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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Baron Marschall himself shook the Conference when in the course of discussion on a proposal to restrict mine-laying he warned against the folly of making laws for the conduct of war which might be rendered useless by “the law of facts.” The implications to be drawn from this excited wide press comment, including a letter to The Times from the Poet Laureate. Too indignant for poetry, Alfred Austin wrote that Marschall’s words were a plain warning of future German aggression of which all her neighbors—Holland, Belgium, France and Austria—should take note. Britain “duly forewarned” should adopt military conscription and the Laureate closed with a line borrowed from his predecessor, Lord Tennyson: “Form! Form! Riflemen, Form!”

  As before, peace advocates converged from all quarters upon The Hague, including Bertha von Suttner and Stead, who had once again appointed himself independent rapporteur. Again he published a chronicle of the proceedings, personalities, disputes and private deals, this time in the form of a four-page daily newspaper, the Courrier de la Conférence. Bloch was dead but Andrew Carnegie took his place and laid the cornerstone for the new Peace Palace, to which he had donated $1,250,000. It was agreed that all member nations should contribute materials representing their finest products for the building that was to express “universal good will and hope.” As before, Socialists, and this time Anarchists and Zionists as well, held their international Congresses in Amsterdam during the Conference to capture some of the world limelight for their causes. The Dutch pastor and pacifist Domela Nieuwenhuis, who managed to combine Anarchism with religion and remain sincere, denounced Carnegie impartially with the delegates as a merchant of death who built a Temple of Peace, while accepting orders for munitions “even from the Japanese,” an accusation accurate in spirit if not in time. “Let all workers regardless of nationality strike on the declaration of war and there will be no war!” Nieuwenhuis cried out.

  The work of the Conference was organized as before in Commissions—on Arbitration, Rules of War on Land, Rules of War at Sea—with an additional Fourth Commission—on Maritime Law. Bourgeois and Beernaert were chairmen as before of the First and Second Commissions, Tornielli of the Third and De Martens of the Fourth. At the opening session Nelidov’s address of welcome aroused no enthusiasm; the first days were gloomy, arrangements and assignments confused and acoustics in plenary session so poor that on one occasion delegates disputed energetically whether the last speaker had addressed them in English or French.

  Carrying out their insistence that disarmament must be discussed if only to prove to the public its impracticability and their own honest intentions, the British brought the question to the floor. None of the nations walked out, because Sir Edward Grey’s explanations in advance, however foggy, had conveyed a sufficiently clear impression that the matter would not be uncomfortably pursued; nor was it. Sir Edward Fry made a grave and moving presentation of the case, describing the appalling increase in engines of death and moved a resolution calling for “further serious study” in the same phrase of postponement as had been used in 1899. Nelidov agreed that if arms limitation was not ripe in 1899 it was not more so in 1907, and the delegates adopted Fry’s resolution without a vote. The matter was disposed of in a total of twenty-five minutes. Stead raged at the “miserable and scandalous debacle” and even Secretary Root concluded that Grey’s support had been merely a gesture to “satisfy English public opinion.”

  Although the world grew bored after Fry’s “funeral oration” as Marschall called it, and even the journalists lost interest, the Conference settled down to serious work on the laws and techniques of war. When busied in drafting and disputing the problems of their trade—the rights and duties of neutrals, the recovery of international debts by force, the rules for opening hostilities—all matters which took war for granted as a fact of human life, the delegates became absorbed. Indeed, they worked harder than at the First Conference, as if war was not only a fact of life but an imminent fact. Committee meetings were held twice a day, lengthy documents had to be read, expert opinions examined, new drafts prepared, and endless confidential talks held to work out compromises. “Never since my examination for the bar have I worked so hard as in the last six weeks,” Marschall reported to Bülow.

  The launching of projectiles or explosives from balloons was reconsidered, and again avoiding any extremes of self-denial, the delegates renewed the prohibition for another limited term of five years. Neutral territory, a matter on which the Belgians were particularly sensitive, was agreed to be inviolable and a convention of twenty-five articles was worked out establishing rules of procedures in case it were violated. As a result of Japan’s treacherous opening of hostilities against Russia by surprise attack in 1904, new and interesting discussions were held on this subject. They culminated in a convention whose signatories agreed not to open hostilities without previous unequivocal warning in the form of a declaration of war or ultimatum accompanied by a conditional declaration of war. Another convention of fifty-six articles was adopted redefining the laws and customs of land warfare. As a result of the Venezuela affair in 1902 a convention against the use of force to collect international debts except if the debtor had refused arbitration was agreed on. This represented one definite advance in international law.

  Naval warfare was the subject of the fiercest struggle, with the right of capture of seaborne commerce as the central issue. As the basic weapon of blockade, Britain was determined to preserve the right of capture free of any restrictions. Germany was equally determined to restrict it by international prize court and other interferences. The use of submarines and underwater contact mines as weapons against blockade Germany was determined to defend and Britain to restrict. On the immunity of private property, Grey, at least, had learned Mahan’s lesson if the American delegation had not. He instructed his delegates that Britain could not assent to a principle which “if carried to its logical conclusion would entail the abolition of commercial blockade.” He added a reason, in his tortured way, which would certainly not have occurred to Mahan. Britain could not agree to anything, he wrote, which might “so limit the prospective liability of war as to remove some of the considerations which now restrain the public from contemplating it.” Translated into simpler language, this meant that Britain could not agree to anything which might, by limiting the damages of war, cause people to enter on it more lightly. With the British Liberals it was obligatory to find a moral reason to fortify a natural policy of self-interest, a practice no one carried to higher perfection or more obscure expression than Sir Edward Grey.

  Eight conventions on naval warfare were ultimately reached establishing rules, rights and restrictions for every possible means of injuring the enemy. It took thirteen articles to prohibit the use of underwater contact mines unless harmless one hour after being laid; another thirteen articles to regulate naval bombardment of shore establishments; fifty-seven articles to govern an international prize court. Other conventions dealt with the right of capture, the nature of contraband, the rights and duties of neutrals at sea but so unsatisfactorily that all these questions were resumed at a conference of naval powers in London in the following year.

  On arbitration, the motive power, now that Pauncefote was gone, was chiefly American, with Secretary Root, a lawyer by profession, supplying the energy behind Choate. Root’s object was to transform the tribunal established in 1899 from an optional court for litigants who agreed to arbitration into a Permanent Court of International Justice with permanent judges deciding issues of international law by “judicial methods under a sense of judicial responsibility.” President Roosevelt supported the aim without strong conviction, confessing to Root midway through the Conference that “I have not followed things at The Hague.” To his friend Speck von Sternberg, the German Ambassador, he expressed himself more forcibly as, for some reason, he habitually did to Germans. He could not take a proper interest in the Hague proceedings, he told Speck, because he was so “utterly disgusted” with the nonsense chattered by professio
nal peace advocates.

  The American proposal for a Permanent Court ran into strong opposition, one obstacle being Brazil’s insistence that all forty-four nations be represented on it. The idea of having decisions made for them “by decayed Oriental states like Turkey or Persia … or a half-breed lawyer from Central or South America,” in the words of one commentator, disgusted the major European powers. The crux, however, was once more compulsory arbitration. On this, reported Marschall to Berlin, would depend the final answer, “Was it a Peace Conference or a War Conference that took place in 1907?” Since his own country utterly rejected the compulsory principle, presumably he faced the answer. He did, not, however, fall into the error made by his predecessors of strenuous isolation. Instead, as Choate said, he was devoted to the principle of arbitration while opposing every practical application of it. The Conference attempted to work out a list of innocuous subjects for compulsory submission on which everyone could agree, but it failed of adoption when eight nations voted against it. In the end a Convention on the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes was adopted containing ninety-six articles of which the compulsory principle was not one. Consequently, no Court of Justice could be established.

  One last point of contention remained: a Third Conference. Believers in the Hague idea wished to see the principle of the interdependence of nations established in the form of a permanent organization and periodic meetings. The day of nations as separate sovereign units was past and before breaking up they wanted a commitment to meet again. Non-believers, chiefly the major European powers, wanted no further limitation of their freedom of action and no more invasions of sovereignty by insistence on compulsory peaceful settlement. They resisted commitment to a Third Conference, more particularly because pressure for it came from the Americans. Secretary Root, faithful to his precept that successive failures were necessary to success, and believing that each of the Conferences had accomplished something toward making possible the next, had instructed Choate to obtain a resolution for a Third Conference. By committing the nations now, he intended also to wrest initiative and control from Russia. Choate fought hard against the reluctance of the other delegates which remained unbending until he threatened Nelidov that if no agreement were reached he would move the resolution publicly in plenary session. Opposition gave way. The delegates adopted a resolution recommending that the next Conference be held “within a period analogous to that which had elapsed since the preceding Conference,” namely, eight years.

  To have achieved this much, Root wrote to Roosevelt, was at least progress “toward making the practice of nations conform to their professed desire for peace.” The desire was real enough. Twice it had brought the nation to The Hague. Twice man’s inherent desire to police himself had wrestled against opposite tendencies. The goal of a new international order in which nations would be willing to give up their freedom to fight in exchange for the security of law was still ahead. The advance toward it taken at The Hague, as Choate said later, was necessarily “gradual, tentative and delicate.”

  He hoped for further progress at the next Conference in 1915.

  * Hay had died in July, 1905.

  * Limitation of armaments rather than disarmament was the question at issue, but the single word, being less awkward, was generally used at the time and the usage has been followed here.

  6

  “Neroism

  Is in the Air”

  GERMANY : 1890–1914

  6

  “Neroism Is in the Air”

  THE BOLD bad man of music at the turn of the century, innovator in form, modern and audacious in concept, brilliant in execution, not immune to vulgarity, and a barometer of his native weather, was Richard Strauss. His every new work, usually conducted at its premiere by himself, crammed the concert halls with a public eager to be excited and music critics eager to whip their rapiers through the hot air of their profession. In the ten years from 1889 to 1899, when he was between twenty-five and thirty-five, Strauss produced six works, Don Juan, Tod und Verklärung, Till Eulenspiegel, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben, which created a new form—or, as the critics said, “formlessness.” Called tone poems, the compositions were rather condensed operas without words. At the premiere of Don Juan the audience called the composer back five times in an effort to make him play the piece all over again. At the premiere of Heldenleben, the passage depicting battle enraged some listeners to the point of leaving the hall and caused others to “tremble as they listened while some stood up suddenly and made violent gestures quite unconsciously.” If to some Strauss was a sensationalist and corrupter of the pure art of music and to others the prophet of a new musical age, even the “inventor of a new art,” one thing was clear: he retained for Germany the supremacy of music which had culminated in Wagner. He was “Richard II.”

  In one sense this made him the most important man in German cultural life, for music was the only sphere in which foreigners willingly acknowledged the superiority that Germans believed was self-evident. German Kultur in German eyes was the heir of Greece and Rome and they themselves the best educated and most cultivated of modern peoples, yet foreigners in their appreciation of this fact fell curiously short of perfect understanding. Apart from German professors and philosophers, only Wagner excited their homage, only Bayreuth, seat of the Wagner Festspielhaus, attracted their visits. Paris remained Europe’s center of the arts, pleasure and fashion, London of Society, Rome of antiquity and Italy the lure of travelers seeking sun and beauty. The new movements and impulses in literature—Naturalism, Symbolism, Social criticism; the towering figures—Tolstoy, Ibsen and Zola; the great novels from Dostoyevsky to Hardy: all originated outside Germany. England after its great Victorian age was again in the nineties pulsing with new talent—Stevenson, Wilde and Shaw, Conrad, Wells, Kipling and Yeats. Russia again produced in Chekhov a matchless interpreter of man. Painters bloomed in France. Germany in painting had little but Max Liebermann, leader of the Secessionists, whose secession, however, took him no further than the presidency of the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts. In literature her outstanding figures were the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, an offshoot of Ibsen, and the poet Stefan George, an offshoot of Baudelaire and Mallarmé.

  In music, however, Germany had produced the world’s masters and seen the procession crowned by Wagner whose dogma of a fusion of the arts became a cult in which foreigners eagerly joined. Wagner Societies from St. Petersburg to Chicago contributed funds to provide the Master’s music dramas with a fitting home, and the “Bayreuth Idea” created intellectual ferment beyond Germany’s borders. Germans believed their sovereignty of music would continue forever without serious challenge from any other country. While many of them, like the Kaiser, detested Strauss’s modernity, his pre-eminence appeared to them happy proof that German musical supremacy was maintained.

  Not only the major cities but every German city or town of substantial size had its opera house, concert hall, music academy, orchestral society and musical Verein of one kind or another. Hardly a German did not belong to a choral society or instrumental ensemble and spend his evenings practicing Bach cantatas over several steins of beer. Frankfurt-am-Main, a town of under 200,000 in the nineties, about the size of The Hague, Nottingham or Minneapolis, boasted two colleges of music, with distinguished teaching staffs and pupils from many countries, a new opera house, “one of the handsomest in Europe,” which gave performances six nights a week, a Museum Society Orchestra of 120 players which gave concerts of symphonic and chamber music, two large choral societies also prolific in concerts, and in addition was host to numerous recitals by visiting artists. Besides activity of comparable kind in Berlin, Munich, Cologne, Dresden, Leipzig, Stuttgart and other cities, music festivals lasting as much as a week in honor of some composer or special occasion were held widely and often.

  The season at Bayreuth since Wagner’s death had acquired an oppressive atmosphere of obligatory reverence. The cab taking a visitor to the
Festspielhaus displayed a card pinned over the seat labeled “Historical!” indicating that the Master had sat there. Performances opened with a blast of trumpets as if commanding the audience to prepare for devotions. At intermission sausages and beer were consumed, followed by another trumpet blast; after the second act more sausages and beer and more trumpets and the same procedure after the third act. The faithful absorbed the Master’s works “as if they were receiving Holy Communion,” reported the young Sibelius, who came in 1894 eager for a great experience and could not leave soon enough. By 1899 when Thomas Beecham, aged twenty, arrived, he found there was a rift in the cult. Malcontents were proclaiming the decadence of the Festival, criticizing the reign of the widow, Frau Cosima, and clamoring for the removal of the son, Siegfried, as director. They said his management was feeble and uninspired, singers were poor and performances shoddy, while the group loyal to “Wahnfried,” the Wagners’ house, countered with charges of intrigue and jealousy.