The Proud Tower (53 page)

It was this prepossession that required both the British and American governments to support inclusion of disarmament on the agenda. Neither Grey nor Roosevelt believed discussion would lead to any practical result and in talks with foreign ambassadors both explained that they were obliged to insist on it for “the sake of public opinion.” Germany, Austria and Russia were determined to exclude it for fear that discussion might somehow trap them into an unwanted position. After months of intricate diplomatic negotiation, the Conference was finally announced without disarmament on the agenda and with so many reservations included in the various acceptances that it seemed probable the Conference might break up as soon as it met. Great Britain, the United States and Spain reserved the right to bring disarmament up for discussion; Germany, Austria and Russia reserved the right to abstain or withdraw if it were mentioned, and other nations reserved a variety of rights in between.

So burdened, the nations assembled on June 15, 1907. The first decade of the new century, now three quarters old, was already marked by three characteristics: a bursting economy, a burst of creative vigor in the arts, and the sound of steady “drumming like a noise in dreams.” For all who did not hear it there were many who did, not all with dread. In the German Navy it was the custom of officers to drink to “The Day.” At a spa near Bayreuth a group of German students and young naval officers made friends with a visiting Englishman and “in the friendliest and most amiable fashion discussed with me the coming struggle between our two countries.” They argued that every empire had its day. England’s decline must come as had that of Spain, Holland and France. Who should fill the throne but the strong, wise, noble and gifted nation whose development had been the outstanding factor of the Nineteenth Century and who now stood “poised for heroic enterprise.” Germany seemed not the only one so poised. The new aggressive powers exhibited by Japan and the United States convinced Europe that these nations were approaching a clash. Following the furor caused in Japan by the California Exclusion Act, both these nations believed it themselves. “The tendency is toward war,” wrote Secretary Root, “not now but in a few years’ time.”

The prospect was viewed by many of the ruling class more matter-of-factly than tragically. Lord Lansdowne, opposing the Old Age Pensions Bill in the House of Lords, said it would cost as much as a great war and the expense of the South African War was a better investment. “A war, terrible as are its consequences, has at any rate the effect of raising the moral fibre of the country” whereas the measure under debate would weaken it. And if the prospect of war appalled the spokesmen of the working class, violence as such did not. Georges Sorel in his
Reflections on Violence
in 1908 claimed that proletarian violence exercised in the interest of class war was a “fine heroic thing,” a civilizing agent that could save the world from barbarism.

The Second Conference was larger in size, longer in duration and more voluminous in results than the First, but otherwise not very different. It lasted through October—for four months instead of two—and produced thirteen conventions, as compared to the previous three. Because the United States had insisted on the presence of the Latin-American states, much to the distaste of the European powers, 44 nations and 256 delegates were present as compared to 26 and 108 at the First Conference. The larger number made it necessary to meet in the Ridderzaal, seat of the Netherlands Parliament in the center of The Hague, rather than in the Huis ten Bosch in its lovely park. Many of the delegates were the same as before; many of the notable ones of 1899 were missing. Bourgeois of France and Beernaert of Belgium again headed their respective delegations, but Münster, Pauncefote and De Staal were dead; Andrew White had not returned; Mahan and Fisher were absent in body if not in spirit. The new president was again a Russian, M. Nelidov, an elderly diplomat like his predecessor whose voice and manner revealed his lack of sympathy with the Conference and who, being in ill health most of the time, left command of the Russian delegation to the pompous Professor de Martens who himself suffered from gout and was often confined to his room. The Russian delegation seemed divided among itself with its members quartered in separate hotels.

Baron d’Estournelles, who was to share the Nobel Peace Prize with Beernaert two years later, was again present for France, and Professor Zorn, looking yellow and emaciated, from Germany. Among the newcomers were Count Tornielli, representing Italy, whose wife had been seated next to President Loubet on the terrible day at Auteuil, and the notorious Marquis de Soveral, who represented Portugal. An intimate friend of King Edward, he was known as the “Blue Monkey” in London Society where it was said, “he made love to all the most beautiful women and all the nicest men were his friends.” A whole block of newcomers was provided by the “impeccable dandies” of Latin America.

Pauncefote’s firm presence was missed. When he died in 1902 Roosevelt sent his body home to England in a cruiser, saying, “I did not do it because he was Ambassador but because he was a damned good fellow.” His place was taken, if not filled, by a judge, Sir Edward Fry, a tiny, unworldly Quaker of eighty-two, yet not so unworldly as to want to yield control of the British delegation to his associate, Sir Ernest Satow, an experienced diplomat, formerly minister to Pekin, who spoke French fluently which Fry did not.

Dominating the Conference were the chief delegates of the United States and Germany: Mr. Joseph Hodges Choate, who at seventy-five with white chin whiskers seemed to personify the Nineteenth Century, and Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, suave and up to date, who though only ten years younger was clearly a man of the new age. Choate was genial and shrewd, famous as a raconteur, Ambassador to England from 1899 to 1905 and a lawyer by profession whose brilliant defence of the rights of property before the Supreme Court in 1895 held off the income tax for another eighteen years. He owned a summer home at Stockbridge designed by Stanford White. His white hair gleaming beneath a glossy silk hat became a landmark of the Conference.

Baron Marschall, Ambassador to Constantinople, a huge handsome man with two
alt-Heidelberg
dueling scars on his cheek, wore “a mask of haughty intelligence that seemed to despise the
ensemble
of human folly.” He played chess and the piano, cultivated roses, and smoked tiny cigarettes endlessly, occasionally flicking the fallen ash from the silk lapel of his coat with a gesture that seemed to say he treated human issues with no more compunction. He despised public opinion which he said was whatever the newspapers chose to make it. A government that could not control the press was not worth its salt. The best way to control a newspaper, he advised, was by “banging the door in its face.” Equally firm were his opinions on his fellow delegates: De Martens was a “charlatan … with an explosive lack of tact”; Barbarosa of Brazil was the “most boring”; Fry was “a good old man completely lacking in experience of modern life”; Tornielli was “gentle and pacific”; Tsudzuki of Japan was a “superior” person who had studied in Germany, spoke German and “felt the utmost veneration for His Majesty”; the Russian military delegate, Colonel Michelson, who made a speech saying that war was terrible and everything should be done by mediation to prevent it, was guilty of talk which might have been understandable coming from Baroness von Suttner but coming from a colonel was a “scandal”; Choate was “the most striking personality” among the delegates with “extraordinary intelligence, profound legal knowledge and great political ability.”

Baron Marschall himself shook the Conference when in the course of discussion on a proposal to restrict mine-laying he warned against the folly of making laws for the conduct of war which might be rendered useless by “the law of facts.” The implications to be drawn from this excited wide press comment, including a letter to
The Times
from the Poet Laureate. Too indignant for poetry, Alfred Austin wrote that Marschall’s words were a plain warning of future German aggression of which all her neighbors—Holland, Belgium, France and Austria—should take note. Britain “duly forewarned” should adopt military conscription and the Laureate closed with a line borrowed from his predecessor, Lord Tennyson: “Form! Form! Riflemen, Form!”

As before, peace advocates converged from all quarters upon The Hague, including Bertha von Suttner and Stead, who had once again appointed himself independent
rapporteur.
Again he published a chronicle of the proceedings, personalities, disputes and private deals, this time in the form of a four-page daily newspaper, the
Courrier de la Conférence.
Bloch was dead but Andrew Carnegie took his place and laid the cornerstone for the new Peace Palace, to which he had donated $1,250,000. It was agreed that all member nations should contribute materials representing their finest products for the building that was to express “universal good will and hope.” As before, Socialists, and this time Anarchists and Zionists as well, held their international Congresses in Amsterdam during the Conference to capture some of the world limelight for their causes. The Dutch pastor and pacifist Domela Nieuwenhuis, who managed to combine Anarchism with religion and remain sincere, denounced Carnegie impartially with the delegates as a merchant of death who built a Temple of Peace, while accepting orders for munitions “even from the Japanese,” an accusation accurate in spirit if not in time. “Let all workers regardless of nationality strike on the declaration of war and there will be no war!” Nieuwenhuis cried out.

The work of the Conference was organized as before in Commissions—on Arbitration, Rules of War on Land, Rules of War at Sea—with an additional Fourth Commission—on Maritime Law. Bourgeois and Beernaert were chairmen as before of the First and Second Commissions, Tornielli of the Third and De Martens of the Fourth. At the opening session Nelidov’s address of welcome aroused no enthusiasm; the first days were gloomy, arrangements and assignments confused and acoustics in plenary session so poor that on one occasion delegates disputed energetically whether the last speaker had addressed them in English or French.

Carrying out their insistence that disarmament must be discussed if only to prove to the public its impracticability and their own honest intentions, the British brought the question to the floor. None of the nations walked out, because Sir Edward Grey’s explanations in advance, however foggy, had conveyed a sufficiently clear impression that the matter would not be uncomfortably pursued; nor was it. Sir Edward Fry made a grave and moving presentation of the case, describing the appalling increase in engines of death and moved a resolution calling for “further serious study” in the same phrase of postponement as had been used in 1899. Nelidov agreed that if arms limitation was not ripe in 1899 it was not more so in 1907, and the delegates adopted Fry’s resolution without a vote. The matter was disposed of in a total of twenty-five minutes. Stead raged at the “miserable and scandalous debacle” and even Secretary Root concluded that Grey’s support had been merely a gesture to “satisfy English public opinion.”

Although the world grew bored after Fry’s “funeral oration” as Marschall called it, and even the journalists lost interest, the Conference settled down to serious work on the laws and techniques of war. When busied in drafting and disputing the problems of their trade—the rights and duties of neutrals, the recovery of international debts by force, the rules for opening hostilities—all matters which took war for granted as a fact of human life, the delegates became absorbed. Indeed, they worked harder than at the First Conference, as if war was not only a fact of life but an imminent fact. Committee meetings were held twice a day, lengthy documents had to be read, expert opinions examined, new drafts prepared, and endless confidential talks held to work out compromises. “Never since my examination for the bar have I worked so hard as in the last six weeks,” Marschall reported to Bülow.

The launching of projectiles or explosives from balloons was reconsidered, and again avoiding any extremes of self-denial, the delegates renewed the prohibition for another limited term of five years. Neutral territory, a matter on which the Belgians were particularly sensitive, was agreed to be inviolable and a convention of twenty-five articles was worked out establishing rules of procedures in case it were violated. As a result of Japan’s treacherous opening of hostilities against Russia by surprise attack in 1904, new and interesting discussions were held on this subject. They culminated in a convention whose signatories agreed not to open hostilities without previous unequivocal warning in the form of a declaration of war or ultimatum accompanied by a conditional declaration of war. Another convention of fifty-six articles was adopted redefining the laws and customs of land warfare. As a result of the Venezuela affair in 1902 a convention against the use of force to collect international debts except if the debtor had refused arbitration was agreed on. This represented one definite advance in international law.

Naval warfare was the subject of the fiercest struggle, with the right of capture of seaborne commerce as the central issue. As the basic weapon of blockade, Britain was determined to preserve the right of capture free of any restrictions. Germany was equally determined to restrict it by international prize court and other interferences. The use of submarines and underwater contact mines as weapons against blockade Germany was determined to defend and Britain to restrict. On the immunity of private property, Grey, at least, had learned Mahan’s lesson if the American delegation had not. He instructed his delegates that Britain could not assent to a principle which “if carried to its logical conclusion would entail the abolition of commercial blockade.” He added a reason, in his tortured way, which would certainly not have occurred to Mahan. Britain could not agree to anything, he wrote, which might “so limit the prospective liability of war as to remove some of the considerations which now restrain the public from contemplating it.” Translated into simpler language, this meant that Britain could not agree to anything which might, by limiting the damages of war, cause people to enter on it more lightly. With the British Liberals it was obligatory to find a moral reason to fortify a natural policy of self-interest, a practice no one carried to higher perfection or more obscure expression than Sir Edward Grey.