The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (48 page)

In France such organisations never had a mass appeal, partly because they were caught up in the political divisions within French society. On the one hand, a strong anti-militaristic tradition in France dated back to the French Revolution when the army had been seen initially as the tool of the old regime, and subsequent rulers, Napoleon or his nephew Napoleon III for example, had also used the army to maintain themselves in power. Yet the Revolution had also produced citizen militias fuelled by the idea of the nation-in-arms to defend against the forces of reaction, which the right and many middle-class liberals had come to regard with deep suspicion. The aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War had added fresh divisive memories: the more radical citizens of Paris had organised themselves into a Commune with a National Guard and the government of France had waged war on it with its own forces.

In the shock of the defeat of 1870–71, it is true, there was considerable discussion across the political spectrum about how to prepare the French to defend their country. In 1882 the government decreed that all schools should have drill organisations, the
bataillons scolaires
. While there was an initial burst of activity and a big parade in Paris, they never
took root throughout France and the government quietly abandoned the programme. In 1889 the abortive coup by General Boulanger reminded good republicans that military training, especially of the wrong sort of people, could lead to trouble. At the grass roots as well, after 1871, a number of shooting and gymnastic societies sprang up with a clear military purpose. (As one sceptical conservative paper noted, it was not clear how doing arms drill and turning somersaults was going to safeguard France from its enemies.) Most of the societies dwindled into social clubs where members could show off their special tight-fitting uniforms. The societies also got caught up in French politics so that in villages there would be one run by the priest and another by the anti-clerical schoolteacher.
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In the Third Republic, the army itself never enjoyed the prestige of the German army or the British navy and the Dreyfus affair damaged it still further. In any case French society was deeply divided about what sort of army it wanted. The left talked in terms of a people’s militia solely for self-defence while the right wanted a proper professional army. For republicans in general, the officer corps was a home for conservatives and aristocrats (often overlapping categories) with profoundly anti-republican views and the Dreyfus affair gave them the opening to carry out a purge, dismissing suspect officers and promoting those seen to be reliable. Frequently, being Catholic, especially educated by the Jesuits, seems to have been the main black mark; enterprising French officers hastened to join anti-Catholic Masonic lodges.
¹⁰⁹
In 1904 a major scandal broke when it turned out that the radical Minister of War had persuaded certain Masons to draw up a secret blacklist of some 25,000 officers who were suspected of being Catholic and anti-republican. Army morale, not surprisingly, was left even lower than it had previously been. Nor did it do anything for the military’s relations with the general public when the government increasingly used it to put down strikes and left-wing demonstrations.
¹¹⁰
In the years before 1914, even while French nationalism was reviving so too was anti-militarism. Every year when conscripts went off to do their service, railway stations would be the scene of protests while the new soldiers frequently joined in to sing revolutionary songs such as the Internationale. Army discipline suffered; officers had to deal with drunkenness, frequent acts of insubordination and even outright mutiny.
¹¹¹
In the last years before
1914, the government, perhaps realising that matters had gone too far and that the French army was not up to the job of defending France, tried to reorganise and reform the army. It had left it very late, though.

From Germany, the Kaiser had watched the French troubles with delight. ‘How can you ally with the French?’ he asked Nicholas when the tsar visited Berlin in 1913. ‘Don’t you see that the Frenchman is no longer capable of becoming a soldier?’
¹¹²
Even in Germany, however, relations between the military, in particular the army, and society suffered strains from time to time. The spread of the franchise and the growth of the centrist parties and the SPD helped to bring the army’s privileged position in German society into question. Much to the annoyance of the Kaiser and his court, the Reichstag insisted on examining military budgets and questioning military policies. In 1906 an enterprising swindler did something that was perhaps worse; he held the army up to ridicule. Wilhelm Voigt was an unprepossessing petty criminal who bought himself an eclectic selection of second-hand officers’ clothes in Berlin. Dressed in what was by all accounts a shabby and unconvincing uniform, he took over command of a small unit of soldiers, who followed him obediently, and led them to the nearby town of Köpenick, where he proceeded to march into the city hall, arrest the senior officials and seize a considerable sum of money. Although he was eventually arrested and sent to jail, he became something of a folk hero. Plays were written and later a film made of his exploit and his wax image joined the famous and notorious figures at Madame Tussaud’s in London. He himself made a small fortune by touring Europe and then North America telling the story of the Captain of Köpenick. While many in Germany itself and in hostile countries such as France deplored the episode as an example of the servility of the Germans at the sight of a uniform, others found it delightfully subversive of the German army.
¹¹³

In 1913 a much more serious incident took place in Alsace which highlighted both the privileged position of the military within Germany and the ability of the Kaiser to protect it. A young lieutenant stationed in the pretty mediaeval town of Zabern (today Saverne in France) near Strasbourg started the trouble by using an insulting epithet to describe the locals and then, when there was a protest, his superior officer escalated matters by arresting civilians, sometimes at bayonet point, for such
crimes as laughing out loud at soldiers. German soldiers also ransacked the offices of the local newspaper which had been reporting on the affair. The civilian authorities in the region were horrified at the breach of laws and the government in Berlin was concerned about the potential impact on relations with the locals and with France. Although much of the German press was now highly critical of the military’s behaviour and there were questions in the Reichstag, the army high command and the Kaiser closed ranks and refused to admit that the military in Zabern had done anything wrong or that any disciplinary action needed to be taken. (In fact they did move the regiment which had perpetrated the offences out of Alsace and the officer responsible for the arrests was quietly court-martialled.) The crown prince, an inferior imitation of his father, sent a wild telegram complaining of the ‘shamelessness’ of the local population and hoping that they would be taught a lesson. (‘I’d like to know’, a Berlin cartoon had the Kaiser asking, ‘where the boy picked up that damned habit of telegraphing.’)
¹¹⁴
Bethmann, the Chancellor, who was convinced that the soldiers in Zabern had broken the law and who had urged the Kaiser to insist on disciplining the perpetrators, in the end chose loyalty to the crown and went before the Reichstag at the start of December 1913 to defend the army’s authority to do as it pleased with its own. Although the Reichstag responded with a motion of no confidence in the government, which passed by a large majority, Bethmann, thanks to weakness of the German constitution, was able to continue in office as though nothing had happened.
¹¹⁵
There was clearly strong support in Germany for asserting civilian control over the army and it is possible that might have happened. Seven months later, however, the German leadership was making decisions in a serious European crisis with a military that saw itself as autonomous.

Militarism was a relatively new term – it first seems to have been used in the 1860s – and its impact on European society in the subsequent decades owed something to both nationalism and Social Darwinism. It reflected contemporary fears about degeneracy and it also showed the strong influence of older pre-modern ideas about honour. Europeans were preparing themselves psychologically for war before 1914; some also found the prospect exciting. Life was easier, especially for the middle and lower classes, but it was not necessarily more
interesting. Far off colonial wars, while the publics followed them with interest, did not fully satisfy longings for glory and great deeds. The spread of literacy as well as the new mass newspapers, historical novels, thrillers, pulp fiction, or Westerns showed alternative, more enthralling worlds. To the dismay of anti-war liberals, war was glamorous. As one said in Britain, ‘Long immunity from the realities of warfare has blunted our imaginations. We love excitement not a whit less than the Latin races; our lives are dull; a victory is a thing the meanest of us can understand.’
¹¹⁶
The younger generations wondered, as they sometimes do today, how they would match up in great conflicts. In Germany, young men who had done their military service felt inferior to their elders who had fought in the wars of unification and longed for a chance to prove themselves.
¹¹⁷

The Futurist Marinetti was by no means the only artist who longed for the violent destruction of comfortable bourgeois society and an end to what one called the ‘rotten, filthy peace’.
¹¹⁸
The poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, another Italian, had a huge impact on the young across Europe with his exaltation of power, heroism, and violence.
¹¹⁹
In 1912, during the Italian war with Turkey, he boasted to Kessler about the impact of his nationalist poems on ‘this tempest of blood and fire that passes over the Italian people’.
¹²⁰
In Britain Rupert Brooke, one of the promising poets of the younger generation, longed for ‘some kind of upheaval’ and the conservative Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc wrote: ‘How I long for the Great War! It will sweep Europe like a broom, it will make kings jump like coffee beans on the roaster.’
¹²¹
The young French nationalist Ernest Psichari, who was a hero to much of his generation for his exploits in French colonial Africa, attacked pacifism and what he saw as France’s decline in his
Call to Arms
, published in 1913. Drawing on religious imagery, as nationalists so often did in the period, he looked forward, he said, to ‘the great harvest of Force, toward which a sort of inexpressible grace precipitates us and ravishes us’.
¹²²
He was killed the following August.

CHAPTER 10
Dreaming of Peace

In 1875 Countess Bertha Kinsky, a forceful and lovely but impoverished young woman, was obliged to take a post as a governess with the Von Suttner family in Vienna. The story was not an unusual one for unmarried but well-educated women. Nor was it strange when one of the sons of the house fell in love with her and she with him. His parents, however, opposed the marriage: to begin with she was seven years older than their son. More importantly she was penniless, and although she carried the name of one of the most ancient of all the great Czech families, the circumstances of her birth had caused something of a scandal. Her mother was middle class, not noble, and was some fifty years younger than her husband, a general. The child was never really accepted by her grand relations, who sometimes referred to her as a bastard.
¹
While she rejected much of her background during her adult life and became by the standards of her class a daring free thinker and radical, she kept much of its style including a certain insouciance towards money.

Once her romance was discovered, it was clearly impossible for her to go on living in the household in Vienna so impulsively she left for Paris to take up a post as private secretary to a rich Swedish manufacturer, Alfred Nobel. It was the start, although neither of them knew it at the time, of a partnership in the cause of peace. She stayed with him only for a few months and then, following her heart, returned to Vienna
and eloped with Arthur von Suttner. The couple made their way to the Caucasus in Russia where they lived from hand to mouth until Bertha discovered that she had a talent for writing, both books and short pieces for German-language publications. (Arthur, who seems to have been a much less forceful and energetic character, gave French and riding lessons.) She also discovered, first hand, the horrors of war, when a conflict between Russia and Turkey, which involved fighting in the Caucasus as well as in the Balkans, broke out in 1877. By the time she and Arthur made their way back to Vienna in 1885, Bertha had become convinced that war must be made obsolete. In 1889 she published her most famous work,
Lay Down Your Arms!
, a heart-rending and melodramatic story of a young woman of noble birth whose tribulations include financial ruin, cholera, and the loss of her first husband in battle. She remarries only to see her new husband go off to war in the conflict between Austria-Hungary and Prussia. Defying her relatives, she goes in search of him and sees for herself the ghastly condition of the wounded after the Prussian victory. She is reunited with her husband but unfortunately they find themselves in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and he is shot by the Commune. ‘Deep convictions, but untalented’ was Tolstoy’s conclusion when he read the novel.
²
Nevertheless it enjoyed a great success and was translated into several languages including English. Its sales gave its author, at least temporarily, funds to support herself, her family, and her unending and indefatigable work for peace.