The World That Never Was by Alex Butterworth Page B

which, only a few years earlier, had hung him out to dry.
    Stieber’s continued involvement with Russia created inevitable conflicts of interest. He would provide indispensable advice and intelligence to the tsar for many years to come in his struggle against sedition, but from this time on his ultimate loyalty would always be to Prussia, or rather to Bismarck and his vision of a strong and unified German state. No lover of socialists and revolutionaries, it was always a pleasure for Stieber when their persecution was his clear imperative. But when, as occasionally happened, the greater benefit for Bismarck lay in their manipulation, he was quite prepared to do whatever was required, regardless of his other freelance loyalties.
    Such, it appears, was the situation in 1867, when Alexander II asked Stieber to contrive for him a seemingly chance meeting with Napoleon III. Fearing that it was cooperation against Prussia that the tsar wished to discuss, according to his own account, Stieber instead worked to keep France and Russia at loggerheads. Among the most valuable resources he possessed was a burgeoning index-card register of subversives, containing information extracted from police and underworld contacts, including at least one from the Batignolles district of Paris. Stieber claimed to have consulted this informant immediately upon arriving for the 1867 Expo on Tsar Alexander’s train, and that it was he who provided the advance warning of Berezowski’s assassination plans.
    Tall tales were a speciality of Stieber’s and his memoirs recount them compellingly, but the ability to manipulate or even rescript the seemingly inevitable course of events in the real world was also an essential aspect of his extraordinary talent for intrigue. The mise en scène in his recollections of the parade at Longchamp is superbly facetious: the glittering silver cuirasses and polished bayonets of 40,000 French soldiers, lined up to witness the unveiling of the mitrailleuse . And then, when the moment arrives to prevent the assassination, technology and cavalry elan are shown to be equally futile beside Prussian good sense: it takes only a well-aimed elbow by Stieber to jog Berezowski’s arm as he steps from the crowd witha double-barrelled pistol, and so deflect a bullet meant for the tsar. Discrepancies between Stieber’s account and that of other first-hand witnesses are of little consequence. His version might have been true or false, his informant real or not; he might have had no foreknowledge of Berezowski’s attack, or arranged for it to be provoked. All that mattered, finally, for Stieber, was the larger message: that for all its pride and pomp, France could not be relied upon when it came to matters of life or death.
    Surveying Paris in the distance that misty October evening in 1870, Stieber could reflect that he had served Bismarck well. France had been provoked to war by the doctored ‘Ems Telegram’, that bore all the hallmarks of Stieber’s cunning, and now, in her hour of greatest need, Alexander II refused to be drawn by the envoys of the Government of National Defence into offering assistance. With a supposed tally of 36,000 agents under his control in the occupied territory, and a base in the pleasant park-city of Versailles, whose monarchist population appeared for the moment to hate the Parisian republic even more than they did the Teutonic invader, the Prussian spymaster could now indulge in a subtler and more finessed form of intrigue.
    Already he had rewritten the details of Napoleon’s defeat at Sedan for propaganda purposes, inventing a scene in which Napoleon was seized while struggling to fire a jammed mitrailleuse at the approaching enemy. Facile in its symbolism, the account expressed a still unsatisfied desire for France’s utter humiliation. Stieber was astute enough, however, to realise that Bismarck’s plans for German unification were not necessarily best served by a straightforward victory;