AS THE HOURS TICKED SILENTLY BY and we grew more used to both the writing and the old-fashioned use of language, we became absorbed in the words that were crammed into every page, transported back to a time when Napoleon had elevated himself to Emperor of France and King of the Italians. As I sifted through the documents, I realized the magnitude of what was happening to me.
Prince August was not just my own flesh and blood and a royal prince who met and fell in love with a Jewish girl, he also was turning out to be the defender of the realm against Napoleon as he rampaged across Europe, wreaking havoc and threatening all the monarchies. It was a startling discovery.
The Hohenzollern monarchs ruled the Prussian Empire, the capital of a group of states that were eventually to become Germany. The mighty European empires of the day were the Prussians, the Austrians, the English and the Russians, and war seemed to be the natural and constant threat between all of them. There was so much information to absorb and understand, it was hard to know where to start.
Every so often one of the archive staff would kindly bring us a hot drink, or one of us would have to visit the washroom, but there were no other distractions. We became so absorbed we didn’t even think to eat until we arrived back at the hotel that evening, exhausted and excited by our discoveries, itching to get back and find out more.
The first day seemed to merge into the second, with very little sleep during the night as my head throbbed with the excitement of what I had discovered. When we rolled back into the archive as it opened the next morning, I quickly returned to evaluating the man who, twenty-five years after his battles with Napoleon, would be Emilie’s partner. Would August be suitable for her? He was certainly eligible. I had been dreaming of him as a dashing, handsome prince, and it felt as though I was embarking on a courtship myself, albeit a most unusual one.
The family appeared to be grooming the young August, bringing him up and training him to be a soldier and a leader. He was already a major by the time he reached twenty-one in 1800, and by 1804 he was already commanding a battalion of grenadiers. The achievements of Prussia under Frederick the Great, August’s uncle, had earned it a fearsome reputation. Well defended, its military superiority allowed it at least some respite from the struggles that were going on around it, but that would not last for long. The Prussian king, Frederick William III, was uncertain how to deal with Napoleon’s aggression, trying at first to appease him. Young August, on the other hand, was lobbying heavily for the Prussians to stand up to Napoleon before it was too late. There were documents in the files that were loaded with famous signatures backing up August’s case to the king for fighting rather than appeasing. Suddenly, I found myself there, right back in my Berlin as it stood under threat. I was willing August on, fearing for his safety. He was absorbing me completely. The French had grown enormously in strength, and August was telling everyone that if the Prussians didn’t strike quickly, they could soon be overwhelmed by this newly superior force. Even the queen, an influential figure, called for an end to the never-ending balls and festivities of the royal court. The very survival of Prussia was at stake, and the empire needed to take up arms to protect itself.
“Look at this,” I hissed to Ken, sliding a document across to him. It showed that August and his elder brother, Louis Ferdinand, had had enough of Frederick William’s indecision and inaction and went to meet him in Breslau in East Prussia (the city where I was born, no less!). “They are presenting him with a petition, an ultimatum, forcing him to fight Napoleon, can you believe it?”
I wondered how much Emilie knew about all of this history when she met August later. Was she seduced by his power and his courage in the way that I was being seduced as I read about it? By the time they met he had already lived a full and colorful life, the same life that I was reading about now. How would that have made her feel? Would she have been as consumed as I was? As I read, I kept hoping for a clue as to what might lie in the future for the prince, but there was nothing in these papers that helped me, or dropped any hints that would lead me to what I was looking for—Emilie Gottschalk.
It was still only 1805. The tsar of Russia finally persuaded Frederick William to join the Austro-Russian Alliance against France, and the Prussian army was being mobilized. I was on the front line, witnessing a first-hand account of the events that I knew from all the history lessons of my childhood would shape Europe for the next hundred years. The alliance against Napoleon was sealed with a ceremonial handshake beside the grave of Frederick the Great, and Prince August had finally got his wish. We read pages and handwritten diary excerpts that took us back into the heat of the battles that were raging. Even though there was still no sign of Emilie, I was intoxicated by this vivid account of huge historical events that was unfolding before my very own eyes.
I had to pinch myself to remember that Prince August wasn’t just a great historical figure, but that he was the future partner of Emilie, my great-great-grandmother. I wanted to know more personal details about him. Was he honorable? Was he a ladies’ man who stole hearts and then broke them? There were so many unanswered questions. If he was so powerful, how was it possible that he could just disappear from history without leaving a trace? And what happened to Charlotte, the daughter that we believed Emilie had borne him? My father and Uncle Freddy had both been certain that he and Emilie spent the last eleven years of his life happily together, but where was the proof? Where was the documentation?
I feared the worst as I read about Louis Ferdinand, August’s glamorous and famously extravagant older brother. He was marching toward the battlefield at Saalfield to confront the French on his white charger, Slop. I felt that I was hearing the news as it was happening. Ken glanced up, concerned by the look on my face.
“What’s up?” he asked as my hand covered my mouth. Louis Ferdinand had been struck down in battle.
“Napoleon has killed Louis Ferdinand,” I exclaimed, louder than I meant to, making other heads rise up from their studies around the room and prompting someone to shush me.
“What year?” Ken whispered back.
“1806.”
“So,” he said, doing a quick calculation in his head, “August would have been twenty-seven years old when his brother died.”
He was reading and translating with me now, equally excited. The death of such a famous and revered soldier had had a terrible effect on the morale of the entire Prussian army. It seemed like a fearful precursor of what might happen next. There were reports of how the news had moved the whole army to tears.
“Good God! They brought Slop to August with his brother’s blood still on the saddle,” Ken said. “Look at this: August is giving a rousing speech to the troops about the destiny of Prussia lying in his hands. He’s climbed back into Slop’s saddle and has set off into battle to avenge his brother’s death. August is rousing his troops before he leads them into battle. ‘Today, I also have another sacred duty to fulfill, to avenge my brother, who died gloriously for our beloved Fatherland. Grenadiers and artillerists, swear to me that you will always follow me, and be assured that I shall always lead you along the path of honor and glory.”
As I listened to Ken translating in a hoarse whisper, nervous of disturbing the other readers, I was right by August’s side, taking on his struggles against Napoleon. I could hear the cheers of the soldiers, all of them inspired to have a leader who was willing to risk his life alongside them. I imagined how resplendent he would have looked in his shako, with its Prussian eagles and gold chains that shone like the polished buttons on his dark blue coat. What an awesome sight: August holding a gleaming saber above his head as he galloped into battle on his dead brother’s great white charger, hungry for revenge and victory.
Then there was the terrifying picture, the horror of the battlefields, as August led from the front in yet another charge, with dead bodies lying all around and the smell of smoke and gunpowder hanging in the air. My ancestor was ready to die for Prussia; he was a brave fighter indeed. He truly had made a difference to history, and I felt proud and deeply moved.
But victory was not yet within August’s grasp. The Prussian army was being led by the Duke of Brunswick. Disaster struck when the duke was shot in the head during the battle of Jena-Auerstedt a few days after the death of Louis Ferdinand, leaving him blinded and unconscious. The duke later died of his wounds. Ken and I had come to Merseburg to discover Emilie, yet now I found myself in the middle of a bitter war with Napoleon, embedded in hand-to-hand fighting, hoping against hope that my great-great-grandfather would successfully beat off the aggressor whose relentless onslaught on Prussia was costing countless lives. The king was not competent to take over the leadership of the troops, and so the courageous Prussian generals battled on for as long as they could on their own, until eventually the might of the French proved too much for them and they were driven back. August managed to rally his grenadiers for one last charge to cover the retreating soldiers, but he was unable to rally them for a return to battle. It was a mighty and gallant effort. At the mercy of these horrendous conditions, August was finally defeated in the mud and the chaos at Prenzlau. When the news of the defeat reached the royal family, the queen immediately packed up and fled Berlin, further undermining the confidence of the Prussian people. It was beginning to look as if the previously all-powerful Prussian Empire of Frederick the Great had finally met its match.
August’s account was as gripping as in any movie. In the end, despite his ferocity and determination, he was captured and very lucky not to have been killed in the battle. The victors immediately robbed August of his Order of the Black Eagle and his pocket watch, though both were returned when the French realized who he was. But they insisted August pay for the return of Slop, who was running around in a blind, riderless panic in the marshlands where August’s battalion had finally become bogged down.
Very soon, the king had fled the country and Napoleon was sitting in Frederick the Great’s magnificent Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, having marched triumphantly through the Brandenburg Gate. The descriptions painted a vivid picture of just how violent and bloody hand-to-hand warfare was in those days. To thrive in such a ferocious and frightening arena, Prince August had to have been a man of great physical strength as well as courage. His capture was a massive coup for Napoleon.
This most valuable prisoner, caked in mud and disheveled, was brought before Napoleon. With one boot missing, having been left behind stuck in the muddy marshes, a defiant Prince August stood face to face with his archenemy, who had been waiting for him in Frederick the Great’s rooms. The victor and the vanquished squared up to one another—what a sight that must have been, the tall Prussian and diminutive Corsican. August stubbornly refused to answer any questions put to him. Despite whatever he might feel about the Prussian prince as an enemy, Napoleon later professed himself greatly impressed with the dignity and fearsome loyalty that August showed in that moment of defeat. Realizing that the prince was an immensely popular figure, Napoleon spared his life, putting him under house arrest in Berlin instead. Napoleon had already been to visit August’s parents at the Bellevue Palace, since August’s father was known to be still strongly in favor of an alliance between France and Prussia. Napoleon was willing to allow August to return to the family home as long as he kept the nighttime curfew imposed on him.
August, however, was not so easily controlled and would steal out at night to rally his men and raise an army. Napoleon learned of this and on Christmas night in 1806 August was awakened roughly by French officers who spirited him out of Prussia to the castle prison of Nancy in France. Uhde, his faithful secretary, and his adjutant, Clausewitz, were taken with him. August requested that his mother be informed of what was happening and she was awakened to see the distressing sight of her son being escorted from the palace.
Napoleon accused August of plotting against him with other Prussian officers but again spared his life. I was later to find out the depth of Napoleon’s respect for this strong-willed young Prussian soldier, who was not prepared to sit quietly for long when his beloved country was under occupation by an enemy force.
I was beginning to wonder how Ken and I would ever be able to get through all the notes and documents that were now stacked in front of us in the time we had left, but I was loathe to skip through any of the densely written texts in case I missed some vital fact or admission.
Eventually, as peace became a possibility, Napoleon allowed August to socialize freely, and the young ladies of Nancy flocked to meet the handsome and dashing young prince. Nancy became a life of balls and parties, and the prince danced the nights away, much to the disapproval of his friend and adjutant, the sober Clausewitz. August was just as interested in helping some of the other five thousand Prussian prisoners of war in the town who were not enjoying the same freedoms as him. He tried to ensure that they were fed and treated fairly, while at the same time secretly preparing them for the moment when they would be able to regroup and become an army once more. The suspicious Napoleon, however, once again heard of August’s plans and ordered that he be moved to another castle at Soissons. Being a prince made imprisonment a very different experience, and August and Clausewitz still had the freedom to work together a great deal, drawing up a plan for reforming the Prussian army once a peace deal with France could finally be worked out.
On their release in 1807, after the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty, while August and Clausewitz waited for their passports to be returned, they received an invitation from the writer and socialite, Madame de Stael, to stay at the Château Coppet in neutral Switzerland, by Lake Geneva. As an arch-dissident she too had been exiled by Napoleon. At Coppet, August’s passion exploded when he met Juliette Récamier, one of the great French beauties of her time. August and Juliette fell instantly in love and vowed that they would marry. Napoleon too had designs on Juliette, but she had already rebuffed him. So the prince was now Napoleon’s rival in love as well as war, a cocktail with potentially fatal consequences.
Later, when reading some of the letters between August and Juliette, I learned that Juliette had second thoughts, and I could see that the power of his love for Juliette was leaving August devastated. It was a shock to suddenly see the human side of the great warrior prince, to see that he was as vulnerable to the pangs of unrequited love as anyone else. Time and again he made appointments with Juliette that she never kept. Her responses to his letters showed she had ended their affair and would not return his great passion. But I could see from his writings just how deeply August could fall in love. It would be a pattern of behavior that he would always follow, I thought, remembering Uncle Freddy telling me that the prince had been devoted to Emilie for the last eleven years of his life.
On his return to Berlin in 1808, August was promoted to brigadier-general and inspector general of the whole Prussian artillery. Despite the edicts of the Paris Peace Treaty, he devised a plan with his generals to rebuild his army by recruiting and training forty thousand men and then sending them home before secretly recruiting another forty thousand to repeat the exercise. The treaty forbade Prussia’s army from exceeding forty thousand men. Month by month they were training a large proportion of the male population of the Prussian empire in readiness for a return to war. August had studied the French army carefully, analyzing the secrets of their success, and was applying the same rules to his own army. Without the French realizing what was happening, a formidable modern army was building up under their noses.
In 1812, Napoleon undertook his ill-judged invasion of Russia with a massive force of nearly six hundred thousand men. However, his army was poorly equipped for the kind of campaign waged by the Russians, and with supplies scarce it suffered huge losses from starvation and disease. At the Battle of Borodino, Napoleon won a bloody and pyrrhic victory. He briefly occupied Moscow, which had been abandoned by its inhabitants, but was forced to withdraw by the Russian army and the advancing winter. Many more soldiers died in the extremely harsh conditions on the retreat. By the end of the campaign, only 110,000 men made it back to French soil. However, the following year, the indefatigable Napoleon regrouped and stormed back with a decisive victory at the Battle of Dresden in August 1813. Yet the coveted prize of Berlin remained beyond his grasp. When the Prussians pushed the French back to the outskirts of Leipzig, a huge allied force confronted him. Combined, the French and allied forces numbered six hundred thousand men, and the Battle of Leipzig, beginning on October 16, 1813, was to be the biggest battle that Europe ever witnessed prior to the First World War.
August described Napoleon as “that little Corsican” and it was obvious that the two hated each other deeply. As chief of the Prussian artillery, August led the charge and was instrumental in Napoleon’s rout. Leipzig proved to be a major turning point in the war and led to Napoleon’s ultimate defeat. I felt a great sense of pride as I read that August was one of the first Prussians to be awarded the Iron Cross for his bravery and heroism.
The victorious leaders, the Russian tsar, the emperor of Austria and the Prussian king, rewarded August by giving him the largest captured French cannon, known as “Le Drôle,” as a token of their gratitude and admiration. A jubilant August transported the cannon back with him to Berlin, where it had pride of place in front of his Bellevue Palace, and it remained there for 132 years. Ken and I were to discover later, when we were guests of the German government during a private tour of the Bellevue Palace, that at the end of the Second World War General Charles de Gaulle arrived personally in a truck and had the cannon removed and taken back to Paris, where it has remained ever since.
His defeat at Waterloo was not the end for Napoleon. He was still refusing to give in, merely retreating back behind his own borders to regroup yet again. The Prussian king then appointed August his commander in France, ordering him to invade and capture Napoleon. In bloody hand-to-hand battles, August seized all the French fortress towns one by one, and the French army, devastated by his relentless onslaught, finally called for a truce.
All through the day Herr Waldmann kept returning to see how we were getting on, and each time he would proudly bring another pile of papers for us. I now felt I had truly got to know the man who was destined to meet and fall in love with Emilie. My father would have been amazed to learn that his daughter, the young girl whom he had trusted with the verbal family inheritance, was now opening up the dungeons of history. But would I ever be allowed to find Emilie herself? By the end of the day we felt that August had introduced us to every member of his illustrious family, but still there was no mention of Emilie or of anyone with the family name of Gottschalk. I had read about the prince’s first two morganatic marriages, to his first wife Friederike, whom he divorced, and his second wife, Auguste, but nothing after that. We found a note about Auguste dying of cancer in Italy in 1833, which would have left the prince a widower soon after meeting Emilie, and we could find a reference to Eduard, the son of his first wife. That left ten years after Auguste’s death when he could have been married to Emilie before he himself died in 1843, which pretty much fits the story that had been passed down through our family. But if that was so and the family story was all true, why weren’t Emilie and their daughter Charlotte recorded anywhere?
When Ken and I finally looked up from our studies, it dawned on us that we were the only ones left in the reading room. It seemed we had become so absorbed in the stories of Prince August we hadn’t even noticed everyone else leaving and going home. Reluctantly, we tore ourselves away from the Hohenzollern family and made our way back to the dreary surroundings of the hotel. Although the day had been fascinating, by the time we got back to the hotel we realized that we were no closer to finding Emilie. But there was always tomorrow.
Victor, our friendly young waiter at the hotel, was eager to chat when we got down for breakfast the next morning. “I really want to travel,” he whispered as he served us, his eyes darting around the room nervously. “We only get to go to the Black Sea a few weeks each year for our holidays, but I want to get to the West.”
“Listen, Victor,” I said, wanting to encourage him in his enthusiasm but anxious to change the subject before he started asking us to smuggle him out of the country or something else that would get us into trouble with the authorities just when we had managed to get into their good graces. “I love this salami. Is there any chance you could find me one to take back to England with me?”
“Oh yes, of course,” he said with a grin, happy to be able to do something to please us. “I will have it for you tomorrow.”
“Victor!” The manager’s voice cut across the hushed atmosphere of the room, and Victor scurried away, looking guilty. He didn’t speak to us, or even look at us, again as we ate our breakfast and talked about everything we had discovered the day before. Ken was now as obsessed with finding out what had happened to August, Emilie and Charlotte as I was, and we kept going over all the possible scenarios, none of which quite seemed to fit the few facts we had gathered so far.
As soon as we had finished our breakfast, we left Victor clearing the table with his eyes still discreetly averted and drove to the archive. Herr Waldmann was waiting, happily holding another mountain of files for us. By now he seemed more anxious than ever for us to find what we were looking for and just as excited as we were by the chase. After only two days, the three of us had already established our routine of working, and Ken and I settled down quickly to our reading. After a few minutes I picked up a scrap of paper that didn’t look like anything special. I stared at it for a moment, trying to work out what it was. Then I saw the name and my heart jumped.