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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  At the same time, England set about refitting her physical forces to meet a world full of new challenges. Her Army having been revealed in action as something less than in step with modern times, Balfour, now Prime Minister, set up a Committee of Imperial Defence to formulate strategy and reorganize and modernize the armed forces. He appointed Sir John Fisher as one of its three members and would have appointed Captain Mahan to succeed Lord Acton as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge but that King Edward objected on the ground that English historians were available. For all his rarefied pose, Balfour’s appreciation of the two hard-headed veterans of The Hague revealed a bent parallel to theirs. In 1904 he appointed Fisher First Sea Lord. The new head of the Navy had momentous plans in mind.

  In the same year, Russia went to war with Japan, soon to become mired in a series of losing campaigns marked by the surrender of Port Arthur in January, 1905, and a humiliating, although not decisive, defeat at the Battle of Mukden in March. Three weeks later the alarm bell rang for Europe in Morocco.

  To Germany’s intense resentment, the Anglo-French Entente had recognized a French sphere of influence in Morocco. Now that Russia could not come to France’s aid, Bülow and Holstein determined on a test of strength that would expose the weakness, as they believed, of the Entente. On March 31, 1905, the Kaiser stunningly, if nervously, descended upon Tangier in a challenge that every nation recognized. Europe shook under the impact and the gesture succeeded too well. It completed the work of the Kruger telegram, convincing Germany’s neighbors of her ultimate belligerent intent and of the need for more specific preparations than a mere Entente. “Roll up the map of Europe,” Pitt had said in despair ninety-nine years before when Napoleon won at Austerlitz. In a different spirit England unrolled it now. She entered into military conversations with France, underpinning their partnership with arms and envisioning, for the first time since Waterloo, an expeditionary force to the Continent in aid of a specific ally against a specific enemy.

  In May, 1905, the Russian Baltic Fleet met its fatal rendezvous in the Straits of Tsushima in the world’s first head-on clash of modern capital ships on the high seas. Though the Russian fleet was annihilated, its defeat did not end the war, thus proving Bloch’s thesis, though few realized it, that against the total resources of a nation, victories on the battlefield were no longer decisive. Japan’s victory startled the Old World and warned the New. Three months after Tsushima, in July, 1905, the President of the United States offered to mediate between Russia and Japan, less to save the Russians than to halt the Japanese, who seemed to him to have gone far enough. Accepting the offer, the parties came to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August to negotiate a peace treaty under the aegis of the President of the United States. It was a significant moment in Western history. For McKinley or Cleveland or Harrison to have played such a role would have been unimaginable, but a new strength and a new man were now at work.

  “Theodore! with all thy faults …” was the one-line editorial in which the New York Sun had expressed its Presidential preference in the election of the previous year. Its candidate, now President in his own right, was exuberantly in charge of a country booming with prosperity. With industry stimulated by the Spanish-American War, the depression, unemployment and savage labour troubles of the nineties had subsided and the bitter class feeling of the McKinley-Bryan campaign of 1896 was dulled by the full dinner pail. The Progressives, who were the new Left, were expansionist and believed America’s direction was “onward and upward.” President Roosevelt leading the march settled the coal strike, “took” Panama, began the building of the Canal, challenged the trusts, slapped the name “muck-rakers” on crusading journalists, bullied the Kaiser out of Venezuela, and when a presumed American citizen was kidnaped by bandits in Morocco, sent the American Fleet to the rescue with the resounding demand (phrased by John Hay): “We want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!”

  “The President is in his best mood,” said his friend Jules Jusserand, the French Ambassador, “he is always in his best mood.” He had the memtal energy of a geyser and the flaws of Everyman. His Attorney-General, Philander Knox, rather admired the way the President ignored his advice and once remarked, “Ah, Mr. President, why have such a beautiful action marred by any taint of legality.” President Eliot still did not admire him, although when Roosevelt came to Cambridge in 1905 for his twenty-fifth reunion Eliot had felt obliged to invite him to stay at his house. On his arrival, perspiring and in need of a wash, Roosevelt pulled off his coat, rolled it up and flung it across the bedroom so violently it knocked a pillow to the floor, took a large pistol from his pocket and slammed it on the dresser. After washing up, “he came rushing downstairs as if his life depended on it,” and when Eliot asked, “Now, are you taking breakfast with me?” replied, “Oh no, I promised Bishop Lawrence I would take breakfast with him—and good gracious!”—clapping his right hand to his side—“I’ve forgotten my gun!” Retrieving it, the President of the United States rushed off to see the Bishop while the president of Harvard, horrified by violation of a Massachusetts law against carrying pistols, muttered, “Very lawless; a very lawless mind.”

  The pistol represented, perhaps, less a lawless mind than the creed of the time that life was a fight. No one felt it more deeply than Roosevelt. He despised Tolstoy’s “foolish theory that men should never make war,” for he believed that “the country that loses its capacity to hold its own in actual warfare will ultimately show that it has lost everything.” He was infuriated when the peace advocates equated progress in civilization with “a weakening of the fighting spirit”; such a weakening, as he saw it, invited the destruction of the more advanced by the less advanced. He confused the desire for peace with physical cowardice and harped curiously on this subject: “I abhor men like [Edward Everett] Hale and papers like the Evening Post and the Nation in all of whom there exists absolute physical dread of danger and hardship and who therefore tend to hysterical denunciation and fear of war.” He deplored what seemed to him, as he looked around, a “general softening of fibre, a selfishness and luxury, a relaxation of standards” and especially “a spirit such as that of the anti-imperialists.” “That’s my man!” the Kaiser used to say whenever Roosevelt’s name was mentioned.

  No President had a more acute sense of his own public relations. When Baron d’Estournelles came in 1902 to beg him to do something to breathe life into the Arbitration Tribunal, Roosevelt listened. “You are a danger and a hope for the world depending on whether you support aggression or arbitration,” d’Estournelles said. “The world believes you incline to the side of violence. Prove the contrary.”

  “How?” the President asked.

  “By giving life to the Hague Court.” Roosevelt promptly instructed Secretary Hay to find something to submit for arbitration and Hay obligingly uncovered an old quarrel between the United States and Mexico over church property, the first dispute to activate the Tribunal. Having been Secretary of State during the Hague Conference and sympathetic to arbitration, Hay wanted to build up the prestige of the Tribunal and now arranged to divert to it the dispute over Venezuela’s debts. Fearing that the President might accept a German proposal to act as individual mediator in this affair, he strode up and down the room exclaiming, “I have it all arranged, I have it all arranged. If only Teddy will keep his mouth shut until tomorrow noon!” That objective being happily accomplished, the Tribunal received another important case.

  Arbitration treaties between individual countries slowly made progress. England and France agreed on one when they joined in the Entente of 1904 and Norway and Sweden concluded another when Norway, without the firing of a shot, became an independent state in 1905—an event hailed in itself as evidence that man was making progress. Two other international disputes of the time, the Dogger Bank affair between Russia and England and the affair of Venezuela’s debts, were referred to the Arbitration Tribunal, whose existence proved an invaluable means of saving face and satisfying public opinio
n. The Hague idea seemed to be putting on flesh.

  In the summer of 1904 the Interparliamentary Union, meeting at the St. Louis Fair, adopted a resolution asking the President of the United States to convene a Second Peace Conference to take up the subjects postponed at The Hague and to carry arbitration forward toward the goal of a permanent court of international law. At the White House, Roosevelt accepted the resolution in person, as well as a visit from Baroness von Suttner, who had a private talk with him on “the subject so dear to my heart.” She found him friendly, sincere and “thoroughly impressed with the seriousness of the matter discussed.” According to her diary he said to her, “Universal peace is coming; it is certainly coming—step by step.” As the most unlikely remark of the epoch, it illustrates the capacity of true believers to hear what they want to hear.

  Roosevelt felt the glamour of a world role and as convener of the Peace Conference considered himself no less fitted than the Czar. Accordingly on October 21, 1904, Hay instructed American envoys to propose that the nations reconvene at The Hague. That the Second Conference, like the First, was called while a war was in progress need not, he suggested, be considered an ill omen.

  The nations accepted on condition that the Conference should not be convened until the Russo-Japanese War was over. No sooner was it over, however, than the Moroccan crisis erupted. Again President Roosevelt played a decisive role and was able to exercise his influence, this time privately, to persuade the Kaiser to agree to an international conference on Morocco. Held at Algeciras in January, 1906, with the United States as a participant, it proved to be a discomfiture for Germany, leaving her more bellicose than before. International tensions were not eased.

  Three months before Algeciras, in October, 1905, the keel of H.M.S. Dreadnought, first of her class, was laid. With guns and armor plate manufactured by separate ordnance firms, she was ready for trials in an unprecedented burst of speed and secrecy, a year and a day later, achieving the greatest of military advantages—surprise. Designed by Fisher, the Dreadnought was larger, swifter, more heavily gunned than any battleship the world had ever seen. Displacing 18,000 tons, carrying ten 12-inch guns, and powered by the new steam-turbine engines, it made all existing fleets, including Germany’s, obsolete, besides demonstrating Britain’s confidence and capacity to rebuild her own fleet. Germany would now not only have to match the ship but dredge her harbors and widen the Kiel Canal.

  Courtesy the Royal Archives, The Hague

  British delegation to The Hague, 1899. Front row, from left to right: Ardagh; Fisher; Pauncefote; Sir Henry Howard, Minister to The Hague. Arthur Peel is first on the left in the back row. (Photo Credit 5.17)

  Brown Brothers

  PARIS EXPOSITION, 1900 Porte Monumentale

  Palace of Electricity (Photo Credit 5.18)

  Alfred Nobel (portrait by E. Osterman) (Photo Credit 5.20)

  Bertha von Suttner (Photo Credit 5.21)

  Brown Brothers

  The Krupp works at Essen, 1912 (Photo Credit 5.22)

  Courtesy Dr. Franz and

  Alice Strauss

  Richard Strauss, 1905 (Photo Credit 5.23)

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Weimar, 1900 (drawing by Hans Olde) (Photo Credit 5.24)

  A beer garden in Berlin (Photo Credit 5.25)

  Brown Brothers

  Nijinsky as the Faun (design by Léon Bakst) (Photo Credit 5.26)

  Radio Times Hulton Picture Library

  Arthur James Balfour, about 1895 (Photo Credit 5.27)

  Brown Brothers

  Coal strike, 1910 (Photo Credit 5.28)

  CAPITAL

  Brown Brothers

  Seamen’s strike, 1911 (Photo Credit 5.29)

  AND LABOUR

  The Mansell Collection, London

  David Lloyd George, about 1908 (Photo Credit 5.30)

  August Bebel (Photo Credit 5.31)

  Keir Hardie (Photo Credit 5.32)

  “Strike” (oil painting by Théophile Steinlen) (Photo Credit 5.33)

  Jean Jaurès (Photo Credit 5.34)

  In Fisher’s mind, as in Clemenceau’s, there was but one adversary. Half jokingly in 1904 he shocked King Edward by suggesting that the growing German Fleet should be “Copenhagened,” that is, wiped out by surprise bombardment, evoking the King’s startled reply, “My God, Fisher, you must be mad!” At Kiel in the same year, the Kaiser upset Bülow by publicly ascribing the genesis of his Navy to his childhood admiration of the British Fleet, which he had visited in company with “kind aunts and friendly admirals.” To give such sentimental reasons for a national development for which the people were being asked to pay millions, Bülow scolded, would not encourage the Reichstag to vote credits. “Ach, that damned Reichstag!” was the Kaiser’s reply.

  Invitations to The Hague meanwhile had been reissued not by Roosevelt but by the Czar, who felt the necessity of regaining face. The upstart American republic had intervened enough. In September, 1905, as soon as his war was over, the hint was conveyed to Washington that he wished the right to call the Conference himself. Roosevelt amiably relinquished it. The Treaty of Portsmouth, which in a few months was to bring him the Nobel Peace Prize, had, he felt, been enough of a good thing. “I particularly do not want to appear as a professional peace advocate … of the Godkin or Schurz variety,” he wrote to his new Secretary of State, Elihu Root.* His withdrawal did not please the peace advocates. Russia, as one of them said, was “not in the van of civilization.” This became strikingly apparent upon the outbreak of the Russian revolution of 1905. Forced by the crisis to grant a constitution and a parliament, the Czar repudiated the action as soon as his regime regained control, and dissolved the Duma to the horror of foreign liberal opinion.

  The time seemed not on the whole propitious for a Peace Conference, but one encouraging development was a change of government in England which brought the Liberals, the traditional party of peace, to power. The new Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, known to all as C.-B., was a solid round-headed Scot of a wealthy mercantile family who had made himself unpopular in Court and in Society by denouncing British concentration camps in the Boer War as “methods of barbarism.” Nevertheless, King Edward, forced to become acquainted, discovered him to be indeed, as a mutual friend had promised, “so straight, so good-tempered, so clever and so full of humor” that it was impossible not to like him. C.-B. had the wit, tact and worldly wisdom that the King appreciated and the two gentlemen, who had a number of tastes in common, soon found each other congenial. They both went annually to Marienbad for the cure, they both loved France and shared a special friendship with the Marquis de Galliffet. Though a Liberal, C.-B. was, to the royal surprise, “quite sound on foreign politics.” He spoke the most fluent French of any Englishman, delighted to shop in Paris, to eat French food and read French literature, Anatole France being one of his favorites.

  As an old-fashioned Liberal automatically disposed to disarmament,* C.-B. in his first public speech as Prime Minister somewhat rashly pledged his party to work for it at the coming Conference, although the Czar’s invitation, as opposed to 1898, had conspicuously omitted to mention the subject. Nevertheless, C.-B. boldly took it on, as well as a pledge to work for a permanent court of arbitration. “What nobler role,” he asked, “could this great country assume than to place itself at the head of a League of Peace?” This may have somewhat overstepped the view of a hard bloc within his own Cabinet composed of Asquith, Haldane and Grey, who as Liberal Imperialists were not altogether as peace-minded as himself. With unexpected toughness at seventy, C.-B. had withstood their attempt to elbow him into the House of Lords so as to obtain leadership of the Commons for Asquith. He detested them all and was enjoying his triumph.

  Soon the relentless dilemma that attaches to office caught up with his Government. After years of excoriating the Tories as warmongers, the Liberals now suddenly found themselves responsible for the country’s safety. Although committed by election pledges to reduction of military and naval expenditu
re, once the General Election confirmed them in office they were not anxious to repudiate the work of modernizing the armed forces which the Tories had begun. C.-B. referred to the members of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Fisher, Lord Esher, and Sir George Clark, presumably in that order, as Damnable, Domineering and Dictatorial; but he had inherited them, not to mention the dreadnought program. Haldane, as Secretary for War, undertook to cut £3,000,000 from the Army estimates while at the same time, through sweeping reforms, achieving a more efficient fighting arm, as Fisher had done in the Navy. He created a General Staff and a reserve force called the Territorials. Officers’ Training Corps were formed in the public schools and universities and supplied with arms, ammunition and instructors by the government. Young men responded with enthusiasm. The calling bugle and screaming fife worked their magic, though chiefly upon the officer class. Recruitment of private soldiers for the Territorials dwindled after the first few years.

  H.M.S. Dreadrought was commissioned in 1906, a strange triumph for the Liberals, and Fisher was demanding construction of three more dreadnoughts for 1907. He threatened, if refused, to resign and take three other members of the Board of Admiralty with him. The Liberal dilemma was painful but not beyond solution. By insisting that the Navy was defensive (which, considering the nature of blockade, was arguable), the Government managed to give Fisher his dreadnoughts and absolve the Liberal conscience at the same time.