Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (78 page)

Spring came early that year, and the warmer weather made Dona more comfortable. Wilhelm and Eitel-Fritz spent the most time at her bedside, but these were long hours passed in silence since even simple conversation exhausted her. Occasionally, on days when Dona showed strength, she was propped up next to her window where she enjoyed looking out into the garden with its flowers and budding trees. Her physician, Dr. Hähner, kept her pain to a minimum by giving her frequent hypodermic injections of a heart stimulant. By the predawn hours of April 11, 1921, her breathing had become extremely labored. At 5:00 a.m.
,
Dr
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Hähner, Countess Keller, and the nurse moved Dona into a position they hoped would make it easier for her to breathe. Over the next hour, her pulse grew weaker and weaker. Wilhelm and Adalbert were both summoned to her bedside where, at 6:00 a.m.
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Augusta Victoria died from massive heart failure. She was sixty-two years old. Sissy, who had been en route back to Doorn, was unaware that her mother had died. She received the news during a stopover in Nuremberg, where placards had been posted announcing the empress’s death.

The tributes that poured into Doorn were heartfelt. They amounted to some ten thousand messages of condolence, “a mark perhaps more of the respect with which Dona had been regarded in Germany than real enthusiasm for” Wilhelm.
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Even American newspapers paid tribute to “the life of the once beautiful Empress and Queen of Prussia, Augusta Victoria who, for nearly 40 years had been the most beloved hausfrau of the German people.”
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It stung Wilhelm deeply that no message of condolence arrived from King George V or the British royal family.

Dona’s body rested at Doorn with a round-the-clock vigil provided by her husband and sons, who were dressed in full Prussian military uniforms. Scattered throughout the room were pine-scented wreaths and bundles of flowers. Willy spent the first night after his mother died seated next to her coffin. He was struck by how much her passing reminded him of Queen Victoria’s. He had great difficulty coming to terms with his mother’s death. He wrote in his memoirs, “I was unable to grasp the idea that she would no more speak to me, that her kind eyes would no more be turned upon me. She was the magnet which attracted us children, wherever we might be, toward the parental home. She knew all our wishes, our hopes, our cares. Now she had been taken from us forever.”
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In a gesture of sympathy, the Allied Mission in Berlin and the German government allowed the empress’s body to be buried in Potsdam, in accordance with her wishes. “I will sleep in my own homeland,”
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she once told her daughter. But there were stipulations. To avoid arousing monarchist sentiments, the train carrying the coffin and its caretakers was required to travel without any fanfare or official ceremonies at any point on German soil until it reached Potsdam. The German government took great pains to keep many of the details of Dona’s funeral a secret in the hope of attracting as little attention as possible. The publicly announced date for the funeral was changed without warning just for this reason. The final, most important condition was that Wilhelm must not accompany his wife’s coffin. This was deeply painful for the former emperor, since “it meant he would never be able to stand at his wife’s grave.”
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In the end, it would fall to his sons to escort Dona to her final resting place; Auwi and Eitel-Fritz immediately left for Germany to begin funeral preparations, while Oscar and Adalbert decided to accompany the coffin on its last journey.

Rather than have a funeral at Doorn, the Hohenzollerns chose to have a small memorial for Dona at the train station at Maarn, five miles away. On the dark, misty night of April 17, Dona’s coffin, decorated in the traditional Prussian style with pine fronds and covered with the Standard of the Queen of Prussia, was taken to the dimly lit Maarn station in a specially modified automobile. Mourners stood along the entire route, their heads bare and bowed low in silent respect. The only sound that could be heard was the clattering of hooves from the horses pulling the coffin. Following close behind was a procession of black automobiles. The first was filled with bouquets and funeral wreaths. The second contained Ernst von Dryander, the court chaplain, wearing his black clerical robes. The third bore members of the former imperial court. Ten minutes after these vehicles arrived at Maarn, a fourth, large motorcar pulled up. Oscar and Adalbert stepped out, both wearing the uniform of the Prussian Guards, complete with iconic, black, spiked helmets and gray capes over their shoulders. Wilhelm’s attire was that of a general of the Brandenburg Infantry, which was one of the last uniforms he would ever be seen wearing. Sissy and the other women wore the traditional mourning black. Their long black dresses were in such stark contrast to the resplendent military uniforms that some witnesses thought they were nuns.

Along with Dona’s husband and children, the service at Maarn was attended by a surprisingly impressive group of former courtiers, government officials, and representatives sent on behalf of Queen Wilhelmina and the kings of Spain and Sweden. When it was time for the service to begin, Dr. Dryander had everyone assemble on the train platform around the coffin, where he said a few words, “his voice vibrating with emotion.” Reporters at the scene noted that the ex-emperor “wept bitterly” over his wife’s coffin. After the brief service, Adalbert, Oscar, and the other male members of the court loaded their mother’s casket into the last of three dark-green compartments attached to the funeral train, which was scheduled to depart before dawn the next morning. Sleeping on the train that night in the second compartment outfitted with beds were the two princes, Dr. Dryander, and the empress’s ladies-in-waiting, who were permanently returning to Germany after the funeral. In the morning, they would accompany the coffin back to Potsdam. Willy asked the Dutch government for permission to go but was told if he did, he would not be permitted to reenter the Netherlands. Accompanied by Sissy, father and son boarded the train for a final good-bye. Afterward, Wilhelm proceeded into the travel car to thank those who were sleeping on board for their devotion to the late empress in accompanying her body to Potsdam. When Wilhelm emerged a few minutes later, according to the
New York Times
reporter on the scene, his “figure was that of a man broken by sorrow.”
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Without any words, he and Sissy got into their automobile and drove back to Doorn. Willy, Sissy’s husband, and the rest of their courtiers who were remaining in the Netherlands followed shortly thereafter.

At 7:45 a.m., the funeral train left Maarn. News reports from that day imply Wilhelm had planned to return to see the train off. However, the Associated Press reported that he “suffered all through the night from severe nervous depression” and could not bring himself to return to Maarn when the “funeral train departed with the body of his wife, Auguste Viktoria.”
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The Dutch government paid their respects by flying their flags at half-mast at all the stations through which the train passed on its way out of their country. The Dutch people were no less reverent. Thousands of ordinary citizens, most of whom had never even laid eyes on Dona, lined the train tracks. When the train crossed into Germany at 10:00 a.m., the outpouring of affection for the country’s last empress was even more heartfelt, despite the best efforts of the republican government. The entire journey from Maarn to Potsdam—more than three-hundred-and-seventy miles–was lined in “an unbroken human chain” of tens of thousands of mourners who had come to pay their last respects.
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All along the way, the people echoed the same words: “The Kaiserin is coming!” So many people lined the railway tracks that the train was forced to delay its arrival in Potsdam. A number of towns forced the train to stop at their stations to allow their citizens the chance to mourn. Hundreds—and in some cases, thousands—of people surrounded the train at different stations. Dressed in black, they dropped to their knees and prayed. In other towns, church bells tolled, choirs sang, and bands played hymns. “A whole people were mourning their beloved Empress,” wrote Sissy.
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The train pulled into Wildpark Station near Potsdam during the predawn hours of April 19; the funeral would take place later that day. So many thousands of people had defied the orders of the German government and paid their respects en route that by the time the coffin reached Potsdam, it was completely covered in wreaths. When the passengers disembarked, they were met by Eitel-Fritz, Auwi, several dozen royals, and former imperial officials. Dr. Dryander recited prayers as each person came to pay his or her personal respects. Once the ceremony was over, the two military regiments that had been Dona’s personal units, the Pasewalker Cuirassiers and the Eighty-Sixth Schleswig-Holstein Infantry, formed an honor guard and stood watch over the coffin for the rest of the night.

As dawn broke that morning, Augusta Victoria was buried. The funeral cortège was surrounded by hundreds of people in the procession from Wildpark Station to Dona’s final resting place: the Antique Temple, the great domed mausoleum built by Frederick the Great at Sanssouci Park. The pallbearers were four knights of the Order of the Black Eagle, the highest chivalric order in the old Prussian kingdom of which Dona and her mother-in-law, Vicky, were the only female members. Immediately behind the pallbearers came Oscar, Eitel-Fritz, Adalbert, and Auwi, along with Ina and Adelaide, all with heads bowed low. The
New York Times
wrote that “the most unparalleled crowds” came out to watch the spectacle. Estimates placed the number of spectators between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand, all of whom stood in respectful silence as the procession moved through the streets. “So intense was the silence that you could hear the plashing of the fountains playing in front of the various palaces,” wrote one witness.
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Sissy had been kept apprised of the entire spectacle. She wrote of how awe-inspiring the funeral was: “The crowd was immense, more than 200,000 appeared, perhaps a quarter of a million, at the funeral, reverently quiet. No one spoke aloud, there was no noise of any kind, no pushing and shoving. A veritable sea of flowers and wreaths had been laid all round the circular, ivy-covered edifice of the Temple of Antiquity. After the coffin had been placed in front of the altar in the mausoleum, my brothers took over the vigil, their swords drawn, while Pastor Dryander gave the funeral oration.”
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Dryander praised “the ex-Empress as mother and woman, one who placed duty above everything else.”
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The funeral service concluded when the pastor read an excerpt from the Gospels. Dona’s casket was then placed in the Antique Temple, next to that of her son Joachim.

For Wilhelm, the loss of his wife affected him very deeply. The day of the funeral was understandably painful, but he was surrounded by stalwart companions, especially his eldest son, his daughter, and his brother Henry, who came to be at his side. Of the four imperial couples who ruled Germany, Austria-Hungary, Britain, and Russia, Wilhelm held the dubious distinction of being the only husband to outlive his wife. The weeks and months that followed Dona’s death were almost unbearable for him. “My loneliness was indescribable,” he recalled.
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He was heard repeatedly telling those around him, “It will be quiet in the house,” and that Dona had been such “a splendid person!”
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He later turned his wife’s bedroom into a shrine devoted to her memory, with a cross of flowers draped across her bed. Once a week, for the rest of his life, he would retire to his wife’s room, mourning her memory and missing her constant, unwavering support.