The War that Ended Peace
Page 9
Britain had abandoned a policy which, if not strictly speaking was either one of isolation or centuries old, had served it well. For much of the nineteenth century it had been able to comfortably build its trade and its empire without worrying too much about combinations of powers against it. The world had changed though and France and Russia together now made a formidable opponent. New powers such as Germany, the United States, and Japan itself were also undermining British global hegemony. Its treaty with Japan was a way of testing the waters, to see if it wanted to plunge further into the entanglements of alliances. In 1902, things were looking up for Britain. The Boer War had finally ended in May and Transvaal and the Orange Free State were now part of the British Empire. And hopes that Germany could be made into a firmer friend had certainly not gone away completely. In Germany, the reaction initially was one of mild pleasure. By allying itself with Japan, Britain was a step closer to a confrontation with Russia in Asia and possibly with France as well. When the British ambassador in Berlin informed the Kaiser about the new treaty, Wilhelm’s initial reaction was: ‘the noodles seem to have had a lucid interval’.67
CHAPTER 3
‘Woe to the country that has a child for King!’ Wilhelm II and Germany
‘It almost breaks my heart’, wrote Queen Victoria in the spring of 1859 to her uncle Leopold, the king of the Belgians, ‘not to witness our first grandchild christened! I don’t think I ever felt so bitterly disappointed about anything as about this! And then it is an occasion so gratifying to both Nations, which brings them so much together, that it is most peculiarly mortifying!’1 The child, born in Prussia to her oldest daughter Victoria, was the future Wilhelm II of Germany and the proud grandmother’s hopes for both it and the future friendship between their peoples promised to come true.
A British–German partnership made a lot of sense. Germany was a great land power, Britain a sea one. Germany’s interests lay mainly in Europe, Britain’s overseas. Until the 1890s while Bismarck was still in control, Germany was content to be a continental power so the two countries were not rivals for empire. It helped too that they had a common enemy in France and shared an apprehension about French ambitions. After all, Prussia and Britain had fought side by side to defeat Napoleon. When Prussia, under Bismarck’s skilful leadership, united the German states into the new Germany in 1870, Britain watched with benevolent neutrality. The great intellectual Thomas Carlyle (who wrote an admiring biography of Frederick the Great) spoke for many of his peers when he said publicly: ‘That noble, patient, pious, and solid Germany should be at length welded into a nation, and become Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vain-glorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and over-sensitive France, seems to me the hope-fullest public fact that has occurred in my time.’2 Germany’s growing prosperity, later the subject of concern in prewar British circles, was initially welcomed as trade between the two countries increased.
3. Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, was a consummate Prussian statesman who, through a mix of skilful diplomacy and force, had brought about the creation of Germany in 1871. In the succeeding decades he had made Germany the centre of European politics, playing one nation off against another and ensuring that France, Germany’s bitter foe, remained isolated. Wilhelm II, who became Kaiser in 1888, resented Bismarck’s dominance and, in 1890, dismissed him with the result that Germany’s foreign policy fell into less skilled hands.
Surely the similarities between the German and English peoples too demonstrated that both were part of the Teutonic race, sharing the same sensible and sober values, as perhaps they had always done. Some historians argued that both – the continental and the island branches – had stoutly resisted the Roman Empire and had developed their own sound political and social institutions over the centuries. Religion, which still counted for much in the nineteenth century, was another link, at least if you were among the majority of Protestants in each country. Moreover, in both countries the elites were largely Protestant.3
Each found much to admire in the other. For the British, it was German culture and science. German universities and higher technical schools became models for British educators. British students in such fields as medicine had to learn German in order to read the latest scientific work. Germans dominated the important fields of biblical scholarship and archaeology, and German history, with its stress on archival work, the amassing of facts, and the use of evidence was felt to show the past ‘as it really was’. For their part Germans admired English literature, especially Shakespeare, and the British way of life. Even during the Great War, the Cecilienhof at Potsdam, built for the crown prince, took as its model an English Tudor house. Its bookshelves to this day are filled with the works of popular British authors from P. J. Wodehouse to Dornford Yates.
At the personal level there were many links, from the business communities in each other’s cities to marriage. Robert Graves, that most English of poets, had a German mother. Eyre Crowe, later famous in the Foreign Office as a firm opponent of Germany, was born to a mixed couple in Germany and educated almost completely in German. Higher up the social scale, English women such as Evelyn Stapleton-Bretherton, born in Sussex, married Prince Blucher, a descendant of the great Prussian marshal, and Daisy Cornwallis-West of North Wales became Princess of Pless, wife of one of the richest men, from one of the oldest families, in Germany. At the very top were the royal families themselves. Queen Victoria was descended from two German royal families, the Hanoverians and, through her mother, the Saxe-Coburgs. She then married a Saxe-Coburg cousin, Prince Albert. Between them they were related to virtually every ruling family in Germany (and most throughout Europe as well). In 1858, when their daughter married the future heir to the Prussian throne, it appeared that another important strand had been added to the web that connected the British and the Germans.
Why did things go so badly wrong? Political scientists might say that the fact that Germany and Britain found themselves on opposite sides in the Great War was foreordained, the result of the clash between a major global power feeling its advantage slip away and a rising challenger. Such transitions, they argue, are rarely managed peacefully. The established power is too often arrogant, lecturing the rest of the world about how to manage its affairs, and too often insensitive to the fears and concerns of lesser powers. Such a power, as Britain was then, and the United States is today, inevitably resists its own intimations of mortality and the rising one is impatient to get its fair share of whatever is on offer, whether colonies, trade, resources or influence.
In the nineteenth century, Britain had the world’s largest empire and dominated the seas and world trade. Understandably perhaps, it showed little sympathy for the aspirations and concerns of other nations. As Winston Churchill, always a statesman with a strong sense of history, wrote shortly before the Great War:
We have engrossed to ourselves, in a time when other powerful nations were paralysed by barbarism or internal war, an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.
Moreover, Britain frequently irritated the other European powers with its confident assumption of superiority, for example, to the institutions and politics on the Continent, by its reluctance to uphold the Concert of Europe, and the way in which it carefully intervened in conflicts only when it saw a clear gain for itself. In the scramble for colonies, British statesmen tended to claim that they were taking on more territory merely for the security of their existing possessions or perhaps out of benevolence towards the subject peoples, while other nations were motivated entirely by greed.
Germany by contrast showed both the insecurities and the ambitions of a rising world power. It was sensitive to criticism and endlessly concerned that it was not being taken seriously enough. It was a big country at t
he heart of Europe, and economically and militarily stronger, as well as more dynamic, than its largest neighbours of France, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Yet in its gloomier moments it saw itself as being encircled. Its trade was soaring around the world and increasingly cutting into Britain’s share but that was not enough. It did not have the colonies, along with the concomitant naval bases, coaling stations, and telegraph junctions which were held to be the mark of a global power. Moreover, when it tried to take territory overseas, in Africa or the South Pacific, Britain invariably appeared to raise objections. So when the new Foreign Secretary, Bernhard von Bülow, gave a stirring speech to the Reichstag in 1897 in which he talked about Germany demanding its place in the sun, it was well received by his countrymen.
Britain, like other dominant powers before and since, was aware that the world was changing and that it faced new challenges. Its empire was too big and too spread out – which prompted arguments from imperialists at home to take even more territories to protect existing ones and the crucial shipping and telegraph routes. Its industrial output, while still great, was less in terms of the world’s total as new powers such as Germany and the United States were catching up fast and older ones such as Japan and Russia were entering the industrial age at high speed. And being first can lead to problems in the long run. Britain’s industrial infrastructure was old and not being renewed quickly enough. Its education system was turning out too many classicists and not enough engineers and scientists.
Yet the question still remains: why did Britain find itself with Germany as its main enemy when there so easily could have been others? Germany was after all only one among several threats to Britain’s world dominance. Other powers wanted their equivalent of a place in the sun. In the years before 1914, there could have been a war over colonial issues between Britain and the United States, Britain and France, or Britain and Russia – and in each case there nearly was. Those potentially dangerous relationships, though, were managed and the main sources of conflict dealt with. (We have to hope today that the United States and China will be as sensible and as successful.)
True, there were strains in the relationship between Britain and Germany over the years, a tendency to suspect the motives of the other, and to take offence too readily. The Kruger telegram of 1896 when the Kaiser impetuously dispatched his congratulations to the President of the little independent Transvaal on the Afrikaners’ success in holding off the Jameson Raid (a gang of British adventurers had tried to seize control of the Transvaal) led to angry comment in Britain. ‘The German Emperor has taken a very grave step’, said The Times, ‘which must be regarded as distinctly unfriendly to this country.’4 Salisbury was at a dinner party when he received the news and is reported to have said to his neighbour, one of Queen Victoria’s daughters, ‘What cheek, Madame, what cheek!’5 British public opinion was enraged. Wilhelm had recently been made honorary colonel of the Royal Dragoons; his fellow officers apparently cut up his portrait and threw the pieces into the fire.6 Paul Hatzfeldt, the German ambassador in London, reported to Berlin: ‘The general feeling was such – of this I have no doubt – that if the Government had lost its head, or on any ground wished for war, it would have had the whole public behind it.’7 On the eve of the Great War, Sir Edward Goschen, the British ambassador in Berlin, said to a colleague that in his view the Kruger telegram was the start of the division between Britain and Germany.8
Even when agreements were reached, the process left behind a residue of bitterness and mistrust. When Britain made difficulties in 1898 in the negotiations over the Portuguese colonies, the Kaiser wrote an irate memorandum: ‘Lord Salisbury’s conduct is quite Jesuitical, monstrous and insolent!’9 The British for their part deeply resented the way the Germans exploited Britain’s preoccupation with the deteriorating situation in southern Africa to make Britain negotiate in the first place. Salisbury, who did not share Chamberlain’s enthusiasm for a broad alliance with Germany, told the German ambassador, ‘You ask too much for your friendship.’10
The following year Germany threatened to withdraw its ambassador from London when Salisbury balked at giving way to German demands over the Samoan islands. The Kaiser impetuously sent an extraordinarily rude letter to his grandmother criticising her Prime Minister. ‘This way of treating Germany’s interests and feelings has come upon the people like an electric shock, and has evoked the impression that Lord Salisbury cares no more for us than for Portugal, Chile or the Patagonians.’ And he added a threat: ‘If this sort of high-handed treatment of German affairs by Lord Salisbury’s Government is suffered to continue, I am afraid that there will be a permanent source of misunderstandings and recriminations between the two nations, which may in the end lead to bad blood.’11 The old queen, after consulting Salisbury, replied very firmly indeed: ‘The tone in which you write about Lord Salisbury I can only attribute to a temporary irritation on your part, as I do not think you would otherwise have written in such a manner, and I doubt whether any Sovereign ever wrote in such terms to another Sovereign, and that Sovereign his own Grandmother about their Prime Minister.’12
The Boer War produced fresh tensions. The German government actually played a helpful role in refusing to join a coalition of powers to force Britain to make peace with the two Boer republics. Germany did not receive as much credit as it might have done in part because of the condescending and high-handed tone Bülow among others adopted with Britain. As Friedrich von Holstein, the effective head of the German Foreign Office, said later: ‘By acting in friendly manner and speaking in an unfriendly one, we fell between two stools (for “we” read “Bülow”).’13
Moreover, the fact that the German public, from the empress down, was largely pro-Boer confirmed the perception in Britain that Germany was working actively for British defeat. Rumours circulated that German officers were enlisting in the Boer armies when in fact the Kaiser had forbidden them to take part. In the opening months of the war, Britain seized three German mail steamers suspected, wrongly as it turned out, of carrying war materiel to the Boers. (One, according to the German diplomat Eckardstein, had nothing more dangerous than boxes of Swiss cheese.) When the British were slow to release the ships, the German government charged Britain with violating international law and used threatening language. Bülow, who wanted to keep the talks with Chamberlain alive for the time being, wrote to the then Chancellor Gottfried von Hohenlohe: ‘The acuteness and depth of Germany’s unfortunate dislike of Britain are most dangerous to us. If the British public clearly realized the anti-British feeling which dominates Germany just now, a great revulsion would occur in its conception of the relations between Britain and Germany.’14 In fact the British public were aware of the feeling in Germany because the British press reported it in detail. The establishment Athenaeum Club in London had a special display of German cartoons and anti-British articles.15
While it is difficult to measure in an age before opinion surveys, it does seem as though elite opinion in each country, whether in foreign offices, parliaments, or the military, was hardening against the other by the start of the twentieth century.16 And there was a new and, for many in ruling circles, disconcerting factor in the growing importance of public opinion. ‘The least ill humour toward us prevails in the higher circles of society, perhaps also in the lower classes of the population, the mass of the workers,’ Count Paul Metternich, who succeeded Hatzfeldt as German ambassador in London, reported to Berlin in 1903. ‘But of all those that lie in between, and who work with brain and pen, the great majority are hostile to us.’17 Loud public demands for the German government to do something about Britain or that the British government stand up to Germany not only put pressure on the decision-makers but limited how far they could go in working with the other country.
Samoa, for example, was a crisis that need not have happened because no great national interests were at stake. Yet it proved unnecessarily difficult to resolve because of public agitation, especially in Germany. ‘For even though the great maj
ority of our pothouse politicians did not know whether Samoa was a fish or a fowl or a foreign queen’, said Eckardstein, ‘they shouted all the more loudly that, whatever else it was, it was German and must remain forever German.’18 The German press suddenly discovered Samoa to be essential for national prestige and security.19
Yet public opinion is often volatile. Think of the sudden change in the United States in 1972 when President Nixon went to Beijing and China went from being a bitter enemy to a new friend. When Queen Victoria had her last fatal illness, the Kaiser rushed to her side even though the Boer War was still on and his government feared that he might meet a hostile reception. He held her in his arms for two and a half hours as she died and later claimed that he helped his uncle, now King Edward VII, lift her into her coffin. She was, he remembered, ‘so little – and so light’.20 The Daily Mail called Wilhelm ‘a friend in need’ and The Times said he would have an ‘abiding place in their memories and affections’. The Telegraph reminded its readers that he was half-English: ‘We have never lost our secret pride in the fact that the most striking and gifted personality born to any European throne since Frederick the Great was largely of our own blood.’ At a lunch before he left, Wilhelm made a plea for friendship: ‘We ought to form an Anglo-German alliance, you to keep the seas, while we would be responsible for the land; with such an alliance not a mouse could stir in Europe without our permission.’21
Economic competition, a troubled relationship with mutual suspicions and occasional open hostility, the pressures of public opinion, all these help to explain why the Kaiser’s wishes did not materialise and why Germany and Britain followed diverging paths before 1914. Yet if Germany and Austria-Hungary had become enemies again (as they had been until 1866) or if Britain had gone to war with France, it would be just as easy to find similar factors at work. And if Germany and Britain had formed an alliance, it would be as easy to find explanations for that. So, when all that is said, the question remains. Why did Germany and Britain become such antagonists?