The Yanks Are Coming! (3 page)

PART I

ARMAGEDDON FAR AWAY

CHAPTER ONE

THE CLASH OF EMPIRES

A
t first it all seemed very far away.

On 28 June 1914 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Countess Sophie, were assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia. It was the couple's fourteenth wedding anniversary. They were utterly devoted; indeed it sometimes seemed Sophie was Ferdinand's only friend. Politically liberal and personally difficult, Ferdinand had married against the wishes of his uncle, Austria's emperor Franz Joseph. As a result, his children were removed from any right to succession, but he was still next in line to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

An empire it surely was, even if its welter of nationalities were only tenuously welded together. Ferdinand was an Austrian, skeptical of Hungarians, married to a Czech, and inclined to be indulgent with Croats and Serbs. His reputation for liberalism—in what was a tolerant, cosmopolitan, fatalistic, conservative-reactionary empire, which regarded itself, in the famous Viennese phrase, as being in a situation that was hopeless but not serious—came largely from his support for expanding the dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a tripartite monarchy that would have given greater autonomy to the Slavs.

It was not a popular position. Austrian hardliners saw no reason for change, Hungarians feared it would lessen their influence, and Slavic nationalists did not want their people reconciled to Austrian rule; they wanted violence, bloodshed, and nationalist revolution. On 28 June 1914, one of their number—Gavrilo Princip, a tubercular student, an atheist in a famously Catholic if multireligious empire, and a member of the Black Hand, a Serbian terrorist movement—committed the murders that eventually created an independent Yugoslavia, all at the cost of a cataclysmic world war and 17 million dead.

The assassination was a bungled affair that succeeded only because of the typically lax security of the Austrians. There were seven conspirators, all perfervid terrorists sick with tuberculosis, lining the Archduke's route through the city. The first never threw his bomb; the second threw his bomb, but it was deftly deflected by the Archduke (though it wounded his wife, slightly, and several others, more seriously); the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth would-be assassins did nothing, and even those who tried to commit suicide with their cyanide pills failed; but Princip got his chance when the Archduke insisted on visiting the wounded in hospital and his wife
insisted on accompanying him—and even then, it was only because the Archduke's driver got lost and turned down the wrong street. It was sheer bad luck that, putting the car in reverse, he paused five feet from Princip, who fired two fatal shots.

The Archduke and his duchess died true to their aristocratic birth, at first ignoring the bullets that had penetrated them. The duchess's concern was for her husband. As blood spilled over his lips she asked, “For heaven's sake, what's happened to you?” He, in turn, feared for his wife: “Sophie dear, Sophie dear, don't die! Stay alive for our children!” His last words dismissed his wounds: “It is nothing.”
¹
But in the chancelleries of Europe, aristocratic phlegm soon gave way to the demands of honor, geopolitical ambition, revanchism, and fear.

GOING TO WAR TO HOLD THE EMPIRE TOGETHER

Austria-Hungary's statesmen knew just how vulnerable they were as a multinational empire. Avenging Franz Ferdinand's death—even if he was not much liked—was necessary to affirm the dual monarchy's staying power. Heirs to the throne simply could not be picked off by Slavic nationalists at will and without consequences. While the reaction throughout much of Europe was measured, shock mingling with the assumption that this was a local affair—there was always something new out of Austria-Hungary—Austria's foreign minister, Count Leopold von Berchtold, advocated “a final and fundamental reckoning with Serbia,”
²
a terror-sponsoring state, the power behind the assassins. He was supported by the hawkish chief of the Austrian general staff, Count Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, who recognized the danger of Slavic nationalism if it were led by Serbia rather than contained within the Habsburg Empire.

If the war were limited to Serbia, the empire could fight it successfully. But of Europe's five great powers—Austria-Hungary, Germany, France, Russia, and Britain—Austria-Hungary was by far the weakest; it could make no pretense to dominate Europe; defending itself in the Balkans was challenge enough. Barely a quarter of its army was Austrian, another near quarter was Hungarian, and the rest, the majority, was a motley of Czechs, Italians, and Slavs whose devotion to the dual monarchy was open to question. Germany was Austria's necessary ally to keep the Russian bear from mauling the Austrian eagle—especially as the Russian bear made a pretense of looking on the Balkan states as her lost cubs. What the Russian bear wanted most of all was to splash in the warm water port of Constantinople, the gateway from the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean, and her cubs could lead her there.

THE GERMAN BLUNDERBUSS

The Austrians took the position that one was either with the dual monarchy or with the terrorists. Germany was with the dual monarchy. But despite Prussian stereotypes to the contrary, turmoil in the Balkans potentially pitting Austria-Hungary against Russia had for decades made Germany the peacemaker of Central Europe. In the famous formulation of Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the German Reich from 1871 to 1890, “The whole Eastern question”—by which he meant the Balkans—“is not worth the healthy bones of a Pomeranian musketeer.”
³

Germany was Europe's most powerful state. United only since 1871 (before that it had been a congeries of kingdoms, principalities, duchies, free cities, and confederations), Germany was an industrial superpower, with the second-largest manufacturing economy in the
world (behind the United States), double the steel production of Britain, and world leadership in fields from applied chemistry to electrical engineering. Germany's industrious population was growing—to 65 million in 1913—casting an ominous shadow over the French, who, for all their reputation as lovers, were not having babies; France boasted a population of only 39 million.

The German education system was broad, deep, and effective, stamping out engineers, physicists, and highly trained specialists in every academic and technical field—including the profession of arms, where even the lowliest private was literate. So professional, well-trained, and highly educated was the German army—and so politically dominant was militaristic Prussia within Germany—that the Second Reich was really the kingdom of the German general staff.

But Bismarck knew how important it was for Germany, having forged itself through “blood and iron,” to reassure Europe that it was a “contented” power. His chief foreign policy goal was to isolate France and keep Germany allied with Austria and Russia. As Bismarck said, “I am holding two powerful heraldic beasts by their collars, and am keeping them apart for two reasons: first of all, lest they should tear each other to pieces; and secondly, lest they should come to an understanding at our expense.”
⁴

All this changed with the arrival of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who assumed the throne in 1888 and dismissed Bismarck two years later. The Kaiser did not follow Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy admonition about speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Instead, he spoke like an exploding blunderbuss while insisting on having the biggest stick possible and waving it furiously. He practiced diplomatic brinksmanship, thrusting himself forward, asserting German rights—and then almost invariably backing down, grumbling about the lack of respect granted to his empire.

In the process, he forfeited Germany's alliance with Russia, though he maintained a friendly correspondence with his cousin Nicky, Czar Nicholas II. Not content with being militarily dominant on the Continent, the Kaiser decided that German pride, prestige, and power demanded a navy to rival Great Britain's and built the second-largest navy in the world, thus alienating the British. He was half-English himself
⁵
—no less than a grandchild of Queen Victoria—though he seemed intent on proving himself more belligerent than the most bullet-headed Prussian martinet, and harbored a special dislike for Britain, the land of his mother. Among other things, he blamed the English doctors who had attended his birth for his withered left arm, which he often tried to disguise by gripping the pommel of a sword with his left hand.

He twisted the lion's tail when he could. About a third of the world's Muslim population lived under the Union Jack, so the Kaiser made a trip to Damascus in 1898 and declared himself a Teutonic Saladin: “The [Ottoman] sultan and the 300 million Muslims who revere him as their spiritual leader should know that the German Emperor is their friend forever.”
⁶
German railroad engineers backed his boast by helping to build the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway and the Hijaz Railway from Damascus to Medina—neither of which was completed before the war, but both of which Britain saw as potential threats to India.

During the Boer War (1899–1902), the Kaiser publicly expressed sympathy for Britain's enemies, and twice in North Africa he tried to divide British and French imperial interests but only united them in consternation at his own belligerence. In the First Moroccan Crisis of 1905–1906, the Kaiser visited Tangier and declared his support for Moroccan independence against the expanding influence of France. An international conference resolved the dispute in
France's favor—but not before French and German troops were mobilized. In 1911 Germany sent a gunboat to Agadir, after a rebellion against the Moroccan sultan and a subsequent deployment of French troops. In return for accepting a French Morocco, Germany demanded an expanded German Cameroon (at French territorial expense) in central Africa. The Kaiser's bullying manner convinced the British government that Germany was not quite the contented power that Bismarck had made it out to be. Indeed, since Bismarck's dismissal, Germany had embarked on a foreign policy of
Weltpolitik
, making Germany a player in the game of global power politics.

Germany's diplomatic sabre-rattling had inspired some odd alliances. Since 1892 anti-clerical republican France had been allied with Orthodox czarist Russia. Russia was notoriously weak—her armed forces had been humiliated in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905
⁷
—but the German general staff could not discount her size (170 million people) or her potential to cause trouble in the Balkans. In the west, Britain's John Bull became the unlikely escort of the French Marianne in 1904 with the Entente Cordiale. On its face the entente simply resolved imperial issues, but de facto it made Britain an ally of France. It was followed in 1912 by an Anglo-French naval agreement committing the Royal Navy to defend France's Atlantic coast.
⁸
In 1907, Britain even agreed to an entente with Russia, which had long been regarded as the great imperial threat to British India. In British eyes the railroad-building, battleship-constructing, Boer-supporting, philo-Islamic German Kaiser had become the greater threat; and the Russians were equally worried that Germany's increasingly friendly relationship with the Ottoman Turks could block their dream of acquiring Constantinople. Bismarck's goal had been to isolate France and conciliate
Russia; the Kaiser had successfully, if unintentionally, made France the anchor of an anti-German coalition that included Russia.

AUSTRIA DECLARES A SMALL WAR; FRANCE, RUSSIA, AND GERMANY MAKE IT A BIGGER ONE

On 23 July, Austria delivered an ultimatum to Serbia. The assassination of the Archduke had put an end to Austrian tolerance. Austria demanded that Serbia ban all propaganda directed against the Habsburg Empire, shut down the nationalist organizations that fanned it, allow Austrian officials to help suppress anti-imperial groups in Serbia, sack Serbian officers as specified by Austria, and allow imperial investigators to bring the terrorists who had conspired against the Archduke to justice. The Serbians were given forty-eight hours to respond. To the Austrians' surprise, the Serbians agreed to almost everything, quibbling only at allowing Austrian police onto Serbian territory, which the Serbs considered an unacceptable violation of their sovereignty. Even the Kaiser thought Serbia's response was a “capitulation of the most humiliating character. Now that Serbia has given in, all grounds for war have disappeared.”
⁹
For the Austrians the point had been to establish the pretext for war, not to get Serbian agreement, and Austria decided Serbia's response was insufficient. On 28 July, the Habsburg Empire declared war on Serbia.

The Austrians' declaration of war put the cat among the pigeons, or the Teutons among the Slavs. But the first major power to go on full mobilization for what could be a wider war was not Austria or Germany,
¹⁰
it was Russia. Russia's foreign minister Sergei Sazonov saw the Austrian ultimatum as a starting pistol—
“c'est la guerre européene!”
—that provided Russia cover (and allies) for a strategic lunge at Constantinople.
¹¹

Encouraging Russian belligerence was France, which had its own territorial designs if Russia could tie down German armies on an eastern front. For more than forty years, the French had wanted to regain the territory of Alsace-Lorraine in southwestern Germany. It had been lost to the Germans when the hapless Napoleon III declared war on Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). That war, disastrous for France, had led to Napoleon's abdication, the creation of a new French republic, and the crowning of a Second German Reich at Versailles. Virtually every Frenchman—republican or monarchist, socialist or Catholic—was passionate about recovering Alsace-Lorraine.
¹²
The French knew they could not regain the territory by diplomacy or by fighting Germany on their own. The French could never instigate a war; they could only hope for one in which they had surrounded Germany with enemies and strengthened themselves with allies. And now they had done just that. French finance of Russia's railways threatened to deposit the Czar's enormous if ramshackle army on Germany's eastern border. With the Entente Cordiale, the French believed they had seduced Britain from her previous policy of “splendid isolation” from the Continent. The “Triple Entente” had put the Russian steamroller in the East on the side of
la belle France
, and in the West procured her the tacit support of the world's largest navy, backed by the resources of the world's largest empire.