If the European concert was used to being conducted by the Great Powers, and the Franco-Russian alliance was incompatible with this, so too was German naval ambition. Given Britain’s development of the Dreadnought type of battleship, the game on the naval chessboard would have been all but lost for Germany, had it not been for the torpedo boat and the U-boat. The German Admiralty henceforth concentrated on such new types of warship, which offered the chance of victory for the weak over the strong. In 1912 Lord Haldane, then the British Secretary for War, hoped that, given the new correlation of forces, Germany might be willing to sign a naval agreement to limit numbers. In Berlin, however, Haldane met with stiff resistance from Tirpitz and the Kaiser: too much prestige and funds had been invested to retreat and acknowledge defeat. There was to be no arms control. A chance to avoid disaster, perhaps the best chance in decades, was wasted.
German strategy, running into a dead end in naval affairs, could have opted for confidence and security building, returning to Bismarckian wisdom. That would have included limiting arms expenditure either on a contractual basis with Britain or unilaterally, in order to out-maneuver the Entente Cordiale. Even the Kaiser, at times, had the good sense to cultivate his Russian cousin, and they met to exchange uniforms and toast each other, as the “Admiral of the Atlantic” and the “Admiral of the Pacific.” Pre-1914 Europe was not on a one-way road to disaster; all was not doom and gloom. The Germans and the British not only managed jointly to contain the vicious Balkan Wars of 1912–13, through a London-based diplomatic conference, but also came to an agreement about how to carve up the Portuguese colonies between them in case Portugal could not service its foreign debt. Even the quarrels over Turkey were brought under control, and a formula was adopted to keep the Russians out while giving naval matters to the British and land matters to the Germans. The latter included the strategic Baghdad railway, which was financed by Deutsche Bank and built by a German consortium led by Mannesmann. It aimed to link the Bosphorus with the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The remnants, in many places blown up during World War I or left to silent decay, can still be seen today.
It was an age of strategic ambiguity, not an inevitable collective walk down the infernal grove. But faced with encirclement, the Grosser Generalstab in Berlin was unnerved and reacted in a professional but utterly undiplomatic and ultimately fatal way. After the wars of German unification under the leadership of Field Marshal Count Moltke, a legend in his own time, German strategy recognized France as the foremost potential enemy. Officially, Russia was an ally even if the Prussians never really dropped their eastern guard. But the concepts of war in the west and war in the east were kept neatly apart so as to allow the political leaders strategic options at a time of crisis.
After 1900, however, after the invention of the battle fleet, German strategic thinking took another fatal turn. The Franco-Russian military alliance of the last decade had by now become an established fact, celebrated through military exchanges and reinforced by steady Russian arms procurement from French companies. French capital markets continued to provide loans for the cash-strapped state and investment in Russian industry (earning 1 per cent above normal market rates). The combined strength of the Tsar’s and the Third Republic’s armies by far outnumbered the central powers’ forces. In this situation, the Prussian Generalstab under Count Schlieffen decided that any future war would have to be fought on two fronts, against France and Russia, and at almost the same time.
What came to be called the “Schlieffen Plan,” was a strategy without any alternative, pure technocratic hubris, and a recipe for defeat. Had not the older Moltke always taught his disciples that no plan could outlast the first encounter with the enemy? In 1905 German strategy was finally built on the assumption that the French were fast in their mobilization and the Russians slow. Therefore, irrespective of the causes of war, hostilities would have to start with a big lightning offensive in the west, defeating the French armies, taking Paris and dictating peace before the Russian bear had really stirred. Meanwhile, in the east only depleted reserves would be put up against the slow-moving Russians, making use of the fortress of Posen, of the rivers and the marshes of these lowlands, and doing their best to hold the Oder line. Subsequently, victory in the west having been achieved, the German armies, swiftly moving by railway, would throw their might against the Russian masses, inflict decisive defeat on them and save the Austro-Hungarian armies from being crushed. Presented as a master plan, in reality this was a strategy born out of despair and bound to lead to disaster.
Germany’s neighbors may have found the country’s recent appearance at the strategic center of the Continent deeply unsettling. After Bismarck, the implications were also too much for the Germans themselves.
6
BRINKSMANSHIP
Not everyone in Europe was sleepwalking to Armageddon in the years prior to 1914. In his book of 1899, Is War Now Impossible?, a Warsaw financier called Ivan Stanizlosovich Block predicted stalemate and trench warfare because of developments in military technology. In Britain, Norman Angeli, one of Lord Northcliffe’s newspaper editors, suggested in The Great Illusion (1910) that the model of the British Empire, made up in large part of practically independent states and guaranteeing “trade by free consent,” should be adopted by Europe as the solution to “the international problem.” In Germany it was Walther Rathenau, more than anyone else, who comprehended the danger of his time and suggested far-sighted methods of avoidance.
Rathenau was a man of many sides—in fact, of vast contradictions, a technocrat, a visionary, a philosopher advocating a cool neoclassical rationalism, a Jewish citizen of the world who would have preferred not to have been a Jew; he was also a Prussian patriot and a designer of electrical networks for the whole of Europe that he thought would render war impossible and waste obsolete. His collected works and letters run to many volumes, written as he was guiding AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft), his father’s industrial empire, through a period of relentless experimentation and constant expansion.
He regarded Germany’s ancien régime with both contempt and admiration. He wanted to be separated from it, but at the same time to be part of it. Rathenau’s vision of the future was rather a network of industrial democracies forming a united Europe, analogous to the electricity grids constructed by AEG at the turn of the century. This ran counter to the nationalism and imperialism prevailing in Europe and, sensing what was to come in 1914, Rathenau worked on it desperately.
I see shadows fall wherever I look. I see them when I walk the streets of Berlin in the evening, when I observe the insolence of our maddening wealth; when I listen to the emptiness of vainglorious phrases or hear talk about pseudogermanic exclusivity. An epoch is not in good health just because the lieutenant shines and the attaché is full of hope. Matters are more serious for Germany now than they have been for decades.
Though born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Rathenau studied electrochemistry, so he understood that the steam-driven machinery of the first industrial revolution was being overtaken by the electricity of the second. “Mechanization” was a stage to be overcome, not only to liberate human beings from boring work, but also to allow the processes of modern management and banking to optimize production and distribution. In 1899 he joined the board of AEG, where his responsibility was to finance and construct electrical power plants and to create a Europe-wide network, with AEG in the center. The overcapacity hitting the electrical markets in 1900 was for him nothing but an incentive to reorganize the industry. He believed less in industry than in some all-encompassing enterprise. In this he was a true son of Prussia—Stockpreusse— and a guide to Lenin. The future world, he insisted, would have to become “a single inseparable economic community.” The nation-states did not fit into this eminently rational universe and Rathenau the patriot pronounced this cold truth in only a subdued way. The implication, of course, was German hegemony, in financial and industrial terms, over the European continent. There would
be no need to make war if the logic of industry settled the matter peacefully and conclusively. Rathenau’s idea of industry was not narrowly determined by the contemporary obsession with monopoly and profit, but was concerned with resource allocation and efficiency.
He sensed that the forces unleashed by modern industry, unless integrated through organizational networks and balances, would destroy each other. In 1912, when the British Imperial General Staff and the French Etat Major had already decided where to meet any future German offensive in northern France, and while Russia increased its mass armies, Lord Haldane had come to Berlin and then gone, without an agreement. Rathenau suggested caps on arms procurement, limitation of budgets, verification through an international court of accounts, and limitation of troop numbers according to population. In December 1913 he expanded on the politico-economic framework needed to move towards lasting peace:
Trade legislation has to be made compatible, syndicates have to be compensated, customs revenue has to be divided and losses have to be made up. The aim is economic unity, equal, possibly superior, to that of the US. Within this system there would no longer be backward, stagnating or unproductive parts. Concomitantly nationalistic hatred would lose its edge... If the European economy is fused, and this will happen sooner than we think, politics will also be fused. This is not global peace, not universal disarmament and certainly not the end of conflict. But it reduces rivalry, saves energies and makes for a civilization of common purpose.
But few in Europe listened. Rathenau’s message was about a future still in the making. Europe was being driven on one side by vast optimism in economic terms, and on the other by deep pessimism in strategic terms. “Es ist nichts,” Archduke Franz Ferdinand repeated while he was bleeding to death. “It is nothing.” He had been shot by a Bosnian Serb, a member of a student terrorist group called Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), assisted by a Pan-Serb secret society called the Black Hand, sponsored in turn by the Serb secret service. The bullets were fired at the heir to the crowns of Austria and Hungary and his wife, at Sarajevo in Bosnia on June 28, 1914, and within less than six weeks led to the Great War. “The great seminal catastrophe of our century,” to quote the US diplomat-cum-historian George F. Kennan, was to leave nothing unchanged: not the proud nation-states of Europe, not the relationship of the sexes, not poetry, painting or music, not the idea of the past or any vision of the future, not the human soul. To quote the title of the poet Robert Graves’ memoir of the trenches, it was Goodbye to All That.
War had loomed for decades but never materialized, the chancelleries of Europe traditionally going to the brink, but not beyond. Self-preservation among the old elites played a role, as did the logic of industrial and financial interdependence and also the recognition that whatever could be gained in war would be nothing compared to what every nation was bound to lose the moment war broke out.
War seemed patently absurd, but it happened nevertheless, and events even showed logic and sequence—as well as chaos, incompetence and blindness. The Austrian generals, possessed by a combination of arrogance and anxiety, felt that only a short victorious war against Serbia could save the monarchy, while it carried with it the risk of a crushing Russian attack in the east. The Tsar, when signing the mobilization order setting the giant Russian army in motion, said, “It is the wish of the people.” He knew that, if he did not sign, tsardom would be at risk from Pan-Slavist hysteria, while if he signed, only a miracle could save the Caesaro-Papism of the Romanovs. Jules Cambon, the French minister, knew that France, in order to save its alliances, would have to go to war, although direct French interests were not at stake in the Balkans. Bethmann Hollweg, the German Chancellor, sensed that, after the first moves, what followed was bound to be “a leap in the dark.” The Kaiser, in spite of his boyish bragging, wanted to stop the westward thrust against France when suddenly faced with the prospect of war on two fronts. But His Majesty was advised by the chief of staff that, if he did so, he would no longer have an army but only a chaotic rabble.
The chain of events from the murder of the Archduke to the guns of August does indeed recall the lines that Leopold von Ranke, Graves’ great uncle, had written about the march of human folly almost a century before:
It is neither blindness nor ignorance that ruins nations and states. Not for long do they ignore where they are heading. But deep inside them is a force at work, favored by nature and reinforced through habit, that drives them forward irresistibly as long as there is still any energy in them. Divine is he who controls himself. Most humans recognize their ruin, but they carry on regardless.
Stefan Zweig, the distinguished Jewish Viennese writer, echoed Ranke when he described the start of war in his memoirs: “The issue was not the small border regions. I have no other explanation than this excess of power becoming the tragic consequence of that inner dynamism accumulated during those 40 years of power, driving towards a violent explosion.”
Surely Austria had enough archdukes to replace the unhappy victim of Serb terror, and so be enabled to stumble on? The vast and heterogeneous empire could ill afford a war, major or minor, for fear of all its nationalities making their claims and overthrowing the precarious balances between Austrians and Hungarians, Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox, Christians and Jews; national aspirations meeting head-on the supranational elites of the monarchy, the bureaucracy, the military and the aristocracy. In Berlin, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had not been seen as a friend of the Dual Alliance. His loss was deemed to be “somehow tolerable,” as a high official of the Wilhelmstrasse stated. But the assassination was indeed more than a cold-blooded, senseless murder. It was an attack on the Habsburg monarchy, to demonstrate its weakness. So, the reaction would have to offer proof of Austrian strength. Whatever Austrian diplomats and generals might decide, the German national interest was at stake, for the Danube monarchy was its last ally to count for anything—Italy was unlikely to stand up against the naval powers controlling the Mediterranean.
If the Austrians could administer a political humiliation to the regime in Belgrade, that was fine; even a surgical strike leading to Serb surrender was acceptable. “Now or never,” William II remarked approvingly on the margins of a report from Vienna, “the Serbs must be put in their place.” But if such strategies ran out of control and Russia marched against the central powers, it was at least preferable that the resulting war began with an Austrian move rather than a German one, as in the latter case the Austrians were unlikely to meet their treaty obligations. The possibilities for escalation were not ignored or excluded but only the first two steps were deliberately accepted. The rest had a kind of fatalistic quality. The situation was even made worse by the Schlieffen Plan, of whose details the Austrians had only a faint idea, which excluded the possibility of Germany attacking Russia first before turning to France, let alone restricting the war to eastern Europe. The Austrians were unaware that, given the westward thrust of the plan, they would have to face the Russian onslaught alone, without German reinforcements. And if Italy could not be bought off, the Austrian armies would face a desperate two-front war.
After the Sarajevo murder, the Russian secret police, the Ochrana, had spread the word that all Slavic brothers now had to stand together and fight. At the same time, the Wilhelmstrasse issued to the Austrians what became known as the “blank check”—the promise to stand behind the Austrians come what may. This was a dramatic departure from Bismarck’s wisdom; now to encourage the Austrians to go ahead, and to do this in the knowledge of their sclerotic diplomatic machinery, meant that Germany’s very existence was being put at risk for interests other than its own.
Meanwhile, the European diplomacy that had, only one year before, helped to settle the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 fell into a state of limbo. In the first phase, there was an absence of recognition that this time the crisis might escalate into the Great War. In the second phase, the vital strategic overview was obscured by the immediate tactical concern of how to preserve the cohesion of the two
blocs facing each other, the central powers and the Entente, and to give reassurance to their weakest members, Austria and Russia. In the third phase, the Russian mobilization was moving at high speed.
The German Empire Page 9