To give them ninety minutes’ mal de mer):
Immaculate aesthetes, clad in perfect taste –
Unruffled voice and hair and such a waist
(The spelling’s optional: I don’t suggest
Any alternative – but you’ll judge best);
Taking from tortoise spectacles and speed
(Who’s seen them run – except, of course, to seed?);
Epitomising Foreign Office lore
In three short words – Ignore – Deplore – Encore.
At last the Peace Treaty was signed at Versailles. We know what contemporaries think of it; we can only guess at the verdict of posterity. We see through a glass darkly that a rearrangement of frontiers which includes a corridor, a reduction of Austria to such proportions that she cannot feed herself, will not stand. The epigram ascribed to Herr Rathenau that the Treaty of Versailles set out to Europeanise the Balkans and has succeeded only in Balkanising Europe will gather truth with every month we live.
CHAPTER 22
THE ROYAL UNEMPLOYED
A GERMAN SUBJECT once irreverently described the Kaiser Wilhelm II as being half journalist, half actor-manager. Another German, even more irreverently, said he was a fool. Immediately after the Armistice we described him as a criminal who ought to be tried for his life. And thirty years ago The Spectator, when classifying the great men of the day, put him in a class by himself as the only genius of the first rank. Which out of all these is the real man?
A good deal of daylight has been let in during the last few months. It is now known that while the Kaiser most certainly did encourage the Austrians to send the ultimatum to Serbia and did approve of sending an ultimatum to Russia, he had not thought it possible for England to intervene in the war and he was not in favour of infringing the neutrality of Belgium. In fact, the Kaiser had not nearly so much actual power as he was supposed to have.
It is now known that it was the General Staff who decided upon invading Belgium; that for two whole days the Kaiser refused his approval and that at last, when the advance had already begun, von Moltke insisted upon an interview at two in the morning and in the Kaiser’s bedroom told him plainly that the destiny of the German Empire was at stake and that if he, the Kaiser, stood in the way, the General Staff must take the responsibility. In other words, that he might either sign or abdicate. From that moment, as I believe, the Kaiser was allowed to play only a very secondary role. He was not consulted by the General Staff except when, for political reasons, they thought it prudent to be able to quote him. They kept him near them and pretended to obtain his sanction to important steps upon which they were already resolved and they found him useful as a sort of gramophone record that could make speeches in the hearing of reporters to stiffen the waning German morale. His life at Charleroi under these humiliating circumstances must have been hard to bear.
They tell a story of a painter who was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Kaiser in all his best clothes, mounted on his favourite horse, surrounded by hounds and crowned with a sort of Viking silver-plated casque, mounted with gold. The Kaiser asked him to paint in the corner of the picture two little angels carrying the Imperial Crown, after the manner of a famous classic Spanish painter.
‘But, Your Majesty, I have never seen the Imperial Crown. I do not know what it looks like. May I see it?’
On this the Kaiser became nettled and said, ‘You ought to know. The Imperial Crown is in Vienna. It ought to have come to Berlin in 1866.’
To a man with this kind of mind the dream of world empire must have come very easily. He had a sort of superficial interest in everything on which the German sun shone. He would talk not unintelligently to bankers about international finance, to motorcar manufacturers about the relative merits of new fuels, to painters about art, to writers about literature. All his opinions were strong and many of them were shallow or wrong-headed.
Undoubtedly he had a cult for England; a longing to be treated as an equal in the craft by English yachtsmen. English country life, with its accompaniments of hunting and shooting, was his ideal; the English tailor was superior to every tailor in the Fatherland. To him, therefore, it was a tragedy when he broke with England. And then how he hated us! He decorated Lissauer for writing the ‘Hymn of Hate’, and on this subject I remember a German telling me that the ‘Hymn of Hate’ was all a matter of policy. It was because the Germans were found not to be hating the British sufficiently that the government decided to mobilise its hate in order to strengthen the ‘will to war’. But the Kaiser’s hate was perfectly genuine because it was strongly mixed with fear. Some prescience must have told him that the fortunes of the Hohenzollerns hung in the balance and that their scale might kick the beam.
Probably no man, however well balanced, could pass through the fire of adulation, such as was the Kaiser’s daily fare, and come out unscathed. When one year he was at Cowes he paid a visit with his staff to a country house in the neighbourhood without notice. His hostess invited him to sit down. He sat astride a chair and proceeded to address her as if she was a public meeting, with his staff grouped in a semicircle behind him. He said, apropos of the public health, that whenever he drove through Germany he would stop at the school, have all the scholars paraded before him and make them blow their noses, because he was convinced that the public health largely depended upon the blowing of noses – and much more in the same strain and at every remark uttered with intense seriousness, however foolish, the staff would gravely nod approval. If we all had to go through life with a claque to applaud every silly thing we said, the best of us would go under.
To such a mind as the Kaiser’s the idea that Germany was being hemmed in came quite naturally. It was nothing to him that Germans were to be found working side by side with Englishmen in every part of the world, that her shipping and her international banking was gradually turning the world into a German possession in a way that actual possession by the hoisting of the German flag could never have achieved. What he wanted was the outward semblance of Empire and for this there were no waste places left. Gradually all the most unlovely features of the Teuton character began to blossom. Poisonous toadstools sprang up everywhere. Germany, that had been a sane, sober, thrifty and domestic country, became loud, vulgar, self-assertive, intolerant and altogether hateful to the world and even to its own citizens and the Kaiser made himself the embodiment of this spirit.
As Traill said of James II, ‘Kings who fail in business undoubtedly owe it to their historical reputation to perish on the scaffold or the battlefield.’ History demanded that the Kaiser should have gone forth at the head of his troops and been killed in battle. Then some heroic niche would have been found for him. He would have been a tragic embodiment of Frederick the Great and his past would have been forgotten. But he committed the one crime that can never be forgiven by Germans: he abandoned his people in their extremity and fled the country. But in sober fact this is what actually happened. During the last few days before the Armistice, von Ludendorff had practically broken down and the direction of affairs had passed into the hands of von Grunow. There came a day when it was necessary to tell plain truths to the Kaiser.
Von Grunow entered the room alone and told him that the war was irrevocably lost. The news did not appear to touch him very deeply Probably he had realised it already. Then von Grunow said, ‘I have other bad news. A rebellion has broken out in Berlin.’ The Kaiser started to his feet and said, ‘Then I will lead the troops to Berlin in person. Please to give the necessary orders,’ and on this von Grunow said, ‘Sir, it is my duty to tell you that your life would not be safe with your own soldiers.’ The Kaiser turned to the colour of ashes and fell back into his chair. Suddenly he had become a very old man without any power of decision or movement. The shock had been too much for him. After a hasty consultation it was decided that, with the growing spirit of rebellion that prevailed even among the troops connected with the General Staff, the Kaiser must be got into a place of safety at all hazards
. A car was brought to the door and von Grunow himself helped him out of his chair and conducted him to the vehicle. The Kaiser was like a little child in his hands. The car then drove off and took him safely to Count Bentinck’s house in Holland. It is a curious fact that the car was held up over three hours by a Dutch sentry. Just before this date the Dutch had decided to clothe their soldiers in the German field-grey and the sentry on the frontier was taken at first by the occupants of the car to be a German soldier in revolt. Probably no more unwelcome visitor ever applied for admission to Holland, but the asylum was granted and it was maintained. To do the Kaiser justice, he has never given the Dutch authorities any cause for complaint.
A still more unwelcome visitor was the Crown Prince, who followed his father. This young man was a joke even among his fellow German royalties as well as German commoners. One prince used to say to the Crown Princess, ‘Why don’t you get your husband to dress properly?’
‘Why, what is wrong with his clothes?’ she asked rather tartly.
‘Well, his hat’s wrong, his tunic’s wrong and his boots are wrong.’
The Crown Prince was very vain about his clothes. He tried to lead the fashion by adopting a military cap made with a ridiculously wide crown, which he wore at the back of his head like a halo; a tunic absurdly tight at the waist and full in the skirts and boots tapered and pointed beyond all reason. He had one quality in common with Frederick the Great – an envy of French lightness and wit and a desire to be accepted by the French as a kindred spirit. In pretending to conduct the siege of Verdun he was certainly dissembling his love, but he tried to make up for it at Charleroi by clumsy civilities to the French residents and a real love-affair with a French girl, to the scandal of Germans and Frenchmen alike. If the Kaiser’s life was not safe with his own soldiers still less was the Crown Prince’s and if the young gentleman has not been credited with respect for the serious things in life, no one has yet affirmed that he lacks respect for his own skin. So he, too, fled for Holland and thereby he forfeited any slender chance he may have had to ascend the throne of the Hohenzollerns. He has one redeeming virtue – his love of approbation and his craving for affection and so within the narrow limits of his island home in Holland he goes about with pockets full of chocolates and a troop of village children at his heels. He knows the family history of every villager and loves nothing better than to take part in every village fete, showering favours on all alike. His popularity in this narrow circle has given him more pleasure than he ever had as heir-apparent to the German Empire. Perhaps the bumptious qualities that were remarked when he visited England are now a little toned down.
Another exiled sovereign seems to have disappeared altogether from the newspapers. Ferdinand of Bulgaria has an intellect. He is a fine musician, a noted ornithologist, a considerable engineer. Politically, he is cunning, unscrupulous and incurably frivolous, but no doubt he took care to make ample financial provision for himself outside Bulgaria before the crash came. He crept out of obscurity to ascend the throne and now the darkness has swallowed him up again. He had no lust for power, no illusions about the risks run by Balkan sovereigns, but he had made a special study of the art of making oneself comfortable and at the moment a throne – even a Balkan one – seemed to be the best thing that offered.
But Providence had denied him one gift – personal courage – and his life was poisoned by the fear of assassination. How he contrived to escape it for so many years speaks volumes for the qualities that earned him his nickname of ‘The Fox’. For, as he used himself to say, assassination is so easy, especially in the Balkans. The assassin who means business has only to aim from a window or take a sporting shot at you from the thickest of the crowd and the trick is done. And it comes naturally from a Bulgarian. Just before Bulgaria entered the war a Bulgarian diplomat came to take leave of a certain British Under-Secretary. ‘Mind,’ he said, ‘I have nothing to say against this plan of yours to assassinate King Ferdinand, but unless I’m much mistaken you will find Ferdinand far more useful to you alive than he can ever be when dead!’
When Ferdinand came to take leave of Sir Arthur Nicholson, our ambassador in Russia, in reply to an earnest expression of hope that he would use all his influence to prevent disturbances in the Balkans, he waved a fat forefinger in the ambassador’s face and said, ‘Have no fear at all. I will be like a leetle lamb.’ Within two months he had the whole place by the ears. He had learned the wrong part in the tragi-comedy: instead of the ‘leetle lamb’ he had cast himself for the part of the ravening wolf.
There is no form of unemployment so deadly as that of the continental monarch who has ‘lost his job’. It is the last post on earth that any man of sense would care to take in these days, because there is no privacy and no retiring age; moreover, it is hard and distasteful work nearly all the time. But the daily life of a king in exile is so ghastly that I blame none of them for trying to get back again. As a rule they are poor and they have to support a number of court functionaries as poor as themselves. And with the daily struggle to make both ends meet goes the uneasy feeling that they are neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. Some of their acquaintances treat them as royal, others do not. There are continual difficulties with the authorities of the country of their exile. If only they could begin life afresh on a lower plane they could, like the rest of us, scratch up a living in honest trade. As it is, they see stretching out interminably before them a life devoted to attending concerts and opening charity bazaars, to which only death will bring surcease, unless, indeed, some endless chain of dreary functions is reserved for them in the place of torment.
The ex-Emperor Karl was a gallant gentleman who refused to sit down tamely under these conditions, but was ready to dare everything to regain a throne. He was not endowed with brains, but the most successful kings have often been those who have their thinking done for them by other people. He had what is far more useful – a good presence, amiability and a very clever wife. She was a Bourbon and it has always been believed that her brother, Prince Sixte, who lives in Paris, was cognisant of the two attempts at restoration to the throne of Hungary which miscarried. Prince Sixte was said at the time to have sent a message to his brother-in-law from Paris to the effect that unless he did something to recover his throne his opportunity might never come again; but that once let his reinstatement become an accomplished fact and he would have, perforce, to be recognised by the Allies. How near the second attempt came to being successful few people know. The majority of the Hungarians were ready to welcome him and, but for the fatal delay of twenty-four hours while conferences were being held and dinners were being cooked and eaten, he might have been proclaimed in Buda Pesth instead of being an exile in that land of bad hotels, Madeira. It is said that when one of his followers produced a priceless tapestry which he had cut down from the walls of one of the imperial palaces and suggested that it should be sold in order that the ex-Emperor should live upon the proceeds, Karl sent it back to the Republican government.
There can be little doubt that some of these dethroned monarchs will return. The greater part of Bavaria is royalist at heart and any day within the next two years we may open our morning paper to find that Prince Rupprecht is king. Baden may not impossibly follow suit. Europe may even come round to the belief that a hereditary president, which is the real position in a limited monarchy, is cheaper than the American form of elected autocrat. Russia herself is awake to the fact that the Red Czar, whom she did not even elect, is a worse form of autocracy than any they knew under the White.
CHAPTER 23
UNREST AT HOME
IN ORDER TO understand the revolutionary movement in England it is necessary shortly to review the movements of the past ten years.
Apart from the Independent Labour Party, which was formed in 1893 by the late Mr Keir Hardie to introduce socialists into the trade unions and to procure their nomination for the House of Commons, it may be said that there were no formidable extremist bodies in Great Britain before 1911; fo
r the British section of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Labour Party were insignificant in numbers and in influence. In the summer of 1911 there was a great wave of industrial unrest, involving strikes of dockers and transport workers in Manchester, Liverpool and London, followed by a railway strike in August. In three days, with one or two exceptions, most of the lines ceased working and troops were called upon to guard the railways and vital points. The men’s grievances were submitted to a Royal Commission and in the debate in the House of Commons initiated by the Labour Members, for the first time political action began to attract trade union leaders. The Trade Union Act passed in 1913 gave the unions power to add political action to the objects covered by their rules.
In 1912 the coal-miners came into the field with a strike for a minimum wage and the government conceded some of their demands in the Coal Mines Minimum Wage Act. In south Wales the coal strike was attended with disorders that called for measures of protection by the military.
In 1913 the Dublin Transport Workers went on strike and the solidarity achieved by this body during the strike made the rebellion of 1916 possible.
In April 1914 the Miners, Transport Workers and Railwaymen appointed a committee to work out a scheme for a Triple Alliance which was to brood over the community as a threat of paralysis whenever one section of the Alliance formulated demands which the employers were not disposed to concede. It was never more than a threat foredoomed to be ineffective, because the component parts were so unwieldy and their interests were so diverse, that they could never be got to work as parts of a single machine. But as a threat it was held in terrorem over the nation for seven years. It was believed that the new Alliance would try its strength in support of the railwaymen, who were said to be meditating another strike, but however that may have been, the war, that great composer of petty disputes, intervened to prevent it.
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