“We’re not bloody heroes,” Abe grated.
“Of course, you are!”
“We just did our duty, that’s all,” Ted Forest insisted.
“Like it or not you chaps are bally heroes!”
Chapter 22
Wednesday 3rd May
Berlin-Spandau Railway Terminus
The King and Queen, their ministers and the rest of the original party, accompanied by the one hundred and seven accredited diplomats – including the Ambassador, Sir Evelyn Baring – all peremptorily expelled by personal order of the King of Prussia, Wilhelm VII, had been driven across the city as darkness fell.
Nevertheless, they had seen the bodies lying on the street and buildings burning in the near distance, heard the regular thump and crump of artillery pieces. A pall of smoke hung over the Reich capital as the blood-letting went on unabated.
It seemed that the Deutsches Heer – the Imperial German Army – had acclaimed Wilhelm Emperor, the High Command of the Kaiserliche Marine had swiftly fallen into step with the generals, with only the Air Force, the one service not dominated by Prussian officers, dithering before eventually, splitting down the middle with individuals and squadrons taking different sides.
Wilhelm’s men had mounted a dawn coup d'état, arresting all thirteen of the Electors who had voted in favour of Ludwig of Bavarian’s accession to the Imperial throne. Ludwig himself, and his wife were presently being held at the notorious Moabit Prison, located inside the massive DG – Deutscher Geheimdienst – German Secret Service Complex in the Mitte District of the city.
The old Kaiser’s security service, officially the German Secret Police Service, had acquired a dreadful reputation in the early years of his reign but had been, albeit only somewhat, rehabilitated in the public eye in recent times. However, this was unlikely to be much comfort to those who fell into the DG’s hands at a time such as this.
It seemed that the King and Queen had witnessed only the beginnings of Wilhelm’s rage at the Charlottenburg Palace. Without risk of over-egging the case, it was obvious that he must, thereafter, have suffered some kind of psychotic episode. The great imperial city had shuddered with explosions and gunfire, the banshee wail of sirens had been continuous, countless aircraft had flown low over the rooftops while the German State Broadcasting Network had played martial music interspersed with orders – not requests – for calm, notifications of a twenty-four hour curfew, warnings that rioters would be shot on sight and that, contrary to the evidence, everything was, quote: ‘Under control and there was no need for the citizenry to worry…’
Stray and spent bullets had hit the Charlottenburg, one had cracked a window within feet of where Queen Eleanor had been sitting that morning. After that the Commanding Officer of the Royal Protection Detail had virtually frog-marched the King and Queen down to the basement, where, shortly afterwards they were joined by the Prime Minister, Sir Hector Hamilton and Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, Sir George Walpole.
Count Lothar von Bismarck of Hesse-Kassel, Foreign Minister in the old Kaiser’s government had found the British party sheltering below ground. He was grey with weariness and mental fatigue. Although he was one of the Electors – despite his ‘electorate’ being essentially honorific – he was not one of the Electors who had allowed whimsy or, in the circumstances, more likely narcotics abuse or congenital imbecility to sway him towards the person of the Kaiser elect, Ludwig. Not actually a great admirer of Wilhelm, he had nevertheless, always done his best to excuse and explain his cousin’s quirks and excesses down the years. It was, the British party assumed, only a combination of his past forbearance and unimpeachable public loyalty, and the fact that he had actually cast his vote for the King of Prussia, which meant he was still at liberty and acting, insofar as it was practical in the present extraordinary circumstances, as an agent of the self-appointed new Kaiser.
Looking every minute of every hour of his near sixty years, the newcomer bowed to the King and Queen and began to apologise profusely for the indignities ‘the situation must inevitably impose upon your most honoured persons…’
His voice had trailed away into the musty, dank air of the crowded basement as he met the gaze of his oldest remaining friend in Christendom.
Ignoring the ire of his monarch and the even colder rage of his Prime Minister, George Walpole had put a fraternal arm of friendship around the German minister’s shoulders.
The two men had sparred, in academia in their younger days and latterly, in the less brotherly sphere of realpolitik for the last, ever-more troubling decade. Whereas, on Walpole’s part, their diplomatic encounters had been interrupted now and then by the vagaries of the workings of democracy in the United Kingdom, this was not a cross that Lothar von Bismarck, whose family had been to all intents, under the Germanic Imperial system, the hereditary masters of the Wilhelmstrasse for the last century ever had to bear.
‘How have we come to this?’ Bismarck sighed, shaking his head.
Eleanor, seeing a good man distraught with shame for acts over which he had no control but nevertheless, still felt palpably responsible, stepped forward and gave him a hug. This was not a thing she had often had occasion to do, notwithstanding Lothar, two years her senior, was actually her nephew.
In that moment there was a horrible sense of familial, royal and patriotic duties getting irretrievably tangled, torn, warped and the Queen knew as well as anyone in the room that there were things were going on around them – unforgivable things – which would taint Anglo-German relations for generations to come. The scale of the disaster was as incalculable as it was intangible, such was the surreal atmosphere of that dreadful day.
It was obvious that no man felt the dire consequences of the catastrophe unravelling about him more keenly that Lothar von Bismarck.
In preparation for his life-long career; first as a junior secretary in the Kaiser’s Colonial Office followed by a succession of increasingly senior posts until eventually, he succeeded his father at the Wilhelmstrasse, the German Foreign Office on the Unter den Linden in Berlin, Lothar had spent two years at Harrow, and subsequently studied Classics and Medieval History at Balliol College, Oxford, where he had first met with many of the men with whom, it was anticipated, he would work with, and more often against, in pursuance of his Kaiser’s policies in later life.
In comparison with the giant, somewhat fiercely over-bearing persona of his illustrious forebear depicted in nineteenth century portraits and monochrome photographs – the acknowledged guiding hand behind the Treaty of Paris, the man every German child was taught was the ‘saviour of the First Reich’ – Lothar was a man constructed on slighter, more dapper lines belying the fact he was the ‘Iron Man’s’ great-great grandson.
Born into an age when in polite German society to be an Anglophile was a thing to be greatly admired and respected, a mark of distinction; and in England to be regarded as a Teutophile or Germanophile, was viewed as thoroughly ‘good form’ and demonstrative of a man or woman having a healthy surfeit of ‘the right stuff’, Lothar had always taken unquenchable pride in his familial connections to the Royal Family. His mother was Eleanor’s eldest sister, a thing that was until he was in his twenties just an incidental matter but then the atrocity of Empire Day 1961 had occurred, and suddenly, his aunt had become, overnight, the Queen Consort of the King of England, and his old friend ‘Bertie’, George V, and thus, by an accident of history Lothar von Bismarck presently found himself nineteenth in line of succession to the English throne.