Worried Queen
Last week the London Daily Telegraph & Morning Post presented what it described as the official German Army plans to invade The Netherlands on Nov.11, plus an "official" explanation of why that invasion did not come off as planned.
The alleged German plan was to attack The Netherlands first, Belgium later--The Netherlands first because Belgium was expected to resist the Allied attempt to aid The Netherlands through Belgium. "Apparently it was not fully understood in Berlin that Dutch-Belgian relations in the matter of mutual assistance against aggression had undergone important changes following the [earlier] exchange of views between King Leopold and Queen Wilhelmina."
On Nov. 10, the Telegraph explained, when suspicions of German intentions seemed confirmed by reports of troop concentrations, King Leopold summoned his ministers to determine the country's atti tude. Guided by "the views and wishes" held by General van Overstraeten, they decided the following: "1) If the German forces attacked Holland but did not come south of Nijmegen and the Rhine, Belgium would not move; 2) if the German advance were directed south of Nijmegen and especially across Dutch Brabant, Belgium would order immediate general mobilization and declare that her own security was threatened." The German Ambassador in Brussels telephoned Berlin the gist of Belgium's decision. "The news from Brussels was received when Generals Keitel, Reichenau and Blaskowitz were assembled in Berlin for a final conference to settle the last details of the attack to be launched the following day. They immediately concluded that the plan on which they had decided would no longer be feasible."
This week the 18 German divisions that did not march over the eastern frontier of The Netherlands, and the Allied forces and British Fleet which did not pour across her southern and sea frontiers to meet them, were nevertheless still at their jump-off positions. All of which put The Netherlands in World War II's very toughest spot and made Her Majesty Wilhelmina Helena Pauline Maria, Princess of Orange-Nassau and Queen of The Netherlands, the world's most worried Chief of State.
Unlike the actual belligerents, The Netherlands with its little policeman's army of 100,000 has not the barest fighting chance of defending itself should its borders be violated. And of all the neutrals save the strong and seagirt U. S., The Netherlands, with the world's third most valuable colonial empire, has the most to lose. Invasion by Germany would be the strongest temptation to Japan to seize the rich Netherlands Indies, and the only force on which Queen Wilhelmina could possibly count to prevent such a grab is the British China Squadron based at Singapore. The British since Sept. 1 have had plenty of other obligations on their hands.
Beset by these actualities and bedeviled by these probabilities, the Queen of The Netherlands has opened her mouth in many a peace appeal, kept it closed in many a case of violated neutrality during the past few months in a desperate effort to keep her political hot corner out of the war play. As never before, the little monarchy, squeezed between Europe's antagonistic No. 1 sea and land powers, is anxious to remain neutral.
Forebears. It was not always that way. Wilhelmina's forebears were a tough collection of fighting men. While they were still nominally under Spanish rule and before the British ran them off the sea (1654), they conquered an Empire in America and Asia in the same military manner as did the British and French. As late as 100 years ago Wilhelmina's grandfather, William II, fought a brief war to try to regain Belgium. The unification of the 29 German States into one big neighboring empire headed by Prussia made the practical Dutch finally realize that a nation of only a few million could no longer play big-time grabby politics in a world of giant neighbors. It was under Wilhelmina that The Netherlands became a "satisfied nation," settled down and hung up its sword like Switzerland and the Scandinavian States.
Princess. Queen Wilhelmina is the11th of her line to govern The Netherlands.
The House of Nassau can trace its origin to 800, its members settling in the Lowlands from Germany in 1400. The Orange-Nassau line barely missed dying out with Wilhelmina's father, William III. William's first wife and two sons died one after the other. At 62 he married the 20-year-old Princess Emma, of Waldeck-Pyrmont, a small German State. Of that marriage the sole issue was Wilhelmina, born August 31, 1880. Repeal of the Salic Law forbidding female rulers allowed her to succeed to the throne.
Princess Wilhelmina's life was mostly work and little play. At ten her father died and she became Queen, with her able mother acting as Regent. On her first appearance on the balcony of the Royal Palace at Amsterdam she is said to have asked: "Mama, do all these people belong to me?" Queen Emma answered: "No, my child, it is you who belong to all these people." Her preparation by private tutors for queenship was guided by this principle. At 18, in 1898, she was crowned in the New Church at Amsterdam, swearing to support the Constitution and uphold the liberties of the people.
As a measure of the personal independence she was to demand, the young Queen refused point-blank to allow her Prime Minister to write her first public speech.
One year later she began her peace and neutrality offensive by offering her sprawling palace at The Hague for the First International Peace Conference, at which many of the present conventions governing war, the rights of neutrals, the principles of arbitration were first laid down.
Private Life. Two years after her coronation Wilhelmina married a dashing young lieutenant of the Prussian Guards, Henry Wladimir Albert Ernst, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Prince Henry was fond of meeting up with sea captains and artists, and led a hard life playing second fiddle for 33 years in a severely formal and moral court. The Queen was far from happily married, and the Prince was far from popular with the strict Dutch. Wilhelmina came very near dying from a miscarriage. Her only child, Juliana, the present Heir to the Throne, was born in 1909. The Prince Consort died in 1934.
The exemplary private life that Queen W'ilhelmina lived blended well with her shrewd qualities as a ruler. Not a breath of scandal has ever touched her. Few if any bits of gossip ever got through the cold, exclusive circle of Dutch nobility that surrounded the court. She was the good mother, the conscientious leader, the faithful churchgoer. Because of her strong Calvinism, her words came to carry almost a scriptural weight among the nobility of The Hague and Utrecht, the patrician families of Amsterdam, all the older townspeople and villagers in the strongly Protestant North. Nor could it be said that she was intolerant; Jews and Catholics came to idolize her.
Her outwardly democratic, thrifty way of living pleased the liberty-loving, saving Dutch. Her palaces were really only big homes. Her Majesty's grocer used the same entrance to the Palace at The Hague as did Her Majesty. The Queen could often be seen by The Hague's inhabitants sewing by a Palace window. There were never unduly elaborate entertainments, there were no expensive State trips for the Royal Family.
As she grew older she grew fatter, even more conscientious. She gave up hunting and riding, took to the bicycle. She made it a daily rule to rise at 6 a.m., usually beginning her royal chores with an hour's work in the spacious garden at the back of the Palace. Nowadays, once a week the Queen receives her Ministers, and woe be to him who does not know his subject well. The Queen has been so long at her job that she can ask the most difficult questions; when a Minister cannot answer them he is told to study up and sent home. In what spare time Her Majesty permits herself she paints landscapes and cows.
Major ripple on the placid surface of Queen Wilhelmina's personal life of late has been the acquisition of a son-in-law in Prince Bernhard zu Lippe-Biesterfeld, whose line has not enjoyed temporal sovereignty in the hilly little Principality of Lippe-Detmold since 1849. Nobody in The Netherlands had ever heard of the Prince before his engagement to Juliana was announced, but all knew that he must fit the proper specifications of a Prince Consort. He must be of royal blood, a Protestant, of flawless character, in perfect health. He was all that, but he also proved to have a few rather mild modern ideas. He liked cocktails, he was fond of speeding. He was said to have lost his head a bit when he suddenly found himself minus debts and with a yearly allowance of $106,000 from the Government. Her Majesty did not approve, but she was said to have softened up a bit when she became a grandmother. A girl, Beatrix, was born to the Prince and Princess in January 1938, another daughter, Irene, last August.
Diplomatist. "Given to duty and very clever in carrying it out," was the way Fisherman-Essayist Henry van Dyke described Queen Wilhelmina in the days when he was U. S. Minister to her court.
As a diplomatist, Her Majesty did not have many serious problems to be clever about in the first part of her reign. There was friction with Venezuela over the Dutch-owned islands of Curasao; the problem of protecting trade interests in Turkey and China; concern over Mexico's program, even then taking shape, of annexing foreign oil properties.
Fifteen years after Wilhelmina ascended the throne World War I began. The British blockade induced a grave food shortage. Trade was completely disrupted and the country was overrun with refugees. Dutch ships were sunk and by 1918 what ships still floated abroad had been seized by the Allies. Only bright spots on The Netherlands' horizon were that: 1) although the Germans considered invading the country, they eventually decided against it, partly because the Dutch had effectively remodeled their land defenses, partly because Germany, already at the Belgian Channel ports, had money and used it to buy supplies in neutral Holland; 2) The Dutch East Indies, selling to the Allies, cleaned up.
The peace conference at Versailles brought the threat of the big powers forcing The Netherlands to cede to a reconstituted Belgium the southern portions of Zeeland and Limburg provinces, which lie next to Belgium. This was averted not only by the Queen's dramatic tour of these provinces but also by the presence in Versailles of two South African statesmen of Boer origin, Generals Colin Graham Botha and Jan Christiaan Smuts. They remembered that it was Wilhelmina who in 1900 defied the British by sending a Dutch warship to pick up Boer Leader Paul Kruger and bring him to safety in Europe.*
Realism. No one has given Wilhelmina more trouble in recent years than Adolf Hitler, and from no ruler has the Fuehrer taken, at times, such straight talk. She protested in a personal letter to Herr Hitler the death sentence passed on Marinus van Der Lubbe, the Dutch Communist, for his alleged part in the famed Reichstag fire. When the Nazis confiscated the passports of German bridesmaids and guests to her daughter's wedding, she stated with quiet directness: "This is the marriage of my daughter to the man she loves, whom I have found worthy of her love; this is not the marriage of The Netherlands to Germany." She wrote to Herr Hitler, and the passports were returned. On the Fuhrer's birthdays she has always tactfully sent congratulations, and fortnight ago, when he escaped assassination, she wired her "relief" at his good fortune.
Her Majesty knows when these little courtesies count. She was not at home when ex-King Amanullah of Afghanistan toured European courts, but she went out of her way to give a ceremonious welcome to Hirohito, then Crown Prince and now Emperor of Japan. Afghanistan meant nothing in The Netherlands' life; Japan, a bad neighbor in the Far East, meant a great deal.
Rich at Home. In the course of Wilhelmina's reign The Netherlands' population has risen from 5,000,000 to 8,500,000. More important, the country has changed from a predominantly agricultural to an increasingly industrial nation. Cheese, butter and tulip bulbs are still important exports, just as windmills, wooden shoes, dikes are still a part of the Dutch landscape. But more typical of The Netherlands in the 20th Century are its huge international banks, its thriving merchants, its busy manufacturers.
Amsterdam became an international banking centre challenging in importance the City of London and the Paris Bourse. It houses such famous institutions as the Amsterdamsche Bank n. v., the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappy n. v., Mendelssohn & Co. (now defunct), whose proprietors will turn a guilder almost anywhere they can find one. They are still sorry that Spain's Dictator Franco turned down their offer to bank him last spring. After Adolf Hitler came to power, Amsterdam became a concentration camp for refugee money. The city's grain market is one of the biggest in Europe; its stock-market is a sensitive, if not completely reliable, seismograph of world conditions.
More remarkable was The Netherlands growth in manufactures. Lacking most of her food, forced to import almost all her industrial raw materials, the country nevertheless spurred its production of tiles and potteries, radio and electrical appliances, Diesel engines, chemicals. Amsterdam (and Antwerp in Belgium), are the largest diamond-cutting centres of the world, an operation carried on in plants similar to auto factories. Rotterdam developed into the continent's third biggest port for transshipment of goods and houses sizable shipbuilding yards.
Richer Abroad. The Dutch are today the largest holders of gold, foreign exchange, foreign and colonial securities of any continental European nation (about $6,000,000,000) and the largest foreign holders, next to the British, of U. S. securities (about $1,000,000,000). But the greatest wealth of The Netherlands is the wealth of the Indies.
Netherlands Beyond the Seas includes Curacao, in the Caribbean; Surinam (formerly Dutch Guiana), in South America, and most important of all, the archipelago officially called The Netherlands Indies, known to the native inhabitants as Indonesia, called by old mariners simply The Indies. These islands, home of orangutans, Komodo dragons, hornbills and headhunters, producer of pearls, spices, rare woods, stretches 1,300 miles from North to South, 3,000 from East to West and are inhabited by 60,000,000 brown-bodied souls, not counting some 1,500,000 Asiatics and Europeans. Queen Wilhelmina has never visited her Eastern Empire (although one of New Guinea's highest peaks is named for her), but she can hardly fail to appreciate what a windfall came to her little country the day in 1602 when daring adventurers of the Dutch East India Co. set out on a five-year voyage to claim the islands.
Parallel. Just as today the fate of The Netherlands Empire leans on the fate of the British Empire, so the colonial history of The Indies roughly parallels that of British-owned India: a period of government by the Dutch East India Co., followed by The Netherlands Government taking over; ruthless suppression of native resistance; enforced labor as a "tribute" to the "Motherland"; a change of masters for eleven years during the Napoleonic wars when the British temporarily took the islands; institution of puppet native rulers who are always "advised" by a resident Dutchman; gradual, systematic improvement of colonial Government, bringing with it greater investments, wiser methods of exploitation, louder demands for native self-government.
Like British-owned India, The Netherlands Indies is divided into territory governed by native rulers in treaty relations with the Dutch, and territory governed directly. The Dutch authorities are not as lenient with the many sultans and princes whom they oversee, however, as the British. They strictly limit the native rulers' allowances and make sure that a part of every little State's income finds its way into education, hygiene, public works. Of the entire population, less than 10,000,000 are States' subjects; the remaining 50,000,000 are ruled direct from Batavia.
In Batavia sits the Volksraad, a legislative assembly composed half of natives and subjects of foreign origin and half of Hollanders. But the Volksraad has exceedingly limited powers. Only recently it acquired the right to initiate legislation. The real power rests in a tropical palace at Buitenzorg, outside Batavia, where lives His Excellency Jonkheer A.W.L. Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, the Governor General. Aside from being able to tell such high-sounding potentates as the Sultan of Solo or the Sultan of Jokyakarta how to run their States, he can also veto any measure that a rebellious Volksraad might pass. Moreover, he himself can "pass" his own ordinances. Appointed to his present job in 1936, the Governor General formerly held the important post of Dutch Minister to Belgium. His wife is the U. S.-born Christina Marburg, daughter of Theodore Marburg, onetime U. S. Minister to Belgium.
The Dutch colonial atmosphere has long been widely hailed as far healthier than the British, but this reputation rests more on circumstance than on conscious planning. Unlike the British, early Dutch colonizers were not discouraged from marrying native women and no social ostracism came to them or their half-caste children. Moreover, the Dutch have scrupulously refused to allow the slightest tampering with the natives' moral code, even going so far as to bar missionaries in some islands. But the native living standard is little, if any, higher than in similar British colonies. If the Dutch have experienced fewer revolts in The Indies than the British have in India, it is largely because the natives of the Indies are by & large more indolent. Besides, the fact that they are split among more than 150 different races and languages tends to make widespread rebellion next to impossible.
Reilly. Meanwhile, the 220,000 Dutchmen in the East Indies live the life of Reilly. No white man is so poor he cannot afford at least two servants at salaries ranging around $8 a month, and the usual staff of a well-to-do household numbers six or seven. No white woman need lift her little finger around the house. U. S. films now arrive in Java, Sumatra and Borneo with little delay, and few are the Dutch Colonials who do not own a U. S.-made car. Tinned foods from home are always available, but the most famous East Indian dish is Ryst-Tafel, which is both a ceremony and a dinner. It has a base of rice, and consists of a hundred or more side dishes including fried chicken, fried pork, beef, the entire gamut of spices, fried bananas, fried shrimps, cucumbers, pickles, ginger, eggs in every conceivable form, all served by a waiters' corps of 20. Experienced East Indian Dutchmen go to bed for a couple of hours after eating Ryst-Tafel.
But there is also work to be done--rubber to be tapped in Sumatra, oil to be drilled for in Borneo and Java, tin to be dug in Bangka. Coffee, tea, tobacco, sugar, rice are the more ordinary products; but copra as a basis for facial creams, lizard skins for shoes and handbags, Sumatra wrappers for cigars, cinchona bark for quinine, sandalwood and teakwood, ebony and macassar oil, and even the bare-breasted women of Bali, tourist paradise, do their full share in making this Netherlands overseas a going concern.
One-sixth. To gather in these riches, colonial Dutchmen are rewarded as handsomely as any similar group in the world. In 1935, of 85,000 Europeans earning a living in the East Indies, some 64,000 were taxed on incomes of more than $4,500 a year; 22,500 between $20,000 and $60,000 a year. But more significant was what this trade did to The Netherlands. Dutch investments in the East Indies were valued at $1,158,000,000. And today one-sixth of The Netherlands' population is dependent upon the colonial trade and but for it The Netherlands would probably have a lot more than 400,000 unemployed.
Almost all the well-to-do families in The Netherlands have their East Indian securities, and not the least investor is the House of Orange-Nassau. Century ago King William I invested $1,600,000 in the East. Large profits accrued, the capital multiplied many times again. Wilhelmina, an astute business woman herself, is a large owner of tin mines, just as she has a moneyed finger in the pie of nearly every enterprise of magnitude in Holland. Her income was once estimated at $5,000,000 a year, making her by far the richest monarch of Europe.
Worried. Wilhelmina therefore has every possible stake in getting her country safely through World War II. A devout Christian, she can hardly be in sympathy with the moral or spiritual aims of either Hitler or Hirohito. Orderly, she is excruciatingly shocked by the international disorders of this, her second, World War. Thrifty and patriotic, she must hang on to her and her country's fortunes to the last drop of her Dutch blood. Helpless, about all she can do is keep one face East, one face West, and hope.
*Another famed exile to whom Wilhelmina gave sanctuary was Kaiser Wilhelm II, of Germany, at the close of the first World War. The Allies wanted to get their hands on him and try him. Wilhelmina called the Allied Ambassadors to her presence and lectured them on the rights of asylum.
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