The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  During the later nineteenth century the position of the world’s first maritime power fell to Britain by default: only the French maintained a navy powerful enough to mount a challenge to Queen Victoria’s. This lack of competition had made the British forces complacent, and the main preoccupation of the officers was to run a ship that was polished, holystoned, painted and burnished to perfection. Holystoning, the scrubbing of the wooden decks with pumice stone, was a daily ritual for the seamen, who would make wooden surfaces gleam like mirrors, only to have them soiled by the next splash of sea water. It kept the men busy, orthodox opinion ran. The rule was similar to that of the French navy: Salute everything that moves and paint everything that doesn’t. Other aspects of navy life were reminders of the most brutal aspects of the bad old days. ‘The day I joined as a little boy, I saw eight men flogged - and I fainted at the sight,’ Fisher commented.

  The navy was slow to reform, and those who thought to innovate often found themselves frustrated and their careers in peril. When the enterprising Captain Sir Percy Scott took command of the Edinburgh in 1886, he found that not only was the standard of gunnery abroad deplorable, but the seamen also resisted the idea of training, which might tarnish their immaculate craft. ‘We were twenty years ahead of the times,’ he recalled later, ‘and in the end we had to do as others were doing. So we gave up instruction in gunnery, spent money on enamel paint, burnished up every bit of steel on board and soon got the reputation of being a very smart ship. She was certainly very nice in appearance. The nuts of all the aft bolts on the aft deck were gilded, the magazine keys were electroplated and statues of Mercury surmounted the revolver racks.’

  For Admiral Fisher, such niceties had no role to play in the navy’s future, nor in his country’s. Having once himself been given a ship to command that was so decrepit that it could hardly survive a storm, never mind an engagement with the enemy, Fisher was determined to reform the navy from the bottom up, a mission he regarded as far too important to let social niceties stand in his way: ‘On the British fleet rests the British Empire. Only a congenital idiot with criminal tendencies would permit any tampering with the maintenance of our sea supremacy,’ he trumpeted, driving home the message that modern warfare between floating forts with heavy artillery was likely to be decided with terrible suddenness. ‘Once beaten the war is finished,’ he explained. ‘Beaten on land, you can improvise fresh armies in a few weeks. You can’t improvise a fresh Navy; it takes four years.’

  As Germany’s naval building programme began heating up, Fisher revised Britain’s strategy, which had so far targeted France as its most likely enemy. Driven with tyrannical rigour by Admiral Tirpitz, who was famous for his histrionics, Germany’s parliament ratified one naval bill after the next, pledging ever more millions to its supremacy on sea, and shipyards working around the clock soon produced a growing and increasingly alarming number of modern, efficient battleships with more and more tonnage and guns. Fourteen large battleships (with an average of 11,000 tons of displacement) came off the docks from 1893 to 1903. During the following decade, twenty-two new-generation battleships would follow, this time with displacements rising from 12,000 to 28,000 tons, monsters roughly half the size of the Titanic (an ocean liner) and consisting of powerful turbine engines, 12-inch guns, and steel armour plate. In addition to this, German docks built some seventy cruisers, torpedo boats and other, smaller war craft.

  Ruling the waves: Admiral Jackie Fisher

  was the driving force behind the

  Dreadnought race.

  Fisher was determined not to risk Britain’s naval pre-eminence. Aided substantially by his friendship with King Edward, he cajoled, threatened and begged the government to give him money for more and more stronger ships. His intention was not so much to play Germany’s game, as to raise the stakes. The ship Fisher planned in 1904 would simply make the entire German fleet obsolete. It would be faster, larger, and more heavily armed. It would blow the Kriegsmarine out of the water before they could even come close. The ideal of the suddenness of war which he had preached for so long had found its perfect embodiment: HMS Dreadnought. Like other visionaries, Fisher had the perverse satisfaction of being treated both as a fool and a lunatic by his adversaries, but with the King’s support he persevered. With the help of two squadrons of Dreadnought-class battleships, Britain’s navy would simply impose its own new rules for wars at sea: British rules.

  Critics pointed out the new class of battleship would not only make Germany’s but also the Royal Navy’s older craft obsolete - as far as large battles were concerned, the largest war fleet in the world would effectively become scrap iron overnight. More dreadnoughts would be needed, even larger ones, to keep pace with the Kaiser’s forces. Fisher was undeterred. On 22 December 1904, he convened a committee to design the vessel, following the recommendations of an Italian engineer and the experience of the battle of Tsushima, during which British naval observers had observed the operation of Japan’s newly built and uncompromisingly modern maritime forces. Abroad Admiral Togo’s flagship, one of them reported home: ‘when 12 inch guns are fired, shots from 10 inch guns pass unnoticed, while, for all the respect they instill, 8 inch or 6 inch might as well be pea shooters.’

  On board the Dreadnought industrial efficiency was all, in both its construction and its operation. The decision to have only one calibre of gun, for example, was motivated by the reasoning that only a single type of ammunition would have to be used and the crews could be trained to operate all guns with equal efficiency. Identical cannon with identical ammunition would be much more easily ranged in on a target, as they should all hit the same spot if fired at the same angle. Fisher was exultant: ‘Suppose a 12 inch gun to fire one aimed round each minute. Six guns would allow a deliberately aimed shell with a huge bursting charge every ten seconds. Fifty percent of these should be hits at 6,000 yards. Three 12 inch shells bursting on board every minute would be HELL!’

  Taking the industrial logic further, Fisher moved with phenomenal speed. Pre-produced steel plates were stacked in the Portsmouth shipyard even before the ship’s keel was laid on 2 October 1905, and from then on the vast form could be seen to grow by the day. Within two months the hull of the world’s largest battleship was towering menacingly over the shipyard and being painted. On 9 February 1906, the launch took place in the presence of the rotund King, who was visibly affected not so much by emotion, as by breathing problems. During the following months, the ship was fitted out in record speed: boilers in March, turbines and six coats of paint in May, guns in June and July. In September, HMS Dreadnought was commissioned and ready and soon steamed off to the West Indies to undergo a batteries test. A weapon of unheard-of proportions had been constructed in a fraction of the normal time.

  The naval arms race, the biggest the world had ever seen, soon became a global phenomenon. France and the United States, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Japan, Italy, the Ottoman empire and several other nations each built their own all-big-gun battleships, which were in turn superseded by even larger ones. Military expenditure swallowed just over a third of national budgets in France and Russia, a little less in Britain and almost a quarter in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire.

  Manly Strength

  The Dreadnought race was symptomatic of its time. Whole societies were in the thrall of uniforms and military strength. Russia alone kept a standing army of 1.4 million men and operated a system of ranks applying to the armed forces, as well as to its civil administration. The Russo-Japanese War had shown the army and its leadership to be woefully inefficient, but it had always been an important element for internal control. The universal draft had nominally existed since 1874, but in practice most young men could sneak or buy their way out of being drafted, leaving the poorest peasants to shoulder the burden of a twenty-year army service term, often begun with a ritual mock funeral conducted by the priest of their home village, as they were not expected to be seen again alive. Feared and loathed especially in the countr
yside, the army’s presence hung over people’s lives like a dark cloud.

  In France, too, army and society were strongly interlaced. The country has a long tradition of military men as head of state, reaching from Napoleon to Marshal MacMahon in 1873, Boulanger in 1888 and Pétain in 1940 right up to General de Gaulle. As always torn between two visions, one Republican and one conservatively Catholic, the French could not agree what the civic function of their army was. While the conservative establishment saw it as an instrument of national glory (one that had been badly tarnishes by the defeat in 1870), the Jacobin tradition regarded it most of all as a school of the nation, mixing social classes and instructing recruits in the values of Republican citizenship and national solidarity, a vision famously articulated by the socialist leader Jean Jaurès in his book l’Armée nouvelle (1907), in which he postulated that a short draft was both democratically and militarily more advantageous than a smaller professional army, which would always pose a danger to the constitutional order. This was no empty theorizing: in 1889 General Boulanger had been within a hair’s breadth of marching on the Elysée Palace, surrounded by enthusiastic supporters.

  The Dreyfus case had laid bare the anxieties of society as a whole and the army in particular, a bitter divide between those who saw the army’s role in hushing up a flagrant miscarriage of justice as proof of its reactionary, royalist tendencies and those who, on the contrary, viewed the Jewish officer as guilty by default, the epitome of everything they hated about the way their country was going. Endlessly argumentative, the French saw their army with equal measures of pride, suspicion and aggression. As Theodore Zeldin relates, cadets of the prestigious Saint-Cyr military academy were advised to go out in their civilian clothes to avoid incidents in some parts of Paris, while one officer complained: ‘Among the masses, we were considered the enemy, les payots. In bourgeois circles, we were considered imbeciles.’

  If the army’s identity was insecure, there was one thing all sides agreed upon: for better or for worse, it was a ‘school of subordination, of the virile spirit, of male pride’, as the French NCO’s Manual (written in 1893 and reprinted until 1913) put it. ‘When one is not a soldier,’ one peasant recruit’s mother told him, ‘one is not a man.’ Real men fought, and those with honour, particularly military honour, to defend, often considered it their duty to fight on the slightest ceremonial pretext. Duelling became all the rage in the 1880s and continued far into the twentieth century.

  It was not only army officers who were in the habit of challenging one another. Marcel Proust was particularly proud of having challenged a literary critic, Jean Lorrain (who had hinted publicly at the writer’s homosexuality), and survived to tell the tale, and in 1908 he challenged a young friend of his who did not even know what he had done to cause offence. As it transpired, the young man in question, nineteen-year-old Marcel Plantevignes, had heard a lady make a remark about the famous poet’s ‘unusual morals’ without springing to his defence. The intensely asthmatic Proust was considerate enough to give the youth’s father the choice of fighting in his son’s stead, as well as the choice of arms. At the father’s adamant insistence, the matter was cleared up without violence, but it is obvious that Proust thought he could not allow even the slightest aspersion to be cast on his robust manliness - a comical idea for all who knew him. Still, more than mere appearances were at stake: ‘my seconds in duels can tell you whether I behave with the weakness of an effeminate man,’ the writer confessed in a letter to Paul Souday.

  Deadly serious: duelling increased around 1900, though most

  confrontations ended with a symbolic drawing of blood.

  Not even committed and progressive peace-lovers like the socialist politicians and writers Léon Blum (later to become prime minister) and Jean Jaurès hesitated to pick up a weapon to defend their honour. The last known sword duel in France was fought by Gaston Defferre and René Ribière, both deputies in the Assemblée Nationale, in 1967. President de Gaulle had thought it prudent to formally forbid his government ministers to act as seconds. Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), ‘le tigre’, prime minister from 1906 to 1909 and again from 1917 to 1929, fought twelve duels: seven with pistols, and five with swords. He was a terrifyingly fine fencer, as the American journalist Wythe Williams reported of one of the prime minister’s duels:

  The adversaries who dared face the point of his sword had no chance. He delighted in first disarming them with a flashing but terrific coup de seconde, the most powerful blow in swordplay, almost paralyzing the arm. The Tiger would laugh mockingly, and bow while waiting for the weapon to be retrieved. Then he would flick his opponent in a part of the anatomy of his own choosing. He would perform the operation delicately, with just enough damage for the satisfaction of honour, and the termination of the affair.

  The leader of the Radical party, Clemenceau did not hesitate to challenge political opponents who, he felt, had gone too far. In 1892 he fought a pistol duel with the antisemitic writer Paul Deroulène in front of a huge crowd controlled by police officers. Six years later, his championship of Dreyfus made him fight the notorious author of La France juive, Edouard Drumont. The opponents missed both times, very probably intentionally, as it was considered ‘bad form’ to hit an adversary with firearms. Duels with sabres or épées, however, were fought at least to first blood and often resulted in serious, sometimes fatal injuries. The duel was perceived as a healthy tonic against the sluggish, decadent life of modern times, ‘the first tool of civilization, the only means man had found to reconcile his brutal instincts and his ideal of justice’, in the words of Anatole France, who was to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921.

  Military Virtue, Military Vice

  The byword for a society ruled by uniformed, mustachioed and heel-clicking officers was of course, Wilhelm II’s Germany. Nowhere else in the world was the link between state and army, between army and national history, so close. It was the army that had transformed Prussia from a sandy nowhere without natural resources or natural borders into a world power, a miracle worked through the pact between Prussia’s kings and their aristocracy. Prussian generals and soldiers had opened the way into the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles after the victorious war with France in 1870; Prussian discipline and manpower were the foundations of the new German empire. It was at least partly true that the empire had been ‘forged in the white heat of the battlefield’, to use a cliché of the time.

  Not all Germany was Prussia, of course, and the excesses of drill-ground mentality and goose-stepping silliness were laughed at not only abroad but also in Stuttgart, Hamburg and the Prussian but Catholic Rhineland. Prussia was, however, the most powerful partner in the federation of states making up imperial Germany, and Prussian culture was imposed through schools and universities, through the army itself, and in a stream of propaganda engulfing all areas of life: ‘People drank from cups adorned with symbols and pictures of different kinds of ordnance, with farewell scenes [of soldiers leaving for the front], propaganda slogans and Hohenzollern profiles; they ate from plates with battle scenes, and beautified their homes with military knick knacks: porcelain soldiers, miniature castles, music corps, guards regiments, monuments and cannon, with tin soldiers in battle formation; and “reservist beer mugs”…’as two later German historians described the scene in many households. Under the Christmas tree, that symbol of German domestic bliss, boys hoped to find what a popular seasonal song had promised them: ‘Tomorrow comes Father Christmas, he comes with his presents: drums and pipes and a gun, flag and sabre and even more, yes, a whole army corps is what I want!’

  Drill and military spirit surrounded the nation’s children as soon as they entered school. A popular manual for primary schoolteachers gave young educators helpful hints on what orders to use: ‘Sit up straight! Quiet! Shut your mouth! Pens straight! Hands up! Show exercise books! - and after the revision Out! ... Obedience to an order must be trained, so that it will be second nature to a teacher to command and to a pupil to foll
ow the orders immediately.’ If the primary schoolteacher was to be the nation’s drill sergeant, professors at the Gymnasium, the secondary school, moved about in a cloud of magnificence, reflecting not only a profound respect for education but also the total hierarchization of society. Badly paid, shabbily dressed and often too poor to marry, even the lowliest of them had a right to be addressed as Herr Professor by pupils who stood to attention when speaking to him - a world memorably evoked by Heinrich Mann’s novella Professor Unrat, later made into one of Germany’s classic black and white films: The Blue Angel, starring Marlene Dietrich as a dance girl leading an ageing Gymnasium teacher astray and causing his social universe to collapse. The world into which boys at a German Gymnasium were introduced had very little connection with the political reality of the day, as Hans Kohn, then a Prague schoolboy, would later remember: ‘Politics - Austrian, European, Turkish or Asian - meant little to us and we knew nothing about it. People did not travel as they do today and our horizon was largely defined by our classical education and the German language. The neighbouring world of the Slavs was unfamiliar to us, although we devoured the fashionable novels by Dostoyevsky and other Russians.’

  All too often the state educated its citizens without educating them to become citizens. With characteristic intuition, the young Thomas Mann had articulated the sense a German child could have of the society he lived in : ‘As a boy, I personified the state in my own imagination and pictured it as a wooden figure in tails, with a black beard, a star on his chest, and equipped with a military as well as academic mixture of titles, which demonstrated to perfection his power and dependability: General Dr von Staat.’