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her immediate family and a series of fanatic or lunatic charlatans who offered comfort to her desperate soul. The Czar, neither well endowed mentally nor very well educated, was, in the Kaiser’s opinion, “only fit to live in a country house and grow turnips.”
    The Kaiser regarded the Czar as his own sphere of influenceand tried by clever schemes to woo him out of his French alliance which had been the consequence of William’s own folly. Bismarck’s maxim “Keep friends with Russia” and the Reinsurance Treaty that implemented it, William had dropped, along with Bismarck, in the first, and worst, blunder of his reign. Alexander III, the tall, stern Czar of that day, had promptly turned around in 1892 and entered into alliance with republican France, even at the cost of standing at attention to “The Marseillaise.” Besides, he snubbed William, whom he considered
“un garçon mat élevé,”
and would only talk to him over his shoulder. Ever since Nicholas acceded to the throne, William had been trying to repair his blunder by writing the young Czar long letters (in English) of advice, gossip, and political harangue addressed to “Dearest Nicky” and signed “Your affectionate friend, Willy.” An irreligious republic stained by the blood of monarchs was no fit company for him, he told the Czar. “Nicky, take my word for it, the curse of God has stricken that people forever.” Nicky’s true interests, Willy told him, were with a
Drei-Kaiser Bund,
a league of the three emperors of Russia, Austria, and Germany. Yet, remembering the old Czar’s snubs, he could not help patronizing his son. He would tap Nicholas on the shoulder, and say, “My advice to you is more speeches and more parades, more speeches, more parades,” and he offered to send German troops to protect Nicholas from his rebellious subjects, a suggestion which infuriated the Czarina, who hated William more after every exchange of visits.
    When he failed, under the circumstances, to wean Russia away from France, the Kaiser drew up an ingenious treaty engaging Russia and Germany to aid each other in case of attack, which the Czar, after signing, was to communicate to the French and invite them to join. After Russia’s disasters in her war with Japan (which the Kaiser had strenuously urged her into) and the revolutionary risings that followed, when the regime was at its lowest ebb, he invited the Czar to a secret rendezvous, without attendant ministers, at Björkö in the Gulf of Finland. William knew well enough that Russia could not accede to his treaty without breaking faith with theFrench, but he thought that sovereigns’ signatures were all that was needed to erase the difficulty. Nicholas signed.
    William was in ecstasy. He had made good the fatal lapse, secured Germany’s back door, and broken the encirclement. “Bright tears stood in my eyes,” he wrote to Bülow, and he was sure Grandpapa (William I, who had died muttering about a war on two fronts) was looking down on him. He felt his treaty to be the master coup of German diplomacy, as indeed it was, or would have been, but for a flaw in the title. When the Czar brought the treaty home, his ministers, after one horrified look, pointed out that by engaging to join Germany in a possible war he had repudiated his alliance with France, a detail which “no doubt escaped His Majesty in the flood of the Emperor William’s eloquence.” The Treaty of Björkö lived its brief shimmering day, and expired.
    Now came Edward hobnobbing with the Czar at Reval. Reading the German ambassador’s report of the meeting which suggested that Edward really desired peace, the Kaiser scribbled furiously in the margin, “Lies. He wants war. But I have to start it so he does not have the odium.”
    The year closed with the most explosive faux pas of the Kaiser’s career, an interview given to the
Daily Telegraph
expressing his ideas of the day on who should fight whom, which this time unnerved not only