The Proud Tower (48 page)

In the committee on limiting new weapons the negative trend had become somewhat embarrassing. Everyone was therefore delighted to fall upon the question of dumdum, or expanding, bullets, which offered an opportunity both to outlaw something and to vent the general anti-British feeling of the time. Developed by the British to stop the rush of fanatical tribesmen, the bullets were vigorously defended by Sir John Ardagh against the heated attack of all except the American military delegate, Captain Crozier, whose country was about to make use of them in the Philippines. In warfare against savages, Ardagh explained to an absorbed audience, “men penetrated through and through several times by our latest pattern of small calibre projectiles, which make a small clean hole,” were nevertheless able to rush on and come to close quarters. Some means had to be found to stop them. “The civilized soldier when shot recognizes that he is wounded and knows that the sooner he is attended to the sooner he will recover. He lies down on his stretcher and is taken off the field to his ambulance, where he is dressed or bandaged by his doctor or his Red Cross Society according to the prescribed rules of the game as laid down in the Geneva Convention.

“Your fanatical barbarian, similarly wounded, continues to rush on, spear or sword in hand; and before you have had time to represent to him that his conduct is in flagrant violation of the understanding relative to the proper course for the wounded man to follow—he may have cut off your head.” Behind the flippant words Ardagh was making the point that war was a bitter business and, more politely than Fisher, was ridiculing the notion that it could be civilized. Unimpressed, the delegates voted 22–2, against the unyielding opposition of Britain supported by the United States, to prohibit the use of the dumdum bullet.

Unanimity, elusive so far, was at last achieved on one topic: the launching of projectiles or explosives from balloons. Here was something, almost untried, that almost everyone was willing to ban, especially the Russians, for whom the prospect of adding a new dimension to warfare was altogether too much. As Colonel Jilinsky almost plaintively put it, “In the opinion of the Russian Government the various means of injuring the enemy now in use are sufficient.” As regards air warfare, most of the delegates were willing to agree and a permanent prohibition was voted. The committee congratulated itself. Then suddenly at the next meeting Captain Crozier, having had serious second thoughts after consultation with Captain Mahan, raised an objection. They were proposing to ban forever, he said, a weapon of which they had no experience. New developments and inventions might soon make airships dirigible, enabling them to be steered by motor power over the area of battle and to take part at a critical moment with possibly decisive effect, thus in the long run sparing lives and shortening the conflict. Would it be in the humanitarian interest to prevent such a development? Instead of permanent prohibition, Captain Crozier proposed a five-year ban at the end of which period they would have a better idea of the capabilities of airships. This time impressed, the delegates agreed.

A proposed ban on the use of asphyxiating gas failed of unanimity by one vote—Captain Mahan’s. He stubbornly refused to withdraw his negative on the ground that the United States was averse to restricting “the inventive genius of its citizens in providing weapons of war.” Nothing had yet been done toward inventing it, and if it were, Mahan believed that gas would be less inhuman and cruel than submarine attack, which the Conference had not outlawed. Against his lone negative, nevertheless, the delegates adopted a ban on asphyxiating gas.

In the world outside The Hague, Chinese nationalists under the name “Righteous Fists,” or Boxers, were attacking foreigners in Pekin, Boers and British had reached the edge of war in South Africa, Americans had launched war upon Filipinos, there were labour riots in Italy, police shot and killed demonstrators in Spain, a parliamentary crisis over manhood suffrage exploded in Belgium and everyone was talking about the assault on the French President at the races. “How bored Europe would be if it were not for France,” patriotically reflected the correspondent of
Le Temps.
M. Bourgeois rushed home to try his hand in the crisis but decided after all not to undertake the burden of government, and, as Jaurès commented rather sourly, “the angel of arbitration flies back once more to The Hague, to return when the danger is over.”

Amid the charms of the Huis ten Bosch, the prospect of a largely negative outcome, so lightly assumed at the start, began to cause anxiety about the public reaction, especially that of the Socialists, society’s “awful conscience.” If the Conference were to end in mere pious but empty ceremony, it was feared, the Socialists would triumphantly denounce the failure as further evidence of the impotence of governments and declare themselves the true representatives of humanity against its masters. Delegates quoted to each other Baron d’Estournelles’ story that when he left Paris, Jaurès had said to him, “Go on, do all you can at The Hague, but you will labour in vain. You can accomplish nothing there, your schemes will fail and we shall triumph.” Through the summer, as one delegate said, the Socialists prowled around The Hague like a cat around a bird cage. In Amsterdam they organized a mass meeting of three thousand which denounced the pretended efforts of the governments and declared peace could never be achieved except through the organization of the masses against the capitalists.

“Why does no one write over the door of the Conference,
Mene
,
Tekel, Upharsin?
” asked the anonymous correspondent of
Le Temps
who left such a vivid record of that summer. Watching Dutch fishermen’s children playing in the streets and pairs of smiling girls who strolled by coquettishly, he wrote, “If this great assembly does not achieve its purpose, the stupid rivalries of states may one day mow down these young people and lay their corpses by millions on the battlefields.”

Hope for the Conference now lay in the Arbitration Commission. The chief delegates of the major powers, Pauncefote, White, Bourgeois, Munster, de Staal, all sat on this commission; its labours were the center of attention; its members, drawn forward by the pull of public opinion, really worked; discussions were animated and strong feelings generated. The British, Russians and Americans had each come with a draft proposal for a permanent tribunal; Pauncefote’s plan, which did not require obligatory submission of disputes, was accepted as the basis for discussion. Count Münster, flanked by his two professors, declared from the start that Germany was utterly opposed to arbitration of any kind in any form. The whole idea was nothing but “humbug,” he told White, and “injurious” to Germany because his country, as he was not shy in explaining, “is prepared for war as no other country is or can be” and could mobilize in ten days, faster than France or Russia or any other power. To submit to arbitration a dispute which might lead finally to war would simply give rival powers time to catch up and cancel Germany’s advantage of rapid mobilization. “Exactly,” noted the Kaiser in the margin of Münster’s report, “that’s the object of this whole hoax.”

The Kaiser invariably became frenetic at the mere mention of arbitration, which he saw an incursion on his personal sovereignty and as a plot to deprive Germany of the gains achieved by her matchless military organization. Nevertheless, with Pauncefote, White and Bourgeois determined to achieve something, the Commission persisted in the effort to hammer out some form of tribunal. The civilian delegates laboured against the heavy resistance of their own governments and military colleagues, who were deeply disturbed at the least hint of the compulsory principle. No one wanted to give up an inch of sovereignty or an hour of military advantage and at times the outlook seemed hopeless. On a day when the wind blew from the sea, Baroness von Suttner wrote in her diary, “Cold, cold are all hearts—cold as the draft that penetrates the rattling windows. I feel chilled to the bone.”

But the necessity of presenting some result to the public was overriding, and tentatively, bit by bit, a tribunal, though puny, began to take shape. Any suggestion of giving it authority over disputes involving “honor or vital interest” caused it to totter toward collapse. The Austrian delegate saw no objection to a tribunal which could decide on minor matters of dispute “such as for instance the interpretation of a Postal or Sanitary commission,” but he resolutely rejected anything more. The Balkan delegates in a group—Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece—created a crisis when they threatened to walk out if a provision for “investigating commissions” was retained. With utmost difficulty, one agreement at a time, the tribunal’s powers and procedures were defined—but not unanimously.

Germany would agree to nothing. The other nations who equally disliked the idea without wishing to say so could rely on Münster’s daily negative vote to do their work for them. A tribunal without Germany’s adhesion, White wrote despairingly, would seem to the world “a failure and perhaps a farce.” He argued earnestly and daily with the German delegates to convince them that their obstruction would only result in the Czar becoming the idol of the plain people of the world and the Kaiser the object of its hatred. They had no right to allow their “noble and gifted” sovereign to be put in this position. He repeated D’Estournelles’ story of what Jaurès had said, and when this seemed to make an impression he repeated it in a letter to Bülow and sought out Stead and told him to use it “in every way.” Stead complied with such zest that Professor Zorn complained of the “terrorism of the Stead-Suttner press” and warned his government that to abstain from all collaboration raised the danger of Germany being denounced as the “sole troubler of peace.” From St. Petersburg the German Ambassador warned Bülow that if the Conference brought forth nothing the Czar would be personally insulted and the world would ascribe the “responsibility and odium of failure to us.”

Pressure began to tell. Münster was wavering when a despatch arrived from Berlin stating that the Kaiser had declared himself “strongly and finally” against arbitration. In desperation White persuaded Münster to send Zorn to Berlin and he himself sent Frederick Holls, secretary of the American delegation, to present the issue in person to the Kaiser and his ministers. Friday’s scheduled meeting of the Arbitration Commission was postponed until they could report back on Monday. Returning to his hotel White found a visitor, “of all men in the world,” Thomas B. Reed, whose “bigness, heartiness, shrewdness” and fascinating conversation helped him to pass the anxious weekend.

In Berlin the Kaiser eluded the interviewers but not a report from Bülow which regretfully advised that the “very popular” idea of arbitration had taken hold of the Conference, won the support of the English, Italians, Americans and even the Russians, leaving Germany in isolated opposition.The margin grew lurid with the Kaiser’s disgust. “I consented to all this nonsense only in order that the Czar should not lose face before Europe,” he scribbled. “In practice however I shall rely on God and my sharp sword! And I shit on all their decisions.”

This evidently being recognized as His Majesty’s gracious consent, word that Germany would sign the arbitration agreement was received at The Hague two days later. At last something would come of the Conference and the awful spectre of nullity and a Socialist triumph receded. Delegates worked mightily to draw up a convention of sixty-one articles, while applying “a zeal almost macabre” to removing any trace of compulsory character. They were ready for a final vote in the closing week of the Conference when it was suddenly frustrated by, of all people, the Americans. Delegates were stunned. Deeply embarrassed, White announced that his delegation could not sign Article 27, the particular contribution of the French, which required signatories to consider it their “duty” to remind parties to a dispute of the existence of the tribunal.

White’s painful predicament was the work of Captain Mahan, who was in turn reacting indirectly to Stead. Under the influence of Stead’s over-enthusiastic reports, the
Manchester Guardian
had hailed the draft of the Arbitration Convention as a great pacific instrument which if it had been operative in 1898 would have required the European powers to bring Spain and the United States to arbitration and would have prevented the war between them. Reading the article, Mahan was appalled. The “honest collision” might have been missed. For the future he saw a net of entanglements spreading before America’s unwary feet. Summoning his fellow delegates he insisted that Article 27 would commit the United States to interfere in European affairs and vice versa, and if signed, would lead the Senate to refuse to ratify the tribunal. Mesmerized and convinced by his implacable logic, White and the others on the delegation submitted, although all their careful work was risked. If the Americans refused to sign a part of the agreement, other nations might back out and the whole delicately assembled structure fall apart. Urgently White tried to persuade the French to drop Article 27 or at least qualify the word “duty.” Bourgeois and D’Estournelles refused to change so much as a comma. Fiasco loomed. Closing ceremonies were scheduled for the following day, July 29. In desperate maneuvers White sought a compromise. At the last minute the Americans arranged to sign under a qualifying phrase disclaiming any obligation to “intrude, mingle or entangle” themselves in European politics. By forceps and barely breathing, Arbitration was pulled into the world.

Total results of the Hague Conference were three Conventions: on Arbitration; Laws and Customs of War on Land; and Extension of the Geneva Rules to Maritime Warfare; three Declarations: on Projectiles from Balloons, Asphyxiating Gases, and Expanding Bullets; six “Wishes” for future accomplishment; and a Resolution. The last expressed the opinion of the Conference that limitation of military expenditures and of new types of weapons was “highly desirable for the moral and material benefit of humanity” and should be the subject of “further study” by the states. It was a pious dirge for all that was left of the original Russian purpose, yet the delegates did not seem ready to bury the Hague idea. However cynically they had come and however stunted their product, most of them could not but feel a sense of having participated in something important and a desire that the foundations they had laid should not be lost. They registered the feeling in a “Wish” for a Second Conference at some future date—although the idea did not please everyone. Count Münster crustily departed saying he had no desire to see international conferences perpetuate themselves like “bad weeds.”