Forge of Empires
Page 69
10 The “jewels” of the Romanov wine collection were stored in the cellars of the Winter Palace. These were plundered by the Bolsheviks after they stormed the palace in 1917. The exquisite vintages were promiscuously consumed by the thirsty rebels, and afterwards Palace Square was filled with besotted Communists.
11 The room in the White House which Lincoln used as an office is now known as the Lincoln Bedroom.
12 Bismarck would later fiercely resent Tsar Alexander’s mistress, Katya Dolgorukaya.
13 Lord John’s older brother inherited the dukedom of Bedford. Although Lord John was properly called Earl Russell after his elevation to the peerage by a fresh creation in July 1861, he continued to be known popularly as Lord John Russell, the name by which he had been called, in courtesy, as the younger son of a duke during his many years in the House of Commons.
14 Adolf Hitler expressed the wish that, at the moment of his own annihilation, he should hear what is called the Liebestod, the love-death song of Isolde, from the third act of Tristan und Isolde.
15 Julia Taft corroborated this account of the trancelike state Lincoln entered when preoccupied by a problem.
16 Responsibility for domestic security arrangements was later placed in the hands of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.
17 Confronted with Hooker’s vaunts, Lincoln told the story of the hen, which, he said, “is the wisest of all the animal creation, because she never cackles until the egg is laid.”
18 The painting was at that time called Le Bain.
19 The plea for a smaller nation to be reasonable in order to appease German aggression was to have its twentieth-century echo. In the summer of 1938, Neville Chamberlain dispatched Lord Runciman to Prague with instructions to arrange an accommodation, one that would be acceptable to Berlin, between the Czechoslovak government and the German-speaking population of the Sudetenland. Lord Robert Cecil observed in 1864 that English ministries preferred to urge, not Germany, but the weaker powers upon which Germany preyed, “to swallow the cup of humiliation to the dregs.”
20 “And almost all things are by the law purged with blood: and without shedding of blood is no remission.”
21 Across the ocean, the breech-loading revolution had not yet taken place; in America, Union and Confederate infantrymen continued to rely on muzzle-loading rifles like the Springfield and the Enfield.
22 The party styled itself the National Union Party in 1864.
23 “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”—Hebrews 10:31. This chapter of Scripture made a deep impression on another nineteenth-century psychologist, Dostoevsky, who cited it in Book VI of The Brothers Karamazov.
24 Peter the Great (reigned 1682-1725) murdered his son; Peter II (reigned 1727-30) died of smallpox; Ivan VI (reigned 1740-41) was deposed, while yet an infant, and flung into Schlüsselberg, where he was murdered on the orders of Catherine the Great; Peter III (reigned 1761-62) was deposed by Catherine and executed by her partners in crime and sensuality; Paul I (reigned 1796-1801) was murdered in a coup d’état; Alexander I (1801-25) died in mysterious circumstances in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov; and Nicholas I (reigned 1825-55) died a broken man, cast down by the defeats suffered by Russia in the Crimea.
25 Seven decades later the Wilhelmstrasse gardens were excavated and a network of underground bunkers was constructed for another German leader, Adolf Hitler, who perished in one of the bunkers in 1945. His corpse was doused with petrol and burnt in the chancellery garden.
26 Other than Venetia, which pursuant to an agreement between Franz Josef and Louis-Napoleon was ceded by Austria to France, and was a short time later united with Italy.
27 “Each weakening of one of the Central Powers,” Metternich declared, “represents the most direct blow at the existence of the other.”
28 The unit was subsequently reorganized as the 2nd Panzer Regiment.
29 Aloof though he seems generally to have kept himself from women, Nietzsche is said to have made several proposals of marriage, which were refused. His subsequent breakdown may have been caused by syphilis, possibly contracted from a prostitute.
30 What Bismarck called his “reptile” or “Guelf” funds encompassed assets sequestered from the demesnes of the exiled House of Hanover.
31 Bismarck and his family occupied No. 76 in the Wilhelmstrasse from 1862 until 1878, when they moved into the adjacent residence, No. 77, the renovated Radziwill Palace, which thereafter served (together with an annex) as the Reich Chancellery. Sixty years later, the new Chancellor of the Reich was appalled by the shabbiness of the place. Pronouncing it “fit for a soap company,” Adolf Hitler ordered Albert Speer to build a massive new structure nearby, at No. 6 in the Voss Strasse. All of the buildings have since been destroyed.
32 The declaration of war was formally delivered to the Wilhelmstrasse four days later by Le Sourd, the French chargé d’affaires at Berlin.
33 Nechaev, who was at one time the protégé of Bakunin, was confined in the most dreaded of the fortress’s dungeons, the Alexis Ravelin. In the 1870s Tolstoy visited the fortress, where Nechaev was then languishing; he was researching his never-finished novel about the Decembrist conspirators. The commandant, under whom Tolstoy had served in the Crimea, showed him over most of the fortress but would not permit him to see the Alexis dungeons. He told Tolstoy that anyone might enter the dungeons, but that only three persons in the Empire—the Tsar, the commandant, and the director of the Third Section—“having once entered them, could again leave them.”
34 Bismarck did not return the compliment; he called Gramont “the stupidest man in Europe.”
35 Tennessee alone was permitted to retain its government as originally reconstructed.
36 After his impeachment, Johnson was tried in the Senate. The votes of two thirds of the Senators were necessary to convict him and remove him from office. When the roll was called, the advocates of conviction were 1 vote short. Had the Senate convicted Johnson, “Bluff Ben” Wade, president pro tempore of the Senate, would have succeeded him as president, for the office of vice president was then vacant.
37 Four agitators were hanged for the murders of the policemen. Prince Kropotkin paid tribute to the “Chicago Martyrs” at a meeting in England to honor their memories.
38 Contemporaries noted that the delegates in the Petrograd Soviet, which waxed in power after the fall of the Tsarist régime in 1917, “had lilywhite hands which had obviously never touched lathe or plow.”
39 This strategy resembled somewhat the one which, in 1914, led to the French victory at the Marne.
40 In fairness to Louis-Napoleon, it should be noted that a number of other nineteenth-century statesmen used rouge to disguise the pallor of their complexions, among them Palmerston and Disraeli.
41 The flogging of horses made a deep impression on Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as well. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky describes how Raskolnikov, dreaming that he has become a child again, watched as drunken peasants outside a tavern beat a little mare to death. “Hit her in the face, in the eyes, in the eyes,” the nag’s owner cried, while the young Raskolnikov, horrified by the sight, “made his way screaming through the crowd to the sorrel nag, put his arms round her bleeding dead head and kissed it, kissed the eyes and the lips.” Tolstoy relates that little Pronka, his serf pupil, told him how, as he was going to school one morning, he came upon Gavruka, one of the villagers. “He was coming from the pub,” Pronka said, “as dru-u-unk as could be.” Gavruka began to beat his nag. The creature was soon in a lather, but he “kept on beating [the] horse over the eyes.” “Why should he beat it?” Pronka asked Tolstoy “He got down and just flogged it.”
42 There was in Bismarck’s rhetoric, Nietzsche said, something that “repels and disgusts. . . .” “But the Germans tolerate it” because they “are becoming militarized in the sound of their language.”
43 Of the other southern states, Baden and Hesse subscribed treaties of incorporation shortly before the Bavarian c
onvention was concluded; the instrument incorporating Württemberg was concluded shortly thereafter.
44 Lincoln’s Freevangelical politics would have enduring appeal; Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ronald Reagan were among those who in their different ways embraced his idea of an American rendezvous with destiny.
45 The former Empress Eugénie survived her husband; she died in Spain in July 1920, in her ninety-fifth year. Their son, Lulu, the former Prince Imperial, was slain by Zulu warriors while fighting with the British in South Africa in June 1879.
46 Bazaine subsequently escaped from his prison on the Ile Sainte-Marguerite, and afterwards lived in exile in Madrid.
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