Back in Germany the left-leaning papers sometimes teased Lothar about his ‘British antecedents’. Cartoons of him hob-knobbing with the Royal Family referring to the King as ‘Bertie’ and the Queen calling him ‘Bissi’, appeared in the press every time he was accused of being ‘soft on the Brits’.
Sometimes, George Walpole felt as if he and his friend had outgrown their relevance in a World increasingly dominated by proletarian ambition and the crying need for faster economic development. They were men of empire and now and then, just occasionally, he looked in the mirror and glimpsed… a dinosaur.
When the King and Queen had returned from their post-Empire Day World tour, Walpole had spent a long weekend with the Royal Household at Balmoral in company with the Prime Minister and other senior members of the current administration discussing, in the main, how the Empire was going to ride out the storms to come. Nobody, least of all the King, honestly believed that the current ‘imperial model’ was sustainable and that talk of full ‘Dominion Status’, self-rule by any other name albeit under the flag of the British Commonwealth, even in the cases of Australia, New Zealand, the Canadian Provinces and although this was probably a pipe dream, India, could give the Empire more than a ‘few short decades’ breathing space, grace, some kind of buffer against the rising demands for self-determination.
Now, it seemed to Walpole, that the crisis they all feared years hence◦– hopefully, when men of their generation were all retired or dead, basically◦– might be upon them already.
For much of the twentieth century the ruling classes of both Germany and the British Isles had cultivated and by and large, enjoyed, cordial and mutually respectful relations. Unfortunately, like many old couples whose marriages seem rock solid from the outside, both parties had concluded that their union had never been more than one of convenience. Obviously, this was not a thing the hundreds of thousands of Anglo-German families inextricably linked by matrimony over the last century, had been in a hurry to come to terms with and their existence, as a minority but significant influential polity in both Empires had to some extent, provided a societal brake, a bridge of sorts over the years, which thus far had frustrated open talk of divorce.
Walpole was afraid that things had gone too far to halt the inevitable parting of the ways. The Submarine Treaty of the mid-1960s had, in retrospect, marked the end of informal co-operation and ushered in an era of co-existence in which the protocols of the century-old Treaty of Paris were increasingly, little better than a fig leaf.
“I’m dreadfully sorry to keep you waiting, old man,” Lothar von Bismarck apologised profusely as he led his aides into the room. His English was clipped, precise and tripped off his tongue with the same native fluency as his Saxon-accented German.
Today, he spoke in English and beneath his normal savoir-faire he was clearly a little flustered. Angry, in fact, that circumstances had delayed him. There was absolutely nothing forced or false about his apology◦– he was clearly mortified by the discourtesy of having kept his old friend waiting◦– and he smiled with tight-lipped relief when Walpole grimaced and assured him that he, too, had been unexpectedly detained by the exigencies of his own administrative duties.
Each man, in common with all members of each country’s professional diplomatic corps was as at home speaking or writing the other man’s language, for such was a basic qualification for all men in their profession. Normally, every diplomat posted to Paris was also expected to be at least, passably proficient in French, an invaluable skill since every second member of the secretariat of the Palace of the Nations these days was a French man or woman.
He was attired as he invariably was of late when he visited the Palace of the Nations, in the immaculate uniform of a Colonel of the 7th Regiment of Foot, Hesse-Kassel, into which he had been commissioned as a cadet at the age of twenty-four, being of that class whose sons’ education was incomplete without a mandatory period of military service of not less than four years between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine.
“I was hoping we might have a little chat alone before we started the main meeting, Lothar,” Walpole suggested urbanely as the two men shook hands.
“Yes, that would be most agreeable,” the German Minister concurred.
They soon retreated to chairs by the windows commanding a view across the gardens of the Champs-Élysées, at this season bursting into leaf and adorned by the first blooms of spring for as far as the eye could see between the Palace of the Nations and the monumental, three hundred and fifty-foot high marble, granite and terracotta L'arc de la Victoire nearly a mile away.
The Arch of Victory…
Walpole had often wondered how it might have altered the perspectives of generations of British statesmen who had walked through the portals of the Palace of the Nations since its completion in 1875, had they looked out not on the L'arc de la Victoire but upon the overgrown ruins of the Tuileries, ploughed under by the merciless artillery of the Kaiser’s Army in the 1860s, the view allocated to Lothar von Bismarck and his predecessors for the last one hundred and three years…
The Foreign and Colonial Secretary forced himself to focus on the here and the now. Unbidden, his aides had placed crystal tumblers and a bottle of twenty-year old Balvenie single malt whisky on the coffee table between the two men.
“Can I tempt you, old friend?” Walpole murmured. Both men shared true connoisseurs’ appreciations of fine whiskies.
“Thank you, yes,” von Bismarck guffawed, allowing himself a thoughtful sigh. “You will be hearing the same news that I am hearing from Spain, George?”
The two men nursed their drinks.
Sipped reflectively.
“Yes.” The Englishman nodded, staring into the mid-distance.
“I am assured that our agents had nothing to do with the timing or the ongoing blood-letting,” Lothar von Bismarck said tersely, picking his words and meanings with exaggerated care even for a career diplomat.
Sir George Walpole had taken it as read that the Kaiser’s surrogates would have been making mischief in Madrid, had Whitehall had the same opportunities as the Wilhelmstrasse, it would have played the same shady game down the years. That said, Lisbon, rather than the Spanish capital, had always been the hotbed of British imperial intrigue in the Iberian Peninsula, a deficiency he had done what he could to address; in hindsight it amounted to too little too late.
“My Kaiser wishes it to be made known to you that he deplores, with all his heart, the desecration of diplomatic property and the abominable treatment of foreign nationals caught in the ‘crossfire’ in Spain.”
One of the telegrams which had been awaiting Walpole at the Gare de Nord Terminus had confirmed that the German and the Russian Embassies in Madrid had not been stormed and ransacked like every other embassy, consulate and foreign commercial concern in Madrid, a pattern repeated in practically all the big cities of Old Spain. The situation in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Spain was less immediately dire but no less threatening: in Mexico City, Havana and elsewhere British Embassies and Consulates, as yet unmolested by the mobs ranging the streets were ringed by◦– essentially, besieged◦– by large, heavily armed police and militia ‘protection’ detachments.
“That is good to know,” Walpole nodded, unconsciously running a hand through his thinning still dark hair, secretly wondering how much it cost his old friend to deal in such transparently false commiserations.