Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (6 page)

The Hohenzollerns got everything wrong socially. The Crown Prince returned from a 1913 fox-hunting tour of England convinced – quite mistakenly – of Germany’s popularity with that country’s ruling class. His father, with his withered arm and obsession with the minutiae of military uniforms and regulations, was a brittle personality whose yearning for respect caused him to intersperse blandishments and threats in ill-judged succession. Wilhelm once demanded of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes:
‘Now tell me, Rhodes, why is it that I am not popular in England? What can I do to make myself popular?’ Rhodes answered: ‘Suppose you just try doing nothing.’ The Kaiser hesitated, then exploded into heavy laughter. It was beyond his powers to heed such advice. In 1908 Wilhelm scrawled a marginal note on a dispatch from his ambassador in London: ‘If they want a war, they may start it, we are not afraid of it!’

In the years before 1914 European allegiances were not set in stone: they wavered, flickered, shifted. The French entered the new century with a possible invasion of England docketed in their war scenarios, and in 1905 the British still had contingency plans to fight France. They believed for a time that Russia might abandon the Triple Entente and join the Triple Alliance. In 1912 Austria’s Count Berchtold indeed dallied with a rapprochement with St Petersburg, though this foundered over irreconcilable differences about the Balkans. The following year, Germany offered loans to Serbia. Many of the first generation of Rhodes Scholars at Oxford were young Germans, whose presence reflected British respect, even reverence, for their nation’s culture. And industry: until 1911, Vickers collaborated with Krupp on the design and manufacture of shell fuses.

Though the Anglo-German ‘naval race’ grievously impaired bilateral relations, Chancellor Theobald Bethmann Hollweg and Lord Chancellor Richard Haldane made fumbling efforts to improve them, the former by seeking an assurance of British neutrality in the event of a continental war. Bethmann paid a domestic price for such advances, becoming mistrusted by fanatical German nationalists as an alleged anglophile. Meanwhile the Kaiser’s brother Prince Heinrich of Prussia, during a January 1914 conversation in Berlin with British naval attaché Captain Wilfred Henderson, remarked in idiosyncratic English readily comprehensible at any London dining table, that ‘other large European maritime nations are not white men’. This comment, which placed alike beyond the pale Russians, Italians, Austro-Hungarians and Frenchmen, won Henderson’s warm approbation. Reporting the royal remarks to the Admiralty, he wrote: ‘I could not help feeling that His Royal Highness had voiced in a peculiarly British way a view that is very prevalent in our own Service.’

These words were thought sufficiently embarrassing to be expunged from a volume of such diplomatic reports published a generation later. But the Prince’s theme was pursued on an evening when German and British naval officers dined together, and the only toast offered was that of ‘the two white nations’. At the 1914 Kiel Regatta, some German sailors
swore eternal friendship to their visiting counterparts of the Royal Navy. The commander of
Pommern
told officers of the cruiser
Southampton
: ‘We try and mould ourselves in the traditions of your navy, and when I see in the papers that the possibility of war between our two nations must be considered, I read it with horror – to us such a war would be a civil war.’ Grand-Admiral Tirpitz employed an English governess for his daughters, who completed their education at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

Yet if Germany admired Britain, it also sought to challenge her, most conspicuously through the creation of a fleet capable of engaging the Royal Navy – this was overwhelmingly the Kaiser’s personal commitment, strongly opposed by the chancellor and the army – and more fundamentally by rejecting the continental balance of power, so dear to British hearts. At Kiel in 1914, Vice-Admiral Sir George Warrender sought to flatter Tirpitz. The Englishman said: ‘You are the most famous man in Europe.’ Tirpitz answered: ‘I have never heard that before.’ Warrender added: ‘At least in England.’ The admiral growled: ‘You in England always think that I am the bogey of England.’ So Tirpitz was, and so too was the Kaiser. However Germany dressed matters up, its leaders aspired to secure a dominance in the management of Europe which no British government would concede, and thereafter they proposed to reach out across the oceans of the world.

Lord Haldane told Prince Lichnowsky, in the German ambassador’s words: ‘England, if we attacked France, would unconditionally spring to France’s aid, for England could not allow the balance of power to be disturbed.’ Lichnowsky was not taken seriously in Berlin, partly because of his enthusiasm for things English. His hosts did not reciprocate. British prime minister Herbert Asquith wrote of the Lichnowskys to his confidante Venetia Stanley: ‘rather trying guests. They have neither of them any manners, and he is loquacious and inquisitive about trifles.’

Haldane’s warning, transmitted to Berlin by the ambassador, was contemptuously dismissed. Gen. Helmuth von Moltke, Germany’s chief of staff, thought the British Army an imperial gendarmerie of little consequence, and the Royal Navy irrelevant in a continental clash of soldiers. The Kaiser scrawled on the ambassador’s report his own view that the British concept of a balance of power was an ‘idiocy’ which would make England ‘eternally into our enemy’. He wrote to Franz Ferdinand of Austria, describing Haldane’s remarks as ‘full of poison and hatred and envy of the good development of our mutual alliance and our two countries [Germany and Austria]’. Several British academics warned of the
prevalence of opinion in German universities about the inevitability of a historic struggle between the Kaiser’s people and their own, identified as ascendant Rome and doomed Carthage.

Germany and the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary were twin pillars of the Triple Alliance, of which Italy was a third member, upon whose attendance in the event of war nobody relied. For much of the previous century, the Ottoman Empire had been known as ‘the sick man of Europe’, its might and territories shrivelling. It had now been supplanted in that predicament by the Hapsburg Empire, whose dissolution in the face of its own contradictions and disaffected minorities was a focus of constant speculation in chancelleries and newspapers, not least in Germany. But the rulers of the Hohenzollern Empire elevated preservation of their tottering ally to a key objective of foreign policy. The Kaiser and his advisers shackled themselves to the Hapsburgs, not least because the beneficiaries of Austria-Hungary’s dissolution would be their chosen enemies: Russia and its Balkan clients. The Kaiser delivered frequent denunciations of ‘Slavdom’ and Russia’s alleged leadership of a front against ‘Germandom’. On 10 December 1912 he told the Swiss ambassador in Berlin: ‘we will not leave Austria in the lurch: if diplomacy fails we shall have to fight this racial war’.

The Hapsburg Empire embraced fifty million people of eleven nationalities, occupying the territories of modern Austria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, parts of Poland and north-east Italy. Franz Joseph was a weary old man of eighty-three, who had occupied his throne since 1848, and created the Dual Monarchy in 1867. For twenty-eight years he had enjoyed an intimacy with the actress Katharina Schratt. He wrote to her as ‘My Dear Good Friend’; she replied to ‘Your Imperial and Royal Majesty, my Most August Lord’. She was fifty-one in 1914, and they had long since settled into a pleasant domesticity. At Ischl, his summer residence, the Emperor rambled alone to her house, Villa Felicitas, where he would sometimes arrive at 7 a.m. after sending a note: ‘Please leave the small door unlocked.’

Having spent some years of his youth as a soldier, even seeing a little action, the Emperor almost invariably affected military uniform; he perceived his army as the unifying force of the empire. Its officer corps was dominated by noblemen, most of whom combined conceit with incompetence. Franz Joseph’s reign was symbolised by his insistence, when a young monarch, upon holding military exercises on a parade ground sheeted in ice, which caused many horses to slip and fall, killing two of their riders. On a larger scale, this was how he continued to rule, seeking
to defy inexorable social, political and economic forces. Norman Stone has categorised the Hapsburg monarchy as ‘a system of institutionalised escapism’. Its capital harboured as much poverty and unemployment as any European city, and more despair than most: in 1913 almost 1,500 Viennese attempted suicide, and more than half succeeded. As for popular consent, one writer has observed of the Austrian parliament: ‘It was less a legislature than a cacophony. But since it was a Viennese cacophony, it shrilled and jangled with a certain flair.’ In March 1914 the racket grew too loud for Franz Joseph: he prorogued the Reichsrat in the face of relentless clashes between its Czech and German members. He and his ministers thereafter ruled by decree.

Austria-Hungary was a predominantly rural society, but Vienna was toasted as one of the most cultured and cosmopolitan capitals on earth, beloved of Franz Lehár and Thomas Mann. Lenin thought it ‘a mighty, beautiful and vivacious city’. Irving Berlin’s ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ was sung there in English, and in 1913 it played host to the world premiere of Bernard Shaw’s
Pygmalion
. It is an oddity of history that in the same year Stalin, Trotsky, Tito and Hitler alike lived for some months in Vienna. The great American boxer Jack Johnson was star turn of that winter’s season at the Apollo Theatre. Among a host of popular cafés, the Landtmann was the favourite of Sigmund Freud. The city represented a global pinnacle of snobbery: bowing, scraping and even hand-kissing shopkeepers flattered their middle-class customers by adding an aristocratic ‘von’ to their names, and addressing them as ‘Your Grace’. Domestic servants were subject to almost feudal routines: employment law entitled housemaids to only seven hours off a fortnight, every alternate Sunday. Aristocratic Viennese had a New Year custom of pouring gobbets of molten lead into buckets of iced champagne, then trying to predict the future by the shapes into which they hardened.

Austrian aristocratic social life was the most ritualised in Europe, dominated by appearances in the boxes of the Parquet Circle at the Court Theatre and Court Opera, and weekly At Homes. Every smart Viennese knew that Sunday was the afternoon of Princess Croy; Monday, of Countess Haugwitz; Tuesday, Countess Berchtold; Wednesday, Countess Buquoy. Countess Sternberg organised weekend ski outings at the Semmering Alp; Countess Larisch presided at bridge parties; Pauline, Princess Metternich, was alleged to entertain so many Jewish bankers that she received sneers as ‘
Notre Dame de Zion
’. Vienna boasted one of the largest and most influential Jewish communities in Europe, and formidable anti-Semitism to go with it.

Though the Germans condescended politically and militarily to the Austrians, they were prone to spasms of social inadequacy when meeting Hapsburg grandees on their home turf. Wickham Steed, the long-serving
Times
correspondent, wrote of Vienna: ‘The combination of stateliness and homeliness, of colour and light, the comparative absence of architectural monstrosities and the Italian influence everywhere apparent, contribute, together with the grace and beauty of the women, the polite friendliness of the inhabitants and the broad, warm accent of their speech, to charm the eye and ear of every travelled visitor.’ But Steed found Viennese vanity ‘insufferable’; he perceived ‘a general atmosphere of unreality’, and complained that the city lacked a soul.

The Austrians cultivated relationships with Germany, Turkey and Greece in efforts to frustrate Serbian ambitions to create a pan-Slav state, a Yugoslavia, embracing several million Hapsburg subjects. In the years before 1914, the Empire also grew accustomed to employing military threats as a routine extension of its diplomacy. Its generals regarded war with reckless insouciance, as a mere tool for the advancement of national interests rather than as a passport to Hades. As Hapsburg minorities became ever more alienated, imperial repression became increasingly heavy-handed. Vienna fostered divisions between its subject Muslims, Serbs and Croats. Most minorities were denied political rights, while being liable to punitive taxation. Vienna might waltz, but there was little grace or mercy about anything else in Franz Joseph’s dominions. The best that might be said was that its neighbours behaved no better.

The leaders of Russia shared with the Kaiser’s court a belief that the two empires were fated to participate in a historic struggle between Germanism and Slavdom. Germans made no secret of their contempt for the Russians, and subjected them to constant snubs. Meanwhile the Tsar’s subjects were resentful of German cultural and industrial superiority. The two nations’ most conspicuous point of friction and threatened collision was Turkey. They circled the ailing Ottoman Empire as predators, each bent upon securing choice portions of its carcass. Control of the Dardanelles entrance to the Black Sea, through which 37 per cent of Russian exports passed, was an especially critical issue. Weak Ottoman supervision was just acceptable in St Petersburg. German dominance was not, yet this was a key objective of the Kaiser’s foreign policy. The Young Turks who seized power in Constantinople in 1908 welcomed German aid, and especially military advisers, in their drive to modernise the country. As for Berlin’s view,
when Gen. Liman von Sanders departed to command the Constantinople garrison in 1913, Wilhelm urged him: ‘create for me a new strong army which obeys my orders’.

Liman’s appointment to Turkey provoked consternation in St Petersburg. The president of the Duma urged Nicholas II to act boldly to wrest the Dardanelles from the Ottomans before the Germans did so: ‘the Straits must become ours. A war will be joyfully welcomed, and will raise the government’s prestige.’ At a December 1913 Russian Council of Ministers meeting, the navy and war ministers were questioned about the readiness of their services to fight, and answered that ‘Russia was perfectly prepared for a duel with Germany, not to speak of one with Austria.’ The following February, Russian military intelligence passed to the government a German secret memorandum which shocked St Petersburg: it emphasised Berlin’s commitment to controlling the Dardanelles, and to securing for the Kaiser’s officers command of the straits’ gun batteries. It seems extravagant to suggest, as do some historians, that the Russians wished to start a war in 1914 to gain the Black Sea approaches. But they were almost certainly willing to fight to stop the Germans getting them.