Book Review

Cousins at War
Did the scions of Queen Victoria bumble their way into World War I?

David A. Andelman | With NATO and American forces deeply engaged in a hot war in Afghanistan and a number of real, potential, or lingering conflicts in a half dozen other locations on at least three continents, examining the origins of war has come into vogue in recent years. And all too often, it is all too easy to attribute these origins to individuals, rather than to historical dynamics or profound social changes. So when it comes to the origins of World War I, it should scarcely come as a major surprise that a trend of sorts has developed in the past several years of examining three cousins whose relationshipspositive and negativehelped shape the world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The three are Russias Czar Nicholas II, Germanys emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Britains King George V. All trace their ancestry to Queen Victoria, an extraordinary woman who could consider herself not only the ruler of an empire on which the sun never set, but also, through her prolific family, the godmother and grandmother of the vast bulk of civilized Europe. Over the past four years, two substantial works have emerged on the

trio. First was Catrine Clays King, Kaiser, Tsar: Three Royal Cousins Who Led the World to War. This was followed, somewhat inexplicably, four years later by Miranda Carters George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I, or, as it is called in its European editions, The Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One. In fact, only one of the three was truly an emperor Germanys Kaiser Wilhelm II, though George V as monarch of the British Empire could certainly have laid claim to such a title had it suited him. Each work has its strengths. Clays, an outgrowth of her BBC documentary with the same title, quotes liberally from the letters of the three that were provided to her by Queen Elizabeth II. Though after awhile one begins to long for some editorial selectivity, they do provide unparalleled insight into the characters of all three of these extraordinary, quirky, and ultimately deeply flawed rulers. The principal flaw in each of the three characters as both our authors Catrine Clay and Miranda Carterobserve them is what can only be described today as hubris, a term that

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was scarcely uttered and only dimly understood in those days when the concept of a republic or democracy was only the province of the former American colonies far across the seas. At least this was the view from the palaces of Berlin, London, and St. Petersburg. And in such a world of absolute monarchs, real hubris has little or no substantial role to play. Yet sadly, this is where the deep flaws of both works emerge. By focusing so single-mindedly on the lives and loves of the rulers, the societies that they purport to rule become deeply distorted through the prism of personal relationships that in the end proved somewhat tangential to the process. Were the personal (and often tendentious) relationships between Nicholas, Wilhelm, and George in the end central to the outcome of the pellmell race toward war in Europe? Or might it not have been forces beyond these monarchs control that ultimately caused the conflict. As Carter demonstrates, somewhat more effectively perhaps than Clay, all three could flail all they wanted, and write touching little notes to each other at critical turning points in the dynamic of history. But in the end, the broader social and political dynamics (over which none of the three had any real control, no matter what efforts they might exert or temper tantrums they might throw) decided the fate of nations and the life or death of millions. Each ruler proved to be in his own way powerless. George could huff and puff, but in the end he proved to be little more than a figurehead against the likes of David Lloyd George or Herbert Asquith. Wilhelm, in turn, an

all but psychotic ruler with deep emotional problems that may be traced back in part to his birth with a withered arm, quailed before his military leadership. As for Nicholas, perhaps the most flamboyantly despotic of the three, he turned out to be at the mercy of his mad wife Alexis and her equally mad guru, Rasputinall finally meeting a violent end at the hands of the very people they had struggled so desperately to hold at bay, namely the forces of the people, or in the case of the Romanovs, a Bolshevik claque. The war permanently changed George, Carter burbles in her final epilogue. But of course. Indeed it permanently changed all three monarchs (though only two survived through the armistice). And if the war permanently changed each of them, imagine what it did to the social, political, diplomatic, and strategic structures of Europe. We hardly have more than a passing sense of the enormous resources poured into this conflictthe lost generation of young British, German, and French (who, because they did not have a ruler linked by blood in some fashion to Queen Victoria, get barely a nod in either of these works). The roots of World War I and the nature of the Europe it shaped were of course far deeper than simply the interactions between cousins. Carter sets up all of these forces in her introduction, observing that this personal, hidden history... shows how Europe moved from an age of empire to an age of democracy, self-determination, and greater brutality. She got the second part exactly right, but in fact the personal hidden history was scarcely demonstrative of the vast dynamic of

Catrine Clay, King, Kaiser, Tsar: Three Royal Cousins Who Led the World to War (John Murray, 2007)

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Miranda Carter, The Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One (Penguin, 2010)

surging passions among the people of the European continent, who played a more important role in the period documented by these books than perhaps any previous period in human history. Indeed, Carter continues, the First World War [was] the one event which set 20th century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world. Quite a sweeping remarkignoring, of course, the horror wreaked by the Japanese in Asia during World War II, not to mention a host of African genocides, and wars in Indochina and Korea. War is indeed a wrenching, history-altering event. There is no doubt why its origins and its outcomesand the rulers who led their nations into battlehave proven to be of such vast interest to historians and political scientists. The problem is that the three men profiled in these two books are not by themselves responsible for the conflicts between the nations they led. Indeed, each tried his level best to use his connections to hold war at bay with a success so limited one wonders if they had any influence. They were all three anachronisms, ill-equipped by education and personality to deal with the modern world, marooned by history in positions increasingly out of kilter with their era, Carter observes. She cites Chekhov, Stravinsky, Einstein, Freud, Planck, Yeats, Wilde, and Picasso as individuals who might have been born under monarchies, but for whom the courts meant nothing. And apparently Carter finds them of as little consequence as they do the courts, since, apart from a brief curtain call

for Chekhov, this reference on page xxiii is the last each will receive in the rest of the volume. If only referentially, what Wilhelm, George, or Nicholas thought of any of these individuals might have helped put their lives more vividly and directly in context with their societies and the broader European equation. But if, as Carter suggests, all three were anachronisms, why should we care deeply about their backgrounds, their attendance at every royal birth or birthday, every parade, every outing on every yacht? Perhaps because they were for their era the boldface names that fascinated and compelled their peopleeven if they played barely walk-on roles in the drama that was unfolding around them. This may be the ultimate lesson of both volumesthat the truly great rulers are those who understand intuitively where their people are leading them, rather than gracelessly attempting to push history in their own direction or mold it in their own image. George, Wilhelm, and Nicholas were so tragically, in the end, simply out of step with their times.

DAVID A. ANDELMAN is editor of World Policy Journal and the author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.

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