The Three Emperors Page 23
The British and Germans, however, chose to see the tsar as they wanted him to be: a good man, at base well disposed to them. Even Britain’s foremost Russian expert, Donald Mackenzie-Wallace, described Nicholas as a man of “strong humanitarian46 sympathies,” and warm feelings for Britain, who disliked Lobanov but had yielded reluctantly to his “great diplomatic experience and his worldwide reputation.” Wilhelm, meanwhile, regarded Nicholas as an innocent who needed to be freed from the manipulations of his ministers and family.
The problem with coming late to the colonial feast, the Germans kept finding, was that everyone else had already staked their claims, especially in Africa. To draw back would be to resign themselves to a few minor colonies, to press on meant conflict with other empire-builders; colonial conflict had become the subject of virtually all arguments with Britain. In November 1895, at a farewell shooting party, the outgoing British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Edward Malet, told the German foreign minister, Marschall von Bieberstein, that he was happy with the general drift of Anglo-German relations (leaving aside, of course, the unmentionable subject of Wilhelm’s disastrous Cowes visit of that summer). But there was, he ventured, just one “dark spot”: their two countries’ rivalry in Southern Africa, specifically in the Transvaal, the enclave in the middle of Southern Africa run by the Boers, the descendants of white Dutch settlers. The British empire, through Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, controlled the rest of South Africa. The Boer republic looked like an irritating anomaly to empire-builders like Rhodes. The fact that gold had been discovered there also made it eminently covetable. The Germans, however, had interests too. They were some of the tiny state’s biggest investors, and were known to sympathize with the Boers; they had given them diplomatic and economic support; Krupp was also selling guns to them. Their most substantial colony, South-West Africa, was not far away. Encouraged by the Boers themselves, who reckoned that German muscle could help them against the increasingly bullying British colonial government, there had been talk of making the Transvaal a German protectorate. The thought of a rich foothold in Southern Africa excited Wilhelm and the German colonial lobby. The British, needless to say, hated the idea. Malet told Marschall he felt bound to point out that there might be “serious consequences”47 if Germany’s aid continued. Marschall replied that the Germans couldn’t help it if the Boers hated the British.
The conversation appears to have gone no further, but when Wilhelm received a report of it he was furious. He told Nicholas that the ambassador had issued Germany with an ultimatum and been “even so undiplomatic48 as to utter the word ‘war.’” It was a moment when nothing seemed to be going right and Wilhelm was especially touchy. The Reichstag had rejected legislation to which he’d publicly attached himself; his ministers—sick of his erratic interventions—had for once resolved to act collectively and were threatening to resign in order to get their way; it seemed possible they might force some kind of constitutional limits on him. His frequent spitting rages had left Eulenburg fearing for his sanity and at least one minister wondering if he was “entirely normal.”49 Summoning Colonel Swaine, the British military attaché,* Wilhelm complained bitterly that, having rejected his friendship, Britain was now threatening him. Malet’s “astonishing accusations,” he said, were the last straw. “For the sake of a few square miles full of negroes and palm trees England threatened to declare war on its one real friend, the German Emperor,” he later reported himself as saying. Swaine, completely taken aback, assured him that there must be a misunderstanding. No, said Wilhelm, it was all of a piece with the way Britain’s “government press” had “behaved in a most unwarranted way towards me. Germany and the Triple Alliance had been perpetually calumnied and teased.” But it was England who was making the mistake. England had brought total isolation on herself by her “selfishness and bullying.” Sooner or later Britain would have to make a choice—Germany and the Triple Alliance, or the other side. “The Colonel seemed profoundly shaken and affected,”50 Wilhelm ended his account of the conversation.
Salisbury, alerted to Wilhelm’s sulk, sent a message that Malet’s words, whatever they had been, had no official force. The kaiser, calmed, decided that his diplomatic skills and eloquence had extracted an apology. This was a conclusion belied by Salisbury’s briefing of the new British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Francis Lascelles, who had just come from St. Petersburg. “The conduct of51 the German Emperor is very mysterious and difficult to explain,” it ran. “There is a danger of him going completely off his head … In commercial and colonial matters Germany was most disagreeable, her demand for the left bank of the Volta was outrageous, so much so that Lord Salisbury thought it must have been an idea of the Emperor himself as no responsible statesman could have put it forward.”
As if to confirm Salisbury’s prognostications, Wilhelm was in the process of making a series of dangerously inconsistent interventions in foreign affairs, which—had they known of them—would have confirmed to his ministers that his intrusions in politics could be laughably inept, if not actively dangerous. Since early in 1895 it had been widely predicted that the Ottoman empire was about to fall apart. Its government in Constantinople seemed to exist in a state of constant and advancing chaos, and its collapse threatened a dangerous free-for-all in eastern Europe and the Levant.* The question of what would happen to Constantinople and the Straits to the Black Sea—or the Eastern Question, as it was called—preoccupied the British, the Russians and the Austrians, who particularly dreaded the possibility of Russian warships in the Mediterranean. “I declare quite52 plainly that I shall stand at Austria-Hungary’s side with all the forces at my disposal,” Wilhelm told the Austrian ambassador, about three days after having made exactly the same offer to Nicholas. The Austrian foreign minister said it was the warmest manifestation of German friendship in all the years of the Austro-German alliance. Towards Christmas Wilhelm said the same thing to the hapless53 Colonel Swaine, whom he had summoned to hear another speech in which he accused the British of deliberately stirring up a crisis over the future of the Ottoman empire—then suggested they take the Turkish capital. The revelation of the kaiser’s offers threw the usually calmly cynical Fritz Holstein into a panic. “What happens now54 if Salisbury, whom HM has deeply offended, communicated the contents of that conversation to St. Petersburg?” he demanded of Eulenburg. As it was, none of the Powers chose to move on Constantinople, and Wilhelm’s offers stayed secret.
Paradoxically, while this dangerously rogue intervention remained undisclosed, Wilhelm found himself at the start of 1896 in the midst of an international furore over something relatively banal and not entirely his fault. On the last day of 1895, 600 armed men—some of them said to be officers of the British army, all of them British—led by Dr. Leander Jameson, a close associate of Cecil Rhodes, the most powerful man in South Africa, creator of De Beers and self-confessed British empire-builder, crossed the border into the Transvaal in an attempt to overthrow the Boer government.
When Wilhelm heard the news he was reported to be “rabid”55 with anger. “The Transvaal republic56 has been attacked in a most foul way,” he wrote to Nicholas on 2 January 1896, “as it seems not without England’s knowledge. I have used very severe language in London, and have opened communication with Paris for common defence of our endangered interests … I never shall allow the British to stamp out the Transvaal!” He wasn’t alone; the whole of Europe loudly condemned the Jameson raid, which was widely suspected of having been backed, or even launched, by the British, though the colonial minister, Joseph Chamberlain, swiftly condemned it and denied the government had been in any way involved. (In fact, the British government was up to its eyes in the Jameson raid. It had been planned with the explicit encouragement of Chamberlain,57 whose involvement was now being vigorously covered up.) Condemnation was especially loud in Germany. Later that day the news came that the Boers had completely routed the raiders. Nevertheless, on 3 January Wilhelm strode into a meeting with his ministers
demanding invasion forces and warships. Europe should teach England a lesson. His ministers talked him out of using force, but they were quite as angry as he. (Marschall had already sent Salisbury a threatening formal note58—an acknowledged first step along the route to war—protesting at the “invasion.” In a moment of almost theatrical farce, Hatzfeldt, hearing of Jameson’s failure, only just managed to snatch it off Salisbury’s desk before he saw it.) It was finally agreed that Wilhelm should send a personal telegram of support to the Boer leader, Paul Kruger.
Today the text seems distinctly banal: “I express my59 sincere congratulations that you and your people have succeeded, by your own energetic actions and without appealing for help to friendly powers, in restoring order against the armed hordes that invaded your country as disturbers of the peace, and in safeguarding the independence of your country from external attack.”
In Britain the “Kruger telegram” brought forth a violent and sudden outpouring of hysterical anger, a confused combination of defensiveness, entitlement and aggression. “The Nation will60 never forget this telegram, and it will always bear it in mind in the future orientation of its policy,” the Morning Post snarled. The kaiser was denounced not only in the press, but in gentlemen’s clubs; society ladies sent him poison-pen letters. German shopkeepers had their windows smashed. In hindsight the level of the public response seems quite out of proportion with the act itself. The telegram didn’t even mention Britain, the rest of Europe was equally condemnatory, and the British government had denounced the raid and denied involvement. The reaction stemmed from a confusion of half-realized assumptions: that the personal should trump the political, and the kaiser, as half English, ought not to question British actions. One expected such things from the French, but Germany was supposed to be Britain’s friend. There was also, however, a new sense of direct hostility towards Germany, that it might be a serious colonial rival that needed to be kept at bay. Overarching all this was a furious sense of entitlement and defensiveness, a manifestation of an aggressive new imperialist spirit that asserted that, because Britain was special, because it was the greatest promoter of civilization that the world had ever seen, it not only had the right to impose its own rules on others, but the normal rules didn’t really apply. No one had the right to criticize its actions.
Wilhelm’s English relatives were quite as angry as everyone else. The queen described the telegram as “outrageous, and61 very unfriendly towards us.” Edward called it “a most gratuitous62 act of unfriendliness,” and giving full rein to his dislike of his nephew continued, “he has shown in addition the worst possible taste and good feeling in congratulating the Boers on their victory over a body … composed exclusively of the Queen’s subjects. But independently of this, the Prince of Wales would like to know what business the Emperor has to send any message at all.” For years afterwards he referred to the Kruger telegram as the event which revealed Wilhelm’s “true feelings”63 about England. Even George “spoke loud64 and abused the German Emperor, not caring what he said,” one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting observed.
The queen administered a lofty grandmotherly reprimand to her German grandson:
As your grandmother65 … I feel I cannot refrain from expressing deep regret at the telegram you sent President Kruger … It is considered very unfriendly towards this country which I feel sure it is not intended to be, and has, I have to say, made a very painful impression … The action of Dr. Jameson was, of course, very wrong and totally unwarranted; but considering the very peculiar position in which the Transvaal stands towards Great Britain, I think it would have been far better to have said nothing … Our great wish has always been to keep on the best of terms with Germany, trying to act together, but I fear Your Agents in the Colonies do the very reverse [which was rich], which deeply grieves us.
Wilhelm, who was completely amazed by the unanimous chorus of excoriation he received, crumpled immediately. He wrote a grovelling reply: “I was so incensed66 at the idea of your orders having been disobeyed, and thereby Peace … endangered, that I thought it necessary to show that publicly … I was standing up for law, order and obedience to a Sovereign whom I rever [sic] and adore.” Subsequently he would blame the telegram entirely on his ministers. Victoria called the letter lame and illogical, but Salisbury advised her “fully to accept67 all his explanations without inquiring too narrowly into the truth of them.”
In Pretoria President Kruger told the German consul, “the old woman68 just sneezed and you ran away.”
Wilhelm, backed by Fritz Holstein in the German Foreign Office, who was so concerned by the British response he thought England might fall into the arms of France, immediately embarked on a charm offensive to re-endear himself to the British. Before the end of January Hatzfeldt had offered Salisbury a formal alliance, which the prime minister as usual politely turned down. In February, when the queen’s son-in-law Henry of Battenberg died of malaria in the Ashanti wars, the kaiser sent a huge deputation to the funeral. When Colonel Swaine, the British military attaché, retired that month, Wilhelm loaded him with lavish decorations and pronounced him a personal friend. In March, unable to restrain the familiar impulse to make anxious those whose intimacy he wanted, he told Sir Francis Lascelles, the new British ambassador, that despite his appalling treatment by the British press, he had to let England know that the Russians wanted “to destroy England,”69 and annex the Balkans, while France was planning to sabotage the Suez Canal route to India. (As it happened, the Russians had been70 encouraging the French to cause trouble for the British in Africa, and had invited the Germans to support them.) These plans, he insisted, had been sanctioned by71 Nicholas himself. The intervention backfired. Hatzfeldt reported dejectedly that Lord Salisbury had been “literally horrified”72 by the kaiser’s warning, having only just begun to relax again in their meetings.
Nor were the English relatives placated. In April, at a family wedding in Coburg,* George informed Wilhelm that he would not be welcome at Cowes that year. Wilhelm, he reported to Nicholas, “seemed more excitable73 than ever, he hardly spoke to me at all which was a good thing.” As for the British public, Hatzfeldt advised the kaiser that if he came to England that year he’d certainly be booed.74 The rebuffs only caused Wilhelm to redouble his efforts. In August he invited the entire British embassy staff to dinner, receiving them in his Royal Dragoons outfit. In the autumn he made the extraordinary suggestion to Lascelles that he might hand over Germany’s African colonies to Britain in return for compensation75—an idea that, had it known about it, would have had the German Right baying for his blood.
The bizarre thing was that in Germany—and indeed across Europe—the Kruger telegram had brought Wilhelm the thing he wanted most: wild approval. The raid had prompted a wave of intense anti-British feeling in Germany, much of it focused on Queen Victoria, the symbol of the British empire. One British journalist reported an elderly German lady telling him what a shame it was that the queen “should be so unworthy a sovereign.” She was well known to be “perpetually tipsy and to drink whisky out of a teapot.”76 Among themselves senior Prussian diplomats referred to her as the kaiser’s “tippling grandmother”77 and “the hucksteress.” Wilhelm was seen as having stood up to bullying, hypocritical Britain and supported the plucky Boers. Yet he barely seemed to notice. A couple of years before, Waldersee had observed crossly that the British had worked out exactly how to manipulate the kaiser—they had only to treat him badly.78
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Despite no tangible signs of a change of Russian policy towards Britain, Queen Victoria persisted in believing that she could win over the tsar. Like Wilhelm, who had learned the lesson from Vicky, she was committed to the idea that personal relationships could supersede or guide foreign affairs. Her favourite granddaughter was tsarina, and she’d decided that gentle, charming Nicholas was part of the family—even though in April 1896 she discovered that Russia had been doing its own intriguing against Britain in Africa, egging on the
French to cause trouble over Egypt.
As if to punch home the message that nothing had changed in Russia, Nicholas’s coronation in May 1896 was overshadowed by the kind of awful human disaster that seemed to dog Russian affairs. George had expected to attend the ceremony, but the queen sent his uncle Arthur instead. “I must say79 I was furious,” he told Nicky, “but there was nothing to be done.” It was just as well. On the day after the coronation the tsar traditionally gave the people of Moscow an open-air feast at Khodynka field north of the city. In the midst of the festivities there was a rumour that the food was running out, the crowd of half a million people stampeded and thousands were crushed to death. The tsar’s uncle and brother-in-law, Grand Duke Sergei, was largely responsible for the disaster. He’d neglected the preparations, more interested in pursuing a feud with another court official whose authority over the event clashed with his. Basic work to fill in deep wells in the ground was not completed, there was a derisory police presence and chaos ensued. The severity of the disaster seemed initially to have been hidden from Nicholas—at Windsor it was said80 that bodies had been shovelled under the grandstand on which he stood, so he could not see them. But even afterwards he never quite seemed to grasp its significance. On the night of the disaster he went to a ball at the French embassy, rather than staying home as a mark of respect to the dead. The picture of the tsar drinking champagne while his subjects mourned was a lasting stain on his personal image. By contrast, Queen Victoria received seventeen on-the-spot reports from Khodynka field, describing in detail81 the circumstances of the stampede, the thousands of mangled bodies laid out across the other side of the vast field, and the anger and demands for retribution it had inspired. Worse, Nicholas failed to punish anyone. It was widely agreed within the imperial court that Grand Duke Sergei, who towered over his small, quiet nephew, had bullied him into closing down an inquiry into the disaster by threatening to boycott the court. He was rewarded by being promoted to commander-in-chief of Moscow. Even within the Romanov family there were mutterings. “How outrageous can82 you get!” Konstantin Romanov, Nicholas’s second cousin, wrote of Sergei in his diary. “… If only the Emperor was sterner and stronger!” The government looked supine and corrupt, and Nicholas appeared weak. Khodynka field cast a long, inauspicious shadow over the new reign.