The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [323]
The English were reading novels about the invasion of England, and the invaders were Germans, men in steel helmets who bit into the globular world with iron teeth. There was the legendary William Le Queux, whose tales were serialised by Lord Northcliffe in the Daily Mail and hugely increased its circulation. He began with The Great War in England in 1897 which was published in 1894. In those nineteenth-century days the hypothetical invaders were French: they were driven back, with the help of Germany, when they besieged London.
In 1906 Le Queux wrote the Invasion of 1910, a futuristic tale of a German invasion of England’s green and pleasant land. The places of German landings, and German battles with the English, were changed, before publication, to suit the readership of the Daily Mail, to the places where Lord Northcliffe had most readers, who would feel the most poignant frisson of armchair terror. Among Le Queux’s innumerable other works was Spies of the Kaiser, published in 1909, a mock-factual series of descriptions of infiltrating Germans and dangerous new weapons. The Secret of the Silent Submarine. The Secret of Our New Gun. The German Plot against England. The Secret of the British Aeroplane. These plots were foiled by a “patriot to his core,” a pipe-smoking barrister, with excellent taste in furnishings. There were emotive illustrations, depicting, for instance, the “execution of von Beilstein” standing blindfold in the Horse Guards Parade, facing an execution squad of guardsmen in bearskin hats, a white-surpliced priest, and two solemn English policemen.
• • •
The Kaiser himself sat in his study on a stool in the shape of a horse’s saddle and wrote letters to his family, his uncle Edward, his cousin Nicholas in Russia, making and proposing many different treaties, against many different enemies. In September 1908, in concert with Colonel Stuart-Wortley, he had written in the Daily Telegraph on German—British relations. German diplomats toned down the passages about how unpopular Britain was in Germany.
The article claimed that William’s “large stock of patience is giving out… You English are mad, mad as March hares … my heart is set upon peace.” He claimed that he had sent his grandmother tips about how to win the Boer War and ended
Germany is a young and growing Empire. She has a worldwide commerce which is rapidly expanding, and to which the legitimate ambition of patriotic Germans refuses to assign any bounds. Germany must have a powerful fleet to protect that commerce and her manifold interests in even the most distant seas.
This article pleased no one. The English press were “sceptical, critical and grudging.” The Japanese were upset by the shrill remarks about the fleets in distant oceans. The Germans were furious with their Emperor; there was a political crisis, the Kaiser made a confused speech when honouring Graf Zeppelin with the Black Eagle for his airship, and there were calls for his abdication. He went away to go hunting in yellow leather boots, and gold spurs, wearing a cross of his own design—a combination of the Order of St. John and of the Knights of the Teutonic Order. He went to a fox cull with Max Furstenberg and killed 84 of the 134 slaughtered foxes. In the evening he was resplendent, with the Order of the Garter below his knee, the ribbon of the Order of the Black Eagle across his chest, and round his neck the Spanish Golden Fleece. He had signed a letter to the English First Lord of the Admiralty about naval competition between Germany and England “by one who is proud to wear the British naval uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, which was conferred on him by the late Queen of blessed memory.”
In May 1910 the Kaiser’s uncle, Edward the Caresser, died. He lay in state in Westminster Hall, and Wilhelm, in another splendid uniform, doffing his plumed helmet, stood by the bier, holding the hand of his cousin George. He went back to Windsor, the old family home, “where I played as a child, tarried as a youth and later as a man and a ruler enjoyed