Yrys
Army.ca Veteran
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As War Loomed, 3 Leaders Wandered Lost
The decades leading up to World War I were, across Europe, an era of dwindling
dynasties and triumphal facial hair. King George V of Britain and Czar Nicholas II
of Russia each possessed impeccable Vandyke beards; people had trouble telling
the men apart. In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II had so elaborate a mustache, teased
into an upward-slanting W, that it earned its own name: “Er ist erreicht!” or
“It is achieved!”
George, Nicholas and Wilhelm — or Georgie, Nicky and Willy, as they sometimes
called one other — were first cousins, and almost everything about them was as
anachronistic and absurd as their bristling whiskers. All three, Miranda Carter
writes in her artful if sometimes lumbering new group biography, “George, Nicholas
and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I,” were “ill-equipped
by education and personality to deal with the modern world, marooned by history
in positions increasingly out of kilter with their era.”
This is a book about ideas as well as history, and the big question Ms. Carter poses
is this one: To what degree can close personal relationships, between royals or other
world leaders, prevent war? It’s one that American presidents continue to contemplate.
At their first summit conference, Ronald Reagan wanted to get Mikhail S. Gorbachev
alone, in front of a blazing fire, to charm him in the process of talking arms reduction.
George W. Bush met Vladimir V. Putin and told reporters that he was able to “get a
sense of his soul.”
George, Nicholas and Wilhelm — two were Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, another
was her grandchild-in-law — were certain that their fondness for one another, and
their blood ties, could effect long-term peace in Europe. That myth was shredded by
World War I. It was torn in a more personal way when George and Wilhelm didn’t
shelter Nicholas after his abdication and arrest. The Russian czar and his family
were slaughtered in a basement, their mangled remains thrown into a mine shaft.
Ms. Carter — she also wrote the excellent “Anthony Blunt: His Lives” (2002) — relates
history on a large canvas here, and it’s a story she mostly tells with vigor and parched
wit. Her book begins, in fact, with what she describes as Kaiser Wilhelm’s “almost only
ever recorded joke.” After King George changed his surname in 1917 to Windsor from
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha — the latter, Ms. Carter writes, “was redolent of the close relations
and blood ties that linked the whole of European royalty” — Wilhelm cracked that “he
was looking forward to seeing a production of the Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.”
Ms. Carter carefully observes the trio’s pampered childhoods, and traces how they
became the men they did. Wilhelm’s left arm was damaged during birth; throughout
his life he could not dress or cut his food without help. He was jocular but cold and
arrogant and prone to flattery. He loved military uniforms and practiced his “fierce”
look for photographers. Alas, Ms. Carter writes, quoting a German general, Wilhelm
could not “lead three soldiers over a gutter.”
A world-class narcissist, Wilhelm had an inane opinion about everything. “He would
personally inform the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg that he was conducting ‘Peer
Gynt’ all wrong,” Ms. Carter writes, and “tell Richard Strauss that modern composition
was ‘detestable’ and he was ‘one of the worst.’ ”
George was a dull mediocrity — he feared clever people and intellectuals, calling them
“eyebrows” — who spent much of his time as an adult collecting stamps and shooting.
He didn’t mix with interesting people, spoke no foreign languages and had what Ms.
Carter calls a “barking temper.” He sulked if he was not allowed to win at tennis.
Nicholas grew up, even by the standards of European royalty, in almost unimaginable
luxury — Ms. Carter describes a childhood spent in “a series of snow-covered palaces.”
His family’s pile outside St. Petersburg contained 900 rooms. “One estimate put the
number of royal servants across the Romanovs’ palaces at 15,000,” she writes. Nicholas
called the secret police who guarded him “naturalists” because they were always leaping
from behind trees.
Nicholas loved rural life, so much so that he quickly fell out of touch with his country
and had little idea of the changes that were sweeping over it. He too was an obsessive
hunter: “667 dead creatures for 1596 shots fired,” he noted one day in 1893.
Ms. Carter writes incisively about the overlapping events that led to the Great War and
a changed world. It was not a good time to be a king — or a kaiser or czar. New winds
were whipping on the political stage. In England the statesman David Lloyd George was
an especially articulate class warrior, declaring: “All down history nine-tenths of
mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining tenth and have been paid with
husks and bidden to thank god they had the husks.” People listened. They paid
attention, too, to their increasingly unfettered press. The London newspaper The
Daily Mail, Ms. Carter points out, “would identify Germany as Britain’s key enemy
well before the British government did.”
The real tragedy was that neither George, Nicholas nor Wilhelm was built to adapt
to a changing world; their time was evaporating. “As great mass movements took
hold of Europe,” Ms. Carter observes, “the courts and their kings cleaved to the past,
set up high walls of etiquette to keep the world out and defined themselves through
form, dress and precedence.”
“George, Nicholas and Wilhelm” is an impressive book. Ms. Carter has clearly not
bitten off more than she can chew for she — as John Updike once wrote about Günter
Grass — “chews it enthusiastically before our eyes.”
You turn this book’s pages with interest, however, but rarely with eagerness. It’s a
volume that never quite warms in your hands, packed perhaps too airlessly with
what Ms. Carter describes at one point as “backstabbing, intrigue and muddle.” That
phrase would have made a good alternative title.
The decades leading up to World War I were, across Europe, an era of dwindling
dynasties and triumphal facial hair. King George V of Britain and Czar Nicholas II
of Russia each possessed impeccable Vandyke beards; people had trouble telling
the men apart. In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II had so elaborate a mustache, teased
into an upward-slanting W, that it earned its own name: “Er ist erreicht!” or
“It is achieved!”
George, Nicholas and Wilhelm — or Georgie, Nicky and Willy, as they sometimes
called one other — were first cousins, and almost everything about them was as
anachronistic and absurd as their bristling whiskers. All three, Miranda Carter
writes in her artful if sometimes lumbering new group biography, “George, Nicholas
and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I,” were “ill-equipped
by education and personality to deal with the modern world, marooned by history
in positions increasingly out of kilter with their era.”
This is a book about ideas as well as history, and the big question Ms. Carter poses
is this one: To what degree can close personal relationships, between royals or other
world leaders, prevent war? It’s one that American presidents continue to contemplate.
At their first summit conference, Ronald Reagan wanted to get Mikhail S. Gorbachev
alone, in front of a blazing fire, to charm him in the process of talking arms reduction.
George W. Bush met Vladimir V. Putin and told reporters that he was able to “get a
sense of his soul.”
George, Nicholas and Wilhelm — two were Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, another
was her grandchild-in-law — were certain that their fondness for one another, and
their blood ties, could effect long-term peace in Europe. That myth was shredded by
World War I. It was torn in a more personal way when George and Wilhelm didn’t
shelter Nicholas after his abdication and arrest. The Russian czar and his family
were slaughtered in a basement, their mangled remains thrown into a mine shaft.
Ms. Carter — she also wrote the excellent “Anthony Blunt: His Lives” (2002) — relates
history on a large canvas here, and it’s a story she mostly tells with vigor and parched
wit. Her book begins, in fact, with what she describes as Kaiser Wilhelm’s “almost only
ever recorded joke.” After King George changed his surname in 1917 to Windsor from
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha — the latter, Ms. Carter writes, “was redolent of the close relations
and blood ties that linked the whole of European royalty” — Wilhelm cracked that “he
was looking forward to seeing a production of the Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.”
Ms. Carter carefully observes the trio’s pampered childhoods, and traces how they
became the men they did. Wilhelm’s left arm was damaged during birth; throughout
his life he could not dress or cut his food without help. He was jocular but cold and
arrogant and prone to flattery. He loved military uniforms and practiced his “fierce”
look for photographers. Alas, Ms. Carter writes, quoting a German general, Wilhelm
could not “lead three soldiers over a gutter.”
A world-class narcissist, Wilhelm had an inane opinion about everything. “He would
personally inform the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg that he was conducting ‘Peer
Gynt’ all wrong,” Ms. Carter writes, and “tell Richard Strauss that modern composition
was ‘detestable’ and he was ‘one of the worst.’ ”
George was a dull mediocrity — he feared clever people and intellectuals, calling them
“eyebrows” — who spent much of his time as an adult collecting stamps and shooting.
He didn’t mix with interesting people, spoke no foreign languages and had what Ms.
Carter calls a “barking temper.” He sulked if he was not allowed to win at tennis.
Nicholas grew up, even by the standards of European royalty, in almost unimaginable
luxury — Ms. Carter describes a childhood spent in “a series of snow-covered palaces.”
His family’s pile outside St. Petersburg contained 900 rooms. “One estimate put the
number of royal servants across the Romanovs’ palaces at 15,000,” she writes. Nicholas
called the secret police who guarded him “naturalists” because they were always leaping
from behind trees.
Nicholas loved rural life, so much so that he quickly fell out of touch with his country
and had little idea of the changes that were sweeping over it. He too was an obsessive
hunter: “667 dead creatures for 1596 shots fired,” he noted one day in 1893.
Ms. Carter writes incisively about the overlapping events that led to the Great War and
a changed world. It was not a good time to be a king — or a kaiser or czar. New winds
were whipping on the political stage. In England the statesman David Lloyd George was
an especially articulate class warrior, declaring: “All down history nine-tenths of
mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining tenth and have been paid with
husks and bidden to thank god they had the husks.” People listened. They paid
attention, too, to their increasingly unfettered press. The London newspaper The
Daily Mail, Ms. Carter points out, “would identify Germany as Britain’s key enemy
well before the British government did.”
The real tragedy was that neither George, Nicholas nor Wilhelm was built to adapt
to a changing world; their time was evaporating. “As great mass movements took
hold of Europe,” Ms. Carter observes, “the courts and their kings cleaved to the past,
set up high walls of etiquette to keep the world out and defined themselves through
form, dress and precedence.”
“George, Nicholas and Wilhelm” is an impressive book. Ms. Carter has clearly not
bitten off more than she can chew for she — as John Updike once wrote about Günter
Grass — “chews it enthusiastically before our eyes.”
You turn this book’s pages with interest, however, but rarely with eagerness. It’s a
volume that never quite warms in your hands, packed perhaps too airlessly with
what Ms. Carter describes at one point as “backstabbing, intrigue and muddle.” That
phrase would have made a good alternative title.
