Europe: A History (182 page)

Vienna was in aggressive mood. The Chief of Staff, General von Hoetzendorff, had asked his German counterpart six months earlier, ‘Why are we waiting?’ He was now doubly incensed by the delays. Even the sceptical Hungarian Prime Minister, Count Tisza, had been won over. ‘My dear friend,’ he told the Belgian ambassador on 31 July, ‘Germany is invincible.’
¹²⁹

The poet Stefan Zweig, who would later condemn the war, was moved by the crowds of patriotic demonstrators. He had just cut short a seaside holiday at Le Coq, near Ostend, and had arrived home on the last Orient Express to run. ‘You may hang me from a lamp-post’, he had told a Belgian friend, ‘if ever the Germans march into Belgium.’ He had then watched German military trains rolling to the frontier at Herbesthal:

As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime, that they belonged together, [acknowledging] the unknown power which had lifted them out of their everyday existence.
¹³⁰

Zweig was fearing service on the Eastern Front. ‘My great ambition… is to conquer in France,’ he confessed, ‘the France that one must chastise because one loves her.’ He would soon print a public farewell to friends in the enemy camp: ‘I
shall not try to moderate this [widespread] hatred against you, which I do not feel myself, [but which] brings forth victories and heroic strength.’
¹³¹

On 3 August, as Zweig arrived at Vienna’s Westbahnhof, Lev Davidovich Bronshtein—Trotsky—departed. He had seen the same demonstrations, had seen the confusion of his socialist colleagues in the offices of the
Arbeiterzeitung
, and had been warned about internment. He immediately took train to Zurich, where he began to pen
The War and the International
—a work where he mobilized famous phrases such as ‘the self-determination of the nations’ and ‘the United States of Europe’ for his vision of a socialist future.
¹³²

Lenin, in contrast, lay low in his refuge at Poronin, near Zakopane in Galicia, confident that the opposition of the German Social Democrats would prevent a major conflict. When he heard that his German comrades had voted for war credits, he was reported to exclaim, ‘From today I shall cease being a socialist and shall become a communist.’
¹³³
In nearby Cracow, the university year had just finished. Graduating students, many of them reserve officers, were leaving to join their regiments—some to fight for the Emperor-King, some for the Kaiser, and some for the Tsar.

In St Petersburg, the court of Nicholas II was coming to terms with the fateful decisions of previous days. The Tsar had ordered full mobilization on Thursday 17/30 July, apparently without consulting the Minister of War. The resultant German ultimatum had been left unanswered. St Petersburg heard of Germany’s declaration of war on the Saturday, and had followed suit on the Sunday. Monday 21 July/3 August, therefore, was the first full day at war. At 7 p.m. military censorship came into force. The newspapers announced that ‘the nation must accept the paucity of information released, content in the knowledge that this sacrifice is dictated by military necessity’.
¹³⁴
That day, the Tsar visited Moscow, and gave a speech in the Great Palace of the Kremlin. Their Imperial Majesties went to pray in the chapel of Our Lady of Iveron, an icon which celebrated Russia’s earliest religious links with Mt Athos.

The optimists in Russia put their faith in the
Bol’shaya Voennaya Programmas
the ‘Great Military Programme’, which had been launched early in 1914 and which aimed, among other things, to cut the imperial army’s mobilization time to eighteen days. As the British military attaché reported, their hope was that ‘the Russians would be in Berlin before the Germans were in Paris.’ The pessimists, headed by Pyotr Durnovo, the Minister of the Interior and Director of Police, felt a strong sense of foreboding. Durnovo had reported to the Tsar in February that if the war went badly ‘a social revolution in its most extreme form will be unavoidable’.
¹³⁵

At Vevey in Switzerland, Romain Rolland, musicologist, novelist, and star of the international literary set, watched aghast as his friends succumbed to war fever. Furious at the stance of the Vatican, he claimed that Europe had lost all moral guidance since the death of Tolstoy, whose biography he had just written:

3–4 August
I’m devastated. I would like to be dead. It is horrible to live in the middle of this demented humanity, and to be present, but powerless, at the collapse of civilization. This European War is the greatest catastrophe in history, for centuries. [It’s] the ruin of our holiest hopes for human brotherhood I’m almost alone in Europe.
¹³⁶

The outbreak of war in 1914 provoked more ponderings on the subject of historical causation than any other modern event. Many people were led to believe that a catastrophe of such titanic proportions must have been determined by causes of a similarly titanic scale. Few imagined that individuals alone were to blame. Huge works were written about the war’s ‘profound causes’. Indeed, historians were still arguing these issues out when a second world war gave them even more food for thought.

The word ‘titanic’ is not irrelevant. Shortly before the First World War, Europe had been shocked by a huge maritime disaster which all the experts had said could not happen. On 15 April 1912 the largest steamship in the world, the White Star liner SS
Titanic
of 43,500 tons, struck an Atlantic iceberg on her maiden voyage and sank with the loss of 1,513 lives. Given the vessel’s size, it was obvious that an accident would have unprecedented consequences. On the other hand, there was no reason to relate the causes of the disaster to its scale. Two committees of inquiry pointed to very specific features of the particular ship and the particular voyage. These included the design of the hull, the provision of lifeboats, the unusual state of the Arctic ice, the excessive speed, the northerly course set by Capt. Smith, and the lack of co-ordinated action during the one and three-quarter hours following the initial collision with the iceberg. Historians of shipwrecks clearly have to inquire why the
Titanic
sank, but also why so many other huge ships have been able to cross the Atlantic in perfect safety.
¹³⁷

The analogy with wars is not entirely out of place. Historians of wars have to enquire not only why peace failed in 1914, but also why it held in 1908 or in 1912 and in 1913. The more recent experience of the ‘Cold War’ has shown, despite the potential for colossal disaster, that armageddon does not necessarily flow from the dynamic of two rival military and political blocs.

No one did more to provoke discussion of these issues than the wiseacre of Magdalen College, A. J. P. Taylor. For the generations involved, war history had been heavily coloured by emotions and moral overtones fired by the death of millions; and it took a man of monumental irreverence to challenge conventional attitudes. Addressing the events of 1914, Taylor named the persons who appeared to have caused the war single-handed: ‘The three men who made the decisions, even if they, too, were the victims of circumstances, were Berchtold [the Austrian Foreign Minister], Bethmann Hollweg, and the dead man, Schlieffen.’ As an incurable germanophobe, he said nothing about Sir Edward Grey.
¹³⁸

In another brilliant essay on the military logistics of 1914, Taylor approached an extreme position where the very notion of causation seemed redundant: ‘It is the
fashion nowadays to seek profound causes for great events. But perhaps the war that broke out in 1914 had no profound causes… In July 1914, things went wrong. The only safe explanation is that things happen because they happen.’
¹³⁹

Elsewhere, he reverted to the more convincing standpoint, which explains the great catastrophes of history in terms of a fatal combination of general and specific causes. The ‘profound causes’, on which other historians had laid such stress, were shown to be an essential element both of the pre-war peace and of the breakdown of peace. Without the ‘specific causes’, they were of little consequence:

The very things which are blamed for the war of 1914—secret diplomacy, the Balance of Power, the great continental armies—also gave Europe a period of unparalleled peace … It’s no good asking ‘What factors caused the outbreak of war?’. The question is rather ‘Why did the factors that had long preserved the peace of Europe fail to do so in 1914?’
¹⁴⁰

In other words, there had to be a spark to ignite the keg of gunpowder. Without the spark, the gunpowder remains inert. Without the open keg, the sparks are harmless.

To illustrate the point, Taylor might well have chosen the case of the
Titanic
. Instead, he chose the analogy not of ships but of motor cars. By so doing, he emphasized the dynamic element common to most variants of catastrophe theory, where events are seen to be moving inexorably towards the critical point:

Wars are much like road accidents. They have a general and a particular cause at the same time. Every road accident is caused in the last resort by the invention of the internal combustion engine… [But] the police and the courts do not weigh profound causes. They seek a specific cause for each accident—driver’s error, excessive speed, drunkenness, faulty brakes, bad road surface. So it is with wars.
¹⁴¹

^*
The Kaiser’s comment was wrongly translated and widely publicized in Britain as ‘a small, contemptible army’—hence the chosen nickname of the British Expeditionary Force, ‘The Old Contemptibles’.

*
‘Modernism’ is usually reserved for cultural as opposed to socio-economic trends. In the 19th c. it was used as a pejorative term by Catholic conservatives (see p. 797), but was later employed as a catch-all label for all avant-garde artistic movements (see p. 854).

TENEBRAE

Europe in Eclipse, 1914–1945

T
HERE
are shades of barbarism in twentieth-century Europe which would once have amazed the most barbarous of barbarians. At a time when the instruments of constructive change had outstripped anything previously known, Europeans acquiesced in a string of conflicts which destroyed more human beings than all past convulsions put together. The two World Wars of 1914–18 and 1939–45, in particular, were destructive beyond measure; and they spread right across the globe. But their main focus lay unquestionably in Europe. What is more, in the course of those two war-bloodied generations, the two most populous countries of Europe fell into the hands of murderous political regimes whose internal hatreds killed even more tens of millions than their wars did. A rare voice of conscience said early on that something vile was happening:

Why is this age worse than earlier ages? In a stupor of grief and dread have we not fingered the foulest wounds and left them unhealed by our hands?
In the west, the fading light still glows and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun, but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses, and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in.
¹

Future historians, therefore, must surely look back on the three decades between August 1914 and May 1945 as the era when Europe took leave of its senses. The totalitarian horrors of communism and fascism, when added to the horrors of total war, created an unequalled sum of death, misery, and degradation. When choosing the symbols which might best represent the human experience of those years, one can hardly choose anything other than the agents of twentieth-century death: the tank, the bomber, and the gas canister: the trenches, the tombs of unknown soldiers, the death camps, and the mass graves.

Consideration of these horrors, which overshadow all the life-giving
achievements of the era, prompts a number of general remarks. In the course of the horrors, Europeans threw away their position of world leadership: Europe was eclipsed through European folly. In 1914 Europe’s power and prestige were unrivalled: Europeans led the field in almost any sphere one cared to mention—science, culture, economics, fashion. Through their colonial empires and trading companies, European powers dominated the globe. By 1945 almost all had been lost: the Europeans had fought each other to the point of utter exhaustion. European political power was greatly diminished; Europe’s military and economic power was overtaken; European colonial power was no longer sustainable. European culture lost its confidence; European prestige, and moral standing, all but evaporated. With one notable exception, every single European state that entered the fray in 1914 was destined to suffer military defeat and political annihilation by 1945. The one country to avoid total disaster was only able to survive by surrendering its political and financial independence. When the wartime dust finally settled, the European ruins were controlled by two extra-European powers, the USA and the USSR, neither of which had even been present at the start.