The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  * The document recovered from the wastebasket of the German military attaché which was the original evidence of treason. It was a list of the information supplied.

  * The last Bourbon Pretender, grandson of Charles X, who styled himself Henri V and died in 1883.

  * He had been promoted.

  5

  The Steady Drummer

  THE HAGUE : 1899 AND 1907

  5

  The Steady Drummer

  JOY, HOPE, SUSPICION—above all, astonishment—were the world’s prevailing emotions when it learned on August 29, 1898, that the young Czar of Russia, Nicholas II, had issued a call to the nations to join in a conference for the limitation of armaments. All the capitals were taken by surprise by what Le Temps called “this flash of lightning out of the North.” That the call should come from the mighty and ever expanding power whom the other nations feared and who was still regarded, despite its two hundred years of European veneer, as semi-barbaric, was cause for dazed wonderment liberally laced with distrust. The pressure of Russian expansion had been felt from Alaska to India, from Turkey to Poland. “The Czar with an olive branch,” it was said in Vienna, “that’s something new in history.” But his invitation touched a chord aching to respond.

  Fear of the swelling armaments industry was widespread. Krupp, the colossus of Essen, was the largest single business in Europe. Skoda, Schneider-Creusot, Vickers-Maxim, the distended combines of many mergers, with harsh names that grated on the ear, had interests in every camp, sold their products to customers on every continent and to both sides of every quarrel, profited from every dispute. Each year one or another of them produced a new weapon more efficient in deadliness, which, when adopted by the armed forces of one power, immediately required a matching effort by its rival. Each year the cost mounted and the huge piles of weapons grew until it seemed they must burst in final, lethal explosion.

  The Czar’s manifesto called for a stop to this process. Addressed to all the governments represented at St. Petersburg, it stated that although the longing for peace had been especially pronounced in the last twenty years, “the intellectual and physical strength of nations, labour and capital alike, have been unproductively consumed in building terrible engines of destruction.” Today these were the last word in science, tomorrow they were obsolete and had to be replaced. The system of “armaments à l’outrance is transforming the armed peace into a crushing burden that weighs on all nations and if prolonged will lead inevitably to the very cataclysm which it is desired to avert.” To arrest this exorbitant competition was now incumbent upon all.

  The summons from such a source surpassed the wildest dreams of the friends of peace. It “will sound like beautiful music over the whole earth,” said a Viennese paper. Phrases like “a new epoch in civilization,” “dawn of a new era,” “omen for the new century,” appeared in the press of every country. In Belgium the summons was called a “veritable deliverance,” an act of “colossal importance” whose author would go down in history as “Nicholas the Pacific.” In New York it seemed a possible beginning “of the most momentous and beneficent movement in modern history—indeed in all history.” Rome lauded “one of the great documents that honors its century,” and Berlin greeted “the new Evangelist on the banks of the Neva” whose goal was noble and beautiful in theory however unrealizable in practice. Humanitarian but utopian was the consensus in London—except for Kipling who uttered dire warning. Britain and Russia were then close to conflict across India’s Northwest Frontier, and Kipling’s poem “The Bear that Walks like a Man,” composed in response to the Czar’s manifesto, told a grim allegory of a man maimed and blinded when the bear he hunted stood up as if in supplication and the hunter “touched with pity and wonder” withheld his fire only to have his face ripped away by the “steel-shod paw”:

  When he stands up as pleading, in wavering, man-brute guise,

  When he veils the hate and cunning of his little swinish eyes;

  When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like hands in prayer,

  That is the time of peril—the time of the Truce of the Bear!…

  Suspicion of Russia’s motive and cynical speculations were ample. The leading question was, had France, Russia’s ally, been consulted in advance? Since disarmament presupposed satisfaction with the status quo and since France was vociferously unreconciled to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, the action of her ally posed, as The Times said, a “most surprising enigma.” From the French reaction it was clear she had not been consulted. “Et l’Alsace-Lorraine?” was l’Intransigeant’s one-line summary. Nevertheless many felt that coming at a time when “the intolerable pretensions and immeasurable ambitions” of Anglo-Saxon imperialism were agitating everyone s nerves and when the maintenance of peace was becoming more and more a “miracle of equilibrium,” the proposed conference was welcome.

  Each group saw reflected in the Czar’s manifesto, as if in a magic mirror, the face of its particular opponent. To Germany it was obvious that if England did not consent to naval disarmament the Czar’s gesture would amount to “a sword stroke in water” and a few days later the Kaiser pronounced his decisive dictum, “Our future lies upon the ocean.” The British saw the major problem in Germany’s naval ambitions. Socialists everywhere were sure that whatever the Russian motive had been, considering the cruelties of Czarist oppression, it was not love of humanity. The German Socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht pronounced it a “fraud.” Many peace advocates considered it a response to the Spanish-American War, which seemed to them a prelude to world disaster. Many Europeans were convinced by the taking of the Philippines of the necessity of curbing American expansion. Americans themselves were not averse to the thought that the Czar had been prompted by their victory over Spain. Speaking for the anti-imperialists, Godkin sadly noted that the “splendid summons” came at a time when the United States was more deeply committed to “the military spirit and idea of forcible conquest” than ever before in her history.

  The puzzle of motive remained. One explanation widely favored was that Nicholas had acted less for humanity than from a human desire to forestall the Kaiser, who was believed to be planning a similar proclamation, urbi et orbi, on his forthcoming visit to Jerusalem.

  Colonel Henry’s suicide in the Dreyfus Affair soon absorbed public attention and ten days later the world gasped again when the Empress Elizabeth was assassinated by an Anarchist. Americans were preoccupied in welcoming home the regiments from Cuba, and the British with Kitchener’s march to Khartoum. From September on, the air darkened with the prospect of war between England and France; Fashoda, as the German Ambassador happily remarked, seemed to have obliterated the memory of Alsace-Lorraine. Peace was crowded out as a sensation.

  Not, however, to the dedicated disciples of the peace movement in Europe and America, whom the Czar’s summons had electrified. Among the best known of these was Baroness Bertha von Suttner, author of the anti-war novel Die Waffen Nieder (“Put Down Your Arms”), which Tolstoy called the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of its cause. When the Baroness’ husband came home waving the newspaper, like Emma Goldman bringing the news of Homestead, she was transported with joy. Letters of congratulation soon poured in from fellow workers in the International Peace Bureau, the Interparliamentary Union, the Peace and Arbitration Association. “Whatever may come of it,” wrote Björnstjerne Björnson, “from now on the air is throbbing with thoughts of peace.” The fervor of the movement was personified by the Baroness, born Countess Kinsky in 1843 into an aristocratic Austrian family of dwindling fortunes. Too strong-minded and energetic to sink into genteel decay, she had taken a position at the age of thirty as tutor-companion to the daughters of the Von Suttner family and had kindled a glowing and reciprocated passion in the son and heir, seven years her junior. But she was dowerless and they parted in Germanic anguish. “He knelt before me and humbly kissed the hem of my gown: ‘Matchless, royally generous-hearted woman, your love has taught me to know a happiness which shall consecrate my
life. Farewell!’ ” At this moment a newspaper advertisement by a “very wealthy, cultured, elderly gentleman living in Paris” who was looking for a mature, educated lady as secretary and manager of his household offered a way out, and the Countess found herself in the employ of the discoverer of dynamite, Alfred Nobel.

  A strange, satiric idealist and pessimist, shy, melancholy, almost a recluse, though hardly elderly at forty-three, Nobel had made millions in the manufacture of explosives and was profoundly disturbed by its implications. He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him. “I wish,” he told his new employee, “I could produce a substance or a machine of such frightful efficacy for wholesale devastation that wars should thereby become altogether impossible.” Despite an immediate sympathy and “the intense intellectual enjoyment” of his society and a tentative hint of something more, the lady succumbed to heartache, left after a week, flew back to the arms of her adorer and eloped with him. After twelve years of marriage and a career as a writer, she discovered—with a sense of revelation—the International Peace and Arbitration Association of London. Its statement of purposes declared that now at the close of the Nineteenth Century the time had come for all men to consult and agree on a means for the peaceful settlement of disputes and the abolition of war. Instantly and passionately a convert, Bertha von Suttner threw herself into the effort to organize branches of the society in Vienna and Berlin. In 1891 her efforts, publicized by the Neue Freie Presse, succeeded in Vienna and the manifesto issued on the occasion expressed the ideals of peace advocates everywhere. They believed a new war to be morally impossible because “men have lost some of their former savagery and disregard for life,” and physically impossible because new weapons were too destructive. They believed the masses though still dumb yearned for peace. While all governments insisted war must be avoided, all were massing armaments to prepare for it and this “monstrous contradiction” must end.

  The Interparliamentary Union, formed in Paris in 1888 to bring together members of the various national parliaments in the cause of peace, now held Congresses each year in different capitals. In the United States the Universal Peace Union named as its chief goals gradual disarmament and a Permanent Court of Arbitration. Stemming from the Geneva settlement of the Alabama dispute between the United States and Britain, the arbitration movement was especially strong in these two countries. Its goal was to substitute judicial settlement for war. Its advocates believed that if a workable process could be arranged, at first by treaty between individual nations, later by general treaty, while at the same time war was shown to be so destructive as to be “impossible,” man would ultimately rather arbitrate than fight. It was a view based on the premise that man was reasonable and that wars came from quarrels susceptible of settlement by other means. The time was one of belief in moral as well as material progress and did not include the view of war as a clash of forces like the winds that blow.

  Nobel was an ardent advocate of arbitration, though not of disarmament, which he thought a foolish demand for the present. He urged establishment of a tribunal and agreement among nations for a one-year period of compulsory truce in any dispute. He turned up in person, though incognito, at a Peace Congress in Berne in 1892 and told Bertha von Suttner that if she could “inform me, convince me, I will do something great for the cause.” The spark of friendship between them had been kept alive in correspondence and an occasional visit over the years and he now wrote her that a new era of violence seemed to be working itself up; “one hears in the distance its hollow rumble already.” Two months later he wrote again, “I should like to dispose of my fortune to found a prize to be awarded every five years,” to the person who had contributed most effectively to the peace of Europe. He thought it should terminate after six awards, “for if in thirty years society cannot be reformed we shall inevitably lapse into barbarism.” Nobel brooded over the plan, embodied it in a will drawn in 1895 which allowed man a little longer deadline, and died in the following year.

  The cause of arbitration almost scored a triumph in January, 1897, when Britain and the United States signed a treaty, negotiated by Secretary Olney and the British Ambassador, Sir Julian Pauncefote, for the settlement of all except territorial disputes, the memory of Venezuela being still warm. Resenting invasion of its control of foreign affairs, the Senate refused to ratify it by three votes. The defeat seemed a calamity, in Olney’s words, “not merely of national but of world wide proportions.” It shook the general belief in man’s moral progress.

  In this belief, fostered in the last ten or fifteen years by signs on every hand of society’s improvement, the peace movement had its origins. The marvelous strides of science had brought the human race to a stage of material welfare ready to prove the faith of the Nineteenth Century that the better off man became the less aggressive he would be. Society now had running water and lighted streets, sanitation, preserved and refrigerated food, sewing machines, washing machines, typewriters, lawn-mowers, the phonograph, telegraph and telephone and lately, beginning in the nineties, the extraordinary gift of individual powered mobility in the horseless carriage. It seemed impossible that so much physical benefit should not have worked a spiritual change, that the new century should not begin a new era in human behavior; that man, in short, had not become too civilized for war. Science made all phenomena seem subject to certitudes and laws, and if man’s physical world could be understood and controlled, why not his social relations also? “Social conditions are destined to become different,” Baroness von Suttner wrote with conviction. The younger generation agreed. “We were sincerely persuaded in 1898 that the era of wars was over,” wrote Julien Benda, a French intellectual who was thirty-one in that year. “For fifteen years from 1890 to 1905 men of my generation really believed in world peace.”

  Fear as well as faith impelled the peace movement, fear of the unchained energy of the machine age. The great surge in mechanical energy, the amazing new techniques and tools and new inventions following one upon the other, the fantastic capabilities of electricity, created an uneasy sense that man had gathered into his hands more power than he could control; power that could escape, run wild and destroy him unless put under limits. In 1820 the world disposed of 778 metric tons of mechanical energy (expressed in the coal equivalent of mineral fuels and water power) compared to 15,000,000 metric tons in 1898. Productivity per man had increased in proportion. Countries were swelling in size and strength. The death rate declined markedly, owing to developments in sanitation and medicine, with the result that since 1870 the population of Europe had increased by 100,000,000, as much as its whole population in 1650. In the same period Great Britain had acquired 4,700,000 square miles of territory, France 3,600,000, Germany 1,000,000 and Belgium 900,000, or seventy-seven times her own size. In the United States during the same period the population had more than doubled and the per capita output of manufactures multiplied four times. The profits of Carnegie Steel rose from $6,000,000 in 1896 to $40,000,000 in 1900. A new prime mover, the internal combustion engine, succeeded the steam engine and brought into existence the oil industry. The steam turbine and diesel engine added new motor power; hydro-electric power throbbed in thousands of dynamos. Steamships increased in tonnage, speed and cargo space. Steel, the key product of the age, mushroomed in products and uses through invention of the Bessemer converter. The relative invention rate reached the highest point in history in the nineties. Aluminum and other light metal alloys were developed. The chemical industry created new materials and processes. The method of mass production, using interchangeable parts, known as the “American system,” came into use in all industrial countries. Dynamite as a blasting agent made possible massive excavations for quarries and mine shafts and mammoth constructions like the Simplon Railway Tunnel and the Panama Canal. The manufacture of dynamite increased from 11 tons in 1867, the year Nobel first put it on the market, to 66,500 tons in 1897. Big business which was necessary to finance heavy industry formed cartels and t
rusts with vast financial resources.

  Nowhere were the added strengths greater than in weapons and other forces of war. The increase in population made manpower available for huge standing armies, and following the German example, conscription was adopted by all the Continental powers after 1871. To arm and equip mass armies required the efforts of mass industry and the munitions companies gathered under their control raw materials, mines, foundries and transportation. Markets and profits were almost limitless and they responded with fierce vigor to the incentive. In the ten years from the mid-eighties to mid-nineties land warfare was revolutionized by the introduction of the magazine-loading small-bore rifle, the improved Maxim machine gun, and smokeless powder. Together these multiplied the range, rapidity and accuracy of firepower five times or more and changed the nature of battle. Infantry who had fired three rounds a minute at Waterloo could now fire sixteen rounds a minute. The small bore added distance to the trajectory and accuracy to the aim. Development of automatic recoil for field guns equally increased the rate of artillery fire. Above all, smokeless powder, patented by Nobel between 1887 and 1891, opened up and extended the battlefield. It cleared the field of vision, permitted concealment of guns, speeded reloading and increased the range and accuracy of artillery from one thousand to five or six thousand yards. Battle would now spread over vast distances and an army be brought under fire before it could see the enemy. The conditions were laid, if barely yet suspected, for the supremacy of artillery over the rifle. The torpedo and the mine equally extended the range of naval warfare and experiments gave awful promise of the submarine.