The King of Prussia scowled, shook his head like a Rottweiler just out of the rain.
“The dummkopfs didn’t tell me that we, the Reich, started, systematically – they were very proud of that – breaking the bloody Submarine Treaty practically the day my dear, lamented, demented if you ask me, father signed it!”
If Wilhelm noticed the way his interlocutors’ jaws must have dropped, momentarily, very nearly to the marbled floor at their feet, he was far too wrapped up in his own roiling internal angst to remark upon it. His tone was one of a man betrayed and yet, grudgingly proud; for he was a man clearly caught betwixt and between any number of violently conflicting emotions.
“Dammit, Bertie,” he complained. “If I’d known what was going on, I…” He threw his arms about theatrically. “No, that’s not true! Actually, I don’t know what I’d have done about it! Those ‘people’ the old man collected around him never trusted me. Now I think about it I wouldn’t put it past them to have nobbled half the Court of Electors. Thirteen of the two-faced traitors voted against me,” he snarled, “for that nutzloser Haufen Scheiße, Ludwig!”
Useless pile of shit…
Immediately, he apologised for his intemperate language.
He looked to Eleanor.
“Forgive me, please. I am not quite myself today, Ellie.”
“That’s quite understandable, Willie,” she cooed comfortingly.
“Anyway, I had to tell you about the Submarine Treaty nonsense,” Wilhelm continued, no less agitated. “My father has done enough damage already with us going to war, or some such, over a stupid misunderstanding over the folly and duplicity of a stupid old man, what!”
The King viewed his cousin.
Beside him his Foreign Secretary was wearing a gravely troubled countenance, and he knew that his wife was looking to him for a lead; and yet, he was torn, desperately hoping his own shame was not as transparent as it felt to him, as he met Wilhelm’s imploring gaze.
“Yes,” he murmured, “now, about the Submarine Treaty…”
Impulsively, the younger man, having paused pacing, resumed his movements as if unwilling or unable to meet the King of England’s eye.
King George opened his mouth to speak but was pre-empted, beaten to the punch by Wilhelm.
“It’s incredible! Unbelievable! They’ve been building a couple of experimental nuclear-powered ships, and what they call a ‘test bed’ submarine ‘hull’ in the Baltic. Apparently, they hollowed out a whole damned island up there so they could carry on without being seen.”
“Ships?”
“Yes, they towed a couple of uncompleted heavy cruiser hulls from the yards at Stettin. I know virtually nothing about the submarine, other than the fact it is still about a year away from launching. They seemed to have been concentrating on their bloody bomb project. There’s a facility down in South West Africa, near Walvis Bay. They’ve already tested a couple of small devices down in the Southern Ocean somewhere…”
By this time the King and his wife were silently distraught; and had the former Crown Prince been able to step beyond his own agonising shame he would have realised that he was not alone in his guilt.
So, when Sir George Walpole made as if to question Wilhelm further, his own monarch cut him short.
“Dammit, George,” the King muttered. “Enough of this double dealing!”
When the King of England employed his ‘captain on the bridge’ tone, everybody in any room in Christendom stopped what they were doing, thinking, or planning and looked to him.
Wilhelm was only human.
He halted mid-stride and looked to his fellow monarch.
The older man was grim-faced.
“I regret to have to confess to you that you are not the only one whose government has been keeping you, or I, in the dark, Willie. Before the Queen and I left England, we too, were briefed about matters of which, until a few days ago, I assure you on my word as an officer and a gentleman, that we had absolutely no inkling.”
Eleanor moaned a soft sigh.
“Bertie and I were livid when we discovered what had been done in our name.”
“I don’t…”
The King raised a hand, unwilling to allow his cousin to voice additional hostages to fortune.
“We too, the British Empire, have been systematically flouting the spirit, and the letter of the Submarine Treaty, Willie. My ministers asked me to broach this matter with the new Kaiser, whom, we all confidently expected to be you at the earliest possible time.”
Wilhelm was too stunned to say anything for some seconds.
Then: “You’ve got the bomb?”
The older man nodded.
“We have had it for several years, actually.”
“And ships?”
“Submarines, yes.”
“And you never knew?”
Both the King and the Queen shook their heads, emphatically.
Presently, Sir George Walpole became aware that he was the sole object of attention in the room. He had always intended to come clean at some stage, one day but his good intentions had been thwarted, first by his losing office and then when he was back in government, by the diktat of successive Prime Ministers, Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff, and to a man, the last three First Sea Lords.
“I was Prime Minister at the time Project Poseidon was initiated, Your Majesty,” he confessed to the King of Prussia. “That was prior to the signing of the Submarine Treaty but I acquiesced, when the decision was taken to redouble the Empire’s efforts to build a viable atomic weapon and to harness the power of the atom for future civil, and as a priority, military uses. We suspected, and later became aware – in general terms – that the nuclear planning and design bureaus active in the German Empire prior to the Treaty, had not been disbanded post-signature and ratification. Likewise, we were cognisant of the German Empire’s experimental establishments on Rugen Island and upon the Peenemunde Isthmus. As for the Walvis Bay facility, we have been monitoring that for some years, at first because we assumed it was a base from which agents of the German Empire and their Boer collaborators, were attempting to foment an uprising against our interests in the Cape. Later, we detected traces of radioactive contamination some miles offshore, and in the northern Cape, and drew the obvious conclusions that relatively small Uranium bombs must have been tested somewhere in the Kalahari Desert. That would have been about three years ago.”
Wilhelm’s mouth opened and shut.
Words would not come as the revelations assailed him, pummelling him from every direction as if he was a defeated pugilist being driven across the ring in the last seconds of an already lost prize fight.
A dreadful rage began to play, like fire, in his dark eyes.
He had come to humbly abase himself before friends; and they had treated him like a dummkopf...
His honour meant nothing to these people!
“What you mean is that you meant to come to Berlin and present me, as the new Kaiser, with a fait accompli!”
“No, that was not our intention, Willie!” The King remonstrated irritably.
The King of Prussian glared at him.
“It might not have been your plan, Bertie. But what of your government?” Wilhelm waved derisively at George Walpole. “You bring with you the man who sees himself as the puppet master of the civilised world! The man who would keep the German beast in its cage! The man who wrote the Submarine Treaty to ensure that the German Empire could never achieve the living space it needs, or to obtain the oil it must have if it is to ever rival the industrial might of New England!”