Dona and her group left for the Netherlands in a specially prepared black train. To ensure the empress’s safety, the government provided her with an escort—the First Guards Regiment—to accompany her to the border and then disembark. But even this benevolent gesture was tainted by political undertones. Instead of wearing the traditional dress uniform in the presence of the empress, they wore civilian clothes. The journey through German territory was performed at breakneck speed. This was necessary to ensure the empress quitted the country while public opinion was still in her favor. With great relief, the train arrived at Amerongen the next day. In spite of the uncertainty of what lay ahead, Dona conducted herself during the journey with great dignity and restraint. Her companions chatted and played cards, but Dona isolated herself at the back of the train, attended only by Countess Keller. Those on board both pitied and were impressed by the empress, who, in spite of her great misfortune, carried herself well. That same regal bearing—the one she had shown as a child—was almost all that Dona had left for her years of exile.
Part 4
Twilight and Shadow
(1918–89)
23
The Edge of Night
(November 1918–April 1919)
Wilhelm arrived in Amerongen to a disheartening welcome. Half a dozen or so Dutch military officers confiscated most of his military property and ordered the majority of his staff back to Germany. The Dutch officers escorted him to his new home, Amerongen Castle, a four-story brick building located a few miles outside the town, belonging to the “phenomenally obliging” Count Bentinck.1108 “Now,” Wilhelm said to his aide upon arriving, rubbing his hands together, “give me a cup of real good English tea!”1109 The next day, he wrote a self-pitying note to Dona: “My reign is ended, my dog’s life is over, and has been rewarded only with betrayal and ingratitude.”1110 Though incredibly small by the standards of Wilhelm’s former homes, Amerongen was still luxurious compared to what many deposed royals were now experiencing. The castle was large enough that it was surrounded by two moats, requiring entry through a medieval-style drawbridge.
On November 28, men dressed in long black coats arrived at Amerongen from Berlin. They were representatives of the new German government, the Weimar Republic. They had come to secure Wilhelm’s signature on the abdication order, ending the reign of the Hohenzollerns once and for all. Unlike other abdications, this one was simple yet exacting.
I hereby for all the future renounce my rights to the Crown of Prussia and my consequential rights to the German Imperial Crown.
At the same time I release all officials of the German Empire and Prussia, as well as all the officers, non-commissioned officers, and men of the Navy, of the Prussian Army, and of the federal contingents, from the oath of fealty, which they have made to me as their Emperor, King and Supreme Commander.…
Given under our hand and our Imperial seal,
Wilhelm
Amerongen, November 28, 19181111
Later that same day, Dona arrived by train at the Amerongen station. She was met with a similar bare-bones welcome to what Wilhelm had received. Looking “worn and ill”1112 according to one witness, she half smiled at the aide-de-camp who was sent to meet her at the station. She was reunited with Wilhelm in the castle gardens. The ex-emperor was standing alone on the bridge over the moat surrounding their new home, leaves from the golden trees fluttering on the surface of the water. The mist that rose from the river created an almost dreamlike quality to the scene. When Wilhelm finally looked up and saw his long-suffering wife, he snapped to attention and gave her a military salute. Then, with tears in her eyes, she ran over to her husband and embraced him, reportedly for the first time in public. A week later, she wrote to her daughter, “Reunited with Papa eight days ago, praise God!”1113
The Austrian imperial family found refuge in the town of Eckartsau, taking up residence at the old imperial hunting lodge nearby. Within a few days of their departure from Vienna, the new government of German-Austria, as it was calling itself since becoming a republic on November 12, confiscated almost all of the imperial family’s assets, including their former homes. Eckartsau had the advantage—besides being remote—of being privately owned by the Habsburgs, but compared to their former palaces, it was terribly spartan. Overnight, Zita’s family lost almost everything. At their new home, they were “without fuel for the heating stoves or more than the barest necessities in the royal pantry.”1114 As Zita recalled, “Food supplies were supposed to be sent out to us from Vienna but the lorries arrived irregularly and, more than once, they were attacked and picked clean on the way. Everything else was in short supply … The electricity was more off than on and some everyday essentials like matches were missing altogether.”1115 The problem of their difficult living conditions came down to the fact that “the court exchequer had been dismissed and the new authorities in Vienna cut off the allowance for the upkeep of the dynasty.”1116 Despite the family’s hardships, Zita’s children found Eckartsau “extraordinary but still very beautiful.”1117
For the next few weeks, delegations from the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire trickled into Eckartsau. Charles met with each of them, showing his usual characteristic calm and respect for each individual. Zita’s task during this time was equally daunting. It was up to her to care for her five children, all under the age of six, while being pregnant for the sixth time. The few free minutes she had each day were spent turning the barely livable hunting lodge into a home.
Security was also an issue. Sentiments against the monarchy were rising, and there were only a handful of guards to protect the family. Their entourage, which only a number of weeks before had numbered in the hundreds, had dwindled to less than fifty. The empress feared for the safety of her family, especially after angry crowds were spotted outside the gates. To make matters worse, the drafty, damp climate at Eckartsau played havoc with the health of the emperor and the children. By Christmas, Zita was the only person in the household who had not fallen ill. “Christmas 1918 was a rather sombre festival,” she recalled, “especially as the emperor, who was anyway suffering from repeated heart attacks and overstrain, had gone down with a severe attack of Spanish influenza ten days before and was now really ill. All the children caught it as well … Charles Ludwig, for example, who was then barely eighteen months old, very nearly died.”1118
The empress was determined to give her children as happy a Christmas as possible, despite being nearly destitute from having had all their assets seized. She had a tree brought in from the forest and decorated. On Christmas Eve, she spread out a pile of tiny gifts for everyone. She recalled how they were able to provide gifts: “We had found at Eckartsau a trunk we had once used on our official journeys which was nearly full of minor presents and this came in most useful.”1119 For the servants who were with the Habsburgs, Zita gave each of them specially wrapped up scraps of chocolate that she had been saving. By Christmas Day, the emperor was dangerously sick. His fever skyrocketed. Zita’s eldest son, Otto, remembered that his father “got up for the occasion but was so weak that [he] had to remain seated in an armchair and retired again to bed immediately afterwards.”1120
The end of the Great War brought with it the end of Old Europe. Almost every monarchical power was overthrown, replaced by republics or dictatorships. The Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs had been dethroned, exiled, or executed. The federal monarchies that had made up the German Empire were dissolved and reformed into the Weimar Republic. The diverse ethnic groups that belonged to the Habsburgs for six hundred years all broke away. What had been one great empire were now half a dozen smaller nations that included Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and a unified Romania. But it was perhaps the former empire of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna that was the most tragic of all, whose rich past was now washed away in violence and bloodshed.
In Britain, whatever popularity George and Mary enjoyed in 1914 had exploded four years later. The king and queen were more popular th
an ever and planned on settling down to a quiet, retiring life to enjoy peace they had not known for years. But as the rest of the world struggled to move past the horror of the last four years, the British royal family was hit by a personal tragedy. At 5:30 a.m. on January 18, 1919, the queen received a telephone call informing her that Prince John, her youngest son, died during the night when a severe seizure caused his heart to fail. The thirteen-year-old prince had led a retiring life at Wood House; however, despite her son’s isolation, Mary suffered his death like any loving mother. She wrote to her old childhood friend, Emily Alcock.
For him it is a great release, as his malady was becoming worse as he grew older, & he has thus been spared much suffering. I cannot say how grateful we feel to God for having taken him in such a peaceful way, he just slept quietly into his heavenly home, no pain, no struggle, just peace for the poor little troubled spirit which had been a great anxiety to us for many years, ever since he was four years old—The first break in the family circle is hard to bear but people have been so kind & sympathetic & this has helped us much.1121
The private funeral for Prince John was conducted on January 21 at the church in Sandringham. Mary confided her memories about the service to her diary that night: “Canon Dalton & Dr. Brownhill conducted the service which was awfully sad and touching. Many of our own people and the villagers were present. We thanked all Johnnie’s servants who have been so good and faithful to him.”1122
The queen did not have much time to mourn the loss of John because only a few months later came the Paris Peace Conference to settle the fate of Europe after the war. Never before in history had there been the precedent of reconstruction after such wholesale devastation. In soldiers alone, there was “an awesome loss of lives. The British Empire had lost 767,000 men; France 1,383,000; the United States 81,000; Italy 564,000; Germany 1,686,000; and Russia 1,700,000. At least 1,000,000 men were missing in action, and over 12,000,000 had suffered serious injury, many maimed, blinded, or mentally unbalanced.”1123 It was estimated that Austria-Hungary had lost more than 17 percent of its active male population.1124 The humanitarian crisis that ensued after the war was equally devastating. In Russia, the hardships imposed by the war and the Bolsheviks’ brutal regime left somewhere between five and ten million people dead from starvation between 1918 and 1922.1125 One of the most pressing concerns at the time of the peace conference was the rampant Spanish influenza sweeping the globe. Despite its name, this deadly pandemic was believed to have originated somewhere in the central United States. The death toll, estimated somewhere between fifty and one hundred million, easily dwarfed those caused by the war.
At the peace conference to rebuild postwar Europe, Britain was expected to play one of the leading roles. Representing Great Britain at the bargaining table was David Lloyd George, its irascible prime minister. The conference was expected to bring together some of the greatest statesmen of the early twentieth century, including Woodrow Wilson of the United States and Georges Clemenceau of France. Germany was forced to take responsibility for the war. Austria-Hungary, though, suffered the worst breakup. It lost all of its territories that did not have a majority of ethnic Germans. The new state of German-Austria (which was renamed the Republic of Austria a few months later) was reduced to less than half of its former size with no access to the Adriatic Sea. Semiautonomous regions were absorbed into neighboring Allied nations, such as Italy and Romania. Despite the meager portions that some of the smaller Allies received, Great Britain emerged victorious as Europe’s only remaining imperial power. In addition to its own overseas territories, the empire received Germany’s colonies in Africa. With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire—the Porte would completely disintegrate in 1922—Britain also became the dominant power in the Middle East. Over the course of the next twenty-five years, British foreign policy in places like Iran and Palestine would fundamentally shape global events well into the twenty-first century.
During the conference, Mary and George played host to an old friend—Queen Marie of Romania, another granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the king’s first cousin. Marie used her stay at Buckingham Palace to launch a whirlwind campaign to gain British support for war-ravaged Romania. Marie remarked about the “tremendous emotion” of arriving in London after so many years away, where she was “greeted at the station by George and May, with a crowd of officials and many, many friends.”1126 Her visit to London lasted only a few days before she returned to Paris for the remainder of the conference, which had become mired in petty squabbles among the delegates. The stalled peace process weighed heavily on Queen Mary’s mind. “Alas,” she wrote to an old American friend, “the end of the war seems to have brought great unrest behind it, it seems such a pity that all classes had worked so well during the war, it is not possible now to work for the reconstruction of the world—it would have been a splendid opportunity to have come together.”1127
With much of the world’s attention fixed on the high-stakes negotiations taking place in Paris, few noticed that the British Empire was beginning to crumble, despite its territorial acquisitions at the bargaining table. The high mortality rate of conscripted Indian soldiers during the war led to a resurgence of anti-British activity in India, which was only made worse by the brutal, almost dictatorial rule that the British colonial government established in 1918. Complete press censorship, arrests without warrants or trials, and martial law turned British India into a powder keg that exploded in 1919 after the massacre in the city of Amritsar in northwestern India. What began as anti-British demonstrations turned violent when five Englishmen were killed. An English female missionary who just happened to be riding her bike nearby was violently assaulted. The retribution a week later by the British government was brutal. As tens of thousands of people crammed into a public garden known as the Jallianwala Bagh near the Golden Temple, British officers opened fire on the crowds at point-blank range. Terrified people literally trampled one another to death as they desperately fought to reach the exits; some were shot as they tried climbing over the garden wall. After six minutes of horrific bloodshed, 379 people were dead, with another 1,500 wounded. The loss of life and the attacks Britain received from the world were harsh reminders that, although the British monarchy was the strongest in the world, in the postwar years, its empire was being shaken to its very foundations.
The New Year brought little relief to Empress Zita of Austria and her family. In spite of her best efforts, Christmas had been exceptionally gloomy. It was becoming obvious that the hunting lodge at Eckartsau was by no means a permanent home. Its damp climate became inhospitable as the temperature outside plummeted. It was also becoming increasingly difficult to heat the building, forcing the young children to huddle together for warmth.
Any hope that Charles and Zita may have had of permanently settling their family abroad was dashed when Swiss authorities went back on a previous offer of total asylum. Instead, the most they would offer the family were traveling visas. In February 1919, the need to get out of the country became more pressing when the first democratic elections were held in Austria. The result was an overwhelming majority for the Socialists, who were antagonistic toward the members of the Habsburg family. A few weeks later, the government passed the Habsburg Law of 1919, forbidding any Habsburgs from entering Austria without renouncing their imperial titles. The government went a step further and confiscated all the land belonging to the members of the imperial family. Estimates at the time placed the worth of these estates at well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Years later, Archduke Otto wrote that everything, even “all the data of the family including the family archives have been taken from us by the Republic of Austria so that we have none.”1128
Internationally, the emperor and empress continued to come under fire, but unlike the slanders against Nicholas and Alexandra (which had some elements of truth), those being made against the Habsburgs were totally unfounded. One American newspaper ran a story in February 1919 claiming “that former Austr
ian emperor Karl is contemplating seeking a divorce from his wife, Zita, on the grounds that she assisted Italian victories” during the war.1129 Those who knew the emperor and empress refused to acknowledge such slander since divorce completely went against what they both believed about marriage. Their continued devotion to one another through their trials also helped dispel the divorce rumors.
The safety of Zita’s family seemed to be in danger until help arrived on February 15. Strangely enough, that help did not come from the Austrians, the Hungarians, or even the Swiss. Instead, the two people who took up the cause of the Austrian imperial family were none other than King George V and Queen Mary. George had very strong feelings when it came to Charles. According to Empress Zita’s official biographer Gordon Brook-Shepherd,
the King nursed a distinctly uneasy conscience over his reluctance to support a rescue bid for his cousin, Tsar Nicholas, the year before. The butchery of the Russian Emperor and his family at Ekaterinburg by Bolshevik thugs had brought soul-searching as well as shock. There was no blood tie between the houses of Windsor and Habsburg and, moreover, they had fought for four bitter years in opposite camps. But the King had not forgotten that, as Archduke Karl, newly-engaged to his Bourbon Princess, the beleaguered squire of Eckartsau had attended his coronation in London (indeed, for the procession, he had been placed in the carriage immediately in front of those carrying the British royal family). But the events of the summer of 1918 rather than those of the summer of 1911 were uppermost in the King’s mind now. When told that Eckartsau could easily become a second Ekaterinburg, he hastily arranged for emergency military protection.1130
Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires Page 54
