The Kaiser and Tsar Exchanged 'Willy' and 'Nicky' Telegrams Trying to Stop World War I

On July 29, 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II, cousins who had signed their personal letters "Willy" and "Nicky" for twenty years, began a frantic four-day exchange of telegrams begging each other to stop the march to war. Neither could. The mobilization plans their own general staffs had built moved faster than any telegram, and the war that followed destroyed both their thrones.

At one o'clock in the morning on July 29, 1914, Tsar Nicholas II sat down at Peterhof Palace, outside St. Petersburg, and wrote to his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II in Berlin. Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia the day before. Russia was sliding toward mobilization to defend Serbia. Germany was bound by treaty to Austria. The two men who would soon command the largest armies on earth wrote to each other in English, the language of both their courts, and signed off with the pet names they had used for two decades. Wilhelm had just returned from his annual summer cruise to Norway, and Nicky opened with the casual warmth of a man writing to family: "Am glad you are back."

"In this serious moment, I appeal to you to help me," Nicky wrote. "An ignoble war has been declared to a weak country. The indignation in Russia shared fully by me is enormous. I foresee that very soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure forced upon me and be forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war. To try and avoid such a calamity as a European war I beg you in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies from going too far."

Willy's telegram, drafted the night before, crossed Nicky's in the wires. He urged calm, promised to mediate with Vienna, and closed: "Your very sincere and devoted friend and cousin, Willy." Over the following days they exchanged ten telegrams, each more urgent than the last, each man insisting he wanted peace while his armies mobilized.

The cousins' relationship was real, if rocky. Wilhelm was the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria. Nicholas had married Victoria's granddaughter Alix. They were third cousins through the Russian and Prussian royal lines, and they had known each other since Nicholas was a boy. They wore each other's military uniforms at state visits and sailed their imperial yachts side by side. Nicholas once confided to his diary after a meeting with Wilhelm: "He's raving mad!" But they kept writing.

What the telegrams could not stop was not a failure of will but a failure of architecture. Russia's military plan had no setting for partial mobilization. When Nicholas tried to mobilize only against Austria, his generals told him the railway schedules could not be split that way. The plan was all or nothing. On July 30, under pressure from his chief of staff, Nicholas ordered full mobilization. Wilhelm, reading the news in Berlin, felt betrayed. "The whole weight of the decision lies solely on your shoulders now," he cabled, "who have to bear the responsibility for Peace or War."

Nicholas begged for time. "It is technically impossible to stop our military preparations," he wrote on July 31. "We are far from wishing war. I give you my solemn word for this." Wilhelm's final reply, on August 1, was a cold ultimatum: "I have been obliged to mobilise my army. Immediate affirmative clear and unmistakable answer from your government is the only way to avoid endless misery." Germany declared war on Russia that evening. The last telegram from Nicky, crossing in the wires with Willy's, still pleaded: "Our long proved friendship must succeed, with God's help, in avoiding bloodshed."

The friendship did not succeed. The war killed about seventeen million people, soldiers and civilians. It destroyed both men who signed those telegrams. Nicholas abdicated in March 1917 and was shot with his wife and children in a cellar in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. Wilhelm abdicated in November 1918 and fled to the Netherlands, where he died in exile in 1941. A chest of personal correspondence was found among Nicholas's effects after his execution. An American journalist, Isaac Don Levine, copied the letters from Soviet archives in 1919 and published them, and the world could finally read what "Willy" had written to "Nicky" for twenty years, and what neither of them had been able to do.

The telegrams are the last document of personal monarchy, the idea that emperors could manage international relations through family ties and friendship. They proved the opposite. The general staffs and the railway timetables had more power than the cousins who signed the orders, and the lesson echoes every time a leader reaches for a phone call or a personal letter in a crisis, hoping a relationship can stop an institutional machine that has already started moving.

Also on this day

• 1588 An English fleet under Lord Howard and Francis Drake defeated the Spanish Armada off Gravelines, scattering Philip II's invasion force.
• 1836 The Arc de Triomphe was inaugurated in Paris after thirty years of construction, commissioned by Napoleon to honor his armies.
• 1890 Vincent van Gogh died in Auvers-sur-Oise from a gunshot wound two days after he was shot, having sold one painting in his lifetime.
• 1958 President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik.
• 1981 Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer at St. Paul's Cathedral before 2,650 guests and an estimated 750 million television viewers.