The Guns of August (5 page)

Edward’s foreign visits continued—Rome, Vienna, Lisbon, Madrid—and not to royalty only. Every year he took the cure at Marienbad where he would exchange views with the Tiger of France, born in the same year as himself, who was premier for four of the years that Edward was king. Edward, whose two passions in life were correct clothes and unorthodox company, overlooked the former, and admired M. Clemenceau. The Tiger shared Napoleon’s opinion that Prussia “was hatched from a cannon ball,” and saw the cannon ball coming
in his direction. He worked, he planned, he maneuvered in the shadow of one dominant idea: “the German lust for power … has fixed as its policy the extermination of France.” He told Edward that when the time came when France needed help, England’s sea power would not be enough, and reminded him that Napoleon was beaten at Waterloo, not Trafalgar.

In 1908, to the distaste of his subjects, Edward paid a state visit to the Czar aboard the imperial yacht at Reval. English imperialists regarded Russia as the ancient foe of the Crimea and more recently as the menace looming over India, while to the Liberals and Laborites Russia was the land of the knout, the pogrom, and the massacred revolutionaries of 1905, and the Czar, according to Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, “a common murderer.” The distaste was reciprocated. Russia detested England’s alliance with Japan and resented her as the power that frustrated Russia’s historic yearning for Constantinople and the Straits. Nicholas II once combined two favorite prejudices in the simple statement, “An Englishman is a
zhid
(Jew).”

But old antagonisms were not so strong as new pressures, and under the urging of the French, who were anxious to have their two allies come to terms, an Anglo-Russian Convention was signed in 1907. A personal touch of royal friendliness was felt to be required to clear away any lingering mistrust, and Edward embarked for Reval. He had long talks with the Russian Foreign Minister, Isvolsky, and danced the Merry Widow waltz with the Czarina with such effect as to make her laugh, the first man to accomplish this feat since the unhappy woman put on the crown of the Romanovs. Nor was it such a frivolous achievement as might appear, for though it could hardly be said that the Czar governed Russia in a working sense, he ruled as an autocrat and was in turn ruled by his strong-willed if weak-witted wife. Beautiful, hysterical, and morbidly suspicious, she hated everyone but her immediate family and a series of fanatic or lunatic charlatans who offered comfort to her desperate soul. The Czar, neither well endowed mentally nor very well educated, was, in the Kaiser’s opinion, “only fit to live in a country house and grow turnips.”

The Kaiser regarded the Czar as his own sphere of influence
and tried by clever schemes to woo him out of his French alliance which had been the consequence of William’s own folly. Bismarck’s maxim “Keep friends with Russia” and the Reinsurance Treaty that implemented it, William had dropped, along with Bismarck, in the first, and worst, blunder of his reign. Alexander III, the tall, stern Czar of that day, had promptly turned around in 1892 and entered into alliance with republican France, even at the cost of standing at attention to “The Marseillaise.” Besides, he snubbed William, whom he considered
“un garçon mat élevé,”
and would only talk to him over his shoulder. Ever since Nicholas acceded to the throne, William had been trying to repair his blunder by writing the young Czar long letters (in English) of advice, gossip, and political harangue addressed to “Dearest Nicky” and signed “Your affectionate friend, Willy.” An irreligious republic stained by the blood of monarchs was no fit company for him, he told the Czar. “Nicky, take my word for it, the curse of God has stricken that people forever.” Nicky’s true interests, Willy told him, were with a
Drei-Kaiser Bund,
a league of the three emperors of Russia, Austria, and Germany. Yet, remembering the old Czar’s snubs, he could not help patronizing his son. He would tap Nicholas on the shoulder, and say, “My advice to you is more speeches and more parades, more speeches, more parades,” and he offered to send German troops to protect Nicholas from his rebellious subjects, a suggestion which infuriated the Czarina, who hated William more after every exchange of visits.

When he failed, under the circumstances, to wean Russia away from France, the Kaiser drew up an ingenious treaty engaging Russia and Germany to aid each other in case of attack, which the Czar, after signing, was to communicate to the French and invite them to join. After Russia’s disasters in her war with Japan (which the Kaiser had strenuously urged her into) and the revolutionary risings that followed, when the regime was at its lowest ebb, he invited the Czar to a secret rendezvous, without attendant ministers, at Björkö in the Gulf of Finland. William knew well enough that Russia could not accede to his treaty without breaking faith with the
French, but he thought that sovereigns’ signatures were all that was needed to erase the difficulty. Nicholas signed.

William was in ecstasy. He had made good the fatal lapse, secured Germany’s back door, and broken the encirclement. “Bright tears stood in my eyes,” he wrote to Bülow, and he was sure Grandpapa (William I, who had died muttering about a war on two fronts) was looking down on him. He felt his treaty to be the master coup of German diplomacy, as indeed it was, or would have been, but for a flaw in the title. When the Czar brought the treaty home, his ministers, after one horrified look, pointed out that by engaging to join Germany in a possible war he had repudiated his alliance with France, a detail which “no doubt escaped His Majesty in the flood of the Emperor William’s eloquence.” The Treaty of Björkö lived its brief shimmering day, and expired.

Now came Edward hobnobbing with the Czar at Reval. Reading the German ambassador’s report of the meeting which suggested that Edward really desired peace, the Kaiser scribbled furiously in the margin, “Lies. He wants war. But I have to start it so he does not have the odium.”

The year closed with the most explosive faux pas of the Kaiser’s career, an interview given to the
Daily Telegraph
expressing his ideas of the day on who should fight whom, which this time unnerved not only his neighbors but his countrymen. Public disapproval was so outspoken that the Kaiser took to his bed, was ill for three weeks, and remained comparatively reticent for some time thereafter.

Since then no new excitements had erupted. The last two years of the decade while Europe enjoyed a rich fat afternoon, were the quietest. Nineteen-ten was peaceful and prosperous, with the second round of Moroccan crises and Balkan wars still to come. A new book,
The Great Illusion
by Norman Angell, had just been published, which proved that war had become vain. By impressive examples and incontrovertible argument Angell showed that in the present financial and economic interdependence of nations, the victor would suffer equally with the vanquished; therefore war had become unprofitable; therefore no nation would be so foolish as to start
one. Already translated into eleven languages,
The Great Illusion
had become a cult. At the universities, in Manchester, Glasgow, and other industrial cities, more than forty study groups of true believers had formed, devoted to propagating its dogma. Angell’s most earnest disciple was a man of great influence on military policy, the King’s friend and adviser, Viscount Esher, chairman of the War Committee assigned to remaking the British Army after the shock of its performance in the Boer War. Lord Esher delivered lectures on the lesson of
The Great Illusion
at Cambridge and the Sorbonne wherein he showed how “new economic factors clearly prove the inanity of aggressive wars.” A twentieth century war would be on such a scale, he said, that its inevitable consequences of “commercial disaster, financial ruin and individual suffering” would be “so pregnant with restraining influences” as to make war unthinkable. He told an audience of officers at the United Service Club, with the Chief of General Staff, Sir John French, in the chair, that because of the interlacing of nations war “becomes every day more difficult and improbable.”

Germany, Lord Esher felt sure, “is as receptive as Great Britain to the doctrine of Norman Angell.” How receptive were the Kaiser and the Crown Prince to whom he gave, or caused to be given, copies of
The Great Illusion
is not reported. There is no evidence that he gave one to General von Bernhardi, who was engaged in 1910 in writing a book called
Germany and the Next War,
published in the following year, which was to be as influential as Angell’s but from the opposite point of view. Three of its chapter titles, “The Right to Make War,” “The Duty to Make War,” and “World Power or Downfall” sum up its thesis.

As a twenty-one-year-old cavalry officer in 1870, Bernhardi had been the first German to ride through the Arc de Triomphe when the Germans entered Paris. Since then flags and glory interested him less than the theory, philosophy, and science of war as applied to “Germany’s Historic Mission,” another of his chapter titles. He had served as chief of the Military History section of the General Staff, was one of the
intellectual elite of that hard-thinking, hard-working body, and author of a classic on cavalry before he assembled a lifetime’s studies of Clausewitz, Treitschke, and Darwin, and poured them into the book that was to make his name a synonym for Mars.

War, he stated, “is a biological necessity”; it is the carrying out among humankind of “the natural law, upon which all the laws of Nature rest, the law of the struggle for existence.” Nations, he said, must progress or decay; “there can be no standing still,” and Germany must choose “world power or downfall.” Among the nations Germany “is in social-political respects at the head of all progress in culture” but is “compressed into narrow, unnatural limits.” She cannot attain her “great moral ends” without increased political power, an enlarged sphere of influence, and new territory. This increase in power, “befitting our importance,” and “which we are entitled to claim,” is a “political necessity” and “the first and foremost duty of the State.” In his own italics Bernhardi announced, “What we now wish to attain must be
fought for,
” and from here he galloped home to the finish line: “Conquest thus becomes a law of necessity.”

Having proved the “necessity” (the favorite word of German military thinkers), Bernhardi proceeded to method. Once the duty to make war is recognized, the secondary duty, to make it successfully, follows. To be successful a state must begin war at the “most favorable moment” of its own choosing; it has “the acknowledged right … to secure the proud privilege of such initiative.” Offensive war thus becomes another “necessity” and a second conclusion inescapable: “It is incumbent on us … to act on the offensive and strike the first blow.” Bemhardi did not share the Kaiser’s concern about the “odium” that attached to an aggressor. Nor was he reluctant to tell where the blow would fall. It was “unthinkable,” he wrote, that Germany and France could ever negotiate their problems. “France must be so completely crushed that she can never cross our path again”; she “must be annihilated once and for all as a great power.”

King Edward did not live to read Bernhardi. In January,
1910, he sent the Kaiser his annual birthday greetings and the gift of a walking stick before departing for Marienbad and Biarritz. A few months later he was dead.

“We have lost the mainstay of our foreign policy,” said Isvolsky when he heard the news. This was hyperbole, for Edward was merely the instrument, not the architect, of the new alignments. In France the king’s death created “profound emotion” and “real consternation,” according to
Le Figaro.
Paris, it said, felt the loss of its “great friend” as deeply as London. Lampposts and shop windows in the Rue de la Paix wore the same black as Piccadilly; cab drivers tied crepe bows on their whips; black-draped portraits of the late king appeared even in the provincial towns as at the death of a great French citizen. In Tokyo, in tribute to the Anglo-Japanese alliance, houses bore the crossed flags of England and Japan with the staves draped in black. In Germany, whatever the feelings, correct procedures were observed. All officers of the army and navy were ordered to wear mourning for eight days, and the fleet in home waters fired a salute and flew its flags at half-mast. The Reichstag rose to its feet to hear a message of sympathy read by its President, and the Kaiser called in person upon the British ambassador in a visit that lasted an hour and a half.

In London the following week the royal family was kept busy meeting royal arrivals at Victoria Station. The Kaiser came over on his yacht the
Hohenzollern,
escorted by four British destroyers. He anchored in the Thames Estuary and came the rest of the way to London by train, arriving at Victoria Station like the common royalty. A purple carpet was rolled out on the platform, and purple-covered steps placed where his carriage would stop. As his train drew in on the stroke of noon, the familiar figure of the German emperor stepped down to be greeted by his cousin, King George, whom he kissed on both cheeks. After lunch they went together to Westminster Hall where the body of Edward lay in state. A thunderstorm the night before and drenching rains all morning had not deterred the quiet, patient line of Edward’s subjects waiting to pass through the hall. On this day, Thursday,
May 19, the line stretched back for five miles. It was the day the earth was due to pass through the tail of Halley’s comet, whose appearance called forth reminders that it was traditionally the prophet of disaster—had it not heralded the Norman Conquest?—and inspired journals with literary editors to print the lines from
Julius Caesar:

Inside the vast hall the bier lay in somber majesty, surmounted by crown, orb, and scepter and guarded at its four corners by four officers, each from different regiments of the empire, who stood in the traditional attitude of mourning with bowed heads and white gloved hands crossed over sword hilts. The Kaiser eyed all the customs of an imperial Lying-in-State with professional interest. He was deeply impressed, and years later could recall every detail of the scene in its “marvelous medieval setting.” He saw the sun’s rays filtered through the narrow Gothic windows lighting up the jewels of the crown; he watched the changing of the guards at the bier as the four new guards marched forward with swords at the carry-up and turned them point down as they reached their places, while the guards they relieved glided away in slow motion to disappear through some unseen exit in the shadows. Laying his wreath of purple and white flowers on the coffin, he knelt with King George in silent prayer and on rising grasped his cousin’s hand in a manly and sympathetic handshake. The gesture, widely reported, caused much favorable comment.