ALBERT AND THE BELGIANS—Charles d’Ydewalle—Morrow ($3).
To most U. S. readers the plight of modern royalty, striving to preserve royal hauteur while controlling squabbling politicians, is closer to high comedy than to tragedy. But to Author Charles d’Ydewalle, Belgian journalist and intimate friend of the late King Albert, the career of at least one modern monarch can properly be termed tragic. In another period of the world’s history Albert might have reigned at peace with his subjects, won fame as an intellectual who had studied Marx, Machiavelli, Taine, kept up with modern literature to the extent of being able to enjoy Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s grim Journey to the End of the Night. But the War made him a soldier whose kingdom was occupied by the enemy, and peace left him with an exhausted country, a deep distrust of his subjects, a painful inability to make or keep friends, a royal victim of the post-War melancholy that Author d’Ydewalle calls “world-sickness.”
Most remarkable feature of Albert and the Belgians is its cool and friendly probing for the secret of Albert’s personality. Nephew of Leopold II, whose exploitation of the Congo brought down international censure upon Belgium and whose dissolute private life outraged his subject,. Albert had not expected to rule. The death of his moody older brother put him in line for the throne. Albert possessed many of the characteristics of his grandfather. Louis Philippe, the “Bourgeois-King” of France, had no liking for display, became known as the worst-dressed monarch of modern times. In the early years of his reign he inaugurated colonial reforms, associated with Socialist politicians, granted universal suffrage, was considered a scholar and mountain climber who was always badly in need of a haircut.
Although Biographer d’Ydewalle writes much of military successes and pre-War diplomacy, tells many an anecdote of highly-placed Germans who admitted their humiliation at the invasion of Belgium, his chapters on the War years are strangely naive and repetitious. Determined to establish Germany’s guilt, he seems to lose sight of his king in his search for a code of ethics in modern warfare. But in a brilliant chapter on the King and his reign, Biographer d’Ydewalle characterizes the daily routine of royalty in terms that are enlightening. Plagued by intriguing politicians, the highest compliment Albert could pay his minister was his sardonic “You, at any rate, have always told me the truth.” One of his most trusted advisers was Vandervelde, onetime president of the Second International, and of him the king remarked, “He is more than an adversary, he is a rival.” He brooded over the casual criticism of journalists. He saw hidden reflections in an article on Maximilian of Mexico, had the author censured. He violently defended the reign of Leopold II even when no one was attacking it. His moods changed with Hamlet-like rapidity, and politicians said he always agreed with the last speaker. The assassination of Tsar Nicholas was a terrible shock to him, and he felt that Clemenceau was endangering the monarchical principle by dethroning the princes of Central Europe. Suspecting slights, he felt that Foch showed wretched taste by remarking that he had gone to Italy to rescue “poor King Victor Emmanuel by the skin of his teeth.” Once he told his aide-de-camp, as they started for a celebration, that there would be no crowd, since his subjects did not like him. The crowd was large, but when the aide tried to cheer Albert by calling attention to it, the King remarked wearily, “Yes, there will be a similar crowd when I am led to the scaffold.”
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