The Proud Tower (84 page)

The news licked through Paris like a flame. Crowds gathered so quickly in the street outside the restaurant that it took the police fifteen minutes to open a passage for the ambulance. When the body was carried out a great silence fell. As the ambulance clanged away, escorted by policemen on bicycles, a sudden clamor arose, as if to deny the fact of death,
“Jaurès! Jaurès! Vive Jaurès!”
Elsewhere people were stupefied, numb with sorrow. Many wept in the streets. “My heart is breaking,” said Anatole France when he heard. Informed at its night session by a white-faced aide, the Cabinet was stunned and fearful. Visions rose of working-class riots and civil strife on the eve of war. The Premier issued a public appeal for unity and calm. Troops were alerted but next morning, in the national peril, there was only deep grief and deep quiet. At Carmaux the miners stopped work. “They have cut down a mighty oak,” said one. In Leipzig a Spanish Socialist student at the University wandered blindly through the streets for hours; “everything took on the color of blood.”

The news of Jaurès’ death appeared in the papers on Saturday, August 1. That afternoon Germany and France mobilized. Before evening, groups of reservists, carrying bundles and bouquets of flowers, were marching off to the railway stations as civilians waved and cheered. Enthusiasm and excitement were equal in every country. In Germany on August 3, Socialist deputies held a caucus to decide whether to vote for war credits. Only a few days ago
Vorwärts
had scorned the pretence of a defensive war. But now the Government talked of the Russian peril and French aggression. Bernstein, the reviser of Marx, assured them that the Government planned to build a “golden bridge” for the Socialists and as proof cited the fact that the Foreign Ministry had extended official condolences in the great loss they had suffered by the death of Jaurès. Of the total of 111 Socialist deputies, only 14, including Haase, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Franz Mehring, were opposed, but they obeyed the strict discipline of the majority. Next day the Social-Democrats voted unanimously with the rest of the Reichstag for war credits.

The Kaiser announced, “Henceforth I know no parties, I know only Germans.” In France M. Deschanel, President of the Chamber, delivering Jaurès’ eulogy before a standing assembly, said, “There are no more adversaries here, there are only Frenchmen.” No Socialist in either parliament disputed these statements of the primary loyalty. Léon Jouhaux, head of the CGT, declared, “In the name of the Syndicalist organizations, in the name of all the workers who have joined their regiments and those, including myself, who go tomorrow, I declare that we go to the field of battle willingly to repel the aggressor.” Before the month was out Vandervelde joined a wartime coalition Government in Belgium and Guesde a Government of “sacred union” in France. Guesde a minister! The tribal pull of patriotism could have had no stronger testimony.

In England where there was less sense of national danger than on the Continent, Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and a few Liberals spoke out against the decision to fight. Elsewhere there was no dissent, no strike, no protest, no hesitation to shoulder a rifle against fellow workers of another land. When the call came, the worker, whom Marx declared to have no Fatherland identified himself with country, not class. He turned out to be a member of the national family like anyone else. The force of his antagonism which was supposed to topple capitalism found a better target in the foreigner. The working class went to war willingly, even eagerly, like the middle class, like the upper class, like the species.

Jaurès was buried on August 4, the day the war became general. Overhead the bells he had invoked at Basle tolled for him and all the world, “I summon the living, I mourn the dead.”

Afterword

The four years that followed were, as Graham Wallas wrote, “four years of the most intense and heroic effort the human race has ever made.” When the effort was over, illusions and enthusiasms possible up to 1914 slowly sank beneath a sea of massive disillusionment. For the price it had paid, humanity’s major gain was a painful view of its own limitations.

The proud tower built up through the great age of European civilization was an edifice of grandeur and passion, of riches and beauty and dark cellars. Its inhabitants lived, as compared to a later time, with more self-reliance, more confidence, more hope; greater magnificence, extravagance and elegance; more careless ease, more gaiety, more pleasure in each other’s company and conversation, more injustice and hypocrisy, more misery and want, more sentiment including false sentiment, less sufferance of mediocrity, more dignity in work, more delight in nature, more zest. The Old World had much that has since been lost, whatever may have been gained. Looking back on it from 1915, Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian Socialist poet, dedicated his pages, “With emotion, to the man I used to be.”

References
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES

The Bibliography, arranged according to chapter, is confined (with one or two exceptions) to those sources cited in the Notes and is not intended to be either systematic or thorough. It is simply a list of what I used, often of what I stumbled on, weighted heavily toward primary personal accounts. It is noticeably light on secondary interpretative studies. When I needed their guidance I used those as nearly contemporary to their subjects as possible, not because they are better books than today’s but because they are closer in spirit to the society and the time of which I was writing. Modern scholarship, nevertheless, has given me a firm underpinning in many places, notably Halévy’s great and reliable encyclopedia of English affairs, Pinson’s and Kohn’s studies of Germany, Morison’s edition of Roosevelt’s letters and two superbly informative biographies of subjects who were at the heart and core of their age, Goldberg’s
Jaurès
and Mendelssohn’s
Churchill
. Each, while focusing on an individual, is a detailed history of his surrounding period, amply and carefully documented. In a narrower field Ginger’s
Debs
and in a still more restricted one Painter’s
Proust
achieve the same result.

Several remarkable investigations made at the time I could hardly have done without: Bateman’s study of landed income in England, Jack London’s and Jacob Riis’s studies of the poor, and Quillard’s study of the contributors to the Henry Subscription. Certain novelists, such as V. Sackville-West, Anatole France, and Proust, were invaluable as social historians, as were certain memoirists: Blum and Daudet on opposite sides, Lady Warwick, Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Lord Esher, Wilfrid Blunt, Baroness von Suttner, Stefan Zweig, and especially Vandervelde, who alone among the Socialists provided an intimate personal view of his milieu, of the kind in which the ruling class is so prolific. Even more valuable, perhaps, are those occasional individuals endowed both with a peculiar extra insight into their time and a gift for expressing it; who illumine what is happening around them by a sudden flash of understanding Romain Rolland is one, Masterman another. Although less central to this book, Trotsky, as revealed in his matchless phrase about the Serbian infantry, has that same mysterious ability to perceive—almost to feel—the historical meaning of the moment and to convey it in words.

Of all the sources listed, the outstanding work is unquestionably Reinach’s (of which more is said in the Notes to
Chapter 4
); the most consistently informative and brilliant writer is A. G. Gardiner; the most striking fact to emerge from the assembled bibliography is the absence (except for Henry Adams, whom I find disagreeable) of first-rate memoirs by an American.

In an effort to keep the Notes to manageable length, I have given a reference
only
for those statements whose source is not obvious. When no reference is given, the reader may assume that any act or quotation by, or statement made to, a person whose memoirs or other work appears in the Bibliography, was taken from that person’s account. For example, in
Chapter 4
, should a reader wish to know what is my source for the statement that Léon Blum and his friend Pierre Louÿs took opposite sides in the Affair and thereafter never saw each again, he should check the Bibliography under the names of the participants in the episode and, in this case, on finding a book by Blum, assume that Blum was my authority. When Mme Melba’s guests throw peaches out the window or Lord Ribblesdale is quoted on the status of a lord, it may be assumed that the work of each cited in the Bibliography is the authority. Often, as when Strauss visits Speyer or makes a passing remark to Beecham, the source is the memoirist, not the principal. In general, when no reference is given, the name of the person mentioned in a particular conversation, correspondence or incident is the key to the source. While this method requires anyone interested to find the page number in the original book for himself, it has the advantage of not perpetuating mistakes, and any other method would have stretched out the Notes to a length equal to the text.

In cases where a book has served in several places it is listed under the chapter of its primary concern.
DNB
refers to the
Dictionary of National Biography, DAB
to the American ditto,
The Times
to the London newspaper,
NYT
to the
New York Times
. An asterisk denotes a source of particular value or interest.

1. The Patricians

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