The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (105 page)

Some of Nicholas’s ministers were more fortunate. Izvolsky never
returned from Paris to Russia and lived on in France with a small allowance from the French government. Sazonov, the Foreign Minister, was dismissed early in 1917. He joined the anti-Bolshevik forces of Admiral Kolchak in the civil war and ended in exile in France, dying in Nice in 1927. Sukhomlinov was blamed for Russia’s failures in the war and in 1916 the tsar abandoned his War Minister and allowed him to be tried on the charges of corruption, neglect of Russia’s armies, and spying for Germany and Austria-Hungary. The corruption was no doubt true but the government was able to produce only the feeblest evidence to support the other charges. The new provisional government which took power early in 1917 threw him and his beautiful wife, Ekaterina, into jail and resumed the trial in the late summer. Ekaterina was acquitted but Sukhomlinov was sentenced to life imprisonment, although in May 1918 the Bolsheviks, who were now in power, released him as part of a general amnesty. He escaped from Russia into Finland that autumn and made his way to Berlin, where he wrote the almost inevitable memoirs and tried to survive in extreme poverty. Ekaterina, who had by now found a new rich protector, stayed on; the Bolsheviks apparently shot her in 1921. One morning in February 1926 policemen in Berlin found the body of an old man on a park bench. Sukhomlinov, who was once one of the richest and most powerful men in Russia, had frozen to death overnight.
⁹

At the war’s end Hoyos, the hawk who had helped to obtain Germany’s blank cheque for Austria-Hungary, briefly contemplated suicide as he contemplated his own responsibility for the war and the end of the Dual Monarchy but thought better of it and died peacefully in 1937. Berchtold, the Chancellor, resigned during the early stages of the war in protest against the short-sighted refusal of the emperor and his colleagues to give Italy pieces of the Austrian territory it desired in order to ensure its neutrality. He lived until 1942, on one of his estates in Hungary, and is buried at his castle at Buchlau, scene of the fateful meeting between his predecessor Aehrenthal and Izvolsky which set off the Bosnian crisis of 1908. Conrad, the chief of staff of Austria-Hungary who had finally got Franz Joseph’s permission to marry Gina von Rein-inghaus in 1915, was dismissed by the new emperor 1917. After the war he and Gina lived simply in the Austrian mountains and he passed the time by studying English – his ninth language – going for walks with
ex-King Ferdinand of Bulgaria and writing a huge self-justifying memoir in five volumes. (There was to be a flood of such memoirs in the 1920s as the key players tried to exonerate themselves and cast the blame on others for the war.) Conrad died in 1925 and was given a state funeral by the government of the new republic of Austria. Gina lived to see Austria absorbed into the Third German Reich and the Nazis always treated her with great deference. She died in 1961.

Asquith came under increasing criticism for his lackadaisical handling of the war effort and was forced to resign at the end of 1916. His successor was Lloyd George, who, despite his antipathy to war, proved to be a strong wartime leader. The rivalry between the two men split the Liberal Party, which has never recovered its former strength. Grey, who was nearly blind, also went into opposition but agreed to be British ambassador to the United States at the end of the war. In his memoirs he continued to deny that he had ever made any commitments to France. Shortly before he died he published a book on the charm of birds. Sir Henry Wilson, who had done so much to build the relationship between Britain and France, ended the war as a field marshal. In 1922 he became security adviser to the government of Northern Ireland which had remained part of the United Kingdom when the South became independent. He was assassinated shortly afterwards by two Irish nationalists on the steps of his house in London.

Poincaré remained in office throughout the war to preside over France’s victory and the restoration to it of Alsace and Lorraine. His term as President ended in 1920 but he came back as Prime Minister twice in the 1920s. He retired because of ill health in the summer of 1929 but survived to see Hitler and the Nazis take power in 1933, dying the following year. Dreyfus volunteered to fight in the army which had disgraced him when war broke out and served throughout; he died in 1935 and his funeral passed through the Place de la Concorde which was lined with troops.

In Germany, Bethmann was forced out of office in the summer of 1917 by the duo of Hindenburg and Ludendorff when he tried to oppose their resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping and their expansionist war aims. Bethmann retreated to his beloved estate at Hohenfinow and spent the few remaining years of his life trying to justify himself and his policies as well as denying German
responsibility for the war. He died in 1920 aged sixty-four. His rival for the Kaiser’s ear, Tirpitz, dabbled in right-wing politics after the war and maintained to his death in 1930 that his naval policy had been right and blamed everyone else from the Kaiser to the army for Germany’s defeat.

Wilhelm survived for years, bombastic, bossy, and self-righteous to the last. During the war he had become ‘the Shadow Kaiser’; his generals did all in his name but paid him little attention in reality. Wilhelm set up his headquarters in the little Belgian town of Spa behind the lines on the Western Front and passed his days in a routine of early morning rides, a couple of hours’ work (which consisted largely of awarding decorations and sending telegrams of congratulation to his officers), visits to hospitals, sightseeing and walks in the afternoons, and then dinner with his generals and bed at eleven. He liked going close enough to the front to hear the gunfire and would proudly say back at Spa that he had been in the war. As Hitler would in a later war, he liked to dream about what he would do after the conflict had ended. Wilhelm was full of plans for encouraging motor racing and for reforming society in Berlin. There were to be no more parties in hotels; the aristocracy must all build their own palaces.
¹⁰
As the war went on his staff noticed that he looked lined and was easily depressed. They took to keeping the increasingly bad news from him.
¹¹

As Germany’s defeat became clear in the autumn of 1918, his military made plans for their Kaiser to die heroically in a last charge onto the battlefield. Wilhelm would have none of this and continued to hope, in vain, that he could keep his throne. As the situation deteriorated in Germany, he was finally persuaded on 9 November to go to the Netherlands by special train and Germany became a republic the same day. Wilhelm’s first request when he arrived at the estate of a Dutch aristocrat who had agreed to take him in was ‘a cup of real good English tea’.
¹²
In spite of pressure from the Allies, the Dutch refused to extradite him and he lived out his days in a small palace at Doorn. He kept himself busy by chopping down trees – 20,000 by the end of the 1920s; writing his memoirs, which, not surprisingly, showed no remorse for the war or for the policies leading up to it; reading long extracts in English from P. G. Wodehouse to his staff; fulminating against the Weimar Republic, socialists and Jews; and blaming the German people for letting him down while still believing they would one day call him back.
He took note of the rise of Hitler and the Nazis with mixed feelings; he found Hitler lower class and vulgar but agreed with many of his ideas, especially where they meant restoring Germany’s greatness. He warned, though: ‘It will run away with him, as it ran away with me.’
¹³
Wilhelm welcomed the start of the Second World War and the string of early German victories with delight. He died on 4 June 1941, less than three weeks before Hitler invaded Russia, and is buried at Doorn.
¹⁴

Was he to blame for the Great War? Was Tirpitz? Grey? Moltke? Berchtold? Poincaré? Or was no one to blame? Should we look instead at institutions or ideas? General staffs with too much power, absolutist governments, Social Darwinism, the cult of the offensive, nationalism? There are so many questions and as many answers again. Perhaps the most we can hope for is to understand as best we can those individuals, who had to make the choices between war and peace, and their strengths and weaknesses, their loves, hatreds and biases. To do that we must also understand their world, with its assumptions. We must remember, as the decision-makers did, what had happened before that last crisis of 1914 and what they had learned from the Moroccan crises, the Bosnian one, or the events of the First Balkan Wars. Europe’s very success in surviving those earlier crises paradoxically led to a dangerous complacency in the summer of 1914 that, yet again, solutions would be found at the last moment and the peace would be maintained. And if we want to point fingers from the twenty-first century we can accuse those who took Europe into war of two things. First, a failure of imagination in not seeing how destructive such a conflict would be and second, their lack of courage to stand up to those who said there was no choice left but to go war. There are always choices.

Acknowledgements

Yet again I have been extremely fortunate in the help I have had from many people in the writing of this book. They deserve credit for what is good about it and I will take responsibility for its shortcomings.

I start, as I should, with my wonderful research assistants who have been indefatigable, highly organised and helpful to the point where I see them as essential collaborators. Dawn Berry, Yulia Naumova, Rebecca Snow, Katharina Uhl, and Troy Vettese unearthed and analysed wonderful materials in several languages and showed an unerring instinct for what was important and interesting. In the last stages, Dawn stepped in to read through the manuscript, sort out the endnotes and wrestle my bibliography into shape. In Toronto, Mischa Kaplan also contributed useful work.

Over the past few years I have had the great pleasure and benefit of being part of Oxford and of St Antony’s College. While there have been times when I have felt like the character in the Monty Python sketch who complained loudly that his brain hurt, I have never ceased to be amazed and deeply grateful for the extraordinary intellectual and social life here. I have learned much and keep learning from my colleagues and students. I have benefited greatly too from being able to use the resources of the Bodleian and the College Library.

The Governing Body of St Antony’s College generously gave me a leave of absence for the academic year 2012–13 and I owe a particular thanks to Professor Rosemary Foot, who selflessly took on the role of Acting Warden, which, to no one’s surprise, she did with her customary integrity and efficiency. I am also grateful to my colleagues who kept
the considerable work involved in the administration of the College flowing smoothly in my absence. They include the Sub Warden, Alex Pravda, the Estates Bursars, Alan Taylor and his successor Kirsten Gill-ingham, the Domestic Bursar, Peter Robinson, the Development Director, Ranjit Majumdar, the Registrar, Margaret Couling, my Personal Assistant Penny Cooke, and their colleagues.

While I have been in Oxford I have also remained part of another great institution, the University of Toronto and I have continued to benefit from contact with my colleagues and students there and by being able to use its excellent library. I am particularly grateful to the Munk Centre of Global Affairs, its founder Peter Munk and its Director Janice Stein, for giving me a fellowship there for the year that I was in Toronto writing this book and who made me part of its lively and stimulating academic community.

Five years ago I did not intend to write a book on the outbreak of the Great War; the path had been too well-trodden and I had other projects underway. When Andrew Franklin of Profile Books put the idea to me, I resisted – and then found that I spent a summer thinking about it. So I owe him perhaps a small grudge but a much bigger thanks for getting me involved in an enthralling subject. Without him and his wonderful team at Profile – including Penny Daniel, Daniel Crewe and the late and much-missed Peter Carson – this book could not have taken shape. And I owe an equal debt of gratitude to my publishers in the United States at Random House and in Canada at Penguin. Kate Medina in New York and Diane Turbide in Toronto are model publishers whose constructive comments and suggestions have made this book much better than it would have been. Cecilia Mackay is an outstanding picture researcher and Trevor Horwood is her equal as a copy-editor. I am also lucky to have had as cheerleaders on what has sometimes seemed like a long journey Caroline Dawnay, agent and friend, and, in Canada, the endlessly enthusiastic Michael Levine.

I would like to thank the curators of the Bodleian Library and Sir Brian Crowe for permission to quote from the Eyre Crowe papers. Thanks too to Professor Laird Easton and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for permission to use his translations of Count Harry Kessler’s diaries. Extracts from Queen Victoria’s journals were used by kind permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Henry Kissinger, Alistair Horne, Norman Davies, Michael Howard, Eugene Rogan, Avi Shlaim, Paul Betts, Alan Alexandroff, Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann and Liaquat Ahamed all kindly took the time from their own work to discuss my ideas with me and give their advice. Many friends and family have offered encouragement as well as hot meals throughout, including Thomas Barcsay, David Blewett, Robert Bothwell, Gwyneth Daniel, Arthur Sheps, and Andrew Watson. I am always grateful that I have a large and friendly family who kept an eye on me and prevented me from becoming a complete hermit living only with the ghosts of Austrian archdukes, Russian counts, German generals or British Cabinet ministers. Ann MacMillan and Peter Snow, Thomas and Catharina MacMillan, Margot Finley and Daniel Snow also read parts of the manuscript and, as they always do, made invaluable comments and criticisms. My best and most painstaking reader is my mother Eluned MacMillan who, yet again, read every word. Although it pains her to criticise her children, she was both honest and very helpful. My deepest thanks to you all.