Death of a Nation
Page 41
The old balance of power system of alliances now creaked inexorably into place with Germany and Austria mobilising in response to Russia’s mobilisation. In turn, Germany insisted on assurances from France that did not come and thus activated the Schlieffen Plan to violate Belgium neutrality in the hope of securing a swift victory against France and avoid having to fight a long, protracted war on two fronts. The British Cabinet, as late as 2nd August, was still prevaricating over whether to intervene in the conflict if France were attacked. The only majority that could be found was on the basis that there was a full-scale German invasion of Belgium, which was actually resisted by the Belgians. However, if they did not resist or only put up token resistance, then no one was in favour of being ‘more Belgian than the Belgians’! Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, in attempting to obtain a definitive expression of British neutrality assured the British ambassador in Berlin of Belgium’s territorial integrity, but to no avail. The Belgians, who had been prepared to repel whoever crossed their borders first and who had troop formations on both her western and eastern frontiers, refused the German request for passage of German troops through their country. The final episode of the diplomatic phase of the crisis turned farcical when the British Cabinet dispatched a telegram to Berlin on 4th August requesting assurances that Belgium’s neutrality be respected. A telegram that still did not state that Great Britain would go to war with Germany if she failed to respect Belgium’s neutrality. By the evening of 4th August, wild rumours were spreading in certain papers that Germany had declared war on Great Britain. The British government rushed to prepare its own declaration, which was presented to the German Embassy, only to discover that the newspaper reports were entirely false. And so, incredibly, Britain, the country least likely to enter the conflict, declared war on Germany. Even belligerent France sat back and waited for Germany to declare war on her.
On 5th August 1914, after expressing the Kaiser’s regret that the allies of Waterloo now found themselves at war, the German Ambassador to London was given a Guard of Honour send-off at Harwich pier by his British counterparts. Kaiser Wilhelm II renounced his honorary titles of British Field Marshal and Admiral of the Fleet, railing against the malice aforethought engineered by Sir Edward Grey and holding his royal cousin, Edward VII, responsible. Wilhelm exclaimed: ‘And thereby the stupidity and ineptitude of an ally is turned into a snare for us. So the famous encirclement of Germany has finally become a fact, despite every effort of our politicians and diplomats to prevent it. The net has been suddenly thrown over our heads and England sneeringly reaps the most brilliant success for her persistently prosecuted anti-German world policy, against which we have proved ourselves helpless, while she twists the noose of our political and economic destruction out of our fidelity to Austria, as we squirm isolated in the net. A great achievement, which arouses the admiration of him who is to be destroyed as its result! Edward VII is stronger after his death than am I who am still alive!’(26) There was no sabre rattling now, nor swaggering confidence, or glee at the onset of war. ‘Him who is to be destroyed’ was grim recognition of the fact that Germany’s fate hung in the balance and that this was going to be a life and death struggle.
In terms of diplomacy and ‘the propaganda war’, France played the shrewdest game. She secretly encouraged Russia to increase the pressure on Austria, failing to pass possibilities for mediation on to her ally, and stating that France was ready to fulfil her obligations as Russia’s ally. France’s support was no less a ‘blank cheque’ to Russia than Germany’s had been to Austria. Unlike Germany, however, France made no attempt to rein in her ally at the last minute. In fact, her actions were quite to the contrary. President Poincaré was determined to keep up the pressure for Russia to act, to wrong-foot Germany and to bring Great Britain into the war. Notes of the French Cabinet meeting of 30th July 1914 show that the talk was of letting Germany put herself in the wrong, of French mobilisation — but not concentration, and of doing nothing to prevent Russian mobilisation, which started the countdown to war. As Ponting states, ‘The (French) Cabinet was determined that, although they were doing nothing to prevent a war, France should avoid the blame for causing it.’ Indeed no man was happier with the outbreak of war than President Poincaré, who wrote in his diary on 3rd August 1914, ‘Never has a declaration of war been welcomed with such satisfaction.’(27) He was the only head of state to express joy at the onset of hostilities.
ESCAPE THROUGH WAR
The war was used by two rotten empires to escape their internal turmoil and shore up their battered international reputations. Russia wanted to restore her reputation both at home and abroad, after her defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05, and the subsequent revolution that followed. Russia’s rapid colonial expansion in the nineteenth century meant that 56 per cent of her population, prior to the First World War, was non-Russian. The war was seen as a way of unifying and rallying a disparate and revolution-ridden empire.
Austria, having had to cede parity to Hungary after her defeat by Prussia, faced ever-greater demands for autonomy from other minorities in her sprawling heterogeneous empire, in which German speakers then accounted for only a quarter of the population. War against the upstart southern Slavs was a way to clamp down on these calls for autonomy, which threatened to break up her multiethnic empire.
In Germany, on 4th August, during the Reichstag’s debate on military appropriations, class and party divisions were swept aside in the so-called Burgfrieden (civic truce) when all the parties buried the hatchet and voted in favour of war credits for Germany to fight a ‘war of defence’.(1) The Kaiser proclaimed, ‘I no longer acknowledge any parties, I only recognise Germans.’ He hoped the war would help heal social, political and class divisions by unifying the nation in a common cause, and prayed that a swift victory would forestall civil strife and the need to accede to greater democratic reforms.clii (2)
The French Third Republic had also been riven with political upheaval and division. However, in the face of the emerging crisis, the parties of the left also agreed to a civic truce, foregoing their opposition to the government and the war in an effort to unite France in a Union Sacrée (Sacred Union). In a speech before the parliament, Prime Minister Viviani stated, ‘In the coming war France will be heroically defended by all its sons, who in a sacred union will not break in the face of the enemy.’(3)
Right up to the outbreak of hostilities on the Continent, Britain was entirely focused on the potential for civil war in Ireland. This civil war did eventually erupt in 1916, just as Britain faced her bloodiest battles on the Somme. Asquith certainly recognised that a war in Europe would distract attentions away from the problems on the home rule front.cliii In a letter to his mistress, Venetia Stanley, on 27th July 1914 Asquith indicated that there were some in the government who saw war as a way out of the Irish crisis. He wrote, ‘Winston on the other hand is all for this way of escape from Irish troubles and when things looked rather better… he exclaimed, moodily, that it looked after all as if we’re in for a “bloody peace”!’(4)
Escape from domestic strife into war was a common theme for all governments of the day. The hope was that a short and decisive war would lift the spirits of the soon-to-be victorious nations. Unfortunately they could not all be victorious, and all of the great nations of Europe were tested to breaking point as they underestimated the cost of a prolonged war. In Britain this led to civil war in Ireland and her eventual independence, while France nearly buckled under the mutinies of front line soldiers who refused to take part in any more offensive operations, with French morale looking as though it was on the brink of collapse by 1917.
Tsar Nicolas, hoping to escape the ever-present threat of revolution, believed a swift victory would dampen the calls for greater democratic reform and revive the fortunes of the monarchy. Conversely, the calamitous performance of Russian armed forces with hopelessly equipped troops and enormous human losses at the front, actually helped to precipitate the revolution
and the murder of the Romanov Dynasty. The Bolsheviks then published the secret agreements between the Tsar’s government and the Allies, which exposed the shady deals about who was going to get what once the war was over. The Bolsheviks called this, ‘The true nature of the war between imperial powers — imperialism at the expense of the workers.’(6) This created even greater cynicism in Russia about who and what they were fighting for and the ensuing civil war killed even more Russians than the Great War itself.
Germany’s hopes for escape from internal poltical strife and divisions ended in not one but two revolutions, the fall of the monarchy, and the proclaimation of a republic which was then saddled with a humiliating and vindictive peace settlement.
Austria-Hungary’s hopes for a swift victorious war, reviving the fortunes of her multinational empire collapsed headlong into the feared ethnic abyss. Her break-up was exacerbated by the spirit of the age, which favoured ethnically homogeneous states. The ‘peace makers’ would assiduously ignore Austria-Hungary’s role as a historical bulwark against Ottoman and Russian expansion as well as her role in keeping the lid on disperate ethnic eruptions in the Balkans and much of Central Europe. Western diplomats largely acted as if she no longer had any legitimate interests in the brave new world they were shaping, where multinational empires belonged on the scrap heap of history. Now there was apparently only room for ever-more ethnically homogenious nation states. France in particular had a desire to see her old rival carved out of existence and to acquire new client states, and the United States was unable to comprehend multinational empires. Hew Strachan sums up American involvement in the redrawing of Europe’s post-war frontiers and the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire thus, ‘Wilson’s presumption against multi-ethnic empires was arrogant and naïve. (As a result of which) in Europe about thirty million people found themselves on the wrong sides of frontiers.’(7) Stranding millions of citizens of the defeated nations on the wrong side of hastily redrawn frontiers was a legacy that became the tinder wood for the Second World War, and one which was only ‘resolved’ by the most barbarous examples of ethnic cleansing in human history.
The First World War did not resolve the ‘German Question’, or restore the balance of power, nor did it create a New World Order. No one was happy with the outcome. Even the French President, Clemenceau, believed the end was only a lull in hostilities before the next war would break out, stating, ‘We have weakened Germany sufficiently to give us respite for twenty years…’(8) Germany had snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory only to be left enfeebled and bitter at the way she had been treated by her European rivals. Britain was bankrupt and Lloyd George found not a single British gold sovereign left in the treasury for him to make his mark on the final Treaty of Versailles; they were all in America.(9) As for Europe, it bled itself near to death in a bitter civil war that surrendered its pre-eminent position in the world. The stalemate in the trenches by May 1918, when Germany had spent its last reserves, France lay exhausted and Britain was bankrupt, would have necessitated a negotiated settlement ‘without annexations or indemnities’ such as that proposed by a majority in the German Reichstag in July 1917, had it not been for the arrival of vast quanties of US men and equipment in the early summer of 1918. In future, the grand geopolitical game would no longer be dominated by the once-great European powers. Neither the US nor Russia were interested in the old balance of power, they had more utopian ideals for New World Orders, none of which hinged on propping up the imperialist structures of the Old World.
Niall Ferguson, during the BBC series of programmes to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, staunchly debated and defended the thesis he had outlined in his superb study of the conflict in The Pity of War. This challenged those who continue to justify one of the most destructive wars in human history largely on the basis of the huge human and material cost alone. Those who have perhaps understandably sought to justify the conflict along the lines of ‘My country right or wrong, it can not all have been in vain,’ were forced to confront an alternate reality:
In the final analysis, the historian is bound to ask if acceptance of German victory on the continent (in the First World War) would have been as damaging to British interests as Grey and other Germanophobes claimed at the time and as the majority of historians have subsequently accepted… With the Kaiser triumphant, Adolf Hitler could have eked out his life as a mediocre postcard painter and a fulfilled old soldier in a German-dominated Central Europe about which he could have found little to complain. And Lenin could have carried on his splenetic scribbling in Zurich, forever waiting for capitalism to collapse — and forever disappointed… There plainly would not have been that great incursion of American financial and military power into European affairs which effectively marked the end of British financial predominance in the world… If the British Expeditionary Force had never been sent, there was no question that the Germans would have won the war… it was the British government which ultimately decided to turn the continental war into a world war… German objectives, had Britain stayed out, would not in fact have posed a direct threat to the Empire; the reduction of Russian power in Eastern Europe, the creation of a Central European Customs Union and the acquistion of French colonies — these were all goals which were complementary with British interests… (The First World War) was nothing less than the greatest error in modern history.(10)
Chronological Time Line of Events Leading To War:
28th June — Assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by Serb terrorists
23rd July — Austrian ultimatum to Serbia
25th July — Serbian reply
26th July — Austria orders partial mobilisation against Serbia
28th July — Austria declares war on Serbia
28th July — Russia partially mobilises along the Austrian border in Galicia
30th July — Russia moves to full mobilisation along Austrian and German borders
31st July — German ultimatum to Russia demanding an end to her mobilisation and Russia’s neutrality
31st July — German and Austrian mobilisation begins
1st August — Germany declares war on Russia
1st August — French mobilisation against Germany begins
1st August — Belgian mobilisation begins against France, Germany and Britain
1st August — German ultimatum to France to end mobilisation and remain neutral
2nd August — Russia first to use force in cross-border attack on Austria
2nd August — German troops cross into Luxembourg and demand right of transit through Belgium
3rd August — Germany declares war on France
4th August — Germany declares war on Belgium and troops invade
4th August — Britain declares war on Germany
6th August — Austria declares war on Russia
7th August — The first British troops land in France
7th August — British and French troops attack the German protectorate of Togoland in Africa. Somewhat ironically they will go on to breach the Congo Act and Belgium’s colonial neutrality by going through the Congo to attack the German colony of Camerooncliv
10th August — German troops attack British forces in South Africa
12th August — Austria-Hungary invades Serbia
12th August — Britain and France declare war on Austria-Hungary
14th August — German forces engage British and French troops during the Battle of the Frontiers from 14th–23rd August, at which point Russian forces invade German East Prussia on 17th August, causing German troops heading for the western theatre of war to be diverted. This effectively causes the failure of the Schlieffen Plan. Mobile warfare stagnates into defensive trench warfare.
THE SUM TOTAL OF WAR
Commercial theft had begun with overseas reserves being frozen. Richard Milton in Best of Enemies — Britain and Germany — 100 Years of Truth and Lies reminds readers of an oft overlooked and largely
forgotten aspect of the commercial character of the war, indeed of all wars, namely to weaken if not destroy your economic competitors, a policy pursued with great vigour by Great Britain from the very outset of the First World War. Commercial theft began with overseas reserves being frozen. Also, German legal patent protection was lifted, which enabled the theft of commercial property rights. Milton writes:
Siemens… was the world’s largest electrical company in 1914, with sister companies in Germany and the UK. Her main activities included electrical communications — telephone, telegraph, undersea cables. Siemens held scores of important UK patents in strategic electrical and communications technologies. The British government decided it was expedient to nationalise the British end of the company and to expropriate all its assets and patents. The family firm in Germany received no compensation.(12)