by Jack Beatty
In June, Caillaux and Jean Jaurès agreed to form a ministry of the Left and President Raymond Poincaré said he was resigned to naming Caillaux premier. In August, Jaurès was dead and Caillaux a pariah, a symbol of the French culture war inked over by the German invasion. Thus when Joseph and Henriette Caillaux sought diversion in Paris, the grand restaurants refused to serve them; their patrons, perhaps guilty over reveling in the tossy and frothy of the trial, demanded it. When Caillaux complained of this treatment to the military governor of Paris, he was given fifteen days of “rigorous military detention” for quitting his post in Bethune. After his release, the Caillaux were dining in a local café crowded with English officers when Joseph, believing the Englishmen were laughing at him, burst from his chair and threw a punch at one of them—unhappily for Caillaux, a boxer in civilian life. Sir John French demanded Caillaux’s removal from proximity to his army. The French government obliged, sending Caillaux on a mission to South America. In mid-December he arrived in Buenos Aires, where, the New York Times reported, “The press comment on his presence is not at all cordial.”17
From early 1915 Raymond Poincaré believed that Caillaux was at the center of a group of businessmen and journalists discussing a separate peace with German diplomats and accepting cash from the German government to influence French policy. Praise from across the Rhine by papers like the Kölnische Zeitung contrasting Caillaux the peacemaker of 1911 with Poincaré the war-plotting revanchist reinforced suspicions that Joseph Caillaux was Germany’s man if not Germany’s agent: “If Monsieur Caillaux had remained in office, if Madame Caillaux’s gesture had not been made, the plot against the peace of Europe … would not have succeeded.” Right-wing newspapers gave currency to conspiracy theories linking Caillaux to a “Jewish-German spy invasion.” Volunteering as a military nurse at a Vichy hospital, Henriette was booed off the wards, while on the street Action Française thugs attacked the couple. They fled to Rome, where Caillaux was overheard boasting that war weariness would sweep him back to power and he would negotiate peace with Germany. When these heresies reached Paris, the press attacked him for “defeatism,” coining a new word. “The chief of the pacifists … is extremely unpopular,” Izvolski reported to St. Petersburg.18
Poincaré feared otherwise. No French leader could forget the precedent of 1871, when in the wake of France’s defeat by Germany rebels seized Paris and proclaimed the revolutionary government of the Commune. In late July 1914, Poincaré addressed the danger of wartime dissension in his diary: “Although Austria has declared war on Russia, Count Szecsen still remains comfortably in the Rue de Varenne and tells his dentist: ‘The Commune will save us.’ But the Commune is the sequel of defeat, and, no thank you, my dear Mr. Ambassador, we are not there yet.”19
Had they got there in 1917? After years of stalemate indistinguishable from defeat, would a new Commune save the enemy? Poincaré saw discouraging signs everywhere. Under the strain of war his union sacrée had broken up, the only Catholic minister and the only socialist minister resigning from the government in September 1917. A wave of strikes in the clothing industry spread to munitions factories. Defeatist propaganda, circulated in newspapers friendly to Caillaux, was blamed. In the spring of 1917, in despair at being thrown away in costly frontal assaults, whole regiments of soldiers mutinied; by August what one senior officer called “a general strike against the war” had destabilized 49 of the army’s 113 infantry divisions. The bad war news would soon get worse. The United States was a year away from fielding an army in France. Revolutionary Russia was pulling out of the war, freeing up hundreds of thousands of German soldiers on the eastern front to swell an attack, expected in early 1918, on the western front. That replay of August 1914 nearly four years on would give the lie to Allied propaganda that Germany was finished. The moment would seek its man—Caillaux.20
In late 1917, Poincaré told an associate, “We must choose between Caillaux and Clemenceau. My choice is made.” Prosecute Caillaux, he urged his choice for prime minister: “Fate has placed him at the crossroads of all the paths of treason.” Clemenceau replied, “Caillaux is a bandit … justice will be done.”21
Charged with high treason, Caillaux was jailed without trial. Writing to the former premier in prison, Anatole France addressed him as “the great citizen who vanquished Germany in 1911 without costing France one drop of blood.” Poincaré was afraid that sentiment would take hold if the public mind began to associate Joseph Caillaux with peace, not treason. With Paris once more menaced by a rampant German army, the time was not right to try Caillaux.22
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) by Félix Vallotton
Not until February 1920, two years after his imprisonment and six years after his passionate defense of Henriette, did Caillaux once more mount the stage of a courtroom. Ripping holes in the government’s case, casting himself as a man persecuted for his ideas, reprising his tears for Henriette, Caillaux “defiantly told a jury full of nationalists that time would prove the price of victory to have been exorbitant.” Acquitted of treason, he was convicted of a trumped-up lesser charge—“having had relations with the subjects of an enemy power”—fined, stripped of his civil rights, and banished from all major cities. He was widely seen as a victim of the malevolence of Clemenceau, who conceded that he had “discover[ed] traitors because he needed them” in order to stamp out defeatism. That perception contributed to Caillaux’s political comeback in the 1920s and 1930. By then, many sadly agreed with him that France would have gained a “moral hegemony of Europe” if it had made peace after its victory on the Marne, sparing millions of lives.23
That was the mood of the 1930s. At the turn of the year 1914, though sorrowed by the 581,167 casualties suffered between August and November, the French still responded to calls for war unremitting. In rhetoric that suggests the pen of Raymond Poincaré, Premier René Viviani voiced the will to hit back hard in a December speech. Before delivering it, Viviani remarked to his defense minister, Alexandre Millerand, that France might be satisfied if Germany returned Alsace without Lorraine. If Viviani ever said that again, Millerand replied, he would demand his resignation. Overcompensating for this lapse, before a Chamber of Deputies in which three seats bore wreaths of evergreen tied with the tricolor sashes worn into battle by the dead legislators who once occupied them—addressing this grave body Viviani breathed fire. The applause was almost continuous but reached its height when he declared:
Against barbarity and despotism; against the system of provocations and methodical menaces which Germany called peace; against the system of murder and pillage which Germany called war; against the insolent hegemony of a military caste which loosed the scourge, France, the emancipator, France, the vengeful, at the side of her allies, arose and advanced to the fray … There is at this time only one single policy: a combat without mercy until such time as we can accomplish the definite liberation of Europe, won by a victory ensuring peace … France, acting in accord with her allies, will not sheathe her sword until after taking vengeance for outraged right; until she has united for all time to the French fatherland the provinces ravished from her by force … and until Prussian militarism has been crushed … and Europe finally regenerated.24
“Combat without mercy”: In a September 1922 issue of Foreign Affairs the journalist and politician André Tardieu brought home to American readers what that had cost France:
The war bled us terribly. Out of our population of less than 38,000,000 there were mobilized 8,500,000; 5,300,000 of them were killed or wounded … not counting 500,000 men who have come back to us from German prisons in very bad physical condition.
From Croquis de Temps de Guerre (1919) (Wartime Sketches) by Théophile Alexandre Steinlen
Almost 4,000,000 hectares of land were devastated, together with 4,000 towns and villages, 600,000 buildings were destroyed, among them 20,000 factories and workshops …
To measure what we have undergone, suppose that the war had taken place in America, and that you
had suffered proportionately. You would have had 4,000,000 of your men killed and 10,000,000 wounded. All your industries from Washington to Pittsburgh would have ceased to exist. All your coal mines would have been ruined. That is what the war would have meant to you. That is what it has meant to us.25
“They will not be able to make us do it another day; that would be to misconstrue the price of our effort,” a Verdun veteran wrote. The French could not pay it twice in a generation. Verdun held out for ten months in 1916; twenty-four years later German troops seized the forts, the citadel, and the city in twenty-four hours.26
Part of the price of victory in 1918 was defeat in 1940. They could not be made to do it again.
On December 2, 1914, the sixty-sixth anniversary of Francis Joseph’s rule, the Austrian army marched into Belgrade. Its commander, General Oskar Potiorek, wired Vienna that he was laying “the town and fortress of Belgrade” at “His Majesty’s feet.” The grateful monarch named a street in Sarajevo after Potiorek, and Viennese marched in a torchlight parade to celebrate the one victory in an autumn of debacles in which the Serbs and Russians had mauled the Austro-Hungarian army. Twelve days later, suffering what Churchill called an “ignominious, rankling and derisory defeat” the Serbian army drove the Austrians out of Belgrade. “It took them over four months to obtain admission to Belgrade,” the New York Times noted, “and it seems to have taken less than a day to turn them out.” This “second signal defeat at the hands of little Serbia” was “a bitter blow … to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.”27
Francis Joseph was habituated to bitter blows. He had accommodated the war by sacrificing thirty minutes of sleep, rising from his iron cot at half past three A.M., instead of his prewar four. Increasingly, a United Press International (UPI) correspondent reported from Vienna, “In his court he is treated like a child,” spending his days working at a desk with an oval portrait of his assassinated wife set on easel before his gaze at all times. His palpable decline renewed his subjects’ pity. A popular “postal photo” showed him seated at a table, his bowed head in his hands. The photograph was taken after an incident at a military hospital. Stopping at the bedside of a heavily bandaged soldier, he had asked, “My good man can I do anything for you?” When the soldier said nothing, a nurse interjected, “His majesty is speaking to you.” The emperor repeated the question. “Yes, you can put a bullet through my head,” the soldier answered, nearly shrieking. “Both of his arms and legs have been shot away,” the nurse explained. At this the old man slumped down in a chair and wept. Physically infirm, he was alive enough morally to feel his responsibility for that soldier’s suffering and perhaps, when routine failed him, for the 949,000 of his soldiers killed, wounded, missing, or taken prisoner in 1914. “He has not asked to visit the hospital since,” UPI noted, ending a dispatch entitled: AUSTRIAN RULER SAD AND BROKEN.28
A pathetic Francis Joseph. He had at least one moment of moral clarity before the final fog.
“Austria-Hungary is not a Fatherland but rather a prison of numerous nationalities all panting to escape,” Serbia’s foreign minister declared before the war, raising the issue of whether the national minorities would fight for Austria. The war opened an avenue of escape. A headline in a Swiss paper asked, AUSTRIA PERILED BY A REVOLUTION? The Rumanians were reportedly refusing to serve in Hungarian regiments, the Czechs deserting from the army, the Croats seditious. Fighting Russia, Serbia, and soon Italy, the questions of where the Austro-Hungarian army would get the men to contain nationalist revolts, and whether if ordered they would shoot their brothers were up in the air. Now, with the army reeling from defeats in Poland and Serbia, was the time for the nationalities to break out of the prison.29
Improbably, they stayed put. Clearly, the nationalities were not “panting to escape”—not yet. And, despite reports of a Christmas Day march of Viennese women shouting, “Give us back our husbands and sons!” and student demonstrators being shot in Budapest, Austria-Hungary’s core was not “periled” by revolution. Remarkably, the belief that it was the emperor’s duty, in Francis Joseph’s words, to “act as a unifying force for the minorities of Central Europe which were too weak to remain independent if left to their own devices,” still held firm, even among the minorities themselves.30
The mystique of the emperor as the empire’s unifier and the nations’ protector survived the emperor’s death on November 20, 1916. Retiring for bed that night, “summoning up his life in his final words,” Francis Joseph instructed his valet, “Tomorrow morning, at half-past three.”31
To an American correspondent who observed him at a 1914 pre-Christmas service at his western operational headquarters in Belgium, Kaiser Wilhelm “looked his part in the present historical drama” displaying “the saddest face I have ever seen in my life.” The kaiser’s stricken visage reminded him “of the expression you catch on certain portraits of Lincoln—the reflective, far-off look.”32
The comparison was inapt. Lincoln ran his war. The supreme warlord surrendered his to the generals. As early as November 1914 he confided to dinner-party guests that “the General Staff tells me nothing and never asks my advice. If people in Germany think I am the Supreme Commander, they are grossly mistaken. I drink tea, saw wood, and go for walks, which pleases the gentlemen.” Occasionally, he broke from these pursuits to offer suggestions, often barbarous and mostly ignored. For example, he proposed that the ninety thousand Russian soldiers captured at the battle of Tannenberg in September 1914 be driven onto a bare waterless strip of land in the Baltic Sea and starved to death.33
An irritant to the generals at the start of the war, the kaiser ended it as the puppet of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the generals who, in July 1917, ousted Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg. The political brake on Prussian militarism gone, the Second Reich, conceived in war in 1871, fulfilled its destiny. In 1917–18, the question italicized by the Zabern incident of 1913 was settled. No longer a state with an army, with fifty-year-olds conscripted and sixteen- to sixty-year-olds facing compulsory labor in armaments factories, Germany was at last an army with a state.34
On the home front, hunger was the war. Under Britain’s “starvation blockade,” the German people lost 525,000 tons of “human mass,” according to a late-1918 report. Prewar Germany imported 45 percent of its calories and 44 percent of its animal protein and all of its nitrates for fertilizer. The blockade severed these lifelines.35
In 1917, Britain’s War Food Committee calculated that while the blockade would impair the “health and efficiency of the German nation,” there were enough calories to go around to prevent starvation. The committee did not figure on the German farmer, who, according to a 1920 Royal Statistical Society paper analyzing why the committee got it wrong, “not only did his best to maintain his stock alive, if necessary using for this purpose food which ought by law to have applied to man, but he also … insisted on eating as much as he did before the War.” The farmer in addition struck deals with arms manufacturers to supply food to their workforces at inflated prices, diverting food from the cities. A run of bad harvests further cut supply. The army competed with the civilian population for food and with the rural economy for manpower—by 1917, women ran 80 percent of farms in Baden. The result: Blockade and war left “the great part of the civilian population during this time … in a state of chronic starvation.”36
Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) by Félix Vallotton. The very model of the Prussian general, Hindenburg and his middle-class brain, Erich Ludendorff, effectively ruled Germany after they ousted Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, who foolishly had made Hindenburg chief of staff.
Children suffered worst. Their limbs swelled with hunger edema. Rickets softened their bones, their jaws broke, their teeth fell out. Among women, deaths from tuberculosis rose by two thirds. On a city streetcar, the “stench of wasting tissue” sickened an American journalist.37
The death reek of the trenches, where the ground bristled with feet, skeletons, skulls, had come home. (Of the m
ud caking the uniform of her lover, killed in Flanders, Vera Brittain recorded, “It was as though it were saturated with dead bodies … All the sepulchers and catacombs of Rome could not make me realize mortality and corruption as vividly as did the smell of those clothes.”) The experience of mass death—its smell, look, nearness—joined civilian and soldier in Germany as it separated them in England. In December 1918, the German National Health Office blamed the blockade for 763,000 “excess civilian deaths,” a figure cut in half a decade later. Many died; more never lived: Births fell by half between 1914 and 1918.38
Divided by politics, religion, region, caste, and class, Germans had experienced a rush of unity in August 1914. “Over all individual fates stands that which we feel as the highest reality: the experience of belonging together,” a conservative minister declared. “The limitations of our egos broke down, our blood flowed to the blood of the other, we felt ourselves one body in a mystical unification,” a feminist journalist recalled of the “spirit of 1914.” Hunger, however, divided Germans anew, family against family.39
In his novel Class of 1902, Ernst Glaser conveys a picture of social decomposition. “It was a hard winter to the end,” he wrote of the “turnip winter” of 1916–17:
The war now got past the various fronts and pressed home upon the people. Hunger destroyed our solidarity: The children stole each other’s rations … Soon the women who stood in pallid queues before shops spoke more about their children’s hunger than about the death of their husbands … A new front was created. It was held by women against an entente of field gendarmes and controllers. Every smuggled pound of butter, every sack of potatoes successfully spirited in by night, was celebrated in their homes with the same enthusiasm as the victories of the armies two years before.