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So sound and sensible is Belgium that only the complex personalities of Leopold and his family could have led the nation into its present intense, but not panicky, concern with the "royal question."
Father's Curriculum. A proper constitutional monarch is the product of infinitely painstaking grooming and conditioning. To Albert I, a model of Belgian commonsense,* it seemed that a bourgeois nation ought to have bourgeois princes. He instructed the tutors of his three children (Leopold, Charles and Marie-Jose) accordingly:
"I do not wish that my children shall love horses or hunting. Fishing, if they must [Charles is the family's fisherman]. They must do sports, gymnastics, swimming, tennis. They should have a practical knowledge of all things and be brought up as sons of the bourgeois, children of the people [only Charles even remotely qualifies; he is fond of working over broken-down automobiles and has earned the popular title 'Prince in Overalls'].
"Develop in them a sense of observation. Give them each day lessons on things that they may come to know, plants, animals and, above all, people [Leopold singularly failed here]. They must be courageous [all are]. They must remember many names. I do not wish that their memories should fail them. This pains people and it must not happen.
"Demand of them strict punctuality [Charles once bawled out officials who were late opening a voting booth] . . . They must work hard [Leopold does; Charles, after a lighthearted beginning, turned more diligent]. They must bring to me personally their weekly reports and speak to me of them. They will be rewarded or punished accordingly."
Sons' Natures. Despite father Albert's memorable instructions, the tutors could not control human temperament. Leopold and Charles were two different natures, reacting differently to the roles history and birth thrust upon them.
From the beginning, Leopold was the strong individualist rather than the submissive figurehead to which a constitutional monarch must aspire. When the Germans invaded Belgium in 1914, his father packed him and Charles off to England. Leopold spent his winters at Eton. During the summers he served as a private with the 12th Infantry Regiment in a reserve sector of the Western Front.
A Brussels tobacco-shop clerk, Pierre Mouillard, who was also a private in the 12th, recalls: "He wasn't a bad little soldier, lots less stiff and proud than he later became. His best friend, I remember, was a Corporal Loriot, a Charleroi miner, who was a pretty extreme Socialist for those days. They got to be friends one day when the petit prince forgot his canteen and Loriot let him drink out of his. After that Loriot was always pulling him out of holes he fell into or teaching him how to swear the way they do in the Charleroi pits."