Source of book: Borrowed from the library
The question of what war in history was the most senseless and stupid has a lot of competition, but it is pretty difficult to dispute that World War One belongs in the conversation. A war that few wanted, that was completely avoidable, and which led to the greatest carnage of any war to that date. Oh, and it set the stage for phase two of the conflict, World War Two, and strongly contributed to totalitarian Communist revolutions in Russia and China. That’s a lot of damage from one incredibly pointless war.
But how did things get to that state in the first place? There are a lot of interconnected reasons, and much ink has been spilled about that. Miranda Carter takes a look at a less explored part of the equation by going all the way back to the three cousins that were on the thrones of major powers at the time of the war, their lives, and how they contributed to the conflict.
To say that the royal families of Europe in the modern era are an incestuous mess is perhaps even an understatement. By the late Victorian Era, everyone was related to everyone, and not just by marriage. The families had intermarried for generations, so a chart of the connections looks less like a family tree and more like a family spider web. (Carter starts the book with four pages of family trees, and notes all the places the four connect.)
King George V of England and Wilhelm II of Germany were first cousins and grandsons of Queen Victoria. Nicholas II of Russia was related to the others by marriage - he married another of Victoria’s grandchildren, and Wilhelm I married another member of the Romanov family. Oh, and George’s father Edward VII and Tsar Alexander III both married members of the Danish royal family, which intersects with the other trees in other places. It’s a total mess, and I’m probably leaving some connections out.
In any case, George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm were originally close due to their family connections. The great matriarch, Victoria, firmly believed that the key to keeping the peace in Europe would be the close family relationships of their rulers. Which, perhaps, demonstrates her lack of understanding of families and how they actually function.
By World War One, these relationships had deteriorated, undermined by constantly shifting political issues, alliances, and personal feuds. Take your average family disputes and add enormous egos fed by a lifetime of coddling and entitlement, mix in some narcissism, sprinkle a lot of military honor culture, and fold in colonialism, and you have a combustible mix which was bound to explode sooner or later.
This book is nearly 500 rather dense pages long, but at least the writing and storytelling is good. Carter does her best to give a lot of detail, including a tremendous amount of primary-source information: correspondence, diary entries, newspaper articles, minutes from conferences, and so on. The result is a flood of information that can only be absorbed in moderate doses. (Hence why I have been working on the book for a couple months.)
What does emerge is a compelling picture of the massive cultural shift from the early 1800s to the early 1900s from monarchy and military honor culture to the constitutional legislative and administrative state. England had already made most of the shift - even Victoria was essentially a figurehead by the end of her reign - but both Russia and Germany were initially full autocracies, and governance of large and complex states suffered greatly as a result.
I cannot attempt to give more of a summary of these three interlocking stories of the main characters, let alone the roles of other important people, from Edward VII to Bernard von Bulow to Rasputin. These are all fascinating stories too, and fill out the colorful society portrayed in this book.
There are a lot of great quotes that I think illuminate the complexities of the political issues of the time. I’ll try to discuss a few highlights in the hope that those who are fascinated with history will give the book a read. World War Two tends to suck the historical oxygen from the room with its dramatic personalities, big bombs, and its notorious genocide, but understanding this second war requires examining the first, and the decades of events that led to it.
Of the three, Wilhelm is the one that fascinated me the most, in no small part because he reminds me so much of Trump. The time was different, so, while Wilhelm (as well as many others in all three countries) was antisemitic, he didn’t need to win a vote, and so didn’t rely on stirring up hate for his power. The rest, though, are there. The narcissism, the persecution complex, the inability to focus on any one thing long enough to do more than fuck it up, the massive and irrational ego, and so on.
Wilhelm’s problems didn’t come out of nowhere, though. His German father wanted him to grow up German, in military culture, while his English mother (Victoria’s daughter) preferred a strict British school experience. This meant eventually a rather abusive tutor and a lot of parental conflict.
A depressive, he seems to have become convinced that he was locked in a Manichean battle to mould Willy’s character, without being able to see that everything he was doing was making it worse. The plan was, as Wilhelm later wrote, to “grasp hold of the soul of the pupil…to ‘wrench it into shape.” Rather than realizing that at least part of Willy’s arrogance was an attempt to hold on to some shreds of self-confidence in the face of constant character demolition, Hinzpeter believed that what his charge needed was “humiliation.”
This is, unfortunately, the core of every authoritarian parenting style. The task of “raising a child” is all about making the child a certain way, and humiliating the child if he or she wasn’t compliant. And no, for most children, this backfires. I know my parents love to accuse me of being arrogant, but I know that what really bothers them is that I stand up for my beliefs when those beliefs conflict with theirs - it is the same power struggle as when I was a child, except they have lost the power they once had.
Wilhelm went on to say later:
“The impossible was expected of the pupil in order to force him to the nearest degree of perfection. Naturally the impossible goal could never be achieved; logically, therefore, the praise which registers approval was also excluded.”
Like Wilhelm, Nicholas was raised with certain beliefs about his role in the world - namely, the Divine Right of Kings, which England had rejected in favor of a constitutional monarchy. It is fascinating to see the direct correspondence between the Christian Nationalist movement, which has coalesced around Donald “Grab ‘em by the Pussy” Trump as their messiah, the old Tsarist project, and Putin’s aggression.
[Ivan the Great] acquired a set of useful messianic myths about Russia’s world mission: to recapture Constantinople, or Tsargrad as the Russians called it, for Christianity (and rather more usefully, to gain secure access to Europe and the Mediterranean for its grain and navy), and to “protect” the Slavic peoples of the Balkans against the Ottoman empire. This dual mission caused his authority to be underwritten by the Russian Orthodox Church. The tsar became the great defender of Orthodoxy; the Church, tied closer to the state than in any country in Europe, declared that the tsar was God’s representative on earth and he must be obeyed at all costs.
It all ties together: religion, ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, and power.
Back to Wilhelm, this passage also made me think about Trump, and his pretense to being a man of culture, when everyone knows he is an ignorant idiot.
Wilhelm considered himself an expert on many things, and was not shy about saying so. In subsequent years, he would personally inform the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg that he was conducting Peer Gynt all wrong; tell Richard Strauss that modern composition was “detestable” and he was “one of the worst”; and, against the wishes of its judges, withdraw the Schiller Prize from the Nobel Prize-winning German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, whose downbeat Ibsen-esque social realism he didn’t like. A hundred years before, when courts had still been centres of cultural patronage, such decisions might have been accepted without comment; now, however, even in Germany the emperor’s taste was frequently the subject of hilarity.
It wasn’t just art, either. Wilhelm thought he was a genius about everything (sound familiar?) but was fundamentally incompetent.
Wilhelm appeared unable to distinguish the trivial from the important - he’d spend hours looking at photographs of warships or moving the position of the smoke stacks on a new cruiser, rather than read government reports. He had no idea how he was going to accomplish all the great things he had promised. For him kingship had been a rather vague notion of having power, being great and beloved. Worse, he was an appalling vacillator, changing his mind - he was too often influenced by the last person he’d talked to, and constantly in quest of popularity - with such frequency that it drove his ministers mad and made the government look irresolute and confused.
Hmm, again, that really sounds familiar. Predictably, this led to chaos and ineffective government, at a time when modern societies were becoming ever more complex and technical to govern.
This lack of focus, even chaos, was becoming characteristic of German politics. Even those embedded in the system could see it. Holstein privately complained that sometimes he seemed to be working in an “operetta-style government.”
It wasn’t just in Germany that the aristocracy was finding itself losing the unquestioning obeisance it was used to.
The obsession with appearances extended further than uniforms into an insistence on certain rules and conformity of behavior and had more sinister consequences than mere pointlessness and triviality. It almost guaranteed that a kind of hypocrisy became encrusted in the culture of court and the upper classes. In Germany, the dominance of and cultural fascination with the army pressed upon the Berlin court and predominant class a caricature hyper-masculinity. In England the aristocracy’s insistence that they lead society by virtue of their virtue meant that they believed they must appear above reproach in everything. Too much was expected, too much forbidden. The conflict could be seen in Wilhelm himself: the imperative to be manly and soldierly all the time had turned him into a caricature and forced him to take refuge in periodic breakdowns. Among Edward’s aristocratic set public exposure was the ultimate sanction, but one could do almost anything society in the wider sense condemned - have mistresses, gamble, take an unseemly interest in livestock or small boys - as long as one wasn’t discovered or didn’t open up that world to scrutiny, for example by leaving one’s spouse. It was the price the ruling class found itself increasingly paying for laying claim to social seniority and power on the basis of seemingly pristine morality and perfect appearances. Aristocracies had perhaps always lived by appearances, but with a public increasingly self-aware and demanding, and a press increasingly powerful, when the rest of the world got a handle on scandal behind the court’s closed doors, the effects could be devastating; while those who kept irreproachably to the rules would too often be forced to live lives of desiccated self-denial.
If anything, the Russian government was even worse and more incompetent. Nicholas had even more power, and even less ability to effectively govern. Added to this was a deep introversion and a distrust of everyone outside his close circle. As a British diplomat wrote about the impossibility of a functional relationship with the Russian government said, “Nothing remains secret here long. The difficulty here is to sift the truth from the lies.”
In connection with the problem of distrust of the British, the author notes that there was a rational basis for this.
The British had a bad habit of moving in their troops on high moral grounds and then accidentally taking over.
This also sounds familiar, yes?
Nicholas was in way over his head, and responded in the worst possible way most of the time. The world was changing, but he was unable to accept that truth.
Russia was in the grip of great social and economic change, and the government was increasingly inadequate to confront it, and he himself believed utterly that he was the only man who could rule it. But he closed himself away.
This too sounds relevant today, doesn’t it? Things are changing, but the American Right refuses to accept it and find solutions to the actual problems we face, choosing instead to try to return to a mythical past.
European courts, all desperately trying to keep out new forces - trade, the bourgeoisie, industry, democracy - which they saw as threats to their status and influence, but their only weapon besides barricades was a desperate holding on to the past. They had ceased to be places where one went to seek one’s fortune, where art was created, or political debate took places, as they had been in the eighteenth century, instead becoming strangled by hierarchy and a million tiny rules, the more arbitrary the better.
Yet another way of channeling one’s insecurities in socially harmful ways. Again, Nicholas was the worst about this.
Nicholas compensated for his anxious feelings of inadequacy and lack of preparedness by holding tenaciously to his belief in divine right. The moment the crown had touched his head, he had become a vehicle for God’s purpose and had magically absorbed a kind of spiritual superiority which made him, whatever his inadequacies, better equipped than any minister to know what Russia needed. It was a mystical idea far more literal even than the pronouncements about his relationship with God which had brought Wilhelm such derision in Europe, and in Nicholas it encouraged a kind of fatalism which would make him oddly passive in a crisis.
An interesting parallel to the Divine Right of Kings in politics is the Divine Right of Parents in patriarchy. I really do believe that my parents compensated for their feelings of inadequacy as parents (and really, no parent is adequate - we are all making it up as we go) by embracing this idea that God spoke through them to their children. Parenthood itself granted that kind of spiritual superiority by magic. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work out well in the end for them either.
Despite the name, the book actually spends more time talking about Edward VII than George. This is because George didn’t ascend to the crown until fairly late - 1910 - and during most of the timeframe of the book, Edward was king. Honestly, Edward wasn’t terrible: he was pretty good at what he did. But he was also a figurehead, not a ruler. Even if he didn’t always understand that.
His powerlessness made Edward lose his temper frequently. It was hard for the British royals to reconcile themselves to this. The habit of deference and courtesy around them meant that the reality of their lack of power was not reflected by the way people felt obligated to treat them.
The Boer War also changed the dynamic. Although the British empire wouldn’t actually shrink until World War Two, the threads were already starting to unravel. Public opinion was shifting, particularly abroad.
Anti-British cartoons, especially in Germany and France, showed British soldiers bayoneting Boer babies; Edward himself was drawn standing on the mutilated bodies of Boer women and children. As the war entered its second year, the British army, under the leadership of Lord Kitchener, had become utterly ruthless in an attempt to flush out the last Boer guerrilla fighters. It burned farms, shot prisoners, and interned women and children, Boer and black, in concentration camps, efficient new invention pioneered a few years before by the Spanish during the Spanish-American War. There the internees died in shaming numbers of famine, thirst, cholera, and mistreatment. The conditions were so appalling that criticism was beginning to leak into mainstream British politics.
The Nazis didn’t invent anything. Much of the worst of what they did was borrowed from countries we like to pretend were the “good guys.”
The Boer war cost Britain an incredible amount both in lives and treasure. But also in prestige.
Almost immediately the British government handed over £3 million for reparations and the reconstruction of the two Boer states and promised their incumbents self-government within the British empire - a gesture which kick-started the country’s international rehabilitation, but also signalled the pointlessness of the struggle, and prompted questions for the first time about whether the empire was costing Britain rather than enriching it.
Hold that thought, because colonialism is going to be a huge factor in the downfall of Russia, and eventually Germany as well.
Into this stew, Wilhelm kept inserting himself, believing that he and only he could conduct the personal negotiations necessary to end conflict.
The Greek royal family quietly loathed him, and his cousin Marie of Romania found him unbearably condescending. The paradox was, of course, that being so bad at personal relationships, Wilhelm should believe so deeply in conducting international relations through personal relationships.
Again, sound familiar? Anyone else these days think he has the key to the art of the deal but is really terrible at it?
Speaking of modern narcissists, how about Russia’s ongoing colonialist adventures?
For Russia, even more than for most countries, war had often proved disastrous. The Crimean War and the Russo-Turkish War of the 1870s had been disasters. Both had left Russia in debt and near-bankrupt, had crippled development, created internal disaffection and lasting hostility with foreign powers. The government and its institutions were in no state to bear the strains of war, and unlike, say, Britain, the country wouldn’t bear the expense. It was a lesson the Russian government would have done well to remember before it found itself at war with Japan in February 1904.
As an aside, Haruki Murakami talked about this conflict and its sequel in a forgotten episode of World War Two, in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Germany eventually would find itself making terrible decisions because of its lust to join the great colonialist powers and expand its colonies.
The problem with aggressive programmes of imperial expansion in distant places is that, when they go wrong, the consequences are felt much closer to home. Russia had already experienced the bitter results of an imperial misadventure; now it was Germany’s turn.
In this case, it was the disaster in Morocco, which ended up solidifying the alliance between France and England.
The book talks a good bit about the relationships of the British royals to the politicians with actual power. Many of the names are familiar to me because Winston Churchill talks about them extensively in his writings on British history and World War Two.
I’ll mention David Lloyd George and the way that both Edward and George hated him, both for his policies and his commoner background. Henry Asquith also gets some play, and he is always witty.
The most surprising thing, though, was to read about a tiff between George and Winston Churchill. Churchill quipped in a report on employment legislation that there were as many “idlers and wastrels” at the top of the social ladder as at the bottom, which is pretty self-evident. George fired back that Churchill was a socialist. Which is pretty funny, considering that Churchill was pretty conservative. But for a monarchist or a white supremacist today, anything that challenges hierarchy is “socialist,” right?
Closer to a true socialist (although not really that close) was Lloyd George.
The much-loathed Lloyd George had drafted his Budget and launched it with speeches which cheerily and baldly pointed out the gap between rich and poor in a way that no British statesman ever had, and with great panache and humour. “A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep as two Dreadnoughts and is more difficult to scrap.”
That’s a great line. Just substitute “billionaire” today, and it is still true. Perhaps even more so. This also serves as a bit of a warning for today’s Right Wing - history shows that when inequality rises too high, changes come, whether peacefully or violently, but they come.
After twelve years in government the Conservatives were an exhausted force. It was surprising perhaps that a party so predicated on privilege had lasted so long, though as governments have learned since, you can get voters to vote against their own economic interests if you can find something sufficiently powerful to counter them with - religion, a powerful hate, a collective (even if unrealistic) aspiration.
Um, Christian Nationalism, white supremacy and anti-LGBTQ hate, and MAGA anyone? As Lyndon Johnson correctly noted before I was born:
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
There are a few more pithy quotes about foreign policy and politics that I have to mention.
How to calm the inevitable accusations from Germany that the Convention was aimed at them? For lack of any other ideas, the British government went for the tried, trusted, and utterly unsatisfactory method of a state visit.
Or this one, again poking a bit at the British:
That the German Foreign Office was using a warship as leverage seemed to the British Foreign Office and Asquith a dangerous precedent: not merely another swipe at France, but a direct challenge to British naval supremacy and therefore its Great Power status - gunboat diplomacy had always been a particular British specialty.
In the run-up to World War One, the German military (which held increasing and eventually near-total power over German politics due to an ineffective Wilhelm and a mostly powerless legislature) decided that war was necessary and inevitable - in fact, it started to advocate for “preventative war” - as much an oxymoron as a preemptive strike usually is in practice.
In the end, either Russia or Germany could have stood down, and kept the war from happening. But once Germany decided that invading France was necessary as “preventative war,” it was nearly inevitable that world war would come. The aftermath of the war may have been mishandled and guaranteed that Germany would fight again, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Allies were right: more than any other country, Germany was responsible for the war.
There are a couple of incidents that didn’t fit into the flow that I wanted to mention somewhere, so I’ll do it here.
First is the story of Nabokov’s great-uncle. The Grand Duke Sergei was blown to tiny bits by an anarchist’s bomb, one of a series of anarchist acts which form the basis of Joseph Conrad’s fascinating novel, Under Western Eyes. The great-uncle was a friend of Sergei, and was offered a carriage ride home. He declined, and missed being blown up. Then, a few years later, he was offered a ticket on the Titanic, but likewise refused.
He comes into the story because he was elected to the Duma after the reforms. Nicholas distrusted the Duma, considering them to be a bunch of peasants. However, Nabokov’s father was one of the new members, and their family went back centuries as part of the aristocracy close to the tsars.
The final incident was after Wilhelm had, yet again, made an idiot of himself in foreign policy, the Reichstag finally had enough, and publicly denounced him. He pouted as usual, and his lackeys tried to calm him down.
In an effort to distract him, the kaiser’s entourage decided to put on an entertainment, the kind that amused him: a ballet spectacular performed by the middle-aged members of his various cabinets. The climax was a performance by Field Marshal Count Dietrich von Hulsen-Haeseler, the hefty, fifty-six-year-old chief of Wilhelm’s military cabinet. Described in some sources as wearing a pink tutu (“not for the first time,” Zedlitz-Trutschler wrote), in others in a pink ball gown - what was undisputed was that he was in drag - with a large feather in his hair, he performed a series of energetic pirouettes, jumps and capers, flirtaciously blew kisses to his audience, stumbled off the stage and suffered a massive heart attack that killed him instantly. It was reported that by the time the doctors arrived, rigor mortis was so far advanced that it was extremely difficult to get Hulsen out of his tutu and into his military uniform.
Yeah, that’s a pretty crazy story. Too implausible for fiction, clearly. Also, Wilhelm’s cabinet was gay as hell - eventually there was a huge scandal and a bunch of trials. Unfortunately, it also led to an increase in hyper-masculinity in German society and eventually Hitler’s attempts at extermination.
That at least gives some idea of the best lines in the book. There is so much more information, though. If you like history, it’s a well written and well researched book with a fascinating story to tell.
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