Europe's Last Summer (14 page)

One concern was Albania, a country created by the European powers as a buffer to contain Serbian expansionism. The assumption had been that it would be Austro-German in orientation; indeed, Albania had been provided with a German monarch. Yet Italy—nominally the ally of Austria and Germany in the Triple Alliance—was maneuvering to achieve hegemony in the newly created country. Italy was becoming a rival and perhaps an enemy.

Was Russia a concern? Wilhelm and Franz Ferdinand tended to think not, and favored a thaw in relations with the Czar. However, some in the foreign office in Vienna feared that, as in 1912, pan-Slav Russians would be able to unite all the Balkan countries—only this time against Germany and Austria instead of against Turkey.

Wilhelm thought that the Balkan states would remain disunited. The trick was to back the right combination of them. Romania was at the top of his list. Its monarch had secretly pledged—personally—to support the Triple Alliance. That did not bind his country. Wilhelm and Franz Ferdinand hoped for a public and secure commitment.

A problem was that Austria was bound to Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, and Hungary and Romania had an apparently irreconcilable conflict—one that endures today. Franz Ferdinand was fiercely anti-Hungarian, and wanted to ally with Romania at Hungary's expense. The Kaiser would not face the issue; he admired Hungary's premier, Count István Tisza, and felt that the Hungary-Romania conflict could somehow be made to go away. He also wanted to bring in Greece as an ally, but lacked convincing evidence that Greece would wish to do so. Finally, he hoped to reconcile Serbia and Austria—much to the disgust of the Austrians, who tried in vain to convince him that Serbia was a menace that somehow had to be eliminated. In effect, the Kaiser was proposing to re-create the victorious alliance of the Second Balkan War, but this time have it led by Germany and the Dual Monarchy. He argued for going with what had been the winning side.

Berchtold saw things the other way around. The Dual Monarchy's foreign minister did not believe that Romania would be an ally of Austria's; it would not back Austria-Hungary because of the Hungarian conflict, and the Dual Monarchy would therefore have to ally with Romania's enemy, Bulgaria. Bulgaria had ties with Turkey, so Greece would have to be thrown on the other side. Therefore Berchtold would essentially reconstitute the alliance pattern of the Second Balkan War too, but he would take over what had been not the winning, but the losing side.

On the eve of the world crisis, there was no agreement in Berlin or Vienna as to who was the enemy or what was the quarrel in the troublesome
Balkans.

As regards Europe as a whole, the two empires were reasonably clear as to who was on what side: they themselves, maybe joined by Italy, on one side; Russia and France, maybe with England, on the other. Moreover, the two chiefs of the general staff, Helmuth von Moltke in Germany and Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf in Austria-Hungary, were in close touch with one another and sometimes discussed their respective war plans. Both generals often urged launching
preventive war.

Indeed, in the words of
Hew Strachan, "Conrad first proposed preventive war against Serbia in 1906, and he did so again in 1908–9, in 1912–13, in October 1913, and May 1914: between 1 January 1913 and 1 January 1914 he proposed a Serbian war twenty-five times."

But the generals were subordinated to monarchs who opted for peace. And in Germany, Moltke also was opposed by Tirpitz, who wanted a cold war—at least for many years to come—rather than a hot one, and whose focus was on a conflict with England rather than with the land powers of France and Russia. Then, too, lobbying against Moltke was the ministry of war, which wanted to keep the officer corps small enough to ensure Prussian control of Germany— which was a level too low to win a war.

Even Moltke, in the circumstances of 1913, had cautioned against launching a war because it was the wrong time to do so. He continued to believe "that a European war is bound to come sooner or later, in which the issue will be one of a struggle between Germandom and Slavdom." But, in his view, a war should not be initiated until public opinion could be rallied around the cause. In Moltke's words: "When starting a world war one has to think very carefully."

As the twentieth century dawned, Europeans were richer and more powerful than anybody ever had been before. They should also have felt more secure than anybody had felt before. But they did not. They—or at least their governments—were in the grip of fear. They sensed the tremors. Where or when, they did not know, but they were convinced an earthquake was going to strike.

Across the ocean, at least one American statesman was sufficiently attuned to European realities to feel the same thing. His name was Edward House. He could speak for the President, and he decided to try his hand at preventing the cataclysm that threatened.

CHAPTER 17: AN AMERICAN
TRIES TO STOP IT

New York City, May 16, 1914. An immense crowd gathered at the docks to witness the departures of passengers on the transatlantic ocean liner
Imperator
bound for Europe. Among those who could be observed boarding the vessel was Edward House: Colonel House, to give him his honorary Texas title.

House, aged fifty-five, was described by the
New York Sun
as "a slender, middle-aged man with a gray, close-cropped moustache, well dressed, calm-looking" who walked quietly but firmly. He spoke quietly too, at times in tones that seemed silken.

He was a lifelong insider in politics, although he was never a candidate for public office. He was someone to whom others confided their secrets. He may have been the best listener of his time. Those who spoke with him came away with the conviction that he had understood them, which usually was true, and that he fully sympathized with them, which often was not.

A man of independent wealth, on familiar terms with the great figures of Wall Street, he lived in Manhattan while maintaining a residence and his political power base in his home state of Texas. When needed, he commuted by train to Washington, D.C., to meet at the White House with his best friend and closest associate, the first-term, reform-minded American chief executive Woodrow Wilson, whom House had helped elect to the presidency in the freak election of 1912. In that election the two Republican candidates, former President Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive, and incumbent President
William Howard Taft, had split the Republican majority between them, allowing Wilson—the candidate of the minority party, the Democrats—to slip through to victory with less than 50 percent of the popular vote, though far more than half of the electoral college.

Woodrow Wilson was one of the oddest men ever elected to the presidency. A recluse who felt at ease only with women and children, he lacked a taste for politics or a liking for politicians, finding deals and compromises distasteful, and political ambition—except his own—sordid.

Serendipity brought Wilson together with House in the 1912 election. House became his alter ego. Once Wilson was elected, to a large extent House took charge of the political aspects of the presidency: the chores that Wilson either could not or would not do for himself. House often interviewed those who wanted jobs or favors from the new administration. If there were deals to be made or trades to be transacted, he did them. Scholars continue to dispute the respective contributions of the two men to the positive accomplishments of the Wilson administration, but House played a key role in such important matters as the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank, tariff reform, and the institution of the income tax.

In the field of foreign affairs, at least in the opening two years of the Wilson presidency, it was House, a gifted student of international politics, who took an interest in European developments, while Wilson, who had no background in the field, did not.

House noted, in the spring of 1914: "the President had given very little thought to the existing situation in Europe." He himself was quite concerned by what he saw and foresaw. House apparently was almost alone among American statesmen in understanding the implications of the Balkan wars, in sensing that they could end by threatening the
peace and stability of the world.

To head off the dangers that he perceived ahead, House proposed to go to Europe to negotiate the creation of a new international structure that would bring a lasting peace among all the Great Powers. Wilson gave his full and admiring support to the endeavor. House's own private name for the mission on which he was to embark was "the great adventure."

House's effectiveness, and his value to the President, were due in large part to his discretion. Secrets were confided to him because it was believed that he could be trusted not to reveal them. Of course, this aroused widespread popular curiosity. Picturing House as a man of mystery, a newspaper editor told one of his reporters: "House sees nobody. He can't be reached. Nobody knows his address, and his telephone number is private." But that was an exaggeration; House made himself available, as good politicians do. Thus aboard the
Imperator,
and although preoccupied by thoughts of his secret mission, he found time to deal with a cable from a woman asking that her husband, a U.S. consular official, be promoted from a posting in Rio to one in London. "Even at sea there is no rest from the office seekers" was House's comment.

The mission with which House had entrusted himself was to persuade Germany and Britain to join with the United States in an alliance to keep the peace. It was a long-held idea of his that the chief powers of Europe had accumulated so much power in their hands that, together with America, they could prevent major wars.

It was an idea that was, so to speak, in the air. Theodore Roosevelt at one time had envisaged the creation of a cartel of perhaps five Great Powers to keep the world at peace. Ideas for a league of nations also surfaced from time to time in Great Britain's Liberal administration.

Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate who had become one of the world's wealthiest men, had pursued a project not unlike House's a few years earlier. Aiming at an alliance of "Teutonic nations," Carnegie asked rhetorically, "Why should these Teutonic nations ever quarrel?" He imagined that he had lined up the support of the British government, notably of Prime Minister
Herbert Asquith and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, for his plan. For it to come into existence, Carnegie believed all that was required was that Kaiser Wilhelm II should take the lead.

"It lies today in the power of one man to found this league of peace," Carnegie explained in 1907. "It is in the hands of the German emperor alone of all men, that the power to abolish war seems to rest." For reasons not entirely clear, Carnegie thought his plans were ruined by the death of England's
King Edward VII in 1910.

Like Carnegie, House believed that he had the support of the British government for his scheme and that the key to its viability was to gain the support of the Kaiser. In the spring of 1914, immediately upon disembarking in Europe, House therefore made his way to Germany. Aboard ship and on arriving in Germany, House sounded out opinion among well-placed and well-informed Germans and what he heard boded ill for the cause of peace. From Berlin he wrote to the President on May 29 that what he had learned thus far "tended to confirm the opinion as to the nearly impossible chance of bettering conditions." Indeed, he wrote, "the situation is extraordinary. It is jingoism run stark mad." House predicted "an awful cataclysm" unless he or Wilson took a hand in events because "No one in Europe can do it. There is too much hatred, too many jealousies."

In Russia there was a violent press campaign against Austria. In Austria there was a violent press campaign against Russia. The
Pan-German League, a well-connected pressure group in Germany, announced (April 19, 1914) that "France and Russia are preparing for the decisive struggle with Germany and Austria-Hungary and they intend to strike at the first opportunity." A
newspaper headline (March 11, 1914) warned Germans that "a war, the like of which history has never seen, is approaching."

In House's analysis Russia and France would "close in" on Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary if Britain gave the word. But Britain hesitated to do so: if Germany were crushed, who would be left to restrain Russia? Still, if Germany continued to threaten English naval supremacy, London would have no choice but to meet Berlin's challenge.

Hence,
House's peace plan: an agreement between Britain and Germany to limit the size of their respective navies, the agreement to be brokered by the United States. This could bring about the essentially peaceful world that America desired, but—always the realist— House cautioned that there might be "some disadvantage to us" in Britain and Germany getting together.

Tirpitz pointed to a different flaw in House's plan. "He disclaimed any desire for conquest, and insisted that it was peace that Germany wanted, but the way to maintain it was to put fear into the hearts of her enemies." House wanted Germany to stop expanding its navy, but Tirpitz desired instead "to increase its expansion."

House's main goal was to set up a meeting with Germany's ruler, and he achieved it. On June 1, in the course of a day-long festival that included religious ceremonies, parades, and the awarding of medals, House was accorded a private personal meeting with the Kaiser that lasted a half hour.

House's diary entry indicates that the two men discussed "the European situation as it affected the Anglo-Saxon race." In the Kaiser's expressed view, England, Germany, and the United States represented Christian civilization. Latins and Slavs were semi-barbarous, he believed, and also unreliable, so England was wrong to ally with France and Russia. On the other hand, the Teutonic core— Germany, Britain, America—should ally with all the other Europeans in defense of Western civilization "as against the Oriental races."