Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  The issue divided the generals and had begun to appear in the press, as Waldersee recorded on 23 October:

  In the press great efforts are made to stamp the bombardment of Paris as barbarous. Doubtless female intrigues are behind this and this time in a wonderful way the Queen and the Crown Princess are of the same opinion. I know with certainty that Stosch, who attaches himself gladly to the Crown Prince, is involved in this. He turns out to be the most effective ally because he can say that all the railroad trains and other means of transport are needed for victualling. Well, we certainly have to live first before we can shoot, so he alone can hold everything up. There are other conflicts, for example, Headquarters v Blumenthal; almost all officers against Roon.138

  While the Prussian victorious progress stalled amidst disagreements and unfavourable publicity, on 9 November 1870 the Russian government renounced the Black Sea Treaty of 1856, which had been imposed upon it after the defeat in the Crimean War. The flagrant gesture of defiance put the English cabinet in an awkward position. The French Empire under Napoleon III with whom Britain had fought the war had ceased to exist, and the new Republic—occupied and humiliated—had no energy to worry about the eastern Mediterranean. Liberal Prime Minister Gladstone and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, decided to send Odo Russell to Prussian HQ to sound out Bismarck on the matter. In London the government believed that he had secretly urged the Russians to use the favourable diplomatic situation to wipe out the shame of 1856.139 Lady Emily Russell wrote to her mother-in-law, the formidable Lady William Russell: ‘It is curious, isn’t it? that he should be going to grapple with Bismarck which is what he said he wished to do beyond everything and this before he is ambassador to Berlin.’140 Odo Russell became an intimate of Bismarck in a way no other foreign diplomat did and his observations of his extraordinary friend provide one of the best insights into the Bismarck of the 1870s and early 1880s.

  Odo William Leopold Russell (1829–84) belonged to the first family of English Whiggery, the Russells, who were the Dukes of Bedford and who inhabited at Woburn one of the great lordly houses of England. His father, who had been the British ambassador at Berlin (1835–41), died when Odo was 13 and his powerful and eccentric mother, Lady William, decided to educate her three boys in civilized places, not barbarous English public schools. Richard Davenport-Hines in his biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography writes that ‘as a result he had nothing of the muddied English oaf about him. He seldom took exercise. He spoke French, Italian, and German with exceptional purity, though his English accent was always tinged with continental inflexions.’141 A flavour of Lady William’s character comes from a passage of a letter to Sir Austen Layard on the German victory over France:

  I am GERMANICA to the pineal gland. Discipline against disorder, sobriety against drunkenness, education against IGNORANCE. There never was such a triumph of intellect over brutism.142

  No wonder her three sons, even as grown men, needed to gather their courage to visit Mother.

  Odo Russell had spent a good deal of time in Rome and spoke equally impressive Italian. In its obituary The Times of 27 August 1884 commented on Odo Russell’s remarkable ability as a Protestant to understand Roman Catholicism, an invaluable asset during the crisis of church and state, in which he would soon have to work:

  His intimacy with Cardinal Antonelli enabled him to acquire a thoroughly Italian subtlety seldom to be met with in an Englishman. A close observer by nature, he has learnt by experience how to observe still more closely: he has discovered how to weigh the characters of men, to discern their weaknesses, and to profit by their meannesses and susceptibilities.143

  On 2 December 1870 Odo Russell wrote to Edmund Hammond, permanent undersecretary in the Foreign Office, about his first impressions of Bismarck and of the political situation at the Versailles Headquarters:

  I am charmed with Count Bismarck, his soldier-like, straightforward frank manner, his genial conversations, are truly fascinating, and his excessive kindness to me have won my heart. His foreign office staff travel with him and form … his family. At dinner and breakfast he takes the head of the table with his under-secretaries on each side—then come the Chief Clerks—then the junior Clerks and the telegraph clerks situated at the end of the table—everybody in uniform. When I dine there I sit between the Count and the Permanent Under-Secretary [von Keudell—JS] who plays the piano divinely after dinner while we smoke. The conversation is in German and the questions of the day are discussed with perfect freedom, which makes them deeply interesting and instructive.144

  Again, another sophisticated observer charmed by Bismarck’s conversation and personality.

  Relations between Bismarck and the General Staff had worsened in the meantime. Paul Bronsart confided to his diary a crushing judgement on the Chancellor:

  Bismarck begins really to be ready for the mad house. He complained bitterly to the King that General Moltke had written to General Trochu and claimed that this as a negotiation with a foreign government belonged in his competence. When General Moltke as representative of the Supreme Command of the Army has written to the Governor of Paris, the matter has a purely military character. Since Count Bismarck claims in addition that he had declared to me that he considered the letter extremely questionable, whereas exactly the opposite is the case, I then submitted a written report to General von Moltke in which I demonstrated the falsehood of the assertion and requested in future not to be asked to carry out verbal instructions with the Count.145

  The pressure from public opinion began to be felt. The Crown Prince recorded in his war diary that his wife had been blamed for the delay of the bombardment and that Johanna von Bismarck and Countess Amelie von Donhöff had spread the lie.146 Bronsart quoted a popular poem which had made the round in Berlin:

  Guter Moltke, gehst so stumm,

  Immer um das Ding herum

  Bester Moltke sei nicht dumm

  Mach doch endlich Bumm! Bumm! Bumm!

  Herzens-Moltke, denn warum?

  Deutschland will das: Bumm! Bumm! Bumm!147

  [Good Moltke, why so mum

  As round it all you come?

  Best of Moltkes don’t be dumb

  Finally go boom, boom, boom

  Moltke dear, why so glum?

  Germany wants boom, boom, boom—JS]

  On 18 December Bronsart put his career on the line to frustrate Bismarck’s intervention in military matters. As he recorded in his war diary, he had been ordered by General Podbielski to provide Bismarck with minutes of a Military Council and decided to disobey orders, a court-martial offence. The whole entry records the agony of conscience of one of the most gifted of the ‘demi-gods’, a lieutenant colonel, a Division Chief in the General Staff, ‘for me the hardest day of the entire campaign’. He had received an order from the King approved by the Chief of the General Staff, General Count Moltke, and handed to him by Lieutenant General Podbielski, Quartermaster General of the entire army. As he records the moment of his decision

  if a man with the ambitious thirst for power like Count Bismarck were once to be admitted, there would be nothing more to be done … I thought about it for ten minutes; the habit of obedience got me through the address and then it failed me, and the feeling of duty, and the need to be disobedient even to the King, won the upper hand even at the sacrifice of my own person.

  He reported to Podbielski that he could not carry out the order in good conscience and submitted his resignation letter at the same time. Podbielski at first flew into a rage and questioned Bronsart’s sanity. Then in the face of this act of moral courage by a senior staff officer, he consulted Moltke, who revoked the order and told the King of his decision. Bismarck never got access to the Military Council minutes.148 Bronsart joins von Werther as two examples of unusual civil courage in the face of Bismarck’s increasing dictatorial attitude. As Bronsart concludes the entry:

  Had I done the demanded letters, even if I had weakened it as much as possible and rendere
d it colourless, it would have been approved and sent. Then Count Bismarck would sit in the saddle. He knows very well how to ride, as he once said about Germany. Where this ride would have taken us is not in doubt.149

  Albrecht von Stosch, now Lieutenant General himself and Commissary-General in the High Command, took part in the dramas between the army and Bismarck. He reported to his wife the reaction of Bismarck to all the frustrations:

  Bismarck is furious that the military delay disturbs very nastily his political combinations; the King has more than enough of conflicts and would like to take a day off. Both unload their anger or discomfort on the patient Moltke, who is never crude but gets sick from inner fury. The King fears Bismarck’s rage, Moltke wraps his anger in aristocratic silence. Roon becomes more ill every day and demands urgently the bombardment.150

  The next day Bismarck clashed with the General Staff again, as Bronsart recorded, ‘the civil servant in the cuirassier jacket becomes more impudent every day and General Roon functions in theses efforts as his true famulus. The only question is do we answer very clearly or not answer at all. Probably the latter will happen.’151 Bismarck summoned Waldersee to see him the day after Christmas. Bismarck unloaded all his grievances to this well-connected adjutant of the King:

  Yesterday Bismarck sent word that he wanted to see me. I found him in his room which serves as living and bed room and was dreadfully overheated. He sat in a long dressing gown, smoked a big cigar, looked as if he were really suffering. He was visibly upset … Then he began to talk in the following way, ‘Every thing is made as difficult as possible for me. There, to begin with Grand Duke of Baden and the Duke of Coburg intrigue with the Crown Prince and are on the way to making a mess of the German question … The General Staff refuses to inform me of the most important things; events, which are of the greatest importance for me, on which I have to base my decisions, are concealed from me. I shall have to ask the King to change all that.’ He grumbled about this chapter, which I know well, with the greatest violence. His eyes grew bigger. Sweat formed on his brow. He looked seriously disturbed. I fear that he will become dangerously ill because this kind of excitability is not natural. In addition to the heavy cigars that he smokes, I saw from the bottle that he offered me that he drinks very strong wine.152

  On New Year’s Eve an extended Military Council took place in the King’s rooms to hammer out a decision: to bombard or not to bombard Paris. The Crown Prince, who opposed ‘this wretched bombardment’, found himself on the losing side and had to accept the decision. As commanding officer of the III Army he consulted his own staff about the starting date and fixed 4 January 1871 for the beginning of the bombardment. In his war diary, he then entered his despair at what Bismarck had done to Germany’s place in the world.

  We are deemed capable of every wickedness and the distrust of us grows more and more pronounced. Nor is this the consequence of this War only—so far has the theory, initiated by Bismarck and for years holding the stage, of ‘Blood and Iron’ brought us! What good to us is all power, all martial glory and renown, if hatred and mistrust meet us at every turn, if every step we advance in our development is a subject for suspicion and grudging? Bismarck has made us great and powerful but he has robbed us of our friends, the sympathies of the world, and—our conscience.153

  The 4th of January arrived. The Crown Prince wrote:

  The eager anticipation with which from daybreak on we watched for the first shot was frustrated by an impenetrable fog, that refused to clear even for one instant, so that there was no real daylight whatever. At the same time an icy wind was blowing that covered the whole landscape with hoar frost.154

  The next day ‘was lit today by bright sunshine, so at quarter after eight this morning the first shell from Battery No. 8 fell on Paris’.155 The bombardment made no difference to ‘the disunity that exists in the highest regions’, as Stosch wrote,156 and on 8 January the Crown Prince found Moltke ‘deeply offended at Count Bismarck’s arbitrary and despotic attitude … the Federal Chancellor is resolved to decide everything himself, without paying the slightest heed to what experts have to say.’157 The next day, 9 January 1871, marked the 50th anniversary of Albrecht von Roon’s military service but, as the Crown Prince wrote, ‘his terrible asthma, which for the last fortnight has been complicated by catarrh … is so indescribably severe that every day he gets choking fits … Count Bismarck is only just recovering from nervous rheumatic pains in the feet that set up a nervous irritation in every part of his body—a doubly unwelcome state of things in such all-important days.’158 The only one of the Triumvirate who made modern Germany, who continued to function normally was General Count von Moltke.

  The Crown Prince took it upon himself to organize a reconciliation between Molte and Bismarck and invited them both to a private dinner in his Headquarters, where the two grand figures really had it out:

  Both talked quite plainly to the other and Moltke, generally so sparing of words, speaking in tones of reproach and quite eloquently, upbraided the Federal Chancellor, brought forward all the grievances he had already confided to me on the 8TH; the other protested in return, and I had repeatedly to interfere to bring back the conversation into smoother water … Then Bismarck attacked the General on his tenderest point, developing the theory that after Sedan we should have stayed on in Champagne to await further developments and ought never to have gone to Paris.159

  While the war dragged on and eroded the tempers and health of the protagonists, political changes took place with rapidity at home in Berlin and in the new Germany about to be born. All the important actors were not in Berlin and the Reichstag had a period of absentee control to counteract. Two developments took place in December. On 13 December 1870, forty-eight members of the lower house of the Prussian Landtag formed the ‘Fraction of the Centre’. The first chairman was Bismarck’s old friend Karl Friedrich von Savigny. Among the main leaders were the brothers Peter und August Reichensperger, Hermann von Mallinckrodt, Ludwig Windthorst, Friedrich Wilhelm Weber, and Philipp Ernst Maria Lieber. Though it soon came to be known as the Catholic Centre Party, none of the founders intended it to be just that as the Bavarian Deputy, Edmund Jörg (1819–1901)160 explained some years later: ‘do not forget that the Zentrum has always guarded against being called the “Catholic” Party. Otherwise how would Windthorst have come along with his Hanoverians?’161

  While the siege of Paris and progress in the war had come to a standstill, the movement to unify Germany got a powerful new impetus from the victories over France in which southern German and Saxon troops had distinguished themselves in the ‘national patriotic war’. The North German Federation had to mutate and become something grander to suit the completion of national unity. In mid-October, Captain Count Berchem, adjutant to Prince Luitpold of Bavaria, approached Robert von Keudell at headquarters to ask him confidentially if ‘in my view the situation was opportune for a proposal that the presidency of the Bund be decorated by an imperial crown. I replied that to my knowledge the Chancellor had never expressed an opinion on the question but I felt confident that such a suggestion would be highly welcome. The Chief approved the answer.’162 Ludwig II, the King of Bavaria, would take the initiative if he got certain concessions from Bismarck: money and territory. An equerry of the Bavarian king, Major Max Count von Holnstein, made two trips to headquarters in November to negotiate. Bismarck offered no territory but he paid the King a large sum of money, 300,000 marks from the secret Guelph fund that Bismarck had, in effect, stolen from the Hanoverian king. These payments to the Bavarian King continued until 1886 when the King died. The payments remained entirely secret, and were, in effect, a royal bribe. Then Bismarck gave Count von Holnstein the text of a letter which the Bavarian king would address to William I.163 The letter duly arrived at headquarters. On 4 December ‘Prince Luitpold presented the Federal Field Marshall a letter from King Ludwig of Bavaria in which he gave expression ‘to the wish that a German Empire be re-established and also the title of Em
peror’. It was known that the King had been consulted and achieved the consent of all the members of the Federation.164 On the following day in Berlin, 5 December, Karl Rudolf Friedenthal (1827–90), one of the leaders of the Bismarckian Free Conservatives in the North German Reichstag,165 got hold of a copy of the letter and gave it to Delbrück, who intended to proclaim it and thus astound the Reichstag. Bebel described what happened, as Delbück rose in a portentous way and announced, ‘The day before yesterday His Royal Highness Prince Luitpold of Bavaria had presented to His Majesty the King of Prussia a letter from His Majesty the King of Bavaria with the following content … Delbrück stopped. He could not recall in which pocket he had stuck the letter. In highest agitation he searched all his pockets, a spectacle which provoked enormous hilarity in the whole house. Eventually he found it but the effect had fizzled.’166

  On 7 December the official press published the text as well. The King of Bavaria urged upon King William the need to ‘restore the German Empire and the worth of the Imperial title’. The King of Bavaria had consulted all the other German princes to strengthen the appeal.167 In the following week Bismarck complained to Johanna that the ‘princes—and even my most gracious one—plague me with their constant business with all those little difficulties which are linked to the very simple “Kaiser question” by monarchical prejudices and useless finery.’168 On 14 December the Reichstag of the North German Federation addressed the King in a petition: ‘United with the Princes of Germany, the North German Reichstag draws near with the supplication that it may please Your Majesty through the acceptance of the German Imperial Crown to consecrate the work of unification.’169 Hans von Kleist wrote to Moritz von Blanckenburg that he was disgusted that the ‘Jew Lasker’ had been chosen to prepare the draft of the motion. ‘Then you will have to take him with you and make him your speaker at Versailles.’170