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 rôle. 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 motor-car 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 of 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 Grünow. There came a day when it was necessary to tell plain
truths to the Kaiser. Von Grünow 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 Grünow
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 Grünow 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 motor-car was brought to the door, and von
Grünow 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
fête, 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.