In Europe

beside liberal ministers.
    Within this field of contradictions, and driven by her own religious fervour, Emily Davison went further and further adrift. Slowly but surely, she began considering herself a martyr, a sacrificial lamb. On Tuesday 3 June, 1913 she was a free woman once more. She walked around at the ‘All in a Garden’ fair organised by the women's movement, and paused for a long time before the statue of Joan of Arc. She told her friends cheerfully that she would come back here every day,‘except for tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm going to the Derby.’ She refused to elaborate. ‘Read the papers, you'll see.’ The next morning she rushed into the main office. ‘I need to borrow two flags.’ In everything now, she
was
Joan of Arc.
    But dying was not a part of her plan. When she committed her ultimate act, the train ticket home, third class, was still in her pocket.

Chapter FOUR
Berlin
    DOORN CASTLE, IN THE HILLS EAST OF THE DUTCH CITY OF UTRECHT , contains everything there is to say about Kaiser Wilhelm II. Five locomotives, pulling a total of ninety-five freight cars, had carried the last of the imperial attributes to the Netherlands in winter 1919, and there they remain to this day, huddled together in less than two dozen mediumsized rooms and a large attic.
    Wilhelm's world contained, among other things, paintings of Frederick the Great, portraits of himself, walls full of battles and parades, tapestries that had belonged to Marie-Antoinette, 600 uniforms – most of which he had designed himself – the special fork which allowed the kaiser, lame in one arm, to cut his own food, a ‘
Garven Laufgewichtswaage 200 kg
’, two reinforced dining-room chairs guaranteed not to collapse under the weight of the emperor or his spouse, cabinets full of cigarette cases and snuffboxes, a heavy leather chair with built-in lectern for ease of discourse, a gold-embossed ‘Patent Water Flush Chamber’ toilet pot, twelve special hot-chocolate cups, an
Unser Kaiserpaar
album with a decorative silver binding, a drawing of the 1913 wedding banquet of the emperor's daughter, Victoria Louise, in which all of Europe's major sovereigns are seen sitting merrily together at the table and, lest we forget, a conjugal bed four metres square.
    In addition to his palace at Potsdam and his immense yacht the
Hohenzollern
, the kaiser possessed at the height of his power some thirty castles and estates all over Germany. He visited a third of them each year, sometimes for no more than a weekend. There was nothing he loved more than to speed through the countryside at night in his own creamy-white train with gold trimmings. During the hunting seasonhe would sometimes kill more than a thousand animals in a single week. Whenever he graced a military manoeuvre with his imperial presence, every unit of his own army had to win – which did not always suit the purpose of the manoeuvre. The
Hohenzollern
– with 350 crew members and space for 80 guests – was kept in readiness for him to board at any moment. In Europe he was known as the ‘showman of the continent’, the ‘crown megalomaniac’, the man who ‘wanted every day to be his birthday’.
    After his fall, and Germany's defeat in 1918, all he had left was this park estate at Doorn with the stiff, white villa at its heart. He ruled over his own life with military precision: prayers at 9.00, newspapers at 9.15, chopping wood at 10.30, correspondence at 12.00, lunch at 1.00, nap from 2.00 to 4.00, working and reading from 4.00 to 8.00, then dinner. In the grass near the villa I happened upon the graves of his three dogs: Arno, Topsy and ‘the faithful Santos, 1907–27.
Begleitete Seine Majestät im Weltkriege
1914 — 18
’.
    His grandson told me that, after the German defeat and his abdication, Wilhelm was a mental wreck. But he was also furious. He lectured endlessly to his visitors, and in 1919 was even heard to say: ‘God's wrath will be terrible. Such general treason on the part of a people against its ruler has no precedent in world history.’ The dream of seizing the throne once more continued to prowl the house, usually set in motion by Wilhelm's new wife, the young Princess Hermine, a stalwart lady who had moved in at Doorn soon after the death of the old empress. On Christmas Day 1931, Sigurd von Illsemann, an aides-de-camp, wrote in his diary: ‘All one has heard here at Doorn for months is the story of how the National Socialists will restore the kaiser to the