The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (47 page)

Militarism has two faces: the placing of the military on a pinnacle, largely above criticism, in society and that wider sense, of military values
such as discipline, order, self-sacrifice and obedience permeating and influencing civilian society. After the Great War, militarism was held to be one of the key forces which pushed Europe towards the conflict and, on the winning side, German, or, as it was more often known, Prussian militarism was singled out for special opprobrium and with some reason. Both Wilhelm II and the Prussian army, which became the core of the German army after 1871, had always insisted that the military answered only to the Kaiser and were above criticism by mere civilians. Moreover, they firmly believed, and many German civilians agreed with them, the army was the noblest and highest expression of the German nation.

Yet militarism was a more general phenomenon across Europe and throughout societies. In Britain small children wore sailor suits and on the Continent schoolchildren frequently wore little uniforms; secondary schools and universities had cadet corps; and heads of state – except in republican France – normally dressed in military uniform. It is rare to see photographs of Franz Joseph, Nicholas II or Wilhelm II in civilian clothes. And their officials, many of whom had done military service in elite regiments, often followed suit. When he attended the Reichstag for the first time as Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg was in a major’s uniform.
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A century later the only political leaders routinely appearing in uniform were military dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.

At the time, militarism was usually blamed by liberals and the left on capitalism, which, so it was argued, was engaged in an all-out competition for control of the world. ‘Wars between capitalist states’, said the resolution of the socialist Second International at its congress in Stuttgart in 1907, ‘are as a rule the result of their rivalry for world markets, as every state is not only concerned in consolidating its own market, but also in conquering new markets, in which process the subjugation of foreign lands and peoples plays a part.’
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The ruling classes stirred up nationalism to divert the workers away from their own interests. Capitalists fuelled the arms race and capitalists profited from it.

The idea that Europe’s tensions were the product of economic rivalry persisted long after the Great War but the evidence is simply not there to support it. Trade and investment between many of the belligerents were increasing in the years before 1914. Britain and Germany indeed
were each other’s largest trading partner. While it is true that some manufacturers gained by the arms race, tension was often as good as outright war and sometimes better since they were often engaged in selling to several different sides at once. Before the Great War the German firm of Krupp upgraded the Belgian fortresses while it was also developing the heavy artillery for the German army to use against them. The British firm Vickers licensed German firms to make the Maxim machine gun and used a licence from Krupp to make fuses for explosives.
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Bankers and businessmen involved in exports and imports generally looked at the prospect of a major war with dismay; it would bring high taxes, disrupt trade, and cause them severe losses, perhaps even bankruptcy.
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The great German industrialist Hugo Stinnes warned his fellow countrymen against war, saying that Germany’s real power was economic and not military. ‘Just let another three or four years of calm development go by and Germany will be the uncontested economic master in Europe.’ He himself bought into French enterprises and iron-ore fields and established a new mining company in the north of England in years immediately before war.
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Like imperialism or liberalism, how Europeans reacted to militarism and what they thought of the military depended on which country they lived in and where they were situated politically. Overall the two old empires of Austria-Hungary and Russia were probably the least militaristic of the European powers before the war. In Austria-Hungary, the army, with its largely German-speaking officer corps, was a symbol of the regime and therefore an object of suspicion for the increasingly militant national movements within the empire. What civilian organisations there were promoting military training and values tended to be nationalist; the Sokol gymnastic movement in Austria-Hungary, for example, was for Slavs only.
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In Russia the newly emerging political class saw the army as an arm of the absolutist regime, its officers drawn from a narrow segment of society. Russian public opinion and Russian intellectuals did not take pride in colonial conquest or past military victories because such things seemed to have little to do with them. In 1905, while the Russo-Japanese War still went on, the novelist Alek-sander Kuprin enjoyed great success with his novel
The Duel
, which showed army officers as, among other things, drunken, dissolute, venal, lazy, bored, and brutal. He does not seem to have been exaggerating.
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In the last few years before the Great War, the tsar and his government took measures to strengthen the martial spirit among young civilians by making physical exercises and military drill compulsory in schools and by encouraging youth groups. In 1911 Baden-Powell visited Russia to inspect them. While the public tended to view initiatives from the government with suspicion there was some popular support and a number of organisations formed, although they never reached more than a tiny number of young Russians.
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Militarism and the military also divided Europeans politically. The left tended to look on both with disapproval, conservatives with admiration. The upper classes in most countries sent their sons to be officers, while the working classes saw conscription as a burden. It was never completely clear-cut, though. While many in the middle classes, businessmen and shopkeepers for example, resented their taxes supporting an idle military and its expensive equipment, others aspired to the values and style of the officer class. In Germany being an officer in the reserves was a mark of social status even for professionals. Jews, left-wingers, members of the lower classes, even men who had married the wrong sort of wives had almost no chance of being chosen. Reserve officers who voted the wrong way in elections or took what were seen as radical stands were summarily dismissed.
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Growing nationalism too gave the military added importance as the defenders of the nation and, in the case of Germany, as its creator. As a German major told the French journalist, Bourdon, in 1913: ‘Such and such a country may possess an army, but Germany is an army that possesses a country. That is why every event in public life at once affects military life, any wave of emotion, happy or the reverse, turns the people instinctively to its army.’
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And much as socialists might deplore it, the working classes across Europe frequently showed an enthusiasm for the military, turning out for brass bands, marches, or celebrations of past victories. In Britain, cigarette manufacturers tapped into popular feeling by including cards depicting famous generals and admirals with their packages. The manufacturers of a famous meat extract had a highly successful advertisement during the Boer War in which the ride of the British commander-in-chief, Lord Roberts, across the Orange Free State spelled out Bovril.
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The schoolmasters, writers, generals, or politicians who told the
young to take pride in the great military victories of the past, who urged them at speech days and in print to be obedient and patriotic and to hold themselves always at the ready to sacrifice themselves for their nation, and who encouraged the boys to emulate their country’s soldiers and sailors and the girls to prepare to look after them, had no idea, of course, that they were helping to prepare a generation psychologically for the Great War. They saw the instilling of military values as part of the attempt to counteract the damaging effects of the modern world and arrest the decline of the nation. General Sir Ian Hamilton, who was a British observer at the Russo-Japanese War, came back to Britain deeply concerned about the rise of Japan and its martial spirit. Fortunately Japan was an ally and Britain therefore had time to foster a similar spirit in its children. ‘From the nursery and its toys to the Sunday school and its cadet company, every influence of affection, loyalty, tradition and education should be brought to bear on the next generation of British boys and girls, so as deeply to impress upon their young minds a feeling of reverence and admiration for the patriotic spirit of their ancestors.’
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Team sports, so loved in the boarding schools of Victorian England, were generally considered good because they fostered healthy habits and, perhaps more important, work and loyalty for the team. One of the most famous poems of its time, Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’, starts with a cricket game where the batsman knows that the hopes of the team rest on his shoulders. ‘Play, play up! Play up! And play the game!’ his captain tells him. The next verse takes the reader to the desert sands in Sudan, ‘sodden red’, where a British force is facing annihilation. ‘But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:/ “Play, play up! Play up! And play the game!”’

In Britain and Germany in particular the years before 1914 saw a proliferation of enthusiastic volunteer associations with a military character, such as the navy leagues, which suggests that militarism was coming from the grass roots as well as from above. In Germany, where, thanks to conscription, there was a large body of men with military experience, about 15 per cent of the adult male population belonged to veterans associations. These were largely social but they also provided funerals for their members with military honours and organised celebrations for such national events as the Kaiser’s birthday or the anniversaries of famous battles.
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British advocates of military
preparedness pushed for expanding the army with recruits coming from volunteers or conscription. In 1904, the hero of the Boer War, Lord Roberts of Kandahar, known affectionately by the British public as Bobs, resigned as commander-in-chief to devote himself to the National Service League which advocated training all able-bodied men for, at the very least, defence of the British Isles if not service overseas. In 1906 he worked with Le Queux on his alarmist novel
The Invasion of 1910
and in 1907 he published his own best-seller,
A Nation in Arms
, which argued for national service on grounds both of defence of the nation and overcoming its social divisions. The League, which had 35,000 members by 1909, tended to draw its support from conservatives. Liberals and those on the left mistrusted the military and strongly disliked the idea of compulsory military service.

In both countries concerns about the young and their supposed decadence fed into militarism. What would set them on the right path, surely, was healthy living and a dose of discipline. In Britain such organisations as the Lads Drill Association and the Boys and Church Lads Brigade tried to reach out to urban and lower class young men. The most famous of all, the Boy Scouts, was founded in 1908 by another hero of the Boer War, Baden-Powell. Within two years it had 100,000 members and its own weekly magazine. He wanted, said Baden-Powell, to transform Britain’s lost boys and young men from ‘pale, narrow-chested, hunched up, miserable specimens, smoking endless cigarettes’ into healthy and energetic patriots.
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Initially he allowed girls to become Scouts as well but this produced a public outcry; a letter to the conservative weekly
The Spectator
complained that the young men and women came back from expeditions to the countryside in a ‘state of very undesirable excitement’. Baden-Powell and his sister moved with dispatch to set up the Girl Guides, which had as one of its aims preparing young women ‘to make themselves of practical use in case of invasion’.
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Two German officers who had also had experience in Africa, in this case in the brutal German repression of the Hereros in German South West-Africa, set up the Pfadfinder, modelled on the Boy Scouts but with an emphasis on a ‘German spirit’. Pfadfinder were exhorted to be loyal to the Kaiser and to his military, which stood armed and always ready to defend his Reich. Military men sat on the executive committee and often ran the local branches.
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In Germany the army establishment and conservatives had initially resisted spreading military training through society; it might give the population the dangerous radical idea that the army belonged to the people. Although there was conscription, not everyone eligible was called up so that it was possible to select reliable recruits, not socialist or liberal ones.
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The success of youth groups organised by the Social Democratic Party in the years just before the war did much to change conservative minds. In 1911 the Kaiser issued a Youth Decree calling for a concerted effort to save the nation’s young from, so it seemed, the modern world, and to educate them to be patriots. Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, one of Wilhelm’s favourite generals and a prominent conservative thinker and military theorist, had long been trying to overcome the army’s resistance to military training for young boys; now the Kaiser gave him approval to set up a league for German youth, to get them physically fit, train them to be obedient and teach them about the glorious Prussian past, ‘so that they will recognize that service to the Fatherland is the highest honor of the German man’. By 1914 the league claimed a membership of 750,000, partly by counting in members of other similar youth organisations, not, of course, the socialist ones.
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