The War that Ended Peace

by Margaret MacMillan

  The man who best exemplified the new mood in the United States was Theodore Roosevelt, whose first and most successful project was himself. A sickly, unprepossessing child from an old Establishment family, he made himself through sheer will into a bold swashbuckling cowboy, explorer, outdoorsman and hunter (the Teddy bear was named after him). He was also a hero of the Spanish–American War for the charge at San Juan Hill, although his many critics noted that his memoirs gave the impression that he had won the war single-handed. Henry James talked about ‘the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and monstrous noise’ and nicknamed him Theodore Rex. Roosevelt was driven by ambition, idealism and vanity. As his daughter famously remarked: ‘My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.’ In September 1900, he became President when an anarchist shot President William McKinley. Roosevelt loved the office – ‘the bully pulpit’ – and took particular pleasure in managing American foreign policy.15

  Like many of his compatriots he believed that the United States ought to be a force for good in the world, promoting the spread of democracy, free trade and peace, which he saw as intertwined. In his first message to Congress in 1901 he said, ‘Whether we desire it or not, we must henceforth recognize that we have international duties no less than international rights.’ He also made it clear that, under his leadership, the United States would back up its good intentions with muscle and that meant having a strong navy. ‘No one point of our policy, foreign or domestic, is more important than this to the honor and material welfare, and above all to the peace, of our nation in the future.’ Roosevelt had always been fascinated by ships and the sea (not unlike his contemporary Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany) and he made good his word. The American navy, which had eleven battleships in 1898, when Roosevelt became Vice-President, had thirty-six by 1913 and was the third largest in the world after those of Germany and Great Britain. The economic growth of the United States and its growing military power worried the Europeans. While the British chose accommodation, Kaiser Wilhelm talked from time to time of the need to bring the European powers together to face the challenges he saw coming from Japan and the United States, perhaps separately or perhaps together. Since the Kaiser was notably inconsistent, he also talked on other occasions of working with the United States against Japan. The prospect that the United States itself might increasingly intervene in Europe’s affairs in the coming century and, moreover, not once but twice take part in Europe’s great wars would have seemed fantastical to the Kaiser, as it would to most Europeans, and to the Americans themselves.

  Surely the evidence of the century that had just passed showed that the world, especially the European world, was moving away from war. With a few exceptions the great powers had come together since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in the Concert of Europe to manage Europe’s international affairs. The leading statesmen of the powers had got into the habit of consulting each other and committees made up of their ambassadors had met frequently to deal with pressing issues, such as the debts owed by the Ottoman government to outside interests. The Concert had worked with success to sustain Europe’s long peace since 1815, guaranteeing treaties, insisting on respect for the rights of nations, encouraging the peaceful resolution of disputes, and, where necessary, calling smaller powers to order. The Concert of Europe was not a formal institution but it was a well-established way of dealing with international relations which served several generations of Europeans well.

  Progress had gone hand in hand with peace so that the Europe of 1900 was a different one from that of a century before, infinitely more prosperous and apparently much more stable. The meetings which took place in the Congress Palace during the Paris Exposition reflected widespread hopes that the future would be even brighter. There were over 130 different events including discussions on the condition and rights of women, socialism, fire-fighting, vegetarianism, and philosophy.16 The 9th Universal Peace Congress which was held there won the Exposition’s Grand Prize for its work. ‘There was a wonderfully carefree atmosphere abroad in the world,’ wrote Zweig, ‘for what was going to interrupt this growth, what could stand in the way of the vigour constantly drawing new strength from its own momentum? Europe had never been stronger, richer or more beautiful, had never believed more fervently in an even better future …’17

  We now know, of course, that such faith in progress and reason was sadly misplaced, that the Europeans of 1900 were heading towards a crisis in 1914 that they failed to manage, with dreadful consequences: two world wars and a host of smaller ones, the rise of totalitarian movements on both the right and the left, savage conflicts between different nationalities, and atrocities on an unimaginable scale. It was the triumph not of reason but of its opposite. Most of them, though, did not know they were playing with fire. We must try to separate that knowledge of what was to come and remember that the Europeans of the time did not, for the most part, realise that they and their leaders were making decisions and taking steps which narrowed their options and which in the end destroyed their peace. We must attempt to understand those people of a century ago. We need to get at, as much as we can, what was in their minds: what they were remembering, fearing, or hoping. And what were their unspoken assumptions, the beliefs and values they did not bother to talk about because everyone shared them? Why did they not see the dangers which were gathering about them in the years leading up to 1914?

  To be fair to that lost world of 1900, not all Europeans shared the general confidence about either the future of humanity or its rationality. The Paris Exposition may have celebrated those two pillars of late nineteenth-century thought, the belief in progress and positivism with its faith that science could solve all problems, but such assumptions were under attack. Increasingly the claims of science to lay bare a universe in which everything worked according to orderly laws were being undermined. The work of Albert Einstein and his fellow physicists into atomic and sub-atomic particles suggested that unpredictability and random occurrences lay beneath the visible material world. Reality was not the only thing being called into question. So too was rationality. Psychologists and the new sociologists were showing that humans were more influenced by unconscious forces than had been assumed. In Vienna, the young Sigmund Freud was inventing the new practice of psychoanalysis to delve into the human unconscious and in same year as the Exposition he published The Interpretation of Dreams. Gustave Le Bon’s work on how people can behave in unexpected and irrational ways when they are in groups made a deep impression at the time and is still being used today by, among others, the American military. His book on the psychology of the crowd, which came out in 1895, was a popular success and was almost immediately translated into English.

  The Paris Exposition also celebrated material progress but there were doubts as well about that. Although Karl Marx welcomed the creative destruction of capitalism as it swept away old societies and brought new social organisations and new industrial methods of production which would ultimately benefit the downtrodden and poor, many on both the left and the right deplored the process. The great French sociologist Emile Durkheim worried about the loss of the old stable communities as people moved into the big cities. Others like Le Bon worried about whether reason and humanity could survive in mass society. Part of the reason Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, valued sport so much was that he saw it as developing the individual and arming him or her against the levelling and dulling effects of modern, democratic civilisation.18 And was life perhaps getting too fast? Doctors had discovered a new illness, neurasthenia, a nervous exhaustion and collapse, which they blamed on the hectic pace and the strains of modern life.19 An American visitor to the Exposition was struck by how many of the new motorcars there were in Paris; ‘they fly along the roads, and whiz through the streets like lightning, and threaten to take the place of carriages, especially for heavy traffic’.20 At the Exposition itself visitors stepped gingerly on and off a moving pav
ement and crowds gathered to watch the frequent tumbles.

  And was European society really superior to all others? Scholars familiar with the history of India or China, for example, challenged the assumption that Europe was in the forefront of civilisation and pointed out that both had achieved great heights in the past yet had apparently declined. So progress might not be linear at all. Indeed, societies might instead go through a cyclical process of advance and decay and not necessarily get better. And what was civilisation anyway? Were the values and achievements of the West really superior to those of other parts of the world and other ages? The guide to the Exposition was patronising about the small exhibit of Japanese art which showed, it said, how Japanese artists stuck doggedly to their traditional styles but a new generation of European artists found inspiration in the arts of other, non-European cultures. When Vincent van Gogh used the styles of Japanese prints in his paintings or Picasso drew on African sculpture they and other European artists did not see these as charmingly primitive or old-fashioned but as different and containing insights that European art lacked. When Count Harry Kessler, an urbane and cultivated German, visited Japan in the 1890s he saw Europe in a new and unfavourable light: ‘We have the greater intellectual, and perhaps also – although I doubt it – stronger moral force, but regarding true, inward civilization the Japanese are infinitely ahead of us.’21

  The Paris Exposition had warning signs, easier to see in retrospect, of the tensions which were shortly going to tear European civilisation apart. The colonial and the national exhibits which were, after all, about showing off hinted at the rivalries among the powers. A famous German art critic of the day mocked French pretensions to lead European civilisation. ‘France’, he reported on his visit to the Exposition, ‘did not take the slightest part in those enormous changes, which commerce and industry created in other countries, especially in its constantly dangerous neighbours, England and Germany.’22 The French for their part had a large building dedicated entirely to Captain Jean-Baptiste March-and’s expedition across Africa two years earlier which had nearly led to a war with Britain, and Loubet, the French President who had talked about justice and human kindness at the opening, had decided to have the Exposition in 1900 in part to forestall the Germans who had been planning their own one for Berlin.23 The Paris Exposition, said Picard, the chief organiser, would not only reflect the genius of France but ‘show our fair country to be, today as yesterday, in the very vanguard of Progress’.24

  And some of that progress was in the military arts. The Palace of Armies and Navies (in a building resembling a mediaeval fortress) showed, said the guide, the great advances of the past decade in making weapons more destructive. It pointed out as a desirable counterbalance that the capacity for defence had also grown with things such as stronger armour plate. In the sections set aside for foreign countries, the British had built a Maison Maxim, its facade decorated with artillery shells and cannon, devoted to the eponymous new machine gun. The Russians brought some of their new weapons and the German emperor sent a display of his favourite uniforms. Outside, a separate pavilion built by the French company Schneider displayed its artillery. War was, said the official catalogue of the Exposition, ‘natural to humanity’.25

  The Exposition also contained harbingers of the system of alliances which was going to push the European powers into choosing sides in the years before 1914. The day of the opening, the French President also opened a new bridge over the Seine, named after the late Tsar Alexandre III. After all, the Russian government, said the guide, had exerted itself enormously to collaborate in the Exposition, ‘this great work of peace’. The Franco-Russian alliance was new – signed only in 1894 – and still a tricky one, made as it was between the Russian autocracy and a republican France. It was understood to be defensive, although its details were secret. Nevertheless it made Germany uneasy, even though it had its own defensive alliance with Austria-Hungary. The new chief of the German army’s general staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, began to make plans for a two-front war, against Russia on Germany’s eastern frontiers and France in the west.

  The greatest power of all, the British Empire, had no alliances with anyone and up to this point that had not caused it concern. But 1900 was not a good year. The British had gone blithely into a war in South Africa the year before against two much smaller Afrikaner republics: the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The odds – the whole British Empire against two tiny states – should have made the outcome a foregone conclusion, but the British had in fact done very badly in what was called at the time the Boer War. Although the Afrikaners were on the run by the end of the summer, they did not finally concede defeat until the spring of 1902. Equally worrying, the war showed just how unpopular the British were in much of the world. In Marseilles, locals gave a warm reception to a party from Madagascar on its way to the Exposition whom they mistook for Afrikaners. In Paris, an enterprising fashion house made a hat in grey felt, à la Boer. At the Exposition itself the modest Transvaal pavilion with its flag flying proudly, drew a large crowd, eager, said the Hachette guide, ‘to show their sympathy for the heroic little nation which is defending its independence in the south of Africa’. Piles of flowers dedicated to ‘the hero’, ‘the patriot’ or ‘the lover of freedom’ surrounded the bust of Paul Kruger, its former President.26

  That sympathy mixed with pleasure when British forces suffered one defeat after another was echoed throughout Europe. Commentary on the Continent made much use of the image of David and Goliath. The German weekly Simplicissimus had a cartoon of a dead elephant being pecked by carrion birds as ants swarmed towards it with the comment ‘the harder they fall …’ There was also shock at the brutal tactics the British used to deal with Afrikaner guerrilla warfare. General Kitchener, who took over command, had local women and children rounded up and placed in concentration camps so that they could no longer feed and shelter their fighters. Through yet more British incompetence, the camps became places of disease and death. A French cartoon had Kitchener as a great toad squatting on Afrikaner corpses and obscene cartoons circulated of Queen Victoria. Her son and heir, Prince Edward, as a result refused to visit the Exposition.27

  Great powers depend on their prestige and the perception of others that they are powerful as much as material factors such as their military and their economies. In 1900 Britain was looking weaker and dangerously alone. In a move that was entirely defensive, it started to mend fences with the other powers and to look for allies. Yet this can also be seen as one of the many steps towards the outbreak of the Great War. Europe was going to drift into an alliance system which divided it into two camps, increasingly suspicious of each other and increasingly well armed. And there were those, a minority to be sure, who did not shrink from the prospect of war, or indeed even welcomed it, because they saw it as noble, necessary, an inevitable part of human history, or as a way of solving their nation’s internal problems. On the other side stood all those Europeans, including many of their leaders, who thought that a general war was simply inconceivable in the modern world. That confidence was also dangerous for it led to the assumption that all crises could be safely managed and, in the case of Great Britain, that it could remain detached, as it had always preferred, from the Continent.

  CHAPTER 2

  Great Britain and Splendid Isolation

  Three years earlier, in 1897, as it celebrated sixty years of Queen Victoria’s reign, Britain had never appeared so powerful. The Diamond Jubilee was marked around the world by events ranging from marching schoolchildren to fireworks to military reviews, in Canada, Australia, the Cape Colony in southern Africa, India, Ceylon, in all the many places the British flag flew. In Rangoon, 600 prisoners were released and at Port Said there was a Venetian fête with water sports. Addresses and telegrams of congratulation poured into London from every part of the empire. It was, said the Spectator, ‘as if one roar of acclaim and loyalty were coming up from the whole earth’. The New York Times correspondent said t
hat Americans shared in the general admiration for the queen and should take pleasure in the fact that relations between the United States and Britain were now so cordial.1

  Manufacturers made sure there were plenty of souvenirs: playing cards, mugs, plates, scarves, commemorative medals, bibles. In Britain itself the cities and towns outdid themselves with banquets and balls and 2,500 bonfires blazed from one end of the country to the other. In Manchester 100,000 children were invited to a special breakfast and in London Alexandra, the Princess of Wales, held Diamond Jubilee feasts at which anyone, no matter how poor or shabby, could dine on roast beef and beer. Four hundred thousand Londoners turned up. The churches held special services while choirs sang Sir Arthur Sullivan’s special jubilee hymn ‘O King of Kings’.

  Following the suggestion of the energetic new Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, the queen and her Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, decided that the Jubilee should show off the empire. So while European monarchs were not invited, Prime Ministers from the self-governing colonies and princes from India were. (This also avoided having as a guest the queen’s difficult grandson Wilhelm II of Germany, who, it was feared, would only make trouble.) The Prince of Wales gave a special dinner for the colonial premiers and on 21 June the queen, showing impressive stamina for her seventy-eight years, presided over a state banquet at Buckingham Palace. She sat between the heirs to the Italian and Austrian-Hungarian thrones, the future Victor Emmanuel III and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, only one of whom would live to succeed. Twenty-four chefs from Paris were brought in for the occasion and the centrepiece was a crown taller than a man made of 60,000 orchids gathered from every part of the empire.