Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. Max Hastings
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of the balance of representation in the Reichstag, with variable but critical influence from the army.
The Hohenzollerns got everything wrong socially. The Crown Prince returned from a 1913 fox-hunting tour of England convinced – quite mistakenly – of Germany’s popularity with that country’s ruling class. His father, with his withered arm and obsession with the minutiae of military uniforms and regulations, was a brittle personality whose yearning for respect caused him to intersperse blandishments and threats in ill-judged succession. Wilhelm once demanded of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes: ‘Now tell me, Rhodes, why is it that I am not popular in England? What can I do to make myself popular?’ Rhodes answered: ‘Suppose you just try doing nothing.’ The Kaiser hesitated, then exploded into heavy laughter. It was beyond his powers to heed such advice. In 1908 Wilhelm scrawled a marginal note on a dispatch from his ambassador in London: ‘If they want a war, they may start it, we are not afraid of it!’
In the years before 1914 European allegiances were not set in stone: they wavered, flickered, shifted. The French entered the new century with a possible invasion of England docketed in their war scenarios, and in 1905 the British still had contingency plans to fight France. They believed for a time that Russia might abandon the Triple Entente and join the Triple Alliance. In 1912 Austria’s Count Berchtold indeed dallied with a rapprochement with St Petersburg, though this foundered over irreconcilable differences about the Balkans. The following year, Germany offered loans to Serbia. Many of the first generation of Rhodes Scholars at Oxford were young Germans, whose presence reflected British respect, even reverence, for their nation’s culture. And industry: until 1911, Vickers collaborated with Krupp on the design and manufacture of shell fuses.
Though the Anglo-German ‘naval race’ grievously impaired bilateral relations, Chancellor Theobald Bethmann Hollweg and Lord Chancellor Richard Haldane made fumbling efforts to improve them, the former by seeking an assurance of British neutrality in the event of a continental war. Bethmann paid a domestic price for such advances, becoming mistrusted by fanatical German nationalists as an alleged anglophile. Meanwhile the Kaiser’s brother Prince Heinrich of Prussia, during a January 1914 conversation in Berlin with British naval attaché Captain Wilfred Henderson, remarked in idiosyncratic English readily comprehensible at any London dining table, that ‘other large European maritime nations are not white men’. This comment, which placed alike beyond the pale Russians, Italians, Austro-Hungarians and Frenchmen, won Henderson’s warm approbation. Reporting the royal remarks to the Admiralty, he wrote: ‘I could not help feeling that His Royal Highness had voiced in a peculiarly British way a view that is very prevalent in our own Service.’
These words were thought sufficiently embarrassing to be expunged from a volume of such diplomatic reports published a generation later. But the Prince’s theme was pursued on an evening when German and British naval officers dined together, and the only toast offered was that of ‘the two white nations’. At the 1914 Kiel Regatta, some German sailors swore eternal friendship to their visiting counterparts of the Royal Navy. The commander of Pommern told officers of the cruiser Southampton: ‘We try and mould ourselves in the traditions of your navy, and when I see in the papers that the possibility of war between our two nations must be considered, I read it with horror – to us such a war would be a civil war.’ Grand-Admiral Tirpitz employed an English governess for his daughters, who completed their education at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
Yet if Germany admired Britain, it also sought to challenge her, most conspicuously through the creation of a fleet capable of engaging the Royal Navy – this was overwhelmingly the Kaiser’s personal commitment, strongly opposed by the chancellor and the army – and more fundamentally by rejecting the continental balance of power, so dear to British hearts. At Kiel in 1914, Vice-Admiral Sir George Warrender sought to flatter Tirpitz. The Englishman said: ‘You are the most famous man in Europe.’ Tirpitz answered: ‘I have never heard that before.’ Warrender added: ‘At least in England.’ The admiral growled: ‘You in England always think that I am the bogey of England.’ So Tirpitz was, and so too was the Kaiser. However Germany dressed matters up, its leaders aspired to secure a dominance in the management of Europe which no British government would concede, and thereafter they proposed to reach out across the oceans of the world.
Lord Haldane told Prince Lichnowsky, in the German ambassador’s words: ‘England, if we attacked France, would unconditionally spring to France’s aid, for England could not allow the balance of power to be disturbed.’ Lichnowsky was not taken seriously in Berlin, partly because of his enthusiasm for things English. His hosts did not reciprocate. British prime minister Herbert Asquith wrote of the Lichnowskys to his confidante Venetia Stanley: ‘rather trying guests. They have neither of them any manners, and he is loquacious and inquisitive about trifles.’
Haldane’s warning, transmitted to Berlin by the ambassador, was contemptuously dismissed. Gen. Helmuth von Moltke, Germany’s chief of staff, thought the British Army an imperial gendarmerie of little consequence, and the Royal Navy irrelevant in a continental clash of soldiers. The Kaiser scrawled on the ambassador’s report his own view that the British concept of a balance of power was an ‘idiocy’ which would make England ‘eternally into our enemy’. He wrote to Franz Ferdinand of Austria, describing Haldane’s remarks as ‘full of poison and hatred and envy of the good development of our mutual alliance and our two countries [Germany and Austria]’. Several British academics warned of the prevalence of opinion in German universities about the inevitability of a historic struggle between the Kaiser’s people and their own, identified as ascendant Rome and doomed Carthage.
Germany and the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary were twin pillars of the Triple Alliance, of which Italy was a third member, upon whose attendance in the event of war nobody relied. For much of the previous century, the Ottoman Empire had been known as ‘the sick man of Europe’, its might and territories shrivelling. It had now been supplanted in that predicament by the Hapsburg Empire, whose dissolution in the face of its own contradictions and disaffected minorities was a focus of constant speculation in chancelleries and newspapers, not least in Germany. But the rulers of the Hohenzollern Empire elevated preservation of their tottering ally to a key objective of foreign policy. The Kaiser and his advisers shackled themselves to the Hapsburgs, not least because the beneficiaries of Austria-Hungary’s dissolution would be their chosen enemies: Russia and its Balkan clients. The Kaiser delivered frequent denunciations of ‘Slavdom’ and Russia’s alleged leadership of a front against ‘Germandom’. On 10 December 1912 he told the Swiss ambassador in Berlin: ‘we will not leave Austria in the lurch: if diplomacy fails we shall have to fight this racial war’.
The Hapsburg Empire embraced fifty million people of eleven nationalities, occupying the territories of modern Austria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, parts of Poland and north-east Italy. Franz Joseph was a weary old man of eighty-three, who had occupied his throne since 1848, and created the Dual Monarchy in 1867. For twenty-eight years he had enjoyed an intimacy with the actress Katharina Schratt. He wrote to her as ‘My Dear Good Friend’; she replied to ‘Your Imperial and Royal Majesty, my Most August Lord’. She was fifty-one in 1914, and they had long since settled into a pleasant domesticity. At Ischl, his summer residence, the Emperor rambled alone to her house, Villa Felicitas, where he would sometimes arrive at 7 a.m. after sending a note: ‘Please leave the small door unlocked.’
Having spent some years of his youth as a soldier, even seeing a little action, the Emperor almost invariably affected military uniform; he perceived his army as the unifying force of the empire. Its officer corps was dominated by noblemen, most of whom combined conceit with incompetence. Franz Joseph’s reign was symbolised by his insistence, when a young monarch, upon holding military exercises on a parade ground sheeted in ice, which caused many horses to slip and fall, killing two of their riders. On a larger scale, this was how he continued to rule, seeking to defy inexorable social, political and economic forces. Norman Stone has categorised the Hapsburg monarchy as ‘a system of institutionalised escapism’. Its capital harboured as much poverty and unemployment as any European city, and more despair than most: in 1913 almost 1,500 Viennese attempted suicide, and more than half succeeded. As for popular consent, one writer has observed of the Austrian parliament: ‘It was less a legislature than a cacophony. But