The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  Lichnowsky, a cordial and capable aristocrat with a passionate commitment to British-German friendship, had been in torment even before hearing this. Four days before this latest talk with Grey, he had wired Berlin that war seemed definitely possible to the authorities in London. He had warned that in his opinion, if war came, “for us there would be everything to lose and nothing to gain.” Now thoroughly frightened, he relayed Grey’s warning to Chancellor Bethmann, who understood its importance. Bethmann sent a fresh appeal to Berchtold in Vienna, the latest of several, asking him again to make clear to the Russians his willingness to talk. But Berchtold had effectively closed up shop. He gave no answer to Bethmann and sent no assurances to Sazonov. He was determined to allow nothing to interrupt preparations for the attack on Serbia.

  The situation was sliding beyond anyone’s control. As Bethmann begged Berchtold to change course, the chief of the German general staff, Helmuth von Moltke, sent a telegram to his Austrian counterpart, the bellicose little field marshal Franz Conrad, who had long been urging the destruction of Serbia. Moltke had been distressed to learn of the large number of divisions the Austrians were assigning to the attack on Serbia. He asked Conrad to shift some of those divisions farther north, to places where the Germans might soon be looking for help in fending off an attack from Russia. More remarkably, and with far less justification, he cautioned Conrad that Austria should not be drawn into any peace proposals that they might see coming from Berlin—from Chancellor Bethmann or even the kaiser.

  “What a joke!” Berchtold exclaimed when he saw how completely Bethmann and Moltke were at cross-purposes. “Who’s in charge in Berlin?”

  The answer was that, not only in Berlin but in St. Petersburg and Vienna and Paris, power was flowing away from the politicians and into the hands of the generals. With Austria-Hungary and Serbia and even Russia mobilized, with France readying her forces and Britain’s Royal Navy on station, war seemed ever more certain. Top generals in all the capitals, fearful of what faced them, were demanding to be freed from the restraints of peacetime. The German high command, still not allowed to take any action, was at the edge of hysteria. Hence Moltke’s almost treasonous warning to Conrad.

  What is most astonishing is that even now, with the crisis this far advanced, Berlin had still done nothing to position her armed forces for action. This was true of Germany alone.

  The peace proposal of which Moltke warned Conrad was an idea of Kaiser Wilhelm’s, and it was arguably the best to be offered by anyone throughout the entire crisis; even Sir Edward Grey thought it had promise. It called for the Austrians, whenever they attacked Serbia, to advance only far enough to occupy Belgrade—a matter of a few miles. By taking possession of the capital city, they would inflict a significant humiliation on Serbia, and by going no farther, they would signal to Russia that they intended no radical upending of the status quo. They could remain in place while negotiations got under way and the crisis was brought down from a boil. There could be no thought of keeping Belgrade, of course, but an eventual withdrawal on terms acceptable to Vienna was in no way impossible.

  The time was ripe for a solution of this kind. Among the generals in all the capitals of Europe, only Conrad was eager for a fight, and he wanted a fight only with Serbia. All the emperors and heads of government, and all the foreign ministers except perhaps Berchtold, understood that if fighting broke out anywhere, it was certain to spread. They understood also that the consequences would be terrible. Never in the history of Europe had so many huge armies gone to war against one another, and never had armies been so monstrously well armed. Expectations of a quick, clean victory were the fantasies of amateur strategists and ignorant superpatriots on street corners. In the army command centers and halls of government, there was widespread appreciation that a terrible ordeal lay ahead.

  It was beginning to dawn on Grey that encircling Germany with huge and hostile armies might not have been the wisest way to keep the peace. On July 31, feeling the jaws of a trap closing on Britain almost as surely as on the continental powers, he instructed his ambassador in Berlin to deliver a pledge to the kaiser and to Bethmann: “If the peace of Europe can be preserved and this crisis be safely passed, my own effort would be to promote some arrangement to which Germany could be a party, by which she could be assured that no hostile or aggressive policy would be pursued against her or her allies by France, Russia, and ourselves, jointly or separately.”

  His epiphany had come too late. Berchtold in Vienna sent no response to Kaiser Wilhelm’s Stop-in-Belgrade plan. Wilhelm, desperate, appealed over Berchtold’s head to Hapsburg emperor Franz Josef, who had ascended to the throne a dozen years before Abraham Lincoln became president of the United States. Franz Josef informed Wilhelm that what he asked was not possible. Conrad’s plan could not be adjusted so as to allow the capture of Belgrade but nothing more. Franz Josef did not want war; he was only repeating what Berchtold and Conrad had told him. All his life he had been presiding over the slow decline of the empire that his forebears had created. His beautiful wife had been assassinated, and his only son had committed suicide (causing his cousin Franz Ferdinand to become heir to the throne). Franz Josef was worn down by his grievous losses and his eighty-seven years. He wanted to die and to do so in peace. But he was not making the decisions.

  The Austrian rejection of Stop-in-Belgrade sealed Europe’s doom. Moltke and the German war minister, almost beside themselves with anxiety, demanded mobilization. Even now the kaiser refused, but he did approve two less momentous measures. The first was a State of Impending War, which was similar to the Period Preparatory to War that had preceded Russia’s mobilization. It recalled soldiers on leave to duty and put the government in control of the infrastructure without which there could be no mobilization: the railways and the telephone, telegraph, and postal systems.

  The kaiser also issued what would become notorious as the Double Ultimatum. It informed Russia that if she did not suspend “every measure against Austria-Hungary and ourselves,” Germany would have no choice except to mobilize. France was asked for things no sensible person could have expected her to give: not only a pledge of neutrality in case of war between Germany and Russia but the temporary surrender of the great fortresses with which she defended her frontier. To the extent that all this was more than a desperate final effort to avoid mobilization, it was probably intended to make Germany appear the victim of hostile neighbors. What it looked like to much of the world was bullying and bluster. No country on earth was as inept as Germany at the art of public relations.

  And now at the eleventh hour, when there was no room for error, something went wrong in a conversation between Grey and Lichnowsky. On the basis of what he understood Grey to have said, Lichnowsky wired Berlin with news that appeared to change everything. Britain, he reported, was offering to remain neutral if Germany would refrain from attacking France. This sent Kaiser Wilhelm into ecstasies; it meant that his armies would have to fight Russia only. (His generals, as we shall see, were less than overjoyed.) It proved to be a transient thrill. Grey quickly made it clear that he had intended no such offer, and the kaiser’s hopes were dashed.

  Berlin sent an offer of its own to London. If Britain would stay out of war if it came, Germany upon the conclusion of hostilities would restore the borders not only of France but of Belgium as well. (She would also, however, regard herself as entitled to take from her defeated foes whatever colonial possessions she might desire.) This served only to insult Grey. He replied coldly, saying that acceptance of such an offer “would be a disgrace from which the good name of this country [Britain] would never recover.”

  Grey and his minions in the Foreign Office were taken aback by the Germans’ mention of Belgium. London regarded Belgium, because of the proximity of her coast to southeastern England, as an essential element of British security. Britain had insisted on the creation of the Kingdom of Belgium in 1831 in order to ensure that such ports as Antwerp would never fall into the hands of Fran
ce, then still the continent’s leading power and therefore considered a threat. It was likewise at Britain’s insistence that the new kingdom committed to “perpetual neutrality…towards all other states.” All the European powers, the Kingdom of Prussia included, signed a treaty guaranteeing this neutrality.

  Why, then, this reference to Belgium in the German communiqué? What could possibly require the restoration of her borders unless those borders were going to be violated? Grey wired Paris and Berlin, asking both governments to affirm their recognition of Belgium’s neutrality and by implication her safety from attack. France, for reasons that we will examine later, was able to respond as quickly and affirmatively as London expected. Germany did not respond at all. Her silence was heavy with menace.

  The deadline for responses to the Double Ultimatum came and went. Neither France nor Russia responded. On the afternoon of Saturday, August 1, Germany and France both declared general mobilization. Germany declared simultaneously that a state of war existed between her and Russia. Two Russian armies were ordered to advance into Germany.

  At this crucial point something was revealed that not even the kaiser or Bethmann knew, never mind London, Paris, or St. Petersburg. It went back to the assumption, first embedded in Germany’s war plans by Army Chief of Staff Alfred von Schlieffen in 1905 and retained in all subsequent revisions of those plans, that if war came, Germany would have to fight on two fronts, against France and Russia simultaneously. So far, so necessary: the Franco-Russian Entente made such an assumption inescapable. The planners assumed further that all nations would mobilize upon declaring war, that Germany could not expect to win a protracted war against two such powerful foes, that Russia was too vast geographically to be defeated quickly, and that Germany’s survival therefore depended upon a lightning-fast victory in the west. Such a victory would be impossible unless Paris was captured quickly, and this was deemed to be feasible only if Germany’s armies began advancing on France from the moment war was declared. The final assumption was that advancing with the necessary speed required avoiding France’s border defenses—impregnable strongholds such as Verdun. The only way to do this was to attack through Belgium.

  The most fatefully wrong of the German planners’ assumptions was also the most understandable: the seemingly self-evident expectation that all the powers would mobilize when they declared war. Declarations of mobilization would, under such circumstances and viewed from a diplomatic perspective, be little more than formalities issued as the various armies set forth to engage one another. Neither Schlieffen nor Moltke nor anyone else had imagined a scenario in which Russia and France would mobilize without first declaring war. That was the sting in the tail of the crisis: Germany had a mobilization plan that did not simply prepare for but began an immediate full-scale attack on France through Belgium. Because of this, just hours after Berlin’s mobilization, its troops were advancing on a small country whose neutrality it was pledged to respect.

  Here again the motivating force was not a desire for conquest but pure raw fear, in this instance Germany’s entirely justified fear of being crushed between the enemies to her west and the vast enemy to her east.

  In any case it was done; the July crisis was over, the Great War had begun. On one side were Britain, France, and Russia, calling themselves the Triple Entente.

  On the other side were the Central Powers: Germany and Austria-Hungary. The question of who started the war has tortured historians for a hundred years. In the United States it was a crucial question from the start. It assumed a central place in debates about how to respond to the conflict, whether to become involved, and how to deal with the losers after it was won. The men making the decisions, sadly, either never knew or chose to ignore several important facts:

  That no one involved in the July crisis wanted a general war, and few wanted even a regional war.

  That Germany was the last to put her armed forces in motion and did so to save herself from destruction, not in pursuit of any territorial ambitions.

  And that for all of them, except perhaps Britain in the beginning, the war seemed a fight for survival. And therefore a fight to the death.

  It is impossible to judge American policy and actions in the five years that followed without keeping these things in mind.

  Chapter 2

  ____

  Neutrality the Wilson Way

  LITERALLY FROM THE first day of the war—even before the fighting began—the United States loomed large in the thinking of all the belligerent nations. As the world’s new economic superpower, vastly surpassing in output both a fading Britain and a fast-growing Germany, America had enormous potential value as an ally and was greatly to be feared as an enemy. That the British understood this is clear in what they did even before declaring war. On August 4, 1914, they sent a little ship called the Teconia, a cable layer, into the North Sea to sever Germany’s five underwater communications cables, including the two that connected Berlin to New York. From that day no European news could be cabled to the United States except from London and Paris, where censorship offices were put in place to stop the transmission of any reporting not acceptable to the Triple Entente. “The cutting of that cable may do us great injury,” an Austrian diplomat stationed in America lamented. “If only one side of the case is given, as may happen if only the English cable is left, prejudice against us will be created here.”

  He was understating the case. As early as August 6, The New York Herald was running a story—improbable on its face and never substantiated—about German soldiers firing at Belgian soldiers being carried on Red Cross stretchers. This set the pattern for what was to follow.

  The warring nations’ concerns about the United States grew more intense as weeks of fighting passed, casualties mounted, and the belligerents found themselves in a conflict of a kind never before experienced: total war, industrial war, with the potential to go on for years and consume all the resources of the belligerents. By the end of August, it was clear that Count Alfred von Schlieffen had been right to worry, as he did even on his deathbed, about his great plan for a lightning descent upon Paris. As modified by Moltke, the plan failed. It was immensely complex, the obstacles were formidable, and in the end it demanded more than even seven German armies could deliver.

  The right wing of the attack force raced across Belgium and into France more or less on schedule, pushed the French and British back and back again until they were almost within sight of the spires of Paris, but finally ran out of momentum. The troops had been on the march for a month, each man carrying some seventy or eighty pounds of weaponry and gear in withering summer heat. Many had had no rations for days, and water was sometimes scarce. Keeping the artillery and ammunition and other essentials moving forward had become an ordeal for men and animals alike. Only token resistance stood between the forward units and the French capital, but large Entente forces were not far away. The more prudent of the German commanders saw no alternative but pulling back to a secure line of defense. The more aggressive generals, their flanks exposed by these withdrawals, had no choice but to follow. They retreated to the Ourq, the first east-west-running river north of the Marne. By the time the French were able to mount a counterattack, they found themselves up against freshly dug but impregnable German fortifications.

  The two sides then tried to outflank each other to the north. This turned, willy-nilly, into an unintended “race to the sea.” Once the sea was reached, in Belgium’s flat and featureless Flanders region, the two sides faced each other along a front that snaked hundreds of miles southward and eastward to the French-Swiss border. That line proved maddeningly static, and along it both sides would mount increasingly massive offensives and repeatedly fail to break through. Meanwhile two Russian armies had invaded Germany from the east and, in spite of immense numerical superiority, were so thoroughly and humiliatingly thrashed that the general in charge committed suicide. To the south and east, in Galicia and the Carpathian Mountains, other Russian armies were savaging their
Austro-Hungarian adversaries but also failing to achieve decisive results. By November the Turks had been drawn into the war on the side of the Central Powers. The armies of their Ottoman Empire were fighting the Russians in the Caucasus and the British in the Middle East.

  By year-end, five months of combat had driven the casualty figures to nightmarish levels but accomplished little else. A hundred thousand German soldiers were dead, an estimated 700,000 wounded. France and Austria-Hungary had suffered about a million casualties each—the number of French troops dead or missing was in the hundreds of thousands—and the total for Russia was approximately twice that. Of the 160,000 men who had crossed to the continent with the British Expeditionary Force, more than half were dead or wounded. On both sides there were generals and politicians who believed, and would continue to believe, that with a few more powerful if costly strokes, they could bring the bloodbath to a glorious conclusion.

  These optimists were a minority, if an influential one. Wiser men knew better. Field Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, a national hero newly installed as Britain’s war minister, stunned his fellow cabinet members by declaring that to deal with what lay ahead, they were going to have to raise an army of at least two million men. That estimate would prove far too conservative. By early September a call-up of reserves had increased the armed forces of the Central Powers to more than three million. Awesome as this total was, it seemed frighteningly inadequate when measured against the forces being mustered by the Entente: 3.5 million Russians, 1.8 million French, 750,000 British. All the belligerents were enlisting fresh recruits at a rate that would dwarf these numbers.

  The war came as a surprise to the American public, of course. It was a surprise to most Europeans, for that matter, in spite of the staggering amounts of money their governments had been spending on arms and the persistence with which they warned that the countries next door were both powerful and wicked. The continent had been mostly at peace for an extraordinarily long time, so that people naturally tended to assume that this was a permanent state of affairs. With the exception of the three quick victories over Denmark, Austria, and France that between 1864 and 1871 led to the unification of Germany, there had been no major wars in the heart of Europe since the fall of Napoleon in 1815.