The Story of the Great War (Vol. 1-8). Various Authors
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the Great War had no sooner started than the old guard bobbed up serenely, and with them new ones—men and women writers, adventurous novelists, privateers of all sorts. They have kept on working and seeing more or less, and have performed necessary and valuable service. They have described the life behind the front, the life in towns, camps, prisons, hospitals and given the news—the rough general outlines—of the swiftly changing drama. Very few have seen any fighting, properly speaking, and although bits of their work here and there deserve to become part of the permanent history of the war, they themselves would be the last to suggest that they have told the real story.
The real story is of two kinds. There is the narrative of the events, the orderly, understanding arrangement and coordination of the showers of facts and rumors that blow in from a hundred sources to the great news centers far from the front. And there is the story of personal experience, the sensations of the individual as he looks into the face of war. The first tells what happened, the other how it felt. For the one, the correspondent is too near, for the other too far away.
The division of the enormous battle fronts into innumerable little news-tight compartments, so to speak, understood in their entirety only by the commanders in chief at the centers of the telegraph and telephone network far behind the front, makes it impossible for a correspondent to see very far beyond his own nose. Even were he permitted to understand the general plan of his own army he could scarcely know, while still at the front, the general plan of the enemy. A well-informed observer working comfortably at his desk in one of the capitals, with the news of the world at his disposal, with experts on every subject within easy calling distance, and with every sort of map and reference book, is much better able to write a story of the war—such a story as this, for instance—than any correspondent actually at the front, however fortunately situated. There have been many such "correspondents at home" and reporters returning from first-hand glimpses of this and that, have often for the first time understood the significance of such details when they were seen through the broad perspective and leisurely analysis of such long-distance observers.
The nourishing flavor of such a little book as Fritz Kreisler's "Four Weeks in the Trenches"—scarcely more than a magazine article, with no sensational adventures and no attempt at rhetorical effect, and of several little collections of published letters—reveals at once the correspondent's other disability. People feel that this man really was there—this is what one real man with a gun in his hand did feel, and not what some civilian, sitting safely out of range, imagines crowds of men might have felt. Its very incompleteness, things left out because of sensibilities so stunned that events made no mark as they whirled by, is often more impressive than the conventional war correspondent's cocksureness and windy eloquence. There are scores of men like this gifted violinist—playwriters, painters, journalists, men trained to see things in various ways—drawn in by universal service and now buried in the mass, but destined some day to emerge to normal life.
From them the story of the individual, of the fighting itself, must come long after the war is over. It will come piecemeal, from diaries now stuck away in the soldiers' pockets, from memories that will only begin to act when peace has given weary brains a chance to work again, from men now tired and dirty and horror-stunned and scarcely able to remember their own names.
PART I—INDIRECT CAUSES OF THE WAR
POLITICAL AND DIPLOMATIC HISTORY OF EUROPE FROM 1866 TO 1914 WITH A CHAPTER ON THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF JAPAN
In order to understand properly the underlying causes which were responsible for the outbreak of the Great European War of 1914, it is necessary to be acquainted with the recent historical development of the various nations involved. In considering the various phases of this development it becomes evident that in modern times the history of any one country exerts a powerful influence upon the history of all the other countries. The vast development of means of communication between the various countries of the earth—railways, steamships, telegraphs, telephones—resulted in an equally vast increase of their commercial and social intercourse until one might almost claim that there is not a single event of any importance whatsoever happening in one country which does not make its influence felt throughout the entire world. It is not always easy or even possible to determine the exact degree to which the various nations of the world are affected by this mutual interdependency, and frequently many years elapse before it becomes evident at all that what one nation has done or neglected to do has an important relation to the fate of another nation, even though the two nations may have few points of contact and be separated by great distances.
To describe historical events as they happen day by day or even year by year throughout the modern world is an almost hopeless task, because a description of this nature would result in a confusion which would be even worse than an entire lack of knowledge concerning these matters. We will, therefore, consider separately the historical development of each nation and thereby try to arrive finally at a clear understanding of the historical causes of the Great War of 1914.
Some of these causes, of course, may be claimed to go back to the beginnings of the history of the various nations; but a majority of them had their origin in comparatively recent times. It is also true that the Napoleonic Wars resulted in certain international alignments some of which, at least in part, held over until comparatively recently. But it was only approximately at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century that international relations assumed the important position and the fateful influence which they hold now. The short war of 1866 between Prussia and Austria, fought primarily to determine the supremacy in German affairs, may conveniently be considered for our purposes a starting point of modern international history because it resulted in changes so important that their final results had a powerful influence over the fate of the entire civilized world. Inasmuch as this war affected more directly Germany and Austria, we will first consider these two countries.
CHAPTER I
GERMANY
In 1866 there was strictly speaking no Germany. That part of the world which during the past forty-five years has been known as Germany consisted of a large number of small states and principalities, speaking the same language and having in a general way the same customs and ideals. All attempts to find some basis for their political unification, however, miscarried. Whenever Prussia, which beyond doubt was the biggest and most powerful of all the German-speaking states, attempted to take the lead it was opposed by powerful Austria as well as by a varying number of smaller states. The latter, much as they desired in certain ways to bring about a united Germany in order to be better protected against their much more powerful neighbors, Russia and France, feared these hardly more than a Germany under the control of Prussia. It gradually became clear that unification of Germany would never be realized as long as Austria and Prussia were contending for leadership. How utterly impossible it was for these two countries to achieve any lasting success as long as they made a common cause of anything had been proven only two years earlier, when both went to war with Denmark about the succession to the throne of the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein. For no sooner had they succeeded through their combined efforts in defeating Denmark and thereby forced the northern kingdom to relinquish its claims on Schleswig-Holstein than they found it next to impossible to settle among themselves the division of the newly acquired territory.
It was about at this time that the greatest statesman of modern Germany, Bismarck, began to become all powerful. It was he who recognized more clearly than anyone else the need of eliminating Austria from German affairs, and then finding some cause which would appeal strongly and equally to all the other German states. The difficulties connected with the division of Schleswig-Holstein offered to him an opportune cause for a quarrel with Austria, and when he felt in 1866 that the Prussian army had been sufficiently re-formed and built up to overpower not only Austria, but any of the other German states which might possibly join with her, he went to war. Prussia had succeeded in forming an alliance with the newly united Italy on the basis of the