The War that Ended Peace

by Margaret MacMillan

  There was enough German activity and German rhetoric, however, to alarm a British government and a British public already inclined to look at Germany with suspicion. Moreover, in Germany, both in government circles and among the general public there was a growing propensity to identify Britain, often openly, as the main obstacle to Germany’s Weltpolitik. Student notes taken at Treitschke’s lectures show him attacking Britain repeatedly. Why, he asked in the 1890s, did Germany ‘have to throw itself at Grandma’s head in such an undignified way, since in England even every little baby is determined to deceive us’. (Not surprisingly, a visit Treitschke made to England only served to confirm his views: London, he said, was ‘like the dream of a drunken devil’.39) In 1900 the ambassador of Austria-Hungary in Berlin sent a long and perceptive memorandum to Vienna in which he noted that the leading German statesmen were looking ahead to the time, no doubt many years hence, when their country would succeed Britain as the world’s leading power and remarked on the ‘universally dominant anglophobia’ in Germany.40 Wilhelm also expected the future to see the rise of Germany and the decline of Britain. As he said in a speech in Hamburg in 1899, ‘Old empires pass away and new ones are in the process of being formed.’

  His attitude to Britain, though, like his relations with the British half of his family, was much more ambivalent than that of many of his subjects. His mother had unwisely held up everything British as a model and he understandably reacted badly. She wanted him to be an English gentleman; he became a Prussian officer. She was liberal; he was conservative. He had come to hate his mother – and indeed treated her badly after his father died – but some of his happiest childhood memories were of visiting Britain with his parents. He had played with his cousins at Osborne on the Isle of Wight and had visited British naval shipyards. He had often climbed aboard Nelson’s flagship the Victory and once helped to fire the guns on the St Vincent, named after Nelson’s great contemporary. When Queen Victoria made him an honorary admiral of the British navy shortly after his accession, Wilhelm was overjoyed. ‘Fancy wearing the same uniform as St Vincent and Nelson. It is enough to make me quite giddy.’41 He sent his grandmother a portrait of himself in his new uniform which he then wore on all possible occasions, including, it is said, to a performance of The Flying Dutchman.42 (He also took his honorary rank as an invitation to give the British much unwanted advice about their navy.)

  As an adult he complained repeatedly about ‘the damned family’ in Britain but he nevertheless deeply loved his grandmother Queen Victoria. Indeed, she was one of the few people in the world he would listen to. He resented what he saw as British arrogance and condescension but could still say to Theodore Roosevelt in 1911: ‘I ADORE England.’43 Daisy Cornwallis-West, who had become the Princess of Pless, thought that his love and admiration for Britain were genuine and that his frequent criticisms were like those of a family member who felt he was misunderstood:

  That was the real grievance. The Emperor felt that he was never properly understood or appreciated by either Queen Victoria, King Edward, King George or the British people. Feeling his own sincerity and believing in himself, he sought to force his personality on us. As an actor of ability in a favorite part will sometimes endeavor to win by charm or subtlety, so the Emperor too often tried to dominate British public opinion by acts which antagonized us – or worse still – merely bored or amused us.44

  That was certainly the case when Wilhelm took up yacht racing at Cowes with his usual enthusiasm. The British were at first inclined to be flattered when the Kaiser became a member of the Royal Yacht Club (proposed by his uncle Edward), bought a yacht and appeared each summer in the early 1890s for the annual regatta. Queen Victoria, who had to put him up with his entourage at Osborne, remarked to no avail that ‘these annual visits are not quite desirable’.45 Wilhelm was unfortunately a poor sport; he complained frequently about the rules and suggested that the handicapping was unfair to his yacht, the Meteor. His uncle complained that Wilhelm thought he was the ‘Boss of Cowes’ and apparently said to friends in 1895: ‘The regatta at Cowes was once a pleasant holiday for me, but now that the Kaiser has taken command there, it is nothing but a nuisance.’46 And there were other incidents to spoil the summer days: Salisbury apparently not getting a message to come to Wilhelm’s gold-plated steam yacht, the Hohenzollern, for an important discussion, or Wilhelm insisting that he and Prince Edward continue their race even though it made them late for dinner with the queen.

  The Kaiser’s relations with his uncle were particularly difficult. Wilhelm may have resented the fact that Edward, ‘fat old Wales’, was charming, confident and widely liked. Wilhelm’s natural prudishness, no doubt fanned by his wife, Dona, was also offended by his uncle’s predilection for beautiful women and raffish friends and he cannot have endeared himself by sending the prince an admonishing letter while the older man was involved in a particularly tricky scandal. In his wilder moments, he took to referring to his uncle as a Satan, ‘an old peacock’, ‘the arch-intriguer and mischief-maker in Europe’.47 On Edward’s side, there was the failure of the older, more assured man to understand the complicated younger one whose bluster hid a sense of insecurity. Edward and his Danish wife Alexandra, who had never forgiven Prussia for seizing Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, saw Wilhelm as the epitome of Prussian militarism. ‘Willy is a bully,’ he once said, ‘and most bullies, when tackled, are cowards.’48 At his last meeting with Wilhelm in 1909, Edward, now king, wrote, not entirely accurately: ‘I know the German Emperor hates me and never loses an opportunity of saying so behind my back, while I have always been so kind and nice to him.’49 Theodore Roosevelt felt that Wilhelm’s emotions were more complicated, that he had ‘a real affection and respect for King Edward and also a very active and jealous dislike for him, first one feeling and then the other coming uppermost in his mind and therefore in his conversation’.50

  Trouble between the two probably started when Wilhelm’s father was dying and Edward arrived to support his beloved sister, Crown Princess Victoria. Edward’s remarks such as ‘William the Great needs to learn that he is living at the end of the nineteenth century and not in the Middle Ages’ may well have gotten back to the Kaiser. Two months after his accession, Wilhelm made it clear that he would not meet his uncle in Vienna although they had separately planned to be there at the same time. Edward was obliged to leave before his nephew’s arrival. Bismarck tried to explain away the incident to the British by blaming Edward’s attitude to Wilhelm: ‘The prince treated him as an uncle treats a nephew, instead of recognizing that he was an Emperor who, though young, had still been of age for some time.’ Salisbury thought the Kaiser must be a ‘little off his head’. Queen Victoria was furious when she wrote to her Prime Minister: ‘this is really too vulgar and too absurd as well as untrue almost to be believed. We have always been very intimate with our grandson and nephew and to pretend that he is to be treated in private as well as in public as “His Imperial Majesty” is perfect madness!’51 She hoped, she told Salisbury, that the relations between Germany and Britain would not be damaged: ‘The Queen quite agrees that that should not be affected (if possible) by these miserable personal quarrels; but the Queen very much fears that with such a hot-headed, conceited, and wrong-headed young man, devoid of all feeling, this may at ANY moment become impossible.’52

  If both countries had been constitutional monarchies, family quarrels would have ruffled the waters for a moment and produced much gossip but caused no lasting damage. The problem in this case was that the German ruler did have considerable powers and was prepared to use them to achieve his ends of making Germany a world power. And that meant, in the mind of Wilhelm himself, and many of those around him, having a blue-water navy, capable of projecting German power on the high seas, to protect German trade and investment and, importantly, German colonies, both the existing ones and the ones to come. In 1896 Wilhelm, in a speech which received considerable publicity, had asked the German people ‘to help me bind fast t
his greater German empire to our own empire at home’.53 Such a view was not particular to Germany; it was coming to be widely accepted in this period that naval power was a key component of world power. How otherwise had Britain – or the Netherlands or France, for that matter – built and maintained their great empires?

  Sometimes it takes one person to put into words what is intuitively already suspected; the role of the sea found its great theorist in the little-known commander of the Naval College in the United States, not yet itself a great naval power. In 1890 Captain Alfred Mahan published his classic work, The Influence of Sea Power upon History. He was fifty at the time, a trim, lanky man who had never much liked going to sea. In many ways, he was the opposite of the rip-roaring sailor. He was taciturn, unsociable, reserved, and prudish. (He refused to let his daughters read Zola’s novels.) He was also exceptionally high-minded; he would not let his children use government pencils.54

  He first got the idea which would make him famous when he was reading Roman history and realised how different things might have been if Hannibal had invaded by sea rather than by land over the Alps, and, crucially, had been able to get support from Carthage by water. ‘Control of the sea’, Mahan believed, ‘was an historic factor which had never been systematically appreciated or expounded.’55 And expound it, he did. In his books, he went back into history to argue that whether it was the Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century or the Seven Years War between Britain and France in the eighteenth, sea power was almost always the deciding factor. And it ensured prosperity in peace as well as victory in war. ‘In these three things’, Mahan wrote, ‘production, with the necessity of exchanging products, shipping, whereby the exchange is carried on, and colonies, which facilitate and enlarge the operations of shipping and tend to protect it by multiplying points of safety is to be found the key to much of the history, as well as of the policy, of nations bordering upon the sea.’56 A strong navy protected the key highways for trade and communication across the oceans, and, equally importantly, enabled the seizing and holding of colonies. Its battle fleets could serve as a deterrent, especially if they were situated in key strategic locations. ‘The fleet in being’, as Mahan and others called it, did not necessarily have to fight; it could be used to put pressure on a hostile power in peacetime and make that power think twice before risking its own fleet, even if it were bigger.57 In war, though, it was the duty of the battle fleet or fleets to destroy the enemy in a decisive battle.

  Mahan and what came to be called in English the navalists did not have it all their own way. There was another school of thought about naval strategy, which initially had the support of Wilhelm’s own Naval Cabinet, which argued that the way to weaken the enemy and win wars was to attack his commerce. In the increasingly interdependent world of the late nineteenth century, few countries could survive long, much less wage war, without seaborne trade. So, instead of investing in large and expensive battleships, it made much more sense to build fast cruisers and torpedo boats and the new submarines to attack enemy merchant shipping. Indeed, the big battleships with their heavy armour plating and armaments also made nice targets for smaller, faster boats, mines, and submarines. The guerre de course, as the French called it, was what the British had used to considerable effect in the Elizabethan age when the government licensed what were essentially pirates to seize the Spanish galleons with their gold and silver from the New World. And when the Great War finally came, that indeed proved to be one of the most effective weapons that Germany used against the Allies: submarine warfare, carried out by an arm of the German navy that had been despised and neglected in peacetime came close to choking off the supplies which Britain needed to carry on the war.

  Mahan’s theories, though, had the great advantages of apparently being proved by history and appealing to national pride. A torpedo boat simply did not compare with a great battleship and commerce-raiding was not the high drama of war in the way in which the clash of mighty ships was. His writings were hugely influential in the United States, where they spurred on the ambition of Roosevelt and others for American colonies and navies, in Britain, where they seemed to explain British world dominance, and in Germany. The Kaiser fell on The Influence of Sea Power upon History; ‘I am just now not reading but devouring Captain Mahan’s book and am trying to learn it by heart,’ he wrote to a friend in 1894. With government support, the book was translated into German and serialised in magazines, and copies were placed on every German naval vessel. Up to that point, Germany’s main military strength had been its army while its navy had been small and mainly performing as a coast guard. Wilhelm now became fixated on the idea that Germany needed a strong navy for the high seas, with big battleships. In a crisis between Greece and the Ottoman Empire over Crete in 1897, the British with their naval power were able to end the dispute while Germany sat on the sidelines. ‘Here again’, Wilhelm complained, ‘one can see how much Germany suffers for lack of a strong fleet.’58 Since he already had supreme command of the navy under the German constitution and had made several changes to its organisation to bring its different departments increasingly under his direct control, the Kaiser was in a position to do something about remedying that, provided, of course, that he could get the necessary funds from the Reichstag.

  Mahan provided the intellectual underpinning but there was something else at work in Wilhelm’s longing for a big navy. He had seen and admired the British navy close up, from the time he was a child. The effect on him had been much like the first sight of a motor car on Toad in Wind in the Willows: ‘Glorious, stirring sight!’As a young man he had gone to represent his family at Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 and the sight of the great naval review had further fuelled his passion for navies. In 1904, when his uncle, now Edward VII, paid a visit to the German naval base at Kiel, the Kaiser toasted him at a dinner of the Kiel Yacht Club (modelled on the one at Cowes): ‘When as a little boy, I was allowed to visit Portsmouth and Plymouth hand in hand with kind aunts and friendly admirals, I admired the proud English ships in those two superb harbours. Then there awoke in me the wish to build ships like these someday, and when I was grown up to possess as fine a navy as the English.’ Wilhelm, almost in tears at his own eloquence, moved three cheers for the king. Edward’s reply was restrained; ‘My dear Willy, you have always been so very nice and friendly with me that I find it difficult to express my gratitude for all your kindness in a way that would really do you justice.’ Bülow forbade the representative of a prominent news agency to wire the Kaiser’s effusions to Berlin: ‘I composed, as often before on such occasions, another – equally friendly, but more sober – Imperial address …’ His master was rather hurt – ‘You’ve left out the best bits’ – but Bülow was firm: ‘If you describe our fleet, constructed with such heavy cost, sometimes with danger, as the outcome of your own personal inclinations and juvenile memories, it will not be easy to obtain further millions for naval construction from the Reichstag.’ The Kaiser got his point: ‘Ach, that damned Reichstag.’59

  The ‘damned Reichstag’ was indeed a problem. It was not showing much enthusiasm for a much bigger navy. The socialists, whose number was growing, liberals and moderates of various stripes, and even some conservatives, were not ready to approve the necessary funding, especially when Wilhelm and his Naval Cabinet could not enunciate a clear case for why such an expense was needed. In 1895 when the Kaiser asked for thirty-six cruisers, the Reichstag gave him four; in 1896 it rejected all his demands. At the beginning of 1897, the Reichstag again challenged the Kaiser’s naval estimates. At that point he turned to the man who, he hoped, would get him his navy.

  Alfred Tirpitz was on the other side of the world, commanding Germany’s East Asian Squadron and, among other things, scouting for a promising harbour on the north China coast. (He chose Kiachow Bay, which Germany duly seized that autumn.) Although he was initially reluctant to give up his command and come back to Germany, Tirpitz bowed to the Kaiser’s wishes and became the Secretary o
f State for the Navy. (He was to hold the office for eighteen years.) It was another crucial step towards 1914: it gave the Kaiser the navy he wanted and altered Germany’s naval strategy. In so doing, it set Germany on a collision course with Britain.

  In 1897, Tirpitz was forty-eight years old, a decade older than Wilhelm. Unlike many of those in the Kaiser’s immediate circle, he was not noble but came from the educated professional classes. His father was a mildly liberal lawyer who became a judge and his mother, a doctor’s daughter. Tirpitz grew up in the east of Prussia in what is now a part of Poland and absorbed the love of Prussia and the strong sense of duty to king and country that was typical of the time and the milieu. His idol then and for the rest of his life was Frederick the Great and he read and re-read Thomas Carlyle’s biography. In his early life, however, the future admiral did not exhibit much promise. He was an indifferent student, showing an aptitude mainly for fighting in the streets. Without the right connections he was unlikely to fare well in the army so, perhaps by default, he chose the navy, which was more open to talent, as a career.

  The Prussian navy he joined in 1865 was small and many of its ships were antiquated. It had to rely on foreign shipyards for repairs. The army had the glorious past, the glamour and the bulk of the resources for Prussia’s defence. As Prussia drew the other German states into its orbit to create Germany, the navy played an insignificant role. Yet it gradually expanded and modernised and Tirpitz steadily ascended the ranks of officers, making his mark as someone who could both master the technical details and think about the wider strategic issues. In 1888 he was appointed captain in command of an armoured cruiser, an impressive promotion for one still so young. By 1892 he was chief of staff for the Naval Command in Berlin. He came to have the nickname ‘The Master’ as well as ‘The Eternal’ (for surviving where others did not).