Friday, November 12, 2010
In the above photo we see HSH Prince Albert I (third from left) visiting the western front during World War I where his son, Prince Louis II (second from right), was serving with the French army. Prince Albert I had strong feelings about the Great War, being a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, then a pacifist, a man very attached to France and yet a very good friend of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. In fact, Prince Albert was on the yacht with the Kaiser when word of the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand first reached him; the event that would ultimately lead to the outbreak of the First World War. He was very reluctant for his son Louis to serve in the French army, much less to go to war, but he could not refuse him and Prince Louis II went on to become a genuine hero in the French military on the western front.