Europe's Last Summer (2 page)

^*
Beginning in 1801, the official title of Great Britain was the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland"; for short, the United Kingdom.

† Called "the Allies" during the war.

§ with Italy as the third member in peacetime. Called "the Central Powers" during the war.

More than 20 million soldiers and civilians perished in the Great War, and an additional 21 million were wounded. Millions more fell victim to the diseases that the war unleashed: upwards of 20 million people died in the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 alone.

The figures, staggering though they are, fail to tell the whole story or to convey the full impact of the war on the world of 1914. The consequences of the
changes wrought by the crisis of European civilization are too many to specify and, in their range and in their depth, made it the turning point in modern history. That would be true even if, as some maintain, the war merely accelerated some of the changes to which it led.

On August 8, 1914, only four days after Great Britain entered the war, the
London
Economist
described it as "perhaps the greatest tragedy of human history." That may well remain true. In 1979 the distinguished American diplomat and historian
George Kennan wrote that he had "come to see the First World War, as I think many reasonably thoughtful people have learned to see it, as
the
grand seminal catastrophe of this century."

Fritz Stern, one of the foremost scholars of German affairs, writes of "the first calamity of the twentieth century, the Great War, from which all other calamities sprang."

The military, political, economic, and social earthquakes brought about a redrawing of the map of the world. Empires and dynasties were swept away. New countries took their place. Disintegration of the political structure of the globe continued over the course of the twentieth century. Today the earth is divided into about four times as many independent states as existed when the Europeans went to war in 1914. Many of the new entities—
Jordan,
Iraq, and
Saudi Arabia are examples that come to mind—are countries that never existed before.

The Great War gave birth to terrible forces that would plague the rest of the century. To drive Russia out of the war, the German government financed Lenin's Bolshevik communists, and introduced Lenin himself into Russia in 1917—in
Winston Churchill's words, "in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city."
Bolshevism was only the first of such war-born furies, followed in years to come by fascism and Nazism.

Yet the war also set in motion two of the great liberation movements of the twentieth century. As Europe tore itself apart, its over-lordship of the rest of the planet came undone, and over the course of the century, literally billions of people achieved their independence. Women, too, in parts of the world, broke free from some of the shackles of the past, arguably as a direct consequence of their involvement in war work—jobs in factories and in the armed forces—beginning in 1914.

Another kind of liberation, a wide-ranging freedom from restraint, came out of the Great War and has expanded ever since in behavior, sex life, manners, dress, language, and the arts. Not everybody believes it to be a good thing that so many rules and restrictions have gone by the way. But whether for good or ill, the world has traveled a long way—from the Victorian age to the twenty-first century—along paths that were blasted out for it by the warriors of 1914.

In searching for the origins of any of the great issues that have faced the world during the twentieth century, or that confront it today, it is remarkable how often we come back to the Great War. As George Kennan observed: "all the lines of inquiry, it seems to me, lead back to it." Afterwards the choices narrowed. The
United States and even Great Britain had a choice, for example, of whether or not to enter the First World War—indeed disagreement has persisted ever since as to whether they were wise to do so—but, realistically, the two countries had little or no choice at all about whether or not to join battle in the
Second.

There was nothing inevitable about the progression from the earlier conflict to the later one. The long fuse could have been cut at many points along the way from 1914 to 1939, but nobody did cut it. So the First World War did in fact lead to the Second, even though it need not have done so, and the Second, whether or not it needed to do so, led to the
Cold War. In 1991 historians
Steven E. Miller and
Sean M. Lynn-Jones maintained: "Most observers describe the present period of international politics as the 'post–Cold War' era but in many ways our age is better defined as the 'post–World War I' era."

From the start, the explosion of 1914 seemed to set off a series of chain reactions, and the serious consequences were soon apparent to contemporaries: In the Introduction to
The Magic Mountain
(1924), Thomas Mann wrote of "the Great War, in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off beginning."

Nor has it entirely left off today. On April 21, 2001, the
New York Times
reported from France the return to their homes of thousands of people who had been evacuated temporarily because of a threat from munitions left over from World War I and stored near them. These included shells and mustard gas. The evacuees had been allowed to return home after fifty tons of the more dangerous munitions had been removed. But a hundred tons of the lethal materials remained—and remain. So munitions from the 1914 war may yet explode in the
twenty-first century.

Indeed, in a sense they already have.
On September 11, 2001, the Muslim fundamentalist suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City destroyed the heart of lower Manhattan and took some three thousand lives.
Osama bin Laden, the terrorist chieftain who seemingly conjured up this horror and who threatened more, in his first televised statement afterwards described it as vengeance for what had happened eighty years earlier. By this he presumably meant the intrusion of the Christian European empires into the hitherto Muslim-governed Middle East in the aftermath of—and as a consequence of—the First World War. Bin Laden's sympathizers who hijacked jumbo jets had smashed them into the twin towers in pursuance of a quarrel seemingly rooted in the conflicts of 1914.

Similarly, the Iraq crisis that escalated in 2002–03 drove journalists and broadcast news personalities to their telephones, asking history professors from leading American universities how Iraq had emerged as a state from the embers of the First World War. It was a relevant question, for had there been no world war in 1914, there might well have been no Iraq in 2002.

It was indeed the seminal event of modern times.

What was the First World War about? How did it happen? Who started it? Why did it break out where and when it did? "Millions of deaths, and words, later, historians still have not agreed why," as the "Millennium Special Edition" of
The Economist
(January 1, 1000–December 31, 1999) remarked, adding that "none of it need have happened." From the outset everybody said that the outbreak of war in 1914 was literally triggered by a Bosnian Serb schoolboy when he shot and killed the heir to the Austrian and Hungarian thrones. But practically everybody also agrees that the assassination provided not the cause, but merely the occasion, for first the Balkans, then Europe, and then the rest of the earth to take up arms.

The disproportion between the schoolboy's crime and the conflagration in which the globe was consumed, beginning thirty-seven days later, was too absurd for observers to credit the one as the cause of the other. Tens of millions of people could not be losing their lives, they felt, because one man and his wife—two people of whom many of them had never heard—had lost theirs. It did not seem possible. It could not, everyone said, be true.

Because the Great War was so enormous an event and so fraught with consequences, and because we want to keep anything similar from happening in the future, the inquiry as to how it occurred has become not only the most challenging but also the biggest question in modern history. But it remains elusive; in the words of the historian
Laurence Lafore, "the war was many things, not one, and the meanings of the word 'cause' are also many."

• • •

In the 1940s and 1950s scholars tended to believe that they had learned all that there was to be known about the origins of the war, and that all that remained to be disputed was interpretation of the evidence. Beginning in the 1960s, however, sparked by the research of the great German historian
Fritz Fischer—of whose views more will be said later—new information has come to light, notably from German, Austrian, and Serbian sources, and hardly a year goes by now without the appearance of new monographs adding considerably to our knowledge. Fischer inspired scholars to comb the archives for what was hidden. What follows in this book is an attempt to look at the old questions in the light of the new knowledge, to summarize the data, and then to draw some conclusions from it.

When and where did the march toward the war of 1914 begin? Recently, in a Boston classroom, I asked university students to pinpoint the first steps—before 1908—along the way. From their responses, the following may illustrate how many roads can be imagined to have led to Sarajevo.

The fourth century A.D.
The decision to divide the
Roman Empire between the Latin-speaking West and the Greek-speaking East had lasting consequences. The cultural divide that ramified into two different branches of
Christianity, two calendars, and two rival scripts (the Latin and the Cyrillic) persisted. The Roman Catholic Austrians and the Greek Orthodox Serbs, whose quarrel provided the occasion for the 1914 war, were, in that sense, fated to be enemies.

The seventh century.
The Slavs, who were to become Europe's largest ethnic group, moved into the Balkans, where the Teutons already had arrived. The
conflict between Slavic and Germanic peoples became a recurring theme of European history, and in the twentieth century pitted Teuton Germans and Austrians against Slavic Russians and Serbs.

The eleventh century.
The formal split between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Christianity generated a conflict of religious faith along the same fault line as those of ethnic group, alphabet, and culture—Roman versus Greek—a fault line that threatened the southeast of Europe and was followed by the political earthquake that struck in 1914.

The fifteenth century.
The
conquest of Christian eastern and central Europe by the Muslim Ottoman (or Turkish) Empire deprived the peoples of the Balkans of centuries of experience in self-government. That perhaps contributed to the violence and fractiousness of that area in the years that led up to the 1914 war—and perhaps contributed to bringing it about.

The sixteenth century.
The
Protestant Reformation split Western Christendom. It divided the
German peoples politically, and led to the curious relationship between Germany and Austria that lay at the heart of the crisis of July 1914.

The seventeenth century.
The beginning of the centuries-long Ottoman retreat from Europe meant that the Turks were abandoning valuable lands that the Christian Great Powers coveted. Desire to seize those lands fed the rivalry between Austria and Russia that set off war in 1914.

1870–71.
The creation of the German Empire and its annexation of French territory in the aftermath of the
Franco-Prussian War made another European war likely as soon as France recovered sufficiently to try to take back what it had lost.

1890.
The German emperor dismissed his Chancellor—his prime minister—Prince
Otto von Bismarck. The new Chancellor reversed Bismarck's policy of allying with both Austria and Russia to keep the peace between them. Instead, Germany sided with Austria against Russia in the struggle to control the Balkans, which encouraged Austria to follow a dangerously bellicose policy that seemed likely to provoke an eventual Russian response.

1890s.
Rebuffed by Germany, and seeing no other alternative, reactionary, monarchical Russia was drawn into an
alliance with republican France. This convinced Germany's leaders that war was inevitable sooner or later, and that Germany stood a better chance of winning if it were waged sooner rather than later.

1900s.
Germany's attempt to rival Britain as a naval power was seen in London as a vital threat.

1903.
In a bloody
coup d'état in Serbia, army officers belonging to a secret society butchered their pro-Austrian king and queen and replaced them with a rival dynasty that was pro-Russian. Austrian leaders reacted by planning to punish Serbia—a plan that if carried out threatened to lead to a dangerously wider conflict.

1905.
The First Moroccan Crisis was a complicated affair. It will be described in Chapter 12. In it Germany's aggressive diplomacy had the unintended effect of unifying the other countries against it. Britain moved from mere friendship with France—the Entente Cordiale—to something closer to informal alliance, including conversations between the two governments and military staff talks, and later to agreement and conversation with France's ally Russia. There was a hardening of European alignments into rival and
potentially enemy blocs: France, Britain, and Russia on one side, and an isolated Germany—with only halfhearted support from Austria-Hungary and Italy—on the other.