Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War by Max Hastings Read Free Book Online

diary a fund-raising event for the Red Cross: ‘I am quite interested in this – how could I not be, having three brothers liable to military call-up? More than that, I have recognised the critical nature of its work since I read a life of Florence Nightingale, and because I know from Paul Rohrbach’s interesting book German World Policies how grave and how constant is the threat of war facing us.’
    Wilhelm II presided over an empire unified only in his lifetime, which had achieved immense economic strength, but remained prey to insecurities which its ruler personified. He had no real thirst for blood, but a taste for panoply and posturing, a craving for martial success; he displayed many of the characteristics of a uniformed version of Kenneth Grahame’s Mr Toad. Visitors remarked the notably homoerotic atmosphere at court, where the Kaiser greeted male intimates such as the Duke of Württemberg with a kiss on the lips. In the first decade of the century, the court and army were convulsed by a series of homosexual scandals almost as traumatic as was the Dreyfus Affair for France. In 1908, Dietrich Graf von Hülsen-Haeseler, chief of the Kaiser’s military secretariat, died of a heart attack while performing an after-dinner pas seul dressed in a ballet tutu before a Black Forest shooting-lodge audience which included the Emperor himself.
    And while Wilhelm’s intimate circle displayed a taste for the grotesque, he himself pursued enthusiasms with tireless lack of judgement; most of his contemporaries, including the statesmen of Europe, thought him mildly unhinged, and this was probably clinically the case. Christopher Clark has written: ‘He was an extreme exemplar of that Edwardian social category, the club bore who is forever explaining some pet project to the man in the next chair. Small wonder that the prospect of being buttonholed by the Kaiser over lunch or dinner, when escape was impossible, struck fear into the hearts of so many European royals.’ Rear-AdmiralAlbert Hopman, a shrewd and iconoclastic naval officer, wrote of the Kaiser in May 1914: ‘He is vanity itself, sacrificing everything to his own moods and childish amusements, and nobody checks him in doing so. I ask myself how people with blood rather than water in their veins can bear to be around him.’ Hopman described to his diary a strange dream on the night of 18 June 1914: ‘I stood in front of a castle … There I saw the old, broken-down Kaiser Wilhelm [I], talking to some people while holding a sabre stuck in its scabbard. I walked towards him, supported him, and led him into the castle. As I did so he said to me: “You must draw the sword … My grandson [Wilhelm II] is too feeble [to do so].”’
    All Europe’s monarchs were wild cards in the doom game played out in 1914, but Wilhelm was the wildest of all. Bismarck’s legacy to his country was a dysfunctional polity in which the will of the German people, expressed in the composition of the Reichstag, was trumped by the powers of the Emperor, his appointed ministers and the army’s chief of staff. Jonathan Steinberg describes the era inaugurated by Wilhelm’s dismissal of his chancellor in 1890, soon after assuming the throne: ‘Bismarck … left a system which only he – a very abnormal person – could govern and then only if he had as superior a normal Kaiser. [Thereafter] neither condition obtained, and the system slithered into the sycophancy, intrigue and bluster that made the Kaiser’s Germany a danger to its neighbours.’ Max Weber, who was born into that era, wrote similarly of Bismarck: ‘He left a nation totally without political education … totally bereft of political will . It had grown accustomed to submit patiently and fatalistically to whatever was decided for it in the name of monarchical government.’ fn3 Democratic influence was strongest on domestic financial matters, weakest on foreign policy, which was deeply secretive, conducted by ministers who were