If only they had treated me with true respect,” the Kaiser said to his wife, gazing out over the broad lawns of his ancestor Frederick’s New Palace. “That my own people should be divided and skeptical, even of me! Yet so it has been from the start.”
William paced restlessly before the tall windows of his drawing room. He preferred this monumental Baroque pile as his family home, because it displayed the power and history of his German dynasty. Built in Potsdam, just two dozen kilometers outside Berlin amid lakes and lesser palaces, the newly refitted mansion gave him ready access to his government, and this without constant, wearying encounters with bureaucrats, politicians and General Staff officers that might appear to diminish his authority.
And yet lately, with his underlings wholly absorbed in the daily conduct of the war, he felt almost an outsider. It was as if his last order that had any force or significance in this struggle had been his very first one: the order to mobilize and send his troops racing according to plan, across uninvolved Belgium toward belligerent France. It was an order he’d given reluctantly under staff pressure, and had later tried to cancel without success. Too late to recall the troops, his Chief of Staff von Moltke had told him. Once set in motion, the necessities of war dictate everything.
And so it went. His Prussian generals controlled the troops and the information he received, and his attempts to direct military affairs were treated merely as rubber-stamping approval, or else dangerous trifling.
But had the generals really needed him as supreme commander to give that first mobilization order, or only as a scapegoat to take the blame if things went wrong…as they were clearly going now, with wartime demands and shortages, and with heavy, unimaginable troop losses in spite of heroic victories in the field?
Der Kaiser addressed his wife at last. “Nothing short of unquestioning loyalty is due a national leader in wartime. They never would have doubted my grandfather, Wilhelm the Great.”
“It was the vile English all along,” the Kaiserin Augusta Viktoria remarked, knitting in an antique chair by his side. “They tried to control you, and when you would not yield, they undermined and slandered you before the world.”
The Empress Augusta was well known to dislike the English. That included her own in-laws, William’s British mother and his grandmother, the sainted Queen Victoria. William did not mind this, since it was his own bitter disputes with the family that had in part brought on this Great War.
“Oh yes,” William told her, “the bastard English press, and those Foreign Office petty aristocrats who dictate to my poor stupid cousin, George V. But, our own good Germans have a part in our troubles, too,” he added, recalling other causes for woe. “These whining politicians, you cannot escape them! From fat old Bismarck at the very start of my reign, they all wish to steal away my power. Whenever I try to rally the will of the people, the true soul of Germany, how they howl in outrage! That speech of mine years ago, when I invoked the dreaded spirit of the Huns, out of that they made a circus show! It certainly was never really what I meant, to call our brave soldiers ravaging Huns! It was only against the Chinese, an inferior race. And then later, that press interview where I tried to speak directly to the English people…just because I said that ordinary Germans are not overly fond of England, and tried to point out the various problems…”
“The German people understand you,” Augusta assured him, not looking up from her knitting. “They hate England, but they love you.”
William heard this with pleasure. His empress, born a Princess of Schleswig-Holstein in the north, could be counted on to support him in all things—though she was seen as dumb and provincial by his mother and the rest of his faithless English kin. A Holstein cow, she had been called, good only for breeding and feeding, so they whispered in their spiteful British way. But she was proud of her role in Kinder, Küche und Kirche. Children, kitchen, and church were, after all, the proper concerns of women in his German empire.
“Yes, my dear,” William said to his wife. “But alas that our German people must suffer so—starving and sacrificing for this war, hemmed in by trenches across Europe and by enemy ships at sea. This new British trade embargo is an outrage. Even the Americans protest it. Our troops are denied vital supplies, and the victories they have earned!”
He drew himself up in a military posture, as he would before a crowd of his subjects. The most humiliating thing was that this injustice had been imposed on him by his nearest relatives—Vicky, Bertie, George, and his dear cousin Nicky, the Czar of Russia, who had also perfidiously declared war. And now his British kin talked of denying their German kinship before their own people, by changing names—Saxe-Coburg to Windsor, Battenberg to Mountbatten—the ultimate treachery to their common forebears!
“German superiority will win out, of course,” the Kaiser reassured his wife. “With the genius of our General Staff, the best officers in Europe, hard Prussians all, how can we fail?” He turned from the window, primping his handlebar mustaches with his good right hand. “The French are no obstacle to us, just a drunken rabble. But the English have made it so hard…my own cousins, and even Grandmama! How could they treat us so?”
“Your mother too, don’t forget,” Augusta reminded him. “She tried to raise you as a British pawn, refusing even to call you by your German name, Wilhelm. And that English doctor, who killed your father with the throat cancer!”
“That was likely just their incompetence, not a conspiracy,” William told her. “I have suffered my own share of their British doctors’ failures.” He patted his useless left arm, stunted at birth from a clumsy breech delivery. “But my mother…she never trusted me, and she ruled my poor weak father to the end. Sad to say, but it’s a good thing Papa died when he did, after only one hundred days as Kaiser. Germany might never have stood up to England!”
“The English should be beaten already,” Augusta observed. “They would be, if not for the help they get from the Americans.”
“Alas, the Americans!” William cried out, all but losing his composure. “A fine, young and vigorous nation, like Germany…but just like the English, traitors to their own Nordic Race! Why on earth would the Americans take sides with perfidious Albion, after fighting a war of independence against them?” He paced the room in frustration. “And then later, a hundred years ago, they fought another war against England over, what…? British tyranny on the high seas, stopping and seizing foreign merchant ships! The same thing that Germany struggles against now! What was it the American journalist wrote, about Churchill’s new Q-ships that now force our U-boats to attack from hiding?—‘Britannia rules the waves, but she also waives the rules!’ A joke, you see, my dear…” he explained to his wife, doing his best to translate the pun, since she had no English. “But, alas, the Yankees still welcome British traders and blockaders, while interning our German vessels in port. And their foreign commerce helps to stiffen the backbone of England’s war machine.”
“Are the Americans going to enter the war? Augusta asked.
“No, they never will join the fight, not on England or Germany’s side. The American government is weak, a popular democracy whose rulers are slave to their masses. The Americans love to profit from the war trade, but they lack any real fighting spirit. Bethmann-Hollweg is in dread of world opinion, because of our U-boat successes, but I have explained to him time and again: these neutral nations are not threatened as Germany is, and they will not go to war over mere principle. Tirpitz, on the other hand, says we must increase the submarine blockade and starve England while we can, by being more ruthless on the high seas. I have to mediate between the two of them.”
Augusta raised her knitting and inspected it. “Germany must do whatever it can to win,” she pronounced.
“Yes, my dear, and we will. We are close to defeating the pathetic Russians in the East, and soon we shall direct our full force against the Western Front. With our brave soldiers and good Krupp arms, we must triumph.” The Kaiser turned again to survey his green lawns, with his lakes glimmering blue in the distance. “It’s a grim business, but the outcome justifies all. We have only this war to win, and Germany can take her rightful place of leadership in a new world.”