The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (45 page)

Another worrying indicator that virility was flagging, at least in certain countries, was a decline in fertility. In France, the birth rate fell sharply from 25.3 live births per 1,000 of population in the 1870s to 19.9 by 1910.
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Although its neighbour Germany’s birth rate declined slightly in the same period, it still remained significantly higher which meant,
in practical terms, that there were more German men available every year for military service. This gap was a matter of public discussion and concern in France before 1914.
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It was too bad about French civilisation, Alfred Kerr, a leading German intellectual, told a journalist from
Le Figaro
just before the war, because it was over-ripe. ‘A people whose men don’t want to be soldiers, and whose women refuse to have children, is a people benumbed in their vitality; it is fated to be dominated by a younger and fresher race. Think of Greece and the Roman empire! It is a law of history that the elder societies shall cede their place to the younger, and this is the condition of the perpetual regeneration of humanity. Later our turn will come, and the ferocious rule will apply to us; then the reign of the Asiatics will begin, perhaps of the blacks, who can tell?’
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The decline in fertility also raised another concern about the future of European society: that the wrong sorts of people were reproducing. The upper and middle classes feared the working classes as a political force; they also suspected that the poor were more likely to harbour vices such as drunkenness and promiscuity or physical and mental defects which they would pass on to their children, thus weakening the race. For racialists there was another worry still: that people they deemed inferior such as Jews or the Irish were increasing in numbers while the right classes or ethnic groups were shrinking. In Great Britain moral crusades to reinforce the family and its values (does it sound familiar?) picked up momentum, perhaps not by coincidence as the naval race with Germany intensified. In 1911 the National Council on Public Morals issued a call to the British public to take seriously its responsibility to educate its young to believe in marriage and to produce healthy children. The signatories, who included eight peers, several bishops, leading theologians and intellectuals, as well as the heads of two Cambridge colleges, claimed that this was the way to ‘cope with the demoralisation which is sapping the foundation of our national well-being’.
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In the years before 1914 the eugenics movement, advocating the breeding and cultivation of human beings as if they were cattle or vegetables, also found considerable support among political and intellectual elites. In 1912, the First International Eugenics Conference took place in London; its honorary patrons included Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, Alexander Graham Bell, and the emeritus president of Harvard
University Charles W. Eliot.
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With such attitudes, war often seemed desirable, both as the honourable way to struggle against fate and as a way of reinvigorating society. Dangerously for Europe, war also came to be accepted by many as unavoidable.

In 1914, on the eve of the war, Oswald Spengler finished his great work
The Decline of the West
, which argued that there were natural life cycles for civilisations and that the Western world had reached its winter. Underlying much of such concern about degeneration and decline were widely shared assumptions drawn from Darwin’s theory of evolution. Although he was talking about the evolution of species over thousands of years and in the natural world, it struck many intellectuals in the nineteenth century that his ideas could be applied to human societies as well. Using Darwin in this way seemed to fit conveniently with nineteenth-century views of progress and science. Social Darwinists, as they came to be known, believed that they could explain both the rise and the disappearance of different societies with the help of such concepts as natural selection. (Herbert Spencer, one of Social Darwinism’s key figures, preferred to call it the survival of the fittest.) And in a leap which had no scientific basis and which was to reinforce racialist theories, Social Darwinists generally assumed that human beings were not a single species but a variety which they confusingly and interchangeably called races or nations. Further confusion was added by the fact that it was not always clear whether a type of people was being described or a political unit such as a state. Another difficulty lay in determining which nations were moving up the evolutionary scale and which were doomed to extinction. And was there any way to alter the direction of travel? Social Darwinists suggested that there was, that nations could and ought to pull themselves together. If they failed in the attempt, perhaps they deserved their fate. After all, Darwin himself gave the subtitle of
The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
to his
On the Origin of Species
.

Such ideas were very much in the air in the years before 1914 and even those who had never read Darwin or Spencer accepted without question that struggle was a fundamental part of the evolution of human society. Not surprisingly Social Darwinism resonated with military men, for it seemed to justify and indeed elevate the importance of their calling, but it also infused the thinking of civilians, whether writers
such as Zola, political leaders like Salisbury, or businessmen like Rathenau. It could produce either pessimism that there was no way for a weaker society to avoid extinction, or a sort of grim optimism that as long as there was the possibility of struggle there was hope. As might be expected, in the prewar crises and in 1914 itself decision-makers generally favoured the latter view. As the Austrian general Conrad, whose writings reflect the strong influence of Social Darwinism, put it: ‘A people that lays down its weapons seals its fate.’
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As an indication of just how far such attitudes had permeated, a young British captain wrote from the trenches during the Great War: ‘It has been rightly said that any living organism that ceases to fight for its existence is doomed to destruction.’
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What Social Darwinism did as well was to reinforce a much older view, expressed by Hobbes among others, that international relations were nothing more than an endless jockeying for advantage among nations. And in that struggle, war was to be expected, even welcomed. ‘Is not war’, asked an article in the
Journal of the Royal United Services Institution
in 1898, ‘the grand scheme of nature by which degenerate, weak or otherwise harmful states are eliminated from the concerted action of civilized nations, and assimilated to those who are strong, vital, and beneficial in their influences? Undoubtedly this is so …’
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And it was not just nature that benefited from war; it was the individual nations themselves. ‘All petty and personal interests force their way to the front during a long period of peace,’ said Bernhardi in a controversial and influential book,
Germany and the Next War
, which was published just before the Great War. ‘Selfishness and intrigue run riot, and luxury obliterates idealism.’
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In an analogy that was often used, war was compared to a tonic for a sick patient or a life-saving operation to cut out diseased flesh. ‘War’, said the Italian Futurist and future fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘is the sole hygiene of the world.’
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What comes out in Kessler’s diaries, among much else, is an acceptance of war as a probability; time and again at moments of crisis Kessler’s friends and acquaintances talk, often in a quite matter-of-fact way, about the prospect of hostilities breaking out.

Those in positions of power in European countries were inevitably affected by the intellectual currents of their time; they also found that they had to deal with something unknown to earlier statesmen such as
Metternich: the public. The nature of politics throughout Europe was changing as society changed and the broadening of the franchise brought new classes into political life and fuelled new political movements. The old liberal parties which stood for free markets, the rule of law, and human rights for all were losing ground to socialist parties on the left and to increasingly chauvinistic nationalist parties on the right. A new breed of politicians was going outside established parliamentary institutions to appeal to popular fears and prejudices and their populism, especially among the nationalist parties, frequently included anti-Semitism. The old hatred of Jews as the killers of Christ was now updated to portray Jews as aliens, whether by religion or blood, who did not belong with the French or the Austrian or the Russian people.
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In Vienna, the rising politician Karl Lueger discovered that he could mobilise the lower classes by appealing to their fears of change and capitalism, their resentment of the prosperous middle classes, and their hatred of Jews, who came to stand in for the first two. He did so with such success that he became a mayor, over the opposition of Franz Joseph, in 1897 and remained, highly popular, in office until he died in 1910. His abilities as a political organiser impressed the young Adolf Hitler who had moved to Vienna in 1907.
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Hatred and fear of others was projected onto other societies as well as within one’s own and helped to create the atmosphere in which war became more appealing.

Thanks in part to the new media, the nation was now acquiring a vivid personality of its own – think of John Bull or Marianne or Uncle Sam. Although identifying with a nation rather than with a region or a village was relatively new for most Europeans, many of them were making up for lost time. For nationalists the nation was both greater and more important than the individual human beings who made it up. Unlike its members, the nation was eternal or close to it. One of the key assumptions of late nineteenth-century nationalism was that there had been something called a German or a French or an Italian nation for centuries, its members marked out from their neighbours by shared values and practices, usually better ones than those of their neighbours. ‘From the time of their first appearance in history the Germans showed themselves a first-class civilized people,’ said Bernhardi.
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(In Europe only Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire did not, for obvious
reasons, develop strong nationalist sentiments; they had too many, separate and conflicting, already.) While the general pattern was the same – members of a nation were identified by such shared attributes as language or religion and linked together by their history – the content of nationalism inevitably varied. The British had a Waterloo railway station; the French had Austerlitz. In Russia, governments in the last part of the century followed a policy of Russifying the many national minorities, forcing Polish or Finnish students, for example, to learn in Russian and go to Orthodox services. And Russian nationalism encompassed not only Russia’s own past but increasingly Panslavism with Russia itself as the natural leader of all Slavs. The new nationalism did not bode well for minorities, whether linguistic or religious. Could Polish-speakers ever be truly German? Could Jews?
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While not all nationalists by any means were racists, there were those who regarded nations as separate species as much as cats or dogs are. Much research went on by professors and enthusiastic amateurs to measure such things as skull or penis size, make lists of racial characteristics, or examine skeletons in an attempt to come up with scientific classifications in which the races were ranked. How they were ranked usually depended on the nationality of whoever was doing the ranking. In Germany Ludwig Woltmann, a doctor and social anthropologist, developed elaborate theories to prove that the Germans were essentially Teutons while the French were Celts, an inferior race. True, France had enjoyed great achievements in the past but those, Woltmann was convinced, were due to the French race’s Teutonic roots, before the Celtic strain had come in to dilute it. He spent much time in France looking at statues of eminent French of the past to spot their Teuton characteristics.
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The ideas which underpinned the development of nationalism across Europe owed much to the work of historians, Treitschke, for example, who created the national histories which came to dominate the field. And they were promoted by patriotic leagues such as the veterans associations in Germany or the Ligue des Patriotes in France or the National Service League in Britain. Past national glories and present triumphs were celebrated all over Europe with festivals and commemorations. ‘We learnt’, said a distinguished British soldier, ‘to believe the English were the salt of the earth and England the first and greatest
country in the world. Our confidence in her powers and our utter disbelief in the possibility of any earthly Power vanquishing her, became a fixed idea which nothing could eradicate and no gloom dispel.’
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While the British celebrated the 100th anniversary of Trafalgar in 1905, the Russians had their great victory over Napoleon at Borodino in 1812 to celebrate in 1912. The following year Germans outdid them both with a huge celebration of the 1813 Battle of Leipzig which included a display put on by some 275,000 gymnasts. And nationalism was fostered as well by eager volunteers, whether political leaders, teachers, bureaucrats or writers. In Germany, it has been estimated, most of the novels written for adolescents before the Great War dealt with the nation’s great military past, from the defeat of a Roman army by Germanic tribes to the wars of unification.
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The popular British novelist G. A. Henty who wrote over eighty books about stirring adventures (whether his heroes were with Clive in India or Wolfe in Quebec the plots were always identical and invariably showed the triumph of the plucky British boy) was clear about his purpose: ‘To inculcate patriotism in my books has been one of my main objects, and so far as it is possible to know, I have not been unsuccessful in that respect.’
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