by Jack Beatty
* “The publication of the Asquith letters [in 1982] … unleashed a rash of speculation on what A. J. P. Taylor called, in his own review of the book, ‘the burning question: did they or didn’t they?’ ” Perhaps the closest student of the matter, Naomi B. Levine, believes the answer is yes: “There is no clear-cut evidence to support a firm conclusion that Venetia was Asquith’s mistress … But the nature of the Prime Minister, his reputation as an importunate lecher, his need to touch, to talk with and be with women, [his wife] Margot’s illness and subsequent disinterest in sex, Venetia’s totally unconventional and liberated views …, her lack of any sense of sin or morality, and some of the language used in the letters themselves strongly suggest that the affair had a strong sexual component, even if actual consummation may not have taken place.” Naomi B. Levine, Politics, Religion and Love: The Story of H. H. Asquith, Venetia Stanley and Edwin Montagu, Based on the Life and Letters of Edwin Samuel Montagu (New York: NYU Press, 1991), 233, 235. “Winston Churchill’s daughter, Mary, later wrote that her mother Clementine disliked ‘Mr. Asquith’s predilection for peering down “Pennsylvania Avenue” (the contemporary expression for a lady’s cleavage) whenever he was seated next to a pretty woman.’ ” 112.
* “To his credit Lloyd George did not fall into the trap of underrating Turkish soldiers as a fighting force. He noted their devoted resistance in the last phase of the Balkan war of 1912 when Constantinople was in danger … Yet Lloyd George’s insight was only partial. He managed to subscribe to the view that a British fleet appearing off Constantinople would, by itself or with minimal military assistance, bring about the capitulation of the Turkish Empire.” Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1986), 112, n. 8.
* This battle, at Sarikamish in Russian Armenia, began the Armenian genocide. “At least 150,000 Armenians who lived on the Russian side of the frontier were serving in the Tsar’s army. [The Ottoman minister of war] Enver [Pasha] persuaded himself that his defeat … had been due to three units of Armenian volunteers, who included men who had deserted from the Ottoman side.” As the Russians advanced into Anatolia, the Ottoman soldiers turned on Armenians on the Turkish side of the frontier. Ottoman officials ordered the execution of Armenian leaders suspected of fomenting rebellion in concert with their coreligionists, the Russians. As early as April 27, the Russians claimed that “the populations of over a hundred villages had been massacred.” On May 25, 1915, the Ottoman minister of the interior “announced that Armenians living near the war zones would be deported to Syria and Mosul … The violence of war against the enemy without enabled, and was seen to justify, extreme measures against the enemy within.” An estimated 1.2 to 2 million Armenians died in these massacres and deportations. Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York: Penguin, 2003), 109–15.
* From the official Australian history: “So through Churchill’s excess of imagination, a layman’s ignorance of artillery, and the fatal power of young enthusiasm to convince older and slower brains, the tragedy of Gallipoli was born.” Churchill quotes this damning judgment on himself in The World Crisis, vol. 2, 1915 (London: Butterworth, 1923), 122.
* Contrast Germany in World War II: “How strong the identification with the oppressor remained despite all the hate and doubt which many Germans may have felt … can also be seen by the fact that, throughout the war, there occurred no noteworthy breakdown of morale among either the fighting forces or the German people as a whole … The Germans never ceased to obey.” Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 387.
NOTES
NOTES FOR THE INTRODUCTION
1 Annika Mombauer, “Contingent and Eminently Avoidable Mistakes” is from Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson’s introduction to An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 2. Here is an example supporting Mombauer’s contention that “certain key individuals” desired war: “When Germany delivered its July 31 ultimatum to Russia to cease its mobilization by noon the next day or face German mobilization, Bethmann Hollweg [the German chancellor] deliberately omitted a sentence (which was included in telegrams to other embassies) warning that mobilization would for Germany mean war. German leaders went out of their way to soften their warning to Russia so that the Russians would not actually capitulate and possible rob Germany of the opportunity to fight its war against France and Russia.” Kier A. Lieber, “The New History of World War I and What It Means for International Security Theory,” International Security 32, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 186–87.
2 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 27, 1, 60. For strikes, see CBS News DVD World War I: The Complete Story, ep. 3, “Doomed Dynasties,” narrated by Robert Ryan. For “escaping forward,” see Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 319. “The inner spring of Europe’s general crisis was the overreaction of old elites to overperceived dangers to their overprivileged positions,” 304.
3 For attitudes of European powers toward the Mexican Revolution, see Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 550–78. For Britain’s need for Mexican oil, see Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 370.
4 George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 3.
5 Ibid.
NOTES FOR CHAPTER 1
1 August Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson (New York: Scribner’s, 1991), 440. On the two Germanys metaphor in France, see Michael E. Nolan, The Inverted Mirror: Mythologizing the Enemy in France and Germany, 1898–1914 (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 5. On Prussian militarism, see especially Karl Liebknecht, Militarism (New York: B. W. Huebch, 1917) and Nicholas Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics 1866–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For general treatments, see Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism (New York: Norton, 1938), V. R. Berghahn, Militarism: The History of an International Debate 1861–1979 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and John R. Gillis, ed., The Militarization of the Western World (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989). For a vivid fictional portrait of militarism’s reach into the German soul, see Heinrich Mann, Man of Straw (New York: Penguin Books, 1979).
2 John C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1888–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1. For von Moltke, see Dennis E. Showalter, “The Political Soldiers of Bismarck’s Germany: Myths and Realities,” German Studies Review 17, no. 1 (February 1994): 64.
3 Seen in Eda Sagarra, A Social History of Germany, 1648–1914 (New York: Holmes & Meir, 1977), 242.
4 For “militarism” and “militarization,” see Gillis, Militarization, 1. For United States spending more than the world, see Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 17.
5 For “in all but name,” see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918 (New York: Berg, 1985), 56. Also see Michael Stürmer, The German Empire, 1870–1918 (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 33. For “map of Africa,” see 83. For comparative figures, see Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books, 1998), tables 10 and 13, 92 and 110. George F. Kennan, The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
6 Von Moltke seen in Ferguson, The Pity of War, 137.
7 John C. G. Röhl, “The Emperor’s New Clothes: A Character Sketch of Kaiser Wilhelm II,” in John C. G. Röhl and Nicholas Sombert, eds., Kaiser Wilhelm II: New Interpretations, The Corfu Papers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 40. For uniforms, see Holger H. He
rwig, “Luxury” Fleet: The Imperial German Navy, 1888–1918 (London: The Ashfield Press, 1980), 18–19. For visits to the Zoo-Aquarium, see CBS News DVD World War I: The Complete Story, ep. 3, “The Doomed Dynasties,” narrated by Robert Ryan.
8 For “Bebel,” see William H. Maehl, “Bebel’s Fight against the Schlachtflotte, Nemesis to the Primacy of Foreign Policy,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 121, no. 3 (June 1977): 213ff. Tirpitz sidelined prophets of submarine warfare. See the account by the editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, Theodor Wolff, who invited the submariners to write anonymous articles for the paper, in The Eve of 1914 (London: Gollancz, 1935), 73–74. Falkenhayn to Tirpitz, see Alfred Vagts, “Land and Sea Power in the Second German Reich,” Journal of the American Military Institute 3, no. 4 (Winter 1939), 220. For the navy, see Herwig, “Luxury” Fleet: The Imperial German Navy, 1888–1918, 20, 23; for number of marks, see 256.
9 For wariness about drafting soldiers from cities, see David M. Rowe, “The Tragedy of Liberalism: How Globalization Caused the First World War,” Security Studies 14, no. 3 ( July–September 2005): 425.
10 For Reichstag resistance to expanding the army, see Dennis Showalter, “From Deterrence to Doomsday Machine: The German Way of War, 1890–1914,” Journal of Military History 64, no. 3 (July 2000): 687–94. For the kaiser, see Ferguson, The Pity of War, 137.
11 For War Ministry official, see Ferguson, The Pity of War, 137. For taxes, see Showalter, “From Deterrence to Doomsday Machine,” 687. For beer and tobacco, see Maehl, “Bebel’s Fight,” 213. Germany had immense power potential, but failed to mobilize it. In their paper, “Comparing the Strength of Nations,” Comparative Political Studies 19 (April 1986): 39–70, Jacek Kugler and William Domke “construct an overall index of actualized power that takes into account not only a nation’s economic resource base (as measured by GNP) but also its political capacity to mobilize this resource base.” Their metrics show “Germany in 1914 to be almost equal in actualized military power to Britain, France, and Russia combined.” Seen in Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 271, n. 68.
12 For “media monarch,” see Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 589. “Hun’s speech” cartoon seen in Röhl, The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1042–44.
13 For “prig,” see Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 238. For Fontane and background, see Volker Durr, “The Image of the Prussian Officer in Literature and History,” in Volker Durr, Kathy Harms, Peter Hayes, eds., Imperial Germany (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 75–89. For “Karl Kraus,” see Edward Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 316. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers: A Trilogy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1932), 158.
14 Michael Howard seen in Geoffrey Best, “The Militarization of European Society, 1870–1914,” in John R. Gillis, ed., The Militarization of the Western World (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 21.
15 For “second Jena,” see Clark, Iron Kingdom, 599.
16 See the account in Clark, Iron Kingdom, 596–99; also see the coverage in the London Times beginning on October 18, 1906, and continuing to November 12, 1906. For a dramatic treatment, see Carl Zuckmayer, The Captain of Köpenick: A Modern Fairy Tale in Three Acts (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1932). For Voigt’s accomplice, the kaiser’s amusement, and the two bags of cash, see Benjamin Carter Hett, “The ‘Captain of Köpenick’ and the Transformation of German Criminal Justice, 1891–1914,” Central European History 36, no. 1 (2003): 23–30. Noting the mitigating circumstances that surround his armed robbery conviction, the court gave Voigt a reduced sentence. His case “demonstrates the remarkable transformation in the German criminal justice system in the last years before the First World War.”
17 For “Burckhardt,” see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871–1918 (New York: Berg, 1985), 27.
18 For Bismarck and monarchy, see the review by Geoffrey Wawro, “The Shrewdest of the Shrewd,” Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2011: “What made Bismarck stand out in a liberalizing era was his … insolent confidence in absolute monarchy and his acute insight into how to save and prolong it.” “Forces of order” and “Holstein,” seen in Michael R. Gordon, “Domestic Conflict and the Origins of the First World War: The British and German Cases,” Journal of Modern History 46, no. 2 (June 1974): 204, 212. For war scares, see A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History (New York: Routledge, 1968), 157. “The government’s area of greatest constitutional freedom was in foreign and military affairs. Exploiting its free hand, it repeatedly trumped up foreign policy challenges on the eve of elections to boost vote totals for the ruling coalition.” Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: Norton, 2000), 107.
19 Quotation from Wehler, The German Empire, 30.
20 For “escape forwards,” see Wehler, The German Empire, 198. For “Gerard,” see James Watson Gerard, My Four Years in Germany (New York: Doran, 1917), 318. “To my mind, the course which really determined the Emperor and the ruling class for war was the attitude of the whole people in the Zabern Affair and their evident growing dislike of militarism.” This view seemed to take hold among American publicists: “The Zabern Affair showed the Pan-Germans that they had to make war before ‘liberal Germany’ rebelled. It must be recognized as one of the immediate causes of the war.” Seen in Barry Cerf, Alsace-Lorraine Since 1870 (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 89. Writing a year after the war, Cerf cites a publication of the Committee of Public Information in Washington, the wartime propaganda agency, titled “German Militarism and Its German Critics” as the source of that judgment about the significance of Zabern.
21 J. Ellis Barker, “Autocratic and Democratic Germany: The Lessons of Zabern,” The Nineteenth Century and After (February 1914). For the Duke of Ratibor, see Wehler, The German Empire, 199. For Bethmann Hollweg in the July Crisis, see Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World Without War, The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 414. The biographer quoted is Konrad Jarausch from The Enigmatic Chancellor: Bethmann Hollweg and the Hubris of Imperial Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 158. The school of historians is that identified with the work of Fritz Fischer (1908–99).
22 For “skirted decision” see W. J. Mommsen, “The German Empire as a System of Skirted Decisions,” in Imperial Germany, 1867–1918 (New York: Arnold, 1995). Germany as an “army with a state” is a formulation credited to a “contemporary of Frederick the Great” and originally applying to Prussia. See Leonard Smith, From Mutiny to Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 250. Also see Emilio Willems, A Way of Life and Death: Three Centuries of German Militarism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1986), 32; and F. G. Stapleton, “An Army with a State, Not a State with an Army,” Historical Review (September 2003): 38–43. The classic history of Prussian militarism is Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955).
23 For “Bülow,” see Mark Hewitson, “Germany and France before the First World War: A Reassessment of Wilhelmine Foreign Policy,” English Historical Review 15, no. 462 (June 2000): 578. C. P. Gooch, Franco-German Relations 1871–1914 (London: Longman’s, 1923), 6.
24 For shifting French opinion on the “lost provinces,” see E. Malcolm Carroll, French Public Opinion and Foreign Affairs, 1870–1914 (New York: Century, 1931); Gooch, Franco-German Relations, 9. For recruits, see Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War (New York: Norton, 2007), 324. For “Raymond Poincaré,” see the London Times, January 21, 1914. Also see John Keiger, “Jules Cambon and the Franco-German Détente, 1907–1914,” Historical Journal 26, no.
3 (September 1983): 656.
25 Bismarck quotation taken from Gerhard Ritter, The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany, vol. 1, The Prussian Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 257. For “glacis,” see Craig, Germany, 29–30. “The ambivalence on which the German effort to assimilate Alsace-Lorraine was to founder” was evident from the start. “The inhabitants were informed … that they were wanted not for their own sake, but for the terrain on which they lived.” At the same time, “they were assured” that the Germans had come to liberate what Bismarck called “the German hearts of the Alsatians … from the bondage of French culture.” See Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 119.
26 Napoleon quotation seen in George Wharton Edwards, Alsace-Lorraine (Philadelphia: Penn Publishing, 1918), 39. For “French Revolution,” see Alan Kramer, “Wackes at War: Alsace-Lorraine and the Failure of German National Mobilization, 1914–1918,” in John Horne, ed., State, Society and Mobilization during the First World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 107. For “Teutonic patience,” see E. A. Vizetelly, The True Story of Alsace-Lorraine (New York: Stokes, 1918), 267. For Germanizing of names, see Barry Cerf, Alsace-Lorraine Since 1870 (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 55–56. On the schools, see Stephen Harp, “War’s Eclipse of Primary Education in Alsace-Lorraine, 1914–1918,” Historian 57, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 1–8.
27 Treatment of recruits from Nicholas Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics 1866–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 40. Suicides were actually higher among drill instructors than recruits. See Dennis E. Showalter, “Army and Society in Germany: The Pains of Modernization,” Journal of Contemporary History 18, no. 4 (October 1983): 601–4.
