The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (46 page)

Education was seen as particularly important in giving the young the right ideas, perhaps because it was feared that they might so easily get the wrong ones. A manual for French schools which was revised just before the Great War pointed to the beauty of France, the glories of French civilisation, and the ideas of justice and humanity which the French Revolution had showered on the world as reasons for French patriotism. ‘War is not probable’, French children were to be taught, ‘but it is possible. It is for that reason that France remains armed and always ready to defend itself.’
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In 1897 80 per cent of the candidates taking the higher French secondary-school qualification, the
baccalauréat
, stated that the purpose of history was primarily patriotic. This was not particular to France; the history taught in countries across Europe was increasingly focussed on the nation, showing its deep roots, its longevity and its glorious accomplishments. In Great Britain in 1905, the new Board of Education published ‘Suggestions’ for teachers which recommended using patriotic poems to teach the right sort of British history. (To be fair, they also suggested that the history included the achievements of peace as well as those of war.)
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In Germany, where the
teaching of history tended to mean Prussian history, a leading educator told teachers that their purpose should be to develop ‘a patriotic and monarchical spirit’ and make the young aware that they must be prepared to defend Germany against its many enemies. ‘To defend honor, liberty, and right; to offer up life, health and property on the altar of the Fatherland, these have always been the joy of German youths.’
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Nations in such a view needed the enthusiastic support of their members if they were to endure. They were, or so many nationalists held, like organisms in the natural world. They struggled for survival and to evolve. Like other organisms they needed nourishment and a secure and adequate habitat.
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Bernhardi argued that, while there were universal laws governing the rise and fall of nations and their states: ‘We must not forget that States are personalities endowed with very different human attributes, with a peculiar and often very marked character, and that these subjective qualities are distinct factors in the development of States as a whole.’
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So even immutable laws could be bent by the right people. Moreover, nations such as Germany with ‘the greatest physical, mental, moral, material, and political power’ ought to prevail; that could only benefit humanity as a whole. What Germany needed, in his view, was more space and, if necessary, they must use force to acquire it. (The Nazis were later to make this idea of
Lebensraum
one of their key goals.) ‘Without war’, he went on, ‘inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow.’
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In the view of nationalists such as Bernhardi, and it is possible to find similar quotations from British or French writers, the needs of the nation were in themselves justification for aggression.

Moreover, imperialism came increasingly to be seen as a measure of a nation’s power and vitality and as an investment for the future, not least as a way to get space for expansion. As Tirpitz said in 1895 as he was dreaming of a great German navy and empire: ‘In my view Germany will quickly sink back from its great power position in the coming century if we do not promote our general maritime interests energetically, systematically and without delay – to no small extent also because the great new national task and the economic benefits to come will offer a strong palliative against educated and uneducated Social Democrats.’
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(No matter that most of the new colonies did not pay for themselves or that few Europeans showed any desire to move to Africa or Asia when
they could go to North or South America or Australia.) British schools celebrated Empire Day. ‘We drew union jacks’, a working-class Englishman remembered, ‘hung classrooms with flags of the dominions, and gazed with pride as they pointed out those massed areas of red on the world map. “This, and this, and this”, they said, “belong to us.”’
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Although Salisbury complained in 1901 of the ‘present passion for Imperialism as if it were a sort of zone of poisonous atmosphere we have got into’,
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he found, as other statesmen were discovering, that public opinion was both volatile and exigent when it came to colonies. Bülow, for example, found himself hemmed in during his quarrel with Britain over Samoa at the turn of the century; he was obliged to turn down a generous offer of compensation elsewhere from Chamberlain for fear of what the German public and, equally important, the Kaiser would say.
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Although most of the colonial disputes in Africa and the Far East had been settled by the time of the Great War, there was still potential for conflict over China, where a revolution in 1911 had led to a shaky Republican government, and much closer to Europe in the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, the hostilities stirred up between Britain and Germany in Africa and the South Pacific or between France and Germany over Morocco remained to increase the antipathies of one European people to another. At the celebrations for the Kaiser’s fifty-fifth birthday in January 1914, the German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg told Jules Cambon, the French ambassador in Berlin:

For forty years, France has pursued a grandiose policy. It has secured an immense empire for itself in the world. It is everywhere. During this time, an inactive Germany did not follow this example and today it needs its place in the sun … Every day Germany sees its population growing by leaps and bounds; its navy, its trade and industry are making unparalleled developments … it is forced to expand somehow or other; it has not yet found that ‘place in the sun’ which is its due.
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Such national rivalries were, in the minds of Social Darwinists, perfectly natural. As Kurt Riezler, a thoughtful German journalist who became a close adviser to Bethmann Hollweg, put it: ‘Eternal and absolute enmity is fundamentally inherent in relations between peoples.’
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In
setting off the naval race, Tirpitz was convinced that conflict was bound to come between the declining power of Britain and the rising one of Germany. In 1904 August Niemann, a well-known German authority on war, wrote: ‘Almost all wars have, for centuries past, been waged in the interests of England, and almost all have been incited by England.’
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Nationalism was not just about pride in one’s own nation; it required an opposite to define it and fed on fears of others. All across Europe, the relations between Germany and Russia, Hungary and Rumania, Austria and Serbia, or Britain and France, were coloured and often poisoned by national and racial fears of the other. When Count Zeppelin’s airship was destroyed by a storm in 1908, the British suspected that much of the patriotic excitement in Germany and the rush by the German public to subscribe funds to replace the airship was directed against Britain.
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It is easy to find examples of hostility on the British side too, in the Foreign Office, for example, which was increasingly dominated by those such as Eyre Crowe who were suspicious and apprehensive of Germany. In 1904 Francis Bertie, the British ambassador in Rome, wrote to a friend in the Foreign Office: ‘Your letter of the 2nd breathes distrust of Germany and you are right. She has never done anything for us but bleed us. She is false and grasping and our real enemy commercially and politically.’
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While there were always British and Germans, right up until the outbreak of war in 1914, who talked in terms of shared values, even a shared Teutonic heritage, their voices were drowned out by the increasing hostility which permeated all levels of society. That had the effect of limiting the options for the leaders in both countries who were swayed by their own views and the pressure from their publics. In 1912, for example, when there was a serious attempt made to wind down the naval race, the accumulated suspicions and the state of public opinion in both countries undercut it.

The mutual antipathy between Germany and France was even greater than that between Germany and Britain, and as complicated. Both found things to admire in the other: French civilisation for the Germans and German efficiency and modernity for the French.
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Germans feared, though, and with reason, that the French had not forgotten their defeat in 1870–71 and, with less reason, that France would go to war to get back Alsace and Lorraine. German planners saw France as Germany’s main enemy and German newspapers paid more
attention to France than to any other European country before the Great War. On the other hand, Germans could and did console themselves with the thought that the Third Republic was corrupt and incompetent and France itself divided.
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German commentators on France frequently stressed French frivolity and immorality (while obligingly telling their readers where to find both when they visited Paris).
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The French for their part looked at a Germany which was outstripping France economically and in terms of population but told themselves that Germans were unimaginative and rigid in their thinking. In an 1877 novel,
Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum
, the popular writer Jules Verne has a French doctor (who has devoted his life to doing good) and a German scientist splitting a large fortune from a common Indian ancestress. (The German is writing a paper entitled ‘Why Do All French People Suffer, to One Degree or Another, from Hereditary Degeneration?’ when he gets the news.) Each decides to build a new city in the United States. The Frenchman chooses a site by the sea in Oregon to build a city Prince Charles would approve of; it is based on ‘freedom from inequality, peace with neighbours, good administration, wisdom among its inhabitants, and bountiful prosperity’. The German chooses to build his Steel City in Wyoming, close to a mine. From his Tower of the Bull he drives his workers on ruthlessly to mine, smelt and make armaments. The only food is ‘withered vegetables, mounds of plain cheese, quarters of smoked sausage meat, and canned foods’.
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French intellectuals were fascinated by Prussia and Prussianism in particular. Perhaps, it was suggested, the dreary flat Prussian landscape and the grey weather had made Prussians a dour, grasping people. A French sociologist argued that the fact that they had moved across the face of northern Europe over the centuries made them rootless and therefore more easily manipulated by their rulers.
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Georges Bourdon, a journalist from
Le Figaro
, who did a series of interviews in Germany in 1913 to, so he said, put an end to ‘the senseless competition in armaments, and to the international distrust and nervousness’, could not bring himself to like or trust the ‘gratuitously arrogant and boastful’ Prussians. ‘It was a poor, unfortunate race, driven by necessity to a life of grinding toil; it has only comparatively recently arrived at any degree of prosperity, and this it has gained by force; thus it believes in force, and never relaxes its attitude of defiance.’
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In both countries highly unflattering and alarming stereotypes developed of the other, thanks in part to a variety of publications from school textbooks to popular novels. Interestingly, in both countries Germany was usually portrayed as a man in uniform (although for the French the image was a semi-comic, semi-alarming one of a brutal soldier with outsize moustaches) while France was a woman (in German depictions either helpless or over-sexed or both).
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In France, perhaps as a mark of the Entente Cordiale, what had been
le vice anglais
now became
le vice allemand
; French academic studies purported to show that German men were more likely to be homosexual than the French. Almost all homosexuals, one such study offered as proof, loved Wagner.
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Many across Europe deplored the new nationalist fervour. Salisbury hated what he called ‘jingoism’ and J. A. Hobson, a leading liberal journalist and intellectual, attacked ‘That inverted patriotism whereby love of one’s own nation is transformed into the hatred of another nation, and the fierce craving to destroy the individual members of that other nation …’
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Concern about the impact of nationalism on war came from an unexpected quarter. In 1890 the elder Helmuth von Moltke, who planned and oversaw Germany’s victories in its wars of unification, told the Reichstag that the age of ‘Cabinet’ wars, that is wars determined by rulers for limited ends, was over: ‘All we have now is people’s war, and any prudent government will hesitate to bring about a war of this nature, with all its incalculable consequences.’ The great powers, he went on, will find it difficult to bring such wars to an end or admit defeat: ‘Gentlemen, it may be a war of seven years’ or of thirty years’ duration – and woe to him who sets Europe alight, who puts the first fuse to the powder keg!’
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He died the following year before he could see the rise of nationalism and the increasing jitteriness in Europe, the heightened rhetoric, the expectations every time there was a crisis that war might break out, and the fears: of being attacked, of spies and, although the term had not yet been invented, of fifth columns waiting inside societies to make their move. He also did not live to see the ways in which the public came to accept and even welcome the prospect of war and the way in which the values of his world were embraced by civilians.