The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (3 page)

The military plans that came along with the arms race and the alliances have often been blamed for creating a doomsday machine that once started could not be stopped. In the late nineteenth century every European power except Britain had a conscript army, with a small proportion of their trained men actually in uniform and a far larger number back in civilian society as reserves. When war threatened huge armies could be called into being in days. Mass mobilisation relied on detailed planning so that every man reached his right unit with the right equipment, and units were then brought together in the correct configurations and moved, usually by rail, to their designated posts. The timetables were works of art but too often they were inflexible, not allowing, as in the case of Germany in 1914, partial mobilisation on just one front – and so Germany went to war against both Russia and France rather than Russia alone. And there was a danger in not mobilising soon enough. If the enemy was on your frontiers while your men were still struggling to reach their units or board their trains, you might have lost the war already. Rigid timetables and plans threatened to take the final decisions out of the hands of the civilian leaders.

Plans are at one end of a spectrum of explanations for the Great War; at the other are the nebulous but nevertheless compelling considerations of honour and prestige. Wilhelm II of Germany modelled himself on his great ancestor Frederick the Great, yet he had been mocked as Guillaume le Timide for backing down in the second of the two crises over Morocco. Did he want to face that again? What was true of individuals was also true of nations. After the humiliation of defeat by Japan in 1904–5, Russia had a pressing need to reassert itself as a great power.

Fear played a large role too in the attitudes of the powers to each other and in the acceptance by their leaders and publics of war as a tool
of policy. Austria-Hungary feared that it was going to disappear as a power unless it did something about South Slav nationalism within its own borders and that meant doing something about the magnet of a South Slav and independent Serbia. France feared its German neighbour, which was stronger economically and militarily. Germany looked apprehensively eastwards. Russia was developing fast and rearming; if Germany did not fight Russia soon it might never be able to. Britain had much to gain from a continuation of the peace but it feared, as it had always done, a single power dominating the continent. Each power feared others but also its own people. Socialist ideas had spread through Europe and unions and socialist parties were challenging the power of the old ruling classes. Was this a harbinger of violent revolution, as many thought? Ethnic nationalism as well was a disruptive force, for Austria-Hungary but also in Russia and in Britain where the Irish question was more of a concern to the government in the first months of 1914 than foreign affairs. Could war be a way of bridging divisions at home, uniting the public in a great wave of patriotism?

Finally, and this is true of our own times as well, we should never underestimate the part played in human affairs by mistakes, muddle, or simply poor timing. The complex and inefficient nature of both the German and the Russian governments meant that the civilian leaders were not fully informed about military plans even when these had political implications. Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian archduke who was assassinated in Sarajevo, had long stood out against those who wanted war to solve Austria-Hungary’s problems. His death, ironically, removed the one man who might have been able to prevent his country from declaring war on Serbia and thus setting the whole chain reaction in motion. The assassination came at the start of the summer holiday period. As the crisis mounted, many statesmen, diplomats and military leaders had already left their capitals. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was bird watching; the French President and Prime Minister were on an extended trip to Russia and the Baltic for the last two weeks of July and frequently out of contact with Paris.

Yet there is a danger in so concentrating on the factors pushing Europe towards war that we may neglect those pulling the other way, towards peace. The nineteenth century saw a proliferation of societies and associations for the outlawing of war and for the promotion of such
alternatives as arbitration for settling disputes between nations. Rich men such as Andrew Carnegie and Alfred Nobel donated fortunes to promote international understanding. The world’s labour movements and socialist parties organised themselves into the Second International, which repeatedly passed motions against war and threatened to call a general strike should one break out.

The nineteenth century was an extraordinary time of progress, in science, industry, and education, much of it centred on an increasingly prosperous and powerful Europe. Its peoples were linked to each other and to the world through speedier communications, trade, investment, migration, and the spread of official and unofficial empires. The globalisation of the world before 1914 has been matched only by our own times since the end of the Cold War. Surely, it was widely believed, this new interdependent world would build new international institutions and see the growing acceptance of universal standards of behaviour for nations. International relations were no longer seen, as they had been in the eighteenth century, as a game where if someone won someone else had to lose. Instead, all could win when peace was maintained. The increasing use of arbitration to settle disputes among nations, the frequent occasions when the great powers in Europe worked together to deal with, for example, crises in the decaying Ottoman Empire, the establishment of an international court of arbitration, all seemed to show that, step by step, the foundations were being laid for a new and more efficient way of managing the world’s affairs. War, it was hoped, would become obsolete. It was an inefficient way of settling disputes. Moreover, war was becoming too costly, both in terms of the drain on the resources of the combatants and the scale of the damage that new weapons and technology could inflict. Bankers warned that even if a general war were to start, it would grind to a halt after a few weeks simply because there would be no way of financing it.

Most of the copious literature on the events of 1914 understandably asks why the Great War broke out. Perhaps we need to ask another sort of question: why did the long peace not continue? Why did the forces pushing towards peace – and they were strong ones – not prevail? They had done so before, after all. Why did the system fail this time? One way of getting at an answer is to see how Europe’s options had narrowed down in the decades before 1914.

Imagine our walkers again. They start out, like Europe, on a broad and sunlit plain but they reach forks where they have to choose one way or another. Though they may not realise the implications at the time, they find themselves passing through a valley which gets narrower and may not lead to where they want to go. It might be possible to try to find a better route, but that would require considerable effort – and it is not clear what lies on the other side of the hills hemming in the valley. Or it is still possible to reverse one’s steps, but that can be expensive, time consuming and possibly humiliating. Could the German government, for example, have admitted to itself and the German people that its naval race with Britain had been not only misguided but a colossal waste of money?

This book traces Europe’s path to 1914 and picks out those turning points when its options narrowed. France’s decision to seek a defensive alliance with Russia as a counterbalance to Germany was one, Germany’s decision in the late 1890s to start a naval race with Great Britain another. Britain cautiously mended fences with France and then, in time, with Russia. Yet another key moment came in 1905–6, when Germany tried to break up the new Entente Cordiale in the first crisis over Morocco. The attempt backfired and the two new friends drew closer together and started to hold secret military talks which added another strand to the ties linking Britain to France. Europe’s subsequent serious crises – the Bosnian crisis of 1908, the second Morocco one in 1911, and the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 – added to the layers of resentments, suspicions, and memories which shaped the relations among the great powers. That is the context in which decisions were taken in 1914.

It is possible to break free of the past and start again. Nixon and Mao, after all, decided in the early 1970s that both their countries would benefit from an end to over twenty years of hostility. Friendships can change and alliances can be broken – Italy did so at the start of the Great War when it refused to fight beside its Triple Alliance partners of Austria-Hungary and Germany – but as the years pass and the mutual obligations and the personal links build up it becomes more difficult. One of the compelling arguments that supporters of British intervention used in 1914 was that Britain had led France to expect its help and that it would be dishonourable to back out. Nevertheless there
were attempts, some as late as 1913, by the powers to cut across the two alliance systems. Germany and Russia talked from time to time about settling their differences, as did Britain and Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary or France and Germany. Whether through inertia, memories of past clashes or fear of betrayal, whatever the reasons, the attempts came to nothing.

Still, we come in the end in to those few generals, crowned heads, diplomats or politicians who in the summer of 1914 had the power and authority to say either yes or no. Yes or no to mobilising the armies, yes or no to compromise, yes or no to carrying out the plans already drawn up by their militaries. The context is crucial to understanding why they were as they were and acted as they did. We cannot, however, play down the individual personalities. The German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, had just lost his much-loved wife. Did that add to the fatalism with which he contemplated the outbreak of the war? Nicholas II of Russia was a fundamentally weak character. That surely must have made it more difficult for him to resist his generals who wanted immediate Russian mobilisation. Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, the chief of staff of the Austrian-Hungarian armies, wanted glory for his country but also for himself so he could marry a divorced woman.

The war, when it finally came, was so frightful that a search for the guilty started which has continued ever since. Through propaganda and the judicious publication of documents every belligerent country proclaimed its own innocence and pointed its finger at the others. The left blamed capitalism or the arms manufacturers and dealers, the ‘merchants of death’; the right blamed the left or Jews or both. At the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919 the victors talked of bringing the guilty – the Kaiser, some of his generals and diplomats – to trial, but in the end nothing came of it. The question of responsibility had continuing significance because if Germany was responsible, then it was right that it should pay reparations. If not, and this of course was the general view in Germany and increasingly in the English-speaking world, then reparations and the other penalties Germany had suffered were deeply unfair and illegitimate. In the interwar years the prevailing view came to be, as David Lloyd George put it: ‘The nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any trace of apprehension or dismay.’
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The Great War was nobody’s fault or everybody’s.
After the Second World War, several bold German historians, led by Fritz Fischer, took a second look at the archives to argue that Germany was indeed culpable and that there was a sinister continuity between the intentions of Germany’s last government before the Great War and Hitler. They have themselves been challenged and so the debate goes on.

The search will probably never end and I will myself argue that some powers and their leaders were more culpable than others. Austria-Hungary’s mad determination to destroy Serbia in 1914, Germany’s decision to back it to the hilt, Russia’s impatience to mobilise, these all seem to me to bear the greatest responsibility for the outbreak of the war. Neither France nor Britain wanted war, although it might be argued that they could have done more to stop it. In the end, though, I find the more interesting question to be to how Europe reached the point in the summer of 1914 where war became more likely than peace. What did the decision-makers think they were doing? Why didn’t they pull back this time as they had done before? Why, in other words, did the peace fail?

CHAPTER 1
Europe in 1900

On 14 April 1900 Emile Loubet, the President of France, talked approvingly about justice and human kindness as he opened the Paris Universal Exposition. There was little kindness to be found in the press comments at the time. The exhibitions were not ready; the site was a dusty mess of building works; and almost everyone hated the giant statue over the entrance of a woman modelled on the actress Sarah Bernhardt and dressed in a fashionable evening dress. Yet the Exposition went on to be a triumph, with over 50 million visitors.

In style and content the Exposition partly celebrated the glories of the past and each nation displayed its national treasures – whether paintings, sculptures, rare books or scrolls – and its national activities. So where the Canadian pavilion had piles of furs, the Finnish showed lots of wood, and the Portuguese decorated their pavilion with ornamental fish. Many of the European pavilions mimicked great Gothic or Renaissance buildings, although little Switzerland built a chalet. The Chinese copied a part of the Forbidden City in Beijing and Siam (today Thailand) put up a pagoda. The Ottoman Empire, that dwindling but still great state which stretched from the Balkans in southern Europe through Turkey to the Arab Middle East, chose a pavilion which was a jumble of styles, much like its own peoples who included Christians, Muslims and Jews and many different ethnicities. With coloured tiles and bricks, arches, towers, Gothic windows, elements of mosques, of the
Grand Bazaar from Constantinople (now Istanbul), it was fitting that the overall result still somehow resembled the Hagia Sophia, once a great Christian church that became a mosque after the Ottoman conquest.