can live again after this torturing nightmare.” “Heaven be praised,” he wrote on the day the wedding was supposed to have taken place, “the horror has not come to pass.”

  At last, Ludwig knew—love. But his was a love divided against itself. His soul aspired to a chaste and Platonic eroticism; his instincts demanded a carnal fulfillment. The royal diary bore witness to the ferocity of the inner struggle. “Only spiritual love is permissible,” Ludwig wrote, “the sensual is accursed. I call down solemn anathema upon it.” He sought to wash himself “of all mire,” that he might be “a pure vessel for Richard’s love and friendship.” His vows of chastity became more fervid. He swore “by the pure and holy sign of the Royal Lilies” to “resist every temptation; and never to yield if at all possible either in acts, words, or even in thoughts.” He and Hornig sealed one of their mutual pledges of continence with a kiss, “holy and pure . . . only one. Ich der König. I the King. . . .”

  “Accursed be I and my ideals,” Ludwig said, “if I fall again.” Yet he did fall.

  While his soldiers were dying for Germany on French battlefields, Ludwig remained in Bavaria. His spiritual opium-eating grew more exotic. He passed his days adoring the moon, invoking the magical properties of lilies, and sighing for the Wagnerian atmosphere of the mountains. “On the mountains there is freedom,” he wrote on the eve of the battle of Sedan, “and there men never bring their pain.”

  Romanticism is disease, Goethe declared near the end of his life. Ludwig had contracted the malady in one of its most virulent forms. He was the Emma Bovary of Bavaria, and his gorgeous abandon prepared the way for the rape of his Kingdom. He dreamt of flight. He would escape to a remote mountain fastness, and revive in a fairy-tale castle the last enchantment of the Middle Ages. He would leave Bavaria altogether and live out the remnant of his life in a charmed zone, in Cyprus or in Crete. All he needed was money. He once confided to Hornig his intention to sell Bavaria in order to pay for his romantic dream. He now saw the chance to do so. Bismarck’s revolution, uncongenial though it otherwise was to a scion of the Wittelsbachs, had this merit—it would allow him to replenish his coffers.

  A deal was cut. The King of Bavaria submitted almost meekly to the wand of the magician. Bismarck made various concessions to the Bavarian negotiators, and obtained a treaty incorporating Ludwig’s Kingdom into the new German Confederation.43 Another, more secret bargain was shortly thereafter struck. It was agreed that a handsome pension should be paid annually to Ludwig out of the “reptile funds.” Certain other transfers of cash were made or promised. Bismarck then dictated a letter. It was no easy thing for Ludwig, with his Wittelsbach hauteur, to swallow the product of a Prussian statesman’s pen; but he needed money, and he did as he was told. He tendered to King Wilhelm of Prussia an invitation to become, not President of a new German Confederation, but Kaiser of a new German Reich.

  Chapter 32

  “YOU HAVE A NEW WORLD”

  The United States of America, April 1870

  THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of the murder of Abraham Lincoln passed almost unnoticed in America. The country was
absorbed in more vivid crimes. There was a sensational murder trial in New York. A man named Daniel McFarland was accused of killing his wife’s lover, Albert Deane Richardson, a crack correspondent on The New-York Tribune and an heroic escapee from a Confederate prison. In Reading, Pennsylvania, a petulant husband shot his wife and her paramour. In the North End of Boston a man was stabbed and beaten to death by desperadoes. William Marcy “Boss” Tweed and the Tammany Ring controlled New York, and stockholders of the Erie Company filed suit against those “notable bad men,” Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, on account of the millions of dollars they allegedly misappropriated.

  Perhaps it is unfair to deplore the crime and filth of that age—the dirt of the Dismal Decades that followed the death of Lincoln. Other ages have been as lurid as the Gilded one. In point of wantonness the Borgias and Viscontis exceeded the standard of Fisk and Tweed, though they had a prettier style. Jay Gould might have been a Medici prince, had his taste not been so bad. The thespian family of Booth, which, in the spring of 1870, continued to operate a theater in New York, had the audacity to stage, on the eve of the anniversary of John Wilkes’s murder of the President, a play about the killing of a virtuous political leader. On April 13, 1870, Edwin Booth acted Macbeth, and offered a subtle rebuke to those who were inclined to be sentimental about the death of Lincoln. Murdered Duncans come and go, but Babylon is eternal.

  The Brown Decades, if they were no more morally grotesque than the mean, were more dramatically disappointing. The country, having been brought to the highest pitch of nervous tension, went suddenly slack. No remedy has yet been found for the moral hangover that follows a free-state revolution. The first such revolution, England’s Glorious one of 1688, appeared to Swift and Pope as unsatisfactory as Lincoln’s revolution appeared to Henry Adams and Henry James.