Fall of Giants

The German embassy was a grand mansion in Carlton House Terrace, one of London’s most elegant streets. It looked across a leafy garden to the pillared portico of the Athenaeum, the club for gentleman intellectuals. At the back, its stables opened on the Mall, the broad avenue that ran from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace.

Walter von Ulrich did not live there-yet. Only the ambassador himself, Prince Lichnowsky, had that privilege. Walter, a mere military attaché, lived in a bachelor apartment ten minutes’ walk away in Piccadilly. However, he hoped that one day he might inhabit the ambassador’s grand private apartment within the embassy. Walter was not a prince, but his father was a close friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Walter spoke English like an Old Etonian, which he was. He had spent two years in the army and three years at the war academy before joining the Foreign Service. He was twenty-eight years old, and a rising star.

He was not attracted only by the prestige and glory of being an ambassador. He felt passionately that there was no higher calling than to serve his country. His father felt the same.

They disagreed about everything else.

They stood in the hall of the embassy and looked at one another. They were the same height, but Otto was heavier, and bald, and his mustache was the old-fashioned soup-strainer type, whereas Walter had a modern toothbrush. Today they were identically dressed in black velvet suits with knee breeches, silk stockings, and buckled shoes. Both wore swords and cocked hats. Amazingly, this was the normal costume for presentation at Britain’s royal court. “We look as if we should be on the stage,” Walter said. “Ridiculous outfits.”

“Not at all,” said his father. “It’s a splendid old custom.”

Otto von Ulrich had spent much of his life in the German army. A young officer in the Franco-Prussian War, he had led his company across a pontoon bridge at the Battle of Sedan. Later, Otto had been one of the friends the young Kaiser Wilhelm had turned to after he broke with Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor. Now Otto had a roving brief, visiting European capitals like a bee landing on flowers, sipping the nectar of diplomatic intelligence and taking it all back to the hive. He believed in the monarchy and the Prussian military tradition.

Walter was just as patriotic, but he thought Germany had to become modern and egalitarian. Like his father, he was proud of his country’s achievements in science and technology, and of the hardworking and efficient German people; but he thought they had a lot to learn-democracy from the liberal Americans, diplomacy from the sly British, and the art of gracious living from the stylish French.

Father and son left the embassy and went down a broad flight of steps to the Mall. Walter was to be presented to King George V, a ritual that was considered a privilege even though it brought with it no particular benefits. Junior diplomats such as he were not normally so honored, but his father had no compunction about pulling strings to advance Walter’s career.

“Machine guns make all handheld weapons obsolete,” Walter said, continuing an argument they had begun earlier. Weapons were his specialty, and he felt strongly that the German army should have the latest in firepower.

Otto thought differently. “They jam, they overheat, and they miss. A man with a rifle takes careful aim. But give him a machine gun and he’ll wield it like a garden hose.”

“When your house is on fire, you don’t throw water on it in cupfuls, no matter how accurate. You want a hose.”

Otto wagged his finger. “You’ve never been in battle-you have no idea what it’s like. Listen to me, I know.”

This was how their arguments often ended.

Walter felt his father’s generation was arrogant. He understood how they had got that way. They had won a war, they had created the German Empire out of Prussia and a group of smaller independent monarchies, and then they had made Germany one of the world’s most prosperous countries. Of course they thought they were wonderful. But it made them incautious.

A few hundred yards along the Mall, Walter and Otto turned into St. James’s Palace. This sixteenth-century brick pile was older and less impressive than neighboring Buckingham Palace. They gave their names to a doorman who was dressed as they were.

Walter was mildly anxious. It was so easy to make a mistake of etiquette-and there were no minor errors when you were dealing with royalty.

Otto spoke to the doorman in English. “Is Señor Diaz here?”

“Yes, sir, he arrived a few moments ago.”

Walter frowned. Juan Carlos Diego Diaz was a representative of the Mexican government. “Why are you interested in Diaz?” he said in German as they walked on through a series of rooms decorated with wall displays of swords and guns.

“The British Royal Navy is converting its ships from coal power to oil.”