And besides, they had always liked the place!
The phone rang loudly.
Fortunately, the King having been a gunnery officer for much of his naval career, was a little deaf, especially, for reasons nobody had ever explained to him on his right side, which was where the telephone sat. Consequently, he was the only person in the room not to very nearly jump out of his skin.
He raised the handset, placing the bowl of the instrument to his left ear.
“His Imperial Highness Crown Prince Wilhelm, Your Majesty.”
The King took a deep breath.
“Willy, my boy,” he guffawed jocularly. “I’m dreadfully sorry to hear that the Emperor is under the weather, again. But how are you bearing up?”
This was greeted by a grunt of rueful acknowledgement.
“They say my father is at death’s door, Bertie,” the heir presumptive to the Imperial throne growled. He and his English cousin were never likely to see eye to eye about everything but nobody in ‘the family’, even in Germany, had ever actually had many bad words to say about the British Empire’s ‘accidental monarch’.
“Oh, dear. That’s very sad…”
“Sad? Every time the old fart has a bad turn; he shits on the rest of us!”
King George raised an eyebrow.
The Crown Prince had one of those booming, parade-ground voices that carried to every corner of a room even when he was on the telephone six hundred miles away.
“This is a bad business, Willy,” the King observed.
“I blame the dummkopfs around the old fool!”
The King hesitated.
“This puts my Government in an awkward position…”
There was an angry silence.
Oddly, the King did not think – for a second – that the anger was directed at him.
He thought he heard shouts at the other end of the line.
“The imbeciles are trying to tell me what to say to you, Bertie,” his cousin apologised. “I told them to get out. Gott im Himmel! They keep me in the dark for years and then they expect me to sort out their scheisse for them like I’m some kind of bloody magician!” The younger man was livid. Momentarily, he lapsed into German: “Ich wette, Sie haben da keine Schwierigkeiten?”
I bet you do not have this trouble over there?
“Not exactly, old man,” the King sympathised. “But we have our moments!”
“Scheisse!” The Crown Prince muttered. “If I hadn’t sent one of my people to France to collect yesterday’s papers, I’d still be completely in the dark about what’s going on!” He had another thought: “You know there’s an embargo on foreign newspapers and the Army is jamming the EBC over here?”
“No, I didn’t know that…”
“Scheisse!” The Crown Prince exclaimed anew, his exasperation peaking. “Forgive me, are their ladies in the room with you, Bertie?”
“Eleanor is here.”
“Forgive me, Ellie,” the Crown Prince apologised, mortified that he might have inadvertently given offence, “I apologise for my language.”
“That’s perfectly all right, Willy!” Eleanor called.
The man at the Berlin end of the line chuckled.
“These are times that try men’s souls,” the Crown Prince observed laconically.
“Look,” the King put in, sensing the right moment had arrived, “while my Government is determined to explore all available routes to a continuing rapprochement with the German Empire, it must prosecute war against the aggressors in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Spain. But…”
“That is difficult when Berlin speaks with two voices?”
“Quite so, Willy.”
The younger man had sobered.
“Those who question the relevance of the settlement of the Treaty of Paris, among whom I count myself,” he explained, sadly, “are in the ascendant in Germany. My father’s diktat regarding the Vera Cruz Squadron was ill-advised but it has found much sympathy in Palace circles. So, although I must personally disown the part that former Kaiserliche Marine vessels and men have played in recent tragic events, I cannot and will not, disassociate myself from the actions of my father’s administration. Apart from anything else, such an action would split the College of Imperial Electors. If I allowed that to happen, I might go down in history as the man who sowed the seeds for the disintegration of the Reich. My father is Emperor by acclamation, upon his death I shall just be the King of Prussia and as you will know, there are two, perhaps, three pretenders to the Imperial throne waiting in the wings.”
King George felt his heart sink.
He looked up, smiled wanly to his wife, expecting and getting, in full measure her gentle, tight-lipped ‘chin up, darling’ look in return.
He sighed.
“Willy, I don’t know what they are telling you over there. You should know that forces of the Triple Alliance have attacked, and are attacking Imperial territories in the Caribbean by sea and air, and that an army of some two hundred thousand men is massing preparatory to an attack upon Empire forces guarding the south western borders of the Commonwealth of New England. Further to this, I am informed that sometime in the next forty-eight hours organised resistance on the island of Jamaica must surely end.”
There was no reply to this from Berlin.
“Further, I am informed by my Government that in conducting operations in the Gulf of Spain and the Caribbean, the Royal Navy anticipates being attacked by submersible vessels constructed with German technical assistance in direct contravention of the Submarine Act.”
“I can tell you nothing of that, Bertie.”
Suddenly, the atmosphere was frosty.
The King wanted to bury his head in his hands.
It was a perverse peculiarity of the German ‘system’ that while theoretically the Kaiser was all-powerful, the ultimate font of all decision, he had only rarely comported himself like a medieval absolute monarch. Wisely, during much of his long rein the Old Emperor had skilfully – and with great aplomb until recent years – played off the minor aristocracy, the gentry of the Staaten, which roughly approximated to the lesser kingdoms – some, themselves like Bavaria, Saxony and Prussia, of the size and wealth second-rate powers – against their hereditary kings, princes and in this enlightened age, a handful of queens and princesses; pitting them against the ever-rising tide of the political parties representing the common people, who sat in many of the Staatshäuser (State Houses), and in that vexing institution, especially to the Kaiser and his ministers, the Reichstag. The Kaiser’s strategy had been to counteract the trend by which, as if by some strange popularist osmosis, this latter institution had developed, slowly but surely in the long decades of his reign, from a powerless talking shop cum meeting place of the Staaten, into a proto-democratic legislature responsible for overseeing an increasingly large number of the administrative functions of the Empire.
For example, the Reichstag was now responsible for the collection of and accounting for the one-third of all taxes levied by the Staaten payable to the Crown, the maintenance of canals and inland waterways, and the administration of the Department for Veterans – responsible for old soldiers who had fallen on hard times – and among other things, the oversight of the Inspector of Public Works for all infrastructure projects funded by Imperial, as opposed to local, Staaten funds.