What unrecorded overthrow
Of all the world has ever known,
Or ever been, has made itself
So plain to you, and you alone?
WHEN THE2 IMPERATOR RETURNED to New York on 15 July 1914, its register of first-class passengers included Mrs. Nicholas Longworth as well as Mr. and Mrs. Kermit Roosevelt. Alice had stocked up in Paris with all the latest hats and dresses, and was looking forward to wearing something spectacular when her parents welcomed the newlyweds at Sagamore Hill that evening.
It was the first time in four years that the Roosevelts could all be together, and it might be the last for as long again. Alice could stay only one night. Nick (waiting at quayside for the ship to dock) urgently needed her in Cincinnati, where he was campaigning to recapture his Congressional seat. Kermit and Belle were booked to sail on to Brazil in just twelve days. Ethel and Dick Derby would remain on Long Island for a while after that, with little Richard3, their son of fourteen weeks. So would Ted4 and Eleanor with Grace, now almost three, and Theodore Roosevelt III, just one month old. Archie, down from Harvard, was available to drive everyone around in the family’s brand-new Buick. Quentin (fully grown now, a big boy not far off seventeen) was getting ready for his first independent adventure, a pack-horse expedition in Arizona.
Alice’s early departure spared her one of the democratic exercises Roosevelt insisted on in his capacity as a man of the people: an open reception for the residents of Oyster Bay. He thought they should be allowed to meet Belle. That young lady5 was no more drawn to the hoi polloi than her elder sister-in-law. But she had learned public manners in the courts of Europe, and acquitted herself gracefully as the villagers sipped tea and looked her over.
Though Belle was, as her name and accent implied, Southern-born, her plentiful teeth qualified her as an authentic Roosevelt. The sight of her laughing with Archie, Quentin, and the Colonel was enough to overexpose the fastest camera film. Kermit found it hard to smile. Otherwise, he was beginning to resemble his father. The slender graduate6 who had gone south in 1912 was a bulkier personage, with a broadening face and body and passé mustache. Ted and Archie, like most young men of their generation, were slick of hair and clean-shaven.
A DELEGATION7 OF New York Progressives tried to crash the reception, but were told that the Colonel could not see them. They had hoped to persuade him, over sandwiches, to run on their ticket for governor. Answering them obliquely on 22 July, Roosevelt announced that he would support a moderate, fusion-minded Republican, Harvey D. Hinman, for the gubernatorial nomination, in opposition to an organization man put forward by William Barnes, Jr. Readers of his statement thought that it showed more animus against Barnes than any particular regard for Hinman:
In New York State8 we see at its worst the development of the system of bipartisan boss rule.… It is impossible to secure the economic, social, and industrial reforms to which we are pledged until this invisible government of the party bosses working through the alliance between crooked business and crooked politics is rooted out of our governmental system.
In New York State the two political machines are completely dominated, the one by Mr. Barnes, the other by Mr. Murphy.* The state government is rotten throughout in almost all its departments, and this is directly due to the dominance in politics of Mr. Murphy … aided and abetted when necessary by Mr. Barnes and the sub-bosses of Mr. Barnes.
Barnes immediately sued him for libel and $50,000 in damages.
ON THE SAME9 NIGHT that Roosevelt was served with his legal papers in Oyster Bay, the foreign minister of Serbia was handed a note from Austria-Hungary. It was far harsher than the one he had received the previous October. His government was given forty-eight hours to guarantee a purge of all terrorist organizations operating on Serbian soil, ban anti-imperial propaganda, condemn its own army for Black Hand connections, and accept Austrian participation in an internal investigation of the murder of Franz Ferdinand.
The terms of this ultimatum10 (which had been issued at the impatient urging of Wilhelm II) were so provocative that it amounted to a declaration of war. In mid-Atlantic11, Commodore Theo Kier of the Imperator heard the news by radio and directed his liner home to Hamburg under full steam.
Serbia rejected the ultimatum cannily, by accepting all its demands except the one for a participatory investigation. This committed Austria-Hungary to a declaration of war on the reprehensible, not to say illegal ground that it had been denied permission to infringe the rights of a sovereign nation. Germany was challenged to court the same obloquy, if it made good on its promise to support Austrian aggression.
On Saturday, 25 July, Tsar Nicholas II waited for Serbia to mobilize in its own defense. Then, reacting much more quickly than the Kaiser had expected, he ordered a partial mobilization of the Russian army. He knew that if he made it total, he would doom his own dynasty. A force consisting largely of discontented peasants was not likely to return, brutalized, from a foreign conflict and remain subservient to Romanoff rule. Nicholas had been threatened with a domestic revolution in 1905, before he allowed Theodore Roosevelt12 to mediate an end to the Russo-Japanese War. But no conciliatory figure was in sight now. Slav honor was Slav honor, and the Teutons had abused it enough.
When Wilhelm II heard the news from St. Petersburg, he said, more in surprise than dismay, “Then I must13 mobilize too.”
One by one, like electrical systems activated from a central switchboard, the powers compelled to respond to a crisis in the Balkans began to generate heat. Serbia mobilized even before Austria-Hungary did. In London, Sir Edward Grey warned of a “European war à quatre”—a four-way conflict with Russia, Germany, and France being drawn into Austria’s provincial problem. He begged his counterpart on the Wilhelmstrasse, Count Gottlieb von Jagow, to push for a mediatory conference between the first three nations and his own. Although it was plain from his tone that Britain would not stand idly by if France was menaced, Jagow’s reply was evasive.
At 11:10 A.M.14 on 28 July, Austria declared war on Serbia. The British ambassador in Vienna reported that its citizens were “wild with joy” at the announcement. Some even got an erotic charge out of it. “All my libido is given to Austria-Hungary,” Sigmund Freud wrote. Even the aged Franz Joseph approved the notion of a Blitzkrieg in the Balkans. He had no delicacy about shedding blood, having managed in the course of a long hunting career to kill more than fifty thousand animals.
Wilhelm II, however15, felt a sudden qualm. He belatedly read the text of Serbia’s reply to the ultimatum of four days before, and thought it satisfactory. “It contains the announcement orbi et urbi* of a capitulation of the most humiliating kind, and with it every reason for war is removed.” Surely, he suggested to Jagow, Vienna’s few remaining grievances could be settled by negotiation. But Franz Joseph had already signed an instrument of war, and Germany had promised to support it “through thick and thin.” The Kaiser’s inner circle of Prussian ministers were willing to temporize only so long as it took Russia to mobilize fully, so that St. Petersburg, not Berlin, would be seen as responsible for the spread of hostilities.
France was already in a state of high alarm. Everything that Clemenceau and other Germanophobes had warned about the threat of another Franco-Prussian war seemed to be coming true. To Edith Wharton16 in Paris, “everything seemed strange, ominous and unreal, like the yellow glare which precedes a storm.” She felt as if she had died, and woken up in a world she no longer knew.
The European republic had more than three million men under arms or on reserve, and had recently extended its period of national service from two years to three. French military commanders were confident of the impregnability of its defenses along the Rhine, but less so of Belgium’s ability to withstand a German sweep westward across Flanders. That might come quickly, as a rearguard reinforcement by General Falkenhayn, before the slow Russian juggernaut began to crowd the eastern fringe of Prussia.
On 29 July17 the general’s soul mate in Vienna, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, ordered Austrian cannons to start bombarding Belgrade. The first shell across the Danube landed before dawn, and the ones that followed soon became too numerous to count. Nobody knew how many million more would be fired before the last fell, and in what soil of what nation. The idea of a world war18, hitherto untenable by military theorists, no longer seemed like fantasy. Conrad exulted, having called for the destruction of Serbia dozens of times in his career. At the same time, he was fatalistic about the long-term consequences. “It will be a hopeless war.… Nevertheless, it must be waged, since an old monarchy and a glorious army must not perish without glory.”
Next morning, The Washington Post encapsulated the situation for Americans:
RUSSIA READY19 TO TAKE UP ARMS FOR SERBIA;
TSAR SENDS 1,280,000 MEN TO AUSTRIAN LINE;
FATE OF EUROPE HANGS ON COUNCIL IN BERLIN
“It’s the Slav20 and the German,” Walter Hines Page wrote President Wilson. “Each wants his day, and neither has got beyond the stage of tooth and claw.”
Both the emperors involved—they communicated in English, calling each other “Nicky” and “Willy”—were now aghast at the drift of events. “An ignoble war21 has been declared to [sic] a weak country,” the Tsar wired his cousin. “I beg you in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies from going too far.”
Allies, in this case, meant only Austria-Hungary. Willy was fearfully aware that Nicky had more than one ally22, and formidable ones too: both Britain and France would be obliged to come to Russia’s aid, should Germany enter the war. “I cannot consider Austria’s action against Serbia an ‘ignoble’ war,” he protested, pointing out that the government in Vienna had declared that its interests were honorable, not territorial. “I therefore suggest that it would be quite possible for Russia to remain a spectator of the Austro-Serbian conflict without involving Europe in the most horrible war she has ever witnessed.”
Nicky could only counter-propose that the Austro-Serbian problem be referred to the Hague International Court for arbitration. In the meantime he informed Willy, at 1:20 A.M. on 30 July, that his country had moved to a state of full mobilization.
Belgium began to mobilize too. King Albert suspected that Germany was about to demand permission to march across his borders en route to Paris. Such permission could not be given without a sacrifice of Belgian sovereignty. That almost certainly meant the destruction of his country and his culture. Several great powers, including Great Britain and France, had declared Belgium “an independent and perpetually neutral state” as long ago as 1839, in the Treaty of London. But after seventy-five years of changing interests, the signatories could not necessarily be relied on, if General Falkenhayn decided to invade.
In a midnight meeting with Sir Edward Goschen, the British ambassador in Berlin, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg tried to send peaceable signals to London. He said that Germany regarded, or professed to regard, its military policy toward France as purely defensive. It could not allow that grudge-bearing nation to compromise the Kaiser’s efforts to come to a settlement with Russia. As long as Belgium “did not take sides” in the matter, “her integrity would be respected.” And if Britain, too, “remained neutral … in the event of a victorious war,” Germany would guarantee never to change the boundaries of France.
When Goschen23, remembering the Agadir crisis of 1911, asked if that extended to France’s overseas possessions, Bethmann-Hollweg’s tone changed. He would give no such assurance. What was more, he “could not tell to what operations Germany might be forced by the action of France.”
The combined vagueness24 and truculence of these remarks, counterpointing the Kaiser’s ambiguous diplomacy, appalled the British Foreign Office. Sir Edward Grey noted that a promise to respect territory was not a promise to respect sovereignty. The boundaries of Alsace-Lorraine had not altered since 1870, yet the flag that flew over Zabern was German. Bethmann’s admission that Germany might be “forced” to negate its own guarantees amounted, in British eyes, to a check as blank as the one Wilhelm II had handed the Austrian ambassador at the beginning of July.
The last forty-eight25 hours of July accelerated with a momentum that Bethmann-Hollweg likened to that of a landslide. All the key figures in the crisis became terrified, with the exception of Falkenhayn and his nominal superior, General Helmuth J. L. von Moltke, the German chief of staff. Their Prussian blood pulsed to the potential of mobilizing the world’s mightiest army, and deploying it east and west. The enormous dynamo was there, oiled and superbly tuned, the end product of decades of tinkering and testing. In the manner of a mechanism developed for one overriding purpose, it wanted to whir into action. Falkenhayn dreaded that the Kaiser or Bethmann-Hollweg might yet effect a negotiated settlement with Nicholas II. He raged against “those peace people26 at the palace” holding up German mobilization while hordes of Slavs were standing to arms. Moltke warned the Chancellor that France and Russia together would bring about “the mutual destruction of the civilized states of Europe.” Since the adjectivemutual implied only a pair of states, it was clear that Germans and Austrians felt menaced on all sides by barbarians.
“Germany does not27 want to be the cause of this egregious war,” he wrote, “but … it would violate the deepest bonds of national loyalty—one of the noblest features of the German psyche … if it did not come to its ally’s aid just when this ally’s destiny is hanging in the balance.”
Forces for good28 and forces for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a thousand-fold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over the whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid, the mainspring coils and spreads at a rate constantly quickening, the whole world movement is of constantly accelerating velocity.
Theodore Roosevelt’s address to the University of Berlin had not gone down well in 1910, and was probably forgotten now, even by those in the audience who had managed to stay awake. The Kaiser had been one of the few who listened to every word, but his hummingbird mind never dwelt on any subject for long. If it had, he might have understood that Roosevelt—an objective American who had just toured nation after European nation—was addressing a particular warning to the German people through him: The machinery is so highly geared, the tension and strain are so great, the effort and the output have alike so increased, that there is cause to dread the ruin that would come from any great accident, from any breakdown, and also the ruin that may come from the mere wearing out of the machine itself.
Now, four years later, the great accident was occurring, and Wilhelm was powerless to prevent it. There was a deterministic logic to Europe’s breakdown, as if that ancient seditionist, Fate, had engineered the whole thing. What empire in 1914, with the exception of the Ottoman, was more worn out than that of Austria-Hungary? Now that the heir to the Dual Monarchy had fallen, who could doubt that many more kings and emperors—maybe all of them east of Spain—would fall too, as generals and politicians became the new autocrats29, and socialists and anarchists and separatists fought for postwar spoils? Even George V of England had to be afraid, with his own Irish subjects resorting to terrorism, and a general strike looming at home. France—“the French Socialist Republic”30as Wilhelm contemptuously called it—had no king to kill. But it was as divided between its militaristic right and enragés of the left as it had been on the eve of the Revolution. Italy, nominally one of the Central Powers counterbalancing the Triple Entente, was so demoralized after its recent “Red Week” labor violence (fomented by a young socialist, Benito Mussolini) that it was likely to declare neutrality out of sheer lack of will. Russia, less centripetal than Austria or France, was more prerevolutionary than either. And the Balkans were the Balkans: forever divided between race and race, religion and religion. What Gavrilo Princip had so reflexively started would not stop.
Owen Wister had been vacationing at Triberg, in the heart of the Black Forest, when the news came from Sarajevo. He stood with other people reading the dispatch on the hotel bulletin board. Nobody spoke. The mountain air was hot and still, charged with pine fumes. An old Bavarian had said, “That is the match31 which will set all Europe in flames.”
Now Wister was in Brussels, awaiting the conflagration. A Belgian doctor told him that Germans shared two characteristics impelling them toward war: “the mania of grandeur, complemented by the mania of persecution.” It was the generalization of a frightened lowlander, certain that his country was about to be invaded, and would have been more accurate if the doctor had referred specifically to Prussians. The Zabern affair had dramatically demonstrated how great was the gulf, in Germany, between the Junker military elite and the bourgeois or working-class Volk empowering the Center Party, the National Liberals, the Progressives, and the Social Democrats—Europe’s largest socialist group. Although the parliament of these parties, the Reichstag, was still unable to override the will of the imperial government, it had profoundly shaken it with last December’s vote censuring Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. More recently, for the first time in history32, the popular majority had refused to join in a traditional standing salute to Wilhelm II.
That insult33 had done much to aggravate the two manias the Belgian doctor spoke of. Even Bethmann-Hollweg, a mild and almost peaceable man by Prussian standards, was persuaded to believe, along with his ministers, that a war mobilizing the entire Reich would purify it of the toxins of socialism and communism.
He and Wilhelm hesitated, prevaricated, and panicked throughout the morning of Friday, 31 July, firing off diplomatic telegrams and summoning ambassadors. But at the same time Moltke and Falkenhayn, who cajoled the Kaiser to proclaim a state of “imminent war danger” at noon, became sure that tomorrow would be der Tag—“the Day” of final European reckoning. Ordinary Berliners34 seemed to sense the same thing. They took to the streets as the summer afternoon heated up. A belligerence as sudden as that which had gripped Vienna three days before spread outward from the imperial palace, along Unter den Linden, and down the Wilhelmstrasse, where Bethmann lived and Jagow worked. Traffic had to be rerouted from the center of the city. A crowd estimated at fifty thousand surged and sang “Heil dir im Siegerkranz,” the German victory anthem:
Holy flame35, burn and glow
Unextinguishable
For Fatherland!
To foreigners listening at a distance, the words and tune could have been “God Save the King” or “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Except that British and American crowds did not sing with this kind of bellicosity. It was not a bloodthirsty so much as an exultant sound, a roar of rapture that all Germans now had a cause worth dying for: the protection and enlargement of the Reich. Only a few patriots felt uneasy about joining in the celebration, which was duplicated in other cities. One of them, the industrialist Walter Rathenau, felt that he was witnessing a Totentanz, “a dance of death36, the overture to a doom which I had foreseen would be dark and dreadful.”
* Charles F. Murphy, boss of Tammany Hall.
* Wilhelm II reversed the words of urbi et orbi, a Latin phrase commonly used by the Vatican to address “the city [i.e., Rome] and the world.”