The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  The key to understanding European royalty is thus that it was genuinely European; conventional national identity was fundamentally incompatible with an essentially multinational monarchy. Queen Victoria, for example, always thought of her family as ‘our dear Coburg family’ and regarded Saxe-Coburg as the royal family’s proper surname. She liked her children to converse in German as well as in English, as her ‘heart and sympathies’ were, in her own words, ‘all German’. It was typical of her to Germanize the name of her daughter Helena to Lenchen, for example. ‘The German element’, she once declared, ‘is one I wish to be cherished and kept up in our beloved home.’ ‘My heart’, she told Leopold of the Belgians in 1863, ‘is so German’. Yet she could just as easily speak of herself as the embodiment of England, Scotland – even India. In much the same way, Tsar Nicholas II invariably wrote to his German-born wife in English, as he did in his many affectionate letters to the German Kaiser. The Queen of the Belgians spoke fluent Hungarian because she was an Austrian archduchess; her husband’s father was German, his mother French. Partly as a result of this cosmopolitanism, the European royals were, literally, in a class of their own. Despite being spread across the continent, the various branches of the family were held together by correspondence and by frequent meetings. State visits by one monarch to another were an integral part of nineteenth-century diplomacy. But behind the formalities, these were genuine family gatherings. The members of the extended royal family even knew one another by affectionate nicknames. Prince George of Battenberg was ‘Georgie Bat’ in Nicholas II’s letters to his wife, while she invariably referred to the King of Greece as ‘Greek Georgie’. To Queen Victoria, Prince Alexander of Bulgaria was always ‘dear Sandro’.

  This system could only be preserved if the members of the various dynasties continued to marry one another; to wed even the grandest of non-royal aristocrats would break up the magic royal circle, because aristocratic families were emphatically members of one or other national elite. When Queen Victoria’s daughter Louise married a son of the Duke of Argyll, the match seemed so unusual that its constitutional propriety had to be defended by the Queen. But she drew the line when her son-in-law Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt contemplated marrying ‘a divorced Russian lady’ following the death of his first wife, Victoria’s daughter Alice. The root of Alexander III’s grudge against Alexander of Battenberg – and one reason he forced him off the Bulgarian throne – was that the Battenbergs were the issue of a morganatic (non-royal) marriage. When the Archduke Francis Ferdinand defied his uncle, the Emperor Francis Joseph, by marrying Sophie, Countess Chotek, he was never really forgiven at court. Indeed, the old Emperor regarded the couple’s assassination in Savajevo as a kind of divine retribution for this lapse; mourning at the court in Vienna verged on the perfunctory. In 1907, for similar reasons, Kaiser William II effectively forbade what would have been the morganatic marriage of Prince Frederick William of Prussia to Paula, Countess von Lehndorff. Marriage to fellow-royals was the rule, and exceptions were made only in extremis, when the sole alternative was spinsterhood.

  The result of all this was an extraordinary genealogical tangle. To give just one example, which Queen Victoria noted with evident relish, Queen Maria Christina of Spain was the ‘daughter of the late Archduke Frederick and the Archduchess Elisabeth, Marie of Belgium’s elder sister. Her Grandfather was the celebrated Archduke Charles, whose wife was a Princess of Nassau, and she is second cousin to Helen, also second cousin to Lily, on her mother’s side.’ Christopher, Prince of Greece, had an equally convoluted family tree: ‘My father was King George I of Greece, born Prince William of Denmark, brother of Queen Alexandra of England… My mother was the Grand Duchess Olga of Russia, daughter of the Grand Duke Constantine and granddaughter of the Czar Nicholas I.’ It was scarcely surprising that this inbred multinational elite aroused enmity in certain quarters. In the wake of the ill-fated Bulgarian adventure of Alexander of Battenberg, Herbert von Bismarck – the son of the Saxe-Coburgs’ most formidable adversary – complained half-seriously: ‘In the English Royal Family and its nearest collaterals, there is a sort of worship of the undiluted family principle and Queen Victoria is regarded as a kind of absolute Chief of all branches of the Coburg clan. It is associated with codicils, which are shown to the obedient relation from afar.’ What really made the Saxe-Coburgs so successful, and what rankled so much with the Bismarcks, was that they were broadly liberal in their social and political inclinations (something that distinguished them from that other German dynasty associated with Britain, one which was to come to grief at Bismarck’s hands, the Hanoverians). The French polemicist who compared the Saxe-Coburgs with the Rothschilds in the 1840s was closer to the mark than he knew: for these two South German dynasties had an almost symbiotic relationship with one another. Dismayed by the influence of Queen Victoria’s daughter and namesake over her husband, the ill-starred Frederick III, Bismarck did his utmost to drive a wedge between their son and the so-called ‘Coburg cabal’.

  Yet it would be a mistake to see this rift as presaging the war of 1914–18. To be sure, William II felt a deep ambivalence towards his English relations. For example, he refused to see the Prince of Wales when both men were in Vienna in 1889, having heard that the Prince had called for the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France. When it turned out that he had been misrepresented, the Kaiser refused to apologize. As Prince Christian of Denmark explained, ‘The Kaiser is as yet too new in his position to feel quite sure of himself and his ability to do the right thing. He is therefore constantly afraid of compromising his dignity, and he is particularly sensitive lest his older relatives should treat him as the “Nephew” and not as the “Kaiser”.’ Only with the passage of time, however, did such tiffs take on the aspect of harbingers of war (not least in the Kaiser’s own excitable mind). In the years before 1914, he had in fact made sincere efforts to improve relations with Russia, the state most feared by German military planners and diplomats. He had positively encouraged the Tsar to take a hard line over Manchuria, pledging German support if it came to war. In 1904 he was asked to become godfather to the Tsar’s son, a request he welcomed with enthusiasm. In 1909, too, when he sent his Easter gift to the Tsar, he was careful to point out that it was ‘a token of undiminished love and friendship… a symbol for our relation to each other’.

  What suddenly became clear in the crisis of that summer was that the Kaiser, like his Saxe-Coburg relatives, lacked the power to override the military and political professionals if they were resolved to go to war. This was the reality of constitutional monarchy: that dynastic family ties could no longer transcend the imperatives of a war between whole peoples in arms. Still, no one could be entirely sure of that until the monarchs had been overruled. Until they were, there remained the possibility of some kind of royal compromise. The British ambassador in St Petersburg wanted to know if it would ‘be possible in the last resort for Emperor Nicholas to address [a] personal appeal to Emperor of Austria to restrict Austria’s action within limits which Russia could accept’. The Germans sent the Kaiser’s brother, Prince Henry, to London, to see if George V could be won over to neutrality. The monarchs themselves acted as if it really was in their power to stop the war. ‘I spoke to Nicky’, the Tsar’s sister Olga recalled, ‘and he replied that Willy was a bore and an exhibitionist, but he would never start a war.’ ‘Willy’ and ‘Nicky’ each endeavoured to localize the war, the Kaiser by urging the Austrians to ‘halt in Belgrade’, the Tsar by delaying Russian general mobilization. Indeed, the two sovereigns continued to seek a compromise even after hostilities had broken out, as the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir William Goschen, somewhat reluctantly acknowledged:

  Of course a good deal of it [the German case] is true; namely, that particularly at the end Germany (incl. the Emperor) did try and persuade them at Vienna to continue discussions and accept Sir E[dward] Grey’s proposals… That the Emperor and Co. have worked at Vienna is certainly true – and the German case, to put it i
n a nutshell, is that while the Emperor at the Czar’s request, was working at Vienna – Russia mobilised – or rather ordered mobilisation… The last thing I hear is that Russia has informed the Imperial Government that the Czar has not been told that the Emperor was working at Vienna – and they have demanded three hours more to consider the German demand. Certainly up to the time of writing this, no mobilisation order has been issued by the Emperor… Jagow [the German Foreign Secretary] told me that the Emperor was fearfully depressed and said that his record as a ‘Peace Emperor’ was finished with.

  ‘Both you and I did everything in our power to prevent war,’ George V wrote to Nicholas II on July 31, ‘but alas we were frustrated and this terrible war which we have all dreaded for so many years has come upon us.’ The ‘we’ he had in mind was, of course, that pan-European kinship group to which nearly all the monarchs had belonged, which had seemed in itself a bulwark against war. Now, as Marie of Battenberg lamented, the days of cosmopolitanism were at an end. Henceforth

  the Tsarina of Russia [though German by birth] was a Russian, just as the Queen of the Belgians, a Bavarian princess by birth, is a Belgian; and the Duchess Marie of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha a German; although she was born a Russian, and became by marriage an English princess. The Duchess of Albany, also, although by birth a princess of Waldeck, is English, and her son, an English prince, by inheriting the Dukedom of Saxe-Coburg, became a German, and remained so during the war. Often did I think during that painful time: It is all very well for you to talk, you fortunate German people, whose blood remains unmixed with that of foreigners!

  The Duke of Saxe-Coburg she alluded to was Charles Edward, one of Queen Victoria’s legion of great-grandsons. Though educated in England, he had inherited the dukedom in 1900 and spent most of the war in German uniform, albeit (at his request) on the Eastern Front. In deference to wartime sentiment, the Coburg line was renamed the ‘Windsor’ line in 1917, and Battenbergs became Mountbattens. The European earthquake shook every social class, but none more than the continent’s cosmopolitan royal elite. Far from causing it, as is still sometimes claimed, they had been powerless to prevent it.

  THE GENERALS’ WAR

  Early on the morning of July 30, 1914, the German ambassador in St Petersburg sent a telegram to Berlin relaying a long conversation he had just had with the Russian Foreign Minister S. D. Sazonov. The gist of it was that Russian military mobilization in defence of Serbia ‘could no longer possibly be retracted’, despite ‘the danger of a European conflagration’. According to Sazonov, the Austrian government had made unacceptable demands of the Serbian government in the wake of the assassination. (The Austrians had insisted that their officials be represented in the Serbian investigation of the conspiracy that had led to the Archduke’s murder, and declared war after the Serbs refused.) The German ambassador explicitly pointed out ‘the automatic effect that the mobilization here would have on us in consequence of the German-Austrian alliance’. But Sazonov was adamant. ‘Russia could not leave Serbia in the lurch. No Government could follow such a policy here without seriously endangering the Monarchy.’ The Kaiser’s comments on this telegram provide a fascinatingly unorthodox interpretation of the origins of the First World War, which deserves to be quoted at length. After a succession of increasingly indignant marginal exclamations (‘Nonsense!’ ‘Aha! As I suspected!’), he exploded:

  Frivolity and weakness are to plunge the world into the most frightful war, which eventually aims at the destruction of Germany. For I have no doubt left about it: England, Russia and France have agreed among themselves – after laying the foundation of the casus foederis for us through Austria – to take the Austro-Serbian conflict for an excuse for waging a war of extermination against us. Hence [the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward] Grey’s cynical observation to [the German ambassador in London, Prince] Lichnow-sky [that] ‘as long as the war is confined to Russia and Austria, England would sit quiet, only when we and France are mixed up in it would he be compelled to make an active move against us’; i.e., either we are shamefully to betray our allies, sacrifice them to Russia – thereby breaking up the Triple Alliance, or we are to be attacked in common by the Triple Entente for our fidelity to our allies and punished, whereby they will satisfy their jealousy by joining in totally ruining us. That is the real naked situation in nuce, which, slowly and cleverly set going, certainly by Edward VII, has been carried on, and systematically built up by disowned conferences between England and France and St Petersburg; finally brought to a conclusion by George V and set to work. And thereby the stupidity and ineptitude of an ally is turned into a snare for us. So the famous ‘encirclement’ of Germany has finally become a complete fact, despite every effort of our politicians and diplomats to prevent it. The net has been suddenly thrown over our head and England sneeringly reaps the most brilliant success for her persistently prosecuted purely anti-German world-policy, against which we have proved ourselves helpless, while she twists the noose of our political and economic destruction out of our fidelity to Austria, as we squirm isolated in the net. A great achievement, which arouses the admiration of him who is to be destroyed as its result! Edward VII is stronger after his death than am I who am still alive! And there have been people who believed that England could be won over or pacified, by this or that puny measure!!! Unremittingly, relentlessly she has pursued her object… until this point was reached. And we walked into the net… !!! All my warnings, all my pleas were voiced for nothing. Now comes England’s so-called gratitude for it! From the dilemma raised by our fidelity to the venerable old Emperor of Austria, we are brought into a situation which offers England the desired pretext for annihilating us under the hypocritical cloak of justice, namely, of helping France on account of the reputed ‘balance of power’ in Europe, i.e., playing the card of all the European nations in England’s favour against us!

  Was there any substance at all to this at first sight hysterical tirade? Few, if any, historians would accept that there was. The consensus has for many years been that it was the German government that wilfully turned the Balkan crisis of 1914 into a world war. Yet that is surely to understate the shared responsibility of all the European empires. For one thing, the Austrian government could hardly be blamed for demanding redress from Serbia in the wake of the Archduke’s murder. Their ultimatum to Belgrade, delivered after much prevarication on July 23, essentially demanded that the Serbian authorities allow Austrian officials to participate in the inquiry into the assassinations. This was, all things considered, not an unreasonable demand, even if it did imply a violation of Serbia’s sovereignty. After all, Serbia was what we today would call a rogue regime. Its ruling monarch had come to power in a bloody coup in 1903 in which the previous king, Aleksandar Obrenović, had been murdered by none other than ‘Apis’. Even if the assassins had been sent to Sarajevo by the same ‘Apis’ without the approval of the Serbian government, the authorities in Belgrade had almost certainly known what was afoot. As The Economist put it on August 1:

  It is fair… to ask… what Great Britain would have done in a like case – if, for example, the Afghan Government had plotted to raise a rebellion in North-West India, and if, finally, Afghan assassins had murdered a Prince and Princess of Wales? Certainly the cry of vengeance would have been raised, and can we be sure that any measure milder than the Note sent from Vienna to Belgrade would have been dispatched from London or Calcutta to Kandahar?

  From a modern standpoint, the only European power to side with the victims of terrorism against the sponsors of terrorism was Germany.

  It is true that when the Kaiser first informed the Austrian ambassador that Germany would back Austria, he explicitly stated that that support would be forthcoming ‘even if it should come to a war between Austria and Russia’. But an offer of support conditional on Russian non-intervention would have been quite worthless. Why, in any case, did the Russians feel so strongly impelled to intervene on the side of the Serbs? They had no real influence over the regim
e in Belgrade. Their motive was purely a matter of prestige – the belief that if they allowed Serbia to be humiliated, it would be interpreted as yet another defeat for Russia, less than a decade after the calamity of Tsushima, to say nothing of the Austrian annexation of Bosnia. It was on this basis that Sazonov and the chief of the Russian General Staff, General Nikolai Yanushkevich, persuaded the hesitant Tsar to order general mobilization of the huge Russian army. A Russian general mobilization clearly implied more than the defence of Serbia. It also implied an invasion of eastern Germany.

  Without doubt, the German generals eagerly seized the opportunity for war and delayed their own mobilization only in order that Russia would appear the aggressor. Yet German anxieties about the pace of Russia’s post-1905 rearmament were not wholly unjustified; there were legitimate reasons to fear that their Eastern neighbour was on the way to becoming militarily invincible. That was why Helmuth von Moltke, the Chief of the German General Staff, argued insistently that ‘we would never again find a situation as favourable as now, when neither France nor Russia had completed the extension of their army organizations’. As he explained to Jagow just six weeks before the Sarajevo assassination:

  Russia will have completed her armaments in two or three years. The military superiority of our enemies would be so great that he did not know how we might cope with them. In his view there was no alternative to waging a preventive war in order to defeat the enemy as long as we could still more or less pass the test.

  The Germans were not, as the phrase ‘more or less’ makes clear, optimistic. Moltke himself had warned the Kaiser as early as 1906 that the next war would be ‘a long wearisome struggle’ which would ‘utterly exhaust our own people, even if we are victorious’. ‘We must prepare ourselves’, he wrote in 1912, ‘for a long campaign, with numerous tough, protracted battles.’ He was just as gloomy when he discussed the issue with his Austrian counterpart, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorff, in May 1914: ‘I will do what I can. We are not superior to the French.’ In any case, ‘The sooner the better’ was not the watchword of Moltke alone. His Russian counterpart, Yanushkevich, threatened to ‘smash his telephone’ after the Tsar had finally approved general mobilization, to avoid the risk of being told of a royal change of heart. The Germans, as is well known, had for some years contemplated an invasion of northern France as a way of avoiding the heavy fortifications that lined France’s eastern frontier. But the French generals, whose belief in the morale-building benefits of the offensive was second to none, were scarcely less eager for war. They had no intention of standing by while Germany defeated their Russian ally, but planned instead to invade southern Germany through Alsace-Lorraine as soon as hostilities began.