The Three Emperors

by Miranda Carter

  From all over Russia they cried for it, they begged for it, and around me many—very many—held the same views … There was no other way out than to cross oneself and give what everyone was asking for. My only consolation is that such is the will of God, and this grave decision will lead my dear Russia out of the intolerable chaos she has been in for nearly a year.501

  For Nicholas the manifesto, which he signed on 30 October (17 October in the Julian calendar), signified absolute failure, and the abandonment of a 600-year-old sacred birthright.

  * Only the Great Powers were regarded as important enough to deserve “ambassadors;” smaller countries made do with “ministers.”

  † The situation was resolved only when the Americans and Germans began to complain that the Russian definition of contraband—which turned out to be just about anything that could be put on a boat—was too elastic and they wanted their ships back too.

  * He probably meant serment, which is French for “oath.”

  * Roosevelt, who though he’d never met him got the point about Wilhelm, told his friend the British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, “It is a wild67 nightmare to suppose that he can use me to the detriment of any other nation.”

  * The Prussian representative chamber which still had a limited franchise and gave an equal number of seats to the Junker aristocracy as to the lower estates.

  12

  CONTINENTAL SHIFTS

  1906–8

  The problem with aggressive programmes of imperial expansion in distant places is that, when they go wrong, the consequences are felt much closer to home. Russia had already experienced the bitter results of an imperial misadventure; now it was Germany’s turn. In early 1906 the Great Powers met at the Spanish town of Algeciras for a conference to resolve the status of Morocco and France’s attempts to surreptitiously turn it into a French protectorate. The conference happened because Wilhelm’s visit to Tangier and Germany’s subsequent threats had blackmailed France into agreeing to it—not an auspicious genesis for such an event. And so it would play out: for Germany what had felt like a master stroke, exposing French imperial ambitions, defeating them and flexing its own military muscle all at the same time, would end in the biggest diplomatic reversal since unification. By the time the conference was in its second week, Germany had alienated almost all the other delegates by giving the impression that it was happy to hold Europe hostage with war threats, by seeming openly opportunistic, by being abrupt and inconsistent and by refusing everyone else’s proposals. “Germany’s conduct,”1 the chief American delegate wrote to President Roosevelt, was “paltry and unworthy of a great power.” The British, whom the Germans had hoped to split from France, had thrown themselves in with France from the start, convinced from the first that the whole thing was a ploy to destroy the Entente Cordiale.

  The German delegation’s line—or lack of it—at Algeciras was an example of the muddle that seemed to reign at the top of the German government. Is wasn’t clear what they wanted: a war? To humiliate France? Free trade? Or a role in running the Moroccan government? The Foreign Office was in confusion. The foreign minister, Oswald von Richthofen, had died of overwork the previous year. His replacement, Tschirrsky, a favourite of Wilhelm’s, was out of his depth and Bülow hated him. Holstein was tired, frustrated and sick of Wilhelm and Bülow’s vanity—the chancellor appeared to base his day-to-day instructions on how the European press covered him personally. No one was pleased to see Eulenburg back and apparently advising Wilhelm again. The only consensus was that mediatory behaviour would be a sign of weakness.2 Germany’s position pushed the new British Liberal government, which had won a landslide at elections in January, straight into the arms of France. In fact, the new foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, immediately summoned Metternich, the German ambassador, and told him that should—perish the thought—Germany go to war with France, Britain would find it very hard to stand by and do nothing. German aggression delivered the Italians, Germany’s Triple Alliance allies, to the other side. It eventually forced the Russians into the French camp too. The Russians had been desperate not to have to take sides at Algeciras, as Russia was still fighting its revolution and needed to be on good terms with everyone. But it also needed a loan, which the French cleverly refused to finalize until the conference was over. When, in February 1906, the Russians asked the Germans to consider giving way a little so the proceedings might come to an end, Bülow reacted furiously, and told the Russian ambassador that, having forced France to the table, there could be no compromise. It was “a question of honour3 for us and especially for the Kaiser;” the Russians ought to put pressure on the French instead. Yet he might have bought the support Germany so needed with a little more tact and an offer of a German loan. When the conference dribbled into April, Sergei Witte and Vladimir Lamsdorff decided they had to back France simply to bring it to an end. Isolated save for Austria and Morocco, Germany finally had to agree to a face-saving solution which gave the French a protectorate in all but name, but guaranteed free trade and German investments.

  Algeciras was an absolute disaster for the Germans: it was a public humiliation and it immeasurably tightened the Entente. Tschirrsky moaned that the whole of Europe had turned against them. The country was furious and disappointed. The press blamed Bülow and Wilhelm. Significant parts of the German General Staff felt that an opportunity to have a war with France and “settle” it once and for all, or at least to not lose face—had been squandered, because Wilhelm and Bülow had shrunk 4from the logical consequences of their actions. Eulenburg told Wilhelm he should sack Bülow for mishandling the affair, and suggested Bülow had done so to force Wilhelm into line. Rather conveniently, Bülow collapsed dramatically at the Reichstag in the middle of a speech claiming that Germany was as satisfied with the outcome as France—his words were greeted by jeers. He remained out of politics until October, though not before he’d made Holstein—who by the end of the conference had been demanding they send troops into France—the official scapegoat and forced him to resign. Holstein, unaware of the author of his demise, blamed Eulenburg.

  Exhibiting his usual perspective, Wilhelm said the whole of Europe had betrayed him—especially the monarchs, despite “all his attempts to curry favour with them,” and it was “unpardonable” that Russia had ranged itself “recklessly on the side of the powers hostile to Germany.” But most of all he was convinced that the outcome demonstrated his uncle’s “machinations” against him.

  During the conference Edward had written to Wilhelm to congratulate him on his forty-second birthday. “We are—my5 dear William—such old friends and near relations that I feel sure that the affectionate feelings which have always existed may invariably continue, be assured that this country has never had any aggressive feelings toward yours, and that the idle gossip and silly tittle tattle on the subject emanates from mischief-makers and ought never to be listened to.” Wilhelm replied, “The whole letter6 breathed such an atmosphere of kindness and warm, sympathetic friendship that it constitutes the most cherished gift among my presents … it is my most earnest endeavour and wish to remain in peace with all Countries, especially my neighbours!” Both letters, paradigms of insincerity, demonstrated only how much the two men disliked each other and how little they had to say to each other.

  When Alfonso XIII, King of Spain, announced he was marrying a British princess in March, Wilhelm decided that Edward had manipulated the Spanish into backing the French at the conference (he himself had been trying to persuade Alfonso to marry a German princess for similar reasons). “All the wretched7 degenerate Latin peoples have become instruments in England’s hands in order to combat German trade in the Mediterranean.” When Edward went to Rome on his annual Mediterranean cruise, Wilhelm, in a spiralling state of near hysteria, told his suite that his uncle was “carrying on against8 him … The whole press of the world, including that of America, had already been mobilized against him by English money, and it was extraordinary how much personal animosity his u
ncle’s attitude revealed.” He told them, “He is a Satan; you can hardly believe what a Satan he is.” There was one genuine reason, however, to feel anxious about British plans: in February they had launched the Dreadnought, a new generation of warship—vast, armoured and carrying big guns—which immediately threatened to make obsolete everything that had come before.

  Even Wilhelm’s own staff considered Algeciras a victory for Edward—even though he’d played no role in it at all. The king had “a clear, practical9 knowledge of men and facts,” the comptroller of Wilhelm’s household, Robert zu Zedlitz-Trützschler, wrote in his diary. “The Emperor on the other hand, has remained a complete stranger to the realities of life, and the value of the purity and virtue of his private life is really discounted by his hypocrisy and pharisaical unctuousness.”

  After Algeciras, the German government seemed to be pulled in two directions: on the one hand, there were those who accepted that sabre-rattling hadn’t worked, and that something needed to be done to defuse the tensions the conference had produced; on the other, there was a feeling that Germany hadn’t played hard enough, that the government had pusillanimously shied away from the logical consequence of its policy—war with France. Tschirrsky, Eulenburg and Metternich, the eminently sensible, plain-speaking ambassador in London, were in the first camp; many of the German officer class were in the second. After fifteen years under the command of General Alfred von Schlieffen, the senior army staff constituted a small Junker elite obsessed with its own privileges and superiority, fearing and fending off dilution by the middle classes, utterly opposed to socialism, which it regarded as degenerate, saturated in the ideas of the nationalist historian Treitschke—who saw Europe as a Hobbesian battlefield where might was everything and the Slav the enemy—and actively welcoming war as a force that would cleanse Germany inside and out. Wilhelm had just replaced the retiring Schlieffen—the appointment was entirely in his gift—with Helmuth von Moltke, who was the nephew of the elder Moltke who had delivered the Prussian victories of the 1860s. Within the army Moltke was regarded as a controversial choice: not quite tough enough, and a little too arty—he played the cello, liked to paint and read Goethe. In other respects he was absolutely a product of the solipsistic world of the German General Staff; different only in that he didn’t welcome the European war that he thought was inevitable. He had told Wilhelm it would be apocalyptically awful, and even the victor would emerge exhausted. But he considered that the sooner it came the better, and that Germany would probably have to attack first. The kaiser had told him that he absolutely agreed. It’s hard not to feel that he found Moltke’s gloomy fatalism rather bracing; it made him feel serious and fatalistic too.

  But though Wilhelm indulged in violent rhetoric, like most of the country including the government and press, he was in reality caught in a muddle between the would-be negotiators and the warmongers: furiously disappointed, teetering between a desire for better relations with the rest of Europe and a lurking sense that if they’d risked a little more they’d have got what they wanted. “In his heart of10 hearts it is true the Emperor does not want to go to war,” Zedlitz-Trützschler wrote, almost regretfully, “because he knows perfectly well how stupendous the crisis would be, but he always wants to achieve great objects with the smallest trouble, and win laurels without danger … he never learns; he deceives himself and is deceived by others.”

  Through the summer of 1906 the language of moderation gradually returned to foreign relations. The new British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, assured Metternich that he didn’t want conflict with Germany, and an attempt was made to repair Edward and Wilhelm’s relationship, which was publicly acknowledged to have become so bad that a cartoon appeared in a German magazine, Lustige Blätter, in August 1906, showing Edward poring over a map of Europe, trying to find a route that would get him to Marienbad without seeing Wilhelm, and hitting on Berlin. “I’m sure not to find him there.” It was arranged that they would meet briefly in mid-August, at the German spa town of Homburg, when Edward was en route to Marienbad.

  Neither looked forward to the event. “Meetings with Edward have no lasting value, because he is envious,”11 Wilhelm scribbled. Edward grumbled that Wilhelm would inevitably spring some awful surprise on him. The kaiser spent most of the occasion teasing Lascelles and laughing about the latest Hague peace conference. He said he had “not the slightest intention of diminishing the armaments of Germany in any way or sort, and that he was quite convinced that if he did it would mean war with some European power.” After lunch he drove Edward off to show him his latest passion, a Roman fort he’d “excavated” and rebuilt at Saalberg. Possibly because Edward could now not bring himself to raise “difficult subjects” like politics with Wilhelm, the visit was said to have gone well. But Fritz Ponsonby felt “There was thunder in the air.”12 (The following summer of 1907 the kaiser laid on 50,000 soldiers and a three-hour march-past, which left Edward grumpily longing for his lunch. Once again, the two men studiously avoided all references to political questions.) A brief visit could not dislodge a growing conviction in Germany that Edward was the sharp end of British foreign policy, committed to encircling Germany—a revival of the old fear of being vulnerably in the middle of the Central European plain. Now Edward’s every visit to the continent sparked reports in the German press that he was negotiating a new secret deal. When he met the Italian king in Rome in the spring of 1907, the Neue Freie Presse wrote:

  Who can fail13 to receive the impression that a diplomatic duel is being fought out between England and Germany under the eyes of the world? The King of England, however, is in serious earnest over the duel, and is no longer afraid of appearing to throw the whole influence of his personality into the scales whenever it is a question of thwarting the aims of German policy … already people are anxiously asking themselves everywhere: What is the meaning of this continual political labour, carried on with open recklessness, whose object is to put a close ring round Germany?

  Another German paper called Edward a “twentieth-century Napoleon,” using diplomacy rather than arms to subjugate Germany. When he went on to see Franz Joseph after the German visit of 1907, the Berlin court was full of rumours that he was now trying to detach Austria from Germany.

  Most of the time Edward wasn’t politicking at all, but there were occasions when he encouraged the confusion. Immediately after meeting Wilhelm in 1907, he was seen in Marienbad with the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, and then the Russian foreign minister. The king, moreover, had publicly associated himself with outspokenly anti-German British public figures such as Admiral Jackie Fisher, who had a bad habit of calling for pre-emptive strikes on the German navy; Sir Charles Hardinge; and Lord Esher, who served on the Committee of Imperial Defence, the institution charged with defining military strategy. After Algeciras, Esher had written in his diary, “L’Allemagne, c’est l’Ennemie14, and there is no doubt on that subject. They mean to have a powerful fleet and commercially to beat us out of the field before ten years are over our heads.” These men didn’t view war with the enthusiasm of some of the German General Staff, but they did see Germany as a threat to be energetically countered.

  Sir Edward Grey did nothing to counter the impression of Edward’s influence or that Britain was increasingly suspicious of Germany. A shy, ascetic, hard-working forty-four-year-old aristocrat from Northumberland whose main passions were bird-watching and fishing, he hated foreign travel even more than Lansdowne had and spoke no foreign languages. He was happy for the king to do the visiting while he laboured over the mountainous piles of Foreign Office paperwork, because ultimately he didn’t think the visits mattered. “Germany,” he wrote after Algeciras, “is our worst enemy and our greatest danger … The majority [of Germans] dislike us so intensely that the friendship of their Emperor or the Court cannot really be useful to us.” In some respects he was right—Edward didn’t make policy and German antipathy towards Britain had spread well beyond the court—but the king’
s trips did help to focus and concentrate German anxiety about Britain. Grey, meanwhile, had regarded Algeciras as a deliberate attempt by the Germans to sabotage the Entente, and distrusted Germany. As a young minister in the early 1890s, he had experienced at first hand the German Foreign Office’s attempts to extract advantage by threat. His staff agreed with him. In 1907 the Foreign Office expert on Germany, Eyre Crowe, wrote a report on Germany concluding that it was “consciously aiming at the establishment of a German hegemony at first in Europe, and eventually in the World.”15 During Algeciras Grey had taken the momentous decision of agreeing to secret talks between the French and British military about how the British army might help if France was attacked by Germany. Only the Liberal prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, one other minister and the king were informed. Grey made it a condition that Britain would not automatically intervene if Germany attacked France, because he thought this might encourage the French to instigate conflict themselves. Edward disliked the secrecy; Campbell-Bannerman worried that simply having the conversations would create a sense of obligation to France—as indeed it would prove. It was a question Grey would wrestle with for the rest of his life. “With more experience,”16 he admitted years later, “I might have shared that apprehension.”

  Well into 1906 the Russian government was still fighting to quell the revolution. It did so, the British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice told King Edward, by employing “the most violent17 and unscrupulous methods,” including encouraging extreme-right groups to attack leftist revolutionaries, and exploiting anti-Semitism as a way of rallying “patriotic Russians”—there were 690 pogroms18 in the two weeks after the October manifesto was announced. The worst, in Odessa, was encouraged by pamphlets paid for by the government and printed by the local police. Nicholas, rationalizing the pogroms with a mixture of wilful blindness and naïveté, told his mother they were the result of “a whole mass19 of loyal people suddenly making their presence felt … nine-tenths of the troublemakers are Jews, the people’s whole anger turned against them. That’s how the pogroms happened. It’s amazing how they took place simultaneously in all the towns of Russia and Siberia.”