‘The desire, no,’ retorted Hindenburg. ‘But the courage – yes.’ In August 1916, Willy appointed Hindenburg as chief of staff, with Ludendorff as quartermaster-general. The duo ran Germany from headquarters at Pless Castle in Poland and later at Spa, Belgium, reporting daily to the Supreme Warlord. In London, Asquith had never mastered arms production and could not control Kitchener and the generals. A shell shortage was solved by Lloyd George; the Kitchener problem solved itself when the field marshal was drowned on the way to Russia; and in December Lloyd George became prime minister, determined to win. In Russia, the process was reversed: Tsar Nicholas appointed a passive incompetent – himself – as commander-in-chief, and a foolish hysteric – his wife Alexandra, advised by an ignorant, venal and debauched Siberian mystic, Rasputin – to manage the complexities of an empire at war. The Habsburgs too were collapsing. Wilhelm forced them to recognize Hindenburg as supreme commander. In November 1916, Franz Josef, sick with bronchitis, sighed, ‘Why does it have to be now?’ and died. Karl was emperor.
On 30 December 1916, a cabal of Romanovs and aristocrats used a beautiful princess to lure Rasputin to a palace where he was poisoned and then shot before being pushed under the ice of the Neva. The lecherous peasant was blamed for the incompetence of the Romanov couple but the responsibility was theirs, and his death diminished their decaying authority. As Nicholas returned to headquarters, bread shortages sparked spontaneous demonstrations that overran the capital. The tsar ordered rioters to be shot, but the troops changed sides. Rushing back, he was isolated in a railway carriage and forced by his generals to abdicate. But he was replaced by a Provisional Government determined to fight on against Germany.
The fall of the Romanovs coincided with the operation on the Wilhelmine scrotum. As he recovered, Wilhelm was stunned by Nicky’s downfall but exhilarated as German armies advanced into Russia: ‘Victory and, as its prize, the first place in the world, is ours if we can revolutionize Russia and break up the coalition.’ His Foreign Ministry identified the perfect bacillus to infect Russia: Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who was in Zurich, had almost given up on the revolution. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘it will happen in our lifetime.’ When it did, he asked, ‘Is it a hoax?’
Now the Germans arranged a sealed train (that is, without passport controls) to deliver the Bolshevik with thirty comrades to Petrograd – as the capital had been renamed to avoid the German overtones of Petersburg. On the train, Lenin immediately assumed autocratic control, dictating smoking and lavatory rotas. His arrival in Russia changed everything.
In July 1917, as more grinding western front battles bled both sides, the Hashemite prince Faisal and his adviser Colonel T. E. Lawrence took Aqaba.
A KING IN ARABIA, A BOLSHEVIK IN PETROGRAD
Sharif Hussein launched his revolt by firing a rifle out of the window of his Meccan palace, then sent his sons to attack the Ottoman forces in Arabia, Abdullah taking Jeddah on the coast while Faisal seized Wejh on the borders of Syria. Deluded about his power and appeal, Hussein declared himself king of the Arabs, a move that outraged his rival, Abdulaziz ibn Saud, who complained to the British: they forced Hussein to demote himself to the modest role of king of Hejaz.
The British sent an intelligence officer who became the family’s champion. Thomas Lawrence, aged twenty-nine, was a classic inside outsider, an Arabist who despised the British elite yet revered the empire, a reticent recluse who was a self-promoting fabulist, a baronet’s illegitimate son, a scholar of Arab history, a beautiful writer whose great love was an Arab boy. It turned out he was also a born desert fighter. Meeting the Hashemite princes, he was bowled over by the thirty-two-year-old Faisal, his ideal of Arab knighthood, gushing: ‘He’s a ripper.’ Lawrence backed the Hashemites, but as a servant of empire he expected Faisal to display the appropriate gratitude. ‘The tribes’, said Lawrence, were ‘lively, almost reckless’, the war ‘one of dervishes against regular forces – and we’re on the side of the dervishes. Our text-books don’t apply.’ But he exaggerated his exploits. In November, he was captured and raped by the Ottomans yet somehow escaped: ‘That night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost.’ As one British army took Iraq, another, now joined by the Hashemites, advanced from Egypt into Palestine where Falkenhayn, sent by Hindenburg, stiffened Ottoman resistance.
