The Memoirs of the Crown Prince of Germany

By Crown Prince William of Germany

Because of his foppish and dandified appearance, emphasised by the cigarette holder he always used, the Crown Prince was regarded by the British during the Great War as a figure of ridicule, known to them as Little Willy. He was born in Potsdam on 6 May 1882, the eldest of Kaiser, and his memoirs begin with his childhood and early years and the development of his relations with his father, a somewhat remote figure…When war came he was given command of the Fifth Army with General Schmidt von Knobelsdorf as his chief of staff, and it was his army that launched the Verdun offensive in February 1916. As you read on the more it becomes clear that he was, in fact, far from his caricature. He was well aware of the enormous prestige attached to his person as son of the All-Highest and he did not hesitate to make use of it, in the political and military scene. He played no small part in the downfall of the Chancellor, von Bethman Hollweg, in 1917. In the aftermath of Ludendorff’s resignation he urged the Kaiser not to appoint Groener in his place, a man he regarded as a defeatist whom he disliked and mistrusted. He also maintained that the German army was not defeated at the Marne; it was withdrawn by its leaders. The battle was lost because the High Command gave it up as lost. When Moltke’s emissary, Lt Col von Hentsch, doing his rounds of the Army commanders ordering them to fall back, arrived at Fifth Army HQ, the Crown Prince refused point blank to comply without a written authority, which Hentsch did not have. And even when von Moltke himself turned up, struggling to repress his tears and demanded the instant withdrawal of Fifth Army, Wilhelm, after a lengthy argument still refused to go until he was ready. Moltke, apparently, left in tears. The imagination boggles at the thought of Haig tearfully imploring Rawlinson to obey orders, and the latter standing there, arms folded and saying: ‘Shan’t!’-Print ed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patavium Publishing
• Release date: Aug 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805233121

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 3

IMPULSUS SCRIBENDI 5

CHAPTER I — CHILDHOOD DAYS 6

CHAPTER II — SOLDIER, SPORTSMAN AND STUDENT 21

CHAPTER III — MATRIMONIAL AND POST-MATRIMONIAL 33

CHAPTER IV — STRESS AND STORM 64

CHAPTER V — PROGRESS OF THE WAR 93

CHAPTER VI — THE GREAT COLLAPSE 113

CHAPTER VII — SCENES AT SPA 131

CHAPTER VIII — EXILED TO HOLLAND 152

THE MEMOIRS OF THE CROWN PRINCE OF GERMANY

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The latest portrait of the Crown Prince

The Kaiser (as Prince Wilhelm) with his eldest son

THE CROWN PRINCE—

As a sportsman

As an artist

CÄCILIENHOF—The Crown Prince’s Elizabethan House, Potsdam

The Crown Prince’s residence at Oels

The Crown Prince with his wife and family

A remarkable Royal group

THE CROWN PRINCE IN INDIA—

An antelope hunt

With his first elephant

German Headquarters: the Crown Prince with General von Hindenburg

The Kaiser and Prince Henry of Prussia visit the Crown Prince at his Headquarters in France

AT VERDUN—The Kaiser with the Crown Prince

Three Kings visit the Crown Prince’s Headquarters in France

THE CROWN PRINCE—

In pre-war days

At work at Headquarters

In the trenches at La Fère; receiving a report from General von Gontar, 25th March, 1918

The Crown Prince in the midst of a convoy of wounded, St. Quentin, 1918

WIERINGEN—

The Crown Princess visits the Exile

The Crown Prince with a native

At work with farrier Luijt, making horseshoes

The Crown Prince, Crown Princess and family, with the Mayor and Mayoress

POTSDAM, 1914—Sanssouci (The New Palace)

WIERINGEN, 1922—The Parsonage (the present home of the Exile)

IMPULSUS SCRIBENDI

March, 1919.

IT is evening. I have been wandering once more along the deserted and silent ways between the windswept and sodden meadows, through greyness and shadow.

No human sound or sign. Only this sea wind driving at me and thrusting its fingers through my clothing. A March wind! Spring is near at hand. I have been here four months.

In the vast expanse above me sparkle the eternal stars, the same that look down upon Germany. From the horizon of the Zuyder Zee, the lighthouses of Den Oever and of Texel fling their beams into the deepening night.

On my return I find my companion waiting anxiously at the little wicket-gate of the garden. Had I been gone such a long time?

I am now sitting in this small room of the Parsonage. The paraffin lamp is lighted; it smokes and smells a little; and the fire in the grate burns rather low and cheerless.

Not a sound disturbs the silence, save this ceaseless moaning of the wind across the lonesome and slumbering island.

Four months!

In this seemingly endless time—which I have spent in one unbroken waiting-for-something, listening-for-something—the thought has recurred again and again to me: Perhaps if you were to write it out of your heart? This idea has seized me again today; it was my one companion as I trudged the silent roads this evening.

I will try it. I will write the pages that shall recall and arrange the past, shall bring me out of this turmoil into calmness and serenity. I will retouch the half-faded remembrances, will give account to myself of my own doings, wishes and omissions, will fix the truth concerning many important events whose outlines are seen at present by the world in a distorted and falsified picture. I will depict all events honestly and impartially, just as I see them. I will not conceal my own errors, nor inveigh against the mistakes of others. I will compel myself to objectivity and self-possession even where recollection’s turgid wave of pain, anger and bitterness breaks over me and threatens to sweep me along with it in its recoil. With the distant days of my youth I will begin my reminiscences.

*****

CHAPTER I — CHILDHOOD DAYS

WHEN I look back upon my childhood, there rises before me as it were a submerged world of radiance and sunshine. We all loved our home in Potsdam and Berlin just as every child does who is cherished and cared for by loving hands. So, too, the joys of our earliest childhood were, for sure, the same as the joys of every happy and alert German lad. Whether a boy’s sword is of wood or of metal, whether his rocking-horse is covered with calfskin or modestly painted—this, at bottom, is all one to the child’s heart; it is the symbol of diminutive manliness—the sword or the horse itself—that makes the boy happy. We played the same boyish tricks as every other German boy—except, perhaps, that we spoiled better carpets and more expensive furniture. Whenever and with whomsoever I have talked of those childhood years, I have found full confirmation of the truth that—be he child of king or child of peasant, son of the better-class or son of the workman—every lad’s fancy has a stage of development in which it seeks the same bold adventures and makes the same wonderful discoveries, undertakes expeditions into roomy and mysterious lofts or dark cellars; there are happenings with rapidly opened hydrants which refuse to close again when the water gushes out, and secret snowball attacks upon highly respectable and punctiliously correct State officials who, forgetting all at once their reverend dignity, turn as red as turkey-cocks and shout: Damned young rascals.

As far back as I can remember, the centre of our existence has been our dearly-beloved mother. She has radiated a love which has warmed and comforted us. Whatever joy or sorrow moved us, she always had understanding and sympathy for it. All that was best in our childhood, nay, all the best that home and family can give, we owe to her. And what she was to us in our early youth, that she has remained throughout our adolescence and our manhood. The kindest and best woman is she for whom living means helping, succouring and spending herself in the interests of others; and such a woman is our mother.

Being the eldest son, I have always stood particularly close to our beloved mother. I have carried to her all my requests, wishes and troubles, whether big or little; and she, too, has shared honestly with me the hopes and fears of her heart, the fulfilments and the disappointments which she has experienced. In many a difficulty that has arisen in the course of years between my father and myself, she has mediated with a calming, smoothing and adjusting hand. Not a heart’s thought of any moment, but I have dared to lay it before her; and this loving and trustful intercourse continued throughout the grievous days of the war; nor has the relationship been destroyed by all the trying circumstances which now separate me from her. I am particularly happy to know that, in these painful times, she is still, in misfortune, permitted to be the trusty helpmate of my sorely-tried father as she was once in prosperity, and I give thanks to heaven that it should be so. She has been his best friend, self-sacrificing, earnest, pure, great in her goodness, perfect in her fidelity. As her son I say it with ardent pride, she is the very pattern of a German wife whose best characteristics are seen in the fulfilment of her duties as wife and mother, and, in her, they display themselves only the purer and clearer now that the pomp of Imperial circumstance has vanished and she stands forth in her simple humanness.

The relations between us children and our father were totally different. He was always friendly and, in his way, loving towards us; but, by the nature of things, he had none too much time to devote to us. As a consequence, in reviewing our early childhood, I can discover scarcely a scene in which he joins in our childish games with unconstrained mirth or happy abandon. If I try now to explain it to myself, it seems to me as though he was unable so to divest himself of the dignity and superiority of the mature adult man as to enable him to be properly young with us little fellows. Hence, in his presence, we always retained a certain embarrassment, and the occasional laxity of tone and expression adopted in moments of good-humour with the manifest purpose of gaining our confidence rather tended to abash us. It may have been, too, that we felt him so often to be absent from us in his thoughts when present with us in the body. That rendered him almost impersonal, absent-minded and often alien to our young hearts.

My sister is the only one of us who succeeded in her childhood in winning a warm corner in his heart. Moreover, all sorts of otherwise unaccustomed restraints were experienced at his hands. When, for instance, we entered his study—a thing which never exactly pleased him—we had to hold our hands behind us lest we might knock something off one of the tables. In addition to all this, there were the reverence and the military subordination taught us towards our father from our infancy; and this engendered in us a certain shyness and misgiving. This sense of constraint was felt both by myself and by my brother Fritz, though certainly neither of us could ever have been characterized as bashful. I myself have only got free from the feeling slowly and with progressive development.

In recalling my father’s study, I am reminded of an incident of my childhood, which has imprinted itself indelibly upon my memory because it involved my first and unintentional visit to Prince Bismarck. It was early in the morning. My brother Eitel Friedrich and I were about to go to Bellevue for our lessons, and I was strolling carelessly about in the lower rooms of the palace. Accidentally, I stumbled into a small room in which the old Prince sat poring over the papers on his writing-desk. To my dismay, he at once turned his eyes full upon me. My previous experience of such matters led me to believe that I should be promptly and pitilessly expelled. Indeed, I had already started a precipitate retreat, when the old Prince called me back. He laid down his pen, gripped my shoulder with his giant palm and looked straight into my face with his penetrating eyes. Then he nodded his head several times and said: Little Prince, I like the look of you, keep your fresh naturalness. He gave me a kiss and I dashed out of the room. I was so proud of the occurrence that I treated my brothers for several days as totally inferior beings. It was incredible! I had blundered into a study and had not been thrown out—not even reprimanded. And it was withal the study of the old Prince.

The nature of our later education tended to estrange us from our father more and more. We were soon entrusted entirely to tutors and governors, and it was from them that we heard whether His Majesty was satisfied with us or the reverse. Here, in the family and in our own early youth, we already began to experience the system of the third, the unfortunate method whereby, to the exclusion of any direct exchange of views, decisions were made and issued by means of third persons, who were also the sole mouthpieces by which the position of the interested party could be stated to the judge. This principle, so attractive to a man of such a many-sided character and so immersed in affairs as unquestionably the Kaiser has always been, took deeper and wider root with the advance of years, and in cases in which place-seeking, ingratiating and irremovable courtiers or politicians have gained possession of posts that gave them the position of go-between, has caused the suppression of disagreeable reports and the doubtless often quite unconscious distortion of news with its consequent mischief. The department (Kabinet), especially the Department of Civil Administration, was fundamentally nothing but a personal board; the head of the department (chef de cabinet) was the mouthpiece and intermediary of any and every voice that made itself heard in this sphere of activity; he also carried back the Imperial decisions. The idea of such a position presupposes unqualified and almost superhuman impartiality and justice—doubly so, when the ruler (as in this case the inner circle was well aware) is susceptible to influence and is shaken by bitter experiences. Then the responsibility of these posts becomes as great as the power they confer, if their occupant goes beyond the clearly-drawn line indicated above.

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Then, and still more when they tacitly combine their influences so as to strengthen their position, they and their helpers at court become distorters of the views upon which the ruler must base his final and important decisions. It is they who are really responsible for the wrong decisions that were issued in the name of the ruler and which possibly sealed his fate and that of his people.

But who would think now of discussing the sins committed against the German people by the heads of many years’ standing of the Civil Department and the Marine Department in the duologues of their daily reports? Closely and firmly they held the Kaiser entangled in their conceptions of every weighty question. If, after all, a mesh was rent, either through his own observation or by the bold intervention of some outsider, their daily function gave them the next morning an opportunity of repairing the damage and of removing the impression left by the interloper. I am aware that none of these men ever wittingly exercised a noxious influence. Every one considers his own nostrum the only one and the right one to effect a political cure.

Turning from those who were the pillars of this principle back to the principle itself, I know too that a chef de cabinet who would have influenced and moulded the decisions of the Kaiser in quite another way might have proved a blessing to the Fatherland and to us all, if that chef had been a firm, strong and steadfast personality. But unfortunately destiny placed among the Kaiser’s advisers no men of such a stamp with the single exception of the clever and resolute Geheimrat von Berg, whose appointment to the responsible post of Chief of the Civil Department took place in the year 1918—consequently too late to be of any effective service. In general, the notions of the rest were characterized by dull half-heartedness. Wherever they had to suggest men for the execution of new tasks, the men whom they proposed and recommended were only too often mediocre. Anyone who was willing to go his own road with a resolute tread was carefully avoided. Hence, instead of a determined course, there was eternal tacking—instead of any steadfast and clear-sighted grasp of the consequences of such a policy, there was masking of the imminent dangers and a deaf ear for the louder and louder warnings of anxiety and alarm, until at last the cup of fate which they had helped to fill flowed over.

It was in the obscurity of their departments that these advisers of the crown laboured, and it is into the darkness of oblivion that their names will disappear. But the taint of their doings will cleave to His Majesty’s memory where no more guilt attaches to him than just this: not to have displayed a better knowledge of character in the choice of his entourage, and not to have been more resolute in dealing with his advisers, when the wisest heads and the stoutest hearts among all classes in Germany were but just good enough for such responsible positions.

It was a fundamental mistake that only the Imperial Chancellor made his report in private. All other ministers were accompanied by the chiefs of their respective departments; for the reports of the Military and Naval Ministers, indeed, Adjutant-General von Plessen was also present. In this way the Departments acquired a certain preponderance over the minister or the man who was responsible.

But this theme has led me far astray. I must return to the recollections of my youth. I stopped at the system of the third party. In regard to us boys, the result was that when we acquired military rank, the Kaiser’s intercourse with us was generally conducted through the head of the Military Department or through General von Plessen; and, indeed, in quite harmless matters of a purely personal nature, we occasionally received formal military notices (Kabinetts-Orders). Amicable and friendly discussion between father and son scarcely ever took place. It was clear that the Kaiser avoided any personal controversy in which decisions might be necessary; here, again, the third party was interposed. For trivialities, which, under other conditions, a few paternal words might have settled, intermediaries and outsiders were employed and thus made acquainted with the affair; in my own case, since nature has not blessed me with a taste for such punctilious formalities, the tension was often increased. It is quite possible that these gentlemen, who were penetrated with the very profound importance of their missions, were not always received by me with a seriousness corresponding to their own self-esteem and that they rewarded me by taking the first opportunity to express to His Majesty their views on my immaturity and lack of courtesy and dignity. Most certainly these intermediaries are in no small degree answerable for misunderstandings, and for the fact that small conflicts were occasionally intensified or caused all kinds of prejudices and imputations. Sometimes I received the impression that these little intrigues assumed the character of mischief-making. Everything I said or did was busily reported to His Majesty; and I was then young and careless, and I certainly uttered many a thoughtless word and took many a thoughtless step.

In such circumstances it was for me almost an emancipation to be ordered before the Kaiser in regimentals and to receive from him in private a thorough dressing down on account of some incident connected with a special escapade. It was then that we understood one another best. Moreover, one might often, in such colloquies, give rein to one’s tongue. An absolutely innocent example comes to my mind. I had always been an enthusiastic devotee of sport in all its forms; hunting, racing, polo, etc. But even here there were restrictions, considerations and prohibitions. One felt just like a poacher. Thus I was not to take part in races or in drag-hunting on account of the dangers involved. But it was for that very reason that I liked this sport. Now I had just ridden my first public race in the Berlin-Potsdam Riding Club, and was hoping that there would be no sequel in the shape of a row, when next morning the Kaiser ordered me to appear before him at the New Palace in regimentals. There was thunder in the air.

You’ve been racing.

Zu befehl.

You know that it is forbidden.

Zu befehl.

Why did you do it, then?

Because I am passionately fond of it, and because I think it a good thing for the Crown Prince to show his comrades that he does not fear danger and thereby set them a good example.

A moment’s consideration, and then suddenly His Majesty looks up at me and asks:

Well, anyway, did you win?

Unfortunately Graf Königsmarck beat me by a short head.

The Kaiser thumped the table irritably: That’s very annoying. Now be off with you. This time my father had understood me and had appreciated the sportsman in me.

The older I grew, the oftener did it happen that serious men of the most varied classes applied to me to lay before the Kaiser matters in which they took a special interest or to call the attention of His Majesty to certain grievances or abuses. I took such matters up only when I was able to inquire into them thoroughly and to convince myself of the justification for any interference. Even then their number was considerable. In most cases the subjects were disagreeable; and they concerned affairs which my father would probably never otherwise have heard of and which he nevertheless ought, in my opinion, to be made acquainted with.

The most difficult matter that I had to take to him was unquestionably the one I was forced to deal with in the year 1907. It was then that I had to open his eyes to the affair of Prince Philip Eulenburg. Undoubtedly it was the duty of the responsible authorities to have called the Kaiser’s attention long before to this scandal which was becoming known to an ever-widening circle. But they failed to lay the matter before him; and since they left him in total ignorance of it, I was obliged to intervene. Never shall I forget the pained and horrified face of my father, who stared at me in dismay, when, in the garden of the Marble Palace, I told him of the delinquencies of his near friends. The moral purity of the Kaiser was such that he could hardly conceive the possibility of such aberrations. In this case he thanked me unreservedly for my interference.

In contrast with the Eulenburg affair, most of the questions which, on my own initiative or at the suggestion of others, I had to bring before His Majesty were questions of home or foreign politics, or they concerned leading personages, nay, rather persons who were irresolute and flaccid, but who stuck tight to posts which ought to have been occupied by clear-sighted and steadfast men. In such cases the Kaiser generally listened to me quietly, and frequently he took action; more often, however, he was talked round again by someone else after I had left. It was inevitable that, in the long run, my reports and suggestions should affect him disagreeably. As he travelled very much, I saw comparatively little of him. In consequence, our meetings were mostly encumbered with a whole series of communications and questions by which he felt himself bothered. I myself was fully conscious of the pressure of these circumstances, but saw no means of altering them. In any case, I considered it my duty to keep the Kaiser frankly informed of all that, in my view, he ought to know but would otherwise remain ignorant of.

Notwithstanding all this tension, and although my father was annoyed by certain idiosyncrasies of mine—above all by my disinclination to adopt the traditional princely manner—he was, in his own way, fond of me, and in the secret recesses of his heart proud of me too.

Naturally, much was whispered, gossiped and written in public about these personal relations of ours. If I had been a person to take all this sort of thing seriously, I might soon have appeared very important in my own eyes. Repeatedly there was talk of marked discord, of sharp reprimands on my father’s part, of open or covert censure. In all this, as I have shown and as I would in no wise cloak or disguise, there was sometimes a grain of truth—a grain about whose significance a mighty cackle arose among the old women of both sexes. To reiterate, there were early and manifold differences of opinion, and many of them led to some amount of dispute. In so far as these conflicts were concerned with personal affairs and not with political questions, they were, at bottom, scarcely more lasting or more serious than those which so often occur everywhere between father and son, between representatives of one generation and another, between the conceptions of today and those of tomorrow; the difference lay in the enormous resonance of court life which echoed so disproportionately such simple events. Thus, these rumours do not really touch the heart of the matter. The frequently recurring fact that father and son differ fundamentally in character, temperament and nature, appears to me, so far as I know the Kaiser and know myself, applicable to us. It is, indeed, regularly observable in the history of our House.

It is possible, too, that there has come between us the great epochal change from traditional conceptions to a broader view of life—a change which seems to have inserted itself between people of the Kaiser’s years and my contemporaries, and by which I have benefited while he has viewed it with hostility. At any rate, many of his notions, opinions and actions appeared to me strange and even incomprehensible; they struck me so at an early period of my life, and the more so the older I grew. The first group of the questions towards which, even as a lad, I felt a certain inner opposition, concerned court ceremony as it was then practised. It was painful to me to see