One day in childhood there comes a moment when you play in the yard with your friends for the last time, until you are called indoors, but you do not yet know it

One day in childhood there comes a moment when you play in the yard with your friends for the last time, until you are called indoors, but you do not yet know it. Look closely at this photograph. The mood is much the same: the wedding of Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia, the Kaiser's only daughter, to the British prince of the blood Ernest Augustus of Cumberland on 24 May 1913 at the Royal Palace in Berlin brought three cousins together at a festive table for the last time: Kaiser Wilhelm II, King George V of England and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. A year after that banquet of turtle soup, roast venison and champagne amid the glitter of diamonds and gilding, the First World War began and wiped the Russian and German Empires from the map of the world. By a cruel irony, this wedding was meant to be a symbol of reconciliation between the families of bride and groom, at odds since 1866, whose grandfather and father had been driven out after the annexation of the Kingdom of Hanover