Reading Comprehension

This passage is on History and I thought a bit of interesting history. I had mentioned in a few sessions about cousins fighting the WWI. This is where I had sourced that information from. In this Passage I am giving the synonyms right in the beginning. Let me know if you find this better than the previous one where I gave it alongside the word. As usual let me request you to key in the summary in the Comments section and as usual you are free to ignore this request. Happy Reading!!!

Before we start, a few words and their synonyms. If you do not require them go right ahead to the passage.

swaggering:

to walk or strut with a defiant or insolent air

to boast or brag noisily

cavalcade:

a procession of persons riding on horses, in horsedrawn carriages, in cars, etc.

trundling:

to roll along.

to move or run on a wheel or wheels.

to travel in a wheeled vehicle

ancien régime:

the political and social system of France before the revolution of 1789

A sociopolitical or other system that no longer exists.

burgeoning:

to grow or develop quickly; flourish

unassailable:

not open to attack or assault, as by military force or argument

kinship:

the state or fact of being of kin; family relationship.

relationship by nature, qualities, etc.; affinity

regicide:

the killing of a king.

inexorably:

unyielding; unalterable

belligerent:

warlike; given to waging war

bombastic:

(of speech, writing, etc.) high-sounding; high-flown; inflated; pretentious.

sabre-rattler:

one who indulges in an ostentatious display of military power (with the implied threat that it might be used)

abdicate:

to renounce or relinquish a throne, right, power, claim, responsibility, or the like, esp. in a formal manner

irresolute:

doubtful; infirm of purpose; vacillating

The old world in its sunset

What Winston Churchill once described as 'the old world in its sunset' had never been captured more brilliantly than at the funeral of King Edward VII in May 1910. This was the occasion of the celebrated Parade of Kings, when over 50 royal horsemen - a swaggering cavalcade of emperors, kings, crown princes, archdukes, grand dukes and princes - followed the slowly trundling coffin through the streets of London.

Never since the days of the ancien régime of pre-revolutionary France had monarchy seemed so firmly entrenched. Instead of diminishing in number, royal thrones had multiplied, and the second half of the 19th and the early years of the 20th centuries had seen the setting up of half a dozen new monarchies, so by the year of Edward VII's death there were more monarchs in Europe than there had ever been.

Whatever the powers of these rulers - whether they were autocrats as in Russia, or virtually powerless constitutional monarchs as in Great Britain - their prestige and position remained almost intact. Few of those watching, or taking part in, Edward VII's funeral could have imagined that this blaze of splendour marked, not a royal high noon, but a royal sunset.

With self-preservation being one of the chief motivations of monarchy, by 1910 Europe's sovereigns, or at least their advisers, had had the foresight to adapt themselves to the more liberal tenor of the times. The French Revolution, a century before, had taught them a lesson. Because the burgeoning middle classes had demanded legal constitutions, the monarchs had granted them. Where there had been a clamour for extended suffrage, they had agreed to it. By assimilating new ideas, monarchies had to some extent converted themselves into symbols of democracy; the leaders of these same monarchies, however, remained stubbornly blind to the gradually spreading republican and revolutionary movements taking root in their countries.

Rendering them unassailable (or so they fondly imagined) was the fact that the monarchs of Europe were all closely related. Queen Victoria was sometimes called the Grandmamma of Europe, and there was hardly a Continental court that did not boast at least one of her relations. During World War One there were no less than seven of the old Queen's direct descendants, and two more of her Coburg relations, on European thrones. Before it happened, can anyone blame this family of kings, or their subjects, for assuming that a war between these crowned cousins was all but impossible?

One can appreciate why Kaiser Wilhelm II, at the outbreak of war in 1914, exclaimed that 'Nicky' had 'played him false'. For the rulers of the world's three greatest nations - King George V of Great Britain and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia on the one hand, and the German Kaiser on the other - were not simply cousins, they were first cousins. If their grandmother Queen Victoria had still been alive, said the Kaiser, she would never have allowed them to go to war with each other.

Instead, World War One proved once and for all that the family ties between the reigning houses of Europe were more or less irrelevant. Their kinship simply snapped, like cotton threads, as the storm of war broke over their heads.

lt was an act of regicide that catapulted Europe into war - an act that not unexpectedly took place in the Balkans. The region had been in a state of ferment for years, and the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by a Serbian nationalist, was the culmination of a train of events leading inexorably to war.

Of all the sovereigns involved in World War One the most apparently warlike turned out to be the least belligerent when the reality of war hit them. Kaiser Wilhelm II soon revealed himself as nothing more than a bombastic sabre-rattler, lacking in every quality of leadership. Eventually, ignored by the High Command, be spent his days 'drinking tea, going for walks and sawing wood'. By the end of the war, with his armies facing military defeat, he was overwhelmed by the forces of republicanism and revolution that he had always more-or-less ignored, and he was forced to abdicate.

In April 1915 the equally irresolute Tsar Nicholas II took the fatal step of assuming personal command of the army. No less misguided was his decision to leave the capital in the hands of his stronger-willed consort, the Empress Alexandra, who was entirely under the influence of the mysterious starets (spiritual advisor) Rasputin. In March 1917, riots broke out in St Petersburg, and a week later Nicholas II heard that a hastily assembled provisional government had decided that he must abdicate. Without the support of either the politicians or the generals, the Tsar had to submit. In the course of a week, the previously apparently unassailable Romanov dynasty had collapsed.

The British sovereign, in the person of King George V, handled things much better. Confining his military activities to the occasional inspecting of troops, he met the threat of social unrest by identifying the crown with the day-to-day wartime lives of his subjects: visiting hospitals, touring factories, conferring decorations. He changed the German name of his House - Saxe-Coburg-Gotha - to the undeniably British one of Windsor.

By the end of World War One, the three great monarchies of Central Europe - Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary - had fallen. In the main, it was those sovereigns without personal power who kept their thrones, and those wielding too much power who lost them.