A Higher Form of Killing (9 page)

Other influential German leaders proposed even more far-reaching war aims, demanding greater territorial concessions by France and land seizures from Russia. One politician demonstrated Germany’s detestation of being patronized by Britain by including among his principal war aims “elimination of the intolerable tutelage exercised by Britain over Germany in all questions of world politics.” In a memorandum submitted to government on the same day as von Bethmann Hollweg dispatched his war aims, the powerful German industrialist August Thyssen demanded the annexation of Belgium, much of northern France including the Pas de Calais, and in the northeast the territories on which stood the French frontier fortresses. To the east he demanded the Baltic states and perhaps the Don Basin, the Caucasus, and the Crimea for Germany. His prime justification was to secure “Germany’s supply of raw materials.” Noteworthily, none of these various submissions spelled out what would be the strategy toward Britain, merely implying it should be humble toward Germany and as a result of other changes commercially and militarily less powerful.

Von Bethmann Hollweg and the others were to be disappointed in their dreams of a speedy victory. The German armies in the west were held and in places pushed back at the battles of Mons, the Marne, and the first battle of Ypres. Thereafter the front lines quickly began to stabilize even if at Ypres the British were left in an exposed salient. By New Year’s Day 1915, a line of trenches 450 miles long stretched from Switzerland to the North Sea, across which 110 Allied divisions—as yet only ten of them British—faced 100 German ones. Over three hundred thousand Frenchmen and nearly a quarter of a million Germans were already dead. Britain had lost some thirty thousand men, nearly one fifth of its small regular army. The war of movement on the western front was over. Stalemate had begun. In the east too stalemate was approaching. The Austro-Hungarian army had lost over a million and a quarter men and the Russians one and a half million.

Across the Atlantic the world’s other emerging great power had watched Europe’s disintegration into war with both alarm and a degree of detachment and disbelief. The
North Dakota
Daily Herald
said of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, “One archduke more or less makes little difference.” The
Philadelphia Public Ledger
quipped in addressing Austro-Hungary: “If the Serbs defeat you it will ‘Servia right’!” The
Dallas News
joined many in Europe in thinking the war would soon be over, suggesting it would be “long before the cotton season is.” A more serious commentator considered that the great safeguard “against the armies and navies Europe has gathered for war is that Europe is not rich enough to use them and is too human and humane to want to use them.” However, Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium turned sympathy toward the Allies. “As if by a lightning flash,” wrote a columnist, “the issue was made plain; the issue of the sacredness of law; the rule of the soldier or the rule of the citizen; the rule of fear or of law.”

Such emphasis on the rule of law chimed well with the views of fifty-seven-year-old Woodrow Wilson, then in the second year of his first term. He had been a student of law and history, and subsequently a professor at Princeton and then president of the university. His secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, defeated three times for the presidency, had been essential to Wilson securing the Democratic presidential nomination. Like Wilson a lawyer, but also a lifelong fundamentalist Christian and teetotaler and more radical than Wilson, he championed labor rights against big business.

A strong supporter of the Hague Treaties and of arbitration, Bryan saw the United States as a “republic . . . becoming the supreme moral factor in disputes.” One of his first acts as secretary of state in 1913 was to persuade most of the major powers (including Great Britain and France but not Germany) to agree to treaties committing themselves, to some extent at least, to the use of cooling-off periods and of arbitration to settle international disputes. At the signing ceremony he presented the diplomats with paperweights cast in the symbolic form of ploughshares from old swords from Washington Naval Yard. He supplemented his income by frequent performances on the lecture circuit. His audiences’ response convinced him they shared his love of peace, but many American commentators doubted whether Bryan’s intellect and political acumen matched his eloquence and undoubted sincerity—a view shared by diplomats with whom he came into contact. British ambassador Sir Cecil Spring-Rice thought talking to Bryan was “like writing on ice” and Bryan himself “a jellyfish . . . incapable of forming a settled judgement on anything outside party politics.” Continental Europeans gagged when served nonalcoholic grape juice by the teetotaler as a substitute for wine at his diplomatic receptions.

Immediately before the outbreak of war Wilson was preoccupied with the illness of his wife Ellen, who was dying of kidney disease. They were a devoted couple—he referred to them as “wedded sweethearts.” When he first heard of Austro-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia, Wilson put his hands to his face and said: “I can think of nothing, nothing when my dear one is suffering.” Ellen died on August 6. When the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, who had lost his own wife in a carriage accident a few years before, wrote him a letter of condolence, Wilson replied, “My hope is that you will regard me as your friend. I feel that we are bound together by common principle and purpose.” One of Grey’s main aims in the early years of the war would be to maintain that sense of shared understanding and empathy with Wilson.

Nevertheless, Wilson was as committed as Bryan to maintaining U.S. neutrality and, if possible, to mediating peace. On August 3 he told a press conference that America stood ready to help the rest of the world resolve their differences peacefully and to “reap a permanent glory out of doing it.” On August 18 he asked his people to be “neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls . . . impartial in thought as well as in action” so that the United States could “speak the counsels of peace” and “play the impartial mediator.” Early in September he would make his first tentative offer to Germany to mediate, which would be rebuffed on the grounds that Germany had had war forced on it and that accepting mediation at this stage would be “interpreted as a sign of weakness and not understood by our people.”

Even before war had begun, Wilson had shown his determination to ensure neutrality among his officers and officials by muzzling the now retired Admiral Mahan, who had long warned Britain through the press of the need to thwart German commercial and colonial ambitions before it was too late. On August 3 he advised the British navy to strike at once, or Germany would defeat France and Russia and turn on Britain. He also suggested that Britain should immediately make a preemptive attack on Italy, then teetering on the brink of joining Germany and Austro-Hungary because of a previous alliance. Under pressure from public opinion, not least from Italian Americans, Wilson initiated a special order on August 6 that prohibited officers of the navy and army of the United States, active or retired, from commenting publicly on the military or political situation in Europe. Mahan asked to be exempted from the order and was refused. He died less than four months later on December 1, 1914, before he could see many of his ideas on sea power vindicated.

Sharing a language and increasingly a common popular culture, the American public with the exception of nearly all German Americans and some Irish Americans were generally sympathetic to Britain. The kaiser would complain in early October, “England has managed to make the whole world believe that we are the guilty party.” However, in reality the actions of his troops were mainly responsible for increased anti-German sentiment in the United States and elsewhere as reports emerged of war crimes committed by them during the early days of the German invasion of Belgium and France. Fearing or believing they were under attack by “citizen guerrillas,” German troops routinely took hostages to ensure good behavior. They shot at least 110 citizens at Andenne Seilles near Namur and burned the town down. At Leffe on the outskirts of Dinant, German soldiers lined up hostages—men, women, and children—in the town square and executed them by firing squad. The dead exceeded six hundred.

The most well-publicized atrocity was at Louvain in Belgium. After German troops had occupied the city, the Belgian army launched a counterattack on August 25. The German soldiers panicked and over the next five days burned down much of the city including its world-famous ancient library with its 230,000 precious volumes, killed more than two hundred civilians, and ejected the remaining forty-two thousand inhabitants by force including sixteen hundred men, women, and children they deported to Germany. A German officer told an American diplomat who visited Louvain on August 28: “We shall wipe [Louvain] out, not one stone will stand upon another! Not one, I tell you. We will teach them to respect Germans. For generations people will come here to see what we have done!”

Such actions were of course in direct breach of the laws of war agreed to internationally at The Hague. British prime minister Herbert Asquith claimed it was “the greatest crime against civilisation and culture since the Thirty Years War—the sack of Louvain . . . a shameless holocaust . . . lit up by blind barbarian vengeance.” Many in Britain called for an announcement that when the war was won the kaiser would be exiled to Saint Helena as Napoleon had been after his defeat at Waterloo. Others called for those responsible to be tried as war criminals. The dean of Peterborough Cathedral in England encapsulated this view: “We may be far still from the final abolition of war, but we should not be far from the end of atrocities in war if those responsible for them in whatever rank had the risk before their eyes that they might have to suffer just penalties as ‘common felons.’ ”

Unwilling for their nation to be seen as book burners and murderers, ninety-three German academics, scientists, and intellectuals, including the Nobel Prize winner Wilhelm Röntgen and future winner Max Planck, as well as the composer Engelbert Humperdinck and the theater director Max Reinhardt, signed a “Proclamation to the Civilised World” protesting Germany’s right to have carried out reprisals and claiming that “if it had not been for German soldiers, German culture would long have been swept away.”

The most likely source of friction between the Allies and the United States and other neutrals early in the war was action by the British navy to enforce a blockade against goods being shipped to Germany. On August 6 the U.S. government asked all belligerents to commit themselves to following the rules laid down for the conduct of maritime warfare in the Declaration of London which—though not ratified by either the United States or the United Kingdom—represented in their view the consensus of world opinion. In line with Grey’s wish to do all that he could to preserve friendly relations with the United States, Britain responded on behalf of the Allies with a note that seemed on the surface an affirmative until, in what could be construed as “small print,” it reserved rights “essential to the conduct of naval operations.”

On the second day of the war, August 5, the German navy sent out a requisitioned excursion steamer, the
Königin Luise
, crudely disguised as a British North Sea ferry. In direct contravention of the agreement at the Second Hague Conference which prohibited the use of unattached mines that would not become harmless after being in the sea for an hour, she began laying her cargo of 180 mines in the North Sea. HMS
Amphion
, a British light cruiser, caught up with and sank her but as she was returning to port hit one of the floating mines the
Königin Luise
had laid and herself sank with considerable loss of life including most of the survivors she had picked up from the
Königin Luise
.

In the years immediately before the war German engineers had achieved a breakthrough in submarine design. Beginning with the Danzig-built
U-19
class, all German submarines were fitted with diesel engines. Diesel was cleaner than the petrol or paraffin that fueled earlier U-boats and had made them, when running on the surface, “almost as visible as a smoke-belching steamer.” It also had a higher flashpoint which made it safer. However, the major advantage was the reliability, power, and endurance of the new engines. Designed by MAN of Augsburg, they gave the submarines the best range—some five thousand miles—and depth performance in the world, meaning they could now be exploited as independent, offensive, strategic weapons rather than primarily defensively. The German navy began the war with twelve such newly built diesel-powered craft.

An event on September 22, 1914, revealed the potential of even its older submarines. Otto Weddigen, captain of the
U-9
patrolling off the Dutch coast, spotted three four-funneled British cruisers steaming line abreast straight toward him at a modest ten knots. They were the obsolescent British cruiser HMS
Cressy
and her sister ships, the
Aboukir
and the
Hogue
. Weddigen immediately attacked. Hit by a single torpedo, the
Aboukir
began to list as water flowed into the longitudinal coal bunkers running the length of the ship which had been designed to withstand shells not torpedoes. She capsized within twenty-five minutes. The
Hogue
, believing a mine had caused the explosion, approached to pick up survivors only to be hit by two torpedoes and sink in ten minutes. The
Cressy
then also tried to rescue the drowning and was torpedoed in turn. Within barely an hour, a single unseen enemy—an old German submarine—had destroyed three cruisers and killed 1,459 British sailors, about a thousand more than the number Nelson lost at Trafalgar.