The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (14 page)

His servants also had to keep their master amused and endure his practical jokes. Throughout his life, Wilhelm’s sense of humour remained that of an adolescent. He made fun of physical oddities, teasing, for example, the representative of the state of Baden in Berlin about his bald head.
³⁶
On his annual summer cruises in the North Sea, Wilhelm forced his fellow passengers to turn out for morning exercises and found great amusement in pushing them over from behind or in cutting their braces. He deliberately shook hands too hard with his strong right hand, its fingers festooned with sharp rings, poked people in the ribs, and pulled their ears.
³⁷
When he struck Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia a ‘resounding blow’ with his field marshal’s baton, it was of course, said Zedlitz, a joke. ‘No one could help noticing that this kind of
nonchalance
was far from pleasant to these royal and imperial personages, and I cannot help fearing that the Emperor has seriously displeased not a few crowned heads by such horseplay, which they can scarcely be expected to find to their taste.’
³⁸
Indeed, the king of Bulgaria, a country which Germany hoped to make an ally of, once left Berlin ‘white-hot with hatred’ after the Kaiser smacked him on the bottom in public.

Although he was prudish when women were present, in the company of his male companions Wilhelm loved rude stories and slapstick, and thought it was the height of comedy to have hefty soldiers dressed up as women. ‘I have done the Dwarf,’ said Kiderlen after one outing with Wilhelm, ‘and turned out the lights to the Kaiser’s vast delectation. In an improvised sing-song, I did the Chinese twins with C.; we were connected by an enormous sausage.’ In 1908 the head of his Military Cabinet died of a heart attack while he was dancing dressed in a tutu and feather hat.
³⁹

There have always been rumours that Wilhelm was homosexual, partly because of his great friendship with Philip Eulenburg who was certainly so, but it seems doubtful. In his youth he had several affairs with women and appears to have been devoted to his wife, the German duchess Augusta Victoria, or, as she was usually known, Dona. Yet when she died, after the Great War, he promptly married again. Dona was
strongly anti-British, extremely conservative and rigidly Protestant; she would not, for example, have Catholics in her household. Nor would she allow anyone about whom there was the slightest murmur of scandal to appear at court. Berlin grew accustomed to the sight of the royal party leaving theatres when Dona felt that she had spotted something indecent on the stage. Beyens, the Belgian ambassador in Berlin, said unkindly but accurately: ‘Her great aim is to make the family life in the royal residences as cosy and homelike as that of a humble Prussian squire.’
⁴⁰
And despite all Wilhelm’s attempts to make her more elegant by choosing her clothes and lading her with expensive and showy jewels, she herself looked like the wife of a Prussian squire. When she wore a gold dress with a red sash to a court ball, said one observer unkindly, she looked ‘like a cheap party cracker’.
⁴¹
Dona adored Wilhelm and gave him seven children but she did not entertain him. For that he turned to his cruises and his hunting parties with his male entourage. He seems not to have noticed that Eulenburg and possibly others in his circle were not much interested in women so that it came as a tremendous shock to him when there was a public scandal.

The Kaiser, as the Eulenburg case so clearly demonstrated, was not perceptive when it came to character. Nor was he good at understanding the points of view of others. Eulenburg himself, possibly the Kaiser’s closest friend and one who loved him for himself, wrote in 1903: ‘H.M. sees and judges
all
things and
all
men purely from his personal standpoint. Objectivity is lost completely and subjectivity rides on a biting and stamping stallion.’
⁴²
He was always quick to feel affronted but frequently insulted others. Germany was in theory a federation of princely states with Wilhelm as first among equals, but he so condescended to and browbeat his fellow rulers that most tried to avoid seeing him if they possibly could.

Wilhelm much preferred talking to listening. In the first twelve years of his reign he gave over 400 official speeches as well as many unofficial ones.
⁴³
The whole court used to worry, said Lerchenfeld, when the Kaiser was about to make a speech because they never knew what he was going to say.
⁴⁴
Often he said very silly or tendentious things indeed. He was fond of saying that he would ‘smash’, ‘destroy’, ‘annihilate’ those who stood in his or Germany’s way. Unveiling a military monument in Frankfurt in the first year of his reign, he declared that
he would not give up any of the territory his ancestors had gained: ‘We would rather leave our 18 army corps and 42 million inhabitants on the battlefield than to yield even a single stone …’
⁴⁵
Perhaps his single most notorious speech is the one he gave in 1900 to send off the German expedition to put down the Boxer Rebellion. They would be facing a savage foe and they must not be soft. ‘
Anyone who falls into your hands falls to your sword!
’ In a sentence that lived on to haunt the Germans, he told the soldiers to be like the Huns of old: ‘You should give the name of Germany such cause to be remembered in China for a thousand years that no Chinaman, no matter whether his eyes be slit or not, will dare look a German in the face.’
⁴⁶

Although he admired toughness in others and sought it for himself, Wilhelm was emotionally fragile. He was torn ‘with doubts and self-condemnation’, said Wilhelm Schoen, one of his diplomats. His entourage worried endlessly about his nerves, his tendency to get agitated, and his bursts of violent temper.
⁴⁷
When he ran up against situations, often of his own making, which he could not handle, he would often collapse and talk of abdicating, even of committing suicide. ‘At such times’, Schoen said, ‘it needed all the Empress’ powers of persuasion to revive his courage and induce him to carry on his office, promising to do better.’
⁴⁸
Did he have, wondered an Austrian military attaché in Berlin, ‘as one says, a screw loose’? It was a fear shared by many of those who worked with him. In 1903 Eulenburg went on the Kaiser’s usual North Sea cruise. It was a time when Wilhelm was normally at ease, relaxing and playing cards with his faithful entourage but he had become increasingly moody. ‘He is difficult to handle and complicated in
all
things’, Eulenburg wrote despairingly to Bülow. Wilhelm changed his opinions from moment to moment, yet always insisted that he was right. ‘Pale, ranting wildly’, Eulenburg went on, ‘looking restlessly about him and piling lie upon lie he made such a terrible impression on me that I still cannot get over it.’
⁴⁹

To understand Wilhelm, and his contemporaries and posterity have spent quite a bit of time doing just that, it is necessary to go back to his childhood, indeed perhaps to his birth itself. His mother, Vicky, was only eighteen when she had him and the delivery was extremely drawn out and difficult. It is possible that the infant suffered a temporary lack of oxygen and perhaps brain damage. Once they realised Wilhelm was
alive, the doctors were preoccupied with the young mother, who was in a pitiable state. It was only some hours later that it was noticed that the baby’s left arm had been pulled out of its socket.
⁵⁰
The arm never grew properly in spite of a range of treatments from electric shocks to strapping it inside the carcass of a hare. Wilhelm’s suits and uniforms were carefully cut to disguise the handicap but it was an awkward one for someone who was expected and certainly expected of himself to cut a dashing military figure on horseback.

His mother, who admitted to Queen Victoria that she did not at first pay much attention to her children (there were to be eight in all), then overcompensated by overseeing every detail of his education. Her mother warned her: ‘I often think too great care, too much constant watching, leads to the very dangers hereafter which one wishes to avoid.’
⁵¹
The old queen was right. Wilhelm disliked his rigid and humourless tutor and the attempts to make him into a good liberal. His parents, the crown prince and princess, had dreams of turning Germany into a properly constitutional monarchy and an inclusive modern state. Vicky did not help matters by making it quite clear she felt in most things that Germany was inferior to Britain. This put them at odds with the stuffy and conservative Prussian court and more importantly with Wilhelm I and his exceedingly powerful minister, Bismarck. Although the young Wilhelm had an intense and often loving relationship with his mother, he came increasingly to resent her. The same was to be true of his relationship with Britain.

To his mother’s dismay, he gravitated towards precisely the elements in Prussian society which she most disliked: the landed Junker class with its reactionary outlook and suspicion of the modern world, the military with their narrow, hierarchical values, and Wilhelm I’s deeply conservative court. The young prince admired his grandfather greatly as the monarch who had brought glory to the Hohenzollerns by uniting Germany under their rule. He also took advantage of the feud between Wilhelm I and his parents. As a young man, when he did not want to go on a trip with his father, he prevailed on his grandfather to intervene. While the crown prince was cut out of all involvement in government affairs at Bismarck’s instigation, Wilhelm was allowed to go on diplomatic missions and 1886 was posted to the Foreign Office for experience, something that had never been permitted his father. In a rare moment
of reflection, Wilhelm told Bismarck’s son that his good relationship with his grandfather, the king, was ‘unpleasant’ for his father: ‘He was not under his father’s authority, he received not a penny from his father; since everything derived from the head of the family, he was independent of his father.’
⁵²

When he was eighteen, Wilhelm joined an elite regiment where, he later claimed, he felt instantly at home. ‘I had lived through such fearful years of unappreciation of my nature, of ridicule of that which was to me highest and most holy: Prussia, the army and all the fulfilling duties that I first encountered in this officer corps and have provided me with joy and happiness and contentment on earth.’
⁵³
He loved the army, loved the company of his fellow officers (and filled his household with them), and particularly loved that it was all going to be his one day. That day came much sooner than anyone thought.

The old King Wilhelm died in March 1888. His son, who was already seriously ill with cancer of the throat, followed him three months later. The timing is one of the great What Ifs of modern history. What would have happened if Frederick, with the support of his wife Vicky, had ruled Germany, say for the next two decades? Would they have moved it firmly away from absolutist rule towards a proper constitutional monarchy? Would they have brought the military under firm civilian control? Would Germany have followed a different path in international affairs, perhaps moving towards greater friendship, even an alliance, with Britain? With Wilhelm II Germany got a different sort of ruler and a different fate.

Wilhelm’s accession to the throne would not have mattered so much, though, if he had been, like his grandmother, uncle, and cousin, the hereditary ruler of Britain. While they had influence, often considerable, they did not have Wilhelm’s power. He could, for example, appoint the ministers he wanted, direct the military and shape Germany’s foreign policy. Where the British rulers had to deal with a Prime Minister and Cabinet who were responsible to a powerful Parliament, Wilhelm appointed and sacked his Chancellors and ministers as he wished. While he was obliged to go to the Reichstag for funding, he, or in practice his ministers, were usually successful in obtaining what they needed. It is true that they learned how to manage him (Eulenburg before his disgrace was particularly adept) and that they did not always
keep him fully informed about sensitive issues. Nevertheless he could and did interfere to determine policies and appointments.

It also would not have mattered if Wilhelm had been, like his distant relation Prince Wilhelm of Wied, the king of Albania. But he was ruler of one of the most powerful countries in the world. As Zedlitz said after one of Wilhelm’s nervous collapses: ‘He is a child and will always remain one – but a child that has power to make everything difficult if not impossible.’ And he went on to quote from the book of Ecclesiastes, ‘Woe to the country that has a child for King!’
⁵⁴
And Germany was both powerful and complicated, a dangerous thing to put into the hands of someone such as Wilhelm. It was rather like giving a powerful motor car to Toad in the children’s classic,
Wind in the Willows
. (Interestingly, Wilhelm hated cars when they first appeared on the grounds that they frightened the horses; as soon as he had one he became, according to Bülow, ‘a fanatical motorist’.
⁵⁵
)

With the unification of the German states into the Reich in 1871, Germany became the most populous country in Europe west of Russia, which meant that it also had an advantage in potential recruits for its armed forces. Moreover, the German army was widely regarded as the best trained, with the best officers, in the world. By 1911 there were nearly 65 million German citizens compared to 39 million in France and 40 million in Great Britain. (Russia had 160 million, one of the reasons France valued it so highly as an ally.) Germany was rapidly becoming Europe’s most dynamic economy. In 1880 Britain was the world’s leading exporter with 23 per cent of the world’s trade while Germany had 10 per cent. By 1913 Germany was looking to overtake Britain: it now had 13 per cent of the world’s trade while Britain had slipped to 17 per cent. In some of the sectors in which economic power was measured in that period Germany was already ahead. It overtook Britain in steel production in 1893 and by 1913 was the world’s largest exporter of machinery.