Miranda Carter’s Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One explores the characters of these three men without whom the origins of the war are impossible to understand, leaning heavily on their own correspondence to give us a fascinating insight into their minds. Just over four years later, only one would still be sitting on his throne. Three emperors who had varying delusions of power, who had varying degrees of actual power, but who in that moment had one thing in common – none of them wanted a pan-European war. In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II was powerless to stop a military which he had hopelessly indulged throughout his reign from jumping headfirst into the war that it had always wanted. In Russia, Tsar Nicholas II was ‘on the verge of tears’ as his generals cajoled him into mobilising his army. In Britain, King George V waited anxiously for news from his government, and was irritated to find that his annual trips to the Goodwood races and sailing at Cowes were about to be cancelled. As Europe descended into a state of war in the summer of 1914, three Emperors – all related – sat on the thrones of their respective nations and were discovering, to one extent or another, how powerful they really were.
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