X

DYNAMO

Part III

Powerhouse of the World, 1815–1914

SOUND

LATE in 1888, or early in 1889, at his London home, the ageing poet Robert , Browning was invited to recite some of his poetry for the benefit of Edison’s ‘perfected phonograph’. He started on his most popular verse:

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.
‘God Speed!’ cried the watch, as the gatebolts undrew;
‘Speed!’ echoed the wall to us galloping through.
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
Not a word to each other, we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our pace;
I turned in my saddle, and … and …

After a few lines he faltered, and confessed that he had forgotten the words written more than forty years before. Recovering, he said to applause that he would never forget the day when he had talked for Mr Edison’s famous machine. This impromptu and undated performance gave rise to one of the very earliest sound recordings to have survived.2

In that same year the German, Emile Berliner, demonstrated his Gramophone, which in place of wax cylinders used discs that could be more readily copied. Manufactured by the toy firm Kammerer und Reinhardt of Waltershausen in Thuringia, the gramophone quickly became the basis of sound recordings for the mass market—a central fea-ture.of modern life.3

Recorded sound has transformed the world of music and of musical appreciation. For Mozart’s bicentenary in 1991, for instance, it was possible to mount an exhibition demonstrating the evolution of the quality and variety of performed sound over the last 200 years. Visitors to Vienna’s Neue Burg were equipped with stereo headphones that responded to infra-red signals as they moved from one ‘sound zone’ to another. They could listen to Leopold Mozart’s own violin playing excerpts from his famous Primer published in the year of Wolfgang’s birth, or compare the sounds of valveless horns and trumpets to those of modern brass instruments. They could listen to the extraordinary slow tempo of an early operatic recording from 1900, with Wilhelm Hersch singing the aria ‘0 Isis und Osiris’, or watch as a computerized sonograph screen analysed the harmonic range of Edita Gruberova singing ‘The Queen of the Night’. One could not hear Mozart himself, alas. But the least expert of listeners could tell how tremendously the performance of Mozartian scores has evolved over time. Here was Mozart’s changing ‘sound world’ brought to life.4

Sound recording has revolutionized people’s perception of their past in many ways. Before 1888, the historical record lacked one of its most vital dimensions: it was silent. Documents and artefacts are deaf and dumb. There is no trace of the roar of Napoleon’s battles, the tempo of Beethoven’s concerts, the tone of Cavour’s speeches. After 1888, history received its soundtrack and has been immeasurably enriched.

The National Sound Archive of the British Library, which possesses Browning’s flustered recital, is typical of scores of similar collections that now exist in every European country. The first such ‘phonothèque’ opened in Paris in 1910. Members of the International Association of Sound Archives (IASA) range from the vast collections of national broadcasting corporations to tiny local or private concerns. Apart from music, the main divisions relate to folklore, literature, radio, oral history, and dialectology.5

In Eastern Europe, Count Tolstoy was among the pioneers recorded for posterity. In 1910, the March issue of Talking Machine News commented: ‘An order has been issued prohibiting the sale of Tolstoy’s record in the Czar’s territory. When will the Slavs rise up and do away with such narrow-mindedness?’

No less influential than Nietzsche was the bowdlerized version of his philosophy peddled by his sister. Elizabeth Nietzsche-Foerster (1846–1935), who led a party of ‘Aryan’ settlers to the colony of Nueva Germania in Paraguay in 1886, nursed her dying brother and appropriated his ideas. She befriended both Wagner and Mussolini, idolized the Nazis, and linked the name of Nietzsche with racism and antisemitism. A tearful Fiihrer would attend her funeral.59

From the sociological point of view, Nietzsche’s views may be seen as an intellectual’s revulsion against the rise of mass literacy, and of mass culture in general. They were espoused by an international coterie of artists and writers, which wished to strengthen the barriers between so-called ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture’, and hence to preserve the role of the self-appointed aristocracy of ideas. In this, they formed a suitable partner for modernism in the arts, one of whose chief attractions lay in the fact that it was unintelligible to the person in the street. ‘Mass culture generated Nietzsche in opposition to itself,’ writes a recent critic, ‘as its antagonist. The immense popularity of his ideas among early twentieth-century intellectuals suggests the panic that the threat of the masses aroused.’

In retrospect, it is the virulence with which Nietzsche and his admirers poured contempt on ‘the masses’ that appears most shocking. ‘Many, too many, are born,’ spake Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, ‘and they hang on their branches much too long.’ In The Will to Power, Nietzsche called for ‘a declaration of war by higher men on the masses … The great majority of men have no right to existence.’ In a private letter written in 1908, D. H. Lawrence, who had just discovered Nietzsche in Croydon Public Library, actually imagined a gas chamber for the painless disposal of superfluous people:

FOLLY

NIETZSCHE once complained that historians never write about the things which make history really interesting—anger, passion, ignorance, and folly. He can only have been referring to the German School. In Poland, for example, there has been a long tradition of analysing the past in terms of vices and virtues. Bochenski’s classic work, The History of Stupidity in Poland, was published in 1842.1 In 1985 the dissident historian Adam Michnik wrote his account of Polish resistance to Communism in terms of The History of Honour.2

Nowadays everyone has learned that the study of ‘Mentalities’ is central to the historian’s trade. An American historian has demonstrated that Folly has marched through European history from beginning to end. The Trojans admitted the Wooden Horse; the Renaissance popes provoked the Protestant secession; the British government drove the American colonists to rebel…3 Yet everyone can learn from mistakes. The old Polish proverb says Polak mądry po szkodzie (a Pole is wise when the damage is done). Blake said something similar in his Proverbs of Hell: ‘If every fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.’ Real folly consists of making the same mistake twice. One could write European history in those terms as well, [ANNALES]

If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace with a military band playing softly, and a cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the Hallelujah Chorus.61

This gem, thirty-three years before Auschwitz, came out of Edwardian England. So, too, did the deeper thoughts of H. G. Wells (1866–1946), seer, socialist, author of The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898), and one of the most popular and prolific writers of the age. In hisAnticipations (1902), he showed himself an enthusiastic advocate of eugenics, the science of improved human breeding which demanded the elimination of the weak, the inferior, and the undesirable. ‘And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races’, he asked, ‘the black… the yellow men … the alleged termite of the civilised world, the lew?’

The important point to remember, of course, is that ‘the masses’, as reviled by their detractors, did not and do not exist. ‘Crowds can be seen; but the mass—the sum of all possible crowds, [is] the crowd in its metaphysical aspect … a metaphor … [which] turns other people into a conglomerate … [and] denies them the individuality which we ascribe to ourselves and to people we know.’

In this same era, the challenge of Marxism spawned intellectual debates which far transgressed the narrow bounds of politics. For example, early readings in historical materialism provided the spur for the ‘Philosophy of Spirit’ developed by the Neapolitan writer Benedetto Croce (1866–1952). Croce’s work in Aesthetics (1902), in Logic (1905), and in The Theory of Historiography (1917) was accompanied by historical studies of Naples, of modern Europe, and of contemporary Italy. Rejecting both metaphysics and religion, he stressed the role of human intuition and the importance of history as the study of evolving spirit. His journal Critica, founded in 1903, gave a platform for his ideas for half a century. Later in life, Croce was to become the intellectual leader of opposition to Italian fascism.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), an Austrian physician, was founder of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. His work exercised a profound influence not only on the nascent medical sciences of psychology and psychiatry, but on all branches of the humanities concerned with the workings of mind and personality. Starting from hypnosis, he explored the unconscious processes whereby the human mind defends itself against external and internal pressures. In particular, he revealed the role of sexuality in the life of the unconscious and of repression in the formation of neuroses. The publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) brought in many followers who were soon to form the International Psychoanalytical Association. Dissension ensued, however, especially when one of Freud’s early associates, Carl Jung (1875–1961), launched the concept of‘collective psychoanalysis’ in The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), together with the distinction between introvert and extrovert personalities. In Civilisation and its Discontents (1930) Freud argued that the repression of desire required by life in developed societies made happiness virtually impossible. He was driven by the rise of the Nazis to flee to England in 1938. By that time psychoanalysis had many strands and many critics; but it had established a new, uneasy dimension in people’s perception of themselves: ‘The Ego is not the master in its own house.’

Decadence, as an artistic movement, can be regarded as an outgrowth of late Romanticism. It was born of the desire to explore the most extreme experiences of human sensuality. In the process, despite endless scandals, it furnished some of the most creative masterpieces of European culture. Its links with Romantic precursors can be traced through Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), who had translated both De Quincey and Poe into French. Baudelaire’s collection Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) was later seen as the manifesto of poetical symbolism, a style seeking to find hidden ‘correspondences’ of order and beauty beneath the ugly surface of reality:

La Nature est un temple oú de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui le regardent avec des regards familiers.

(Nature is a temple where living columns I now and then release confused words; I There Man passes amongst forests of symbols I which watch him with familiar glances.)

In his ‘Invitation to the Voyage’, he sets out for an imaginary paradise, ‘where everything is order and beauty, delectation, calm and bliss’—Là, tout n’est aurorare et beauté, I Luxe, calme et volupté. Baudelaire’s successors, especially Paul Verlaine (1844–96) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) achieved poetical effects which were the linguistic counterparts of the images of the Impressionist painters, whom they were among the first to admire:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons

De l’automne

Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur

Monotone.

(The long sobbings I Of the violins I Of autumn I Wound my heart I With their languorous I Monotony.)

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles

(Black A, white E, red I, Green U, blue O—vowels)

The Decadents paid dearly for their defiance. Verlaine expressed the view that ‘decadence implies … the most sophisticated thoughts of extreme civilization’. But few of his contemporaries agreed. Baudelaire was heavily fined and humiliated for the ‘offence to public morals’ supposedly contained in his poems. Verlaine was imprisoned, having eloped with Rimbaud and shot him during a quarrel. In 1893 a German writer in Paris decried the drugs, the homosexuality, the pornography, the hysteria, and ‘the end of an established order that has satisfied logic and fettered depravity for thousands of years’. ‘The prevalent feeling’, wrote Max Nordau, ‘is that of imminent perdition and extinction.’ In England, Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854–1900), author of several brilliant comic dramas, notably The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), spent two bitter years in Reading Gaol for homosexual offences. Much of the work of his collaborator, the erotic illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), was unpunishable, as was that of Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909), poet, critic, and Old Etonian flagellant. The mood of these aesthetes was totally at odds with the preoccupations of most sections of society, where religious observance, social betterment, and temperance were at their height, [BAMBINI] [TOUR]

Modern painting broke forever with the representational art which had prevailed since the Renaissance, and which photography had now rendered obsolete. The moment of departure came in 1863, when édouard Manet (1832–83) in a fit of exhibitionism exhibited Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe at the ‘Salon des Refuses’ in Paris. From then on a dazzling succession of labels had to be invented to keep track of the trends and groupings which were incessantly experimenting with genre, technique, colour, and form. The original Impressionists, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Cezanne, and Degas, so named after Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1874), were followed by the Pointillists (1884) led by Seurat, the Neo-impressionists (1885), the Nabis (1888) of Serusier and Bonnard, the Synthetists (1888) inspired by Gauguin, and the Expressionists (1905) pioneered by Ensor, Van Gogh, and the German Briicke Group. After them came the Orphists, the Fauves (1905), headed by Matisse, Dufy, and Vlaminck, the Cubists (1908) of Braque and Picasso, the Futurists, the Black Cat and the Blue Rider Group (1912). By 1910 or 1911, in the work of Vassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), a Russian settled in Germany, painting approached the stage of pure abstractionism, [IMPRESSION]

BAMBINI

ON 6 January 1907 a one-room nursery school opened its doors in Rome’s slum suburb of San Lorenzo. It was equipped with child-size furniture, with a cupboard full of puzzles and learning games, and with no qualified teacher. It was provided for the children of working parents who would otherwise abandon them on the streets during the daytime. It was called La Casa dei Bambini, ‘the Children’s House’.

The founder of the school, Dr Maria Montessori (1870–1952), was a woman well in advance of her time. She was a feminist who advocated equal pay for equal work, a qualified doctor, and director of an institute for retarded infants. Secretly, she was also the mother of an illegitimate boy, Mario Montessori, who was later to run the Association Montessori Internationale in Amsterdam.

The Montessori Method, published in 1910, preached the principles of child-centred education. Children want to learn. Children can teach themselves. Children have five serses and must explore them all. Children must have the freedom to choose what to learn and when. All they need is a place free from intimidation, proper equipment, and encouragement. These ideas were anathema to most of the educators of the day, who favoured ‘chalk and talk’, religious instruction, ferocious discipline, and a rigid syllabus and timetable. ‘Education is not acquired by listening to words,’ Dr Montessori told them, ‘but by experiences in the environment.’

Some of Montessori’s ideas can still raise a frown. She believed that children hate sweets, and love silence. She insisted that writing should precede reading. But her central conviction, that the needs of the child are paramount, became the cornerstone of modern, progressive pedagogics. Hundreds of her schools were opened across Europe, and in the USA. In Fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany they were closed down.

In many ways, Montessori followed in the steps of two earlier pioneers— the Swiss J. H. Pestalozzi (1746–1827) and the Thuringian Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852). Froebel’s first Kindergarten or ‘Children’s Garden’, set up at Burgdorf near Berne in 1837, was the true ancestor of the Casa dei Bambini. Montessori’s ideas on child psychology were in turn developed by the Swiss educationalist, Jean Piaget (1896–1980).

TOUR

AT 2.15 pm on 1 July 1903, some sixty cyclists set off from a starting-line near the café of Réveil-Matin in the Parisian suburb of Montgéron. They were heading for Lyons, over 467 km of ill-made roads, on the first of six designated stages of the first Tour de France. They were expected to ride night and day. Nineteen days later, Maurice Garin was acclaimed the winner when he entered the Pare des Princes, having covered a total of 2,430 km at an average road speed of 26.5 km per hour. He was riding a machine with dropped handlebars, and wore knee-length stockings, plus-fours, a polo-neck sweater, and a flat cap with earflaps. His prize was 6,125 Fr.F.—the equivalent of £242. With the exception of the war years, the race has been contested every July ever since.1

Europe’s most protracted and most popular sporting event arose from the conjunction of several modern phenomena—the concept of leisure and recreation; the organization of mass (male) sport; targeted technology—in this case cable brakes, cycle gears, and rubber tyres; and the competition of mass-circulation newspapers.

The immediate origins lay in the rivalry of two Parisian weeklies, L’Auto (‘The Motor Car’) and Le Velo (‘The Bicycle’). The publisher of L’Auto, Henri Desgrange, who was trying to break into the cycling market, had been successfully sued for changing his paper’s name io L’Auto-Vélo. The Tour was his response. He never looked back. He saw the circulation of L’Auto multiply dramatically whilst Le Velo dwindled into obscurity. He remained patron and sponsor of the Tour until his retirement in 1936.

The Tour took final form over a period of years. The route, in particular, varied. For five years, from 1906, it was extended to include Alsace; but permission was withdrawn by the German government when roadside crowds began singing the Marseillaise. In the mountains, it was directed over the Col de Tourmalet (2,122 m) in the Pyrenees, and the terrifying Col du Galibier (3,242 m) in Savoy, where contestants had to carry their machines over unmade tracks. From a maximum length over 5,000 km, it settled down in the 1930s to a more modest length c.3,700 km, undertaken in 30 daily stages. The idea of a bright-coloured jersey to identify the race leader was adopted in July 1913, when Desgrange dashed into a wayside store and bought the first maillot jaune.

After the First World War, the Tour assumed international proportions. Belgian, Italian, and Spanish riders frequently gained the laurels. Champions such as Eddie Merckx or Jacques Anquetil had a following as great as any sports stars. In July 1991, watched by 22 million spectators, the 79th Tour was won by the Basque from Spain, Miguel Indurain, with an average speed of 39.504 km/h.2 In 1994, the 82nd Tour saw Indurain winning for an unprecedented fourth time in a row over a course which took the riders across the Channel to England. And Indurain would live to ride again.

In architecture and design, the Continent-wide wave of Art Nouveau ‘seceded’ from prevailing standards and practices. The earliest example was Victor Horta’s Tassel House (1893) in Brussels. But its monuments could be found at every point between the Glasgow School of Art (1898) of C. R. Mackintosh, the factories of Peter Behrens in Germany, and a string of Austro-Hungarian railway stations from Carlsbad to Czernowitz. The Secessionshaus (1898) in Vienna was built by J. Olbrich in what was called the Jugendstil for exhibiting the works of breakaway artists. It bears the inscription: ‘DER ZEIT IHRE KUNST: I DER KUNST IHRE FREIHEIT’ (Art for its time; freedom for Art).

In music, Debussy and Ravel explored musical impressionism. Then, with Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Webern, the avant-garde abandoned the basic harmonies and rhythms which had reigned since the Middle Ages, [TONE]

In literature, the Decadents’ defiance of social and sexual mores was overtaken by intellectual radicalism of a still more profound order. First the Frenchman Marcel Proust (1871–1922) and the Irishman James Joyce (1882–1941), then Franz Kafka (1883–1924), a German Jew from Prague, overturned accepted views concerning the reality of the world, and the means whereby human beings perceive it. They were the literary partners of Freud and Einstein, [COMBRAY]

The year 1913 saw the appearance of the first volume of Proust’s à la recherche du temps perdu and of Kafka’s first stories. The première of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps caused a riot in Paris. One publisher in Dublin tore up Joyce’s manuscripts for fear of libel, whilst others took their courage in their hands with D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Apollinaire’s Alcools. The first light of day fell on Max Ernst’s Landscape (Town and Animals) and on Kokoshka’s Self-portrait. Most European artistic ventures, like most of European society, still clung to tried and traditional forms; but in the world of Modernism, the fashion was to tear apart the very foundations of conventional culture.

International relations had remained remarkably stable throughout the nineteenth century. Europe continued to be dominated by the five Great Powers that had organized the Congress of Vienna; and no general conflict had occurred between them since 1815. The wars which did break out were limited both in time and scope. There were international police actions, where one of the Powers could intervene to suppress revolutionary outbreaks that could not be controlled locally. Such were repeated French interventions in Spain and in Italy, or Russian interventions in Poland and Hungary. There were regional conflicts, notably in Italy, in Germany, and in the Balkans. There were various colonial wars overseas. But there was nothing to match the scale of the Napoleonic Wars before 1815 or the Great War which began in 1914. Europe’s energies were for long directed either inwards, to the tasks of internal change, or outwards to fresh imperialist conquests across the globe. Only two intractable problems possessed the capacity to upset the international order. One of them was the accelerating rivalry between France and Germany. The other was the so-called ‘Eastern Question’.

IMPRESSION

IN the 1860s, Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir liked to paint together. I They wanted to see how each would capture a different effect from the same scene, and to compare their results. One of their favourite haunts was the suburban riverside of Bougival, beyond St Cloud, near Paris.

Monet’s La Seine à Bougival dates from 1869 (see Plate 67). He appears at first to have chosen the mundane, not to say banal, scene of people strolling over a bridge in the evening sunlight. Yet he was trying to achieve an entirely novel effect: he was not painting the world as he thought it was or ought to be, i.e. realistically or idealistically; he was painting the impression which the world made on him. Another canvas of his, Impression: Lever du soleil (1874), was to lend its name to a movement which was deliberately and unashamedly subjective. Monet paid a high price for pursuing his own stubborn course. For years he sold no pictures. To his contemporaries his work seemed either worthless or outrageous. Once, when he left Paris to visit his new-born son, creditors seized the contents of his studio and sold them off for a pittance. He attempted suicide.1

The Impressionists were interested in three matters. First, they sought to explore the foibles of the human eye which contrives to see certain things and not to see others. For this reason, they were intent on constructing an imprecise or selective image. Monet’s deliberately blurred brush strokes at Bougival produced blotchy waves, lop-sided windows, fuzzy leaves, and messy clouds.

Secondly, they were fascinated by the wonderful workings of light. Monet had served for a couple of years with the Chasseurs d’Afrique, and had seen the extreme effects of desert light in the Sahara. He would later conduct a series of systematic experiments with light by painting the same subjects over and over again. His twelve studies of the façade of Rouen Cathedral, each one bathed in the different light of a different time of day, did much to convince the public of the method in his madness.

Thirdly, they were delving into the complex variations in the sensibility and receptivity of the artist’s own mind. This was the key to the epoch-making impetus which they gave to modern art.

It is sometimes considered that modern art, and Impressionism in particular, was reacting against the realistic imagery made possible by photography, [PHOTO] In fact, nothing could be more selective and transitory than the image registered by light entering a camera lens for a fraction of a second at a specific exposure and a specific angle. The Impressionists were intensely interested in photography. They often used it in their preparatory studies. Cezanne, for instance, used snapshots both for his landscapes and his self-portraits.2 However, the camera, though selective like the human eye and very responsive to the play of light, has no mind. And it is in the realm of the human mind that modern artists really came into their own. For that reason, they ultimately reached their goal, which, in Cezanne’s words, was to make themselves ‘more famous than the old masters’.

COMBRAY

EUROPE is full of locations redolent of time past. But there is none to equal the village of llliers, near Chartres. For llliers was the place which provided Marcel Proust with his boyhood vacations, and which he was to recreate in his mind as ‘Combray’.

Of all the literary masters, Proust was the supreme timesmith—and hence a writer of special interest to historians. He was convinced that the past never dies, and that it can be recaptured by art from the deepest levels of subconscious memory. Hence, a banal incident such as the crumbling of cake into a cup of tea could trigger the recall of places and events thought lost for ever. More exactly, it could trigger the recall not just of similar banalities in the past but of worlds of emotion and experience with which they were inextricably connected.

For this reason, Proust spent the nineteen years from 1903 to 1922 immured in a fumigated, cork-lined room in Paris, isolated from the world in an attempt to bring the past back to life. And much which he resurrected, together with the myriad thoughts and anxieties of his youth, was to be found at llliers—’la maison de Tante Léonie’, ‘la rue de l’Oiseau-Flèche’, ‘le Pare de Tansonville’, ‘le côté de chez Swann’:

These are not at all the sort of places where a great man was born, or where he died, and which one visits to pay him homage. These are the places which he admired, which he asked to provide him with thought, and which still stand guard over that thought…1

Generally speaking, the spirit of the past is best preserved in small intimate museums. One can still feel the shade of Charles Dickens in his house on Doughty St, London WC1; one can visit the life of the young Karl in the Marxhaus, preserved by the SPD in face of much adversity at Trier; and one can still imagine oneself stretched out on Freud’s red velvet couch in his house at Bergstrasse 19 in Vienna. But the ultimate pilgrimage in search of lost time can only be directed to that very ordinary village in the Eure-et-Loir, now suitably renamed in Proust’s honour ‘llliers-Combray’.

Franco-German rivalry could be traced to the division of Charlemagne’s Empire; but its modern emanations were rooted in the Revolutionary Wars. Frenchmen remembered the two German powers, Prussia and Austria, as the invaders of 1793 and 1814–15. Prussians and Austrians remembered France as the occupier of 1805–13, against whom their modern existence had been won and defined. For several decades after 1815 a defeated France and a divided Germany were indisposed to brawl. Yet the old animosities seethed under the surface. By 1840 France was once again demanding the frontier of the Rhine, and raising a storm of German protest reflected in the patriotic songs of the day, ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and the ‘Deutschlandlied’. In 1848 France was seen, once again, as the source of Germany’s internal unrest. By the 1860s, when France was launched into the self-confident adventures of the Second Empire and Prussia was asserting itself in Germany, both powers were frightened by the other’s aggressive posture. Bismarck engineered the perfect pretext through the Ems Telegram. As it proved, he engineered the event whose consequences would destroy the balance.

The Franco-German War of 1870–1, the third of Bismarck’s lightning wars, caused an even bigger sensation than Sadová. It was actively sought by the French, who were itching to teach the Prussians a lesson. But they found themselves facing a coalition of all the German states, whose forces were better armed, better organized, and better led. France’s military supremacy, which had lasted since Rocroi in 1643, was annulled in less than two months. The first cannon-shot was ceremoniously fired on 1 August 1870 by the Emperor Napoleon’s son, to cries of ‘à Berlin’. After that, one mighty German thrust surged across the frontier, and encircled the main French army at Metz. Another French army, marching to the relief of Metz with the Emperor at its head, marched straight into a finely laid trap near Sedan. In the immortal words of General Bazaine on the eve of almost certain defeat: ‘Nous sommes dans le pot de chambre, et demain nous serons emmerdés’ (We are in the chamber pot, and tomorrow we shall be covered in it). Surrounded on all sides, and battered at arm’s length by an enemy that had learned to refrain from frontal assaults, the French resisted Krupp’s steel guns for some hours before capitulating. The Emperor was taken prisoner, abdicated, and eventually took refuge in England. France fought on for eight months; but with Paris besieged, starving, and crumbling from the Prussian artillery, the government of the Third Republic was forced to sue for a humiliating peace. In May 1871 it submitted, consenting to cede Alsace-Lorraine, to pay huge reparations, and to accept German occupation for two years.

Prussia’s crowning victory had several long-term consequences. It facilitated the declaration of a united German Empire, whose first Emperor, William I (r. 1871–88), King of Prussia, was acclaimed by the princes of Germany assembled at Versailles. It served notice that the new Germany would be second to none in military prowess. In France, it provoked the desperate events of the Paris Commune, and it fuelled the passions of anti-German hatred that were to call ever more insistently for revenge.

The ‘Eastern Question’, as it came to be called, grew from two related and apparently unstoppable processes—the continuing expansion of the Russian Empire and the steady retreat of the Ottomans. It gave rise to the independence of the Balkan nations, to the Crimean War (1854–6), and to a chain of complications which eventually sparked the fatal crisis of 1914. The prospect of Ottoman collapse loomed ever more starkly throughout the century. For the Russians, this was entirely desirable. The re-establishment of Christian power on the Bosporus had formed the ultimate goal of tsarist policy ever since the myth of the Third Rome was formulated. Possession of the Straits would fulfil Russia’s dream of unrestricted access to warm water. As Dostoevsky remarked in 1871, in triumphant expectation: ‘Constantinople will be ours!’ For the other Powers, the demise of the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ held a host of dangers. Britain feared for its lines of communications to India. Austria felt threatened by the emergence of a gaggle of Russian-sponsored states on her south-eastern border. Germany felt threatened by the rise of the only land power whose military capacity might some day overtake her own.

Russia’s compulsive expansion continued at a rate which for the period 1683–1914 has been calculated on average, perhaps conservatively, at 55 square miles per day.70 But it did not always threaten Europe directly. Following the gains of the Napoleonic period, the main thrusts were now directed against what Russians sometimes called the ‘Middle South’ in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and against China and Japan. Europe, however, was not immune from the Bear which constantly probed the limits of tolerance. Russia’s involvement in the Greek War of Independence sounded the alarm bells, and her gains at the Treaty of Adrianople (1829) were restricted to a small corner on the Danube delta. Both in 1831 and 1863, Russian violation of Poland’s nominal independence evoked vigorous protests from Britain and France. But it was not unwelcome to Berlin and Vienna, which had Polish territories of their own to hold down. So nothing was done. Russia’s advance into the Danubian principalities in 1853 provoked an immediate military response from Austria and the onset of the Crimean War (see below). After that, St Petersburg understood that direct annexations in Europe could be costly, and that parts of her empire were vulnerable to attack from adversaries with superior naval power. The decision was taken to withdraw from North America; and in 1867 Alaska was sold off to the USA for a trifling $8 million. Real estate was more easily acquired elsewhere. In 1859, after half a century of brutality and devastation, the conquest of the mountain tribes of the Caucasus was completed, and their Chechen hero, Shamil, captured. In 1860 the Amur and Maritime provinces were acquired from China, in 1864 Turkestan from Persia, in 1875 Sakhalin and the Kuriles from Japan. All these gains would later be denounced by the losers as the fruit of ‘unequal treaties’. In 1900 the Russian occupation of Manchuria provoked conflict and defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5). In 1907 the division of Persia into British and Russian spheres of influence ended several decades of Britain’s fears over Central Asia whilst raising suspicions about Russia’s designs on the Persian Gulf.

The Crimean War (1853–6) took place when Britain and France decided to assist the Porte in efforts to defend the Danube principalities and to resist Russian claims of protection over the Ottomans’ Christian subjects. Austria immediately occupied the principalities, and the Western powers, aided by Sardinia, sent a punitive expedition to the Crimea. Despite nasty trench warfare, cholera, and appalling losses, the Allied siege of Sebastopol ñnally succeeded. The Peace of Paris (1856) neutralized the Black Sea, imposed a joint European protectorate over the Ottoman Christians, and guaranteed the integrity of both the Ottoman Empire and the principalities. [ABKHAZIA]

None the less, the Russians were back in the Balkans within twenty years. On this occasion, the opening was provided by simultaneous revolts in three Ottoman provinces—in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria. Military intervention by Serbia and Montenegro, diplomatic meddling by Austria, and the murder of 136 Turkish officials in Bulgaria elicited a ferocious Ottoman response. In May 1876 over 20,000 peasants were slaughtered in the notorious Bulgarian Horrors. In London, Gladstone raged: ‘Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves.’ In Constantinople, two successive sultans were overthrown. In St Petersburg, the Tsar felt duty-bound to protect the Balkan Christians. Two international conferences were convened to impose conditions on the new Sultan, Abdul Hamid II the Damned (r. 1876–1909), who baffled them all by promises of a parliamentary constitution. In April 1877 Russian armies invaded Ottoman territory on the Danube and in Armenia. Their advance was long delayed by stout Turkish resistance on the Balkan passes; but by January 1878 the Cossacks were threatening the walls of Constantinople. By the Treaty of San Stefano (1878) the Porte was obliged to accept the Tsar’s stiff terms, including the creation of an independent ‘Greater Bulgaria’ of alarming proportions (see Appendix III, p. 1245).

The Congress of Berlin, 13 June-13 July 1878, was convened to satisfy British and Austrian demands for the revision of the San Stefano Treaty and the curtailment of Russian ambitions. It was a grand diplomatic occasion, the last when all the European Powers could meet to settle their differences on equal terms. With Bismarck in the chair as the self-styled ‘honest broker’, it marked united Germany’s supreme status in Europe; and it drew the sting of the war fever, which filled the London music halls:

We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while Britons will be true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople!71

In many respects, however, the Congress exemplified the most cynical aspects of the European power game. None of the Balkan peoples was effectively represented.None was treated with consideration: Bosnia and Herzegovina were handed over to Austrian occupation; Bulgaria was split in two, and excluded from the Aegean; Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania, patronizingly confirmed in their independence, were all refused the pieces of territory which they thought most important. The Powers, in contrast, simply helped themselves: Russia, denied the Straits, took Bessarabia from her Romanian ally; Britain took Cyprus from her Ottoman client; Austria took the Sanjak of Novi Bazar; Disraeli left Berlin claiming ‘Peace with Honour’. Not surprisingly, the Balkan nations were soon seeking their own, often violent solutions. The Powers abandoned the Concert, and sought security in bilateral treaties and alliances. The brakes were removed from the pursuit of national interest at all levels.

Land forces still provided the key to Continental politics. So long as this held true, it was possible to discern that Germany and Russia would be bound to play the preponderant roles in any generalized conflict. Of the five European Powers, three had serious military defects. Britain possessed a mighty navy but no conscript army. France was suffering a catastrophic fall in the birth rate that seriously threatened the supply of conscripts. The Austro-Hungarian army was technically and psychologically dependent on Germany.

The formation of two opposing diplomatic and military blocs took place over three decades. At first, Britain and France were kept apart by colonial rivalry, Britain and Russia by mutual suspicions over central Asia, Russia and France by tsarist-republican animosities. So for a time Bismarck was free to construct a system that would protect Germany from French revenge. In 1879 he forged the Dual Alliance with Austria, in 1881–7 the Dreikaiserbund of Germany, Austria, and Russia, from 1882 the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy, in 1884–7 and 1887–90 the two ‘reinsurance treaties’ with Russia. Yet the logic of Europe’s two most intense political passions—France’s loathing for Germany and Russia’s longing for the Straits—was sure to assert itself. France was bound to seek escape from the web which Bismarck had so brilliantly woven; and Russia was bound to chafe at the check on her Balkan ambitions. Hence, in the years after Bismarck’s dismissal, Russia’s relations with Germany cooled: and the Tsar looked for new partners. In 1893, with French banks already investing heavily in Russian concerns, the Franco-Russian Alliance was signed between Paris and St Petersburg. At a stroke, France escaped from isolation, regained her confidence, and threatened Germany from both sides. In 1904, France settled her differences with Britain, and entered the Entente Cordiale. In 1907, after the Anglo-Russian agreement over Persia, the way was finally opened for the Triple Entente of France, Britain, and Russia.

At the time, it may have seemed that Europe’s diplomatic kaleidoscope had thrown up just another temporary constellation. Both the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente were essentially defensive in nature; and there were still several loose ends. Both Britain and Germany, for example, were still hoping to reach an accommodation, despite their differences. In fact, with the West and East combining against the Centre, the Powers had manoeuvred themselves into a strategic configuration whose stresses were to be played out for the rest of the twentieth century. Almost without noticing, Europe had divided itself into two massive armed camps; and there was no ‘honest broker’ left. (See Appendix III, p. 1312)

Developments in military technology remained sluggish through much of the century, though important organizational and logistical changes took place. Railways revolutionized the existing methods of transport, mobilization, and supply. The work of the General Staffs was redesigned on the Prussian model in order to deal with the permanent flow of conscripts. But apart from their rifled percussion muskets, the armies of the Crimea were much like those of Austerlitz. The effect of rifled barrels was felt only gradually, first in the Prussian Dreyse needle gun of 1866, then in the superior French chassepot rifle and the Krupp breech-loading cannon of 1870. In naval design, steam-driven and armour-plated warships came into vogue. Yet the thorough exploitation of modern machines and modern chemicals had to await the advent in the 1880s of high explosives, the machine-gun, and long-range artillery, [NOBEL]

Despite the absence of major engagements after 1871, it is not true to say that military theorists failed to consider the impact of the new weapons. One writer, the Polish railway magnate Jan Bloch, argued in La Guerre future (1898) that offensive war had ceased to be a viable proposition. The reaction of most generals was to demand the supply of more troops.72 As the numbers multiplied, and battlefield prognosis promised stalemate, the realization dawned that mobilization procedures might provide the key to victory. General mobilization was judged more threatening than mere declarations of war. Yet there were few signs of urgency. In the heyday of imperialism, Europe’s armies were much more likely to be facing spear-carrying tribesmen than each other.

None the less, a growing awareness of the potential for large-scale conflict gave rise to the science of geopolitics. The tentacles of imperial power circled a globe that was now criss-crossed by world-wide communications. It was only to be expected that military and political strategists should begin to think in global terms. In his seminal lecture ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ (1904), Halford Mackinder (1861–1947), Oxford’s first Professor of Geography, remarked that there was no more virgin territory into which the empires could expand. So competition over existing resources was bound to intensify. The progress of that competition would be constrained both by the distribution of population and by the configuration of the continents. In a sensational map entitled ‘The Natural Seats of Power’, he marked out Eurasian Russia as the location of the world’s supreme natural fortress. This ‘heartland’ was ringed by an ‘inner crescent’ of semi-continental powers from Britain to China, and by an oceanic ‘outer crescent’ linking the Americas with Africa, Australasia, and Japan. In the first instance, his aim was to warn the Western powers against a possible conjunction of Russia with Germany. At a later stage, when advocating the creation of a belt of strong new states to keep Russia and Germany apart, he coined the famous formula:

Who rules eastern Europe, commands the Heartland;
Who rules the Heartland, commands the World-island;
Who rules the World-Island, commands the World.73

NOBEL

IT is a supreme irony that the world’s most prestigious prizes for achieve-I ment in physics, chemistry, literature, medicine, and, above all, peace should have been funded from the profits of armaments. Alfred Bemhard Nobel (1833–96) was a Swede who grew up in St Petersburg, where his father had founded a torpedo works. Trained as a chemist, he returned to Sweden to work on the improvement of explosives. After first producing nitroglycerine, he then invented dynamite (1867), gelignite (1876), and bal-listite (1889), the precursor of cordite gunpowder. The family firm grew immensely rich from their manufacture of explosives and from their development of the Baku oilfields. Always a man of pacifist views, Nobel founded the five prizes which bear his name by testamentary bequest. In the first nine decades of the Nobel Peace Prize, and presumably because Europe had urgent need for peacemakers, the great majority of prizewinners were Europeans:

1901	J.-H. Durant	1930	Archbishop Nathan
	Frédéric Passy		Söderblom
1902	Élie Ducommun	1933	Carl von Ossetzky
	Charles-Albert Gobat	1937	Sir Edgar Cecil
1903	William Randall Cremer		—
1905	Bertha von Suttner	1946	Emily Balch
1907	Ernesto Moneta		J. R. Mott
1908	K. P. Arnoldson	1949	Lord Boyd Orr
	Fredrik Bajer	1951	Léon Jouhaux
1909	Auguste Beernaert	1952	Albert Schweitzer
	Baron P. d’Estoumelles	1958	Fr. Dominique Pire
1911	Tobias Asser	1959	Philip Noel-Baker
	A. H. Fried	1961	Dag Hammarskjóld
1913	Henri L. Fontaine	1962	Linus-Carl Pauling (U.S.A.)
	—	1968	René-Samuel Cassin
1920	L.-V. Bourgeois	1971	Willy Brandt
1921	Karl Branting	1974	Sean Macbride
	Christian Lange	1976	Elizabeth Williams
1922	Fridtjof Nansen		Mairead Corrigan
1925	J. Austen Chamberlain	1979	Mother Teresa
1926	Aristide Briand	1982	Alva Myrdal
	Gustav Streseman	1983	Lech Wałęsa
1927	F. E. Buisson	1986	Elie Wiesel
	Ludwig Ouidde	1990	Mikhail Gorbachev

Of all the recipients, only two, both Germans, were made to suffer for their support of peace. Ludwig Ouidde (1858–1941) had been jailed for opposing German rearmament. Carl von Ossetzky (1889–1939), leader of the German peace movement, died in a Nazi concentration camp.

Mackinder’s ideas were destined to be taken very seriously in Germany, as they were, in the subsequent era of air power, in the USA.

In the first dozen years of the twentieth century, the long European peace still held. But fears began to be expressed about its fragility. Franco-German rivalry, recurrent Balkan crises, antagonistic diplomatic blocks, imperialist frictions, and the naval arms race all combined to raise the temperature of international relations. One alarm sounded in Bosnia in 1908, another at Agadir in 1911. Whilst all the Powers professed a desire for continued peace, all were preparing for war. [EULENBERG]

The Bosnian crisis indicated where Europe’s most likely flash-point lay. Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia in 1908 without a shred of legal justification, having occupied and administered the country for the previous thirty years by international mandate. But Kaiser Wilhelm declared that he would fight at Austria’s side ‘like a knight in shining armour’; and the Powers felt unable to intervene. Austria’s démarche robbed Belgrade of its hopes of a Greater Serbia, and served notice on Russia about further meddling. It was also a factor in the revolt of the ‘Young Turks’ who in 1908–9 took over the Ottoman government, throwing themselves into a programme of nationalism and modernization. Above all, it convinced the Balkan states that their differences could only be settled among themselves and by force.

In 1912–13 three regional wars were fought in the Balkans. In May 1912 Italy attacked the Ottoman Empire, seizing Rhodes, Tripoli, and Cyrenaica. In October 1912, with the Porte diverted by a rising in Albania, the Balkan League of Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece took the offensive against the Ottomans in Macedonia. In June 1913 Bulgaria attacked Serbia to start the Balkan War of Partition. On each occasion, international conferences were held and treaties were signed. Albania emerged as a sovereign state, but Macedonia did not. Austrian gambling paid off. Germany’s influence in Turkey greatly increased. Russian ambitions remained unsatisfied. The Eastern Question stayed unresolved (see Appendix III, p. 1309). [MAKEDON] [SHQIPERIA]

In a climate of growing unease, serious thought was given to the task of minimizing international conflict. In the absence of government leadership, a number of private initiatives gave rise to agencies such as the Institute of International Law (1873), the Inter-parliamentary Union (1887), and the Nobel Committee. After a long period of gestation which began in 1843, when the first Peace Congress had been held in London, an International Peace Bureau began to operate regularly from 1891 out of Berne in Switzerland, co-ordinating national branches and organizing meetings. Pacifist opinions were given publicity from various quarters including the Swiss jurist J. K. Bluntschli (1808–81), the German Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914), the Austrian A. H. Fried (1864–1921), the French socialist Jean Jaurès, and the English economist Norman Angelí (1873–1967). Angeli’s The Great Illusion (1910) argued that the economic interest of nations had rendered war redundant, [NOBEL]

Yet the most successful appeal for action came from the Tsar of Russia. Following his intervention, two massive peace conferences assembled at The Hague in 1899 and 1907 to discuss disarmament, the arbitration of international disputes, and the rules of land warfare. Practical results were not lacking. The International Court of Justice came into being in 1900, and the Hague Convention in 1907. A maritime conference assembled in London in 1908–9.

But pacifism enjoyed general support neither among the citizens nor the politicians of the leading states. The ethos of unrestrained state power was deeply rooted. As Field Marshal von Moltke had written in response to Bluntschli:

Perpetual peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream. War is part of God’s order. Without war, the world would stagnate and lose itself in materialism. In it, Man’s most noble virtues are displayed—courage and self-denial, devotion to duty, willingness to sacrifice oneself, and to risk life itself.74

Similar sentiments were voiced in France and Britain. Jaurès would be murdered on 31 July 1914 on the grounds that pacifism was treason.

At the same time, the generals were coming to recognize that the destructive-ness of a future war would far exceed anything previously known, and that the Powers would embark on it at their peril. In his last address to the Reichstag in May 1890, the ageing Moltke issued a grave warning:

If this war were to break out, no one could foresee how long it would last nor how it would end … Gentlemen, it could be a Seven Years’ War; it could be a Thirty Years’ War; and woe to the man who … first throws the match into the powder keg.75

As a result, the military staffs of Europe were torn between the prevailing spirit of militarism and the growing counsels of prudence. They then followed the most dangerous of all courses. They accelerated their preparations for war, assembling huge arsenals and training vast conscript armies, whilst carefully avoiding conflict for decade after decade. The cauldron of rivalries, fears, and hatreds steadily raised an explosive head of steam.

The cauldron’s lid was eventually blown off by another assassination, a month before that of Jaurès. On 28 June 1914 the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Francis-Ferdinand of Austria-Este, was paying an official visit to the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. Accompanied by his morganatic Czech wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, he had disregarded all warnings, having deliberately timed his visit to coincide with the Serbian National Festival of Vidovdan (St Vitus’ Day), the anniversary of the Battle of Kossovo (See Chapter VI). In Serbian eyes, it was a calculated insult. In consequence, the crowds which lined the streets of Sarajevo concealed a group of young assassins sent by one of the secret Serb societies opposing Habsburg rule, the Black Hand.

In the morning, the Archduke’s car, a Graf und Stift (1910) 28 h.p., took an unexpected route; and the visitors arrived safely for lunch at the city hall, where Sophie received a delegation of Muslim ladies. A bomb had been thrown, but the explosion caused no injuries and a man was arrested. After lunch, however, the Archduke’s driver took a wrong turning. In his efforts to change direction, he reversed the open vehicle and its passengers right up to a spot beside another conspirator, a 19-year-old consumptive student, Gavrilo Princip. Fired at point-blank range, the bullets of Princip’s revolver mortally wounded the imperial couple. Francis-Ferdinand murmured ‘Sopherl, Sopherl! Sterbe nicht! Bleibe am Leben fur unsere Kinder!’ (Sophie dear, don’t die! Stay alive for our children!) But Sophie was dead. And her husband died within the hour. They would be buried at the dead of night in the chapel of their house at Arstetten on the Danube. Their car, and their blood-soaked clothing, would be preserved at the Army Museum in Vienna.76 [KONOPIПTE]

EULENBERG

ON 23 October 1907 the case of Moltke v. Harden opened in a Berlin court. It was the first of six highly publicized trials known collectively as ‘the Eulenburg Affair’. It exposed a widespread homosexual network in the Kaiser’s immediate entourage.

In Germany, as elsewhere, male sodomy was illegal. Paragraph 175 of the penal code punished ‘unnatural vice’ between men with 1–5 years’ imprisonment. General Kuno von Moltke had sued the editor of the journal, Die Zukunft (The Future), Maximilian Harden, for publishing material which ridiculed two high-ranking courtiers named only as ‘Sweetie’ and ‘the Harpist’. Moltke claimed that he and his friend, Philip, Prince von Eulenburg, had been libelled. Lurid details were aired in open court, especially by Eulenburg’s ex-wife and by a soldier called Bollhardt. But the key evidence came from Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, a professional sexologist. Latent homosexuality, he explained, was not in itself illegal, though the practice of sodomy was. The court accepted Harden’s defence that the plaintiff’s homosexuality was manifest, but that no breach of Paragraph 175 had been implied.1

The political implications were grave. Moltke was the military commandant of Berlin. Eulenburg, sometime ambassador to Vienna, was especially close to the Kaiser and openly aspired to the Chancellorship. Both Harden and Hirschfeld held liberal views, and opposed the Kaiser’s foreign policy. Both were campaigning for the repeal of Paragraph 175, and both were Jews. The imperial establishment felt itself to be under attack from treasonable elements.

In later rounds of the scandal Chancellor von Bulow sued another liberal editor, Adolf Brand; the chief of the Kaiser’s military secretariat, Count von Huelsen-Haeseler, dropped dead in the Kaiser’s presence dressed in a tutu in the middle of a drag act; and the Moltke/Harden case was twice retried. The Potsdam garrison was shaken by a series of courts martial for sodomy, and by a rash of associated suicides. (The tight white breeches and thigh-length boots of the cuirassiers had been singled out in court as specially provocative.) Harden’s legal costs were secretly refunded by the imperial chancellery. Eulenburg was ruined. Despite a lifetime of licence, he protested his innocence. But he was condemned on charges of perjury, and only avoided arrest through a stream of feigned illnesses and legal postponements that continued to 1918.

Germany was not alone in its experience of salacious scandals with political overtones. In that same era, Britain was rocked both by the trial of Oscar Wilde and by the tragedy of Sir Roger Casement, who was executed for treason.2 In the 1920s, however, when Germany was humiliated by national defeat, the scars of the earlier sexual scandals ran deep. The circle of homosexuality-treason-Jewry was further implanted in the popular mind by a chain of associations which started with the murder of the finance minister, Walter Rathenau, a homosexual Jew, in 1922. In his memoirs, the Kaiser himself linked the catastrophe of the Great War to a conspiracy of ‘international Jewry’ first revealed by Harden’s accusations. Historians have linked the events of 1907–9 to the Kaiser’s increasing reliance on his generals, and to their policy of pre-emptive attack.3

The Nazi Party, whose propaganda fed on such matters, was peculiarly hostile to homosexuals. Dr Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology was demolished by a Nazi mob as early as May 1933. The Gestapo decimated Berlin’s large homosexual community through a series of raids immediately before the Olympic Games in 1936. The lot of the ‘Pink Triangles’ in the concentration camps must be placed high on the list of Nazi crimes.4 Paragraph 175 was finally abolished in 1969.

Within four weeks, the gunshots of Sarajevo brought Europe’s diplomatic and military restraints crashing to the ground. Ultimata, mobilization orders, and declarations of war ricocheted round the chancelleries. Vienna wanted action against Serbia, and was given carte blanche by Berlin. On 23 July an ultimatum was delivered to Belgrade, demanding Austrian participation in the pursuit of the assassins. The Serbian government prevaricated, and ordered partial mobilization. On the 25th, Russia’s Imperial Council decided to give support to Serbia, but failed to consult either Britain or France about it. On the 28th, Austria-Hungary officially declared war on Serbia. Thereon Russia mobilized, prompting Germany to issue ultimata first to Russia and then to France. Thanks to the war-plan of General Schlieffen, the German General Staff needed to be assured that they would not be trapped by a simultaneous attack on two fronts. The die was cast. When the two ultimata evoked no response, the Kaiser followed his generals’ advice that the safety of the Reich permitted no delay. On 1 August Germany declared war on Russia, and on the 3rd on France. On the latter date, since German troops had crossed the Belgian frontier on their way into France, the British government sent an ultimatum to Berlin. The five European powers were embarking on the general war which they had studiously avoided for ninety-nine years.

KONOPIПTE

THE castle of Konopište (formerly Konopischt) lies deep in the pine-woods of central Bohemia. In the 1890s, when it served as the favourite hunting-lodge of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, it was fitted out in sumptuous leather and mahogany. It housed the Archduke’s enormous collection of game trophies. It was, and still is, an elegant charnel-house, crammed with everything from elephants’ tusks to reindeer antlers. It later appealed as a rest home for the Nazi SS, who chose to paint it black.

Archduke Francis-Ferdinand is remembered for four things. First, by morganatically marrying a Czech Countess, Sophie von Chotek, he was obliged to surrender his children’s rights of succession. Secondly, with Sophie’s approval, he was’a determined champion of the narrow (Catholic) bigotry that, in Austria, went under the name of religion’.1 Third, he wanted to transform the Dual Monarchy into a federation of equal nations. Fourthly, by scorning advice to steer clear of Bosnia in the summer of 1914, he helped lay the fuse which detonated the First World War.

Francis-Ferdinand’s assassination was the third in a series of family killings. He had become imperial heir twenty-five years earlier through the death of his cousin Rudolf. Rudolf had been deeply disturbed by the conflicting influences of an ultra-traditionalist father, the Emperor Francis-Joseph, and of a wilful and wayward mother, the Empress Elizabeth. Passionately anti-clerical, he had once written in a notebook: ‘Are we higher spirits or animals? We are animals …’ He shot himself and his lover of seventeen days, Maria Vetsera, at another Habsburg shooting-lodge, at Mayerling in Austria in 1889. The Empress Elizabeth was stabbed to death by an anarchist in Geneva in 1898.

Few sources stress Francis-Ferdinand’s passion for hunting. Yet he scoured the globe for species to kill with a zeal that far exceeded the social demands of his day. He was an early adept of the machine-gun, and would have all the animals of the forest driven into his sights. Two of his trips to Poland sufficed to bring the European bison to the point of extinction. He ordered the remains of his victims to be carefully preserved. At KonopiSte their bodies were stuffed and mounted under glass in their thousands; their heads hung on the walls; their teeth, meticulously repaired by the imperial dentist, packed into row upon row of display cabinets.

The Archduke left Konopište with his wife on 23 June 1914, heading for Sarajevo. When he was killed, the Emperor was said to have breathed a sigh of relief. ‘God permits no challenge,’ he muttered to his aide-decamp; ‘a Higher Power has re-established the order which I had no longer been able to maintain.’ This epitaph is generally thought to refer to the Archduke’s morganatic marriage. It might equally apply to the wilful slaughter of helpless creatures.

Monday, 3 August 1914, The Foreign Office, Whitehall, London swi. The British Foreign Secretary was looking from his study onto a peaceful summer’s evening. Sir Edward Grey was responsible for the international relations of the largest Empire in history. Austria was fighting Serbia. Two days ago, Germany had declared war on Russia and France had mobilised; German troops had occupied Luxemburg, and were poised to attack Belgium; Russian troops had entered East Prussia. But Britain was still at peace. After a long speech in the House of Commons, Sir Edward had just helped the Prime Minister, Henry Asquith, to draft an ultimatum to be sent to Berlin if Belgium were invaded. It must have been 8 or 9 p.m., for he remembered the lamplighter turning up the gaslamps in the courtyard below. He turned to a friend who was with him and who later recalled his words: The lamps are going out all over Europe. I doubt that we shall see them lit again in our lifetime.’ The scene is one of the most famous in British history, described in numberless textbooks. The words are cited in almost all anthologies of quotations.77

Unfortunately, Sir Edward’s memoirs did not entirely confirm the story:

My recollection of those three days, August 1,2 and 3, is one of almost continuous cabinets and of immense strain; but of what passed in discussion very little remains in my mind… There was little for me to do; circumstances and events were compelling decision…

A friend came to see me on one of the evenings of the last week—he thinks it was on Monday, August 3rd. We were standing at a window of my room in the Foreign Office. It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below… My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe: we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’

What exactly transpired is rather puzzling. It is strange that a metaphor about lamps being extinguished should have been prompted by the sight of lamps being lit. Grey’s most meticulous political biographer makes no mention of the scene.79 What is more, on the very eve of war, when diplomacy was supposedly at its most intense, the man at the eye of the storm had ‘little to do’. He had time to receive a friend, and to have a conversation of such little consequence that he could not remember the details.

That same evening, Berlin was facing the realization that its diplomats had just committed Germany to a war on two fronts and with no committed allies. In the Reichstag the Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, had blamed it all on Russia: ‘Russia has thrown a firebrand into our house,’ he declared. In St Petersburg, where Germany’s declaration of war had been received two days previously, the Tsar and his generals had already set the steamroller in motion. In Paris the French were reeling under Bethmann’s unlikely accusation that a French plane had bombed Nuremberg. In Vienna, where the Austrian Government had been pursuing its attack on Serbia for the past week, the Emperor-King and his ministers were in no hurry to join another war against Russia. In Rome the third partner of the Triple Alliance was lying low. Only in Belgrade could one actually hear the sound of the guns.

Map 23. Europe, 1914

In the interminable debates about the causes of the Great War, the diplomatic system of the early twentieth century has often been made a prime culprit. It has been frequently asserted that the dice were weighted in favour of war through the logic of the two opposing blocs, the Alliance and theEntente. Vast political and economic forces had supposedly created a ‘geopolitical consensus’ in which both sides agreed about the necessity of supporting their allies and the dire consequences of inaction. This consensus allegedly tied the diplomats’ hands, driving them inexorably along the fatal road from a minor Balkan incident to a global conflagration. This contention needs to be examined. The Central Powers were bound in advance by the Triple Alliance. Germany was indeed obliged to assist its Austrian ally, if Austria had been attacked. But Austria had not been attacked, and Vienna was not able to invoke the terms of the existing treaties. The assassination at Sarajevo could not be construed as an act of war against Austria, especially after Belgrade’s conciliatory response to the Austrian ultimatum. What is more, Germany was painfully aware that her third ally, Italy, would never take up arms in defence of Austria unless absolutely forced to do so. Austria’s determination to punish Serbia, therefore, and her request for German approval cannot be attributed to the requirements of the Triple Alliance.

In the case of the Triple Entente, the chain of obligations was still looser. The Entente was not an Alliance. Russia and France were indeed obliged by treaty to assist each other if attacked; but they were painfully aware that the third member of the Entente, Great Britain, was not formally obliged to take up arms in their defence. What is more, since none of the Entente Powers was formally allied to Belgrade, an Austrian attack on Serbia could not be construed as a casus belli. In particular, there was no Russo-Serbian treaty in force.80 By the Treaty of 1839, Britain was committed to uphold the independence of Belgium. But that was an old obligation which long preceded the undertakings of the Entente. Despite appearances, therefore, the diplomatic system of 1914 left the governments considerable room for manoeuvre. It did not oblige Germany to support Austria in all circumstances, or Russia to support Serbia, or Britain to support Russia and France. Almost all the key decisions were justified in terms of’honour’ or ‘friendship’ or ‘fear’ or ‘expediency’, not of treaties. In which case it is appropriate to look less at the diplomatic system and more at the diplomats.

Sir Edward Grey (1862–1933), later Earl Grey of Fallodon, was a quintessential English gentleman. Handsome, modest, and retiring, he was imbued with the spirit of patriotic service. G. B. Shaw mischievously called him a ‘typical British Junker’. He was descended from a county family in Northumberland which came to prominence first through the exploits of a soldier forebear on the battlefield of Minden in 1759, and later through the whiggish 2nd Earl, a sponsor of the Great Reform Bill of 1832. The family was best known from the perfumed brand of Indian tea which was named in the 2nd Earl’s honour. Sir Edward himself was just old enough to remember the Franco-Prussian war. When at the age of 8 he asked his father which side Britain favoured, he was told: ‘The Germans’. He was sent with his two brothers to board at Winchester, before proceeding via Balliol College, Oxford, to an impeccable career as Liberal MP for North Berwick, Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office 1892–5, and Foreign Secretary in Asquith’s Liberal Government from 1906 to 1916.81

Grey’s lifestyle was simplicity itself. He was deeply devoted to his wife, Dorothy, with whom he shared a passion for nature and to wfibm he corresponded, when separated, on every single day of their marriage. With her he remodelled the estate at Fallodon, creating an extensive wildfowl reserve. He was an habitual angler and bird-watcher, and an accomplished poetical scholar. When working in London, it was part of his sacred routine to catch the 6 o’clock train from Waterloo every Saturday morning, and to spend a weekend’s fishing near his cottage at Itchen Abbas in Hampshire. ‘He would much rather catch a 3 lb trout on the dry fly than make a highly successful speech in the House of Commons.’

Grey was destined to write at length about these simple joys. He published books on fly-fishing, on the waterfowl at Fallodon, and on Wordsworth’s Prelude.

That serene and blessed mood
In which …
… we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul.
With an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

As a guest lecturer in America, he once chose the subject of ‘Recreation’. He recounted the story how, as Foreign Secretary, he had entertained the ex-President, Theodore Roosevelt, whom he had taken on a twenty-hour trip through the Hampshire countryside. The visitor was a keen ornithologist with a fine ear for birdsong. Grey was greatly impressed when Roosevelt unhesitatingly picked out the call of a gold-crested wren—the only member of the species that is common to England and America. ‘We are listening today’, he had said, ‘to songs which must have been familiar to races of men of which history has no record.’

Grey was not the typical imperialist or globe-trotting diplomat. Unlike his two brothers, one of whom was killed in Africa by a lion and the other by a buffalo, he saw little of the British Empire. Though he read French, he spoke no foreign languages; and, with the exception of Continental vacations, he knew no foreign countries well. He was deeply imbued with the spirit of the ‘splendid isolation’ of the 1890s, when he had first entered foreign relations. He saw no reason why Britain should become unduly involved in Europe’s affairs. His watchwords were ‘No commitments’ and ‘Our hands must be free’. In 1914, at 52, Grey’s personal life was blighted. His wife had been killed in a carriage accident eight years before. He communed with nature alone, and with failing eyesight. He could not read papers easily: he had cataracts and deteriorating damage to the retina. But for the pressure of business, he would have gone in the summer of 1914 to consult an oculist in Germany.

Grey’s views on Germany were not hostile. He was not really hostile towards anything. But he felt uneasy about German ambitions. Contrary to talk of colonial rivalry, and of Germany’s desire for ‘a place in the sun’, he judged that the Kaiser’s ambitions were directed elsewhere. ‘What Germany really wanted’, he wrote after the war, ‘was a place in a temperate climate and a fertile land which could be peopled by her white population… under the German flag. We had no such place to offer.’ He did not approve; on the other hand, German designs on Eastern Europe did not pose a threat to the British Empire.

Most of the news in the month following Sarajevo had little to do with the European crisis. On the afternoon that the Archduke was shot, Baron de Rothschild’s Sardanapale won the Grand Prix de Paris by a neck. Britain’s calendar for July 1914 was filled with the usual summer announcements:

2 Death of Joseph Chamberlain.

3 At Christie’s, Corot’s Le Rond des Nymphes realized 6,600 guineas.

4 Harvard won the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley Regatta.

7 A statue to Victor Hugo unveiled at Candide Park, Guernsey.

9 The Anglican Church admitted women to parochial councils.

10 London-Paris-London Air Race won in 7 hrs 13 mins 6 sec.

12 Diventis, Switzerland: 1,300th anniversary of St Sigisbert.

16 Gravesend Parish Church: the US Ambassador unveils stained-glass windows commemorating the Indian princess Pocahontas.
Georges Carpentier (France) defeats ‘Gunboat’ Smith (America) in the White Heavyweight Boxing Championship of the World.

24 Failure of the Conference on Irish Home Rule.

26 The Scottish Borderers’ Regiment fires on a crowd at Howth following an Irish gun-running incident.

31 Jean Jaurès, French socialist leader, was murdered in Paris. On 1 August Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Expedition sailed for Antarctica.85

The first sign of real trouble in London came on 31 July, when the Stock Exchange was closed and the bank rate raised to 8 per cent. On Sunday, 2 August, ‘prayers for the nation’ were ofFered in all churches and chapels of the United Kingdom. Ominously, on 3 August Cowes Regatta was cancelled.

Grey’s performance during the crisis of 1914 attracted both praise and scorn. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, was an admirer:

[Grey] plunged into his immense double struggle a) to prevent war, and b) not to desert France should war come. I watched… his cool skill… with admiration. He had to make the Germans realise we were to be reckoned with, without making France or Russia feel that we were in their pocket.86

The Manchester Guardian, Britain’s leading Liberal paper, strongly disagreed. Having expected Britain to stay neutral, it was horrified when war was declared. ‘For years’, it cried, ‘[Grey] has been holding back the whole truth.’

David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was also very critical. At the start of 1914 he had argued for a reduction in arms expenditure, believing that Anglo-German relations were ‘far more friendly than for years past’. ‘Grey was the most insular of our statesmen,’ he later wrote. ‘Northumberland was good enough for him…’ And he pointed to what he considered the fatal flaw: ‘Had he [Grey] warned Germany in time of the point at which Britain would declare war … the issue would have been different.’

In Germany, similar criticisms were expressed in harsher language. Many believed that Grey was ‘the bungler’, ‘the wily hypocrite’, ‘the chief architect of the war’, who dragged Germany down. Even those Germans who appreciated Grey’s goodwill judged him severely. ‘[Sir Edward] imagined that he was steering his ship with a sure hand, unaware that other hands were on the wheel.’ He was ‘a man with two sets of human values … a double morality’.89

After the war Grey did not mention collective guilt, still less the faults of the diplomats. Instead, he recounted an anecdote about Japan. ‘We used to be a nation of artists,’ a Japanese diplomat once told him; ‘but now… we have learned to kill, you say that we are civilized.’

Sir Edward’s road to war began very late—in the last week of July. On the 25th he travelled as usual for a weekend’s fishing at Itchen Abbas—’with unflappable sangfroid … or with culpable disregard of duty’.91 At that stage, ‘he had no thoughts of war.’ His initial sympathies had lain with Austria, and to him things only seemed to slide when Austria spurned Serbia’s conciliatory stance. He was convinced that the powers would ‘recoil from the abyss’; that Britain was bound to support France if war came; that Britain, however, should give no pledge it could not fulfil; and, therefore, that we (the British Government) ‘must address ourselves to Germany’. On the 26th, after dining with Viscount Haldane, he talked with an informal German emissary, Ballin, who reported back that Britain would stay neutral unless Belgium was completely ‘swallowed’. On the 27th he proposed an international conference, but found that the proposal was not taken up.

On the 31st, when Germany and Russia were both mobilizing, Grey had still made no positive commitments to anyone, though he had rejected a German proposal for a non-aggression treaty (see below). On Saturday, 1 August, since he had cancelled his trip to Hampshire, he dined at Brooks’s Club, where he was seen playing billiards. On the 2nd he attended a Sunday Cabinet meeting, an unheard-of event, where ministers came to no definite conclusion about the consequences of a German invasion of Belgium. Several ministers, including Morley, the Lord President, and John Burns, President of the Board of Trade, gave notice of resigning if Britain did not stay neutral.

Sir Edward’s timetable on 3 August started with another morning Cabinet. At 2 p.m., after lunch, he went to the Foreign Office to meet the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, who informed him that the invasion of Belgium was imminent, and asked in return for the drift of Sir Edward’s speech due within the hour. Grey declined to divulge this, then he crossed the street to the Palace of Westminster and at 3 p.m. rose to speak:

Last week, I stated that we were working… to preserve the peace of Europe. Today… it is clear that the peace of Europe cannot be preserved. Russia and Germany at any rate have declared war.

Sir Edward explained that Britain still possessed the freedom to decide its policy. Britain was not a party to the Franco-Russian Alliance, and ‘did not even know [its] terms’. However, in outlining the factors which would determine British action, he started by expressing sympathy for the predicament of the French. ‘No country or Government has less desire to be involved in war over a dispute between Austria and Serbia than France. They are involved in it through an obligation of honour… under a definite alliance with Russia.’ In listing Britain’s interests, he made special mention of the English Channel and the Anglo-Belgian Treaty of 1839. From this he concluded that Britain’s ‘unconditional neutrality’ would not be an acceptable stance. Thanks to the Navy, Britain did not stand to suffer much more by entering the war than by standing aside. But British prestige would be severely damaged if the ‘obligations of honour and interest’ were disregarded. He was confident that Britain would not flinch from its duty:

If, as seems not improbable, we are forced to take our stand on these issues, then I believe … that we shall be supported by the determination, the resolution, the courage and the endurance of the whole country.92

Though the language was vague, Sir Edward had finally told the world that Britain’s continuing neutrality was conditional on Germany withdrawing the threat to Belgium and the Channel ports.

After his speech Sir Edward was approached by Winston Churchill, who said, ‘What next?’ ‘Now we shall send them an ultimatum to stop the invasion of Belgium within 24 hours.’ In the Prime Minister’s office in the Commons, Asquith was visited by his wife. ‘So it’s all up?’ she said. ‘Yes, it’s all up.’ ‘Henry sat at his writing table, leaning back, pen in hand … I got up and leant my head against his. We could not speak for tears.’

In 1914 Britain’s defences depended almost entirely on the Fleet. Neither the First Lord of the Admiralty nor the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis Battenberg, had favoured war. But Prince Louis had stopped the Fleet’s dispersal after the summer’s manoeuvres, and on 2 August he had recommended full naval mobilization.95 Churchill concurred. In the early hours of the 3rd, at his Admiralty desk, Churchill received a letter from his wife, who wrote that ‘it would be a wicked war’. He replied:

Cat-dear, It is all up. Germany has quenched the last hopes of peace by declaring war on Russia, and the declaration against France is momentarily expected.

I profoundly understand your view. But the world has gone mad, and we must look after ourselves and our friends… Sweet-Cat, my tender love, Your devoted W. Kiss the kittens.96

After talking to Grey, Churchill sent a note to the Prime Minister: ‘Unless forbidden to do so, I shall put Anglo-French naval disposition into force to defend the Channel.’

Tuesday 4 August was a day of waiting in London. News arrived in the morning that German troops had crossed the Belgian frontier in force. Britain’s ultimatum to Berlin was dispatched at 2 p.m., demanding a reply within the day. Asquith wrote to his intimate confidante, Venetia Stanley: ‘Winston, who has put on all his warpaint, is spoiling for a sea fight…’ Two German ships, the Goeben and the Breslau, were steaming through the Mediterranean bound for Turkey. The British were confident of catching them.

The ultimatum expired, unanswered, at 11 p.m.—midnight in Berlin. Fifteen minutes later the Cabinet convened at 10 Downing Street. The scene was later described by David Lloyd George in a private letter to Mrs Asquith:

Winston dashed into the room radiant, his face bright, his manner keen, one word pouring out on another how he was going to send telegrams to the Med., to the North Sea, and God knows where. You could see he was a really happy man.99

At which point the Admiralty sent the signal to all ships of the Fleet: ‘Commence hostilities at once with Germany.’ Contrary to the inclination of its leading politicians, Britain had abandoned peaceful neutrality. The decision transformed a Continental war into a world-wide conflict.

Britain’s declaration of war put the final seal on the biggest diplomatic disaster of modern times. It completed the most dire of the scenarios which the diplomats had been contemplating over the previous month. It Was. the fourth such declaration in line—the first by Austria, the second and third by Germany. Britain was the only Entente Power to take the initiative in going to war.

Four weeks earlier, when Vienna had demanded satisfaction from Belgrade over the assassination at Sarajevo, analysts could have foreseen that the European crisis could be resolved in one of four different ways. It might conceivably have been settled without war, as had happened in 1908 after the Bosnian affair. On the other hand, it might have produced a local war limited to Austria and Serbia. Thirdly, if the Great Powers did not show restraint, it might have sparked the Continental war for which both the current diplomatic alliances and the plans of the General Staffs had been designed. In this case Germany and Austria would have been pitted against Russia and France, and Britain would have remained neutral. Lastly, God forbid, it was just possible that Britain would become directly involved and that the controlled Continental war would be expanded into a totally uncontrolled global conflict. For this reason the diplomatic relations between London and Berlin were of greater import than those between Europe’s other capitals. Vienna was the key to a local war, Berlin to the Continental war, London to global conflict.

Any competent student could have listed the reasons why Britain’s involvement raised very special complications. From the strategic point of view, Britain’s assets were spread right round the globe, and their fate would not just affect the interests of the European states. From the political point of view, the British Empire in 1914 was still judged the world’s greatest power, and war against Britain would be seen as a bid for world supremacy. From the economic point of view, Britain was still the capital of world finance. Though her technical and industrial strength was no longer the equivalent of Germany’s, she could mobilize colossal resources. From the diplomatic point of view, the lofty ‘lords of Albion’ had never known defeat. They were noted for their ineffable self-confidence, for their obstinate sense of righteousness, and for their perfidy.

Most importantly, from the purely military point of view, Britain represented a wild card, a spoiler, a participant whose impact was completely unpredictable. Thanks to naval supremacy, the British Isles could not be eliminated even by the most decisive of Continental campaigns. At the same time, Britain only possessed what the Kaiser was to call ‘a contemptibly small army’,* which could not play a major role on the Continent until gradually expanded by conscription. The British Government enjoyed the exceptional luxury of a position where sudden defeat did not come into the reckoning, and where a protracted war would see British military capacity steadily rising over a period of two or three years.

These facts had clear consequences. If the Continental campaigns went well for France and Russia in the early stages, Britain’s participation might well tip the balance in favour of a decisive victory. If things went well for the Central Powers, however, Berlin and Vienna could not count on any such favourable outcome. Even if the French and Russian armies were defeated in the first shock, the Central Powers, like Napoleonic France, would still be left facing a defiant and impregnable Britain, which would use all its wiles to mount new coalitions against them. If the initial fighting were inconclusive, Britain would be better placed than anyone to build up its relative strength in later phases. Unlike Germany, Britain had no chance of winning a Continental campaign; but she could not be easily defeated. In short, whatever happened, Britain had the capacity for ruining the prospects for the quick ‘limited war’ of which all German generals dreamed.

There was much talk at the time of militarism. Colonel House, the American, who visited Berlin in 1914, was shocked by the bombastic displays. Yet all the Powers cultivated a degree of military pomp and swagger; the differences were at best those of style. In all countries in 1914, unlike 1939, the military ethos was closely bound by a code of honour. A German observer remarked bitterly, ‘Militarism in the United Kingdom is regarded [by the British] as of God, and militarism in Germany as of the devil.’ Military technicalities were in play as well. One concerned the control of the English Channel. The British and French naval staffs had agreed in advance that the French fleet should be concentrated in

the Mediterranean, whilst the Channel should be patrolled by the Royal Navy. This meant that British neutrality during a Franco-German campaign in Belgium would automatically give German warships a free run of the French and British coasts. Another important detail concerned mobilization procedures. German provisions envisaged a preparatory stage called ‘a state of imminent war’, to be followed by a second stage in which full mobilization could be completed almost immediately. In effect, a German declaration of Kriegsbereitschaft was equivalent to other countries’ declarations of general mobilization.

These were the matters to which Germany’s diplomats, led by their Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, were required to turn their minds before forcing a showdown.

Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg (1856–1920) was an archetypal Prussian civil servant. Learned, polite, and earnest, he had spent his entire life in the upper echelons of the state bureaucracy. He was descended from a banking family from Frankfurt, which had moved to Berlin and been ennobled two generations back. They came to prominence through Theobald’s grandfather, Moritz August, a law professor who had distinguished himself in the liberal opposition to Bismarck’s regime. Theobald himself was just too young to have served in the Franco-Prussian War, which his grandfather had abhorred. He was sent with his brother, Max, to board at the Fürstenschule Pforta, before proceeding via legal studies at Strasburg and Leipzig to success in the formidable civil service examinations. As a primus omnium at school, and with a Ph.D. in jurisprudence in his late twenties, he was perfectly prepared for a lightning ascent of the bureaucratic career ladder—Oberpräsidialrat at Potsdam, Regierungspräsident at Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), Oberpräsident or ‘Provincial Governor’ of Mark Brandenburg, Minister of the Interior in 1905, Vice-Chancellor in 1907, Imperial Chancellor and Prime Minister of Prussia from 1909. From then until July 1917 he was responsible for all civilian policies, domestic and foreign, of Europe’s most powerful state.101

Bethmann Hollweg was not the typical Junker. He inherited a fine landed estate at Hohenfinow east of Berlin, but the Rittergutwas bought by his grandfather, not rooted in family tradition. He had served in the local regiment, the 15th Uhlans, but only for one year after leaving school. He came to be deeply attached to Hohenfinow—a three-storey red-brick pile set at the end of a long linden avenue amid 7,500 acres on a bluff overlooking the Oder. He adopted the motto Ego et domus mea serviemus domino (My house and I shall serve the Lord). But as a young man he had lived through years of restless, romantic wanderlust, reading poetry and rambling round the Eifel and the Siebengebirge with bohemian friends. He was embarrassed by his brother, who fled to sell real estate in Texas rather than face the state exams. He once stood for election to the Reichstag in the local constituency; but the narrow vote in his favour was overruled by the electoral commission on a technicality; and he never ventured into popular politics again. He married a somewhat unconventional girl, Martha Pfuel-Wilkendorf, who remarked, when he was offered the highest office in the Reich, ‘Theo, dear, you can’t do that!’

Bethmann’s personality was anything but simple. He was a creature of routine, taking a hard morning’s horse ride at 7 a.m. even in Berlin. But his orderly habits did not make for efficiency or decisiveness. He was extremely articulate and well informed; but he had a fatal tendency for procrastination, and repeatedly committed gaffes which a smarter politician would have avoided. He was particularly ill at ease in the military establishment which surrounded the Kaiser; yet he was also terrified of the Social Democrats, who held great sway in the subservient democratic sector of German politics. Much of the inside information about his chancellorship derives from the diary of his personal assistant, Kurt Riezler, who worked alongside him admiringly throughout the crisis of 1914. Riezler noted: ‘His cunning is as great as his bungling.’ His biographer talks of his ‘aggressively defensive self-consciousness’.104

Bethmann owed his position partly to his seniority in the civil service and partly to the belief that he could hold the middle ground between the conservatives and the radicals. By German standards he was a very moderate conservative: in foreign policy he had frequently gone on record to state his commitment to peace, and to warn against the dangers of militarism. For this he was the bete noire of the Pan-German League, who often called for his dismissal.

His guiding principle was supposedly Weltmacht unà kein Krieg, ‘World power but no war’. In the previous November he had reprimanded the Crown Prince for his lack of restraint: ‘To rattle the sabre at every diplomatic entanglement… is not only blind but criminal.’ Pondering the prospects shortly after Sarajevo, he had confided to Riezler, ‘Any general conflict [will lead] to a revolution of all existing conditions.’ Two weeks later, he had personally protested to the Kaiser about the bombastic statements of the Crown Prince and certain sections of the Press.

In July 1914, at the age of 58, Bethmann’s personal life had been blighted by the death of his wife only two months earlier. He travelled back and forth between Hohenfinow and Berlin alone, or with Riezler. Bethmann’s feelings towards England were very friendly. His son Ernst, who was to be killed in the war, had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1908. Everything he said or wrote before the crisis underlined his wish and expectation for Anglo-German rapprochement.

Bethmann’s performance attracted little admiration, except from his immediate associates. Riezler admired his fortitude under pressure, and compared his ‘scruples’ to the ‘icy hypocrisy’ of Grey. ‘The Chancellor is a child of the first half of the nineteenth century,’ he noted, ‘and the heir to a more idealistic culture.’ Yet the Kaiser was brutal: when things began to go wrong in mid-July and Bethmann offered to resign, the Kaiser apparently said, ‘It’s you that have cooked this soup, and now you’re going to eat it.’ Albert Ballin, President of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and the informal go-between with London, was no more sympathetic. A friend of Bethmann’s predecessor as Chancellor, he called Bethmann ‘Bülow’s revenge’, and talked of his ‘torpor’, his ‘passivity’, his ‘lack of initiative’, his ‘enormous ineptitude’. ‘Bethmann’, he said, ‘was an uncommonly articulate man … who did not realise that politics is a dirty business.’ Von Bülow, the former Chancellor, pointed to what he considered the fatal flaw: ‘It would have been quite enough to have told Vienna [after Sarajevo] that we definitely refused our authorisation of any breach between Serbia and Austria-Hungary.’

In England, the criticisms of Bethmann were merciless. Popular sources recounted not only his ‘half-heartedness’ and ‘indecision’ but also his ‘essentially Prussian conceptions of political morality’. It was generally believed that Bethmann conducted German foreign policy unaware that the wheel of state was really in the hands of the military.111 After the war, Bethmann was to make a strong point of collective guilt. ‘All nations are guilty,’ he insisted in his Memoirs. ‘Germany, too, bears a large part of the blame.’

Bethmann’s road to war began in the first week of July. Owing to the Foreign Minister’s absence on honeymoon, Bethmann took personal charge of German diplomacy from the start. He constantly protested his determination to avoid an international conflict. On the morning of 5 July he was summoned by the Kaiser to advise on Austria’s request for assistance in its quarrel with Serbia. Two contradictory decisions were taken—one to refrain from a direct response, and the other to assure Francis-Joseph that Germany would not desert him. In the afternoon he attended a meeting of the Kaiser’s military advisers, where the opinion prevailed that Russia would not intervene and that Serbia should be punished, ‘the sooner the better’. This encouraged Bethmann to tell the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador:

Vienna has to judge what has to be done to clarify Austria’s relations with Serbia. [None the less], in this undertaking it can count safely on Germany’s support of the Monarchy as an ally and a friend—whatever the decision.113

Here was the notorious ‘blank cheque’ for Austria’s war against Serbia.

Back at Hohenfinow on the evening of the 8th, Bethmann talked to Riezler ‘on the verandah under a starry sky’. He explained the dangers of a general conflict. He then said that inaction was the worst policy of all. He was obsessed by fears of Russia: ‘The future belongs to Russia, which grows and grows, looming above us as an increasingly terrifying nightmare.’ At bottom, therefore, the Chancellor agreed with those more outspoken generals who said that Germany’s position could only suffer from delay. Six days later, on the 14th, though nothing special had happened, Riezler reports the Chancellor as saying, ‘Our position is desperate … This action is a leap in the dark and as such a most serious duty.’ It would seem that Bethmann had already resigned himself to ‘the calculated risk’ of a Continental war.115

In the third week of July Bethmann began to suspect that his gamble was ill-conceived. None of the requisite pieces of the puzzle was falling into place. He advised the Kaiser to prolong his Baltic cruise in order to maintain a show of normalcy. When his advice was refused he tendered his resignation, and his resignation was refused as well. According to Riezler, the Chancellor was in fatalist mood, and was sensing that public opinion favoured war—’an immense if undirecteddrive for action in the people’.116 With this in mind he took two practical steps. He stopped the Minister of Interior from arresting the assorted socialists, Poles, and others on its list of Reichsfeinde or ‘unreliable elements’; and in a secret meeting with the Social Democrat leader he informed the Opposition of the gravity of the situation. Both these steps had the effect of disarming popular opposition to the war.

On the 29th, when Russia responded to Austria’s attack on Belgrade with partial mobilization, Bethmann at last paid serious attention to the possibility of a general conflict. He proposed a neutrality agreement to Great Britain, guaranteeing the integrity of France’s metropolitan territory. In the night, contrary to his previous line, he bombarded Vienna with ‘World on Fire’ telegrams advising mediation. Neither produced any effect. As a result, Germany was facing war with Russia without having secured Austrian support. Berlin was committed to help Vienna, but Vienna might not help Berlin. The Alliance was in total disarray.

The moment of decision was reached on 30 July. The Kaiser took fright from the telegrams coming out of St Petersburg. In the margin of one of them he scrawled a note about ‘the war of extermination against us’.117 Berlin was convinced of its ‘encirclement’. At 9 p.m. Bethmann met with the military leaders, von Moltke and von Falkenhayn. They took the decision to declare ‘a state of imminent war’, thus automatically starting the countdown to the outbreak of a general Continental war in the first days of August. And they did so without any knowledge of Russia’s full mobilization or of Belgian and British intentions. From that point on, barring retractions, the die was cast.

In the two key decisions of 5 July and 30 July, there is little evidence to suggest that the generals forced through a warlike line contrary to Bethmann’s advice. It is true that in the last resort the Kaiser possessed the traditional Prussian Kommandogewalt or ‘power of command’ over both generals and ministers. But the Chancellor never put himself in a position where it might have been used against him. He did not stumble into war; he was party to the decisions which provoked it.118 The one thing to say in mitigation, and often ignored by Allied historians, is that Russia had mobilized with the same rashness as Germany.

Henceforth, for the Chancellor, the main consideration was to pin the blame on the Entente. At 11 p.m. on the 30th he learned that Russia’s general mobilization was in train, and used the information to justify his prior decision taken in the dark. On the 1st Bethmann declared war on Russia, whilst demanding impossible assurances from Paris that France should abandon the Franco-Russian alliance. Ballin was privy to the scene in the garden-room of the Kanzlerspalais, where Bethmann was frantically driving the clerks to complete the drafting of the declaration. ‘Why such haste to declare war on Russia, Your Excellency?’ he asked. ‘If we don’t, we shan’t get the socialists to fight.’ On the 2nd the German Ambassador in Brussels was ordered to take a letter from a sealed envelope, prepared seven days before by von Moltke. The letter demanded that Belgium accept German protection against a (non-existent) French attack. On the 3rd, Germany declared war on France.

On the afternoon of 3 August, at the same time that Grey was addressing the Commons, Bethmann addressed the Reichstag with his speech about the Russian ‘firebrand’. ‘A war with Russia and France has been forced upon us,’ he declared. Echoing Grey’s words about determination and resolution, Bethmann said: ‘The entire German nation … is united to the last man.’

On the 4th, German troops invaded Belgium. In mid-afternoon Bethmann heard from the Wilhelmstrasse that the British ultimatum had arrived. In his Speech from the Throne, the Kaiser spoke calmly of ‘drawing the sword with a clear conscience and clean hands’.121 But Bethmann was livid. When the British Ambassador called to take his leave, the walls of the Kanzlerspalais reverberated to the strains of an unprecedented tirade of recriminations. Shouting in French, the Chancellor harangued the Ambassador for a good twenty minutes:

This war is only turning into an unlimited world catastrophe through England’s participation. It was in London’s hands to curb French revanchism and pan-Slav chauvinism. Whitehall has not done so, but rather repeatedly egged them on … All my attempts [for peace] have been wrested from me. And by whom? By England. And why? For Belgian neutrality. Can this neutrality, which we violate from necessity, fighting for our very existence, really provide the reason for a world war?… Compared to the disaster of such a holocaust, does not this neutrality dwindle into a scrap of paper? Germany, the Emperor and the Government are peaceloving. The Ambassador knows that as well as I do. We enter the war with a clear conscience. But England’s responsibility is monumental.122

The Ambassador broke into tears. Diplomacy had come to an end.

Oddly enough, Bethmann’s phrase about the ‘scrap of paper’—un chiffon de papier—does not appear in the Ambassador’s original summary of the tirade. Like Grey’s words about ‘the lamps going out’, there must be some doubt whether it was uttered at that fateful meeting.123

The emotions of those summer days found their best expression in places often far removed from the haunts of diplomats.

In Paris, on 3 August Marcel Proust drove to the Gare de l’Est with his brother, a medical officer en route for Verdun, then returned to the Boulevard Haussmann after midnight to write to his agent. ‘Millions of men are going to be massacred in a War of the Worlds, like that of Wells.’

In England, Virginia Woolf was spending the Bank Holiday at Rodmell, near Lewes in Sussex. At 4 p.m. on the 3rd she wrote to Vanessa Bell. ‘Dearest, Would it be possible for you to let us have half the rent—£15—before we go away?… The postman brought rumours that two of our warships are sunk—however, we found … that peace still exists … I do adore Thee.’

The young poet Rupert Brooke, who had dined the previous week at 10 Downing Street with the Asquiths and Churchill, dashed off a letter to Gwen Darwin, now Mrs Raverat:

Everything’s just the wrong way round. I want Germany to smash Russia to fragments, and then France to break Germany. Instead of which I’m afraid Germany will badly smash France, and then be wiped out by Russia. France and England are the only countries that ought to have any power. Prussia is a devil. And Russia means the end of Europe and any decency. I suppose the future is a Slav Empire, world-wide, despotic and insane.126

D. H. Lawrence was on holiday with three friends in the Lake District:

I had been walking in Westmoreland, rather happy, with water-lilies twisted round my hat … and I pranked in the rain, [whilst] Kotilianski groaned Hebrew music—Ranani Sadekim Badanoi… Then we came down to Barrow-in-Furness, and saw that war was declared. And we all went mad. I can remember soldiers kissing on Barrow station, and a woman shouting defiantly to her sweetheart: ‘When you get at ‘em, Clem, let ‘em have it’… — and in all the tram-cars ‘War—Messrs Vickers Maxim call in their workmen’…

Then I went down the coast for a few miles. And I think of the amazing sunsets over flat sands and a smoky sea … and the amazing vivid, visionary beauty of everything heightened up by immense pain …127

In Germany and Austria the excitement ran equally high. Thomas Mann was at Bad Tölz in Bavaria, wondering when the Landsturm would call. Declining to act as witness at his brother Heinrich’s wedding, he recorded his current feelings:

Shouldn’t we be grateful for the totally unexpected chance to experience such mighty events? My chief feeling is a tremendous curiosity—and, I admit it, the deepest sympathy for this execrated, indecipherable, fateful Germany, which, if she has not hitherto unqualifiedly held ‘civilisation’ as the greatest good, is at any rate preparing to smash the most despicable police state in the world.128

In Vienna, rumours were rife that the Papal Nuncio had been refused access to the Emperor. Pius X was said to be heartbroken by his failure to preserve the peace. (He died on 20 August.) Vatican documents later showed the rumours to have been false: the Papal Secretary of State approved of imperial policy.

Vienna was in aggressive mood. The Chief of Staff, General von Hoetzendorff, had asked his German counterpart six months earlier, ‘Why are we waiting?’ He was now doubly incensed by the delays. Even the sceptical Hungarian Prime Minister, Count Tisza, had been won over. ‘My dear friend,’ he told the Belgian ambassador on 31 July, ‘Germany is invincible.’

The poet Stefan Zweig, who would later condemn the war, was moved by the crowds of patriotic demonstrators. He had just cut short a seaside holiday at Le Coq, near Ostend, and had arrived home on the last Orient Express to run. ‘You may hang me from a lamp-post’, he had told a Belgian friend, ‘if ever the Germans march into Belgium.’ He had then watched German military trains rolling to the frontier at Herbesthal:

As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime, that they belonged together, [acknowledging] the unknown power which had lifted them out of their everyday existence.130

Zweig was fearing service on the Eastern Front. ‘My great ambition… is to conquer in France,’ he confessed, ‘the France that one must chastise because one loves her.’ He would soon print a public farewell to friends in the enemy camp: ‘I shall not try to moderate this [widespread] hatred against you, which I do not feel myself, [but which] brings forth victories and heroic strength.’

On 3 August, as Zweig arrived at Vienna’s Westbahnhof, Lev Davidovich Bronshtein—Trotsky—departed. He had seen the same demonstrations, had seen the confusion of his socialist colleagues in the offices of the Arbeiterzeitung, and had been warned about internment. He immediately took train to Zurich, where he began to pen The War and the International—a work where he mobilized famous phrases such as ‘the self-determination of the nations’ and ‘the United States of Europe’ for his vision of a socialist future.132

Lenin, in contrast, lay low in his refuge at Poronin, near Zakopane in Galicia, confident that the opposition of the German Social Democrats would prevent a major conflict. When he heard that his German comrades had voted for war credits, he was reported to exclaim, ‘From today I shall cease being a socialist and shall become a communist.’ In nearby Cracow, the university year had just finished. Graduating students, many of them reserve officers, were leaving to join their regiments—some to fight for the Emperor-King, some for the Kaiser, and some for the Tsar.

In St Petersburg, the court of Nicholas II was coming to terms with the fateful decisions of previous days. The Tsar had ordered full mobilization on Thursday 17/30 July, apparently without consulting the Minister of War. The resultant German ultimatum had been left unanswered. St Petersburg heard of Germany’s declaration of war on the Saturday, and had followed suit on the Sunday. Monday 21 July/3 August, therefore, was the first full day at war. At 7 p.m. military censorship came into force. The newspapers announced that ‘the nation must accept the paucity of information released, content in the knowledge that this sacrifice is dictated by military necessity’.134 That day, the Tsar visited Moscow, and gave a speech in the Great Palace of the Kremlin. Their Imperial Majesties went to pray in the chapel of Our Lady of Iveron, an icon which celebrated Russia’s earliest religious links with Mt Athos.

The optimists in Russia put their faith in the Bol’shaya Voennaya Programmas the ‘Great Military Programme’, which had been launched early in 1914 and which aimed, among other things, to cut the imperial army’s mobilization time to eighteen days. As the British military attaché reported, their hope was that ‘the Russians would be in Berlin before the Germans were in Paris.’ The pessimists, headed by Pyotr Durnovo, the Minister of the Interior and Director of Police, felt a strong sense of foreboding. Durnovo had reported to the Tsar in February that if the war went badly ‘a social revolution in its most extreme form will be unavoidable’.135

At Vevey in Switzerland, Romain Rolland, musicologist, novelist, and star of the international literary set, watched aghast as his friends succumbed to war fever. Furious at the stance of the Vatican, he claimed that Europe had lost all moral guidance since the death of Tolstoy, whose biography he had just written:

3–4 August I’m devastated. I would like to be dead. It is horrible to live in the middle of this demented humanity, and to be present, but powerless, at the collapse of civilization. This European War is the greatest catastrophe in history, for centuries. [It’s] the ruin of our holiest hopes for human brotherhood I’m almost alone in Europe.136

The outbreak of war in 1914 provoked more ponderings on the subject of historical causation than any other modern event. Many people were led to believe that a catastrophe of such titanic proportions must have been determined by causes of a similarly titanic scale. Few imagined that individuals alone were to blame. Huge works were written about the war’s ‘profound causes’. Indeed, historians were still arguing these issues out when a second world war gave them even more food for thought.

The word ‘titanic’ is not irrelevant. Shortly before the First World War, Europe had been shocked by a huge maritime disaster which all the experts had said could not happen. On 15 April 1912 the largest steamship in the world, the White Star liner SS Titanic of 43,500 tons, struck an Atlantic iceberg on her maiden voyage and sank with the loss of 1,513 lives. Given the vessel’s size, it was obvious that an accident would have unprecedented consequences. On the other hand, there was no reason to relate the causes of the disaster to its scale. Two committees of inquiry pointed to very specific features of the particular ship and the particular voyage. These included the design of the hull, the provision of lifeboats, the unusual state of the Arctic ice, the excessive speed, the northerly course set by Capt. Smith, and the lack of co-ordinated action during the one and three-quarter hours following the initial collision with the iceberg. Historians of shipwrecks clearly have to inquire why the Titanic sank, but also why so many other huge ships have been able to cross the Atlantic in perfect safety.137

The analogy with wars is not entirely out of place. Historians of wars have to enquire not only why peace failed in 1914, but also why it held in 1908 or in 1912 and in 1913. The more recent experience of the ‘Cold War’ has shown, despite the potential for colossal disaster, that armageddon does not necessarily flow from the dynamic of two rival military and political blocs.

No one did more to provoke discussion of these issues than the wiseacre of Magdalen College, A. J. P. Taylor. For the generations involved, war history had been heavily coloured by emotions and moral overtones fired by the death of millions; and it took a man of monumental irreverence to challenge conventional attitudes. Addressing the events of 1914, Taylor named the persons who appeared to have caused the war single-handed: ‘The three men who made the decisions, even if they, too, were the victims of circumstances, were Berchtold [the Austrian Foreign Minister], Bethmann Hollweg, and the dead man, Schlieffen.’ As an incurable germanophobe, he said nothing about Sir Edward Grey.138

In another brilliant essay on the military logistics of 1914, Taylor approached an extreme position where the very notion of causation seemed redundant: ‘It is the fashion nowadays to seek profound causes for great events. But perhaps the war that broke out in 1914 had no profound causes… In July 1914, things went wrong. The only safe explanation is that things happen because they happen.’

Elsewhere, he reverted to the more convincing standpoint, which explains the great catastrophes of history in terms of a fatal combination of general and specific causes. The ‘profound causes’, on which other historians had laid such stress, were shown to be an essential element both of the pre-war peace and of the breakdown of peace. Without the ‘specific causes’, they were of little consequence:

The very things which are blamed for the war of 1914—secret diplomacy, the Balance of Power, the great continental armies—also gave Europe a period of unparalleled peace … It’s no good asking ‘What factors caused the outbreak of war?’. The question is rather ‘Why did the factors that had long preserved the peace of Europe fail to do so in 1914?’

In other words, there had to be a spark to ignite the keg of gunpowder. Without the spark, the gunpowder remains inert. Without the open keg, the sparks are harmless.

To illustrate the point, Taylor might well have chosen the case of the Titanic. Instead, he chose the analogy not of ships but of motor cars. By so doing, he emphasized the dynamic element common to most variants of catastrophe theory, where events are seen to be moving inexorably towards the critical point:

Wars are much like road accidents. They have a general and a particular cause at the same time. Every road accident is caused in the last resort by the invention of the internal combustion engine… [But] the police and the courts do not weigh profound causes. They seek a specific cause for each accident—driver’s error, excessive speed, drunkenness, faulty brakes, bad road surface. So it is with wars.141

*The Kaiser’s comment was wrongly translated and widely publicized in Britain as ‘a small, contemptible army’—hence the chosen nickname of the British Expeditionary Force, ‘The Old Contemptibles’.

*‘Modernism’ is usually reserved for cultural as opposed to socio-economic trends. In the 19th c. it was used as a pejorative term by Catholic conservatives (see p. 797), but was later employed as a catch-all label for all avant-garde artistic movements (see p. 854).