The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (42 page)

For the next few years, however, Russia and Austria-Hungary remained on relatively good terms. In the autumn of 1903 the tsar visited Franz Joseph at one of his hunting lodges and the two discussed the deteriorating situation in Macedonia, where the Christian population was in open rebellion against its Ottoman rulers (and also busy killing each other for being the wrong kind of Christian). They agreed they would present a common front on required reforms to the Ottoman government in Constantinople. The following year Austria-Hungary and Russia signed a Neutrality Treaty and there was even talk, which went nowhere, of reviving the Three Emperors League with Germany.

Nevertheless, all was not well in the relationship. Neither side entirely trusted the other, especially where the Balkans were concerned. If the Ottoman Empire was going to disappear, and that looked increasingly likely, each country wanted to be sure that its interests were protected. Austria-Hungary wanted a strong Albania to emerge to block South Slav access to the Adriatic (Albanians were, providentially, not Slavs); Russia did not. Quietly, and sometimes quite openly, the two vied for influence in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria. Even over Macedonia, the two disagreed over the details of the reforms. After its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, when Russia turned its attention back to the west, the chances of a confrontation in the Balkans grew markedly. Moreover, once Russia had mended its relations with Great Britain in 1907, it no longer needed to rely as much on Austria-Hungary to help it in the Mediterranean and in dealing with the Ottoman Empire. And there had been a crucial change in the leadership in Austria-Hungary in 1906; Conrad became chief of staff and Aehrenthal, who wanted a more active foreign policy than Gołuchowski, had become Foreign Minister. As Europe entered into a series of crises, the two great conservative powers were moving further apart, dangerously so in the troubled Balkans which lay between them.

CHAPTER 9
What Were They Thinking? Hopes, Fears, Ideas, and Unspoken Assumptions

Writing at the start of the 1930s Count Harry Kessler, the son of an Anglo-Irish beauty and a rich German banker who was given a hereditary title by Wilhelm I, looked back across the Great War at the Europe of his youth:

Something very great, the old, cosmopolitan, still predominantly agrarian and feudal Europe, the world of beautiful women, gallant kings, and dynastic combinations, the Europe of the eighteenth century and the Holy Alliance was growing old and weak, dying out; and something new, young, energetic, and still unimaginable was in the offing. We felt it like a frost, like a spring in our limbs, the one with muffled pain, the other with a keen joy.
¹

Kessler was uniquely well placed to witness the hopes and fears, and to record the thinking of Europeans in those years before 1914. He was born in 1868, came of age in the last part of the century, and was still in the prime of life when the Great War broke out. (He died in 1937 as war was marching again towards Europe.) Educated at a British private
school and a German Gymnasium, with family in Britain, Germany and France, a German grandee and snob who also longed to be an intellectual and an artist, and a homosexual who loved beautiful women as well as men, he moved easily across social, political, sexual, and national lines. His diaries, which he kept throughout his life, are filled with lunches, teas, dinners, cocktails, outings with Auguste Rodin, Pierre Bonnard, Hugo Hofmannsthal, Vaslav Nijinsky, Sergei Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan, George Bernard Shaw, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, or Gustave Mahler. And when he is not in artists’ studios or at the ballet or the theatre, he is at court balls in Berlin or gentlemen’s clubs in London. He helps to draft the plot and libretto for Richard Strauss’s
Der Rosenkavalier
; he also discusses Germany’s relations with Britain with Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, the Chancellor who succeeded Bülow.

9. The Zabern incident of 1913 started when a German officer in a small town in Alsace referred to local civilians in a disparaging way which set off popular protests. The military authorities over-reacted, raiding newspaper officers and arresting civilians on flimsy charges. While the German civil authorities were concerned to bring the military under control, the military closed ranks and refused to back down. It was for many in Germany and elsewhere a chilling example of the way in which the German army saw itself as outside civilian control.

Kessler moved in very special circles and what he saw and heard there was not necessarily representative of Europeans as a whole. (Since there were not public opinion polls in those days there are limitations on how full a picture we can ever get.) On the other hand, people who make it their business to think about society or try to portray it often have antennae out which sense undercurrents before they manifest themselves on the surface. In the period before 1914 artists, intellectuals, and scientists increasingly challenged older assumptions about rationality and reality. It was a time of intense experimentation in circles which were then avant garde but whose ideas were to enter the mainstream in succeeding decades. The cubism of Picasso and Braque, the attempts of the Italian constructivists such as Balla to capture movement, the free-flowing dance of Isadora Duncan, the deeply erotic ballets staged by Diaghilev and danced by Nijinsky, or the novels of Marcel Proust, all in their own ways were acts of rebellion. Art, so many in the new generation of artists held, should not be about upholding the values of society; it should be shocking and liberating. Gustav Klimt and the younger painters he led out of the establishment Association of Austrian Artists challenged the accepted wisdom that art should be realistic. One of the goals of the Viennese Secession was
not
to show the world as it actually was but to probe beneath the surface into the life of instinct and emotion.
²
The Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg freed himself from the accepted forms of European music with its rules about harmony and order to create works that were dissonant and disturbing. ‘Inside, where the man of instinct begins, there, fortunately, all theory breaks down.’
³

Old institutions and values were under attack and new ways and new attitudes were emerging. Their world was changing, perhaps too fast, and they had to attempt to make sense of it. ‘What were they
thinking
?’ is a question often asked about the Europeans who went to war in 1914. The ideas that influenced their view of the world, what they took for granted without discussion (what the historian James Joll called ‘unspoken assumptions’), what was changing and what was not, all are important parts of the context within which war, even a general
European war, became a possible option in 1914. Of course, not all Europeans thought and felt the same; there were huge differences by class, country and region. And many people, just as today, were like the writer Stefan Zweig’s parents, living life as it came and not reflecting much about where the world was going. When we look back at the years before 1914 we can see the birth of our modern world, but we should also recognise the persistence and force of older ways of thinking and being. Millions of Europeans, for example, still lived in the same rural communities and in the same manner as their ancestors. Hierarchy and knowing one’s place in it, respect for authority, belief in God, still shaped the way in which Europeans moved through their lives. Indeed, without the persistence of such values, it is hard to imagine how so many Europeans can have gone off willingly to war in 1914.

In the end the decisions that took Europe into that war – or failed to prevent it – were made by a surprisingly small number, and those men – few women played a role – came largely but not entirely from the upper classes, whether the landed aristocracy or the urban plutocracy. Even those, such as Cambon brothers, who came from the middle classes, tended to absorb their values and share their outlook. The class of the ruling elites, whether civilian or military, as well as their hopes and fears is one key to understanding them. Another is their upbringing and education, and yet a third the wider world around them. Their ideas and attitudes had been laid down in their youth twenty or thirty years earlier, but they were aware of how their own societies were evolving and of new ideas that were in the air. They were capable of changing their views just as democratic leaders of today are on such matters as same-sex marriage.

What Kessler also picked up on in his diaries was a sense among artists, intellectuals and political elites that Europe was changing rapidly and not always in ways they liked. Europe’s leaders were frequently uneasy about their own societies. Industrialisation, the scientific and technological revolutions, the play of new ideas and attitudes, were shaking societies across Europe and calling old, long-established practices and values into question. Europe was both a mighty continent and a troubled one. Each of the major powers had prolonged and serious political crises before the war, whether over the Irish question in Britain, the Dreyfus affair in France, the stand-off between crown and
parliament in Germany, the conflicts among nationalities in Austria-Hungary or the near revolution in Russia. War was sometimes seen as a way of getting beyond the divisions and the antipathies and perhaps it was. In 1914 in all the belligerent nations there was talk of the nation in arms, the Union Sacrée, the holy union where divisions, whether of class, region, ethnicity or religion, were forgotten and the nation came together in a spirit of unity and sacrifice.

Kessler was part of a generation that lived during one of the greatest and most fast-moving periods of change in the history of human society. By the time he was in his early thirties and went to the Paris Exposition of 1900 (which he thought a ‘disconnected, wild mishmash’),
⁴
Europe was already markedly different from the world of his youth. Population, trade, cities, all were bigger. Science was unlocking one puzzle after another. And there were more factories, more miles of railway tracks, more telegraph lines, more schools. There was more money to spend and more to spend it on: the new cinema, cars, telephones, electricity, bicycles, mass-produced clothing and furniture. Ships were faster and in the summer of 1900 the first Zeppelin was climbing into the sky. In 1906 the first aeroplane flight in Europe took place. The motto for the new Olympics could have stood for Europe: ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’.

Only in part, however. Too often when we look back at the Europe of that last decade of peace, we see the prolonged golden summer of another, more innocent age. In reality European pre-eminence and the claims of European civilisation to be the most advanced in human history were being challenged from without and undermined from within. New York was competing with London and Paris as a centre of finance and the United States and Japan were cutting into European markets and European power around the world. In China and throughout the great Western empires, new nationalist forces were gathering strength.

And change of the sort that Europe was experiencing comes with a price. Europe’s economic transformation brought terrific strains and repeated cycles of boom and bust raised doubts about the stability and future of capitalism itself. (It was not just in Vienna that Jews were identified with capitalism; economic instability also provided additional fuel for anti-Semitism across Europe.)
⁵
All over Europe, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century agricultural prices were depressed
(partly because of competition from the New World) and the effects of that depression rippled through farming communities, driving small landowners to bankruptcy and peasant farmers to penury. Although urban populations benefited from cheaper food, each European country also experienced downturns in its business cycle or stagnation and contraction in particular industries. In Austria-Hungary, for example, a Black Friday in 1873 ended a frenzy of speculation and thousands of enterprises, both big and small, including banks, insurance companies and factories, went bankrupt. And unlike our times, most countries did not have safety nets to catch the unemployed, the uninsured, and the unfortunate who tended to come mainly, but not entirely, from the lower classes.

Although working conditions had improved dramatically in the western European countries over the course of the nineteenth century, they were often dreadful further east, where the industrial revolution was newer. Even in developed countries such as Britain and Germany, pay was still low and hours long by comparison with today. After 1900, when prices started to rise, the working classes found themselves increasingly squeezed. Perhaps as important, they felt themselves to be excluded from power and undervalued as human beings.
⁶
The huge migration out of Europe may be an indication of dissatisfaction with the prevailing social and political structures as much as a search for better opportunities. Some 5 per cent of Britain’s population emigrated between 1900 and 1914 and unskilled labourers made up the single largest group by occupation.
⁷
Others chose to stay and fight and throughout Europe in the years before 1914 there was a marked upswing in union membership and strikes. This rise in social tension and labour unrest caused deep concern among military and political elites. Even if revolution were averted, would an alienated working class make good citizens or, perhaps as important, good soldiers? Indeed, would they come to the defence of their country at all? On the other hand, that fear could make war seem desirable, to appeal to patriotism or as an excuse to crack down on the rebellious elements in society.