Europe: A History (178 page)
In 1912–13 three regional wars were fought in the Balkans. In May 1912 Italy attacked the Ottoman Empire, seizing Rhodes, Tripoli, and Cyrenaica. In October 1912, with the Porte diverted by a rising in Albania, the Balkan League of Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece took the offensive against the Ottomans in Macedonia. In June 1913 Bulgaria attacked Serbia to start the Balkan War of Partition. On each occasion, international conferences were held and treaties were signed. Albania emerged as a sovereign state, but Macedonia did not. Austrian gambling paid off. Germany’s influence in Turkey greatly increased. Russian ambitions remained unsatisfied. The Eastern Question stayed unresolved (see Appendix III, p. 1309).
[MAKEDON] [SHQIPERIA]
In a climate of growing unease, serious thought was given to the task of minimizing international conflict. In the absence of government leadership, a number of private initiatives gave rise to agencies such as the Institute of International Law (1873), the Inter-parliamentary Union (1887), and the Nobel Committee. After a long period of gestation which began in 1843, when the first Peace Congress had been held in London, an International Peace Bureau began to operate regularly from 1891 out of Berne in Switzerland, co-ordinating national branches and organizing meetings. Pacifist opinions were given publicity from various quarters including the Swiss jurist J. K. Bluntschli (1808–81), the German Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914), the Austrian A. H. Fried (1864–1921), the French socialist Jean Jaurès, and the English economist Norman Angelí (1873–1967). Angeli’s
The Great Illusion
(1910) argued that the economic interest of nations had rendered war redundant,
[NOBEL]
Yet the most successful appeal for action came from the Tsar of Russia.
Following his intervention, two massive peace conferences assembled at The Hague in 1899 and 1907 to discuss disarmament, the arbitration of international disputes, and the rules of land warfare. Practical results were not lacking. The International Court of Justice came into being in 1900, and the Hague Convention in 1907. A maritime conference assembled in London in 1908–9.
But pacifism enjoyed general support neither among the citizens nor the politicians of the leading states. The ethos of unrestrained state power was deeply rooted. As Field Marshal von Moltke had written in response to Bluntschli:
Perpetual peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream. War is part of God’s order. Without war, the world would stagnate and lose itself in materialism. In it, Man’s most noble virtues are displayed—courage and self-denial, devotion to duty, willingness to sacrifice oneself, and to risk life itself.
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Similar sentiments were voiced in France and Britain. Jaurès would be murdered on 31 July 1914 on the grounds that pacifism was treason.
At the same time, the generals were coming to recognize that the destructive-ness of a future war would far exceed anything previously known, and that the Powers would embark on it at their peril. In his last address to the Reichstag in May 1890, the ageing Moltke issued a grave warning:
If this war were to break out, no one could foresee how long it would last nor how it would end … Gentlemen, it could be a Seven Years’ War; it could be a Thirty Years’ War; and woe to the man who … first throws the match into the powder keg.
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As a result, the military staffs of Europe were torn between the prevailing spirit of militarism and the growing counsels of prudence. They then followed the most dangerous of all courses. They accelerated their preparations for war, assembling huge arsenals and training vast conscript armies, whilst carefully avoiding conflict for decade after decade. The cauldron of rivalries, fears, and hatreds steadily raised an explosive head of steam.
The cauldron’s lid was eventually blown off by another assassination, a month before that of Jaurès. On 28 June 1914 the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Francis-Ferdinand of Austria-Este, was paying an official visit to the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. Accompanied by his morganatic Czech wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, he had disregarded all warnings, having deliberately timed his visit to coincide with the Serbian National Festival of
Vidovdan
(St Vitus’ Day), the anniversary of the Battle of Kossovo (See Chapter VI). In Serbian eyes, it was a calculated insult. In consequence, the crowds which lined the streets of Sarajevo concealed a group of young assassins sent by one of the secret Serb societies opposing Habsburg rule, the Black Hand.
In the morning, the Archduke’s car, a Graf und Stift (1910) 28 h.p., took an unexpected route; and the visitors arrived safely for lunch at the city hall, where Sophie received a delegation of Muslim ladies. A bomb had been thrown, but the explosion caused no injuries and a man was arrested. After lunch, however, the Archduke’s driver took a wrong turning. In his efforts to change direction, he reversed the open vehicle and its passengers right up to a spot beside another conspirator, a 19-year-old consumptive student, Gavrilo Princip. Fired at point-blank range, the bullets of Princip’s revolver mortally wounded the imperial couple. Francis-Ferdinand murmured ‘Sopherl, Sopherl! Sterbe nicht! Bleibe am Leben fur unsere Kinder!’ (Sophie dear, don’t die! Stay alive for our children!) But Sophie was dead. And her husband died within the hour. They would be buried at the dead of night in the chapel of their house at Arstetten on the Danube. Their car, and their blood-soaked clothing, would be preserved at the Army Museum in Vienna.
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[KONOPIПTE]
EULENBERG
O
N
23 October 1907 the case of
Moltke
v.
Harden
opened in a Berlin court. It was the first of six highly publicized trials known collectively as ‘the Eulenburg Affair’. It exposed a widespread homosexual network in the Kaiser’s immediate entourage.
In Germany, as elsewhere, male sodomy was illegal. Paragraph 175 of the penal code punished ‘unnatural vice’ between men with 1–5 years’ imprisonment. General Kuno von Moltke had sued the editor of the journal,
Die Zukunft
(The Future), Maximilian Harden, for publishing material which ridiculed two high-ranking courtiers named only as ‘Sweetie’ and ‘the Harpist’. Moltke claimed that he and his friend, Philip, Prince von Eulenburg, had been libelled. Lurid details were aired in open court, especially by Eulenburg’s ex-wife and by a soldier called Bollhardt. But the key evidence came from Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, a professional sexologist. Latent homosexuality, he explained, was not in itself illegal, though the practice of sodomy was. The court accepted Harden’s defence that the plaintiff’s homosexuality was manifest, but that no breach of Paragraph 175 had been implied.
1
The political implications were grave. Moltke was the military commandant of Berlin. Eulenburg, sometime ambassador to Vienna, was especially close to the Kaiser and openly aspired to the Chancellorship. Both Harden and Hirschfeld held liberal views, and opposed the Kaiser’s foreign policy. Both were campaigning for the repeal of Paragraph 175, and both were Jews. The imperial establishment felt itself to be under attack from treasonable elements.
In later rounds of the scandal Chancellor von Bulow sued another liberal editor, Adolf Brand; the chief of the Kaiser’s military secretariat, Count von Huelsen-Haeseler, dropped dead in the Kaiser’s presence dressed in a tutu in the middle of a drag act; and the Moltke/Harden case was twice retried. The Potsdam garrison was shaken by a series of courts martial for sodomy, and by a rash of associated suicides. (The tight white breeches and thigh-length boots of the cuirassiers had been singled out in court as specially provocative.) Harden’s legal costs were secretly refunded by the imperial chancellery. Eulenburg was ruined. Despite a lifetime of licence, he protested his innocence. But he was condemned on charges of perjury, and only avoided arrest through a stream of feigned illnesses and legal postponements that continued to 1918.
Germany was not alone in its experience of salacious scandals with political overtones. In that same era, Britain was rocked both by the trial of Oscar Wilde and by the tragedy of Sir Roger Casement, who was executed for treason.
2
In the 1920s, however, when Germany was humiliated by national defeat, the scars of the earlier sexual scandals ran deep. The circle of homosexuality-treason-Jewry was further implanted in the popular mind by a chain of associations which started with the murder of the finance minister, Walter Rathenau, a homosexual Jew, in 1922. In his memoirs, the Kaiser himself linked the catastrophe of the Great War to a conspiracy of ‘international Jewry’ first revealed by Harden’s accusations. Historians have linked the events of 1907–9 to the Kaiser’s increasing reliance on his generals, and to their policy of pre-emptive attack.
3
The Nazi Party, whose propaganda fed on such matters, was peculiarly hostile to homosexuals. Dr Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology was demolished by a Nazi mob as early as May 1933. The Gestapo decimated Berlin’s large homosexual community through a series of raids immediately before the Olympic Games in 1936. The lot of the ‘Pink Triangles’ in the concentration camps must be placed high on the list of Nazi crimes.
4
Paragraph 175 was finally abolished in 1969.
Within four weeks, the gunshots of Sarajevo brought Europe’s diplomatic and military restraints crashing to the ground. Ultimata, mobilization orders, and declarations of war ricocheted round the chancelleries. Vienna wanted action against Serbia, and was given
carte blanche
by Berlin. On 23 July an ultimatum was delivered to Belgrade, demanding Austrian participation in the pursuit of the assassins. The Serbian government prevaricated, and ordered partial mobilization. On the 25th, Russia’s Imperial Council decided to give support to Serbia, but failed to consult either Britain or France about it. On the 28th, Austria-Hungary officially declared war on Serbia. Thereon Russia mobilized, prompting Germany to issue ultimata first to Russia and then to France. Thanks to the war-plan of General Schlieffen, the German General Staff needed to be assured that they would not be trapped by a simultaneous attack on two fronts. The die was cast. When the two ultimata evoked no response, the Kaiser followed his generals’ advice that the safety of the Reich permitted no delay. On 1 August Germany declared war on Russia, and on the 3rd on France. On the latter date, since German troops had crossed the Belgian frontier on their way into France, the British government sent an ultimatum to Berlin. The five European powers were embarking on the general war which they had studiously avoided for ninety-nine years.
KONOPIПTE
T
HE
castle of Konopište (formerly Konopischt) lies deep in the pine-woods of central Bohemia. In the 1890s, when it served as the favourite hunting-lodge of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, it was fitted out in sumptuous leather and mahogany. It housed the Archduke’s enormous collection of game trophies. It was, and still is, an elegant charnel-house, crammed with everything from elephants’ tusks to reindeer antlers. It later appealed as a rest home for the Nazi SS, who chose to paint it black.
Archduke Francis-Ferdinand is remembered for four things. First, by morganatically marrying a Czech Countess, Sophie von Chotek, he was obliged to surrender his children’s rights of succession. Secondly, with Sophie’s approval, he was’a determined champion of the narrow (Catholic) bigotry that, in Austria, went under the name of religion’.
1
Third, he wanted to transform the Dual Monarchy into a federation of equal nations. Fourthly, by scorning advice to steer clear of Bosnia in the summer of 1914, he helped lay the fuse which detonated the First World War.
Francis-Ferdinand’s assassination was the third in a series of family killings. He had become imperial heir twenty-five years earlier through the death of his cousin Rudolf. Rudolf had been deeply disturbed by the conflicting influences of an ultra-traditionalist father, the Emperor Francis-Joseph, and of a wilful and wayward mother, the Empress Elizabeth. Passionately anti-clerical, he had once written in a notebook: ‘Are we higher spirits or animals? We are animals …’
2
He shot himself and his lover of seventeen days, Maria Vetsera, at another Habsburg shooting-lodge, at Mayerling in Austria in 1889. The Empress Elizabeth was stabbed to death by an anarchist in Geneva in 1898.
Few sources stress Francis-Ferdinand’s passion for hunting. Yet he scoured the globe for species to kill with a zeal that far exceeded the social demands of his day. He was an early adept of the machine-gun, and would have all the animals of the forest driven into his sights. Two of his trips to Poland sufficed to bring the European bison to the point of extinction. He ordered the remains of his victims to be carefully preserved. At KonopiSte their bodies were stuffed and mounted under glass in their thousands; their heads hung on the walls; their teeth, meticulously repaired by the imperial dentist, packed into row upon row of display cabinets.
The Archduke left Konopište with his wife on 23 June 1914, heading for Sarajevo. When he was killed, the Emperor was said to have breathed a sigh of relief. ‘God permits no challenge,’ he muttered to his aide-decamp; ‘a Higher Power has re-established the order which I had no longer been able to maintain.’
3
This epitaph is generally thought to refer to the Archduke’s morganatic marriage. It might equally apply to the wilful slaughter of helpless creatures.
Monday, 3 August 1914, The Foreign Office, Whitehall, London swi
. The British Foreign Secretary was looking from his study onto a peaceful summer’s evening. Sir Edward Grey was responsible for the international relations of the largest Empire in history. Austria was fighting Serbia. Two days ago, Germany had declared war on Russia and France had mobilised; German troops had occupied Luxemburg, and were poised to attack Belgium; Russian troops had entered East Prussia. But Britain was still at peace. After a long speech in the House of Commons, Sir Edward had just helped the Prime Minister, Henry Asquith, to draft an ultimatum to be sent to Berlin if Belgium were invaded. It must have been 8 or 9 p.m., for he remembered the lamplighter turning up the gaslamps in the courtyard below. He turned to a friend who was with him and who later recalled his words: The lamps are going out all over Europe. I doubt that we shall see them lit again in our lifetime.’ The scene is one of the most famous in British history, described in numberless textbooks. The words are cited in almost all anthologies of quotations.
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