The World

Hohenzollerns, Krupps, Ottomans, Tennos and Songs

DARLING, HARPIST, TUTU AND CONCETTINA: WILLY AND HIS FRIENDS

It started with Friedrich Krupp, son of the great cannoneer, Wilhelm’s partner in the arming of his forces and the building of his ships, Meister of 50,000 workers at Essen. Krupp was married with children, but he spent much of his time enjoying a promiscuous gay life at Capri and in Berlin hotels. In Germany, as in every other European country, homosexuality was illegal and could be prosecuted under the Criminal Code’s inhumane paragraph 175. It was also taboo in this macho Pietist society, leaving gays vulnerable to both arrest and blackmail.

When the socialist press started to spread rumours, Wilhelm advised Krupp to avoid Capri, but then the Meister’s wife, Margarethe, received anonymous letters and photographs revealing Krupp’s orgies. She appealed to the kaiser and tried to seize the company. Instead the kaiser colluded in her confinement in a lunatic asylum, Krupp thanking him for ‘the kind and gentle way in which Your Majesty intervened on my behalf’. In November 1902, socialist journalists exposed ‘Krupp on Capri’, naming a young barber as his lover. A week later Krupp committed suicide. The kaiser, having been assured that Krupp was ‘asexual’ even if he had ‘an exceptionally soft’ nature, attended the funeral of this ‘truly German man’, attacked the socialists and then, recognizing the Krupp dynasty as a strategic asset, presided over the succession. Krupp had left two daughters: the fourteen-year-old Bertha was the sole heir. Wilhelm chose her husband, Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, a diplomat, who on their marriage in 1907 assumed the name Krupp and proved a skilful magnate, providing the guns for the First World War – nicknamed Big Berthas by the troops – and then embracing Hitler.

In 1907, a socialist journalist aided by an embittered bureaucrat in the Foreign Ministry exposed an aristocratic homosexual circle, led by ‘the Harpist’ (Eulenburg) and his lover ‘Sweetie’, General Kuno ‘Tutu’ von Moltke. As Princess Eulenburg understood, ‘They are striking at my husband, but their target is the kaiser.’ Willy ordered his friends to sue for libel. In October 1907, Moltke launched the first of seven court cases that unveiled a secret realm of saucy nicknames, fabulous costumes, secret power and sexual assignations with a cast of grandees, waiters and fishermen. Advised by the chief of his Military Cabinet, General Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler, a harsh critic of Phili’s camarilla, the kaiser dismissed Moltke and dropped Phili, who had introduced him to ‘gentlemen of dishonourable reputation’. Phili collapsed and was then arrested. Another journalist alleged that Chancellor ‘the Eel’ von Bülow, though married, was a secret homosexual, nicknamed Concettina in their coterie, and had appointed his young lover to the Privy Council.

Willy had a nervous collapse. While recovering with friends in England, he gave a provocative interview which would almost destroy him. At home his anachronistic hatred for the elected politicians, unions and press, indeed for much of the modern world, combined with the louche Phili scandal, undermined his supremacy – just as tensions rose in the Balkans.

Germany’s ally, Austria, struggling to control its restless Slavs, was challenged by Serbia under its pro-Russian king Peter Karad¯ord¯evic´,^* guided by a nationalist public and a secret coterie of powerful irredentists who dreamed of a greater Serbia carved out of Habsburg territory. Willy’s friend Franz Ferdinand regarded Serbia as an existential threat, but now Tsar Nicholas started to back the Serbs.

If there was an answer to this conundrum it was to be found in Vienna, where after fifty years on the throne the antique emperor, Franz Josef, still went about his usual routine. He ‘still stands upright’, wrote his daughter Valerie, ‘a simple and just man’, after so many tragedies and defeats.

In September 1898, Empress Sisi was getting off a ferry in Geneva when a passer-by brushed against her. She fell but got up again and walked 100 yards chatting. ‘What did that man want?’ she asked a courtier. ‘Perhaps he wanted to take my watch?’ Then she suddenly gasped, ‘Oh no, what’s happened to me now?’ and collapsed. An anarchist had stabbed her in the heart with an iron file. ‘How can you kill a woman who’s never hurt anyone?’ asked Franz Josef. ‘You don’t know how much I loved this woman.’

As this bowed, grey, bewhiskered monarch grieved, Franz Ferdinand sought a solution while all around their booted, braided and epauletted Habsburg court – the dullest in Europe – seethed Vienna, the most exciting city, a laboratory for the ideas of race, revolution and art that made the twentieth century.

VIENNA: FRANZI, FREUD, KLIMT, HITLER AND OTHER ARTISTS

The feeling that the empire was ending gave the city a nervy, feverish, almost sexual charge, expressed by writers, doctors and artists, many of them Jewish.

A Galician Jewish doctor, Sigmund Freud, son of a wool merchant, was both typical and exceptional. Adored by his mother, highly educated and multilingual, Freud first studied the effects of cocaine, almost losing himself to coke addiction before he settled for cigar smoking. In 1886, now married to a rabbi’s granddaughter and father of a family, he set up a private practice specializing in nervous disorders, treating a patient suffering from mysterious ailments, ‘Anna O’ (actually a wealthy Jewish feminist named Bertha Pappenheim), by encouraging her to discuss sexually charged incidents from her childhood that eased her neurotic symptoms, a process he called ‘psychoanalysis’ which ultimately changed the consciousness of the twentieth century. His Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, argued that a subconscious coexisted with the conscious. He followed that up with the idea that character, governed by the libido and the death drive, was formed by psychosexual experiences in childhood. In particular, he identified the Oedipus complex of paternal hatred and maternal attraction, along with castration anxiety for boys, penis envy for girls.

Just as Freud was first publishing on dreams, another Jewish doctor, Arthur Schnitzler, son of a Hungarian throat surgeon, who knew Freud, was writing La Ronde, which, starting and ending with a prostitute, told the story of ten sexual liaisons in decadent Vienna. Schnitzler was accused of writing pornography, but replied, ‘I write about love and death. What other subjects are there?’ Working in the War Ministry’s archive, an aspiring writer, son of a Jewish banker, Stefan Zweig, a committed cosmopolitan who in a cosmopolis glowing with rabid racism and universalist liberalism disdained all sides, wrote in his autobiography The World of Yesterday, ‘From the start, I was sure in my heart of my identity as a citizen of the world.’ Son of an Austrian gold-engraver, Gustav Klimt painted seething erotic paintings The Kiss and Woman in Gold, agleam with gold leaf, depicting his lover Adele Bloch-Bauer, a Jewish financier’s daughter married to an older banker. Klimt became famous, but many aspiring artists were penniless.

The Austrian official’s son Adolf Hitler wanted to study art at the Vienna Academy of Arts but, twice failing to win a place, he moved to the city in 1907 aged eighteen, living in a bed-and-breakfast, reading in bed – ‘books were his whole world’ – about Frederick the Great and Germanic mythology, and attending Wagner operas.

That December, Hitler was poleaxed by the death of his forty-seven-year-old mother, Klara, from cancer. He kept her portrait in his pocket and a painting of her in his room until his own death. He was grateful to the Jewish doctor who cared for her, promising he would never forget; much later, Dr Bloch was the only Jew he protected. For a while he lived cushily on his mother’s inheritance. When her money ran out, he lived in workers’ hostels, doing menial work and lived by selling his sketches on postcards, all the while observing the tensions between Germans, Jewish bourgeoisie and Slavs.

The native Viennese were almost overwhelmed by a deluge of immigrant Czechs, Jews and Poles. Between 1880 and 1910, the city’s population doubled; a fifth of the inhabitants were Czech, while 8.7 per cent were Jewish, higher than in any other European city. A new German nationalism targeting these immigrants was rallied by ‘Handsome Karl’ Lueger, the long-serving mayor who horrified Franz Josef with his vulgar racism: the Habsburgs were the only dynasty whose multi-ethnic empire meant they could not embrace nationalism. ‘Vienna mustn’t become Jerusalem!’ said Lueger. Yet he joked, ‘I decide who’s a Jew,’ adding, ‘Some of my best friends are Jewish.’

Young Hitler respected Handsome Karl, whom he recalled as ‘an excellent speaker’, but he particularly admired Georg Ritter von Schönerer, aristocratic Führer (leader) of an antisemitic, anti-Catholic movement who favoured the Roman salute. Hitler often watched debates in the Imperial Council, disgusted by the jabbering Slavic parliamentarians, and noticed the senescent Emperor Franz Josef conveyed in his carriage between palaces.

In the same streets and cafés, Josef Djugashvili, the Georgian Bolshevik, nicknamed Koba, was living in a boarding house next to Schönbrunn, working on an article for Lenin about the nationalities of the Russian empire. Djugashvili, a student priest, failed poet, prolific lover and handsome if pockmarked loner with a withered arm and hazel-coloured eyes, was a fanatical Marxist who had spent years in Siberian exile, frequently escaping. The tsar’s secret police, the Okhranka, the only efficient organization in the Russian empire, had smashed the revolutionaries, sending many to Siberia and even more into exile.

In late 1912, Djugashvili went to visit Lenin in Kraków, in Habsburg Galicia. In his Bolshevik faction, filled with garrulous windbags whom he called ‘the tea-drinkers’, Lenin appreciated the toughness of Djugashvili and his brigands. He funded his Party by ordering Koba to raid banks: in June 1907, in Tiflis, Djugashvili had pulled off a spectacular (but bloody) heist. Lenin praised this ‘wonderful Georgian’ as ‘exactly the type we need’. For his Viennese article, Djugashvili chose a new name, emulating Lenin, by adopting a proletarian pseudonym: Stalin – Steelman. While in Vienna, he met a bouffant-haired, barrel-chested Marxist journalist, a glamorous if arrogant hero of 1905, Leon Trotsky, son of a rich Jewish farmer in Ukraine. The two hated each other on sight. Neither of them met Hitler.

Down the road, in his gorgeous Belvedere Palace, Franz Ferdinand sought a creative solution to the Slavic problem. In 1906, he promoted a new chief of staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, who was equally obsessed with destroying the Serbs and annexing Bosnia to save the empire. But the tsar and his nationalistic public supported their fellow Orthodox Slavs. Both worm-eaten empires looked to ferocious and uncontrollable Balkan nations to bolster their obsolescent swagger.

In September 1908, Franz Ferdinand orchestrated a deal with Russia that bypassed Serbia: if Russia got a free hand over the Straits of Constantinople, Bulgaria, also a Russian protégé, would become independent,^* and Austria would annex Bosnia. Franz Ferdinand boasted to Willy that ‘he was involved in it everywhere. Its driving force.’ A month later, Franz Josef announced the annexation of Bosnia, at which Russian Slavophiles, outraged by the betrayal of Serbia, forced Nicholas to deny the pact. Serbia threatened war, backed by Russia, forcing the Habsburgs to appeal to their ally, Kaiser Wilhelm. ‘I stand by you,’ Willy promised Franzi, ‘through thick and thin.’ Europe was close to war.

In late October, the London Daily Telegraph published the kaiser’s outrageous interview, given months earlier, assuring the British that his fleet was aimed at the Yellow Peril and claiming that he had protected the British, who were ‘mad as March hares’. Britain was alarmed by Wilhelm, and at home his rule was threatened; he sacked ‘traitor’ Bülow and promoted the steady Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. The kaiser not only backed the Habsburgs but encouraged war: ‘Get on with it!’

In November, Willy went shooting with ‘dear Franzi’ and then on to a hunting party given by his new best friend, the Austro-German Prince Max von Fürstenberg, at Donaueschingen Castle. There, as everyone was having cocktails before dinner, General Count von Hülsen, the strapping moustachioed chief of the kaiser’s Military Cabinet, emerged wearing a bright-pink ball dress belonging to their hostess and a hat decked with ostrich feathers. As a witness recalled, he was ‘dancing gracefully to the music, holding a fan coquettishly in his hand. Rewarded with resounding applause, stepping backwards throwing kisses to the ladies,’ he retired – then collapsed. ‘The man who had just been so full of the joys of life – dead! And by his head stood the Kaiser, by the body of the man who had been closer to him than any other.’ While this flamboyant death was being hushed up, Russia threatened to back Serbia. At this, in February 1909, Wilhelm warned France that ‘In the event of Russian’s intervention against Austria, the casus foederis [triggering a treaty obligation] arises for us immediately: mobilization.’ Facing war with Germany and a European conflict, Nicky, weakened by revolution, blinked. ‘The role Germany’s played is odious and disgusting,’ he told his mother. ‘We won’t forget it.’ Willy and Franzi were elated at Russia’s retreat. ‘It was a real pleasure to me to be a good second to you for once,’ Willy told his friend. ‘A wonderful trial-run for the showdown.’

A sense of desperation and of diminishing time encouraged extreme solutions. Reclaiming his autocratic powers, Nicholas rebuilt his army; next time he would have to fight. In Belgrade, Apis sought a way to accelerate Serbian resurgence. In Constantinople, Ottoman officers sought to halt the dismemberment of their empire. In Thessalonica, a cosmopolitan Ottoman city, home to 90,000 Jews, soldiers backed by merchants of an abstruse religious minority^* joined a secret Committee of Union and Progress – Young Turks – that took over the Third Army and forced Abdulhamid to accept a parliament. The last Ottoman autocrat abdicated; a parliament was elected; a passive sixty-five-year-old Ottoman, Mehmed V, was enthroned. Among the Young Turks, a dashing young officer, Enver Bey, disdained democracy: only war could restore empire. As Mehmed clutched at the reins of power, another decaying empire was losing its veteran monarch: that November, Empress Cixi realized she was dying and reached for the arsenic.

I WANT NANNY: THE BABY EMPEROR, DR SUN YAT -SEN AND THE SONG SISTERS

First Cixi ordered the poisoning of her nephew Emperor Guangxu,^* then she sent eunuchs to seize without warning the Manchu toddler Prince Puyi, two-year-old son of Prince Chun, taking him away from his mother (whom he did not see again for seven years) and, with the child screaming, convey him by palanquin to the empress. ‘I remember suddenly finding myself surrounded by strangers,’ wrote Puyi, ‘while before me was hung a drab curtain through which I could see an emaciated, terrifying, hideous face. This was Cixi. I burst into loud howls. Cixi told someone to give me some sweets, but I threw them on the floor.’

‘I want nanny,’ shouted Puyi.

‘What a naughty child,’ said Cixi. ‘Take him away.’

Two weeks after her death, in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, Piyu, terrified by the drums and music, sobbed all the way through his coronation as Xuantong Emperor. ‘Don’t cry,’ said his father, Regent Chun. ‘It’ll be over soon.’ Xuantong grew up into a capricious hell-child – ‘Flogging eunuchs was part of my daily routine,’ he later admitted, and he fired his airgun at courtiers.

That tireless hatcher of conspiracies Dr Sun Yat-sen, now forty-four, determined ‘to expel the Tatar barbarians [Manchus], revive China, establish a republic and distribute land equally’, watched this from his exile. He had travelled for a decade, seeking backers and ideologies to help win him power in China. At one point the government trapped him in the London embassy, and he was about to be sent home for beheading when a press outcry forced his release. He had launched at least seven failed revolutions and, on 10 October 1911, he was in the USA planning his next when soldiers in Wuhan mutinied. The regent sent Cixi’s long-serving general Yuan Shikai, appointed prime minister, to crush them, but rebellion spread quickly. Sun rushed home.

In December, revolutionary delegates in Nanjing elected Sun Yat-sen as provisional president of the first Chinese Republic. Arriving in Shanghai, Sun set up headquarters in the mansion of Charlie Song, whose daughters Qingling and Meiling were still studying in America, but the eldest, the twenty-three-year-old Ailing, charmed the new president, who was married with several concubines, all of whom he treated appallingly. Ailing did not reciprocate. And Sun was powerless: he was not the only president of China.

In Beijing, General Yuan Shikai was offered the leadership by the revolutionaries if he deposed the monarchy. On 12 February 1912, he orchestrated Puyi’s abdication – the end of 250 years of Manchus and two millennia of emperors – and, as Sun resigned, became president.^* Yuan, born into the gentry, lived in a traditional Chinese household with a wife and nine concubines with bound feet, while for his health he drank human milk, delivered by wet nurses. Now this conservative paladin, who disdained Dr Sun as a cosmopolitan amateur, embraced power and its trappings, being escorted around by a corps of giant bodyguards in uniforms trimmed with leopard-skin. A mix of agitators, generals and gangsters seized power. In Shanghai, elegant fulcrum of capitalism and fashion, the criminal Green Gang bestrode business and politics: a revolutionary, Chen Qimei, linked to the gangsters, captured Shanghai for Sun. When Sun was challenged by a former supporter, Chen ordered a henchman to assassinate him. The assassin was a follower of Sun named Chiang Kai-shek, son of a poor family who had been educated in Japan. Chiang would become the ruler of China.

In China’s first real elections, forty million voted and Sun’s nationalist KMT party won the most seats in a national assembly that now sat in Beijing. Both sides, allied to the criminal gangs, tried to kill each other. Yuan survived one attempt and hired the Green Gang to kill Sun. In March 1913, he murdered Sun’s nominee for premier and dismissed the assembly.

Sun fled to Japan, accompanied by Charlie Song, joined by his daughters, who became the leader’s secretaries. Sun fell in love with Ailing, but when she married someone her own age, he moved on to his new assistant, the middle sister, Qingling, fresh from Wellesley College, Massachusetts: ‘I just can’t get Qingling out of my head,’ he confessed. ‘I have encountered love for the first time.’ Qingling flirted, warning him she might marry President Yuan and ‘be an empress’. Sun appealed to her father, who stated pointedly, ‘We’re a Christian family; no daughter will become anybody’s concubine, king, emperor or president.’ But Qingling, aged twenty-one, started an affair with the fifty-year-old Sun, her ‘Big Busy Man’. They eloped to Tokyo and married.

Sun’s return looked unlikely as President Yuan dismissed parliament and declared himself emperor.

A FAMILY WEDDING: THREE EMPERORS AND THREE PASHAS

Yet Yuan was not dictator for long. When he died of uraemia, the Central Country splintered into pieces, ruled by three weak governments while real power rested with the warlords and gangsters, led by a man who was a cross between the two. Zhang Zuolin, who called himself the Mukden Tiger, had started as a skinny brigand, nicknamed Pimple, but now he dominated northern China with his own army of 300,000. Taking control of Beijing, he toyed with restoring the Manchu. But they were irrelevant now.^*

Yet in Europe the dynasties remained central. In May 1913, the kaiser, babbling about the imminence of war, hosted his cousins Tsar Nicholas II and King-Emperor George V, at the 1,000-guest wedding in Berlin of his only daughter, Viktoria Luise, to Prince Ernst August of Hanover, first cousin to the British and Russian monarchs.

George, a dutiful but splenetic martinet, arrived with Queen Mary, but Nicholas came alone. Georgie and Nicky both wore Prussian Dragoon uniforms with spiked pickelhaube helmets, Willy dressed as a British dragoon with a Russian order; but behind dynastic swagger and sartorial ententes, the three emperors tensely surveyed a quaking Ottoman empire. The trepidation had started in 1911 when Italy, desperate for colonies after its Ethiopian humiliation, seized Tripoli and Benghazi. The Young Turk Enver tried to hold Tripoli, then rushed to defend the Turkish homeland as the hungry new kingdoms of the Balkans – Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro – joined the carve-up. In this first Balkan war, Bulgarian troops grabbed the most territory.

In January 1913, believing himself to be the Turkish Napoleon, Enver seized power with two comrades, Talaat and Jemal – the Three Pashas – who embraced a toxic mix of Turkish ultra-nationalism, social Darwinism, including eugenics and a hierarchy of racial superiority taught them by their German military instructors, and militaristic warmongering, to save race and empire. They loathed Christian minorities, particularly Armenians and Greeks, and their views were not that different from those later espoused by the Nazis. Enver joined the dynasty, marrying the sultan’s daughter.

At the Hohenzollern wedding, ‘There was absolute unanimity between George V, the emperor [Nicholas] and me,’ Willy boasted to Franz Ferdinand (who was not at the wedding), that the Balkan kingdoms could attack Bulgaria.^* The kaiser dragged George’s private secretary aside. ‘The Slavs have become unrestful and will want to attack Austria,’ he predicted ominously. ‘Germany is bound to stand by her ally. Russia and France will join in and then England.’

Many in Britain were convinced that war was now inevitable. The Liberal chancellor, David Lloyd George, a self-made silver-tongued lawyer known as the Welsh Wizard (as a priapic dynamo he was also nicknamed the Goat), had delighted in baiting and taxing the aristocracy to fund social welfare for the working classes, but now he warned that Britain would fight if peace became ‘a humiliation intolerable for a great country’. His friend Winston Churchill, aged thirty-seven, newly appointed first lord of the Admiralty, ordered four more battleships ‘to prepare for an attack by Germany as if it might come the next day’, and made a key decision: he converted the navy from coal to oil, purchasing 51 per cent of a company, Anglo-Persian Oil, that had struck oil four years earlier. Iran, ruled by the Qajar shahs, recently weakened by a revolution, became vital to British power, as the possession of oil now became essential to great powers. ‘Mastery itself,’ declared Churchill, ‘was the prize.’

Even in his wedding toast, Wilhelm could not resist combining family with race. ‘My darling daughter, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the joy you have given me,’ he proclaimed. ‘As long as the German tongue is spoken, it will tell of the prominent role played by the Guelphs and Hohenzollerns in the historic development of our fatherland.’ At the end of the ball, Nicholas approached the bride. ‘I hope,’ he said gently, ‘you’ll be as happy as we have been.’

The three emperors would never meet again. Willy kept close to Franz Ferdinand, writing after the wedding to express ‘staunch confidence in you, dear Franzi’ and encouraging the Austrian commander, General Conrad, to destroy Serbia. Conrad, chomping at the bit, in 1913 asked twenty-three times to go to war. ‘I go along with you!’ said Willy, who was infuriated by the glacial slowness of Austrian decision-making, which was still ultimately in the hands of Franz Josef. ‘The struggle between Slavs and Germans can no longer be avoided and will surely come,’ he raged. ‘When? We shall see.’

In mid-June 1914, Wilhelm stayed with Franz Ferdinand at Konopischt Castle, Prague. The kaiser recommended war; if the Austrians ‘didn’t strike, the position would get worse’. Two days after his return, he told Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg that Russia planned a pre-emptive strike. On 28 June, in Kiel, Willy, accompanied by Gustav Krupp, boarded his yacht Meteor to prepare for a race, while Franzi and Sophie headed to Sarajevo to open a museum.

* Serbia was dominated by the two rival dynasties, Obrenovići and Karađorđevići. King Alexander Obrenović had been hated for his pro-Austrian policy and for divorcing his popular queen to marry Draga, an experienced engineer’s widow twelve years older than him. An officer codenamed Apis founded a secret organization, the Black Hand, that decided to kill the king. Apis was Dragutin Dimitrijević, bald, muscle-bound and bullish (his codename was the Egyptian bull-god), who on 11 June 1903 stormed the palace and, finding Alexander and Draga hiding in a cupboard, shot them and then mutilated their bodies, cutting off her breasts and tossing them out of the windows into a heap of manure. Apis installed the Black George family as kings and would play a special role in the tragedy of the First World War.

* Thanks to the Bosnia deal, the Bulgarian prince Ferdinand declared himself tsar. Chosen in consultation with Russia, Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg was mocked in the family for his long proboscis (Willy called him the Nose), effete eccentricity and open bisexuality. When he was chosen as prince in 1887 aged twenty-six, Queen Victoria thought this ‘should be stopped at once’ since he was ‘totally unfit … delicate, eccentric and effeminate’, but ‘Foxy’ Ferdinand turned out to be shrewd. Wilhelm loathed the Nose, almost causing a diplomatic incident by smacking him on the bottom at a family wedding.

* The Dönme were a heretical sect which, fusing Muslim and Jewish rituals, believed that a seventeenth-century messianic Jewish mystic, Sabbatai Zevi, was indeed the messiah. Accepted by neither Jews nor Muslims, the Dönme had become wealthy textile merchants in Thessalonica, where many of the Young Turks – including the future rulers Enver, Talaat and Kemal (Atatürk) – were based.

* Forensic tests on his body were carried out in 2008, revealing 2,000 times the usual amount of arsenic.

* Puyi, that vicious toddler-tyrant, went on terrorizing his eunuchs in the Forbidden City. Permitted to live as emperor within the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, he did not know for some time that he had abdicated. He had been missing maternal affection, but the arrival of an English tutor, Reginald Johnston, who gave him the name Henry, changed his life. The court arranged his marriage to a Manchu princess, Wanrong, which was unhappy but long-lived.

* Zhang restored Puyi as emperor for a matter of weeks then deposed him again. In 1924, Puyi was expelled from Beijing and fled to Japanese protection with the empress. Happiest with a male lover, he treated his wife and mistresses cruelly. Wanrong became an opium addict.

* Greenlighted by the tsar, Greece, Romania and Serbia now attacked Bulgaria; Enver joined in. In this second Balkan war, Bulgaria lost its gains and Enver got back Adrianople (Edirne).