The German Emperor, despite his threatening words to Daisy Pless at the beginning of 1912, had remained anxious to maintain cousinly relations with Britain ever since her alliances with France (1904) and with Russia (1907) had raised the spectre of encirclement.
Securing the presence of a German-friendly British ambassador on the Wilhelmstrasse became one of Willy’s personal missions. In 1908, as Sir Frank Lascelles stepped down after thirteen years of service, the Emperor asked for him to be succeeded by Sir Maurice de Bunsen, who was then at Madrid. It would be pleasant to conjecture that Willy was seeking to compensate Maurice for his own failure, back in Bismarck’s day, to rescue Maurice’s Uncle Georg – the Emperor’s childhood friend and playmate – from the wrath of a vindictive chancellor. It is more likely, however, that Willy was viewing a man whose grandfather had served as Prussia’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s as a potential ally.
Willy’s request was not granted. In 1908, Lascelles was replaced as British ambassador in Berlin by Sir Edward Goschen. In 1912, Wilhelm lost out once again when George V recalled Sir Maurice from Madrid and despatched him – greatly to de Bunsen’s relief – to Vienna.
Vienna was everybody’s favourite posting in those pre-war years. Richard Seymour, serving there under Sir Edward Goschen before the 1908 transfer to Berlin, thought Vienna the most captivating city in the world. Goschen himself – as a violin-playing music-lover who (despite his tubby figure) adored a waltz – remembered his time in Austria with wistful joy. Berlin offered a poor substitute to a man who disliked most Germans and took no pride in his own descent from an eminent Leipzig publisher. If the Emperor made a point of staying away from the British Embassy during Goschen’s six-year stint on the Wilhelmstrasse (1908–14), it cannot be said that his absence was much mourned.1
One sound reason for posting the reluctant Sir Edward to Berlin was that he was able, through his close friendship with Edward VII – and their shared fondness for taking long summer breaks at the spa towns of Baden and Bad Homburg – to act as a discreet supplier of information about Germany’s escalating programme for armaments and shipbuilding. Doubtless, Goschen also kept the King posted about the latest ideas whirling through the brain of the King’s volatile nephew. The Ambassador established no personal friendship with the Emperor, but his contacts in the Wilhelmine circle (the Anglophile and music-loving Chancellor Theodore von Bethmann-Hollweg, became one of Goschen’s closest friends) were excellent.
Possibly, noting Goschen’s closeness to the British monarchy, the Emperor decided to take a leaf out of his royal uncle’s book. In the summer of 1912, when the elderly Marschall von Bieberstein died after only three months in office, Wilhelm looked about for a new ambassador to the Court of St James’s who could act as his own personal representative and informant. Searching, in particular, for a man whose winning ways would gain England’s trust, his choice fell upon Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky. The Prince’s credentials (perfect manners, exquisite English and a fond first cousin in Count Benckendorff, the Russian ambassador in London) seemed to Wilhelm easily to outweigh his old friend’s lack of experience as a diplomat. Endorsing Lichnowsky’s suitability for the post on 3 October 1912, the Emperor was delighted by this personal step towards restoring good relations with England.
The English shared Willy’s enthusiasm. The German Embassy had become a little dull during Count Metternich’s day, enlivened only when Daisy Pless stepped in to act as the bashful Ambassador’s social hostess and to preside over a diplomatic dinner party or an embassy ball; Marschall Bieberstein’s residence, while brief, was also dour. Now, only George V’s old-fashioned wife complained about Princess Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s insistence on plastering the walls of Carlton House Terrace with works by Franz Marc, Picasso and Kokoschka, while a few strait-laced peeresses raised their eyebrows at a pretty young woman who kicked her way through autumn leaves, in public parks, while wearing white socks and – far more shockingly, in those days – no hat (‘hutlos’).2
The critics were in a minority. Daisy Pless found that the Prince grew a little gruff when she prattled on, while Sir Edward Goschen, sharing a car with Mechtilde and a motley crew of cats, children and dogs after visiting the Lichnowskys’ Silesian shooting estate, pronounced the Princess to be ‘ein bisschen sauvage’ (‘a bit crazy’).3 But the English were, for the most part, entranced by the friendly Lichnowskys and their romantic history (Karl Max’s ancestors had housed and funded Beethoven, who repaid them with the Moonlight and Pathétique sonatas). How could they not be charmed by an impetuous blonde princess who declared herself bewitched by the beauty of London’s mist-drenched parks and terraces of rose-red brick?4 How could they not be beguiled by a kindly and still handsome prince who spoke with such evident conviction – based on Lichnowsky’s absolute faith in the Emperor’s assurances to him – of Germany’s desire for a harmonious partnership with England?
On 3 June 1914, an ardent Anglophile’s happiness was crowned by the presentation to him of an honorary doctorate at Oxford, during which the Public Orator saluted Lichnowsky as a true representative of the spirit of his nation (‘Totam Germaniam animo salutamus’). At a dinner held in his honour that same evening, the Prince took the opportunity to declare that ‘the whole of humanity would be best served if the Teutonic peoples were brought nearer together and would join hands for the purpose of spreading their civilization to distant regions’. Reporting upon the event the following day, the Berliner Tageblatt wondered if one gallant ambassador might yet preserve the friendship between England and Germany. The writer did not, however, sound entirely hopeful.5
Three weeks later, Prince Lichnowsky (who disliked sailing) was a dutiful guest on the Emperor’s yacht as the Meteor put into Kiel to welcome a carefully scheduled visit by three light British cruisers and four mighty dreadnoughts. Georg von Hase, appointed by the Emperor to act as ADC to their honoured English guest Admiral Warrender, never forgot his first glimpse of the British ships, ten miles out at sea from Kiel, advancing through a swirling mist: ‘On came the formidable giants, the greatest warships in the world . . .’6
In a visit that was intended to be conciliatory, the evidence of mutual suspicion was hardly concealed. The British declined to reveal the secrets of their wireless rooms. The Germans kept their guests away from the submarine production yards. ‘Whatever you do,’ a colleague warned von Hase, ‘tell them nothing about our U-boats.’7
Superficially, the tone was resolutely cordial. The Emperor, while furious with Sir Edward Goschen and his underlings for appearing in top hats instead of yachting caps, accepted the Meteor’s defeat by a British ship with reasonable grace and apologised for the absence of his wife (the Anglophobic Empress disliked the etiquette of Kiel, a place in which women took second place to the boats, only marginally less than the idea of shaking the hand of a British admiral).
All went well. The weather was magnificent. Garden parties and playful tugs-of-war between English and German sailors took place in the town. When local girls ran short, men twirled and trotted together around the hall of the Imperial Dockyard while, on board the boats, gay groups of dancers moved from the deck of the George V to the Viktoria Luise. News that the Emperor of Austria’s heir and his wife had been murdered in Sarajevo on 28 June, the fourteenth anniversary of their wedding, barely rippled the surface of the festivities. Wilhelm ordered flags to be lowered as a mark of respect, but only gentle Edward Goschen shed tears for the death of the unpopular Archduke, a man whom he had counted as his friend.
Nothing, on 28 June, seemed to threaten the carefully established new relationship between the mighty navies of England and Germany. Glumly setting off the following day to offer his official condolences to the Habsburgs, the German Emperor bade Admiral Warrender a warm and public farewell. Steaming away from the Baltic port, Warrender despatched a radio signal of similar warmth back to the German fleet: ‘Friends In Past and Friends For Ever.’8
Certainly, there had been a large degree of stage-management at Kiel; certainly, the messages of friendship proffered on both sides expressed hope rather than commitment. Nevertheless, the encounter – the British Navy’s first official visit to Kiel in ten years – had augured well. A month later, one of Goschen’s colleagues at the British Embassy could scarcely believe how many terrible shifts had taken place within so short a space of time. ‘When I think of Kiel and now!’ Horace Rumbold wrote on 30 July 1914, ‘It seems almost incredible.’9
At the time of the Kiel rapprochement, Sir Maurice de Bunsen had been stationed at Vienna for half a year. ‘We were delighted by the prospect of Vienna and wished for nothing better,’ his English wife, Berta, wrote in the diary she kept of that memorable time.10
Neither the shabby British Embassy nor the glorious city quite lived up to the magnificent expectations of an intensely sociable ambassador’s wife. Berta could not conceal her disappointment when a ball at the Schönbrunn Palace ended at suppertime, enabling the ancient Emperor to totter off to bed and leaving no time at all for the British Ambassador’s wife to display her waltzing skills. Neither did Berta relish the proximity of the British Embassy to the residence of Count Heinrich Tschirsky, the German ambassador. The Count, as Berta irritably noted, never missed out on a chance to explain Germany’s need to attack Russia ‘before she grew too strong’. What Berta did not grasp in those early months was that Germany was merely biding its time, waiting for the chance that came its way on 28 June.
The assassination at Sarajevo of the Archduke and his consort caused few tears to be shed in Vienna. Writing to his sister, Hilda, back in England, de Bunsen remarked that the younger Habsburgs had been generally disliked, and that the Emperor of Austria was well aware of the danger of despatching his heir to Sarajevo, known to be a Serbian trouble spot. Berta noted that the Viennese even went out in the streets to dance with joy after the news came through.11
On 24 July, taking courage from a private assurance of German support, Austria made her formal response to the Archduke’s assassination. An ultimatum was delivered to Serbia with such provocatively ferocious conditions that refusal seemed certain. Serbia, however, capitulated, surrendering on all but one minor point. One point was all that Austria – and Germany – required. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany, as planned, fell in behind her.
To a dismayed Maurice de Bunsen (he told Berta that the situation was the worst he had ever known), the undoubted local villain of the piece was their neighbour across the street. Count Tschirsky, as Maurice de Bunsen anxiously advised the Foreign Office in London, had been a prime supporter of Austria’s aggressive approach. Citing Count Benckendorff at London’s Russian Embassy as his authority, de Bunsen explained Tschirsky’s tit for tat strategy. If Austria attacked Serbia, then Russia would come to the latter’s defence. Germany, as Austria’s ally, would thus have obtained the pretext she needed for going to war against the Tsar.12
Maurice had confided to his wife his fears of an imminent and appalling crisis well before the Austrian ultimatum was issued. England was not yet involved, but Berta’s considerable sangfroid began to crack on 27 July, the day that a tight row of armed guards suddenly sprouted along the front of every embassy in Vienna. Five days later, she heard that German troops had been mobilised for action on two fronts, against both Russia and France. In Vienna, the mood grew fraught. ‘Panic is seizing people,’ Berta wrote on the evening of 2 August. ‘I got tonight a wild letter from Baroness Fould Springer . . . begging me to take her children to England.’ The de Bunsens’ Austrian chauffeur had already been despatched to fight the Serbians; on the morning of 3 August, his German replacement set off in tears to join the troops assembled on the Western Front, while declaring that ‘he would shoot high or low if he were asked to shoot at English or French’. Meanwhile, the Embassy’s Parisian cook, Raymond, under marching orders from France, found time to prepare a splendid last dinner for his sombre employers and their guests.
On the morning of 4 August, a haggard Count Tschirsky ventured out of his door across the street to enquire of Ambassador de Bunsen what the chances were of England staying neutral. ‘Maurice said he did not know yet. Then Tschirsky said: “If England comes in, then we are crushed.”’13
Events were moving too swiftly to be absorbed. All around her, Berta de Bunsen saw the shattering fragments of the cosy, reliable world into which she had settled a mere eight months earlier. An Austrian friend, Count Larisch, unofficially passed along news contained in a letter from his son in Berlin. It spoke of a ‘great move forward’ planned by Germany on 10 August. The fact that the Austrian Larisch’s son was privy to the news showed that his country would be fighting against France and Russia on Germany’s side, and that – as Berta noted with sick dismay – ‘we may be forced to fight against these nice people’.
On 4 August, England declared war on Germany, but not, as yet, on Austria, although the atmosphere in Vienna clearly foretold what was to come. An outraged Berta learned that the German wife of one of Maurice’s own diplomatic colleagues, Theo Russell, had secretly been celebrating the sinking by German mines of an English cruiser, the Amphion, on 6 August (the Amphion had sunk a German mine-layer, a hastily converted Hamburg holiday ship, on the previous day). It troubled her more to contemplate the perilous futures of the innocent English people who resided in Vienna. In her diary, Berta singled out a Miss Congreve and her widowed sister, Baroness Oesterreicher, as dear old ladies who had inhabited the city of Vienna for decades and knew no other home; Maurice was praised by his proud wife for helping wherever he could to give money and to facilitate escapes.
On 12 August, the news that the de Bunsens had been dreading reached Vienna. England was now the official enemy of Austria, as Germany’s ally. Orders were clear: departure must be immediate, by whatever route the de Bunsens could manage to find.
Packing up as many possessions as could be crammed into the single saloon car provided for their hasty exodus, the de Bunsens gave one last glance across the street at the shuttered windows of the German Embassy. Bitterly, Berta imagined Count Tschirsky peering out through a chink in the panels, gloating at a departure during which the de Bunsen’s slow-moving vehicle was pelted with rocks. Reaching, finally, the safe haven of neutral Switzerland, Sir Maurice and his wife settled into the same hotel as another new exiled diplomatic couple. Jules Cambon, formerly the popular French ambassador at Berlin, was ready to provide a first-hand report of events at their own British Embassy on the Wilhelmstrasse.
The Cambons themselves had not fared too badly during their last hours on enemy territory; Sir Edward Goschen had been less lucky. Angry Berlin crowds had hurled stones and bricks at the Embassy’s bleak facade, breaking eleven of the former Palais Strousberg’s large windows. Some of the bolder members of the mob had clambered onto the sills to try to force their way inside, while flying cobblestones crashed into the Embassy’s hastily vacated reception rooms on the ground floor.
Leaving the following morning, Sir Edward Goschen was obliged to lug his own trunks out into the street while the German staff, having torn the British insignia off their uniforms, stood by with folded arms. One staff member had apparently spat on the Ambassador’s valise. A parting salvo had been delivered from the Emperor, who wished the Ambassador to know that he was forthwith divesting himself of any British titles bestowed upon his imperial self by treacherous Albion.14
The Emperor’s injured tone was sincere. The discovery of how little his opinions counted in a time of crisis had come as a considerable shock.
Realisation of his powerlessness had begun to dawn on Wilhelm II during a fraught exchange of telegrams with his cousin Nicholas II, the Tsar, between 28 July (when Austria declared war on Serbia) and 1 August (when Russian troops mobilised along Germany’s eastern borders). The following day, Wilhelm’s chief of staff, General von Moltke, had been forced to explain that the Emperor’s peremptory command to call off the invasion of France, while sending German troops back east to face the Russians, could not be obeyed. By 2 August, it was already too late. His troops had occupied Luxembourg and were only awaiting the outcome of England’s ultimatum to Germany before following their orders to march through Belgium into France.
Germany and Russia were now formally at war. England, to the horror of both the Emperor and his chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, was preparing to stand by the treaty that, faraway back in 1839, had pledged her always to support a threatened Belgium. Counting on his own firm friendship with Goschen, the Chancellor pleaded with the British Ambassador that England was being absurd. Why should she abandon neutrality for ‘a mere scrap of paper’ (the 1839 Treaty)? Why would Britain not honour the understanding of neutrality that she had given to Germany, her cherished sisterland?
Emperor Wilhelm, like his anguished chancellor, had become certain that Britain would not interfere in a European war. Seeking where best to lay the blame for that misplaced conviction, the most evident and recent culprit appeared to be his own well-meaning brother.
In July 1914, Prince Henry was yachting at Cowes and relaxing at Eastbourne in the company of his sisters Sophie and Mossy when news came through of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. The moment seemed right to make use of family connections to discover England’s attitude. Visiting Buckingham Palace informally on 26 July, Henry asked King George what England’s line would be. Fatally, once again, the Prince drew a wrong conclusion.
What George actually said in July 1914 – according to his own account on a half sheet of paper preserved in the Royal Archives at Windsor – was that a German war against Russia and France would make it impossible for England not ‘to be dragged into it’. Prince Henry, writing to his brother Wilhelm on 28 July, had heard differently. The King, so Henry informed the German Emperor, had offered an almost unequivocal reassurance to his cousins: ‘We shall try all we can to keep out of this and remain neutral.’15 That message was just what Wilhelm had wanted to hear. Germany could do as she pleased; England, on the pledged word of her king to a member of his own family, would stand aside.
Prince Henry’s subsequent actions suggest that he was less confident than he sounded. Directly after paying his hasty visit to London, and having urged his alarmed sisters to pack their cases for immediate departure to Europe, the Prince returned to Germany. These were not the actions of a man who placed much hope in England’s future neutrality.
One man continued to believe, until the very end, in a compromise that could somehow save England’s friendship with Germany. Possibly, the bestowing of his Oxford doctorate a mere month earlier had caused Prince Lichnowsky to become unrealistic in his views; possibly, he interpreted too much from his own close friendship with the Germanophile family of Prime Minister Asquith. ‘Mediation’, strikingly, is the word that crops up in every Foreign Office reference to discussions with the Prince. He could not give up hope.
‘Maybe he’ll finally accept it,’ the Emperor coolly noted in the margin of a note from the Prince that reached him on 4 August, acknowledging – at last – that a break was imminent. ‘Poor Lichnowsky.’16
Wilhelm’s marginal annotations to diplomatic communiqués were notoriously erratic; nevertheless, his impatience with the romantic Prince was, on this occasion, understandable. Only four days earlier, the Prince had despatched the glad news to Berlin of Sir Edward Grey’s personal assurance that Britain would not intervene. The English Foreign Secretary, a kind-hearted man, had perhaps weakened in the face of Lichnowsky’s evident despair. It is more likely that Lichnowsky, like Prince Henry, heard more than was promised and dashed off a report before coming to his senses.
On 2 August, the day after his discussion with Grey, Lichnowsky paid a final visit to his friend Asquith, an encounter during which both men shed tears.
On 3 August, Edward Grey made his celebrated speech to Parliament. The tired-eyed Foreign Secretary now declared that the only hope of escaping war lay in an ignoble casting aside of Britain’s long-standing commitment to defend Belgium. ‘We cannot do that,’ Grey stated, to a cheering House. In that one sentence, England’s grounds for war were given and understood.
A few still hoped for a miracle. Daisy Pless, back in Britain on a visit to her English family, cabled King George with a heartfelt request: ‘Your Majesty please remain now and forever at Germany’s side so that all Europe may be protected . . .’17 But Daisy’s plea, like a sheaf of others that begged, on the eve of war, for peace at any price, had come too late. German troops were already marching across the Belgian borders. Britain’s ultimatum had been ignored.
On the evening of 4 August, Lichnowsky received a sturdy package from Sir Edward Grey. The contents were self-evident from its bulk; in order to leave England, the Ambassador and his staff would need the passports that were always held by the Foreign Office. Retiring to his dressing-room, the Prince put on his pyjamas, turned on the pink-shaded light and stretched out upon his bed. Below the Carlton House Terrace windows, he could hear a great roar and the cheering of the crowds along the Mall as the King, together with the Queen and the Prince of Wales, emerged onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace, following the official declaration of war. (‘It is a terrible catastrophe, but it is not our fault,’ the King consoled himself that night as he offered a prayer for the safety in action of his own dear Bertie, his younger son.18)
Crowds were still surging along the shadowy Mall later that night, as a junior Foreign Office official, entering the German Embassy by a small side door, was ushered up to the dressing-room in which Lichnowsky lay. Here, murmuring his regrets, Harold Nicolson unobtrusively exchanged the note contained in the previously delivered – and seemingly still unopened – packet (in which an exhausted Grey had erroneously informed the Ambassador that Germany had declared war on Britain) for a second, and correct, statement of the facts. Lichnowsky, courteous to the end, signed for the receipt, apologised for having had his light off and sent his regards to Nicolson’s father, Sir Arthur.
On 5 August, Daisy Pless came across Mechtilde Lichnowsky, quietly weeping as she wandered for a last time around the sandy pathways of St James’s Park. Walking across the Mall, Daisy was greeted at the German Embassy by the distracted Prince. A team of London workmen were hard at work; the imperial eagle had already been brought down from its proud perch above the entrance. King George, so Daisy gathered, had sent a few kind words via his private secretary, Frederick Ponsonby; he had even apologised that etiquette prevented him from saying a personal farewell.19
Lichnowsky’s love of England was widely known and sympathy for him was considerable. The Asquith family called at the Embassy on 5 August, the day of departure. Grey, inviting Lichnowsky to visit his rooms in Richard Haldane’s home at Queen Anne’s Gate, seemed ‘deeply moved’ and anxious to offer reassurance. ‘We don’t want to crush Germany,’ Grey told the Prince, a declaration that Lichnowsky dutifully passed along to Berlin.20
Painful though the departure felt, everything was done with a respect that went straight to Prince Lichnowsky’s tender heart. A special train was laid on to conduct the Ambassador, his family and his staff to Harwich, where a Guard of Honour stood by to salute as the evacuating Germans stepped on board a British ship. ‘I was treated’, the Prince wrote with forlorn pride, ‘like a departing Sovereign.’ Travelling later towards Berlin, on board a German train, the Lichnowsky party were passed by a troop train crowded with laughing boys on their way to the front, their necks hung with garlands of flowers by proud families and friends. The Prince waved to the young soldiers until they were out of sight, when he burst into tears.21
Visiting the shuttered German Embassy in London a few weeks later, as part of an official clearance group, a young man called Shane Leslie found its interior in chaos. A silver half-filled cigarette case still lay open on the Ambassador’s desk. Books were scattered everywhere. Mechtilde’s rosary beads lay strewn across the bedroom floor. Abandoned toys were tumbled in heaps around the children’s nursery.
Leafing through the books, the young officer opened a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. A final gift of consolation to the Prince from Margot Asquith, the Prime Minister’s wife, it carried the date of her last visit: ‘the day of war’. Out across the breadth of the little flyleaf, the impulsive Mrs Asquith had scrawled her last words of tribute to a well-loved friend.
Concluding his account of a distressing commission, Shane Leslie mused on the strangeness of a world in which he was now bound by law to regard a gentle German diplomat as his enemy. ‘To the most true and honourable of men’ were the words that Mrs Asquith had written on the flyleaf of the Meditations; copying them into his report, Leslie added a comment of his own: ‘which I believe he is’.22
As the desolate German Ambassador left England, Sir Edward Goschen and his son returned home.
Goschen adored his younger boy. Always known, for some reason, as ‘Bunt’ to a loving father, the Oxford-educated and Wagner-loving George Goschen had been the Ambassador’s chief companion in Berlin following the sudden death of Hosta Goschen from a brain tumour in 1912. (The Emperor Wilhelm, ever tactful, had chaffed Sir Edward on having killed off his beloved wife by knocking her about; the Empress, more graciously, sent a remembrance card upon each anniversary of Lady Goschen’s death.) Bunt had been there to support the first sociable venture that his father tremulously undertook as a widower – a musical evening at which Cambon, the French ambassador, and his wife, were among the sympathetic guests. Bunt was at his adoring father’s side again, duetting in a Bach sonata, on the night in March 1913 when news came through to the Wilhelmstrasse ofthe assassination of the King of Greece, brother to England’s Dowager Queen Alexandra. A few days later, when the composer Puccini paid a visit to the Embassy – and astonishingly revealed his absolute lack of music-reading skills – Bunt was on hand to strum the scores. In April of that year, ‘my dear old Bunt’ took up his first diplomatic appointment, at Cairo, at £300 per year. It was, so his proud father noted, a splendid start.
Edward Goschen had kept no diary through his frightening last hours in Berlin; life left no time for it. Safely home in England, however, he resumed his journal at the end of the year. He noted that he and Bunt had been playing Mozart’s Violin Sonata No. 6 on the evening of 15 December, when the news that he had dreaded came through. Bunt, a peace-loving and dreamy young man of twenty-seven who had completed just one month of army training, was required to join his regiment.
Two weeks later, Sir Edward recorded the news of Bunt’s death as brokenly as though he could not see the page for tears. ‘That darling darling boy – who has been such a loving, bright and always cheery companion to me, so full of bright hopes, of promise, of talents – and such Joie de Vivre . . .’23