Willy wasn’t thanking God. He was struggling with all his might to understand the disaster happening all around him.

‘The war,’ Prince Max of Baden, his newly appointed Chancellor, said to him grimly over the telephone on 8 November, ‘is not as good as lost. It has been lost – and if civil war in Germany is to be avoided, there is no other alternative but for you to abdicate.’

Max was in Berlin. Willy was at Military Headquarters, hundreds of miles away at Spa.

‘Abdicate?’ Willy roared, hardly able to believe his ears. ‘I’m not a lily-livered ninny like Nicky Romanov! I’m a successor of Frederick the Great, and a successor to Frederick the Great does not abdicate.’ And, with great fury, he slammed the receiver back on its rest.

He swung round to view himself in the nearest mirror. He was fifty-nine and, unlike a lot of the men his age, was still a fine figure of a man. His figure had thickened over the years, but he didn’t have a paunch. His strong-boned facial features had held up well. His jawline was still arrogantly firm; his nose, unmarked by red veins, was just as jutting as ever; the cleft in his chin still gave him a look of great panache.

Rather than abdicate, he would go to the Front and lead his army himself. In his mind’s eye he could see himself doing it. He could see himself, like a legendary hero in a romantic saga, dying a glorious death at the head of his troops.

Unfortunately, no one else could. With capitulation staring them in the face, all his generals were unanimous that the war was lost; and they, like Max, insisted that his abdication was the only thing that could save Germany from disintegration.

‘Then I shall abdicate as German Emperor but remain King of Prussia,’ he announced grandly, when faced with the inevitable, only to discover, with overwhelming disbelief, that no one was listening to him any longer.

Two days later, without even having had another conversation with Willy, Max announced his abdication, and the abdication of his eldest son and heir.

‘Impossible!’ Willy bellowed when the news was brought to him. ‘Preposterous! No one can abdicate a throne except the person sitting on it.’

‘But they have,’ he was told bluntly by his generals. ‘Germany is now a republic, you are no longer Kaiser – and you cannot,’ they added, even more bluntly, ‘remain in Germany, not unless you want to meet the same fate as the Tsar did. You must go into exile.’

Exile. His first thought was England, but having waged war against it for four years, even he realized that England was an impossibility. One of his generals suggested Holland.

‘Queen Wilhelmina is a cousin of yours, isn’t she?’ the general in question said. ‘I’m sure she will grant you asylum.’