The War that Ended Peace
Page 31
Old institutions and values were under attack and new ways and new attitudes were emerging. Their world was changing, perhaps too fast, and they had to attempt to make sense of it. ‘What were they thinking?’ is a question often asked about the Europeans who went to war in 1914. The ideas that influenced their view of the world, what they took for granted without discussion (what the historian James Joll called ‘unspoken assumptions’), what was changing and what was not, all are important parts of the context within which war, even a general European war, became a possible option in 1914. Of course, not all Europeans thought and felt the same; there were huge differences by class, country and region. And many people, just as today, were like the writer Stefan Zweig’s parents, living life as it came and not reflecting much about where the world was going. When we look back at the years before 1914 we can see the birth of our modern world, but we should also recognise the persistence and force of older ways of thinking and being. Millions of Europeans, for example, still lived in the same rural communities and in the same manner as their ancestors. Hierarchy and knowing one’s place in it, respect for authority, belief in God, still shaped the way in which Europeans moved through their lives. Indeed, without the persistence of such values, it is hard to imagine how so many Europeans can have gone off willingly to war in 1914.
In the end the decisions that took Europe into that war – or failed to prevent it – were made by a surprisingly small number, and those men – few women played a role – came largely but not entirely from the upper classes, whether the landed aristocracy or the urban plutocracy. Even those, such as Cambon brothers, who came from the middle classes, tended to absorb their values and share their outlook. The class of the ruling elites, whether civilian or military, as well as their hopes and fears is one key to understanding them. Another is their upbringing and education, and yet a third the wider world around them. Their ideas and attitudes had been laid down in their youth twenty or thirty years earlier, but they were aware of how their own societies were evolving and of new ideas that were in the air. They were capable of changing their views just as democratic leaders of today are on such matters as same-sex marriage.
What Kessler also picked up on in his diaries was a sense among artists, intellectuals and political elites that Europe was changing rapidly and not always in ways they liked. Europe’s leaders were frequently uneasy about their own societies. Industrialisation, the scientific and technological revolutions, the play of new ideas and attitudes, were shaking societies across Europe and calling old, long-established practices and values into question. Europe was both a mighty continent and a troubled one. Each of the major powers had prolonged and serious political crises before the war, whether over the Irish question in Britain, the Dreyfus affair in France, the stand-off between crown and parliament in Germany, the conflicts among nationalities in Austria-Hungary or the near revolution in Russia. War was sometimes seen as a way of getting beyond the divisions and the antipathies and perhaps it was. In 1914 in all the belligerent nations there was talk of the nation in arms, the Union Sacrée, the holy union where divisions, whether of class, region, ethnicity or religion, were forgotten and the nation came together in a spirit of unity and sacrifice.
Kessler was part of a generation that lived during one of the greatest and most fast-moving periods of change in the history of human society. By the time he was in his early thirties and went to the Paris Exposition of 1900 (which he thought a ‘disconnected, wild mishmash’),4 Europe was already markedly different from the world of his youth. Population, trade, cities, all were bigger. Science was unlocking one puzzle after another. And there were more factories, more miles of railway tracks, more telegraph lines, more schools. There was more money to spend and more to spend it on: the new cinema, cars, telephones, electricity, bicycles, mass-produced clothing and furniture. Ships were faster and in the summer of 1900 the first Zeppelin was climbing into the sky. In 1906 the first aeroplane flight in Europe took place. The motto for the new Olympics could have stood for Europe: ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’.
Only in part, however. Too often when we look back at the Europe of that last decade of peace, we see the prolonged golden summer of another, more innocent age. In reality European pre-eminence and the claims of European civilisation to be the most advanced in human history were being challenged from without and undermined from within. New York was competing with London and Paris as a centre of finance and the United States and Japan were cutting into European markets and European power around the world. In China and throughout the great Western empires, new nationalist forces were gathering strength.
And change of the sort that Europe was experiencing comes with a price. Europe’s economic transformation brought terrific strains and repeated cycles of boom and bust raised doubts about the stability and future of capitalism itself. (It was not just in Vienna that Jews were identified with capitalism; economic instability also provided additional fuel for anti-Semitism across Europe.)5 All over Europe, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century agricultural prices were depressed (partly because of competition from the New World) and the effects of that depression rippled through farming communities, driving small landowners to bankruptcy and peasant farmers to penury. Although urban populations benefited from cheaper food, each European country also experienced downturns in its business cycle or stagnation and contraction in particular industries. In Austria-Hungary, for example, a Black Friday in 1873 ended a frenzy of speculation and thousands of enterprises, both big and small, including banks, insurance companies and factories, went bankrupt. And unlike our times, most countries did not have safety nets to catch the unemployed, the uninsured, and the unfortunate who tended to come mainly, but not entirely, from the lower classes.
Although working conditions had improved dramatically in the western European countries over the course of the nineteenth century, they were often dreadful further east, where the industrial revolution was newer. Even in developed countries such as Britain and Germany, pay was still low and hours long by comparison with today. After 1900, when prices started to rise, the working classes found themselves increasingly squeezed. Perhaps as important, they felt themselves to be excluded from power and undervalued as human beings.6 The huge migration out of Europe may be an indication of dissatisfaction with the prevailing social and political structures as much as a search for better opportunities. Some 5 per cent of Britain’s population emigrated between 1900 and 1914 and unskilled labourers made up the single largest group by occupation.7 Others chose to stay and fight and throughout Europe in the years before 1914 there was a marked upswing in union membership and strikes. This rise in social tension and labour unrest caused deep concern among military and political elites. Even if revolution were averted, would an alienated working class make good citizens or, perhaps as important, good soldiers? Indeed, would they come to the defence of their country at all? On the other hand, that fear could make war seem desirable, to appeal to patriotism or as an excuse to crack down on the rebellious elements in society.
The old upper classes, whose wealth largely came from landowning, distrusted much of the New World and feared with reason that their hold on power was weakening and their way of life was doomed. In France revolution had already destroyed much of the status and power of the old landed aristocracy, but everywhere across Europe the aristocracy and gentry were under threat from falling agricultural and land prices, their values under challenge from a new urbanised world. Franz Ferdinand, and he spoke for many Austrian conservatives, blamed the Jews for the end of the old hierarchical society which had been based on sound Christian principles.8 In both the Austrian and German officer corps the mood seems to have been one of pessimism about the future of their way of life.9 That may well have affected the willingness of the leading generals to go to war in 1914. As the Prussian Minister of War, General Erich von Falkenhayn, said on 4 August as the war became a general one: ‘Even if we will perish, it was nice.’10
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p; During Europe’s last decades of peace, the upper classes fought a determined rearguard action. Although social mobility was on the increase thanks to economic and social change, birth still counted for much. Even in London, where society had always been more open to talent and wealth, the distinguished American mining engineer and future President Herbert Hoover found the stratified nature of British society ‘a constant marvel – and grief ’.11 Nevertheless, across Europe the newly rich industrialists and financiers were making their way into upper-class circles, often by acquiring titles, or by marrying their children into the aristocracy, a transaction where wealth was exchanged for birth and social status. Yet members of the old upper classes still dominated the higher levels of politics, bureaucracy, the military, and the Church in most European powers in 1914. Moreover, their old values proved surprisingly resilient and indeed seeped out into the rising middle classes, who themselves aspired to become gentlemen by adhering to the same standards of honourable behaviour.
Intangible yet very precious, honour was, so the upper classes believed, something that came with birth; gentlemen had their honour and the lower classes did not. As Europe went through its rapid social changes in the last part of the nineteenth century, honour became both an attribute that the old landowning classes could cling to with increasing determination as something that distinguished them from the newly prosperous middle classes and, for the socially ambitious, a mark of a higher and better social status. Honour could be lost by unworthy behaviour, although what that meant was never entirely clear-cut, or by failing to defend it, with one’s life if necessary by committing suicide or by fighting a duel which often amounted to the same thing. When Colonel Alfred Redl, a high-ranking intelligence officer in Austria-Hungary, was discovered to be selling his country’s top-secret military plans to the Russians, Conrad’s first reaction was that Redl must be given a revolver to do the right thing. He was left alone with a pistol and duly blew his own brains out.
Duels, which were fought over matters of honour, not only persisted in nineteenth-century Europe but indeed increased, among students, for example, in universities in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The duel by this point had become so surrounded with rules and rituals that guides had to be drawn up to deal with such technical questions as choice of weapons – usually swords or pistols – and place, and, even more complicated, who was entitled to give a challenge (honour was compromised if the challenger was not worthy of being an opponent) and on what grounds (cheating at cards or making insulting remarks, for example; according to one Austrian guide, staring at someone while toying with a dog whip was quite enough).12 The closest equivalent we have today are the street gangs where the slightest signs of disrespect can lead to death.
Although duelling was outlawed in most European countries, the authorities generally looked the other way and the courts were slow to convict. Indeed, those in positions of authority, including the Hungarian Prime Minister István Tisza, sometimes resorted to duels themselves. In Budapest there were special fencing schools for those whose skills needed a quick tuning up.13 Georges Clemenceau, the radical French politician who was Prime Minister between 1906 and 1909 and again in the latter days of the Great War, fought a dozen duels against political opponents. Even as an old man he practised fencing every morning.
The Dreyfus affair produced its own crop of duels. Duelling was accepted in artistic circles as well with the young Marcel Proust challenging a critic of his work while Claude Debussy drew a challenge from the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck for not casting his mistress in Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, for which Maeterlinck had written the libretto.14 In Germany Kessler challenged a bureaucrat who blamed him for a scandal caused by a show of Rodin drawings of naked young men. The only European country where duelling was no longer accepted as something that gentlemen did was Great Britain. But then, as the Kaiser was fond of saying, the British were a nation of shopkeepers.
Honour and its bodyguard the duel were taken particularly seriously in the armies of continental Europe. As a handbook on the Austrian army said in 1889: ‘The strict interpretation of military honor ennobles the officer corps in its entirety and endows it with the character of knighthood.’ (The late nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the Middle Ages was yet another way of avoiding the modern world.) In the French army officers could be dismissed for refusing a challenge. Although there were anti-duelling campaigns across Europe, they made little headway against the military authorities. In 1913 Falkenhayn protested to the German Chancellor that ‘the roots of the duel are embedded and grow in our code of honor. This code of honor is a valuable, and for the Officer Corps, an irreplaceable treasure.’15 Indeed, as the high commands worried increasingly about the dilution of their officer corps by the sons of the bourgeoisie, duels and codes of honour became more important rather than less as ways of instilling the right values.16
Since many of the men in charge of Europe’s international relations came from the same upper-class backgrounds (and often were related), it is not surprising that they too used the language of honour and shame. (We still use it from time to time today although we are more likely now to talk in terms of a nation’s prestige or influence.) In 1909, when Russia gave way in the crisis over Bosnia-Herzegovina, a Russian general confided to his diary: ‘Shame! Shame! It would be better to die!’17 In 1911, in an interview with the newly appointed Russian ambassador to Bulgaria, the tsar stressed that Russia would not be ready for a war until 1917 at the earliest but then added: ‘Though if the most vital interests and the honour of Russia were at stake, we might, if it were absolutely necessary, accept a challenge in 1915 …’18 Unfortunately for Europe, what honour and insult consisted of was often determined as subjectively as it was for individuals. The cause might seem trifling, said General Friedrich von Bernhardi, a well-known writer on military matters, but defending the nation’s honour was justification for war: ‘Nations and States can achieve no loftier consummation than to stake their whole power on upholding their independence, their honour, and their reputation.’19 The conservative historian Treitschke, who so influenced the generation that was in power by 1914, even used the language of the duel: ‘If the flag of the State is insulted, it is the duty of the State to demand satisfaction, and if satisfaction is not forthcoming, to declare war, however trivial the occasion may appear, for the State must strain every nerve to preserve for itself the respect which it enjoys in the state system.’20
There was something almost desperate in the stress on honour, whether for the individual or the state. It reflected fears that the material success of Europe, so evident in the new cities, the railways, or the great department stores, was leading to a coarser, more selfish and more vulgar society. Was there not a spiritual emptiness which organised religion seemed incapable of filling? That disgust with the modern world and what the eminent German poet Stefan George called ‘the cowardly years of trash and triviality’ led some intellectuals to welcome war as something that would cleanse society. The German Walther Rathenau, who was an unusual combination of a very successful industrialist and a leading intellectual, published Zur Kritik der Zeit in 1912 in which he expressed concerns about the effects of industrialisation and the loss of ideals and culture. As he wrote to a friend just before the Great War: ‘Our era is one of the most difficult of the numerous transitional periods – ice age, catastrophes.’21 Rathenau nevertheless was an optimist of sorts, believing that the world would eventually regain the spiritual, cultural and moral values which it was losing in the early stages of capitalism and industrialisation.22 His older compatriot Friedrich Nietzsche had entertained no such hopes: ‘For long now our entire European culture has been moving with a tormenting tension that grows greater from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restless, violent, precipitate, like a river that wants to reach its end.’23
Nietzsche, who became a professor in Basle at the remarkably young age of twenty-four, was brilliant, complicated, and sure that he was right.
What he was being right about is difficult if not impossible to pin down since he wrote copiously and frequently contradicted himself. What drove him on was a conviction that Western civilisation had gone badly wrong, indeed had been going wrong for the past two millennia, and that most of the ideas and practices which dominated it were completely wrong. Humanity, in his view, was doomed unless it made a clean break and started to think clearly and allow itself to feel deeply.24 His targets included positivism, bourgeois conventions, Christianity (his father was a Protestant minister) and indeed all organised religion, perhaps all organisation itself. He was against capitalism and modern industrial society, and ‘the herd people’ it produced. Humans, Nietzsche told his readers, had forgotten that life was not orderly and conventional, but vital and dangerous. To reach the heights of spiritual reawakening it was necessary to break out of the confines of conventional morality and religion. God, he famously said, is dead. (Surely one of the reasons that Nietzsche’s thought was so appealing is that he had a gift for aphorisms and the telling phrase, like the philosopher Jacques Derrida in a later generation.) Those who embraced the challenge Nietzsche was throwing down would become the Supermen. In the coming century, there would be a ‘new party of life’ which would take humanity to a higher level, ‘including the merciless destruction of everything that is degenerate and parasitical’. Life, he said, is ‘appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity …’25 The young Serbian nationalists who carried out the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and so precipitated the Great War were deeply impressed by Nietzsche’s views.