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EUROPE'S LAST SUMMER Who Started the Great War in 1914? DAVID F R O M K I N T H I S I S A B O R Z O I B O O K P U B L I S H E D B Y A L F R E D A

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EUROPE'S LAST SUMMER Who Started the Great War in 1914? DAVID F R O M K I N T H I S I S A B O R Z O I B O O K P U B L I S H E D B Y A L F R E D A . K N O P F Copyright © 2004. by David Fromkin All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. All photographs are reprinted with the kind permission of the Illustrated London News Library excerpt: "Colonel Edward House" and "Count GrafBerchtold" (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis); "German General Erich von Falkenhayn" (Corbis); and "German Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz" (Bettman/Corbis). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fromkin, David. Europe's last summer: who started the Great War in 1914? /by David Fromkin.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-3 75-41156-9 1. World War, 1914-1918—Causes. II. I. Title: Who started the Great War in 1914?. Title. D$ 11.F746 2004 940.3'n—dc22 2003027391 Manufactured in the United States of America First Edition / The peremptory transition from an apparently profound peace to violent general war in a few mid-summer weeks in 1 9 1 4 continues to defy attempts at explanation. — J O H N K E E G - A N , The First World War CONTENTS Map xiii PROLOGUE (i) Out of the Blue 5 (it) The Importance of the Question 5 (Hi) A Summer to Remember PART EUROPE'S 12 ONE TENSIONS C H A P T E R 1 EMPIRES CLASH C H A P T E R 2 CLASSES STRUGGLE C H A P T E R 3 NATIONS QUARREL C H A P T E R 4 C O U N T R I E S ARM 17 21 25 28 C H A P T E R 5 ZARATHUSTRA PROPHESIES C H A P T E R 6 DIPLOMATS A L I G N WALKING 39 43 PART TWO THROUGH MINEFIELDS C H A P T E R 7 THE EASTERN QUESTION 49 C H A P T E R 8 A C H A L L E N G E FOR T H E A R C H D U K E C H A P T E R 9 E X P L O S I V E G E R M A N Y 54 X C O N T E N T S PART T H R E E DRIFTING TOWARD WAR C H A P T E R 10 M A C E D O N I A — O U T OF C O N T R O L 67 C H A P T E R 11 A U S T R I A — F I R S T OFF T H E MARK 70 C H A P T E R 12 F R A N C E AND G E R M A N Y M A K E T H E I R PLAY C H A P T E R 13 ITALY GRASPS; T H E N T H E BALKANS DO T O O C H A P T E R 14 T H E S L A V I C T I D E 87 C H A P T E R 15 EUROPE GOES TO T H E BRINK C H A P T E R 16 MORE BALKAN T R E M O R S 94 98 C H A P T E R 17 AN A M E R I C A N T R I E S TO STOP IT 104 PART FOUR MURDER! CHAPTER 18 THE LAST WALTZ 113 C H A P T E R 19 IN T H E L A N D OF T H E A S S A S S I N S C H A P T E R 20 T H E RUSSIAN C O N N E C T I O N C H A P T E R 21 T H E T E R R O R I S T S S T R I K E C H A P T E R 22 EUROPE YAWNS 118 129 132 137 C H A P T E R 23 DISPOSING OF T H E BODIES 144 C H A P T E R 24 R O U N D I N G UP T H E S U S P E C T S 146 PART F I V E TELLING LIES C H A P T E R 25 G E R M A N Y SIGNS A B L A N K C H E C K C H A P T E R 26 T H E G R E A T D E C E P T I O N 153 162 C H A P T E R 27 B E R C H T O L D RUNS OUT OF T I M E C H A P T E R 28 T H E S E C R E T IS K E P T 168 170 PART SIX CRISIS! C H A P T E R 29 T H E FAIT IS N O T ACCOMPLI C H A P T E R 30 P R E S E N T I N G AN U L T I M A T U M C H A P T E R 31 SERBIA MORE OR L E S S A C C E P T S 175 185 195 C O N T E N T S PART SEVEN COUNTDOWN C H A P T E R 32 S H O W D O W N IN B E R L I N C H A P T E R 33 J U L Y 26 206 C H A P T E R 34 J U L Y 27 212 C H A P T E R 35 J U L Y 28 217 C H A P T E R 36 J U L Y 29 225 C H A P T E R 37 J U L Y 30 229 C H A P T E R 38 J U L Y 31 234 C H A P T E R 39 A U G U S T 1 257 C H A P T E R 40 A U G U S T 2 243 C H A P T E R 41 A U G U S T 3 247 C H A P T E R 42 A U G U S T 4 249 201 C H A P T E R 43 SHREDDING T H E E V I D E N C E THE 251 PART EIGHT MYSTERY SOLVED C H A P T E R 4 4 A S S E M B L I N G I N T H E LIBRARY C H A P T E R 45 W H A T DID N O T H A P P E N 257 259 C H A P T E R 46 T H E KEY TO WHAT HAPPENED C H A P T E R 47 W H A T WAS IT A B O U T ? 269 276 C H A P T E R 48 WHO C O U L D HAVE P R E V E N T E D IT? C H A P T E R 49 WHO S T A R T E D IT? 286 C H A P T E R 50 C O U L D IT H A P P E N AGAIN? C H A P T E R 51 S U M M I N G UP 295 EPILOGUE C H A P T E R 52 A U S T R I A ' S WAR 299 C H A P T E R 53 G E R M A N Y ' S WAR 303 Appendix 1: T h e Austrian Note 307 Appendix 2: T h e Serbian Reply 313 Who Was Who Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index 517 319 339 331 557 292 282 i PROLOGUE: ( i ) Out of the Blue Shortly after eleven o'clock at night on Sunday, December 29,1997, United Airlines Flight 826, a Boeing 747 carrying 374 passengers and 19 crew, was two hours into its scheduled trip across the Pacific from Tokyo to Honolulu. It had reached its assigned cruising altitude of between 31,000 and 33,000 feet. Meal service was about to be completed. It had been an uneventful trip. In a terrifying instant everything changed. The plane was struck, without warning, by a force that was invisible. The aircraft abruptly nosed up; then it nosed down into a freefall. Screaming bodies were flung about promiscuously, colliding with ceilings and with serving carts. A thirty-two-year-old Japanese woman was killed and 102 people were injured. Regaining control of the jumbo jet, the captain and cockpit crew guided Flight 826 back to the Japanese airport from which it had taken off hours before. What was so frightening about this episode was its mysteriousness. Until the moment of impact, the flight had been a normal one. There had been no reason to expect that it would be anything else. There had been no warning: no flash of lightning across the sky. You could 3 4 P R O L O G U E not see it coming, whatever "it" may have been. Passengers had no idea what had hit them and airline companies were in no position to assure the public that something similar would not happen again. Experts quoted by the communications media were of the opinion that Flight 826 had fallen victim to what they called "clear air turbulence." They likened this to a horizontal tornado, but one that you could not see. Some of the experts who were interviewed expressed the hope that within a few years some sort of sensing technology would be developed to detect these invisible storms before they strike. Transparency, the public learned from this episode, signifies little; a pacific sky can rise up in wrath as suddenly as can a pacific ocean. Something like such an attack of clear air turbulence is supposed by some to have happened to European civilization in 1 9 1 4 during its passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The world of the 1890s and 1900s had been, not unlike our own age, a time of international congresses, disarmament conferences, globalization of the world economy, and schemes to establish some sort of league of nations to outlaw war. A long stretch of peace and prosperity was expected by the public to go on indefinitely. Instead, the European world abruptly plunged out of control, crashing and exploding into decades of tyranny, world war, and mass murder. What tornado wrecked civilized Old Europe and the world it then ruled? In retrospect, it may be less of a mystery than some of those who lived through it imagined. The years 1 9 1 3 and 1 9 1 4 were ones of dangers and troubles. There were warning signs in the early decades of the twentieth century that catastrophe might well lie ahead; we can see that now, and military and political leaders could see it then. The sky out of which Europe fell was not empty; on the contrary, it was alive with processes and powers. The forces that were to devastate it—nationalism, socialism, imperialism, and the like—had been in motion for a long time. The European world already was buffeted by high winds. It had been traversing dangerous skies for a long time. The captain and the crew had known it. But the passengers, taken completely by surprise, insistently kept asking: why had they received no warning? P R O L O G U E 5 (i i) The Importance of the Question In the summer of 1914 a war broke out in Europe that then spread to Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. Known now, somewhat inaccurately, as the First World War, it ended by becoming in many ways the largest conflict that the planet had ever known. It deserved the name by which it was called at the time: the Great War. To enter the lists, countries of the earth ranged themselves into one or another of two worldwide coalitions. One, led by Great Britain,* France, and Russia, was called the Triple Entente;* the other, led by Germany and Austria-Hungary, was known at first as the Triple Alliance. Between them the two coalitions mobilized about 65 million troops. In Germany and France, nations that gambled their entire manhood on the outcome, 80 percent of all males between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine were called to the colors. In the ensuing clashes of arms they were slaughtered. More than 20 million soldiers and civilians perished in the Great War, and an additional 21 million were wounded. Millions more fell victim to the diseases that the war unleashed: upwards of 20 million people died in the influenza pandemic of 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 alone. The figures, staggering though they are, fail to tell the whole story or to convey the full impact of the war on the world of 1914. The consequences of the changes wrought by the crisis of European civilization are too many to specify and, in their range and in their depth, made it the turning point in modern history. That would be true even if, as some maintain, the war merely accelerated some of the changes to which it led. On August 8 , 1 9 1 4 , only four days after Great Britain entered the war, the London Economist described it as "perhaps the greatest tragedy of human history." That may well remain true. In 1979 the 5 'Beginning in 1801, the official title of Great Britain was the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland"; for short, the United Kingdom. Called "the Allies" during the war. HVith Italy as the third member in peacetime. Called "the Central Powers" during the war. 6 P R O L O G U E distinguished American diplomat and historian George Kennan wrote that he had "come to see the First World War, as I think many reasonably thoughtful people have learned to see it, as the grand seminal catastrophe of this century." Fritz Stern, one of the foremost scholars of German affairs, writes of "the first calamity of the twentieth century, the Great War, from which all other calamities sprang." The military, political, economic, and social earthquakes brought about a redrawing of the map of the world. Empires and dynasties were swept away. New countries took their place. Disintegration of the political structure of the globe continued over the course of the twentieth century. Today the earth is divided into about four times as many independent states as existed when the Europeans went to war in 1914. Many of the new entities—Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia are examples that come to mind—are countries that never existed before. The Great War gave birth to terrible forces that would plague the rest of the century. To drive Russia out of the war, the German government financed Lenin's Bolshevik communists, and introduced Lenin himself into Russia in 1917—in Winston Churchill's words, "in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city." Bolshevism was only the first of such war-born furies, followed in years to come by fascism and Nazism. Yet the war also set in motion two of the great liberation movements of the twentieth century. As Europe tore itself apart, its overlordship of the rest of the planet came undone, and over the course of the century, literally billions of people achieved their independence. Women, too, in parts of the world, broke free from some of the shackles of the past, arguably as a direct consequence of their involvement in war work—jobs in factories and in the armed forces—beginning in 1914. Another kind of liberation, a wide-ranging freedom from restraint, came out of the Great War and has expanded ever since in behavior, sex life, manners, dress, language, and the arts. Not everybody believes it to be a good thing that so many rules and restrictions have gone by the way. But whether for good or ill, the world has traveled a long way—from the Victorian age to the twenty-first century—along paths that were blasted out for it by the warriors of 1914. In searching for the origins of any of the great issues that have P R O L O G U E 7 faced the world during the twentieth century, or that confront it today, it is remarkable how often we come back to the Great War. As George Kennan observed: "all the lines of inquiry, it seems to me, lead back to it." Afterwards the choices narrowed. The United States and even Great Britain had a choice, for example, of whether or not to enter the First World War—indeed disagreement has persisted ever since as to whether they were wise to do so—but, realistically, the two countries had little or no choice at all about whether or not to join battle in the Second. There was nothing inevitable about the progression from the earlier conflict to the later one. The long fuse could have been cut at many points along the way from 1914 to 1939, but nobody did cut it. So the First World War did in fact lead to the Second, even though it need not have done so, and the Second, whether or not it needed to do so, led to the Cold War. In 1991 historians Steven E. Miller and Sean M. Lynn-Jones maintained: "Most observers describe the present period of international politics as the 'post-Cold War' era but in many ways our age is better defined as the 'post-World War F era." From the start, the explosion of 1914 seemed to set off a series of chain reactions, and the serious consequences were soon apparent to contemporaries: In the Introduction to The Magic Mountain (1924), Thomas Mann wrote of "the Great War, in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off beginning." Nor has it entirely left off today. On April 2 1 , 2001, the New York Times reported from France the return to their homes of thousands of people who had been evacuated temporarily because of a threat from munitions left over from World War I and stored near them. These included shells and mustard gas. The evacuees had been allowed to return home after fifty tons of the more dangerous munitions had been removed. But a hundred tons of the lethal materials remained—and remain. So munitions from the 1914 war may yet explode in the twenty-first century. Indeed, in a sense they already have. On September 1 1 , 2001, the Muslim fundamentalist suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City destroyed the heart of lower Manhattan and took some three thousand lives. Osama bin Laden, the terrorist chieftain who seemingly conjured up this horror and who threatened more, in his first televised statement afterwards described it as vengeance for 8 P R O L O G U E what had happened eighty years earlier. By this he presumably meant the intrusion of the Christian European empires into the hitherto Muslim-governed Middle East in the aftermath of—and as a consequence of—the First World War. Bin Laden's sympathizers who hijacked jumbo jets had smashed them into the twin towers in pursuance of a quarrel seemingly rooted in the conflicts of 1914. Similarly, the Iraq crisis that escalated in 2002-03 drove journalists and broadcast news personalities to their telephones, asking history professors from leading American universities how Iraq had emerged as a state from the embers of the First World War. It was a relevant question, for had there been no world war in 1914, there might well have been no Iraq in 2002. It was indeed the seminal event of modern times. What was the First World War about? How did it happen? Who started it? Why did it break out where and when it did? "Millions of deaths, and words, later, historians still have not agreed why," as the "Millennium Special Edition" of The Economist (January 1, 1000-December 3 1 , 1999) remarked, adding that "none of it need have happened." From the outset everybody said that the outbreak of war in 1914 was literally triggered by a Bosnian Serb schoolboy when he shot and killed the heir to the Austrian and Hungarian thrones. But practically everybody also agrees that the assassination provided not the cause, but merely the occasion, for first the Balkans, then Europe, and then the rest of the earth to take up arms. The disproportion between the schoolboy's crime and the conflagration in which the globe was consumed, beginning thirty-seven days later, was too absurd for observers to credit the one as the cause of the other. Tens of millions of people could not be losing their lives, they felt, because one man and his wife—two people of whom many of them had never heard—had lost theirs. It did not seem possible. It could not, everyone said, be true. Because the Great War was so enormous an event and so fraught with consequences, and because we want to keep anything similar from happening in the future, the inquiry as to how it occurred has become not only the most challenging but also the biggest question in modern history. But it remains elusive; in the words of the historian Laurence Lafore, "the war was many things, not one, and the meanings of the word 'cause' are also many." P R O L O G U E 9 In the 1940s and 1950s scholars tended to believe that they had learned all that there was to be known about the origins of the war, and that all that remained to be disputed was interpretation of the evidence. Beginning in the 1960s, however, sparked by the research of the great German historian Fritz Fischer—of whose views more will be said later—new information has come to light, notably from German, Austrian, and Serbian sources, and hardly a year goes by now without the appearance of new monographs adding considerably to our knowledge. Fischer inspired scholars to comb the archives for what was hidden. What follows in this book is an attempt to look at the old questions in the light of the new knowledge, to summarize the data, and then to draw some conclusions from it. When and where did the march toward the war of 1914 begin? Recently, in a Boston classroom, I asked university students to pinpoint the first steps—before 1908—along the way. From their responses, the following may illustrate how many roads can be imagined to have led to Sarajevo. The fourth century A.D. The decision to divide the Roman Empire between the Latin-speaking West and the Greek-speaking East had lasting consequences. The cultural divide that ramified into two different branches of Christianity, two calendars, and two rival scripts (the Latin and the Cyrillic) persisted. The Roman Catholic Austrians and the Greek Orthodox Serbs, whose quarrel provided the occasion for the 1914 war, were, in that sense, fated to be enemies. The seventh century. The Slavs, who were to become Europe's largest ethnic group, moved into the Balkans, where the Teutons already had arrived. The conflict between Slavic and Germanic peoples became a recurring theme of European history, and in the twentieth century pitted Teuton Germans and Austrians against Slavic Russians and Serbs. The eleventh century. The formal split between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Christianity generated a conflict of religious faith along the same fault line as those of ethnic group, alphabet, and culture—Roman versus Greek—a fault line that threatened the P R O L O G U E southeast of Europe and was followed by the political earthquake that struck in 1914. The fifteenth century. The conquest of Christian eastern and central Europe by the Muslim Ottoman (or Turkish) Empire deprived the peoples of the Balkans of centuries of experience in selfgovernment. That perhaps contributed to the violence and fractiousness of that area in the years that led up to the 1 9 1 4 war—and perhaps contributed to bringing it about. The sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformation split Western Christendom. It divided the German peoples politically, and led to the curious relationship between Germany and Austria that lay at the heart of the crisis of July 1914. The seventeenth century. The beginning of the centuries-long Ottoman retreat from Europe meant that the Turks were abandoning valuable lands that the Christian Great Powers coveted. Desire to seize those lands fed the rivalry between Austria and Russia that set off war in 1914. The creation of the German Empire and its annexation of French territory in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War made another European war likely as soon as France recovered sufficiently to try to take back what it had lost. 1870-71. 1 8 9 0 . The German emperor dismissed his Chancellor—his prime minister—Prince Otto von Bismarck. The new Chancellor reversed Bismarck's policy of allying with both Austria and Russia to keep the peace between them. Instead, Germany sided with Austria against Russia in the struggle to control the Balkans, which encouraged Austria to follow a dangerously bellicose policy that seemed likely to provoke an eventual Russian response. 1 8 9 0 5 . Rebuffed by Germany, and seeing no other alternative, reactionary, monarchical Russia was drawn into an alliance with republican France. This convinced Germany's leaders that war was inevitable sooner or later, and that Germany stood a better chance of winning if it were waged sooner rather than later. P R O L O G U E 1900^. Germany's attempt to rival Britain as a naval power was seen in London as a vital threat. 1 9 0 3 . In a bloody coup d'etat in Serbia, army officers belonging to a secret society butchered their pro-Austrian king and queen and replaced them with a rival dynasty that was pro-Russian. Austrian leaders reacted by planning to punish Serbia—a plan that if carried out threatened to lead to a dangerously wider conflict. 1 9 0 5 . The First Moroccan Crisis was a complicated affair. It will be described in Chapter 1 2 . In it Germany's aggressive diplomacy had the unintended effect of unifying the other countries against it. Britain moved from mere friendship with France—the Entente Cordiale—to something closer to informal alliance, including conversations between the two governments and military staff talks, and later to agreement and conversation with France's ally Russia. There was a hardening of European alignments into rival and potentially enemy blocs: France, Britain, and Russia on one side, and an isolated Germany—with only halfhearted support from Austria-Hungary and Italy—on the other. To some extent all of these were right answers. Other dates—among them 1908, which is discussed in the pages that follow—also served as the starting points of fuse lines that led to the explosions of 1914. All of them can be said to have contributed something to the coming of war. Yet, in a sense all of them are wrong answers, too, to the question of why the conflict came. Thirty-seven days before the Great War the European world was comfortably at peace. Europe's leaders were starting their summer vacations and none of them expected to be disturbed while away. What went wrong? All of the fuse lines identified by my students had been as dangerous to the peace of Europe in 1910 and 1912 as they were in 1914. Since they had not led to war i n i 9 i o o r i 9 i 2 , why did they in 1914? The question is not only why war came, but why war came in the European summer of 1914; not why war? but—why this war? Why did things happen as they did and not otherwise is a question that historians have been asking ever since Herodotus and Thucydides, Greeks of the fifth century B . C , started to do so more than P R O L O G U E twenty-five hundred years ago. Whether such questions can be answered with any accuracy remains debatable; often so many tributaries flow into the stream that it is difficult to say which is its real source. In its magnitude and many dimensions, the First World War is perhaps a supreme example of the complexity that challenges and baffles historians. Arthur Balfour, a prewar British Prime Minister, longtime Conservative statesman, philosopher, and named sponsor of the Jewish state in Palestine, is quoted somewhere as having said the war was too big to be comprehended. , Not merely, therefore, is the explanation of the war the biggest question in modern history; it is an exemplary question, compelling us to reexamine what we mean by such words as "cause." There were causes—many of them—for Europe's Great Powers to be disposed to go to war with one another. There were other causes—immediate ones, with which this book is concerned—for them to have gone to war when and where and how they did. (i i i) A Summer to Remember To the man or woman in the streets of the Western world—someone who was alive in the vibrant early years of the twentieth century— nothing would have seemed further away than war. In those years men who dreamed of battlefield adventure had been hard pressed to find a war in which they could participate. In the year 1901, and in the thirteen years that followed, the peoples of western Europe and the English-speaking Americas were becoming consumers rather than warriors. They looked forward to more: more progress, more prosperity, more peace. The United States at that time (commented an English observer) "sailed upon a summer sea," but so did Great Britain, France, and others. There had been no war among the Great Powers for nearly half a century, and the globalization of the world economy suggested that war had become a thing of the past. The culmination of those years in the hot, sun-drenched, gorgeous summer of 1914, the most beautiful within living memory, was remembered by many Europeans as a kind of Eden. Stefan Zweig spoke for many P R O L O G U E when he wrote that he had rarely experienced a summer "more luxuriant, more beautiful, and, I am tempted to say, more summery." Middle- and upper-class Britons in particular saw themselves as living in an idyllic world in which economic realities would keep Europe's Great Powers from waging war on one another. For those with a comfortable income, the world in their time was more free than it is today. According to the historian A. J. P. Taylor, "until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state." You could live anywhere you liked and as you liked. You could go to practically anywhere in the world without anyone's permission. For the most part, you needed no passports, and many had none. The French geographer Andre Siegfried traveled all around the world with no identification other than his visiting card: not even a business card, but a personal one. John Maynard Keynes remembered it, with wonder, as an era without exchange controls or customs barriers. You could bring anything you liked into Britain or send anything out. You could take any amount of currency with you when you traveled, or send (or bring back) any amount of currency; your bank did not report it to the government, as it does today. And if you decided to invest any amount of money in almost any country abroad, there was nobody whose permission had to be asked, nor was permission needed to withdraw that investment and any profits it may have earned when you wanted to do so. Even more than today, it was a time of free capital flows and free movements of people and goods. An outstanding current study of the world as of 2000 tells us that there was more globalization before the 1914 war than there is now: "much of the final quarter of the twentieth century was spent merely recovering ground lost in the previous seventy-five years." Economic and financial intermingling and interdependence were among the powerful trends that made it seem that warfare among the major European powers had become impractical—and, indeed, obsolete. One could easily feel safe in that world. Americans felt it at least as much if not more than Europeans. The historian and diplomat George Kennan remembers that before the 1 9 1 4 war Americans felt a sense of security "such as I suppose no people had ever had since 1 4 P R O L O G U E the days of the Roman Empire." They felt little need for government. Until 1 9 1 3 , when an appropriate amendment to the Constitution was ratified, the Congress was deemed to lack even the power to enact taxes on income. Stefan Zweig, the Austrian-Jewish author, remembering those antebellum years decades later, remarked that "When I attempt to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, prior to the First World War, I hope that I convey its fullness by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency." In the Western world, it was by and large true that ordinary people felt no apprehension. As will be seen, there were leaders who worried, but in the winter and spring of 1914 not even they expected war to break out in the summer. France, it is true, would have liked to recover territories taken away by Germany decades before, but those well placed to judge were certain that France would not start a war to get them back. Russia, as France's ally, was well informed on French official thinking; and the Russian Prime Minister reported to the Czar on December 1 3 , 1 9 1 3 , that "All French statesmen want quiet and peace. They are willing to work with Germany." These feelings seemed to be reciprocated by the Germans. John Keiger, a leading scholar of the politics of those years, has argued: "There is no doubt that at the end of 1 9 1 3 Franco-German relations were on a better footing than for years." Germany feared an eventual war with Russia, but in 1 9 1 3 , Berlin recognized that Russia was in no condition to wage a war, and would not be able to do so for years to come. It was axiomatic that Britain wanted peace. So, as Professor Keiger writes, "the spring and summer of 1 9 1 4 were marked in Europe by a period of exceptional calm." None of the European Great Powers believed that any one of the others was about to launch a war of aggression against it—at least not in the immediate future. Like airline passengers on United Airlines Flight 826, Europeans and Americans in the glorious last days of June 1 9 1 4 cruised ahead above a summer sea and beneath a cloudless sky—until they were hit by a bolt that they wrongly believed came from out of the blue. PART O N E EUROPE'S TENSIONS C H A P T E R 1: EMPIRES CLASH t the start of the twentieth century Europe was at the peak of human accomplishment. In industry, technology, and science J L . JL.it had advanced beyond all previous societies. In wealth, knowledge, and power it exceeded any civilization that ever had existed. Europe is almost the smallest of the continents: 3 or 4 million square miles in extent, depending on how you define its eastern frontiers. By contrast, the largest continent, Asia, has 17 million square miles. Indeed, some geographers viewed Europe as a mere peninsula of Asia. Yet, by the beginning of the 1900s, the Great Powers of Europe— a mere handful of countries—had come to rule most of the earth. Between them, Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Russia dominated Europe, Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and even substantial parts of the Western Hemisphere. Of what little remained, much belonged to less powerful European states: Belgium, E U R O P E ' S T E N S I O N S Holland, Portugal, and Spain. When all of its empires were added together, Europe spanned the globe. But the European empires were of greatly unequal size and strength, an imbalance that led to instability; and as they were rivals, their leaders were continuously matching them against one another in their minds, trying to guess who would defeat whom in case of war and with whom, therefore, it would be best to ally. Military prowess was seen as a supreme value in an age that mistakenly believed Charles Darwin's survival of the fittest to refer to the most murderous rather than (as we now understand it) to the best adapted. The British Empire was the wealthiest, most powerful, and largest of the Great Powers. It controlled over a quarter of the land surface and a quarter of the population of the globe, and its navy dominated the world ocean that occupies more than 70 percent of the planet. Germany, a newly created confederation led by militarist Prussia, commanded the most powerful land army. Russia, the world's largest country, a backward giant that sprawled across two continents, remained an enigma; enfeebled by a war it lost to Japan in 1904-05, and by the revolution of 1905, it turned itself around by industrializing and arming with financial backing from France. France, despite exploiting a large empire, no longer was a match for Germany and therefore backed Russia as a counterweight to Teutonic power. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary ruled a variety of nationalities who were restless and often in conflict. Italy, a new state, as a latecomer aspiring to take its place among the powers, hungered to be treated as an equal. It was commonly believed at the time that the road to wealth and greatness for European powers was through the acquisition of more colonies. The problem was that the Great Powers already controlled so much of the world that there was little left for others to take. Repeatedly, in going forward, the European powers ran up against one another. Time and again, war threatened, and only skilled diplomacy and self-restraint enabled them to pull back from the brink. The decades before 1914 were punctuated by crises, almost any one of which might have led to war. It was no accident that some of the more conspicuous of these crises resulted from moves by Germany. It was because Germany's emperor—the Kaiser, or Caesar—in changing his Chancellor in 1890 also changed his government's policy. Otto von Bismarck, the • i E M P I R E S C L A S H iron-willed leader who had created Germany in 1870-71, was skeptical of imperialism.* Far from believing that overseas colonies bring additional wealth and power, he apparently viewed them as a drain on both. In order to distract France from thoughts of recovering territories in Europe that Germany had seized—in Alsace-Lorraine— Bismarck encouraged and supported France in seeking new acquisitions in North Africa and Asia. As such a policy would bring France into frequent collisions with imperial England and Russia, thus dividing Germany's potential rivals, it suited all of Bismarck's purposes. Post-Bismarck Germany coveted the overseas territories that the Iron Chancellor had regarded as mere fool's gold. It positioned itself to take part in the coming partition of China. But the rulers in Berlin had come to the game too late. Germany no longer could win an empire on a scale proportioned to its position as the greatest military power in Europe. There was not world enough. No more continents were there for the taking: no more Africas, no more Americas. Nonetheless—heedlessly—Wilhelmine Germany displayed an interest in overseas land. As France moved deeper into Morocco at the beginning of the twentieth century to round out its North African empire, Germany, instead of offering encouragement and support, as Bismarck would have done, stepped in to oppose. These German moves misfired and sparked two of the more high-profile international crises of those years: the Morocco crises of 1905-06 and of 1 9 1 1 . To the German government these maneuvers may have been mere probes, but they caused genuine alarm in Europe. In retrospect, it is clear the problem was that Germany's post-1890 hunger for empire could no longer be satisfied except by taking overseas territories away from the other European countries. This was not something likely to be accomplished by peaceful means. Could Germany therefore content itself with remaining the leading military and industrial power on the Continent but with African and Asian empires smaller than those of England or France? Germans themselves disagreed, of course, about what the answer to that question ought to be, and the climate of opinion was changing. Germany in *For reasons not entirely clear, Bismarck briefly departed from this policy in the early 1880s, when Germany acquired a small number of colonies. E U R O P E ' S T E N S I O N S I 914 was the only country on the Continent with more industrial than farm workers, and the growing strength of its socialist and working-class masses suggested that the nation might be compelled to focus its attention on solving problems at home rather than on adventures abroad. Alternatively, it suggested that Germany's leaders would have to pursue an aggressive foreign policy in order to distract attention from problems at home that remained unsolved. J C H A P T E R 2: N CLASSES STRUGGLE or was Germany alone in being divided against itself. Europe before the war was in the grip of social and economic upheavals that were reshaping its structure and its politics. The Industrial Revolution that had begun in eighteenthcentury France and England continued, at an accelerated pace, to effect radical changes in those two countries, as well as in Germany, and was making similar changes in others. Agrarian Europe, in part still feudal, and smokestack Europe, bringing modernity, lived literally at the same time but figuratively centuries apart. Some still were living as though in the fourteenth century, with their pack animals and their slow, almost unchanging village rhythms, while others inhabited the crowded, sprawling cities of the twentieth century, driven by the newly invented internal combustion machine and informed by the telegraph. At the same time, the growth of an urban factory-working population in the Industrial Revolution brought conflict between that population and factory owners over wages and working conditions. It E U R O P E ' S T E N S I O N S also pitted both workers and manufacturers, on the one hand, who could expand their exports only in a free-trade world, against farmers, who needed protection, and the cash-poor landed gentry on the other. Class became a line of division and loyalty—the chief line according to many. Domestic strife threatened all the countries of Western Europe. In Britain, the Labour party was formed to speak for a working class no longer content to be represented by the Liberal party, which sympathized with wage-earners but spoke as the voice of the professional classes and even some of the well-born. On the Continent, labor also turned to socialism, with growing success at the polls: in the German elections of 1 9 1 2 , the Social Democrats emerged as the largest single party in the Reichstag. It should have been some consolation to German and British conservatives that workers in their countries usually expressed their socialism peacefully by voting rather than (as Syndicalists did in France, Spain, and Italy) by strikes, riots, and terrorist attacks. But governments, in these times of frequent war crises, worried that their peoples might not support them if war broke out. The issue had another side to it: foreign adventures could distract from class and social conflict and bring the people instead to rally around the flag. Which would it be? Would class and social clashes divide, or would international conflicts unite? C H A P T E R 3: NATIONS QUARREL T o socialist internationalism, the rival was nationalism, a passion that increasingly was taking priority over all else in the minds and hearts of Europeans as the nineteenth century departed and the twentieth arrived. Even Britain contracted the fever. Ireland—or at any rate its Roman Catholic majority—agitated violently for autonomy or independence, and clashed with the Protestants of Ulster who prepared to take up arms to defend the union with Great Britain. Edwardian England already was a surprisingly violent country, torn by such issues as industrial wages and working conditions and also by the cause of woman suffrage. It was rocked, too, by a constitutional crisis that was also a class crisis. The crisis focused on two interrelated issues: the budget, and the power of the hereditary House of Lords to veto legislation enacted by the popularly elected House of Commons. Between them these conflicts eroded the sense of national solidarity. Now that the country also was polarized on the question of home 23 2 E U R O P E ' S T E N S I O N S 4 rule for Ireland, large sections of the army and of the UnionistConservative party seemed prepared to defy law and government in order to hold on to the union with Ireland. The precedent set by the United States in 1861 was troubling. Would there be a British civil war? On the continent of Europe the flames of nationalism threatened to burn down even structures that had endured for centuries. Hapsburgruled Austria, a holdover from the Middle Ages that until recently had been headed by the so-called Holy Roman Empire, remained, as it had been in the nineteenth century, the principal enemy of European nationalism. The two great new nations of Germany and Italy had been carved out of domains that the Hapsburgs once had dominated. At universities, coffeehouses, and in the dimly lit hiding places of secret societies and terrorists, in the Balkans and Central Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, plans were being hatched by ethnic groups that aspired to achieve something similar. The nationalists were in contact with one another and with nihilists, anarchists, socialists, and others who lived and conspired in the obscurity of the political underground. It was there that Serbs, Croats, Czechs, and others plotted to disrupt and destroy the Austrian Empire. The Hapsburgs were a dynasty that over the course of a thousand years had come to rule a motley collection of territories and peoples—a multinational empire that held no prospect of ever becoming a homogeneous national state. Centered in Germanspeaking Vienna, Austria-Hungary encompassed a variety of languages, ethnic groups, and climates. Its 50 million people comprised perhaps eleven or so nations or parts thereof. Many of its lands originally had been dowries that had come with marriage to territorial heiresses: whatever else you might say about them, the Hapsburg family wedded well. At its height in the sixteenth century, when it included Spain and much of the New World, the Hapsburg family holdings comprised the largest empire in the world. Hapsburg roots went back to Christmas Day 800, when Charlemagne the Frank was crowned emperor of the Roman Empire in the West by the pope. As Holy Roman Emperor, a post to which a Hapsburg was almost always elected from the fifteenth century until it was abolished in the early nineteenth century, the Hapsburgs dominated Central Europe, including its many German- and Italian-speaking political entities. N A T I O N S Q U A R R E L In the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, they lost their Italian possessions to the newly unified Italy, and they were excluded from Prussian-organized, newly unified Germany in 1 8 7 0 - 7 1 . Once the leader of Europe's Germans and Italians, the Hapsburg emperor was left as the odd man out. Left alone with a German core—of Austria's 28 million inhabitants, only 10 million were German—and a restive empire of Central European and Balkan peoples, mostly Slavs, the Hapsburg ruler Franz Joseph found himself presiding over a political entity that arguably was not viable. The solution that he found in 1867 was a compact between Austria and a Hungary that was ruled by its Magyar minority, in which Franz Joseph served both as emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. The Dual Monarchy, as it was called, was a state in which Austria and Hungary each had its own parliament and its own Prime Minister, but there was only one foreign minister, one war minister, one finance minister—and, of course, only one monarch of both the Austrian empire and the Hungarian kingdom. The peoples who ruled were the minority Germans of Austria and the Magyar minority in Hungary. What they attempted to rule, in the words of one Hapsburg statesman, was "eight nations, seventeen countries, twenty parliamentary groups, twenty-seven parties"—and a spectrum of peoples and religions. Europe was rapidly becoming a continent of nation-states. As it entered the twentieth century, a chief weakness of Austria-Hungary was that it was on what looked to be the wrong side of history. But what was threatening to bring it down was a force that was not entirely progressive either; nationalism had its atavistic aspects. Whether considered to be a political philosophy or its contrary, a type of mass delirium, nationalism was ambivalent. It was the democratic belief that each nation had the right to become independent and to rule itself. But it also was the illiberal insistence that nonmembers of the nation should assimilate, be denied civic rights, be expelled, or even be killed. Nationalism was hating some as an expression of loving others. To add to the murkiness, there was no agreement on what constitutes a nationality. The 1 9 1 1 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it a "vague term" and remarked that "a 'nationality'... represents a common feeling and an organized claim rather than distinct attributes which can be comprised in a strict def- 26 E U R O P E ' S T E N S I O N S inition." So there was no general agreement on which groups were nations and which were not. It was one more issue for Europe to fight about. Some thought—some still think—that it was the main thing that Europe had to fight about. In the absence of scientific measurement of public opinion through polls, historians are unable to tell us with any certainty what the people of Europe thought or felt in the pre-1914 age. This leaves a gap in our knowledge. It is not so great a gap as it would be today, for a century ago the public played little role in the formation of foreign policy. But public opinion was of some significance, in that decisionmakers presumably did take it into account—to the extent that they knew what it was. Evidence suggests that the most widespread feeling in Europe at the time was xenophobia: a great deal of hostility toward one another. The ethnic groups of the Balkans provided a conspicuous example of mutual hatred, but countries far more advanced exhibited such tendencies too. England is a case in point. It had been in conflict or at war with France on and off since the eleventh century—in other words, for about a thousand years. Anti-French feeling remained high well into the twentieth century. Even during the First World War, in which the two countries were allies, British and French officers schemed and maneuvered against one another to take control of the postwar Arab Middle East. Britain came into collision with Russia much later than it did with France, but once they did clash it was all across the board. The two countries opposed each other on one point after another, economically, politically, militarily, and ideologically, until Britons grew to object to Russians not merely for what they did but for who they were. The story is recounted at length in a classic: The Genesis ofRussophobia in Great Britain by John Howes Gleason. Germany came into existence as a state only in 1 8 7 1 , and seemed to be a possible ally—the idea was discussed at the highest levels more than once—but the British became suspicious of Germany and then antagonistic. This was for a variety of reasons, thoroughly discussed in Paul Kennedy's definitive account, The Rise of the AngloGerman Antagonism. So the British, though they believed themselves to be open- N A T I O N S Q U A R R E L minded, detested the peoples of the next three ranking Great Powers: the French, the Russians, and the Germans. The questions that European statesmen attempted to resolve at the dawn of the twentieth century therefore were being faced against a background of peoples who harbored hostile, sometimes warlike, sentiments. The rise of independent mass-circulation newspapers in the nineteenth century in such European countries as England and France brought to bear upon decision-making yet another powerful influence impossible to calculate precisely. Appealing to popular fears and prejudices in order to win circulation, the press seems to have exacerbated hatred and divisions among Europeans. Of the anti-German British press and the anti-British German press, the German emperor wrote to the King of England in I Q O I : "The Press is awful on both sides." C H A P T E R 4: COUNTRIES ARM "ationalism, as preached by Giuseppe Mazzini and his disciples in nineteenth-century Europe, was supposed to bring _1_ ^| peace. Instead it brought war. So it was with an even more profound development of the time: the energy revolution that was made possible when Michael Faraday learned how to generate electricity. Practically limitless power was the new thing that made almost all else possible. Henry Adams, historian and prophet, the American Janus who saw both behind and ahead, identified it. Marveling at the dynamos he saw at the Chicago (1893) and Paris (1900) world fairs, he speculated that they might render all past human history obsolete. It would "upset schoolmasters," he observed, but "professorial necks" had been "broken" a few times before since Europe began, and of these few times, "the nearest approach to the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up the Cross." Indeed the rays of electricity were something that Adams found almost supernatural: an "energy like that of the Cross." 28 C O U N T R I E S A R M 2 9 It was natural that Adams should be optimistic; he was a child of the century that believed history was the story of progress. Before the nineteenth century began men had looked backward to a golden age. Now they looked forward to it. Europeans and Americans were fascinated by speculations about the future. A new genre of fantasy fictions catered to their tastes. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells were the pioneers in creating tales of scientific and technological marvels: of flying machines, life below the oceans, and interplanetary travel. The focus on all the wonders that the future held in store for an empowered humanity may have been somewhat unbalanced. Only a few saw that the dark side of the otherwise Promethean story was that the human race made use of its amazing possibilities by calling forth explosive new powers of destruction. In an often-quoted letter written when war came in 1914, Henry James, the famous American novelist resident in England, wrote: "The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness . . . is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words." Science had not made human beings more peaceful and civilized; it had betrayed such hopes and instead had made it possible for armies to be more savagely destructive than warriors of earlier times could have dreamed of being. What Europe was building up toward was not a better world, but a giant smashup, as, in the first twentieth-century war among modern industrial societies, the accumulated explosive power that advanced science had developed was concentrated on the goal of mass destruction. Why did contemporaries believe that they were headed for a more peaceful world? How could they dismiss the possibility of a war among European powers from their fears and their minds? Why were they taken by surprise by the outbreak of war? Did they never look to see what their leading industry was manufacturing? Looking back, perhaps the most remarkable feature of the prewar international landscape was the accelerating arms race. The German armaments firm Krupp was the largest single business in Europe. Its giant rivals—Skoda, Creusot, Schneider, and Vickers-Maxim—also 3° E U R O P E ' S T E N S I O N S were enormous. In large part, in the new industrial age, Europe's business had become the business of preparing to fight a war. In retrospect the intense arms race was the most visible feature of Europe's political landscape in those antebellum years. It is odd that the man in the street did not see this with equal clarity at the time. The European war economy had become immense in scale, but it did not bring security. A technological breakthrough such as Britain's development of the Dreadnought, rendering all existing battleships obsolete, not merely forced a country to write off its previous efforts and investments, but risked leaving it naked before its enemies during the years required to catch up. Each adjusted its military manpower requirements—its blend of regular army, conscripts, and reserves of one sort or another—to at least match the levels of its potential adversaries. The unrelenting competitiveness achieved the opposite of what was intended. The buildup in the armed forces was intended to achieve national security, but instead undermined it: the arms race, driven by mutual fears, ended by making all the Great Powers of Europe radically insecure. All the Great Powers—even Russia, after the 1905 revolution— were relatively open societies in which the appropriation of funds by parliaments for military purposes could be scrutinized by rival states, whose analyses were not infrequently colored by alarmism. As military programs mandated by legislation embodied schedules, countries were aware of one another's production timetables for armaments and therefore could be tempted to launch a preemptive strike. An innovation dating from the nineteenth century was that the armed forces of the respective countries now routinely prepared contingency plans for making war on their rivals should hostilities break out. These, of course, were secret, although governments usually had at least an idea of what each other's overall strategy would be. There was no great mystery as to who potential enemies were likely to be. France and Russia, despite major ideological differences, were known to be allies, driven together by Germany's threat to both of them. Germany was closely bound up with Austria-Hungary, and also was allied with the unreliable Italians, even though the Italians still harbored territorial claims against Austria. Great Britain, though preferring to remain neutral, was being impelled by the growth of German ambitions to draw closer to France and—for France's sake— to Russia. C O U N T R I E S A R M The various war crises of the early twentieth century jolted the Great Powers into initiating joint staff talks with the armed forces of their allies. Secret army and navy discussions between Britain and France in 1905-06 and 1 9 1 1 dealt with how to meet an attack by Germany. In 1908-09 similar talks were begun by the chiefs of the German and Austro-Hungarian general staffs and were focused on a possible war with Russia. Secret naval talks between Britain and Russia were authorized by the British cabinet in May 1 9 1 4 and, when Berlin learned of them, terrified Germany. Such joint talks did not commit the European governments in a formal sense, yet in transforming theory into practice Europe's governments somehow took a further giant step on the road that led to 1914. And as it happened, they did define the war to come. They produced a script that in fact was to be followed. They provided a good indication of who would stay with which coalition: Germany and Austria would stick together, while Britain would decide to back France and Russia. Whether or not their accelerating arms race made conflict inevitable, as British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey claimed, the Great Powers of Europe somehow brought the event closer by engaging in what were essentially dress rehearsals for war—and not just for any war, but for the opening stages of the very war they were indeed about to wage. Was it fear of one another, driven by the arms race, and feeding on itself, that was pushing Europe to the brink? Or was it inborn aggression, pent up during the unnaturally long four decades of peace among the Great Powers, that now threatened to explode? Or were governments, as many were to say, deliberately maneuvering their countries toward war in order to distract attention from domestic problems that looked to be insoluble? Or were some governments pursuing aggressive or dangerous policies they should have known that other countries would be obliged to resist by force of arms? Whatever the reasons, as Helmuth von Moltke, chief of Germany's general staff, told the civilian Chancellor in a memorandum dated December 2 , 1 9 1 2 : "All sides are preparing for European War, which all sides expect sooner or later." War plans were criticized and changed in the light of experience gained in war games. They were updated in response to changing circumstances and to new information about enemy plans gleaned from E U R O P E ' S T E N S I O N S espionage by the intelligence services. France was exceptional in that, on the eve of war, it modified its war plans in the light of a fashionable philosophy. The new French doctrine was that morale was the key to victory. It was a view derived from the teachings of military officers Ardant du Picq (1821-70)* and Ferdinand Foch (1851-1929). That it was the moral rather than the material that ought to be emphasized seemed to be confirmed by the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941), who saw in the elan vital—the life force—the energy that propelled evolution. These views lent themselves to the glorification of the attack—at the expense, perhaps, of prudence—and that manifested themselves in the bias toward the offensive that many were to criticize later in Plan XVII, the organizational and strategic plan adopted by France in May 1 9 1 3 . Of all the strategies explored in advance by the military chiefs of the European powers, the one that was to figure most largely in later thinking about the war was the scheme named after Count Alfred von Schlieffen, the German general to whom the design was attributed. Schlieffen ( 1 8 3 3 - 1 9 1 3 ) served as chief of Germany's Great General Staff from 1891 to 1906. The general staff of the Prussian army had been called "Great" since 1 8 7 1 , to distinguish it from the general staffs of other states in the German confederation: Bavaria, Saxony, and Wurttemberg. An elite body of about 650 officers, the Great General Staff served as the brains and nerve center of the army. In its first hypothetical war plan after German unification in 1 8 7 1 , the Great General Staff imagined a conflict in which the enemy consisted of a coalition of France, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. This, the most dangerous of possibilities, corresponded to the German nightmare of being surrounded: the "Slav East and the Latin West against the center of Europe," in the words of Helmuth von Moltke—known as Moltke "the elder"—then chief of the general staff. From 1879 on, following the alliance agreement with AustriaHungary, Germany's planning always made provision for a war against France and Russia: an unlikely combination on ideological grounds, for France was an advanced democracy and Russia was a backward tyranny. Driven together—against the odds—by the Ger*Some sources give his date of birth as 1 8 3 1 . C O U N T R I E S A R M man threat, in 1894 France and Russia did indeed enter into an alliance, and Germany's war plans stopped being hypothetical. Successive chiefs of the Great General Staff asked not whether such a war would occur, but when. The difficult challenge that they faced— how to fight a two-front war successfully—had arisen because of the ineptness of their country's leaders in foreign policy. Moltke the Elder and his successor, Count Alfred von Waldersee, planned to fight Russia in a limited war that would compel the Czar to make peace quickly, while at about the same time battling France with the objective of negotiating peace on favorable terms. It was a moderate strategy, defensive in spirit, aimed at coming out ahead. But it did mean splitting forces in order to fight both enemies at the same time. Count von Schlieffen took over as chief of the general staff on February 7 , 1 8 9 1 . He was appointed despite his lack of combat experience. Lonely since the death of his wife, he was a solitary figure with narrow professional interests. He was a sarcastic officer whose twisted monocle made him look like the caricature of a Prussian. Schlieffen conducted what was almost a university for the officers under his command. He put them to work testing and reworking deployment plans annually in the light of what was learned in frequent war games and in horseback rides to study the terrain. Under his supervision staff officers prepared forty-nine different overall strategic plans for the European war they believed was coming: sixteen against France alone, fourteen against Russia alone, and nineteen against them together. In the event of a two-front war, Germany essentially had three choices. One of them—fighting France and Russia at the same time—seemed a risky strategy for an outnumbered Germany. Dealing with Russia first seemed impractical; the Russians, even if defeated, could retreat into the almost endless interior of their vast country: they could not be dealt a quick knockout blow. Moreover, the Russians were arming and building armies and railroads at a rapid pace; they were becoming more formidable opponents all the time. On the other hand, Schlieffen, as of 1905, held a low opinion of Russian military capabilities. A number of factors pointed to a strategy of engaging France first, and to the military mind, the only practical way for Germany to attack France was through neutral Belgium. Some officers in 34 E U R O P E ' S T E N S I O N S the French high command understood this. In Britain, Winston Churchill knew..it; he had learned it at a confidential briefing of Britain's Committee of Imperial Defence in 1 9 1 1 . The reasons for it had been explained to the committee by Major General Sir Henry Wlson, Director of Military Operations at the War Office. At the end of Schlieffen's tenure as chief of staff, he composed an informal memorandum outlining for his successor how such an invasion of France through Belgium might be done. The memorandum assumed that Germany had at its disposal for the hypothetical attack ninety divisions—at a time when only seventy were available. Does this mean that the memo was not really a proposal? Does it mean that it really was only a demonstration on paper that Germany needed a larger army than the war ministry was willing to raise? Was it a document meant to persuade the war ministry to change its mind? Whatever else it may have been, it served as a scenario and probably is best viewed as such. The Schlieffen memoranda of 1905-06 remain subjects of intense controversy. After the First World War came to an end, German generals who survived the war claimed that it had been lost only because dead colleagues had failed to follow to the letter an alleged secret Schlieffen plan that would have proved a guide to victory. Their claim was in large part accepted. The plan supposedly called for almost the entire German army to constitute a right arm—a right flank—that would drive to the Dutch and Belgian coasts, and then sweep down to envelop western France, then turn and scoop up Paris on the way to a decisive victory east of Paris: a victory over a French army that at that point would be completely surrounded. France would be destroyed forever as a Great Power. It all would have taken a matter of weeks, and the German army would then have been transferred east to deal with Russia. Throughout the twentieth century, and now into the twenty-first, historians have debated the consequences of the so-called Schlieffen plan. Its rigid timetable supposedly forced Germany to initiate the war when and as it did. The course of events in the summer of 1 9 1 4 often is pictured as an example of automation, as though the government of Berlin were caught up in the grip of its own unchangeable secret plan. We now can see that any such account is a distorted one. We have scholarly resources not available generations ago. Schlief- C O U N T R I E S A R M fen's papers, carried off by Americans, were discovered in Washington, D.C., in 1953 in the National Archives. After the pioneering research of Gerhard Ritter in the 1950s, lucidly seconded in 2001 by John Keegan, it became clear that, whatever else it might have been, the Schlieffen memorandum of 1905, with its 1906 supplement, was not a plan. It was not operational. It did not go into details or issue orders. It can be viewed in context by reading a selection of Schlieffen's military writings, which has just appeared in English translation by Robert T. Foley. A further challenge—mounted as this is being written—is the publication of Inventing the Schlieffen Plan by Terence Zuber. Based on archival material that he tells us has not been used before, Zuber argues that even the memoranda we speak of as embodying the Schlieffen strategy proposal do not express his actually proposed strategies and his war plans and ideas. Of course Germany did invade France through Belgium, as Schlieffen's memorandum imagined it would do. But that was pursuant to what with more accuracy should be called the Moltke plan, for it was during Moltke's tenure of office that the operational document—the actual plan for invading France—was promulgated. Reviewing the Schlieffen memoranda some five years later, in 1 9 1 1 , Moltke indicated in his notes that he agreed that France should be invaded through Belgium. The decision exercised a sort of multiplier effect on Germany's quarrels. In the context of Germany's post1890 foreign policy, it created the very encircling coalition Germans professed to fear. It also automatically transformed a German war into a European war that as a result would become a world war. If Germany attacked Russia, Germany would start by invading Belgium, Luxemburg, and France, thereby bringing them, too, into the war, thus also bringing Great Britain into the war, bringing in, in addition, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and others too, possibly including Britain's Pacific ally, Japan. All of this rousing up of additional enemies was undertaken in pursuance of a strategy that even in the words of a scholar who believes in the existence of the Schlieffen scheme, "never achieved the final, perfected form that is sometimes imputed to it." Schlieffen envisaged violating the neutrality of Luxemburg, Belgium, and Holland in invading France. Moltke decided instead to leave 36 E U R O P E ' S T E N S I O N S Holland alone. In the first place, Dutch armed resistance might tip the scales against the invaders; in the second, if a war of attrition developed, Germany would need a neutral Netherlands as a conduit for supplies. These were both good reasons for respecting Dutch neutrality. One of the consequences of doing so, however, was to narrow the invasion route through which the German forces were to move. It would be a corridor twelve miles wide. It could be dominated by the Belgian fortifications at Liege. So, relying on total surprise and a sprinter's speed, German forces would have to seize Liege before the enemy even knew that war was upon them. All this would be possible only if there was complete secrecy. Moltke therefore did not allow even Germany's other military leaders—let alone the civilian ones— to share this information. One other point later—in the summer of 1914—assumed great importance. The increased speed of Russia's mobilization ability, and the strengthening of its armed forces, meant that in the event of war, Germany on its own might not have the ability to ward off Russia's first blow. It would have to call on Austria-Hungary to help. That was to prove a key to understanding the crisis of July 1914. In the unified German federation that Prussia had organized into a single power in the wars of the 1860s and 1870s, the armed forces played a disproportionately large role and—through it—so did the King of Prussia, who served not only as German emperor but also as military chief. As Chancellor—Germany's civilian leader—Otto von Bismarck wore a military uniform, seeking to identify himself with the military service and thereby indicating where he, who had created the new state and was the author of its constitution, believed that power rested. Vested in the Kaiser were almost dictatorial powers in the great matters of war and peace: almost, but not quite. His was the power to declare war or to make peace—so long as he could obtain the countersignature of the Chancellor. But as the Chancellor was appointed by the Kaiser and served at his pleasure, this did not provide much of a check on the monarch's power. In the Imperial German army, the Kaiser served as supreme warlord. Immediately below him were three distinct bodies that sometimes competed with one another: the Prussian War Ministry, the C O U N T R I E S A R M War Cabinet, and the Great General Staff. Their functions were separate but sometimes overlapping. They, too, were appointed by the Kaiser. It often was said, after he was made chief of the Great General Staff in 1906, that the younger Moltke had been chosen because Wilhelm liked him. Moltke's biographer, Annika Mombauer, in a recently published work based in part on previously unknown primary sources, tells us that he "had been the Kaiser's friend as well as his long-term adjutant," that as a young man he was "a tall dashing military figure," and that "his pleasant manners and varied cultural pursuits made him an appealing candidate." Born in East Prussia, Moltke came of the right stock. His candidacy cannot have been hurt by the fact that he was a nephew of the great Moltke—Moltke the Elder, as he was known subsequently— the commander of Bismarck's armies who, in defeating Denmark, Austria, and then France, had been the general whose victories created modern Germany. The nephew knew what he owed to his uncle's name. On the occasion of his general staff appointment, he asked Wilhelm: "Does Your Majesty really believe that you will win the first prize twice in the same lottery?" Big and heavy, he was fifty-eight years old at the time of his appointment. Although he painted, played the cello, and took an interest in spiritualist matters, he held conventional military and political views. Goethe's Faust is said to have been "his constant companion"; but it would have taken much more than his rather ordinary intellect to suspect that Faust might bear some relevance to the bid for total power that Prussia was mounting in his time. Appreciating that Austria was of vital importance to his plans, Moltke worked with his Austrian counterpart, Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, to strengthen the Austro-German alliance. He succeeded in restoring warmth to a relationship that had been strained. Both chiefs of staff, it transpired nonetheless, held back and failed to give their entire confidence to one another. Moltke did not reveal the extent of his need for Austrian assistance in meeting the initial Russian attack that he expected. Conrad, in turn, did not admit that Austria was going to focus on destroying Serbia and would hope Germany—by itself—would assume full responsibility for dealing with the Czar's armies. 38 E U R O P E ' S T E N S I O N S Until recently, the common view among scholars, especially in Germany, has been that Moltke was inadequate, weak, and of less than major importance. The appearance of Mombauer's biography should change that view. Moltke was a figure of considerable significance both for what he did and for what he did not do. As a favorite of the Kaiser's who therefore was in a position to get a hearing for his views, Moltke took the lead in advancing two propositions: first, that the alliance with Austria was absolutely central to Germany and had to be given top priority; and second, that war against the Triple Entente—Britain, France, and Russia, three countries that had pledged mutual friendship—was bound to break out not much later than i o i 6 o r i o i 7 , and that Germany would lose the war unless it launched a preventive attack immediately. Certain that war would come, Moltke wanted it sooner rather than later. He wanted it even though, like many of his colleagues, he feared that it would bring European civilization to an end. CHAPTER 5: ZARATHUSTRA PROPHESIES T he greatest arms race the world had known was not only waged among mutually hostile nations, busily planning to destroy one another, but took place in a civilization in which it was widely believed that only destruction could bring regeneration. The prophet of the age was the powerfully eloquent, though unsystematic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (i 844-1900). Nietzsche preached the values of the irrational. Though he was German, his message struck a chord in many countries. He was a European figure, not a parochial German one. Fittingly, he made his home in Switzerland and Italy. The French Revolution of 1789 had ushered in a century of revolutions that had failed to achieve the dreams they embodied. Unfulfilled revolutions and revolutions betrayed had left Europe frustrated, and in a mood—following Nietzsche—to smash things. Rejecting Europe's inherited values, Nietzsche had proclaimed in Thus Spake Zarathustra that "God is dead!" The debut of the Stravinsky-Nijinsky ballet Le Sacre du Printemps 39 4° E U R O P E ' S T E N S I O N S on May 29, 1 9 1 3 , at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris, is often taken as the symbol of the Nietzschean rebellion in all the arts. Crowds hating the ballet—a pagan celebration with deafening dissonances—screamed their protests against what they regarded as savagery exalted in the place of civilization. Hysteria and frenzy seemed to be the order of the day. It may well be that the European sense of frustration—the sense of stalemate in life, art, and politics—led to a violent sense of abandon, of letting go: a sense that the world ought to be blown up, and let the consequences be what they may. Europe's Nietzschean mood seemed to play some sort of role in making the Great War possible. As A. J. P. Taylor writes: "Men's minds seem to have been on edge in the last two or three years before the war in a way they had not been before, as though they had become unconsciously weary of peace and security. You can see it in things remote from international politics—in the artistic movement called Futurism, in the militant suffragettes. . . , in the working-class trend toward Syndicalism. Men wanted violence for its own sake; they welcomed war as a relief from materialism. European civilization was, in fact, breaking down even before war destroyed it." In the opening years of the twentieth century, Europeans glorified violence, and certain groups among them, at least, felt a need for radical change. Across the whole spectrum of existence, change was overcoming Europe at a pace faster than ever before—and far faster than Europe knew how to cope with. A panoramic view of Europe in the years 1900 to 1 9 1 4 would show prominently that the Continent was racing ahead in a scientific, technological, and industrial revolution, powered by almost limitless energy, that was transforming almost everything; that violence was endemic in the service of social, economic, political, class, ethnic, and national strife; that Europe focused its activities largely on an escalating, dizzying arms race on a scale that the world never had seen before; and that, in the center of the Continent's affairs, powerful, dynamic Germany had made strategic arrangements such that, if it went to war, it would bring almost all Europe and much of the rest of the planet into the war for or against it. Given these conditions, does not the question "How could war have broken out in such a peaceful world?" rather answer itself? Z A R A T H U S T R A P R O P H E S I E S 41 Would it not have been more to the point to ask how statesmen could have continued to avoid war much longer? How had they managed to keep the peace for so long? Which is not to say that war could not have been averted, but merely that, by 1914, it might have taken extraordinary skill to keep on averting it. Today, we take it for granted that governments hope to keep the peace. It is our often unarticulated assumption. Since the development of weapons of mass destruction, everybody would lose, we say, if war were to break out among the Great Powers. The human race, we are told, might not survive such a conflict. Our principal international institution, the United Nations, is described as a peacekeeping organization because preventing war is the primary reason that the countries of the earth have joined together. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that a century ago world leaders would have shared such a view. Their thinking at the time was well expressed in what has been called "the first great speech" in the political career of Theodore Roosevelt, newly appointed assistant secretary of the navy in the incoming administration of U.S. President William McKinley. Addressing the Naval War College in 1897, Roosevelt claimed: "No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war." War, he declared, was a fine and healthy thing. "All the great masterful races have been fighting races; and the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, then . . . it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best." He argued: "Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin." Someday circumstances might be different, he said, but until they were, war would continue to be needed. "As yet no nation can hold its place in the world, or can do any work really worth doing unless it stands ready to guard its rights with an armed hand." The speech was reprinted in full in all major American newspapers, and the chorus of approval from the press all around the United States made it clear that Roosevelt was not speaking for himself alone. He lived in a world in which war was considered desirable—even necessary. Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, chief of staff of the Dual Monarchy's armed forces, was another leader who frequently expressed his opinion that war was "the basic principle behind all the events on this 42 E U R O P E ' S T E N S I O N S earth." It also, as he saw it, was the key to personal success. He was carrying on a love affair with a married woman, and was of the view that if he could come back from the battlefield as a war hero, his mistress could be persuaded to leave her wealthy husband. The pursuit of "honor" was a frequent theme of the times. In Conrad's personal vision, a warrior's nobility wins him the love of women and the acclaim of men. Heads of state and government in the conflicts of 1914 were to argue that their country's honor compelled them to join in the fray; U.S. President Woodrow Wilson used the concept in his address to Congress in 1917 asking for a declaration of war against Germany. Some—Conrad was one, and his octogenarian emperor Franz Joseph was another—at times felt that they had to lead their country into a war because of their code of honor, even if they were likely to lose. These views—held by warriors and aristocrats on the one hand, and by many artists and intellectuals on the other—were not necessarily shared by the masses, including workers, farmers, and the peace-loving commercial and middle classes. But the public played no role in the war-and-peace decisions: decisions that they did not even know were being made behind closed doors. The several dozen leaders who did discuss and decide these matters lived in a world of their own, and it was a world in which war and warriors were glorified. C H A P T E R 6: DIPLOMATS ALIGN mong the Great Powers of Europe, peace had prevailed from 1871 to 1914. It was a long run. It is at least arguable that JL A-what had made that achievement possible was not only the skill but also the character and the outlook of Europe's statesmen. In large part they were a sort of extended family: monarchs and aristocrats whom the French Revolution had failed to sweep away. Shaped by the tolerance and the values of the eighteenth century, they had kept their positions and their system throughout the nineteenth. They were bound together by ties of education, of culture, and, in many cases, of blood. The conduct of foreign affairs was their shared vocation. Cosmopolitan and disinclined to prejudices, they tended at times to put the welfare of Europe as a whole ahead of that of their own country. Indeed, it was not unusual for a diplomat to take service with a foreign country: for a German or a Corsican, for example, to serve as foreign minister of Russia. Once—a long time before, it is true—an Austrian, the Count of Stainville, had been Vienna's envoy to Paris at the same time that his son was Paris's envoy to Vienna. 43 44 E U R O P E ' S T E N S I O N S Hans Morgenthau (1904-80), the great twentieth-century theorist of international relations, describes the way it used to be in terms that exude nostalgia: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to a lessening degree up to the First World War, international morality was the concern of a personal sovereign—that is, a certain individual prince and his successors—and of a relatively small, cohesive, and homogeneous group of aristocratic rulers. T h e prince and the aristocratic rulers of a particular nation were in constant, intimate contact with the princes and aristocratic rulers of other nations. They were joined together by family ties, a common language (French), common cultural values, a common style of life, and common moral convictions about what a gentleman was and was not allowed to do in his relations with another gentleman, whether of his own or of a foreign nation. In other words, they played the game of world politics as though it had rules. The loss of aristocratic values and the weakening of ties were what made the behavior of some of the statesmen in July 1914 possible. In our democratic age, we tend to forget how great a role continued to be played by kings and emperors and by the hereditary aristocracy as recently as a century ago, not merely by their values and their codes of conduct, but by themselves. We have been reminded of it by a study that has just been published, Royalty and Diplomacy in Europe, 1890-1914, by Roderick R. McLean. Personal friendships among monarchs could help to bring countries together. The reverse could also be true. Both possibilities could be seen at work in the ambivalent relationship between the two most powerful Continental emperors, Nicholas II of Russia and Wilhelm II of Germany. Each could exercise almost absolute powers within his country in matters of war and peace. Czar Nicholas II succeeded to the Russian throne at the end of 1894 and was crowned the following year. Deferential and inexperienced, he had been described only shortly before by his father as inadequate: "He is nothing but a boy, whose judgments are childish." Kaiser Wilhelm II undertook to guide his young relative through the jungles of world politics. There was nearly a decade's age difference between the two. Moreover, Nicholas was hesitant where Wil- D I P L O M A T S A L I G N helm was assertive. The young Czar was so polite that the Kaiser believed he was hearing agreement even when he was not. Wilhelm initiated a secret correspondence with him that lasted for nearly two decades. At first Nicholas welcomed the letters. In 1896 the two emperors met for a conference in Breslau, in what now is Poland. Agreements between them were reached easily. But Wilhelm's desire to tutor and dominate turned Nicholas against him. From then on, the Czar regarded the Kaiser with a dislike bordering on hostility. Nicholas decided that he wanted to break off their correspondence. Ignoring Nicholas's desires, Wilhelm continued to write to him for a further eighteen years. On occasion the two rulers did hold meetings. After one such, in 1902, Nicholas commented: "He's raving mad!" From time to time the Kaiser did seem to exert some influence; he may have played a part in persuading the Czar to involve his empire in a war against Japan (1904-05), a war that proved to be a disaster. Mostly, however, Nicholas preferred neither to see nor to hear from his tiresome relative. In this he was not alone. Queen Victoria, the Kaiser's grandmother, warned Nicholas against Wlhelm's "mischievous and unstraight-forward proceedings." To her prime minister, Victoria described Wlhelm as "a hotheaded, conceited, and wrong-headed young man." She did not invite Wilhelm to her Diamond Jubilee (1897) or to her eightieth birthday celebration (1899). In his own version of history, the Kaiser described himself as Victoria's favorite grandson. For all of the German emperor's failings, he was a blood relative and was treated as such. This solidarity among cousins was a sentiment that made for peace and stability between the Czar and the Kaiser. McLean tells us: "Until at least 1908, both monarchs remained convinced that neither would undertake a hostile act against the other." These personal relationships played their role in the story of how Europe managed not to have a war among the Great Powers in the opening years of the twentieth century. But ultimately family ties did not succeed in relaxing the tensions that arose among the powers. Indeed it would have taken statesmanship of a high order to guide the countries of Europe through the explosive issues with which they had to deal. It was like walking through minefields. PART TWO WALKING THROUGH MINEFIELDS CHAPTER 7: THE EASTERN QUESTION E ver since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the statesmen of Europe—the handful of prime ministers, foreign secretaries, and chancellery officials who dealt with arcane issues of foreign policy—remained convinced that they knew how (though not when) their world would be brought to an end. The war among the advanced industrial Great Powers, they believed, would be occasioned by the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, as its vast and valuable territories excited the predatory instincts of the rival expansionist European empires. There had been a time, centuries before, when the Turks had ruled not just the Middle East but much of North Africa and Balkan Europe as well—all the way to the gates of Vienna. Now the Sultan's backward and demoralized forces were in full, if slow, retreat before the Christians. Which European powers would take, in particular, southeastern Europe for themselves—"the Eastern Question"—was commonly seen as the most explosive longrange issue in international politics. "One day the great European 49 5 0 W A L K I N G T H R O U G H M I N E F I E L D S War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans," Bismarck was quoted as saying at the end of his life. Fearing the cataclysm, with its incalculable consequences, Great Britain traditionally tried to postpone facing the issue by propping up the decaying Turkish empire. On the opposite side, Austria, later joined by Russia, pursued expansionist policies at the Sultan's expense, looking toward an eventual partition of the Ottoman domains. As so often happens when the political world focuses on a particular threat, the threat in question failed to materialize; the danger was averted. Over the course of the nineteenth century, one Christian people after another in southeastern Europe threw off the shackles of Ottoman rule without then being absorbed by a Great Power. By the first decade of the twentieth century Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece all had become at least de facto free countries. They were quarrelsome nations; some at times were aggressive rivals; and each set its own course in world affairs. They coveted the territories remaining to the Turks in Europe. By the beginning of the twentieth century Constantinople mostly had to fear these local states rather than the Great Powers. The greatest of the Great Powers—Britain, France, Germany, and even Russia—now preferred the Ottoman frontier to remain where it was. In April 1897, Russia and Austria-Hungary agreed to preserve the status quo in what remained of the Ottoman Balkans. In this respect, the chancelleries of Europe could breathe a sigh of relief. For a century they had been walking through a minefield, and they had emerged from it not merely alive but relatively unscathed. CHAPTER 8: A C H A L L E N G E FOR T H E A R C H D U K E T he Hapsburgs had served as a ruling dynasty in Europe for so long that it could easily be forgotten that the country they ruled in 1914—Austria-Hungary, or the Dual Monarchy— was of quite recent origin. It was so new that the man who created it—the emperor Franz Joseph—was still alive and ruled. In 1914, Austria-Hungary was forty-seven years old; Franz Joseph, eightyfour. The Dual Monarchy was an improvisation. There had been an urgent need of it in the 1860s when the Germans of Austria, expelled from the world that Prussia consolidated, found themselves cut off from other Germans and unable to stand on their own. A permanent alliance with the Magyar rulers of Hungary was Franz Joseph's solution in 1867. The economic provisions of the agreement were not permanent; they came up for renewal every ten years. But Austria and Hungary had interests and ambitions that sometimes were antithetical. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Franz Joseph's nephew and heir presumptive, had devoted much thought to the 51 5 2 W A L K I N G T H R O U G H M I N E F I E L D S question of how he would reconstitute the Hapsburg lands when he ascended the throne. One plan ascribed to him was to create a triple monarchy, joining Slavs to Germans and Magyars as a governing people of the empire, enabling Austro-Germans to play the Slavs off against the Magyars. He seems to have dropped that scheme in favor of others, all aimed at restoring Austrian greatness. Franz Ferdinand deplored the consequences of his country's Hungarian connection. His feelings in this respect were both known and reciprocated. It was not unreasonable to predict that when Franz Joseph died and Franz Ferdinand ascended the throne with radical constitutional changes in mind, disturbances would ensue. Austria-Hungary was a ramshackle structure, then, only with difficulty holding itself together, and maintaining its formal ranking as a Great Power in part by courtesy of the others. So in retrospect the Eastern Question—the issue of what to do with the European possessions of a collapsing Turkish empire—overlapped an emerging Austrian question: what to do with the shaky Dual Monarchy. There were those who asserted that, after the Sultan of Turkey, the Hapsburg emperor was the new Sick Man of Europe. In the deadly game of world politics, Austria-Hungary continued to hunt, but also was being hunted. The Eastern Question had been turned upside down and stood on its head. The Hapsburgs had coveted Balkan lands; now Balkan peoples coveted Hapsburg lands. Austria-Hungary was in area one of the largest states in Europe. Two of its perhaps eleven nationalities, Germans and Magyars, exercised most of the political power. In Austria the one-third of its population that was German tended to dominate the two-thirds that was not; in Hungary, the 40 percent that was Magyar ruled the 60 percent that was not. Nationalism had been sweeping Europe since the days of the French Revolution. It inspired a literature in which a repressive Austria was singled out as a villain. Thus, sinister and unbending, and an implacable enemy of the liberties of mankind, Hapsburg Austria casts a dark shadow over Europe in such works as Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma. Some, and maybe most, of the leading ardent nationalities' movements in Europe—those of the Czechs, for example, and a number of ethnicities in the Balkans—aimed at breaking up the Hapsburg Empire, or at least decentralizing it. A C H A L L E N G E F O R T H E A R C H D U K E One of Austria-Hungary's weak spots was that it ruled so many Slavic peoples—members of the largest ethnic group in Europe— and that Slavic Russia, it was feared, could exert a pull on their loyalties by sponsoring pan-Slavism. Historians tell us that the Austrian army was strong, although it had an astonishing record, going back more than a century, of losing battles and wars. The generals of the Dual Monarchy knew that they could not fight, on their own, on equal terms against Russia, with its vast expanses and enormous population. In order to stand a chance Austria-Hungary would require the protection of Germany. C H A P T E R 9: EXPLOSIVE GERMANY s it entered the twentieth century, the German state was still in its infancy. Yet in many ways it already had become—or JL JL_perhaps had been from the start—out of date in its political structure. In the thirty years of its existence, Germany had stopped being an essentially agricultural country and had surged ahead to become the Continent's most dynamic commercial and industrial power. One result was that the country was now divided against itself. As noted before, farming interests still demanded protective tariffs in order to survive, while industry now pushed for the free trade it needed in order to thrive. This was but one of the many contradictions that made Kaiser Wilhelm IPs Reich so difficult to fathom— and to govern. At the cutting edge of the modern world in some respects, Germany was obsolete in politics, and therefore unable to reconcile the diverse trends to which modernism gave rise. According to Volker R. Berghahn, "the salient feature of German domestic politics before 1914 was . . . an almost total impasse." He quotes Gustav Schmidt to explain: "The notion of several groups 54 E X P L O S I V E G E R M A N Y blocking each other and hence blocking a way out of the deadlock offers 'the key to an understanding of German politics in the last years before the war.' " Some, under the spell of Nietzsche, believed that the solution was to dynamite society. It was not easy to identify an alternative that did not involve violence. Until the nineteenth century the German peoples of Europe had been fragmented. In the former Holy Roman Empire alone, they dwelt in hundreds of principalities, cities, and other quasisovereignties. Napoleon restructured them. The Allies who defeated Napoleon tried their hand at restructuring too. In the end, unification came from within the German-speaking world. The country we know today as Germany derives from the German Empire, which was created through a series of wars culminating in 1870-71 by militarist, Protestant Prussia, led by Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck's new unified Germany contained less than half the German peoples of Europe. It consisted of the kingdom of Prussia, three other kingdoms, eighteen duchies, and three free cities. But Bismarck deliberately excluded Austria, which had led the German states of Europe. He did so, of course, in order to secure Prussia's own leadership in German Europe. This also had the effect of ensuring a Protestant majority in the German federation. A later Chancellor of Germany, Prince Bernhard von Bulow, reminded his government's representatives abroad in 1906 that if the Germanspeaking Austrians were to be incorporated into Germany, "We shall thereby receive an increase of about fifteen million Catholics so that the Protestants would become a minority . . . the proportion of strength between the Protestants and the Catholics would become similar to that which at the time led to the Thirty Years War, i.e., a virtual dissolution of the German empire." In Germany, Bismarck had chosen to bring into the political world a smaller country that he and his fellow Prussians could control rather than a larger one that they could not, and that continued to be Berlin's preference. Yet it became Germany's belief that, in case of war, Austria would be indispensable as an ally, even though Austria was weaker than Germany. The continued existence of the Hapsburg Empire was viewed in Berlin as a vital German interest, indeed, perhaps as Germany's main vital interest in international politics. 5 6 W A L K I N G T H R O U G H M I N E F I E L D S Prussia, undemocratic and militaristic in its culture, was controlled by its army and the largely impoverished landowning Junker class that led its officer corps. In turn, Prussia exerted considerable control, and in time of war almost total control, over the rest of Germany. Germany, by industrializing rapidly, made itself into the economic leader of the Continent, but in doing so necessarily converted much of its population into an industrial proletariat. The workers could not be admitted into the officer corps of the army without diluting the aristocratic Prussian character of the corps—and the regime it supported. So Germany, despite harboring ambitions to dominate Europe and perhaps even the world, deliberately chose not to increase the size of its army to the extent that would be required to realize such expansionist dreams. Admiral Alfred Tirpitz explained in 1896 that in the end the armed forces existed "to suppress internal revolutions." The very industrial revolution that was making Germany the greatest country on the Continent was at the same time generating forces that were threatening the regime. It was only one of the many contradictions in Germany's policies. Driving Germany's industrial growth was the country's educational system. Here, too, was a contradiction. The best-educated general public in Europe was unlikely in the long run to tolerate an archaic government structure or a leadership drawn exclusively from a narrow pool. Long after the Great War, sympathetic foreign observers were to make the argument that Germany's increasing greatness should have been peacefully accommodated by the other powers: that they should have appeased Berlin. Put this way, the responsibility for the outbreak of war falls on the shoulders of the main countries—Britain, France, Russia, and the United States—that eventually stood in the way of Germany's rise to world power. They gave Germany, the argument runs, no way to assert itself other than through war. As the French historian Elie Halevy understandingly put it in the 1930s: "But suppose that, presently, one nation is found to have gained immensely in military or economic strength at th...