It was only when Eleanor studied in London that she discovered herself. Home-schooled then educated at Groton and Harvard, Franklin was the opposite, genial and urbane, athletic and exuberant with a leonine head and dazzling smile but very precious and spoilt. He had grown up a Little Lord Fauntleroy, adored by his father – Squire James who died in 1900 – and his forceful mother Sara, who gave him absolute confidence. But his mother loathed Eleanor, who in turn worried, ‘I’ll never be able to hold him. He’s too attractive.’ Although she thought sex ‘an ordeal to be endured’, six children followed. Franklin’s choice of bride partly reflected his hero-worship of Teddy: he too dreamed of being president.
Teddy rashly promised that he would follow Washingtonian tradition and not run for a third term, so when he left the White House in 1908 he was just fifty – and set off to hunt big game and travel in Latin America. It was a decision that he would bitterly regret, and that his cousin Franklin would cheerfully avoid. It was Franklin who would cope with the aggressive Japan created by its Russian victory.
Young Hirohito was tutored by the war heroes General Nogi and Admiral Togo. In 1907, Meiji signed General Military Ordinance No. 1 granting the military ‘the authority to act independently of the cabinet’ while laying down that the guiding rule of policy would be ‘the rights and interests we planted in Manchuria and Korea’.* In 1912 when Meiji died and his sickly son succeeded, Hirohito’s tutor Nogi and his wife bowed to portraits of the
In October 1905, the rolling revolution forced Tsar Nicholas to concede a constitution. His adored heir Alexei turned out to have haemophilia, making his early death likely, a secret that Nicholas and Alexandra struggled to bear. Their pain was eased by a mystical Siberian, Grigori Rasputin, whose peasant simplicity, religious conviction and tsarist devotion restored their confidence. While determined to claw back autocracy to hand over to his son, besieged in his palaces as terrorism and chaos stalked the empire, Nicholas had retained the loyalty of his army. Now, he presided over a bloody reconquest of his own empire, and his gleeful rival, Wilhelm, saw a chance to force the tsar into a world-changing alliance.
Relishing the eclipse of Russia, Willy invited Nicky to meet on their yachts in the Baltic. Still advised by Phili, Willy was at his zenith, appointing Eulenburg’s insinuating protégé, Bernhard von Bülow, as chancellor. ‘Since I have Bülow,’ Willy told Phili, whom he raised to prince and ambassador in Vienna, ‘I can sleep peacefully.’ Bülow was not nicknamed the Eel for nothing, flirting with Phili as much as he flattered Willy.*
After a rebellion by Herero, Nama and San peoples in South West Africa, Willy encouraged his commander, Lothar von Trotha, to pursue genocide. ‘I believe the nation should be eliminated,’ said Trotha. The exact numbers are unknown, but from October 1904 as many as 60,000 men, women and children were slaughtered, a decision approved by Alfred von Schlieffen, the elderly chief of staff. ‘Racial war,’ Schlieffen said, ‘once commenced, can only be ended by annihilation or the complete enslavement of one party.’ But he was also working on a plan for a European war.
On their yachts in the Baltic, Willy bamboozled the tsar into an alliance that contradicted Russia’s French alliance. Afterwards, Nicky was forced to cancel it. Willy’s aggressive fleet building – he planned a home fleet of sixty battleships by 1918 – backfired, provoking Britain into intensifying the construction of its Dreadnought battleships and moving towards France, just six years after the two countries had almost gone to war over Fashoda. In 1904, that urbane Francophile Edward VII encouraged an
Schlieffen believed the only way Germany could win a European war was to smash France, possibly crashing through neutral Belgium, while holding off Russia. Schlieffen’s plan became even more essential and yet risky when in August 1907 Britain and Russia signed an alliance, ending a half-century of central Asian rivalry. Willy’s failures had achieved the envelopment of Germany.
