Military matters were the special province of the kaiser. The army and navy chiefs were appointed by him, and reported to him, rather than to or through the chancellor. Wilhelm II enjoyed having this power, for he loved playing soldier. He identified himself with the Homeric hero Achilles, though the resemblance between the two was clearer to him than to others.
Germany was Europe’s growing power in almost every sphere. Another emperor might have seen in this a reason to keep the peace and wait until the industrial greatness of his country brought with it the effective domination of the Continent—as it was bound to do eventually. Wilhelm II was inclined to follow a different path. His impatient desire was to force the issue: to intimidate the other countries of Europe into conceding immediately the German supremacy to which her might entitled her. But Britain, an empire he admired but envied, seemed always to thwart him.
It was to discuss Britain’s attitude that Moltke was summoned by the kaiser to a conference Sunday morning, December 8, 1912, along with three high naval officers. Kaiser Wilhelm was enraged that a British cabinet minister had said that Britain would never allow Europe to come under complete German domination. The kaiser and Moltke decided to go to war. Moltke wanted “to launch an immediate attack,” saying that “war was unavoidable, and the sooner the better.” The navy, however, claimed that it was not ready and would need a year or a year and a half to accomplish certain preparations. The kaiser (and the gloomy Moltke) agreed to the postponement only reluctantly.
Moltke was well acquainted with the character of the vain, strutting, boastful, insecure kaiser, whose withered arm gave him an asymmetrical look in keeping with his unbalanced personality. He was someone who let people down. Caught up in enthusiasm or bragging, he would announce bold decisions that he would weakly retract the morning after.
So Moltke may not have counted overly much on the “decision” of December 1912 to go to war, even though the civilian chancellor was made privy to it within a week. Yet all along Moltke looked forward to an inevitable war, sparked, as he had indicated in 1909, by a Balkan incident that could be portrayed as a Serbian attack on Austria-Hungary; and the 1912 decision provided him with a rough timetable.
Only a month or so before the actual outbreak of war in 1914, the German foreign secretary noted that Moltke told him that in two or three years the “military superiority of our enemies would … be so great that he did not know how he could overcome them. Today we would still be a match for them. In his opinion there was no alternative to making preventive war in order to defeat the enemy while there was still a chance of victory. The Chief of the General Staff therefore proposed that I should conduct a policy with the aim of provoking a war in the near future.”
Though some historians still dissent, modern scholarship seems to indicate that the German government did just that. It was not (as used to be believed) that a local crisis in the Balkans somehow spun out of control; it was rather that the kaiser’s government had been waiting for something like the Sarajevo incident to happen. When it did occur, Germany deliberately seized on it as a pretext to provoke a war.
“Provoke” was indeed the word, for the German government was not willing to bet that its citizens or its parliament would support an act of aggression. The German people, like the peoples of the powerful neutral countries, would have to be persuaded that Germany was defending herself against an attack by others.
In May 1914, a month before Sarajevo, Moltke took the baths at Carlsbad in company with the Austrian army chief Conrad. Conrad, whose position in the Hapsburg government was far less powerful than Moltke’s in the German regime, had long advocated an Austro-Hungarian attack on Serbia. At Carlsbad the two generals refined war plans they had adopted five years before. Moltke assured Conrad that on the thirty-ninth or fortieth day after mobilization, Germany would have defeated France and would turn against Russia.
By June 1914 the German navy had completed its preparations. So the time to go to war had arrived. Moltke had told his colleagues that if Germany was to have a chance of winning it, the sooner the better. All of them were acquainted, and had been at least since 1909, with the scenario: a Serbian attack on the Hapsburg Empire in the Balkans would trigger the sought-for war. Everybody knew that Bismarck had predicted that “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” would be the cause of the next big war. Indeed, they counted on it, knowing that provocative acts happened in the Balkans all the time; the kaiser and his ministers had only to wait.
And then came the shootings in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary consulted Germany, and both the kaiser and Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg not merely gave the Hapsburg Empire a blank check to take action against Serbia—with Germany guaranteeing to fend off Russian interference—but left the Hapsburg government with the feeling that Germany was urging the strongest possible action and indeed might abandon Austria-Hungary if she were feeble and failed to act. Some evidence uncovered relatively recently suggests that the more offensive language in the ultimatum sent by Vienna to Belgrade might even have been the kaiser’s.
Wilhelm went yachting with the armaments tycoon Krupp von Bohlen and told him that “no one would ever again be able to reproach him”—the kaiser—“with indecision.” Another source quotes him as saying (in a curiously modern idiom that must be the result of free translation): “This time I haven’t chickened out.”
BUT HE SPOKE TOO SOON. When Serbia accepted almost all of the terms of the Hapsburg ultimatum, he tried to back down: “But that eliminates any reason for war,” he exclaimed, forgetting that he wanted one. Believing that France might stay neutral, he asked Moltke not to invade her—only to be told that what he asked was no longer possible: armies were on the move and it was too late to stop them. “How did all this happen?” Kaiser Wilhelm asked his chancellor.
Of the motives of the chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, more than much has been written. On all sides it is recognized that he knew what giving the blank check to the Hapsburgs and urging them to act strongly meant: that it almost certainly would lead to a general European war. He knew that the generals regarded such a war as inevitable, and thought that Germany could win only if it were fought now rather than later (“The military keep on urging for a war now while Russia is not yet ready,” as a Saxon official reported). He knew that Moltke wanted war and had been waiting for a Balkan incident to ignite one. And he knew that he was doing what Moltke wanted done to bring about a war.
That said, some believe that Bethmann-Hollweg hoped against hope for a peaceful resolution of the crisis nonetheless—which is to say, that Serbia would surrender without a fight. As late as July 25, the German foreign minister candidly admitted that “neither London, nor Paris, nor St. Petersburg want war.” But London, Paris, and St. Petersburg might have no choice in the matter if Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia, as Germany encouraged her to do; the number two official at the German Foreign Office conceded that such an attack would lead “with a probability of 90 percent to a European war.” Perhaps, as some claim, Bethmann-Hollweg tried to keep at least Britain out of it; but it is not unfair to say that it was with eyes open that he allowed the war to occur.
To his own people, but to them alone, Bethmann-Hollweg successfully painted Russia as the aggressor. The decisive moment was when Russia started to mobilize. “I run to the War Ministry,” a Bavarian official wrote. “Beaming faces everywhere. Everyone is shaking hands in the corridors: people congratulate one another for being over the hurdle.” On August 1, 1914, the head of the kaiser’s navy cabinet wrote that “the mood is brilliant” because “the government has succeeded very well in making us appear as the attacked.”
AT THE TIME, however, there was no conclusive evidence that Austria-Hungary had consulted Germany before initiating the crisis: it was possible to believe that Germany had been dragged into the conflict by the terms of her alliance with the Hapsburg Empire, forced to defend an Austrian move of which she herself had not known in advance and did not approve. Alternatively, G
ermany’s leaders, even if they had known what Austria-Hungary was going to do, might not have foreseen where the Austrian move might lead. The war could have come about, in other words, through error rather than design: through miscalculation, misinformation, and misunderstanding.
To Americans, it was natural to believe, too, that the causes of the war were mired in the complexities of Europe’s intricate power politics: the arms races, the secret treaties, and above all, the rival alliance systems. Yet it transpires that such was not the case. It was not the Austrian alliance that sucked Germany into the conflict; Germany acted of her own volition. Nor did alliances bring Russia and France into the war; it was Germany’s declaration of war on them that brought them into it. Great Britain entered the war not because of a treaty of alliance, but because Germany invaded a country whose neutrality Britain had guaranteed.
But Americans were not necessarily wrong to believe that the coming of war showed the political system of Europe to be deeply vicious. Although Germany deliberately tossed a match into it, Europe already was a powder keg. Social, cultural, class, and ethnic tensions were widespread, as was industrial strife, creating a climate in which politicians found it expedient to pursue a bellicose foreign policy. There was a sense in the air that Europe suffered from some malady that required bloodletting for its cure, or that called for a cycle of death and rebirth. On the announcement of the outbreak of war, foreign observers noted with surprise that crowds in the belligerent countries were seized by a frenzied enthusiasm: a wild happiness, a sort of mass delirium.
7
“… I WAS GOING TO STOP THE WAR”
IT WAS JULY’S END, 1914. A year out of Yale, dapper twenty-three-year-old William Bullitt, a handsome young man of medium height with wavy brown hair, had reached the capital city of tsarist Russia in the course of his European travels with his mother, Louisa. The Bullitts moved into the National Hotel in St. Petersburg, but at night could not sleep: through their windows came the sounds of impending war. There was shouting in the streets. The city was awake. Crowds were singing the national anthem. The Bullitts heard strains—or so they believed—of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
It had all come about as suddenly and without warning as the eruption of a sleeping volcano. After Austria-Hungary had declared war on Russia’s ally Serbia, on July 30 it had ordered a general mobilization to warn off Russia from coming to Serbia’s defense. Now Tsar Nicholas II was responding by marshaling a general mobilization in Russia. Throughout the territories of his empire—one-sixth of the land surface of the globe—the tsar was calling what ultimately would be 5 million civilians into military service to meet at assembly points according to plan for transport to their assigned units.
Bullitt later wrote that “I was young and … I hated war, and I’ll confess … that I was naive enough to make up my mind that I was going to stop the war.…” He and his mother caught the last train out of St. Petersburg to Berlin. There they registered at the Adlon Hotel, and promptly contacted James Gerard, a family friend who served as U.S. ambassador to Germany. Gerard, who as late as July 27 had advised Washington that there would be no war, now warned the Bullitts to leave at once.
The Berlin correspondent of The New York Times wrote that the city was “raging mad for war.” The streets were filled with “shrieking, singing” mobs. “‘War! War!’ they shouted.” From the window of their railroad train compartment as they left for London, the Bullitts watched German troops marching off to fight.
Like the Bullitts, other Americans heard singing everywhere in Europe. The New York Evening Post reported that in Munich students were chanting war ballads and mobs were singing “Watch on the Rhine.” In Vienna, according to the New York World, “half the population of the city seemed to be on the streets … singing national hymns and cheering.” In Paris, wrote a correspondent of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, “a howling mob” had marched to a statue of Joan of Arc and was singing the “Marseillaise.”
ON AUGUST 4, 1914, thirty-one-year-old Felix Frankfurter, who had just accepted appointment as a professor at the Harvard Law School, was a guest at Sagamore Hill, TR’s three-story mansion in Oyster Bay on Long Island’s north shore. Sagamore Hill had served as the summer White House (1901–09), and from it the former President kept a watchful eye on fast-moving events in Europe. German troops had invaded Luxembourg August 2 and neutral Belgium the night of August 3–4. The question these invasions posed to the House of Commons was whether Britain should honor her treaty commitment to Belgium.
Another guest at Sagamore Hill August 4 was an Englishman, Charles Booth, head of the great shipping line Cunard. Frankfurter described the ex-President as doing “a tomahawk war dance” around Booth, while crying “You’ve got to go in! You’ve got to go in!” At 6 p.m. New York time, 11 p.m. London time, and midnight Berlin time, Britain did so.
A keen and realistic student of international politics, TR understood both why Germany may have had to violate Belgium’s neutrality and why, in response, Britain had to declare war on Germany. As the war went on, he was also among the first to see how America’s interests might be affected by its outcome. In August 1914, however, not even he foresaw an American involvement in the drama being played out in Europe. But his young distant cousin in the Navy Department did.
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT BELIEVED that “the greatest war in human history” was about to begin, and seems to have been the only person in the government who thought the United States might be drawn into it. Secretary of the Navy Daniels, wrote Roosevelt, was “feeling chiefly very sad that his faith in human nature and civilization, and similar idealistic nonsense, was receiving such a rude shock.” He claimed that “I started in alone to get things ready and prepare plans for what ought to be done by the Navy.”
Daniels and Secretary of State Bryan, in Roosevelt’s view, had no “conception of what a general European war means.” Receiving the news in early August that Germany had invaded France, Roosevelt told his wife that “a complete smash up is inevitable.” Daniels, he said, “is bewildered by it all.”
Over the course of the next few months, Roosevelt was to wage an undercover campaign for increased military preparedness, secretly undermining Daniels and the President. In the autumn of 1914, TR waged a public campaign for military preparedness, which President Wilson opposed, saying that increased defense spending would mean that “we had been thrown off our balance by a war with which we have nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us.…”
Having proclaimed America’s neutrality in the European conflict, and having asked all Americans to be neutral in thought as well as action, Wilson designated Sunday, October 4, 1914, as a day of “prayer and supplication,” and urged his fellow citizens “to repair … to their places of worship” on that day to petition God to bring peace. Prayers were recited and speeches declaimed in churches, synagogues, and meeting halls throughout the country on Peace Sunday, and in addressing one such meeting, the governor of Illinois pointedly remarked that “if this Republic can live in peace, others ought to be able to do the same.”
IN AUGUST 1914, as the war broke out in Europe, ceremonies were held to mark the opening of TR’s great monument, the Panama Canal. An editorial in The New York Times noted the coincidence of the two events: “The European ideal bears its full fruit of ruin and savagery just at the moment when the American ideal lays before the world a great work of peace, goodwill and fair play.”
Robert A. Taft, not long out of the Harvard Law School and just beginning his practice in Cincinnati, observed: “Aren’t the nations of Europe a queer lot, to go to war for nothing.” Taft’s sympathies were with the Allies, but even so, the war illustrated for him, as for other Americans who gave it any thought, how different Europe was from America and how right it was for the United States to have stayed away from Europe’s politics. A small-town newspaper, the Wabash, Indiana, Plain Dealer, remarked of the war in Europe that “we never appreciated so keenly as now the foresight exercised by our fo
refathers in emigrating from Europe.”
Though the war reinforced Americans in their view that they were superior to Europeans, it also aroused their sympathy for the suffering that Europeans were undergoing. Herbert Hoover, a successful engineer-businessman living in London, gave practical expression to that sentiment: he created and managed a volunteer organization—the Commission for Relief of Belgium—that fed and clothed the entire population of German-occupied Belgium. It was the only sort of foreign involvement with which Americans felt comfortable: a humanitarian, not a political, endeavor.
A parallel activity, in part inspired by the multimillionaire former steel manufacturer Andrew Carnegie, was launched by a Baltimore publicist named Theodore Marburg at the Century Association in New York City on January 15, 1915. It was an organization dedicated to creating a league of nations: the League to Enforce Peace. Intended to prevent the outbreak of another 1914 war, its idea was for the powers—the United States and the countries of Europe—to agree to act together to force countries involved in disputes to submit them to arbitration. Former President William Howard Taft became president of the organization.
Bryan attacked Taft’s group because its program would pledge the use of force to compel nations to arbitrate. This would require the United States to send troops into combat abroad to settle disputes between Europeans—the very thing that Bryan, in the mainstream of the American political tradition, wished to avoid. TR attacked from the other side: he claimed Taft would sign a piece of paper establishing a league but then would fail to build the armed forces to back it up. TR had proposed a league of nations of his own back in 1905, which would have been a cartel of the great powers. The cartel would have policed the rest of the world.
Leagues of nations were very much the stuff of political discourse east of the Mississippi in the first months of the war, as Americans observed with dismay what Europeans were doing to one another. West of the Mississippi, Americans felt too remote from the foreign conflict to give it much attention.
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