by Jack Beatty
Led by senior producer Karen Shiffman and host Tom Ashbrook, my colleagues on the staff of On Point, which in 2011 celebrated its tenth anniversary on National Public Radio, buoyed me to do my best work by daily displaying theirs.
My wife, Lois, edited the manuscript with an artist’s eye for clarity, style, grammar, and structure; a skeptic’s habit of challenging windy assertions; and a highly literate reader’s sense of when enough—evidence, explanation, detail—is enough. I’m grateful to her for all that, and much more.
IMAGE CREDITS
Constant, “8 × La Guerre 8,” 1951, lithography, 40.1 × 27.8 cm © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York c/o Pictoright Amsterdam
Courtesy of the Naval Historical Foundation
Simplicissimus
Der Wahre Jacob
London Illustrated Weekly
Der Wahre Jacob, May 1905
Courtesy of the Linen Hall Library (Belfast)
© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland
Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland
© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City
© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City
Puck, March 5, 1913
© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City
Punch
Simplicissimus, July 8, 1912
“Éducation,” L’Assiette au beurre, March 11, 1905: 206. Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware
Punch, 5 April 1905
Der Wahre Jacob, March 1906
Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library
“Debout Les Morts!” (1917) (The Dead Rise Up!) by Frans Masereel © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
“Toter Sapenpost” (1924) (Dead Sapenpost) by Otto Dix © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
“The Grenade” (1915) by Max Beckmann © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
“Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor” (Shock Troops Advance Under Gas) by Otto Dix © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
“The First Searchlights at Charing Cross” 1914 (oil on canvas) by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889–1946) Leeds Museums and Galleries (City Art Gallery) UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library
“War Profiteers” 1917 by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889–1946) © Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library
“Germany’s Children Are Starving” by Käthe Kollwitz © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Footnotes
* Since the 1920s, successive generations of historians have produced stellar histories of the war’s origins. I relied on the following: Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 1, 1911–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1923); Sidney Bradshaw Fay, The Origins of the World War, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1927); Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, 3 vols. (New York: Enigma Books, 2005; originally published in 1952); Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: Norton, 1967), War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914 (New York: Norton, 1975), and From Kaiserreich to Third Reich: Elements of Continuity in German History, 1871–1945 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986); Imanuel Geiss, ed., July 1914: The Outbreak of the First World War (New York: Scribners, 1967); Hew Strachan, The First World War: Volume I: To Arms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) and The First World War (New York: Penguin Books, 2003); Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig, eds., Decisions for War, 1914–1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
* For the causes listed above and a cogent argument that Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was a major cause of the war, see Richard Ned Lebow, “Franz Ferdinand Found Alive, World War I Unnecessary,” in Philip E. Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow, and Geoffrey Parker, eds., Unmaking the West: “What-if” Scenarios That Rewrite World History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). I draw on Lebow’s paper in my account of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in chapter 5. For a new generation of historians, see William Mulligan, The Origins of the First World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–22. Also see Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, eds., An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007) and Annika Mombauer, “Review Article: The First World War: Inevitable, Avoidable, Improbable, Desirable, Recent Interpretations on War Guilt and the War’s Origins,” German History 25, no. 1 (2007): 78–95.
* By the time these troops arrived in October, Peking was relieved and the war “virtually over.” To force the Chinese to sign a degrading peace treaty, the Germans conducted scores of “punitive expeditions” against Chinese villages, executing prisoners in batches of up to 175 and killing noncombatants who looked at them “askance.” See Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practice of War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 147–48. Hitler used the same word in the same sense in instructing his troops on how to conduct themselves in Russia. Eliciting his order was Stalin’s July 1941 call for partisan warfare against the Nazi invaders. “Hitler, who saw partisan warfare as a chance to destroy potential opposition, reacted energetically … Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler had already relieved his soldiers of legal responsibility for actions taken against civilians. Now he wanted soldiers and police to kill anyone who ‘even looks at us askance.’ ” Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 234.
* As an index of bloody mindedness (and of French militarism), consider Le Matin’s editorial response to Germany’s unveiling of a statue commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig in 1813: “We celebrate neither Jena, where 40,000 French crushed 70,000 Prussians and captured 200 standards; nor Austerstadt, when 25,000 men under Davout vanquished 66,000 of Brunswick, nor Lützen, nor Bauzen, where the Marie Louise Legion cut to pieces 15,000 of Blücher’s veterans … We celebrate none of the 100 victories gained in Germany 100 years ago. Germans would do well to remember when celebrating the Battle of the Nations (so-called Leipzig) that only 157,000 French were, after a desperate struggle, finally thrown back by 350,000 of the allies.” London Times, October 19, 1913.
* “The society of the Empire was shaped by the aristocracy, the officer corps, and the civil service, with the aristocratic officer of the guard’s regiments as the social model of all other classes. It was he whom the German bourgeoisie sought to emulate; its leaders—particularly the industrialists with newly-acquired wealth—copied the way of life of the aristocratic officer and frequently tried to join the ranks of the nobility.” Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914 (New York: Norton, 1975), 13. The counterview is argued at length by the British scholar David Blackbourn in an essay titled “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” which includes these sentences: “If one looks at nineteenth-century Europe it is difficult to identify an unambiguous instance in which the bourgeoisie ruled as a class … It is even more difficult to find bourgeois revolutions of the supposedly classic type in any period.” Blackbourn maintains that the bourgeoisie led a “silent revolution” in Germany, establishing their commercial values up and down the social scale. See David Blackbourn and Geoff Ely, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 174.
* June 1933 saw the “Köpenick blood-week.” After a young Social Democrat shot and killed three Nazi storm troopers, “the brownshirts mobilized en masse and arrested more than five hundred local men, torturing them so brutally that ninety-one of them died.” Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin, 2005), 21.
* “This document, discovered and published after the Revolution, so accurately foretold the course of events that if its credentials were not impeccable one might well suspect it to be a post-1917 forgery.” Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 211.
* “Dull-witted and scared, an all-powerful nonentity, the prey of prejudices worthy of an Eskimo, the royal blood in his veins poisoned by all the vices of many generations, Nicholas Romanov, like many others of his profession, combined filthy sensuality with apathetic cruelty.” Leon Trotsky, 1905 (New York: Random House, 1971), 135.
* In negotiating the Franco-Russian Military Convention and treaty of January 1894, “General Obruchev, Chief of the Russian General Staff, emphatically denied the possibility of a partial Russian mobilization against Austria [alone]” on technical grounds and because, as he explained to his French counterpart, “in making a partial mobilization we should expose ourselves to too great dangers with the menace of a rapid attack from Germany.” The French wanted reassurance that Russia would not fight its own war against Austria-Hungary, leaving them to face Germany alone. L. C. F. Turner, “The Russian Mobilization in 1914,” Journal of Contemporary History 3, no. 1 (January 1968): 66.
* “Although Kokovtsov’s is the only detailed description of these events, other accounts testify that such a measure was under consideration … Diplomats in western Russia, and in the capital, reported rumors of a mobilization for the first two weeks of November. It was widely felt that ‘military circles’ were pressing for a strong stand against an anticipated Austrian aggression on Serbia.” David MacLaren McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia 1900–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 186. Interministerial conflict over resources also played a role in the mobilization. Sukhomlinov had exploited earlier war scares to pressure Kokovtsov to increase the military budget. Just a month earlier, Kokovtsov had refused his request for sixty-three million rubles to strengthen the defenses along the Austrian border. To get those rubles, he may have talked Nicholas into a mobilization, nearly topping his war scare with a war. See William C. Fuller Jr., Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 223–24.
* Wangenheim makes the Young Turks sound like fools. In fact, while acknowledging her imperial ambitions, they recognized that Germany and the Ottoman Empire shared a common strategic goal—containing an expanding “Slavdom.” Theirs was an alliance of mutual convenience. See Mustafa Aksakal, “War as Savior? Hopes for War and Peace in Ottoman Politics Before 1914,” in Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, eds., An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 296.
* This marked the last occasion when the three royal cousins—Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas II, and King George V of Great Britain—were together. Every time he met privately with “Nicky” “Georgie” felt that “Willy’s” ear was “glued to the keyhole.” It’s unlikely that Willy overheard anything significant. In an age of nationalism, family ties between rulers counted for little. Moreover, “monarchical government and, even more so, monarchical solidarity had ceased to be a trump card in international affairs.” Willy was an obnoxious presence to Nicky and an object of detestation to his German wife, Alexandra. The “Willy-Nicky” correspondence, first released in 1917 by Russia’s provisional government, shows Nicky acceding to Willy’s importunities to make war on Japan or to sign a peace treaty with Germany without telling Nicky’s ally, France—records Nicky saying yes to just about anything to shut Willy up. “The more one studies these telegrams the more one realizes how completely ‘Nicky’ was as clay in ‘Willy’s’ hands,” the American historian Sidney B. Fay wrote in 1918. Warmer relations might have weighed in the scales of peace in July 1914. Whether the strain between them, unacknowledged by Willy, made things worse is debatable. “The relationship between the three, their personal likes and dislikes, did indeed contribute to the outbreak of hostilities,” Catrine Clay argues in King, Kaiser, Tsar: Three Royal Cousins Who Led the World to War (New York: Walker & Co., 2006). Robert A. Kann is less sure. “One would hesitate to say that the Tsar’s dislike of the Kaiser had in itself a decisive influence on the tragic turn of events in 1914.” He goes on: “After all, Russian policy was determined far less by relations with Germany than by relations with Austria-Hungary … German policy … was predetermined not by imperial likes and dislikes but by the alleged necessity to support the one reliable ally, Austria-Hungary, at any price.” See Robert A. Kann, “Dynastic Relations and European Power Politics (1848–1918)” in Journal of Modern History 45, no. 3 (September 1973): 399–400. The quotation above about monarchical solidarity is from 406. For correspondence, see S. B. Fay, “The Kaiser’s Secret Negotiations with the Tsar, 1904–1905” in American Historical Review 24, no. 1 (October 1918): 49.
* Richard Pipes regards it as doubtful whether Rasputin possessed the extraordinary “sexual prowess” with which his legend endows him. A doctor who treated Rasputin after a “jealous mistress” stabbed him in June 1914 found his “genitals shriveled, like those of a very old man.” The doctor “ascribed this to the effects of alcohol and syphilis.” Protected by the Tsarina, Rasputin “felt above the law.” Pipes offered this example: In March 1915, the chief of the Corps of Gendarmes, V. F. Dzhunkovskii, had the courage to inform the tsar that his agents had overheard Rasputin boast at a dinner party at Moscow’s Praga Restaurant that he ‘could do anything he wanted with the Empress.’ His reward was to be sacked and sent to the front.” Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991), 259–60.
* Things are worse today. “Teenage Russians have less of a chance of living to the age of sixty than they had a hundred years ago … The latest gimmick to encourage drinking is the sale of talking vodka bottles: When you open the bottle, the cap starts talking. It starts with practical instructions like ‘pour’ and then, as the evening progresses, it produces an increasing drunken mixture of shrieks, giggles, and sound effects.” From Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (New York: Oxford, University Press 2002), 161. More recently, the Lancet reported, “The extraordinary consumption of alcohol, especially by men in the last several years, has been responsible for more than half of all deaths of [Russians] aged 15 to 54.” Moscow Times.com, July 2, 2009.
* “Sazonov might have taken a different course; Kokovtsov might have successfully argued against war-triggering risks.” But they might not have. “It is difficult to conceive of any Russian government that could have held back from action in support of Serbia in July 1914,” David M. McDonald writes in United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900–1914, 218.
* This claim is borne out by statistics. In 1913 the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, accounted for 19.2 percent of the world’s manufacturing production and 20.2 percent of steel production; France and Russia for 14.3 and 9.4. Add Britain to their column and the percentages jump to 27.9 of world manufacturing and 17.1 of steel, an edge in the former and a near tie in the latter. The sufficient condition of Germany’s defeat, the numbers suggest, was the U.S. entry into the war, which increased the Allied—U.S., UK, and France—number to 51.7 for manufacturing and 44.1, more than twice the percentage of the Central Powers, for steel. See Paul M. Kennedy, “The First World War and the International Power System,” International Security 9, no. 1 (Summer 1984): tables on 19 and 25.
* “The conventional wisdom holds that the allied victory in World War I was a good thing; it prevented an expansionist continental power from achieving hegemony in continental Europe. This assessment represents the view of the world from the corporate boardrooms and corridors of power in London, New York, and Washington. From the perspective of say, Polish Jewry, the outcome was a disaster.” Richard Ned Lebow, “Counterfactual Thought Experiments: A Necessary Teaching Tool.” History Teacher 40, no. 2, accessed at www.historycooperative
.org/journals/ht/40.2/lebow.html. Ferguson’s picture of Hitler as a victorious and fulfilled soldier living out his days in a German-dominated Central Europe needs this corrective: Hitler would probably have had to keep fighting and killing to fasten German rule on vast alien populations. “If the official war aims of the First World War had been achieved, it would have resulted, estimated very roughly, in an empire of 400 to 500 million inhabitants, with a ruling group of 60 million Germans.” Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 367.
* “Protestant Ulster’s devotion to ‘King Carson’… became so unanimous and intense that the Ulster Unionist Council’s standing committee might have served as a model of Mussolini’s Fascist Grand Council.” Thomas C. Kennedy, “War, Patriotism, and the Ulster Unionist Council, 1914–18,” Éire-Ireland 40, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall/Winter 2005): 192.
* The invaluable source on the Curragh, which includes the relevant documents as well as eyewitness accounts, is Ian F. W. Beckett, ed., The Army and the Curragh Incident 1914 (London: Bodley Head, 1986). The standard narrative remains A. P. Ryan, Mutiny at the Curragh (London: Macmillan, 1956). More recent academic treatments can be found in Elizabeth A. Muenger, The British Military Dilemma in Ireland: Occupation Politics, 1886–1914 (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1991) and Stephen Mark Duffy, “No Question of Fighting”: The Army, the Government and the Curragh Incident, 1914 (Ph.D. diss., Texas A&M University, 1993). For service gossip on the officers involved see The Marquess of Anglesey: A History of the British Cavalry 1816–1919, vol. 7, The Curragh Incident and the Western Front, 1914 (London: Leo Cooper, 1996). For an in-depth analysis of the politics of the Curragh, see the relevant chapter in Patricia Jalland, The Liberals and Ireland: The Ulster Question in British Politics to 1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980). Also see the excellent brief account in A. T. Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis: Resistance to Home Rule, 1912–1914 (London: Faber & Faber, 1967). Also see Charles Townsend, “Military Force and Civil Authority in the United Kingdom, 1914–1921,” Journal of British Studies 28, no. 3 (July 1989): 262–69; Donald Lammers, “Arno Mayer and the British Decision for War: 1914,” Journal of British Studies 12, no. 2 (May 1973): 137–65; Ian F. Beckett and Keith Jeffrey, “The Royal Navy and the Curragh Incident,” Historical Research 62 (February 1989): 54–69. Indispensable is the Times for March and April 1914.
