The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (7 page)

The Paris Exposition also celebrated material progress but there were doubts as well about that. Although Karl Marx welcomed the creative destruction of capitalism as it swept away old societies and brought new social organisations and new industrial methods of production which would ultimately benefit the downtrodden and poor, many on both the left and the right deplored the process. The great French sociologist Emile Durkheim worried about the loss of the old stable communities as people moved into the big cities. Others like Le Bon worried about whether reason and humanity could survive in mass society. Part of the reason Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, valued sport so much was that he saw it as developing the individual and arming him or her against the levelling and dulling effects of modern, democratic civilisation.
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And was life
perhaps getting too fast? Doctors had discovered a new illness, neurasthenia, a nervous exhaustion and collapse, which they blamed on the hectic pace and the strains of modern life.
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An American visitor to the Exposition was struck by how many of the new motorcars there were in Paris; ‘they fly along the roads, and whiz through the streets like lightning, and threaten to take the place of carriages, especially for heavy traffic’.
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At the Exposition itself visitors stepped gingerly on and off a moving pavement and crowds gathered to watch the frequent tumbles.

And was European society really superior to all others? Scholars familiar with the history of India or China, for example, challenged the assumption that Europe was in the forefront of civilisation and pointed out that both had achieved great heights in the past yet had apparently declined. So progress might not be linear at all. Indeed, societies might instead go through a cyclical process of advance and decay and not necessarily get better. And what was civilisation anyway? Were the values and achievements of the West really superior to those of other parts of the world and other ages? The guide to the Exposition was patronising about the small exhibit of Japanese art which showed, it said, how Japanese artists stuck doggedly to their traditional styles but a new generation of European artists found inspiration in the arts of other, non-European cultures. When Vincent van Gogh used the styles of Japanese prints in his paintings or Picasso drew on African sculpture they and other European artists did not see these as charmingly primitive or old-fashioned but as different and containing insights that European art lacked. When Count Harry Kessler, an urbane and cultivated German, visited Japan in the 1890s he saw Europe in a new and unfavourable light: ‘We have the greater intellectual, and perhaps also – although I doubt it – stronger moral force, but regarding true, inward civilization the Japanese are infinitely ahead of us.’
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The Paris Exposition had warning signs, easier to see in retrospect, of the tensions which were shortly going to tear European civilisation apart. The colonial and the national exhibits which were, after all, about showing off hinted at the rivalries among the powers. A famous German art critic of the day mocked French pretensions to lead European civilisation. ‘France’, he reported on his visit to the Exposition, ‘did not take the slightest part in those enormous changes, which commerce and
industry created in other countries, especially in its constantly dangerous neighbours, England and Germany.’
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The French for their part had a large building dedicated entirely to Captain Jean-Baptiste March-and’s expedition across Africa two years earlier which had nearly led to a war with Britain, and Loubet, the French President who had talked about justice and human kindness at the opening, had decided to have the Exposition in 1900 in part to forestall the Germans who had been planning their own one for Berlin.
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The Paris Exposition, said Picard, the chief organiser, would not only reflect the genius of France but ‘show our fair country to be, today as yesterday, in the very vanguard of Progress’.
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And some of that progress was in the military arts. The Palace of Armies and Navies (in a building resembling a mediaeval fortress) showed, said the guide, the great advances of the past decade in making weapons more destructive. It pointed out as a desirable counterbalance that the capacity for defence had also grown with things such as stronger armour plate. In the sections set aside for foreign countries, the British had built a Maison Maxim, its facade decorated with artillery shells and cannon, devoted to the eponymous new machine gun. The Russians brought some of their new weapons and the German emperor sent a display of his favourite uniforms. Outside, a separate pavilion built by the French company Schneider displayed its artillery. War was, said the official catalogue of the Exposition, ‘natural to humanity’.
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The Exposition also contained harbingers of the system of alliances which was going to push the European powers into choosing sides in the years before 1914. The day of the opening, the French President also opened a new bridge over the Seine, named after the late Tsar Alexandre III. After all, the Russian government, said the guide, had exerted itself enormously to collaborate in the Exposition, ‘this great work of peace’. The Franco-Russian alliance was new – signed only in 1894 – and still a tricky one, made as it was between the Russian autocracy and a republican France. It was understood to be defensive, although its details were secret. Nevertheless it made Germany uneasy, even though it had its own defensive alliance with Austria-Hungary. The new chief of the German army’s general staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, began to make plans for a two-front war, against Russia on Germany’s eastern frontiers and France in the west.

The greatest power of all, the British Empire, had no alliances with anyone and up to this point that had not caused it concern. But 1900 was not a good year. The British had gone blithely into a war in South Africa the year before against two much smaller Afrikaner republics: the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The odds – the whole British Empire against two tiny states – should have made the outcome a foregone conclusion, but the British had in fact done very badly in what was called at the time the Boer War. Although the Afrikaners were on the run by the end of the summer, they did not finally concede defeat until the spring of 1902. Equally worrying, the war showed just how unpopular the British were in much of the world. In Marseilles, locals gave a warm reception to a party from Madagascar on its way to the Exposition whom they mistook for Afrikaners. In Paris, an enterprising fashion house made a hat in grey felt,
à la Boer
. At the Exposition itself the modest Transvaal pavilion with its flag flying proudly, drew a large crowd, eager, said the Hachette guide, ‘to show their sympathy for the heroic little nation which is defending its independence in the south of Africa’. Piles of flowers dedicated to ‘the hero’, ‘the patriot’ or ‘the lover of freedom’ surrounded the bust of Paul Kruger, its former President.
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That sympathy mixed with pleasure when British forces suffered one defeat after another was echoed throughout Europe. Commentary on the Continent made much use of the image of David and Goliath. The German weekly
Simplicissimus
had a cartoon of a dead elephant being pecked by carrion birds as ants swarmed towards it with the comment ‘the harder they fall …’ There was also shock at the brutal tactics the British used to deal with Afrikaner guerrilla warfare. General Kitchener, who took over command, had local women and children rounded up and placed in concentration camps so that they could no longer feed and shelter their fighters. Through yet more British incompetence, the camps became places of disease and death. A French cartoon had Kitchener as a great toad squatting on Afrikaner corpses and obscene cartoons circulated of Queen Victoria. Her son and heir, Prince Edward, as a result refused to visit the Exposition.
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Great powers depend on their prestige and the perception of others that they are powerful as much as material factors such as their military and their economies. In 1900 Britain was looking weaker and dangerously alone. In a move that was entirely defensive, it started to mend
fences with the other powers and to look for allies. Yet this can also be seen as one of the many steps towards the outbreak of the Great War. Europe was going to drift into an alliance system which divided it into two camps, increasingly suspicious of each other and increasingly well armed. And there were those, a minority to be sure, who did not shrink from the prospect of war, or indeed even welcomed it, because they saw it as noble, necessary, an inevitable part of human history, or as a way of solving their nation’s internal problems. On the other side stood all those Europeans, including many of their leaders, who thought that a general war was simply inconceivable in the modern world. That confidence was also dangerous for it led to the assumption that all crises could be safely managed and, in the case of Great Britain, that it could remain detached, as it had always preferred, from the Continent.

CHAPTER 2
Great Britain and Splendid Isolation

Three years earlier, in 1897, as it celebrated sixty years of Queen Victoria’s reign, Britain had never appeared so powerful. The Diamond Jubilee was marked around the world by events ranging from marching schoolchildren to fireworks to military reviews, in Canada, Australia, the Cape Colony in southern Africa, India, Ceylon, in all the many places the British flag flew. In Rangoon, 600 prisoners were released and at Port Said there was a Venetian fête with water sports. Addresses and telegrams of congratulation poured into London from every part of the empire. It was, said the
Spectator
, ‘as if one roar of acclaim and loyalty were coming up from the whole earth’. The
New York Times
correspondent said that Americans shared in the general admiration for the queen and should take pleasure in the fact that relations between the United States and Britain were now so cordial.
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Manufacturers made sure there were plenty of souvenirs: playing cards, mugs, plates, scarves, commemorative medals, bibles. In Britain itself the cities and towns outdid themselves with banquets and balls and 2,500 bonfires blazed from one end of the country to the other. In Manchester 100,000 children were invited to a special breakfast and in London Alexandra, the Princess of Wales, held Diamond Jubilee feasts at which anyone, no matter how poor or shabby, could dine on roast beef and beer. Four hundred thousand Londoners turned up. The
churches held special services while choirs sang Sir Arthur Sullivan’s special jubilee hymn ‘O King of Kings’.

Following the suggestion of the energetic new Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, the queen and her Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, decided that the Jubilee should show off the empire. So while European monarchs were not invited, Prime Ministers from the self-governing colonies and princes from India were. (This also avoided having as a guest the queen’s difficult grandson Wilhelm II of Germany, who, it was feared, would only make trouble.) The Prince of Wales gave a special dinner for the colonial premiers and on 21 June the queen, showing impressive stamina for her seventy-eight years, presided over a state banquet at Buckingham Palace. She sat between the heirs to the Italian and Austrian-Hungarian thrones, the future Victor Emmanuel III and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, only one of whom would live to succeed. Twenty-four chefs from Paris were brought in for the occasion and the centrepiece was a crown taller than a man made of 60,000 orchids gathered from every part of the empire.

The next day, Tuesday 22 June, a huge parade wound its way for six miles through London from Buckingham Palace to St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘Of unparalleled grandeur’, said
The Times
, it was designed to celebrate both Victoria’s long reign and her vast empire. It was an impressive display of British power. A newsreel, one of the first made, shows rank after rank of sailors, marines, mounted cavalry, and soldiers. The Canadians led the empire section which included Indian lancers, the Rhodesian Horse, the Trinidad Light Horse, and the Cape Mounted Rifles.

Open carriages brought members of the royal family and foreign princes and grand dukes, most of them related to each other and to the queen herself. And finally came the state carriage drawn by eight cream horses with the tiny figure of Victoria, dressed as she had been since the death of her beloved Albert thirty-six years before, in black with a black bonnet. She had not always been popular with her subjects but this day she received loud and fervent cheers. In her journal that night the queen wrote: ‘No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those 6 miles of streets … The cheering was quite deafening & every face seemed to be filled with real joy. I was much moved and gratified.’
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The service, which included a Te Deum composed by the dead Albert, was held outside because the queen could
not manage the steps to the cathedral and had refused to be carried up them. (She also refused to contribute towards the Jubilee’s costs.)