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Book Review
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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 Wil-
helm II, and Britains King George V.
All trace their ancestry to Queen Vic-
toria, an extraordinary woman who
could consider herself not only the
ruler of an empire on which the sun
never set, but also, through her pro-
lific family, the godmother and grand-
mother of the vast bulk of civilized
Europe.
Over the past four years, two sub-
stantial works have emerged on the
trio. First was Catrine Clays King,
Kaiser, Tsar: Three Royal Cousins Who
Led the World to War. This was fol-
lowed, 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 edi-
tions, The Three Emperors: Three Cous-
ins, 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 documenta-
ry 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 ex-
traordinary, quirky, and ultimately
deeply flawed rulers.
The principal flaw in each of the
three characters as both our authors
Catrine Clay and Miranda Carterob-
serve them is what can only be de-
scribed today as hubris, a term that
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Book Review
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. Pe-
tersburg. And in such a world of abso-
lute monarchs, real hubris has little or
no substantial role to play.
Yet sadly, this is where the deep
flaws of both works emerge. By focus-
ing so single-mindedly on the lives
and loves of the rulers, the societies
that they purport to rule become deep-
ly distorted through the prism of per-
sonal 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 pell-
mell race toward war in Europe? Or
might it not have been forces beyond
these monarchs control that ultimate-
ly 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 mil-
lions.
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 emo-
tional problems that may be traced
back in part to his birth with a with-
ered 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 meet-
ing a violent end at the hands of the
very people they had struggled so des-
perately 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 per-
manently changed all three monarchs
(though only two survived through
the armistice). And if the war perma-
nently changed each of them, imagine
what it did to the social, political, dip-
lomatic, and strategic structures of
Europe.
We hardly have more than a pass-
ing 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 na-
ture of the Europe it shaped were of
course far deeper than simply the in-
teractions between cousins. Carter
sets up all of these forces in her intro-
duction, 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 per-
sonal hidden history was scarcely de-
monstrative of the vast dynamic of
Catrine Clay, King,
Kaiser, Tsar: Three
Royal Cousins Who
Led the World to
War (John Murray,
2007)
DAVID A.
ANDELMAN is editor
of World Policy Jour-
nal and the author of
A Shattered Peace:
Versailles 1919 and
the Price We Pay
Today.
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Book Review
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 per-
haps 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 conti-
nent 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 geno-
cides, and wars in Indochina and
Korea. War is indeed a wrenching, his-
tory-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 sci-
entists.
The problem is that the three men
profiled in these two books are not by
themselves responsible for the con-
flicts 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 anachro-
nisms, ill-equipped by education and
personality to deal with the modern
world, marooned by history in posi-
tions 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 ap-
parently 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 referential-
ly, 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 Euro-
pean 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 out-
ing on every yacht? Perhaps because
they were for their era the boldface
names that fascinated and compelled
their peopleeven if they played bare-
ly 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 in-
tuitively where their people are lead-
ing them, rather than gracelessly at-
tempting 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.