Colonel Roosevelt (68 page)

By the time this ultimatum was headlined
in tomorrow’s European papers (sharing space, no doubt, with the dedication of the
Volkerschlacht
monument), six days would be left. That was hardly enough time for Serbia to comply, let alone hope that nations dreading a more general war might intervene. As every half-educated burgher living west of the steppes knew, Russia was Serbia’s most reflexive ally, and would not tolerate any further Austrian aggrandizement in the Balkans. The annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 had been provocation enough.

Wilhelm had not welcomed that particular move. But recently he had shown signs of conversion to the Austrian way of thinking.
His
particular phobia was against the Eastern Slavs: the Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, and even Poles who for fourteen centuries had menaced Prussia across its erasable slate of a border—the
plattland
that any tourist could see from the monument’s observation deck, fading into the enormous distance. A thousand years before, Leipzig had been a Slav settlement. Those sentinels bespoke the granite determination of Teutons that it would never be so again.

“
Ich
gehe mit Euch,
” the Kaiser said privately to Conrad. “I am with you. The other powers are not ready; they will attempt nothing against it. In a couple of days you would be at Belgrade.”

Franz Ferdinand jealously observed the intimacy developing between Wilhelm and his general, and returned to Vienna that evening in something of a huff.

LEFT ALONE TO STAND
against the gray Saxon sky in the days following, after the tents and platforms and bunting had been cleared away, the Leipzig memorial became an iconic shape, inspiring to Germans, Austrians, and Reichslanders, ludicrously overwrought to citizens of other countries.
French comments had been especially scathing. It was not only the largest such pile since the days of Ancient Egypt, it was something new in its
völkisch
, ethnic quality, appealing
less to memory of a particular battle than to the aspirations of a people who felt that their time for dominance had come.

An eruptive bigness, as of lava rising, seethed beneath the vineyards and farms and spotless towns of the Fatherland. Since the Franco-Prussian War, the population had burgeoned to sixty-eight million, twenty-nine million more than that of France. Its notable feature was a huge new middle class, thrown up by a fabulously successful program of industrialization. To Germans, all things seemed possible in the arts and sciences. What the monument was to architecture, the symphony was to Richard Strauss. In Vienna on the night of the Leipzig celebration, that master of the modern orchestra had premiered his most gargantuan score yet, a
Festive Prelude
for 150 instruments, including eight horns, six extra trumpets, and organ. It would seem that music could not get more earth-shaking. Yet Arnold Schönberg was simultaneously opening up a new system of harmony which, like the relativism of Albert Einstein, abolished all sense of stability.

Macht
alone, overwhelming political and armored might, could contain all these forces and perpetuate the Reich for who knew how many thousand years. Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s son and heir, declared that it was the “holy duty” of his countrymen to hold themselves ready for a “conflagration” which would make the battle of 1813 seem but a first spark. “
It is only by reliance on our brave sword that we shall be able to maintain that place in the sun which belongs to us, and which the world does not seem very willing to accord us.”

If the prince’s language sounded unduly inflammatory, it was because he sensed a Prussian militarism developing in the very
Volk
that Germany’s oligarchy of princes and generals depended on to beat back, once and for all, the Eastern hordes. Although there was no denying the impressive depth and breadth of the
Kultur
that had made Germany the most powerful nation in the world, its society was paradoxically rife with socialism and “progressivism,” not to mention communism and anarchism.
In last year’s general elections, the Social Democratic Party had won an astonishing third of the vote, and, with Catholic centrists and other anti-Prussian factions, now held the balance of power in the Reichstag.

As a reaction to that victory, the Kaiser and his court of almost exclusively Prussian generals and landowners had forced upon the parliament the greatest troop buildup in German history. The army was now increased to well over three-quarters of a million men, with seventy-two-thousand called up this month alone. Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Chancellor, argued that a record force was needed to prepare for the coming battle of “Slavdom against Germandom.” The Reichstag had reluctantly granted his wish, but was looking for an issue that would transform it at last into a parliament of public opinion, rather than a tame enacter of the imperial will.

SERBIA YIELDED TO THE
Austrian ultimatum. Its surly capitulation served only to accelerate Russia’s long-term program of rearmament and (what made the German
Chancellor ever more apprehensive) raiload building, with most lines pointing west. Aross Europe, from Königsberg to Bordeaux and from Naples to Edinburgh and Christiania, fears of a multinational war sharpened into certainty. Georges Clemenceau, France’s former prime minister and its most eloquent Cassandra, had been railing since the spring against the
pangermaniste
monstrosity in Leipzig, and all it stood for. The German army bill, he wrote, made it “inevitable” that France must fight for her survival again—and soon. She was, after all, the ally of Russia. His warnings used so many words of common meaning on both sides of the Atlantic that they did not need translation. Germany was plotting a “
fureur d’hégémonie dont l’explosion ébranlera tout le continent européen quelque jour.” Its ultimate aim was nothing less than “une politique d’extermination.”

EARLY IN NOVEMBER
there was a scuffle between two army recruits on a rifle range outside Zabern, in the Reichsland.

In living French memory, Zabern had been Saverne, and the Reichsland known as Alsace-Lorraine. But the Ninety-ninth Prussian Infantry had been garrisoned in the town for twenty-five years. Restaurants served more beer than wine, and the Kaiser’s portrait hung in the offices of the civil authority.

The fight on the range was broken up by Günter von Forstner, a twenty-year-old lieutenant. With members of his entire squad listening, he lectured the youths on the importance of proper behavior in a region where there was a racial difference between the conquerors and the conquered. It was especially important not to tangle with any “Wackes” downtown.

Wacke
, an almost untranslatable word connoting peasant or thickheaded inferiority, had as much force locally as
nigger
in the United States. Forstner went on to say that German soldiers had, nevertheless, the right to draw arms against this subspecies if shoved or insulted. “
Should you kill one of them, so be it,” the lieutenant went on. “Behave right, and you’ll get ten marks from me, no one will blame you.”

A sergeant standing at his elbow increased the offered bounty. “
And me, I’ll give you three marks more.”

They were indulging in what passed among Prussians as humor. But the citizens of Zabern were not amused when reports of Forstner’s words were published in two town newspapers. With repetition, the lieutenant’s language got stronger: “
For every one of those dirty
Wackes
you cut down, I’ll pay you ten marks.” The story spread to Paris and Berlin.

On 7 November, a public demonstration broke out in front of Forstner’s house on the main street in Zabern. Stones were thrown. Amid catcalls of “Dirty Prussian!” two toughs broke down the front door before being dispersed by police. Thereafter, Forstner was escorted everywhere by a security detail so preposterously armed that the curses thrown at him became death threats. Within twenty-four hours, officers of the entire regiment were rendered jittery by the gathering hostility. Colonel Adolf von Reuter, the garrison commander, was so provoked by shouts in the street, as he sat at dinner in the Carpe d’Or tavern, that he went out and ordered the crowd to disperse, in the tone of a man who expected to be obeyed. His pallor and flap ears succeeded only in stimulating a competition for creative insults: “
Tête de macchabée!” “Espèce de lapin blanchi avant l’âge!
”
^*
The fury of the crowd grew till he and his fellow diners had to retreat to the barracks, pursued by hecklers screaming, “We are not
Wackes
!”

Demonstrations followed almost daily, with cries of “
Vive la France.
” Colonel Reuter warned the municipal government that if it did not keep order, he would impose martial law. He then left for an undisclosed destination, pleading ill health. Lieutenant Forstner was overheard telling recruits, “
As far as I am concerned, you can shit on the French flag.” This was too much for his superior officers, who disciplined him with six days’ house arrest. Police contained the situation until 17 November, when Reuter returned and announced that he did so “by order of his Majesty the Emperor and King.”

By now,
l’affaire Zabern
had attracted the attention of international observers, who saw it as a showdown between German and French nationalism, more fraught with strategic implications than the scare over Serbia. Reporters and photographers from as far away as Bloomington, Indiana, poured into the little town. Demonstrations against the Ninety-ninth Regiment resumed. On 28 November, a huge crowd assembled in the square outside the barracks, as if miming the attack on the Bastille. Reuter finally lost patience. He sent sixty bayoneted troopers into the mob and arrested twenty-seven Alsatians, including three members of the Zabern judiciary. The offenders, judges and all, were thrown into jail overnight, and accounts of the incident telegraphed to Berlin.

The anti-Prussian majority in the Reichstag was sufficiently alarmed to demand an explanation from Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and his war minister, General Erich von Falkenhayn. When Bethmann-Hollweg rose in response on 3 December, the situation in Zabern had deteriorated further. Lieutenant Forstner, freed from house arrest, was accused of molesting a fourteen-year-old girl, and, for good measure, befouling the linen of a local hostelry. Enraged by
shouts of “
Bettscheisser,
”
^*
he had slashed one Alsatian across the face.

The Chancellor, sounding old and weary, announced that the lieutenant was to be court-martialed. Citizens of the Reichsland would, he promised, no longer be referred to as
Wackes
. On the other hand, they had no more right to complain about ethnic discrimination “than any other branch of our people.” He hedged his way through a defensive review of the situation, over roars of contempt from socialists and centrists. General Falkenhayn—every bit as bristling as his Austrian counterpart—followed with a speech praising Forstner as a young Prussian of the best military type. The majority needed no further excuse to move that Germany’s entire military government be censured.