# 'George, Nicholas and Wilhelm' (WWI) - New York Times



## Yrys (23 Mar 2010)

As War Loomed, 3 Leaders Wandered Lost 

The decades leading up to World War I were, across Europe, an era of dwindling
dynasties and triumphal facial hair. King George V of Britain and Czar Nicholas II 
of Russia each possessed impeccable Vandyke beards; people had trouble telling 
the men apart. In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II had so elaborate a mustache, teased 
into an upward-slanting W, that it earned its own name: “Er ist erreicht!” or 
“It is achieved!”

George, Nicholas and Wilhelm — or Georgie, Nicky and Willy, as they sometimes 
called one other — were first cousins, and almost everything about them was as 
anachronistic and absurd as their bristling whiskers. All three, Miranda Carter 
writes in her artful if sometimes lumbering new group biography, “George, Nicholas 
and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I,” were “ill-equipped 
by education and personality to deal with the modern world, marooned by history 
in positions increasingly out of kilter with their era.”

This is a book about ideas as well as history, and the big question Ms. Carter poses 
is this one: To what degree can close personal relationships, between royals or other 
world leaders, prevent war? It’s one that American presidents continue to contemplate. 
At their first summit conference, Ronald Reagan wanted to get Mikhail S. Gorbachev 
alone, in front of a blazing fire, to charm him in the process of talking arms reduction. 
George W. Bush met Vladimir V. Putin and told reporters that he was able to “get a 
sense of his soul.”

George, Nicholas and Wilhelm — two were Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, another 
was her grandchild-in-law — were certain that their fondness for one another, and 
their blood ties, could effect long-term peace in Europe. That myth was shredded by 
World War I. It was torn in a more personal way when George and Wilhelm didn’t 
shelter Nicholas after his abdication and arrest. The Russian czar and his family 
were slaughtered in a basement, their mangled remains thrown into a mine shaft.

Ms. Carter — she also wrote the excellent “Anthony Blunt: His Lives” (2002) — relates 
history on a large canvas here, and it’s a story she mostly tells with vigor and parched 
wit. Her book begins, in fact, with what she describes as Kaiser Wilhelm’s “almost only 
ever recorded joke.” After King George changed his surname in 1917 to Windsor from 
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha — the latter, Ms. Carter writes, “was redolent of the close relations 
and blood ties that linked the whole of European royalty” — Wilhelm cracked that “he 
was looking forward to seeing a production of the Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.”

Ms. Carter carefully observes the trio’s pampered childhoods, and traces how they 
became the men they did. Wilhelm’s left arm was damaged during birth; throughout 
his life he could not dress or cut his food without help. He was jocular but cold and 
arrogant and prone to flattery. He loved military uniforms and practiced his “fierce” 
look for photographers. Alas, Ms. Carter writes, quoting a German general, Wilhelm 
could not “lead three soldiers over a gutter.”

A world-class narcissist, Wilhelm had an inane opinion about everything. “He would 
personally inform the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg that he was conducting ‘Peer 
Gynt’ all wrong,” Ms. Carter writes, and “tell Richard Strauss that modern composition 
was ‘detestable’ and he was ‘one of the worst.’ ”

George was a dull mediocrity — he feared clever people and intellectuals, calling them 
“eyebrows” — who spent much of his time as an adult collecting stamps and shooting. 
He didn’t mix with interesting people, spoke no foreign languages and had what Ms. 
Carter calls a “barking temper.” He sulked if he was not allowed to win at tennis.

Nicholas grew up, even by the standards of European royalty, in almost unimaginable 
luxury — Ms. Carter describes a childhood spent in “a series of snow-covered palaces.” 
His family’s pile outside St. Petersburg contained 900 rooms. “One estimate put the 
number of royal servants across the Romanovs’ palaces at 15,000,” she writes. Nicholas 
called the secret police who guarded him “naturalists” because they were always leaping
from behind trees.

Nicholas loved rural life, so much so that he quickly fell out of touch with his country 
and had little idea of the changes that were sweeping over it. He too was an obsessive 
hunter: “667 dead creatures for 1596 shots fired,” he noted one day in 1893.

Ms. Carter writes incisively about the overlapping events that led to the Great War and 
a changed world. It was not a good time to be a king — or a kaiser or czar. New winds 
were whipping on the political stage. In England the statesman David Lloyd George was
 an especially articulate class warrior, declaring: “All down history nine-tenths of 
mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining tenth and have been paid with 
husks and bidden to thank god they had the husks.” People listened. They paid 
attention, too, to their increasingly unfettered press. The London newspaper The 
Daily Mail, Ms. Carter points out, “would identify Germany as Britain’s key enemy 
well before the British government did.”

The real tragedy was that neither George, Nicholas nor Wilhelm was built to adapt 
to a changing world; their time was evaporating. “As great mass movements took 
hold of Europe,” Ms. Carter observes, “the courts and their kings cleaved to the past, 
set up high walls of etiquette to keep the world out and defined themselves through 
form, dress and precedence.”

“George, Nicholas and Wilhelm” is an impressive book. Ms. Carter has clearly not 
bitten off more than she can chew for she — as John Updike once wrote about Günter 
Grass — “chews it enthusiastically before our eyes.”

You turn this book’s pages with interest, however, but rarely with eagerness. It’s a 
volume that never quite warms in your hands, packed perhaps too airlessly with 
what Ms. Carter describes at one point as “backstabbing, intrigue and muddle.” That 
phrase would have made a good alternative title.


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## Rifleman62 (24 Mar 2010)

> A world-class narcissist, Wilhelm



Sounds Like: a one term President.


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## Dennis Ruhl (25 Mar 2010)

All 3 were their father's sons and despite any relationship all 3 were nationalists first.  Before the tragic outcome all 3 probably viewed it as they would a game of chess.  George had no power to start or prevent war and his advice was probably suspect because of his German heritage.


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## OpieRWestmrR (15 Apr 2010)

George V wasn't the upper class twit of the year this article makes him out to be.  
Wilhelm II and Nicholas II may have had notions of personal influence but George V was much more pragmatic and knew his job was to lead figuratively rather than literally.
As for "pampered childhood", George V served in the Royal Navy from 1879 (age 14) to 1891 and commanded RN ships - no sinecure in that day and age. He unwillingly resigned his commission to become Prince of Wales after his older brother died. 
George V was an abrupt, non-intellectual, innately conservative man but he was also very politically aware. 
He chucked his German titles and changed his name in July 1917, after H G Wells called on the British people to ditch "the ancient trappings of throne and sceptre" of George's "alien and uninspiring court" in a letter to _The Times_ during the Russian Revolution. George said, "I may be uninspiring but I'll be damned if I'm an alien," and took appropriate action.
He rightly opposed plans to risk British lives to rescue Nicholas from Bolshevik imprisonment. 
He refused to sanction British Government 'black ops' during the Irish Troubles.
He refused to sanction British Government plans to suppress striking British workers during the 1920s and refused to consider the strikers "revolutionaries". "Try living on their wages before you judge them," he told the Baldwin Government - not the statement of an ignorant dinosaur out of touch with his times.
He cooperated without fuss in the transformation of Empire to Commonwealth. He worried about the rise of fascism in the 1930s. 
He did not want his dissolute eldest son Edward to succeed him. He figured his second son Albert (later George VI) would make a steadier head of state and how right he was.
To lump him among 'l'etat c'est moi' autocrats is just plain wrong.


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## Spr.Earl (15 Apr 2010)

Tuche Larry,Prince Edward was a spend thrift or what we would call to day a male whore,he gambled,whored and abused his postition in life.


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## OpieRWestmrR (30 Apr 2010)

Spr.Earl said:
			
		

> Tuche Larry,Prince Edward was a spend thrift or what we would call to day a male *****,he gambled,whored and abused his postition in life.



Yes, indeed. I shudder to think what might have been if he had been King in 1940 - a 'perfect storm' of Edward VIII, Neville Chamberlain and US Ambassador Joe Kennedy.


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## Journeyman (30 Apr 2010)

Yrys said:
			
		

> A world-class narcissist, Wilhelm had an inane opinion about everything.


I believe he's currently posted to the Infantry School.


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## Lex Parsimoniae (30 Apr 2010)

Larry Ellenwood said:
			
		

> George V wasn't the upper class twit of the year this article makes him out to be...
> 
> ...To lump him among 'l'etat c'est moi' autocrats is just plain wrong.


Thanks for that Larry - I learned something today.


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