Europe's Last Summer

by David Fromkin

  CHAPTER 12: FRANCE AND

  GERMANY MAKE THEIR PLAY

  For a long time France had been eyeing Morocco. It was the last territory in North Africa that remained independent, and it would nicely complement the nation's holdings in Algeria and Tunisia. France was moving to assert a presence in Morocco when, in 1905, Germany unexpectedly intervened. The Kaiser, albeit reluctantly, was sent by his government on a trip—by ship, through a Force 8 gale—to champion Moroccan independence. On Germany's part this was a pretext aimed at disrupting the newly formed Entente of Britain with France. But the German maneuver failed: Britain sided with France. An international conference convened and sympathized with France, too. The conference awarded France the leading role in Moroccan affairs by a treaty signed at Algeciras in 1906. At Germany's insistence the treaty pledged the Europeans to uphold the rule of the Sultan, not to undermine Morocco's independence, as France (or at least its colonialist party) actually aimed to do and in fact went ahead to do.

  In March 1911, according to French authorities, rebel tribes brought disorder to the interior of Morocco and threatened one of the capital cities, Fez. The Sultan of Morocco appealed to France to send troops and to restore order. In Berlin it was believed that the tribal uprising had been fomented by the French in order to provide them with an excuse for occupying the country. Even if the uprising were genuine, it was safe to assume that once French troops were installed in Morocco, they would remain. The new German foreign secretary, Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter, decided to spring a trap. Until the French acted he did nothing but remind them that to do so would abrogate existing treaty arrangements and lead to negotiations to replace them. His aim was to force France to offer Germany substantial compensation: enormous tracts in Africa. In turn, such a diplomatic triumph would shore up the Berlin government's position in the forthcoming parliamentary elections of 1912, where prospects otherwise were quite bleak.

  French troops occupied Fez on May 21, 1911. Without consulting even such key members of his own government as the armed forces chiefs, Kiderlen sent a naval cruiser, the Panther, to anchor in the harbor of Agadir on Morocco's Atlantic coast. He then asserted Germany's claims on July 1. Apparently he assumed that England, as France's longstanding imperialist rival, would stay out of the conflict. So would Russia, unwilling to risk war for a country as far away and unimportant as Morocco. Austria-Hungary was an ally and so, at least in theory, was Italy.

  Kiderlen's calculation was that an isolated France would give way. But it turned out that France was not isolated. Great Britain rallied to its support: Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, though of radical, pacifist-leaning, anti-imperialist political origins, made that clear in a rousing speech at a Mansion House banquet on July 21. Russia, too, with some ambiguity, seemed to sympathize with France, while Austria-Hungary refused to extend even diplomatic support for Germany. Italy was of no help.

  The Kaiser and his political friends, reluctant from the start to let the foreign secretary play out his risky hand, weighed in on the side of peace. Germany backed down. Austria had gotten away with annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina due to German support, so France had gotten away with taking Morocco due to Britain's aid. France, which already held Algeria and Tunisia, now received Germany's recognition of its protectorate over Morocco too. In return, Germany was awarded compensation in Africa that it deemed to be inadequate. All was agreed November 4,1911.

  Everything seemed to fall into place in the wake of the Agadir crisis. The outlines of a future war, although not its cause, became increasingly clear. Germany had been put on notice that Great Britain might well come in on France's side, and that Russia would do so too if what was at stake was France's survival rather than a mere colonial issue.

  Germany could not rely on Italy, a nominal ally, nor even on the Dual Monarchy. Regarding the Austrian alliance as vital, Germany learned at Agadir that it was a one-way affair: Berlin would help to pursue Vienna's interests, but Vienna would not help to pursue Berlin's. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg had known it even before the crisis; he had told the Kaiser: "If it comes to a war, we must hope that Austria is attacked so that she needs our help and not that we are attacked so that it would depend on Austria's decision whether she will remain faithful to the alliance." In other words, a conflict would have to be Austria's in the first instance or else Vienna would sit out the war.

  The Agadir crisis alerted Germany to another danger: financial vulnerability. It decided to collect all the cash that was owing to it. Beginning in mid-summer 1911, Germany's central bank, the Reichsbank, systematically called in foreign debts, a program that if continued would have been completed within five years and would have turned Germany into a total debtor. By 1916, Berlin would have repatriated all of its own money. But it also would be holding hoards of cash that it had borrowed from other European powers, and that now would finance a war against them.

  German deeds and words in the summer of 1911—the dispatch of the Panther to Morocco and the language used in communicating with the Great Powers—alarmed Europe and brought about a sharp reaction. There is irony in this because they were the work neither of the Kaiser nor of the Chancellor, but of a somewhat out-of-control foreign secretary who died at the end of the year after downing six cognacs.

  David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain's Liberal government, was one of those former anti-imperialists whose mind was changed by and about the Germans. Hence the Mansion House speech in which he pledged to spend whatever it took to maintain England's supremacy. His young political protégé Winston Churchill, home secretary and a leading friend of Germany's as late as the spring of 1911, reversed his position too and foresaw the coming world war.

  Churchill later recalled that on the afternoon of July 24, 1911, as he walked with Lloyd George by the fountains of Buckingham Palace, a messenger caught up with them to bring the Chancellor in all urgency to see the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey. In his room at the House of Commons, Grey told them: "I have just received a communication from the German Ambassador so stiff that the Fleet might be attacked at any moment." And indeed, the Royal Navy was put on alert immediately.

  Grey, Lloyd George, Churchill, and other interested ministers met irregularly during the summer as the crisis in Morocco played itself out. Under the pressure of events, government leaders became aware that Britain was unprepared for war. Secret staff talks with Belgium and France in 1905–06, renewed from time to time along with some exchanges of information, and discussions within the armed services and within government committees, had arrived at contrasting and inconclusive results.

  A whole-day top-level conference of the Committee of Imperial Defence convened August 23, on the initiative of Director of Military Operations Major General Henry Wilson. It seems that this was the only time before 1914 that the two armed services, army and navy, outlined their respective and competing strategies for waging war. At the conference a decision was made between the two: Britain would not merely fight the war at sea; it would also send an army—an expeditionary force—to fight a land war on the continent of Europe alongside France and against Germany.

  Participants were shocked to discover two great failings on the part of the Royal Navy. The fleet was not prepared to transport the expeditionary force from Britain to the Continent, and it refused to create the equivalent of the army's general staff. To ride roughshod over the entrenched admirals, it would be necessary to find a new civilian head of the Admiralty: someone dynamic. In October, Prime Minister Asquith appointed controversial, energetic young Winston Churchill a month before his thirty-seventh birthday. Churchill, in a memorandum that he prepared and circulated, already had discerned the main outlines of the coming world war and threw himself into a frenzy of activity as he prepared to win it.

  In Britain's war plans, Germany was the enemy. The ally was France.

  To tell of France in the world politics of 1914 is to speak of its leader, Raymond Poincaré. His policy was—
and remains—widely misunderstood. It was and is assumed that he aimed at reversing the results of the Franco-Prussian War: that he sought to lead a crusade to recover the lost territories, above all, territories in the land of his birthplace, Lorraine. This was not so, according to his most recent biographer, John Keiger. Rather, he was a moderate centrist who preferred peaceful accommodations.

  Remarkably little was known of his conduct of affairs until quite recently. As late as the 1980s, his two biographers in France were unaware that Poincaré's private papers existed; indeed, the more recent of the two claimed in 1984 that the French statesman had destroyed his papers. It remained for Poincaré's first English-language biographer, Keiger, whose work was published in 1997, to study and make use of these materials.

  Raymond Poincaré, born in the town of Bar-le-Duc in western Lorraine on August 20, 1860, a person of formidable weight and solidity, grew to be the dominant public figure in the French politics of his time. On his father's side, he came from a family of professionals distinguished in the sciences and in education for more than a century. His mother's ancestors were judges and politicians. His cousin Henri became one of the leading mathematicians of the twentieth century.

  Virtuous, cautious, abstemious, middle-of-the-road, and essentially nonpartisan, he nonetheless was driven by a fierce competitiveness: by an ambition to win all of life's contests. At the age of twenty he became the youngest barrister in France. At twenty-six he was elected the youngest member of parliament. At fifty-two, on January 17, 1913, he was the youngest person ever elected to be President, a seven-year position. He also was the first to be elected directly from the office of Prime Minister to that of President. As President, he was a dominating figure. By the summer of 1914, he had taken almost full control of French foreign policy. With regard to Germany, he stood in a typically middle position among the center-left forces, between his pro-German colleague Joseph Caillaux and the lone wolf German-hating Georges Clemenceau. But an observer at the time might have discerned a tilt in favor of Berlin. On January 20, 1914, Poincaré dined at the German embassy—the first time a President of France had done so since 1870.

  Keiger suggests that Poincaré's increased friendship with Germany was the product of confidence, stemming in part from the results of the First Balkan War, in which the Balkan forces, trained and armed by France, defeated the Ottoman armies, trained and armed by Germany. Moreover, Poincaré took up the cause of the French colonialist alliance, the Comité de l'Orient, which sought control of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine should the Turkish empire collapse—an objective which might well pit France against its allies England and Russia.

  Yet it transpired that as France set about rounding off its colonial designs, Britain, its traditional rival, offered not opposition, but support. And Germany, which once had encouraged France's imperial ambitions, now stood in the way. New alliances and alignments were in the process of formation. Change was in the air.

  Germany, having once again alienated the other powers in the Panther episode, now took measures to defend against the hostility it had aroused. In the words of David G. Herrmann, an authority on the pre-1914 arms race, "The most significant military consequence of the second Moroccan crisis remained the German decision to embark on an extraordinary program of land armament in the expectation of a future war. . . . The resulting German army law started an international spiral of land-armaments construction. The Germans regarded themselves as responding to a threat from all sides, but. . . they took the plunge in fall expectation that their rivals would react" in the same way, by a massive new arms buildup "and that war would only be a matter of time. In due course, the prophecy fulfilled itself."

  As the Moroccan crisis drew to a close, another European power staked out a claim to parts of the Muslim world: Italy, the peninsula that stretches from central Europe to the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. It had never been unified since the fall of Rome nearly 1,500 years before. Its more than 30 million people now were searching for a role in world affairs.

  Italy was a geographical entity that had become a country only recently, in the war of 1859. It had acquired its capital city of Rome in the early 1870s. It claimed to rank as a Great Power and felt the need to win colonies, such as older, more established countries possessed. Italians harbored even more ambitious goals: they dreamed of their ancestors in ancient Rome and hoped to win similar glory. Austria-Hungary's move in the Balkans followed by France's in North Africa jolted the Italians into pursuing such aims.

  CHAPTER 13: ITALY GRASPS;

  THEN THE BALKANS DO TOO

  The territory of Tripolitania, now part of Libya, was Italy's first target. Under the indolent sway of the Ottoman government, Tripolitania, along with adjoining Cyrenaica, was ruled minimally and defended inadequately. For years, Italian diplomats had been clearing the way for a future takeover. In 1900, France had waived any objections it might have had in return for Italy's similar waiver in regard to France's hoped-for annexation of Morocco.

  Later the Italians made similar arrangements with the Austrians in regard to Bosnia-Herzegovina and with the Russians in respect to the Straits of the Dardanelles. To keep Italy as an ally, Germany agreed to the Tripoli venture; Britain concurred in hopes of detaching Italy from that alliance.

  So once Austria had moved on Bosnia, and France on Morocco, the Italian press and public urged their leaders to go ahead before it became too late. In a leisurely fashion more Mediterranean than modern, the Italian government then gave the other powers notice of its intention to go to war—some two months in advance.

  As a young Italian diplomat later remembered it, "I . . . expected that the communication itself would create a stir. Nothing of the kind! Nobody took the slightest notice. . . . People thought that we were bluffing."

  On September 29, 1911, Italy declared war, accusing Turkey of injuring Italian interests. Italy occupied the Libyan coastline quickly, but then was bogged down in the interior. Fighting continued for about a year. A cease-fire took effect October 15, 1912, followed by a peace that left Italy in possession not only of Libya but also of Rhodes and other Dodecanese islands off the shore of Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean.

  The Italian war was a signal to Hartwig's Russian-inspired Balkan alliance that their time had come to strike—and to preempt Austria. The pace of conflict was accelerating; the clashes began to overlap. The Italo-Turkish war started before the Second Moroccan Crisis was resolved, and now out of the embers of countless local blood feuds, the First Balkan War caught fire in 1912 before the Italian colonial war was concluded. Indeed, the main reason that the Turkish government accepted Italy's terms for concluding hostilities was its need to focus on southeastern Europe. There was a revolt in Albania, a border conflict with Montenegro, continuing guerrilla warfare in Macedonia, and, above all, turmoil in Constantinople, where opponents of the Young Turks briefly had come to power.

  As seen earlier, on March 13, 1912, Bulgaria and Serbia had been brought together by the pan-Slav Russian Nicolai Hartwig, who inspired them to take advantage of the Italian war to press their own claims against a distracted Turkey. Greece joined later. So, by verbal agreement, did Montenegro. Russia did not, at first, apprise France of what was afoot; even later Russia did not keep France informed fully. But even St. Petersburg may not have been kept advised: Hartwig was running something close to a rogue operation. Izvolsky and other leaders of the Russian government "denounced the dangers of Hartwig's 'incurable Austrophobia' " and what the historian Dominic Lieven has recently called "his disloyalty to overall Russian foreign policy."

  The Balkan peoples harbored murderous hatreds against one another, and asserted rival claims to territories and frontiers, but they acted together in order to strike at Turkey before it could make peace with Italy. Mounting a crusade to free all that remained of the Ottoman Empire in Christian southeastern Europe, Montenegro declared war on Turkey on October 8, 1912, followed by its allies Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece on October 17. Turkey i
mmediately brought the war with Italy to an end.

  The Ottoman forces were, to everyone's surprise, quickly and utterly defeated. They were driven from almost all of Turkey-in-Europe. In a month of lightning warfare, the Balkan states had practically brought the Eastern Question to a close. This was a role that the Great Powers had always imagined that they themselves would play. Now they scrambled to make sure that whatever settlement was reached—by others—would not threaten their vital interests. Their task was complicated by a change of personnel: the foreign secretaries of Germany and Austria died, the foreign secretary of Russia resigned, and their replacements did not carry the same weight.

  In December 1912 a conference of ambassadors convened in London. Sixty-three sittings ensued. Macedonia was partitioned. Bulgaria felt cheated of its share by Serbia and Greece. A peace treaty was signed May 30, 1913, but did not last. A month later, on the night of June 29–30, Bulgaria turned against its former allies, Serbia and Greece, in a surprise attack ordered by King Ferdinand I without consulting even his own government. It led to the so-called Second Balkan War, in which Bulgaria was defeated by Serbia, Greece, Turkey, and Romania.

  The Treaty of Bucharest, signed on August 10, and negotiated by the local states rather than by the Great Powers, brought the First and Second Balkan Wars to an end. Austria-Hungary was taken by surprise. It had wanted to see Serbia crushed—hoping and believing that Turkey would win the first war and Bulgaria the second—and might well have intervened to dictate different results had there been time. As it was, the Hapsburg Empire feared for its future. The fears centered on victorious Serbia and its sponsor, Russia.

  Austrian fears were not unjustified. During the Balkan wars, Russia's new foreign minister, Serge Sazonov, told the Serbian ambassador in St. Petersburg that "we shall shake Austria to the foundations," and that in winning as much as possible in the peace negotiations "we must be content with what we shall receive, regarding it as an installment, for the future belongs to us."