The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (83 page)

His king was privately less enthusiastic. When he tried to talk alone with Nicholas, he complained, Wilhelm’s ear ‘was glued to the keyhole’. The Kaiser had also harangued George about Britain’s support for France: ‘There you are making alliances with a decadent nation like France and a semi-barbarous nation like Russia and opposing us, the true upholders of progress and liberty …’
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Wilhelm apparently believed that he had made a deep impression and so weakened the Entente between Britain and France.
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It was the last time the cousins were to meet. In shortly over a year their countries would be at war with each other.

Europe still had choices in that last period of peace. True there was much troubling its nations in 1913: fear of losing ground, fear of being outnumbered and outgunned by their neighbours, fear of unrest or revolution at home, or fear of the consequences of war itself. Such fears could have played out either way: to make the powers more cautious or to make them ready to gamble on war. Yet while Europe’s leaders did not have to opt for war it was increasingly likely that they would. The naval race between Britain and Germany, rivalry between Austria-Hungary and Russia in the Balkans, the rift between Russia and Germany, France’s anxieties about Germany had driven apart nations who had much to gain from working together. And the previous dozen or so years with their accumulated suspicions and memories weighed heavily in the minds of decision-makers and their publics. Whether defeat and isolation by Germany for France, the Boer War for Britain, the Moroccan crises for Germany, the Russo-Japanese War and Bosnia for Russia or the Balkan wars for Austria-Hungary, each power had its share of bitter experiences, ones it hoped not to repeat. Demonstrating that you are a great power and avoiding humiliation are powerful forces in international relations, whether for the United States or Russia or China today, or for the European powers a century ago. If Germany and Italy wanted their places in the sun, Britain hoped to avoid decline and hang on to its huge empire. Russia and France wanted to regain what they felt to be their rightful stature while Austria-Hungary was struggling for its survival. Military force was an option they all considered using but somehow, for all the tensions, Europe had always managed to pull back in time. In 1905, 1908, 1911, 1912 and 1913, the Concert of Europe, a much weakened one, had held. The dangerous moments were coming closer together, though, and in 1914, in a world which had
become dangerously inured to crises, Europe’s leaders were to face the choice, yet again, for war or for peace.

And yet again they had to deal with the gusts of fear and heightened nationalism that ran through their own publics, and the lobby and special-interest groups grew increasingly skilled in stirring up opinion. In Germany, for example, Major General August Keim, who had been active in the German Navy League, founded a similar organisation at the start of 1912 to agitate for a bigger army. The Wehrverein had 40,000 members by May and 300,000 by the following summer and funding from big industrialists such as Alfred Krupp. Keim supported each military bill that went to the Reichstag but invariably said they were completely inadequate.
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In Britain the mass papers continued to circulate stories of German invasion plans and German waiters who were really serving officers. Sudden press wars between nations flared up. In 1913 the German press made a fuss when French actors appeared in German uniforms in a play called
Fritz le Uhlan
while in Berlin the following summer the aptly named Valhalla theatre planned to mount a melodrama,
The Terror of the Foreign Legion, or the Hell of Sidi-bel-Abbes
.
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Early in 1914 a German paper published an article from its St Petersburg correspondent to say that hostility to Germany in official Russian circles was growing. The Russian press responded by accusing the Germans of preparing a preventive war against Russia. Sukhomlinov, the War Minister, gave a belligerent interview to a leading paper to say that Russia was ready.
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In the early summer of 1914 General Aleksei Brusilov, who was to lead one of Russia’s few successful attacks in the Great War, was taking the waters at the south German resort of Bad Kissingen, where he and his wife were astounded by what they saw at the local festival. ‘The central square, surrounded by banked masses of flowers, was surmounted by a superb set-piece representing the Kremlin at Moscow with its church, ramparts, and towers, and, in the foreground, the Cathedral of St. Basil.’ Guns fired a salute and a magnificent display of fireworks lit up the night and while a band played the Russian and German national anthems followed by Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, the model of the Kremlin burned to the ground. The German crowd cheered happily while Brusilov, his wife, and a handful of fellow Russians stood by silently chagrined and resentful.
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Although the ruling classes across Europe often shared the nationalism of their publics they also worried about their reliability. Political parties of the left were growing, and in some countries their leaders were now openly revolutionary. In Italy initial enthusiasm for the war in North Africa had quickly worn off among the socialists and their supporters; the young radical Benito Mussolini organised demonstrations to protest as the troops left for the war and the moderate leaders of the Socialist Party were expelled and replaced by more radical ones. In the German elections of 1912, the Social Democrats gained sixty-seven new seats, something that was viewed with near panic by the right. The leader of the conservative and nationalist Agrarian League published
If I Were Kaiser
to argue for a good victorious war which would give the government an excuse to get rid of universal suffrage.
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And workers were both better organised and more militant. In the cities, towns and countryside of northern Italy, the army had to be called in to suppress strikes and demonstrations. In Britain the number of workers on strike had risen sharply from 138,000 in 1899 to 1,200,000 in 1912. While the numbers had dropped in 1913, the first seven months of 1914 saw almost a thousand strikes, often about apparently trivial matters. Moreover, like those on the Continent, the British working classes appeared to be increasingly open to revolutionary ideas and ready to use direct action such as strikes and sabotage for political goals. Early in 1914, three of the most militant unions, representing railway and transport workers and miners, joined forces in their own triple alliance. Since the alliance could, if it chose, close down the coal mines, stop the trains and paralyse the docks, it represented a threat to British industry and ultimately to Britain’s power which caused much unease among the ruling classes.

On the other side of Europe, Russia continued its fitful moves towards the rest of the modern European world. The assassination of Stolypin, though, in the autumn of 1911 had removed a man who might have dragged the tsarist regime, over the objections of Nicholas and his court, into making reforms before it was too late. The tsar, who was increasingly under the influence of reactionaries in his court, did his best to stall Russia’s move towards constitutional government. He appointed compliant and right-wing ministers and ignored the Duma as much as possible. At the start of 1914 he dismayed moderate opinion by suddenly dismissing his Prime Minister, Kokovtsov – ‘like a
domestic’ said one of the grand dukes – so removing one of the few remaining competent and reform-minded ministers.
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Kokovtsov’s successor was an elderly favourite of the tsar. Ivan Goremykin was charming, reactionary, and utterly incapable of leading Russia in the troubles already upon it, much less the ones about to come. Sazonov, the Foreign Minister, said of him: ‘An old man who had long ago lost not only his capacity for interesting himself in anything but his own peace and well-being, but also the power of taking into account the activities in progress around him.’
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Goremykin himself had no illusions about his own capacities for his new position. ‘I completely fail to understand why I was needed,’ he told a leading liberal politician. ‘I resemble an old raccoon fur coat which has been packed away in the trunk long ago and sprinkled with camphor.’
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To make matters still worse, the scandal surrounding Rasputin was becoming increasingly public. Rumours swirled through Russian society that the priest had an unhealthy influence over the imperial family and was far too intimate with the tsarina and her daughters. The tsar’s mother wept as she told Kokovtsov: ‘My poor daughter-in-law does not perceive that she is ruining both the dynasty and herself. She sincerely believes in the holiness of an adventurer, and we are powerless to ward off the misfortune which is sure to come.’
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The 300th anniversary of Romanov rule fell in 1913, and Nicholas and Alexandra travelled across Russia that spring on a rare excursion to show themselves to the people. Although the imperial couple and their courtiers still believed that the ordinary Russians, especially the peasants, loved and revered the Romanovs, Kokovtsov, who accompanied his master, was struck by the small size of the crowds and their noticeable lack of enthusiasm. The March winds were cold and the tsar did not always bother to come out at the different stops. In Moscow the crowds were again small and there were murmurs at the pitiful spectacle of the sickly heir to the throne as he was carried along in the arms of his Cossack bodyguard.
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In the Duma the divisions between the conservatives and the radicals had deepened, producing little but endless debates and recriminations, while the democratic parties of the middle were increasingly squeezed out by the extremes of left and right. The Council of State which was supposed to function as an upper house was dominated by elderly reactionaries who saw their role as blocking any liberal
measures which came out of the Duma.
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On the right there was talk of a coup to restore absolutist rule while for much of the left revolution seemed the only way to effect change. In the cities, the workers were falling under the influence of the far left, including the Bolsheviks. In the last two years before the war, strikes increased sharply in number and violence. Out in the countryside the mood among the peasants was increasingly sullen; in 1905 and 1906 in many parts of Russia they had tried to seize farms from the landed classes. They had failed that time but they had not forgotten. Russia’s subject nationalities, whether in the Baltic, Ukraine, or the Caucasus, were stirring and organising, partly in response to government policies of Russification which produced absurd situations such as Polish students being forced to read their own literature in Russian translation and which left deep and growing resentments.

The reaction of the authorities to unrest within Russia was to blame agitators, whether revolutionaries or Freemasons and Jews, who were seen as amounting to much the same thing. In 1913 the reactionary Minister of the Interior and Minister of Justice had the approval of the tsar when they pandered to Russian anti-Semitism by allowing the trial of a Kiev Jew, Mendel Beilis, for allegedly carrying out the ritual murder of a Christian boy. The evidence was not only flimsy but, as became apparent, fabricated. Even the tsar and his ministers knew by the time of the trial that Beilis was innocent but they decided to go ahead on the grounds that Jews were known to carry out ritual murders, just not in this case. The trial raised outrage among liberal circles in Russia and abroad and the clumsy efforts of the government to ensure a conviction – which included arresting defence witnesses – undermined its credibility still further. Beilis was acquitted and emigrated to the United States, where he was to witness the collapse of the old order in 1917 from a position of safety.
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By 1914, Russians and foreigners alike had taken to describing the country as being on top of a volcano with the fires which had erupted in the aftermath of the war with Japan in 1905 and 1906 gathering force again under the surface. ‘An unskilled hand’, said Count Otto von Czernin of the Austrian-Hungarian embassy in St Petersburg, ‘may fan the flames and start a conflagration if the nationalist hotheads, together with the extreme Right, bring about a union of the
oppressed nationalities and the socialist proletariat.’
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Russian intellectuals complained of a feeling of helplessness and despair, of watching the old society collapsing while a new one was not yet ready to be born.
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War increasingly came to be seen as a way out of Russia’s dilemma, a way to bring Russian society together. The Russian upper and middle classes agreed with each other and the government on only one thing – the glory of Russia’s past and the need to reassert its role as a great power. Defeat by Japan had been a terrible humiliation and Russia’s evident weakness in the Bosnian crisis of 1908 and more recently in the Balkan wars brought the liberal opposition together with the most passionate reactionaries to support the rebuilding of the military and an assertive foreign policy.
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There was much talk in the press and the Duma of Russia’s historic mission in the Balkans and its rights to the Straits even if that meant war with Germany and Austria-Hungary, or, as the more fervent Russian nationalists put it, the inevitable struggle between the Slavs and the Teutonic races.
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Although its deputies spent the greater part of their time attacking the government, the Duma always supported spending on the military. ‘One must profit from the general enthusiasm,’ the speaker of the Duma told the tsar in the spring of 1913. ‘The Straits must belong to us. War will be accepted with joy and will serve only to increase the prestige of the imperial power.’
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