When William Came - A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns

CHAPTER III: “THE METSKIE TSAR”

“I was in the early stages of my fever when I got the first inkling of what was going on,” said Yeovil to the doctor, as they sat over their coffee in a recess of the big smoking-room; “just able to potter about a bit in the daytime, fighting against depression and inertia, feverish as evening came on, and delirious in the night.  My game tracker and my attendant were both Buriats, and spoke very little Russian, and that was the only language we had in common to converse in.  In matters concerning food and sport we soon got to understand each other, but on other subjects we were not easily able to exchange ideas.  One day my tracker had been to a distant trading-store to get some things of which we were in need; the store was eighty miles from the nearest point of railroad, eighty miles of terribly bad roads, but it was in its way a centre and transmitter of news from the outside world.  The tracker brought back with him vague tidings of a conflict of some sort between the ‘Metskie Tsar’ and the ‘Angliskie Tsar,’ and kept repeating the Russian word for defeat.  The ‘Angliskie Tsar’ I recognised, of course, as the King of England, but my brain was too sick and dull to read any further meaning into the man’s reiterated gabble.  I grew so ill just then that I had to give up the struggle against fever, and make my way as best I could towards the nearest point where nursing and doctoring could be had.  It was one evening, in a lonely rest-hut on the edge of a huge forest, as I was waiting for my boy to bring the meal for which I was feverishly impatient, and which I knew I should loathe as soon as it was brought, that the explanation of the word ‘Metskie’ flashed on me.  I had thought of it as referring to some Oriental potentate, some rebellious rajah perhaps, who was giving trouble, and whose followers had possibly discomfited an isolated British force in some out-of-the-way corner of our Empire.  And all of a sudden I knew that ‘Nemetskie Tsar,’ German Emperor, had been the name that the man had been trying to convey to me.  I shouted for the tracker, and put him through a breathless cross-examination; he confirmed what my fears had told me.  The ‘Metskie Tsar’ was a big European ruler, he had been in conflict with the ‘Angliskie Tsar,’ and the latter had been defeated, swept away; the man spoke the word that he used for ships, and made energetic pantomime to express the sinking of a fleet.  Holham, there was nothing for it but to hope that this was a false, groundless rumour, that had somehow crept to the confines of civilisation.  In my saner balanced moments it was possible to disbelieve it, but if you have ever suffered from delirium you will know what raging torments of agony I went through in the nights, how my brain fought and refought that rumoured disaster.”

The doctor gave a murmur of sympathetic understanding.

“Then,” continued Yeovil, “I reached the small Siberian town towards which I had been struggling.  There was a little colony of Russians there, traders, officials, a doctor or two, and some army officers.  I put up at the primitive hotel-restaurant, which was the general gathering-place of the community.  I knew quickly that the news was true.  Russians are the most tactful of any European race that I have ever met; they did not stare with insolent or pitying curiosity, but there was something changed in their attitude which told me that the travelling Briton was no longer in their eyes the interesting respect-commanding personality that he had been in past days.  I went to my own room, where the samovar was bubbling its familiar tune and a smiling red-shirted Russian boy was helping my Buriat servant to unpack my wardrobe, and I asked for any back numbers of newspapers that could be supplied at a moment’s notice.  I was given a bundle of well-thumbed sheets, odd pieces of the Novoe Vremya, the Moskovskie Viedomosti, one or two complete numbers of local papers published at Perm and Tobolsk.  I do not read Russian well, though I speak it fairly readily, but from the fragments of disconnected telegrams that I pieced together I gathered enough information to acquaint me with the extent of the tragedy that had been worked out in a few crowded hours in a corner of North-Western Europe.  I searched frantically for telegrams of later dates that would put a better complexion on the matter, that would retrieve something from the ruin; presently I came across a page of the illustrated supplement that the Novoe Vremya publishes once a week.  There was a photograph of a long-fronted building with a flag flying over it, labelled ‘The new standard floating over Buckingham Palace.’  The picture was not much more than a smudge, but the flag, possibly touched up, was unmistakable.  It was the eagle of the Nemetskie Tsar.  I have a vivid recollection of that plainly-furnished little room, with the inevitable gilt ikon in one corner, and the samovar hissing and gurgling on the table, and the thrumming music of a balalaika orchestra coming up from the restaurant below; the next coherent thing I can remember was weeks and weeks later, discussing in an impersonal detached manner whether I was strong enough to stand the fatigue of the long railway journey to Finland.

“Since then, Holham, I have been encouraged to keep my mind as much off the war and public affairs as possible, and I have been glad to do so.  I knew the worst and there was no particular use in deepening my despondency by dragging out the details.  But now I am more or less a live man again, and I want to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of what happened.  You know how much I know, and how little; those fragments of Russian newspapers were about all the information that I had.  I don’t even know clearly how the whole thing started.”

Yeovil settled himself back in his chair with the air of a man who has done some necessary talking, and now assumes the rôle of listener.

“It started,” said the doctor, “with a wholly unimportant disagreement about some frontier business in East Africa; there was a slight attack of nerves in the stock markets, and then the whole thing seemed in a fair way towards being settled.  Then the negotiations over the affair began to drag unduly, and there was a further flutter of nervousness in the money world.  And then one morning the papers reported a highly menacing speech by one of the German Ministers, and the situation began to look black indeed.  ‘He will be disavowed,’ every one said over here, but in less than twenty-four hours those who knew anything knew that the crisis was on us—only their knowledge came too late.  ‘War between two such civilised and enlightened nations is an impossibility,’ one of our leaders of public opinion had declared on the Saturday; by the following Friday the war had indeed become an impossibility, because we could no longer carry it on.  It burst on us with calculated suddenness, and we were just not enough, everywhere where the pressure came.  Our ships were good against their ships, our seamen were better than their seamen, but our ships were not able to cope with their ships plus their superiority in aircraft.  Our trained men were good against their trained men, but they could not be in several places at once, and the enemy could.  Our half-trained men and our untrained men could not master the science of war at a moment’s notice, and a moment’s notice was all they got.  The enemy were a nation apprenticed in arms, we were not even the idle apprentice: we had not deemed apprenticeship worth our while.  There was courage enough running loose in the land, but it was like unharnessed electricity, it controlled no forces, it struck no blows.  There was no time for the heroism and the devotion which a drawn-out struggle, however hopeless, can produce; the war was over almost as soon as it had begun.  After the reverses which happened with lightning rapidity in the first three days of warfare, the newspapers made no effort to pretend that the situation could be retrieved; editors and public alike recognised that these were blows over the heart, and that it was a matter of moments before we were counted out.  One might liken the whole affair to a snap checkmate early in a game of chess; one side had thought out the moves, and brought the requisite pieces into play, the other side was hampered and helpless, with its resources unavailable, its strategy discounted in advance.  That, in a nutshell, is the history of the war.”

Yeovil was silent for a moment or two, then he asked:

“And the sequel, the peace?”

“The collapse was so complete that I fancy even the enemy were hardly prepared for the consequences of their victory.  No one had quite realised what one disastrous campaign would mean for an island nation with a closely packed population.  The conquerors were in a position to dictate what terms they pleased, and it was not wonderful that their ideas of aggrandisement expanded in the hour of intoxication.  There was no European combination ready to say them nay, and certainly no one Power was going to be rash enough to step in to contest the terms of the treaty that they imposed on the conquered.  Annexation had probably never been a dream before the war; after the war it suddenly became temptingly practical.  Warum nicht? became the theme of leader-writers in the German press; they pointed out that Britain, defeated and humiliated, but with enormous...