In hopes of resuscitating the idea of an alliance, Vicky asked the kaiser to meet the British ambassador, Sir Frank Lascelles, at her home, Schloss Friedrichshof, near Frankfurt, in mid-August. Lascelles was, in many respects, Wilhelm’s perfect ambassador. An old-school diplomat who had previously served in St. Petersburg, he was scrupulously polite and congenial, and regarded his prime function as to establish the best relations he could with the kaiser. He noted that24 the kaiser really took notice of only four ambassadors: the Italian, the Austrian, the Russian and himself. He had also come to believe that beneath all the sound and fury, Wilhelm sincerely loved England, and as a result the ambassador made himself an ever-available ear and tactful filter between the kaiser and the British government. Years later, he told Philipp zu Eulenburg25 that if he’d reported everything Wilhelm had said to him in the twelve years he spent in Berlin, England and Germany would have been at war twenty times over. The kaiser regularly subjected Lascelles to earfuls of enthusiasm, or fury, at all times of the day or night. Other embassy staff were less enthused. Shortly after the Kruger telegram in early 1896, Wilhelm turned up at 10 p.m. and stayed until 1:30, helping himself to whisky and cigars and talking for hours “about Grand Mamma and26 Cowes and Lord Dunraven and his journey in Cumberland,” while the embassy staff stood and listened and longed for him to leave.
Though Bülow had tried to remind him to be calm and collected, within minutes Wilhelm launched into a tirade about Britain’s “scant consideration,” and the “curt refusal which His demands usually met with.” Lascelles tried to explain that the British had found the German demands for African territory “exorbitant.” But he added cautiously that there might be those in England who would support a strictly defensive alliance which would come into force only if one side were attacked by two other powers simultaneously. The problem with saying things like this to Wilhelm was that he heard what he wanted to hear. The next day he sent Lascelles a telegram thanking him for his “energetic intercession” and looking forward to a “favourable conclusion.” The day after, there was another enthusiastic telegram telling a bemused Lascelles that he’d given “instructions”27 to London and Berlin. With that, Wilhelm set off on a tour of the Holy Land, which climaxed in his grand entry into Jerusalem.
He returned to Europe in autumn to find Britain on the point of war with France over a solitary little fort in the middle of nowhere in southern Sudan called Fashoda. Fashoda was the point where French plans to dominate Africa east to west, from Dakar to Djibouti, intersected with British plans to connect South Africa to Cairo. A French troop occupied the fort; a British one sat outside it—very politely.* Back in Europe, however, French and British public opinion was hysterical about the threat from the other—demonstrating the pitch to which imperial competition had come. Then, in early November, the French government became engulfed in the latest fall-out from the Dreyfus case and reluctantly withdrew. Though the crisis had passed, Wilhelm wrote to his mother—expecting her to send the letter on to the queen, as she did—encouraging the British to go to war with France. “The moment28—militarily spoken—is well chosen as nobody will dream of helping France … I of course in private as Grandmama’s grandson will pray for the success of her arms with all my heart … Officially as the head of the German Empire I would uphold a strict and benevolent neutrality. Should a second Power think fit to attack England from the rear, whilst it is fighting, I would act according to our arrangements made with Sir Frank Lascelles.”
Poor Sir Frank. What “arrangements,” the queen and Salisbury wanted to know? Lascelles tried to resolve the misunderstanding, not entirely successfully. At dinner in mid-December, Wilhelm firstly told him that Britain was about to go to war with France, a pronouncement “I attempted, though I am afraid in vain, to combat.” Then, when Lascelles suggested that perhaps Wilhelm might have “attributed too great importance to what I then said” at their August meeting, the kaiser explained that the agreement was that “if either of our two countries were to be attacked by two powers at the same time the other would come to its assistance, and that he would be prepared to act accordingly.” Trying not to look completely dazed, Lascelles said carefully that while this might be a possible starting point for negotiation, he of course had no authority to make such an agreement. Wilhelm said he understood, but naturally if England was ever in danger, he “would certainly come to her assistance.” Lascelles reminded Wilhelm that the German ambassador had recently said that the Germans believed that “no formal agreement was necessary between England and Germany” because if it came to a war, such arrangements could be made “in 24 hours.” “Half an hour,”29 Wilhelm said. A few days later he wrote to his mother that as a result of his “understanding” with Lascelles, he had been able to inform the Russian ambassador that England was about to attack France but that Germany and Russia could remain uninvolved because it would take place on water.
Lascelles wasn’t the only one who found the kaiser exhausting to deal with. Bülow found managing him far more difficult and time-consuming than he had expected—especially over Britain. “You cannot have the faintest idea what I have prevented,” he grumbled to Eulenburg, “and how much of my time I must devote to restoring order where our All Highest master has created chaos.” At the same time, the endemic intrigue in the German court meant Bülow felt obliged to devote a great deal of time to staying in his master’s favour. “No one,” one member of Wilhelm’s entourage observed, “could fail to admire—though it shook one’s confidence—the inconceivable skill with which he would almost imperceptibly shift his ground whenever he had inadvertently expressed an opinion which did not quite find favour with the Emperor, and veer to his side.”30 He would even change his trousers if Wilhelm happened to express a dislike for their particular shade of grey. It was by no means always clear who was the manipulator and who the manipulated.
Months after the war with France failed to materialize, Wilhelm was still telling anyone who would listen that Britain had missed a perfect opportunity to annihilate France. The reason, he claimed, was that Grandmama refused to31 forgo her annual holiday in the South of France.
At the end of August 1898 Nicholas astonished the world by proposing an international conference to discuss disarmament and “universal peace.” His open letter described nations “building terrible engines of destruction,” which were “transforming the armed peace into a crushing burden that weighs on all nations and if prolonged will lead inevitably to the very catastrophe which it is desired to avert.”32 To publicize his initiative, Nicholas took the unprecedented step of giving no fewer than three audiences to the most famous journalist in the English-speaking world, W. T. Stead, the man who had campaigned against slavery in the Congo, exposed child prostitution in London, and turned Gordon of Khartoum into a saint. The excitable Stead was completely starstruck. He gushed about Nicholas’s perceptiveness, his modesty, his disarmament ideas, his desire to be on good terms with England, his conviction that Queen Victoria was “the greatest living33 statesman,” and pronounced himself “grateful to God that such a man sits upon the Russian throne.”
Nicholas had been inspired by the writings of a Polish banker and railway entrepreneur called Ivan Bloch, whose six-volume tome La Guerre future—published in English as Is War Now Impossible?—painted a grim picture of the consequences of a full-scale European conflict, pointed out how crushing the costs of defence spending were becoming to all European states, and argued that war must become impossible. Bloch managed to get an audience with the tsar—despite being Jewish—and Nicholas had been horrified, not so much by the projected casualties, as by Bloch’s all-too-convincing predictions of social collapse and revolution. The Russian government knew only too well how defence spending could impact on an economy. Its vast expenditure on its western frontier with Germany, for example, was directly reducing the money available for internal development.
Across Europe there was an enormously positive response from the public and press. W
hat Bloch and Nicholas described seemed frighteningly true: nations were at each other’s throats; the largest, richest manufacturers in Europe were now armaments companies: German Krupp, British Vickers Maxim and French Schneider-Creusot. It was no accident that 1898 was the year H. G. Wells published the mother of all invasion-scare novels, The War of the Worlds, with its devastating death rays and mass destruction. In certain lights the future looked pretty scary. The political elite, however, was more cynical and resistant. Vicky, who saw some merit in the idea, pointed out to her mother, “Nicky is quite34 against constitutions and liberty for Russia … peace seems hardly in accordance with the oppression and suffering of a race still governed by despotism.” Edward was convinced it was a “dodge” cooked up by the unscrupulous foreign minister, Muraviev: “It is the greatest rubbish and nonsense I ever heard of … the thing is simply impossible … France could never consent to it—nor we.”35 When Nicholas met George at their Danish grandmother Amama’s funeral in September, and tried to persuade him to head the British campaign (somewhat paradoxically, since what Nicholas had always liked about George was that he made no political demands upon him), Edward flatly refused. As for Wilhelm, he was disgusted. “Imagine!”36 he scolded Nicholas. “A monarch dissolving his regiments sacred with a hundred years of history and handing them over to Anarchists and Democracy!”
Cynicism was not entirely misplaced. The Russian government’s chief reason for taking up the idea was its discovery that the Austrian army was about to adopt a new generation of rapid-fire field guns, which Russia, currently rearming its infantry, simply couldn’t afford. And when, a couple of months before the Hague peace conference took place in May 1899, the British ambassador in St. Petersburg raised the issue of the four new battleships Russia had commissioned, Nicholas replied that it wasn’t the right moment for “exchanging views37 about a mutual curtailment of naval programmes.” By then, the tsar’s enthusiasm had waned when, according to the British Russia expert Donald Mackenzie Wallace, it had been pointed out to him that the proposed alternative to war—an arbitration court—would undermine38 the intrinsic superiority of the Great Powers, since small countries would have just as much muscle as big ones; and that there were thirty outstanding small disputes with other Asian powers which Russia would almost certainly lose in arbitration. Nor did he like being hailed as a hero by European socialists.
All the major European nations and America felt obliged to send delegations to the Hague conference, but most of the government delegates were pro-war and the proposals were endlessly watered down. Disarmament disappeared from the agenda, and the modest suggestion to freeze arms levels was almost universally opposed. The German delegation was particularly obstructive, utterly opposed even to the idea of arbitration, which Wilhelm claimed was an infringement of his divine right.* Within six months of the conference, Russia would be sending large numbers of troops into Manchuria, and Britain would be at war in Southern Africa—both would prove horribly expensive mistakes in all senses. Despite the grim credibility of Bloch’s arguments, no European government would accept the idea of arms reduction. Writing in the Contemporary Review in 1901, he put his failure down to the fact that his ideas ran too much counter to “the vested interests of the most powerful class of the community,” and “the steadfastness with which the military caste clings to the memory of a state of things which has already passed away.”
The truth was there were highly influential voices within the international political elite proclaiming the inevitability and even the morality of war. It wasn’t just the chauvinistic German historian Treitschke—required reading for all German army officers and government officials—who insisted that states existed in a constant state of Hobbesian conflict and that war purified and united, ennobled and invigorated, and that too much peace led to decadence. In all the colonial and would-be colonial states, war had become legitimized as a test of national racial fitness, and pronounced inevitable as a vital mode of natural selection by the idea of Social Darwinism—which also, by no coincidence, legitimized the domination of “backward” and “inferior” races by “advanced,” “superior” ones. Theodore Roosevelt had told the American Naval War College in 1897, “No triumph39 of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war … the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, then … it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best,” and the rest of the country had applauded. And in an article implicitly critical of the peace conference, the admired naval historian Alfred Mahan, whose single vote at the Hague conference was said to have prevented the banning of “asphyxiating gas,” described war as an “honest collision”40 between nations, a “heroic idea” and a “law of progress.”
That’s not to say that everyone who believed in the inevitability of war wanted it right now. It was dawning on Queen Victoria, for example, that her German grandson showed a worrying propensity to create conflict where it wasn’t wanted. In March 1899 she wrote to Nicholas warning him that Wilhelm took
every opportunity41 of impressing upon Sir F. Lascelles that Russia is doing all in her power to work against us; that she offers alliances to other Powers and has made one with the Ameer of Afghanistan against us. I need not say that I do not believe a word of this, neither do Lord Salisbury nor Sir F. Lascelles. But I am afraid William may go and tell things against us to you, just as he does about you to us. If so, pray tell me openly and confidentially. It is so important that we should understand each other, and that such mischievousness and unstraightforward proceedings should be put a stop to. You are so true yourself, that I am sure you will be shocked at this.
It was an extraordinary thing to do in view of the queen’s lifelong antipathy to Russia and her sense of kinship with Germany. But Wilhelm had worn her down. He had recently been sending her messages that Russia was about to attack Northern India. Neither Salisbury nor she believed him, it was just, she wrote, another attempt “to set [Russia]42 against us.”
Nicholas’s reply confirmed the queen’s suspicions:
I am so happy43 you told me in that open way about Wilhelm. Now I fully understand what he is up to—it is a dangerous double game he is playing at. I heard very much the same from Count Osten-Sacken from Berlin about the English policy, as what you and Lord Salisbury must have learnt from Sir F Lascelles about us. I am very glad you did not believe the story of the alleged alliance between us and the Amire [sic] of Afghanistan, for there is not a syllable of truth in it. As you know, dearest Grandmama, all I am striving at now is for the longest possible prolongation of peace in this world.
Anglo-Russian relations had not themselves been in an especially happy place. The British Foreign Office knew the Russians had offered to help44 the French military during Fashoda, and the two sides were still locked in furious rivalry over China, but they had agreed to try to negotiate a settlement, to split China into a Russian sphere of influence north of the Great Wall and a British one south of it. The British hadn’t really wanted it, but at least it promised to put a curb on Russian expansion. “All that Russia45 wants,” Nicholas told the queen, “is to be left quiet and to develop her position in the sphere of interest which concerns her being so close to Siberia.” The negotiations had been tortuous. “Mouravieff [sic] is a terrible46 trickster, and always contrives on some plea or other to put off the final meeting,” one British minister commented. At least part of the delay was due to an internal power struggle between Muraviev, who believed Russia needed a hiatus to establish itself in Manchuria without constant international hostility, and Witte, who was utterly against limiting Russia’s railway and financial expansion in China. The agreement, a historic one between England and Russia, was signed—after the Foreign Office delivered a blunt, irritated ultimatum—in April 1899.
Wilhelm, meanwhile, remained in the queen’s bad books. It was not just the going behind her back and the lame attempts to set her against Russia. They had also argued when Affie’s only son had killed himself in the early New Ye
ar of 1899,* leaving the duchy of Coburg without a direct male heir. The queen was exasperated by Wilhelm’s lack of sympathy and they clashed over who should inherit. She wanted the duchy to go to one of her other sons, Arthur of Connaught or Leopold, or their sons. Wilhelm threatened to pass a law to make it impossible for a foreigner to inherit. The queen retaliated by not inviting him to her eightieth birthday celebrations in May. Wilhelm saw this as a personal rejection, and it set off another geyser of resentment, antipathy and suspicion. He summoned the British military attaché, Colonel Sir James Grierson, and calmly told him that it would be impossible for him to come to his grandmother’s birthday party, or to visit England at all, while Salisbury, “his consistent47 enemy,” with his “disgraceful” foreign policy, remained prime minister. He had, he continued, been England’s “one true friend” for years, but had “received nothing in return but ingratitude.” One day, he told Grierson, England would be sorry. Then he began to talk about Joseph Chamberlain and the City, saying they wanted to go to war with Germany because it had fewer ships than France. The kaiser, Grierson reported, was perfectly friendly, but “from the above, Your Excellency will not fail to see that his Majesty was talking somewhat at random.” Privately, Grierson told his friend Arthur Bigge, the queen’s deputy private secretary, that he had not reported everything that Wilhelm had said, and that he seriously wondered if the emperor might be slightly mad.48
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