Others saw an emptiness, a mal, a cynicism that “gnaws at us,” as Georges Clemenceau observed, a Paris that drifted into lethargy, spreading a malaise that affected the rest of the country. Nevertheless, France still carried a Napoleonic longing for achievement, grandeur, and accomplishment that it would never achieve again. For despite an affinity with foreign artists, dancers, and composers at the turn of the century—especially Strauss and Mussorgsky (who died in 1881 but remained quite popular)—France seemed to rebel against anything French.
One critic, decrying that domestic art had descended into chaos and spectacle, complained that foreign styles were “barbarism,” and in frustration concluded, “Plus d’école, mais une poussière de talents; plus de corps, mais des individus” (“No school any longer, only a smattering of talent; no group any longer, only individuals”)4. In short, France suffered from a crisis of confidence concealed by bursts of artistic energy in a decaying edifice of French culture and past glories, a few real, but most imagined. There was no industry or entrepreneurship, leaving wags of the day to joke, “Three Englishmen start a business, three Germans start a war, three Frenchmen start five political parties.”
Condescension and Self-Doubt
France’s mal was a source of contempt for aristocratic Germans, who did not suffer France’s lack of self-esteem. The Second Reich was willpower on steroids: “Since we have no Bismarck among us,” complained liberal historian Friedrich Meinecke, “every one of us must be a piece of Bismarck.”5 No concept more penetrated the average intellect typified by Wilhelm II than that of will. Of course, along with will came power and triumph. No one—at least until Western liberals, especially American, of the late twentieth century came on the scene—set out to undermine their own societies and cultures. Even the liberal Left accepted the proposition that in Germany, “there is a single will in everyone, the will to assert oneself.”6 One student announced, “We will conquer!…With such a powerful will to victory nothing else is possible.”7 That Kultur—that self-esteem—derived in large part from war, a “life-giving principle,” as General Friedrich von Bernhardi labeled it in 1911. The author Ludwig Thoma, writing from Munich on the eve of the conflict, recorded, “I was struck by the impression of how this courageous and industrious people has to purchase with its blood the right to work and to create values for mankind.”8 Students in Bavarian universities were summoned to arms in August 1914 with the call, “Students! The muses are silent. The issue is battle…. [German Kultur] is threatened by barbarians from the east…and the holy war begins.”9 The “desire for peace has rendered most civilized nations anaemic,” wrote von Bernhardi, an aspiration which was “directly antagonistic” to universal laws.10
But even Germany possessed a powerful internal counterweight, a large number of socialists and working-class who did not always buy into the call of “will.” Kaiser Wilhelm sensed these undercurrents, and struggled to make sufficient incremental reforms to appease the more radical elements, while at the same time not threatening the established landed classes. The Second Reich suffered from deep structural problems and had seen chancellors come and go with increasing regularity, each unable to substantively address Germany’s internal tensions. Germany had been united for less than forty-five years, and the nation was still young, vigorous, and finding itself with some difficulty in structure and means, but not in determining the ultimate goal.
At the outbreak of World War I, all across Europe, the young clamored for war, leaving for the front with enthusiasm as the older generation accepted the conflict with grim resignation and helplessness. Young French writers Charles Péguy, Henry de Montherlant, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle joined Germans Walter Flex, Ernest Wurch, and Ernst Jünger and Brits Robert Nichols and Rupert Brooke (who would die in action) in describing war as “purgative,” a “marvelous surprise,” “a fine thrill,” “a privilege,” or a “holy moment.”11 In contrast to later intellectuals, musicians, and celebrities of the Vietnam era, who pompously declared war vile and pointless, the European opinion makers wanted, as Arthur van den Bruck put it, “an insurrection of the sons against the fathers,” precisely for war. Afterward, when the casualty lists and endless graves blasted them with reality, these same energetic belligerents would sing a different tune—or rather, write a different verse. British writers and poets, especially, immersed themselves in the senselessness of the carnage, losing all enthusiasm for causes and even alternative outcomes. R. C. Sherriff, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Maurice Baring, and the aforementioned Nichols all turned to defeatism, nihilism, and gloom.
But that was only after four years of the most grotesque combat the world had seen. Earlier, in 1914, attitudes were different. This was especially true in Germany, where belligerence was fueled by perceptions that others did not respect Germany properly, an attitude strengthened by alliances between the British and French. Affronts had piled up in the German mind. France had built the Suez Canal with virtually no German assistance: at first, even Britain opposed it until changes in the proposed tonnage rates convinced British investors to agree to a new protocol in 1873. But Germany, still organizing itself as a nation, played almost no role in the Canal and policies were dictated to her until the First World War. In 1903, Germans experienced a new slight when, after partnering with the British to collect Venezuelan debts, President Cipriano Castro had refused to honor his country’s obligations, whereupon England, Italy, and Germany imposed a blockade. Castro gave in, but Germany emerged a loser when the British press ripped English politicians for “allying” with her. That incident was followed by a British insult involving the Baghdad Railroad in 1911. The project, designed to link Turkey and the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, was too large for German capitalists. When London investors seemed sympathetic—needing only government assurances—Parliament backed down in another public firestorm. German capitalists, thinking their financing was assured, had already laid two hundred miles of track when the financing was pulled, leaving investors with a train to nowhere.
Stumbling to Global Conflict
Both the Boer War, in which Germany supported the Boers behind the scenes, and the Moroccan Crisis (1905–6), where former antagonists Britain and France reached an accord, shocked the Germans and convinced the Kaiser that he was aligned against a constellation of enemies. “We shall be unable to make any overseas acquisitions,” he noted after the accord. “Against France and England an overseas policy is impossible.”12 German resentment toward France and Britain was reignited with the Agadir Crisis of 1911, when a German attempt to gain a foothold in Morocco through “gunboat diplomacy” was thwarted high-handedly by the French (with quiet and reluctant support from Britain). After a settlement in which Germany gained territory in the former French Congo in exchange for territory near Cameroon and an acknowledgment of the French protectorate in Morocco, many Germans felt the game was rigged. The deal received sharp criticism from the German press.
Such developments were taken as insults to the German character. “We must secure to German nationality and German spirit throughout the globe that high esteem which is due them…and has hitherto been withheld,” insisted Prussian general and military historian Friedrich von Bernhardi.13 German resentment toward England, Russia, and France continued to build until 1914. After Austria delivered an ultimatum to Serbia, demanding an end to all anti-Austrian propaganda, a crackdown on Serbian dissidents, and the removal of anyone from military or government service who had anti-Austrian sentiments, the Kaiser received a telegram from his ambassador in Russia indicating Russia would support Serbia. Looking at it, he responded, “I have no doubt left about it: England, Russia and France have agreed among themselves—after laying the foundations of the casus foederis…through Austria—to take the Austro-Serbian conflict as an excuse for waging a war of extermination against us.”14 Thus German paranoia, seemingly fully justified due to political, moral, and physical assaults from a perceived strangling circle of enemies, pushed the country over the brink.
The combination of insult and the alliance of Britain and Russia with France spurred even German intellectuals to build a case for war, viewing it as an unpleasant but inevitable instrument of national policy, which could spark national revival, even the resurrection of Europe. Although later many of them would sing a different tune, in 1914, observers looked forward to a time when “after the pain of this war there would be a free, beautiful, and happy Germany.”15 War was like childbirth: bloody, but necessary to create new life. German writers described the onset of bloodshed as “liberation from bourgeois narrowness and pettiness” and “a vacation from life.”16 Hermann Hesse lectured that struggle was “good for many Germans” and that “a genuine artist would find greater value in a nation of men who have faced death and who know the immediacy and freshness of camp life.”17 Emil Ludwig, later a critic of martial sentiments such as these, harbored no such doubts at the moment of the first German offensive, when he was unabashed in his support for war: “even if a catastrophe were to befall us such as no one dares to imagine, the moral victory [of August 1914] could never be eradicated.”18 Another novelist, Ernst Glaser, wrote of the world around him, “The war had made it beautiful.”19 Art, poetry, philosophy—these were what the war was fought over, claimed another. “An aesthetic pleasure without compare,” said a character in a German novel, describing combat.20 War was an effort on behalf of Europe itself. “Let us remain soldiers even after the war,” said Franz Marc, “for this is not a war against an eternal enemy…. it is a European civil war, a war against the inner invisible enemy of the European spirit.”21 Where the British waged war to preserve traditional social values and civilization, Germany aspired to spiritual greatness as the protector and propagator of the “true European Spirit” much like it had been during the Holy Roman Empire. Germany was “propelled by a vision, the British by a legacy.”22
Even then, the Kaiser and his advisers were cautious. Desperate to avoid being the odd man out of a European alliance system, Germany had blustered and bullied, foolishly allowing nonaggression pacts with Russia to expire. Even worse, the infamous Schlieffen Plan to sweep through the flat plains of Belgium into France ensured that two more enemies—Belgium and Britain (because of her traditional concern about access to northern European ports)—would be aligned against her. Whereas Germany’s national inferiority complex propelled her in one direction, France, having solidified the Russian alliance, drifted in another, overconfident of her military abilities.
French bellicosity swelled in the years before the war as the nations quietly prepared for conflict. Subscribing to concepts of the offensive à outrance and élan (“offense to excess,” or “hit ’em with everything you got,” and “fighting spirit”), the French developed a mirror strategy to the one they knew Germany would most likely employ in the event of war, namely a sweep from the north through Belgium, even if the Belgians denied them free passage. Thus the French response would be to blast through the Ardennes on the German left flank—just as Germany was swinging around the French left flank—meaning that in both cases, strategy would to a great degree determine policy rather than vice versa. All in all, the respective war plans had put all Europe on a hair trigger of mobilization, made worse by the German plans to disregard Belgium’s neutral rights if and when war came. In previous wars, nonbelligerent nations had frequently allowed foreign armies passage through their territory, provided they pay for damages. German planners still clung to their hope that Belgium would relent and not resist.
The wood and tinder were firmly in place and all that was needed was the proverbial spark. That came on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, when Gavrilo Princip, part of a group of six high-school-aged South Slav nationalists, nervously waited for the car carrying Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, guns and grenades in hand.
Assassination by Accident
History is rife with seemingly minor incidents that turn the course of the world. Soldiers from General George McClellan’s army found General Robert E. Lee’s battle orders with a package of cigars before the battle of Antietam. Abraham Lincoln’s assassin succeeded only because a guard was away from his post at Ford’s Theatre. Theodore Roosevelt, running for president in 1912, was in point-blank range of John Schrank’s gun when a bystander deflected the bullet’s path just enough so that Roosevelt’s folded, fifty-page speech absorbed the shot and stopped the bullet short of his heart. The impact of any of those turns of fate is debatable, though one would be hard pressed to argue that any were more earth-shattering than the chain of events that followed the death of the archduke and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo in 1914.
While on his way to make a routine diplomatic speech, Franz Ferdinand, the Hapsburg heir apparent, rode with his wife Sophie Chotek, a low-ranking Bohemian aristocrat whom he had married out of love, down the avenue bordering the Miljacka embankment of Sarajevo, unaware that it was lined with assassins. While the couple was en route, four of the would-be killers got cold feet. One who did not hurled a grenade at the party: it blew out a front tire on the following car, slightly wounding the military governor’s aide-de-camp. After stopping to look after the wounded officer, Franz Ferdinand doggedly continued to city hall. The military governor prevailed on him to forgo the remaining events, and the archduke decided to alter his course and drive to the hospital to inquire about the aide-de-camp on his way back to his train. As the procession started toward the hospital, the lead chauffeur turned in error to follow the scheduled route, and the military governor told the cars to stop. They did, leaving the archduke less than ten feet away from Princip, who was standing on the sidewalk. The assassin fired two shots at point-blank range, killing both the archduke and Sophie.
Immediate reaction was restrained—after all, political assassinations were common at the time, and at least a dozen Austrian leaders had been shot at in the previous few years. Not only had President William McKinley been assassinated in 1901, but between 1898 and 1913 no fewer than forty political figures had been killed, including six prime ministers and four kings, among them King George I of Greece. Almost all of the assassinations had been carried out by leftists or anarchists. The Balkans alone had seen eight successful assassinations, but this one in particular was directly tied to the expanded influence of a Serbian state working for the independence of southern Slavic states from Austria-Hungary, which the Austro-Hungarians felt could not be permitted out of fear that a Slavic-Serbian state might ally with Russia. And there were larger forces at work than the Austro-Serbian conflict: the Balkan states had fought several successful mini-wars against the Ottoman Empire to greatly diminish its power in Europe, while both Russia and Austria suddenly faced restless nationalities inflamed by the success of the Bulgarians and Serbs in evicting the Turks. Russia, having failed in 1908 to support Serbia against Austria, could not abandon a Slavic ally a second time, while the Austrians wanted to institutionalize their informal protectorate over Serbia. The subsequent ultimatum issued to Serbia was so strong as to constitute a virtual declaration of war. Backed by its allies the Germans, Austria delivered its message to Belgrade on July 23 (hence its name the “July ultimatum”) and began mobilizing. Serbia had forty-eight hours to comply with Austrian demands. Immediately, however, the Serbs received another secret telegram—of support from Russia. Wheels of war rapidly spun, with no one any longer in control of the throttle. European military leaders, politicians, and monarchs suddenly realized what had been set in motion. French premier René Viviani, a Socialist, called for his country to pull back from the borders by ten kilometers, terrified that “war might burst from a clump of trees, from a meeting of two patrols, from a threatening gesture…a black look, a brutal word, a shot!”23 Another powerful antiwar voice, Socialist Jean Jaurès, had opposed France’s Three-Year Law, which required young Frenchmen to serve three years in the military. Modern romantic notions that Jaurès alone could have halted the acceleration to war are unrealistic, but forever unanswered, as on July 31, 1914, a nationalist assassin kille
d Jaurès in a Paris café. The president of the Chamber of Deputies eulogized Jaurès, saying, “There are no more adversaries here, there are only Frenchmen.”24 Indeed, the entire French Socialist movement had joined the “establishment” over the previous twenty years; now, to prove their loyalty, Socialists had to support the war—a position most regretted within the year, and one which permanently reversed the movement’s willingness to engage in a compromise of convenience.
Miscalculations abounded on both sides. France and Russia assumed that the obvious weight of populations aligned against Germany would forestall hostilities—especially if England and Belgium were thrust into the Allied camp. Britain dallied to embarrass the Germans, all the while appearing resolute in her support for France and Belgium. The war speech by the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, when it finally came, began with such conciliation to Germany that a Tory minister whispered to another, “By God, they are going to desert Belgium!”25
Confidence in both German and French militaries led the main belligerents to conclude that each could defeat the other, and indeed, do so quite rapidly. Had most of the leaders truly believed they were in for a war of four years and deaths in the millions, they might well have redoubled their efforts for peace. But this wasn’t the only monumental miscalculation: a string of incomprehensible smaller errors compounded juvenile attachments to cavalry on both sides and, in the case of the French, outrageously silly uniforms with red pants. When some wiser heads attempted to replace the garish French colors with camouflage gray or khaki, they were shouted down with thunderous derision. Bright uniforms, claimed the Echo de Paris, were mainstays of French “taste and military function,” and a former war minister during a hearing on adopting different uniforms exclaimed “Eliminate the red trousers? Never! Le pantalon rouge c’est la France!”26
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