A Higher Form of Killing (8 page)

Despite the troubles in the Balkans and the continuing arms race, in the golden summer of 1914 few saw reason to worry unduly about an impending war. Then the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his morganatic wife Sophie, in the Bosnian-Herzegovinan city of Sarajevo, changed everything. It happened on June 28, their wedding anniversary, and also the day Serbs commemorated the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 when their troops had been heavily defeated by the Ottoman Turks but a single Serb had penetrated Ottoman lines and killed their sultan. Austro-Hungarian interrogation of captured members of the assassination team revealed that although subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire they had been trained and armed in Serbia and were part of an organization that wanted to incorporate Bosnia-Herzegovina into Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian authorities demanded but failed to secure guarantees from the Serbian government that it would move against anti-Austrian nationalist and terrorist groups in its territory and accept on-the-spot Austro-Hungarian oversight of its compliance. Therefore, having satisfied itself of German support, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28.

Governments across Europe ordered the mobilization of their armies to ensure they were not disadvantaged should a more general war break out. The German general staff alone time-tabled eleven thousand train movements. Despite further diplomatic maneuverings during which, for a brief period, arbitration to solve the conflict seemed possible, Germany—concerned to preserve the advantage its speed of mobilization gave —declared war on August 1 on Russia and on August 3 on France in the latter case with only the most sketchy pretense of justification. The day before, Germany had sent an ultimatum to neutral Belgium demanding to use its territory in operations against France and stating that if Belgium resisted it would be considered an enemy. Britain had previously refused to commit itself in the buildup to war. However, the intended violation of neutral Belgium’s rights in direct contravention of the 1907 Hague Convention on neutral rights, and even more specifically of the Treaty of London signed by the European powers, including Prussia, in 1839 guaranteeing Belgian neutrality, left Britain no room for maneuver.

At three
P.M.
on August 4, 1914, the tall distinguished-looking German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg rose to address a packed Reichstag. German troops, he announced, were advancing on France, had occupied Luxembourg, and were “already in Belgium.” “Our invasion of Belgium is contrary to international law but the wrong—I speak openly—that we are committing we will make good as soon as our military goal has been reached.” His words handed the Allies the moral high ground and an unassailable propaganda advantage.

That evening the British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Edward Goschen, called on von Bethmann Hollweg to present a British ultimatum: leave Belgium or face Britain’s entry into the war. Germany had until midnight to decide. Goschen found the chancellor, a habitual chain smoker, “excited” and “very agitated”; he complained that Britain was committing an “unthinkable” act, “like striking a man from behind while he was fighting for his life against two assailants.” Britain, the chancellor said, would be responsible for everything dreadful that must follow “just for a word—neutrality,” a word which in war time had so often been disregarded—all just for a scrap of paper Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation.” Sir Edward replied stiffly that if it was strategically a matter of life or death for Germany to advance through Belgium, it was equally a matter of life or death for Britain to keep its solemn compact.

Some hours before midnight and the expiry of the ultimatum, according to a British diplomat within, a mob “of quite well-dressed individuals, including a number of women,” stoned the British embassy, smashing many windows. The crowd “seemed mad with rage . . . howling ‘Death to the English pedlar nation!’ ” “that was guilty of Rassen-verrat!”—“race treason.”

Von Bethmann Hollweg later complained: “My blood boiled at his [Goschen’s] hypocritical harping on Belgian neutrality, which was not the thing that had driven England into the war.” British hypocrisy would soon become a familiar German charge. The kaiser too was nonplussed at Britain’s decision. His relationship with Great Britain had always been one of his most complex, emotional, and ambiguous. Her first grandchild, he adored his grandmother Queen Victoria and is said to have held her in his arms as she died in 1901. He had cordially loathed her successor, his uncle Edward VII. After one of Edward’s royal visits to France to cement the Anglo-French entente, the kaiser told three hundred guests at a Berlin dinner “He is Satan. You can hardly believe what a Satan he is.” When Edward died in 1910, the kaiser advised Theodore Roosevelt that the forty-five-year-old George V was “a very nice boy . . . He is a thorough Englishman and hates all foreigners but I do not mind that as long as he does not hate Germans more than other foreigners.”

As an autocrat the kaiser overestimated the power of the monarchy in the British democracy. In late July 1914, on the eve of war, he placed great credence in an account from his brother Henry, then yachting in England, of a conversation with George V in which the latter said that Britain would remain neutral. He told a skeptical von Tirpitz that “I have the word of a King and that is sufficient for me.” When Britain declared war he complained, “to think that Nicholas [the czar of Russia] and Georgie should have played me false! If my grandmother had been alive she would never have allowed it . . . Only among the ruins of London will I forgive Georgie.”

The ambiguity of the kaiser’s feelings toward Britain extended far beyond its royal family. He admired much about the country and its culture, including its capital’s fine architecture. His enthusiasm for battleships and Atlantic liners had been roused in British ports. He was proud not only of being a Knight of the Garter but also an honorary British Admiral of the Fleet and Field Marshal. Initially he had wanted an alliance between what he thought of as “the two Teutonic nations,” commenting in 1901 that “with such an alliance not a mouse could stir in Europe without our permission and the nations would in time come to see the necessity of reducing their armaments.” Such an alliance would be a defense against the encirclement of Germany, which he feared.

Subsequently, he had simply wanted Britain to stand aside and allow Germany a free hand in Europe and in so doing recognize in political terms its real and rising economic strength. Germany had become the dominant force in European steel and chemical production as well as coal mining. In 1870 Britain had 32 percent of the world’s manufacturing capacity, but by 1910 its share had fallen to less than 15 percent, while Germany’s had risen to 16 percent. (The United States by then had 35 percent.)
*
Thereafter the kaiser had come to believe that Britain still treated Germany too lightly, undervaluing both him and his nation, and to share his mentor Bismarck’s view of the British: “I have had all through my life sympathy for England and its inhabitants but these people do not want to let themselves be liked by us.”

It is easy to portray the kaiser—sensitive about his withered arm, early at odds with his parents, and alternately looking for love or bullying to gain attention—as a sad, somewhat comic, deluded figure. However, his ambitions and his views of Britain reflected those of most of his cabinet and much of his nation as is evident from von Bethmann Hollweg’s comments to Goschen about a “kindred nation” and shouts of “race treason” by the mob attacking the British embassy. Von Tirpitz too had been something of an Anglophile, speaking fluent English and reading English books like the kaiser, sending his daughters to Cheltenham Ladies’ College and admiring the British navy wholeheartedly. But he too had come to feel slighted and patronized, complaining that “the English believed that they could treat us like Portugal.” Nevertheless, when von Bethmann Hollweg told the German cabinet on August 3 that with the German invasion of Belgium Britain’s entry into the war was inevitable, von Tirpitz cried out, “All is then lost.” James Gerard, U.S. ambassador to Berlin, described how: “The army and all Germany believed . . . that Great Britain would remain neutral, and that Germany would consequently become, if not the actual owner, at least dictator of the world.”

The kaiser would have happily included the United States in a Teutonic alliance between Germany and Britain. In January 1914, he told Colonel Edward Mandell House, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s main confidant and frequent envoy to Europe, that the Russians as Slavs and the French as Latins would never be suitable allies for the English. Only an English, American, and German alliance based on their common Anglo-Saxon racial heritage would withstand the challenges of the new century. As Gerard later remarked as the war progressed, Germany and its people would be even more ready to include the United States with Britain in their charges of hypocrisy.

The war had popular support in each of the belligerent countries. In France an officer described how as his troop train left a Paris station at six
A.M.
he saw a huge crowd and “quite spontaneously, like a smouldering fire suddenly erupted into roaring flames, an immense clamour arose as the
Marsellaise
burst from a thousand throats. All the men were standing at the train’s windows waving their kepis . . . The women were throwing kisses and heaped flowers on our convoy.” In Saint Petersburg the French ambassador saw an enormous crowd in front of the Winter Palace “with flags, banners, icons and portraits of the Tsar. The Emperor appeared on the balcony. The entire crowd at once knelt and sang the Russian national anthem. To those thousands of men on their knees . . . the Tsar was really the autocrat appointed of God, the military, political and religious leader of his people, the absolute master of their bodies and souls.”

In Munich, an Austrian eking out a living as a painter—Adolf Hitler—witnessed a vast crowd gathered in the Odeonsplatz acclaim the proclamation of mobilization. He was “not ashamed to acknowledge that I was carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment . . . and . . . sank down upon my knees and thanked heaven out of the fullness of my heart for the favour of having been permitted to live in such times.” Almost immediately he petitioned for permission to join a Bavarian regiment even though he was an Austrian subject. It was speedily given.

Religious leaders backed their countries. In Berlin, the kaiser’s pastor led a vast congregation in its prayers for victory while at the Oranienstrasse synagogue the rabbi prayed for a German triumph. A German newspaper proclaimed this is “a holy war: Germany cannot and is not allowed to lose . . . if she loses so, too, does the world lose its light, its home of justice.” On the opposing side, the bishop of London insisted, “The Church can best help the nation first of all by making it realise that it is engaged in a holy war.”

On a much more personal level, a British girl, then seven years old, recalled how her grandmother summoned her from the garden telling her, “ ‘I have got something very serious to tell you. The Germans are fighting the British, there is a war on and all sorts of people will be killed by these wicked Germans. And therefore there must be no playing, no singing and no running about.’ And then she took from us all our toys that were made in Germany, amongst them a camel of which I was very fond.”

Soldiers marching off to the conflict believed it would not last long. A Russian officer worried about packing his dress uniform for a triumphal entry into Berlin. German officers talked of being in Paris in a few weeks. The crowds waving French troops off called “
Au revoir. A bientot
,” expecting to see them again soon. In Britain a Cambridge University undergraduate enlisted with some friends, recalling, “We were quite clear that Germany would be defeated by the 7th of October when we would go back to Cambridge [for the beginning of term].” The kaiser told his departing troops, “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.”

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Key population statistics in 1914 were approximately: United Kingdom, 46 million; Germany, 68 million; United States, 99 million; France, 40 million; Austro-Hungary, 51 million; Russia, 166 million.

CHAPTER FIVE

“The Worst of Contrabands”

But the troops were not even home by Christmas. In the first few days and weeks of the war, Germany’s armies advanced through most of Belgium and into France, despite stronger resistance by the Belgian army than expected that allowed the leading elements of the British Expeditionary Force time to join the fighting. The German advance deprived France of 10 percent of its territory and a third of its industrial capacity.

On September 9 the usually cautious von Bethmann Hollweg, elated by the speed and scale of Germany’s advance, listed extravagant war aims for Germany. The overall goal was “Security for the German Reich in west and east for all imaginable time. For this purpose France must be so weakened as to make its revival as a great power impossible for all time. Russia must be thrust back as far as possible from Germany’s eastern frontier.” More specifically, France should be forced to give up the iron ore fields of Briey “which is necessary for the supply of our industry” and pay a large war indemnity. A treaty should make France economically dependent on Germany, excluding British commerce from French markets. Belgium, if allowed “to continue to exist” should be a “vassal state” with Germany taking military control over the Belgian coastal ports, perhaps with the French ports of Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne being added to the vassal state. Luxembourg should become part of Germany. Colonial concessions should be forced from the defeated. Germany should be dominant in “a central European economic association through common customs treaties to include France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Austro-Hungary, Poland, and perhaps Italy, Sweden, and Norway . . . All its members would be formally equal but in practice would be under German leadership and [this will] stabilise Germany’s economic dominance over Mitteleuropa.”