World War One: A Short History (2 page)

There is much to be said for a German Europe. She had
emerged as the strongest Power in 1871, when, under Chancellor Bismarck, she had defeated France, and she had gone far ahead. In 1914, Berlin was the Athens of the world, a place where you went to learn anything important – physics, philosophy, music, engineering (the terms ‘hertz’, ‘roentgen’, ‘mach’, ‘diesel’ all commemorate that era, and the discoveries on which the modern world is built). Three of the members of the British cabinet that went to war in 1914 had studied at German universities – the Secretary of State for War had translated Schopenhauer – and so too had many of the Russian-Jewish Bolsheviks whom the Germans encountered at and after Brest-Litovsk. There was no end to the ingenuity of German chemists and engineers, and the Central Powers came close to victory on the mountainous ways of the Italian front because Ferdinand Porsche invented the four-wheel drive to deal with them (and then went on to the Volkswagen and much else).
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In 1914 the great smokestacks of the Ruhr or industrial Saxony predominated, as once those of Britain and Manchester had done. Certainly, as Churchill acknowledged, Germany produced a spectacular war effort, with victories such as the battle of Caporetto against the Italians in 1917, or the March offensive of 1918 against the British, displays of panache of which the plodders on the Allied side were utterly incapable.

The idea of a German Europe also made sense on the ground, and, again, there is a ghostly resemblance to the present. A European economic space, protected from British or American competition, including the ore of Sweden and France, the coal and steel industries of Germany, and with outrunners into North Africa and even Baghdad, where oil had already become important: why not? In 1915 one of the most enlightened Germans, Friedrich Naumann, wrote a bestseller called
Mitteleuropa
in which he called, not so much for a German empire, as for a sort of Germanic commonwealth, Berlin showing the way for the various smaller peoples to the south-east, of whom
there were many. These peoples – Poles the largest group – had been swallowed up in the historic empires of Austria, Russia, Turkey; there were millions of Poles in Germany. Nationalist movements arose among most of them, and threatened the very existence of Austria and Turkey. Overall, seen from Berlin, these non-German peoples were being allowed to get away with too much. The Austrians spent so much money in a futile effort to buy off the nationalists that there was not enough left for the sinews of power – the army especially, which had a smaller budget than the British army, one tenth its size. If Austria were properly managed, with a dose of Prussian efficiency, such problems would go away. In a Germanic
Mitteleuropa
, ran the thinking, these lesser peoples, whose culture anyway owed much to Germany, would come to heel. Since 1879 there had been an Austro-German alliance. Naumann meant to give it economic teeth. Other Germans had in mind a more forceful approach.

The confidence of these Germans grew as the country’s industry boomed, and success went to their heads. Bismarck had been cautious: he could see that a strong Germany, in the centre, might unite her neighbours against her. But a new generation was coming up, and it was full of itself. The symbolic figure at its head was a new young emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who came to the throne in 1889. His model was England. She was vastly rich and had an enormous overseas empire. England was conservative as regards institutions, which had long historical roots, but she was also go-ahead, and her industries accounted for a large part of the world’s trade. Her overall position was guaranteed by an enormous navy. Why should not Germany acquire an overseas empire to match? Under Wilhelm II, German power and the blundering expression of it became a – the – European problem.

Already, on the Continent, there was rivalry with France, the outcome in the short term of Bismarck’s great victory of 1871,
when the new Germany had annexed the eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, and in the longer term of a history that went back to the seventeenth century, when France had dominated Europe and perpetuated the division of Germany into quarrelling states and statelets. To Franco-German rivalry was added a further relationship of tension. Bismarck had been careful not to estrange Russia, and there was a close understanding between Berlin and St Petersburg, in part because of monarchical solidarity in general and in part because each had taken its share of a Poland that was not easily digestible. But a new factor came up in the later nineteenth century, as the Turkish empire in Europe weakened. Austria, Germany’s ally, had powerful interests in the Balkans, and so too did Russia: there were Austro-Russian clashes, and Bismarck’s balancing act became strained. Frustrated in their search for German support, the Russians looked to France, which anyway had money to spare for investments abroad, whereas German money stayed at home.
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By 1894, France and Russia were formally in alliance. Matters then became much more complicated when Germany bid for world power and constructed a great navy.

In 1900 the non-European world appeared to be disintegrating. India and Africa had passed into European control; China and Turkey looked increasingly likely to collapse, and Germans wished for their share. They then proceeded in quite the wrong way, and the generation that emerged into maturity around 1890 has much to answer for. The last thing that Germany needed was a problem with Great Britain, and the greatest mistake of the twentieth century was made when Germany built a navy designed to attack her. That cause somehow united what was best in Germany. Max Weber is one of the most respected sociologists, and his gifts were enormous: languages, law, history, philosophy, even the statistics of Polish peasants buying up Prussian land. In 1895 he gave a well-publicized
inaugural lecture when he was appointed to a chair at Freiburg University. He was remarkably young for such a position – not much more than thirty. The professor (who had resigned from the Pan-German League on the grounds that it was not nationalist enough) talked what now appears to be gibberish, making less sense than Hitler: England has no social problems because she is rich; she is rich because of empire; she exports undesirables – Irish, proletarians, etc. – because she has assorted Australias where they can be dumped; from these she can get cheap raw materials and a captured market; so she has cheap food, and there is no unemployment; England has her empire because she has a great navy. Germany also has undesirables – Poles, proletarians, etc. – therefore she too must dump the undesirables in colonies; a navy is therefore a good idea; England would accept a German imperial role if in a battle the German navy were large enough to do serious damage to the British navy before being itself sunk; that would mean that, come the next British naval battle, the British would not have enough ships and would therefore be sunk, by French or Russians. This was received with rapture by the audience. It is one of the stupidest documents ever put together by a clever man, and hardly worth even parodying. Every step in the argument was wrong, beginning with the assumption that the British had few social problems: these might even have been rather less without the sheer costs of empire. At the end of European imperialism, in the 1970s, the poorest country in the continent was Portugal, which ran a huge African empire, and the richest were Sweden, which abandoned its only colony – in the Caribbean – long before, and Switzerland, which never had an empire at all.

Weber had a moral sense,
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and when he saw his young students being mown down in 1914 he refused to join the crew of professors cheering on the national cause. But he and his like had led the younger generation down a deadly path. Germany produced a navy, and it took one third of the defence
budget. The money, diverted from the army, made it unable to take on the two-front war that the Franco-Russian alliance portended. There was not enough to take in more than half of the young men who could have been trained: they could not be fed and clothed. They were exempted, and the German land army in 1914 was hardly larger than the French, although in 1914 the French population stood at under 40 million, to the Germans’ 65 million. The German battleships themselves were very well built, but there were too few of them, and they were hopelessly vulnerable. They spent almost the entire First World War in harbour, until, at the end, threatened with pointless sacrifice, the crews mutinied, bringing down the German empire itself. But the navy, designed only to sail across the North Sea and therefore not needing the weight of coal that worldwide British warships required, could lay on extra armour. This was such an obvious piece of blackmail that it pushed the British into a considerable effort – not only did they outbuild the Germans, almost two-to-one, in ships, but they also made defensive arrangements with France and Russia. These involved colonial bargains – Egypt for Morocco with the French (the
Entente Cordiale
) in 1904, and Persia with the Russians in 1907. There were informal understandings regarding naval cooperation if it came to trouble. To each of these steps, the German reaction was blundering and blustering – a demand for some slice of derelict Morocco in 1905, encouragement of frivolous Austrian aggressiveness in the Balkans in 1909 and a gunboat sent to Morocco in 1911. This ‘sabre-rattling’ went down well with a great part of opinion at home, but it created an air of international crisis, and by 1914 an emissary of the American President was talking of militarism gone mad.

Around this time there emerged a matter with which the world has had to live ever since. President Eisenhower, in the 1960s, found the right phrase for it: ‘the military-industrial
complex’. War industry became the most powerful element in the economy, employing thousands if not millions, taking a large part of the budget, and stimulating all sorts of industries on the side, including the writing of columns in newspapers. Besides, war industry was subject to bewildering change: what appeared to be an insane waste of money at one stage might turn out to be essential (aircraft being the obvious case), whereas what appeared to be common sense turned out to consist of white elephants (fortresses being, again, the obvious case). Technology was becoming expensive and unpredictable, and by 1911 there was an arms race. By then, any country’s armaments had become an excuse for any other country’s armaments to increase, and there were crises in the Mediterranean and the Balkans to make every country feel vulnerable. When Germany sent her gunboat to Morocco in the summer of 1911, she uncocked a gun. But the finger on the trigger was, peculiarly, Italy’s.

If Turkish territory was to be parcelled out, then why should not Italy take her share? The British had taken Egypt, the French, North Africa. Italian empire-builders looked at the rest, and went to war. It is a strange fact of modern European history that Italy, weakest of the Powers, brings the problems to a head: no Cavour, no Bismarck; no Mussolini, no Hitler.
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Now, Italy opened the series of events leading to war in 1914. Knowing that, because of the Moroccan crisis, the British, French and Germans would do nothing to stop her, she attacked Ottoman Turkey and tried to seize Libya. The Turks were too weak, and in any event had no ships to defend even the islands off the Anatolian coast, which the Italians seized. The prospect of an Ottoman collapse caused the various Balkan states, in the first instance, to declare their interests. In alliance, in 1912, they attacked, winning in a few weeks, clearing the Ottoman army from the Balkans. Then, in a second Balkan war (1913) they fell apart among themselves, and fought again.
The Turks staged a recovery, but the victors were Serbia, which cooperated closely with Russia, and Greece, which cooperated closely with Great Britain.

When China had been disintegrating, ten years before, the Powers had also been rivals, but the rivalry was naval. If the Ottoman empire was disintegrating – and almost no one now expected it to last – then the rivalry would be nearer home and would involve land connections and armies. For Russia, the straits between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara or the Dardanelles between the Marmara and the Aegean were vital: the windpipe of the Russian economy. Ninety per cent of grain exports went through, and much else came in, to keep going the industries of southern Russia. During the Italian war, in 1911–12, the Turks had closed the Dardanelles; there had been an immediate economic stoppage in southern Russia. To get security at the Straits was a vital matter for Russia, and early in 1914 the Entente Powers forced the Turks to grant a status close to autonomy to the partly Armenian provinces of eastern Anatolia. This (and the parallel Anglo-French interest in the Arab provinces) might easily have spelled the end of the Ottoman empire, as the Christian Armenians might become Russian instruments. Before the treaty could be ratified, the Turks opened a line to Berlin.

Germany was the Power that threatened them least – quite the contrary, the Kaiser paraded himself as protector of Islam and gave the Sultan a vast, Germanic railway station on the Asian shore of Istanbul as a sign of approval and support. At the end of 1913 a German general, Liman von Sanders (son of a converted Jew, and therefore considered in wooden Berlin thinking to be suitable for the Orient), became in effect commander of an Ottoman army corps, placed at the Straits between the Black Sea and the Aegean. The Russians reacted against this, but they could not stop the sending of a German military mission to Turkey – several dozen specialist officers –
and in any case the chief figure in the new regime at Istanbul was very clearly the Germans’ man: Enver Pasha, who spoke German almost perfectly and had the kind of military energy that the Germans admired. He and other ‘Young Turks’ generally came from the Balkans and had learned at first hand how ‘nation-building’ was carried on there – a new language, militarism, expulsion of minorities. Germany was the magnet for them, whereas France or England were the models for their political opponents. For the moment, given the despair that followed upon the Balkan Wars, it was Enver and his friends who were in the ascendant, and they invited Liman von Sanders. A Russian nightmare was a Germany in charge of the Straits, and the arrival of that German military mission at Sirkeci station in December 1913 marked the beginning of the countdown to war, eight months later.