A Patriot's History of the Modern World (14 page)

The Future of War

Few doubted the biblical-level destruction that war threatened to wreak on Europe. A sobering portrait of such a landscape came from Ivan S. Bloch, a Polish Jew, banker, and railroad financier obsessed with modern warfare. Still clinging to the Norman Angell/Winston Churchill position that war was obsolete, Bloch produced a six-volume analysis called
La Guerre Future
(1898), which was condensed and translated into English as
Is War Now Impossible?
Armed with the new Maxim gun (soon improved upon with Browning's light air-cooled machine gun), long-range artillery, smokeless powder, and rifled barrels, military forces could decimate units moving in open ground. The bayonet charge was now a thing of the past; cavalry, hopelessly out of date as an offensive force (although it would take multiple military disasters to prove the point). Defensive forces, dug in behind earthworks and entrenchments, fronted by the new barbed wire and acres of land mines, would have a massive advantage. Perhaps war was not impossible, but had not the previous century shown that “civilized powers” rarely fight one another? Between 1879 and 1917, of the 270 wars recorded, fewer than a third of them were fought in Europe, although those that did occur always threatened to engulf the major powers. Another indicator of belligerence, military spending, was also down among the Western nations. Russia, the leader, spent 4 percent of national product on its military, but Germany and Britain spent only 3 percent, and only France and Germany had even 1 percent of their populations in the armed forces (France at 1.5 percent was the leader).
¹
And, as we have seen, the U.S. Army was minuscule compared with the Europeans' land forces.

This in no way invalidates the arguments that “militarism,” however one defines it, did not contribute significantly toward the war. But the proliferation of weapons didn't dictate the rise of militaristic attitudes—the process is vice versa. Germany had implemented a reserve system that allowed quick access to vast manpower pools, a factor in both the strategic planning of the German General Staff and the belligerence of the Kaiser at opportune times. Many hoped, however, that the hostile attitudes and aggressiveness of the military leadership, particularly in Germany, could be curbed by marriages between Europe's royal families. But in the end, these blood relationships mattered little. None of Old Europe's leaders were “men of the people,” few commanded widespread personal loyalty, and in any event, the monarchs of 1914 could not veto war plans drawn up by their military high commands. Kaiser Wilhelm II would argue for redirecting the German war effort away from France, but in vain. In Russia, the Czar was insulated from public audit, while at the same time fearing a democratic uprising on the one hand and aristocratic backstabbing on the other.

Important pockets of optimism could be found across Europe—the Germans had an annual growth rate of almost 3 percent in their GDP—but in many cases this represented a recent burst, not as in the United States, where the GDP had averaged almost 4 percent growth annually since the Civil War and occasionally approached 7 percent. Nevertheless, European growth constituted a continuing trend. Land reform had begun in Russia, slowly, to be sure, but significant in its potential. Inflation in the West was low due to the gold standard, business—especially American business, after the Panic of 1893—was prospering, and wages were rising. Cities, though dirty and crowded, had an air of expectation and hope.

No city denied the approaching storm clouds of chaos and blood more than Paris, which (aside from Brussels) had the most to lose in a continental conflagration. Paris had recovered from the Prussian invasion of 1870 to stake its claim as the “New Jerusalim,” [sic] although it was hardly holy. To many the city seemed to embody urban perfection by human hands, thanks to its art, culture, and fashion. Journalist William Shirer called the French capital “as near to paradise on this earth as any man could ever get,” and writer Harold Rosenberg described Paris in 1940 as “the Holy Place of our time. The only one.”
²
Thomas Appleton said Paris was where good Americans went when they died. By 1900, Paris was not only architecturally interesting, with its Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Coeur, but also morally provocative. Its lenient censorship laws “permitted entertainment and publications that
would have had little chance of survival elsewhere in Europe,” and its “ambiguous morality” encouraged brothels, cafés, low-level drugs, and saloons, all mixing with the contradictory odors of fine perfume, auto exhaust, and horse dung.
³

Others saw an emptiness, a
mal
, a cynicism that “gnaws at us,” as Georges Clemenceau observed, a Paris that drifted into lethargy, spreading a malaise that affected the rest of the country. Nevertheless, France still carried a Napoleonic longing for achievement, grandeur, and accomplishment that it would never achieve again. For despite an affinity with foreign artists, dancers, and composers at the turn of the century—especially Strauss and Mussorgsky (who died in 1881 but remained quite popular)—France seemed to rebel against anything French.

One critic, decrying that domestic art had descended into chaos and spectacle, complained that foreign styles were “barbarism,” and in frustration concluded, “
Plus d'école, mais une poussière de talents; plus de corps, mais des individus
”
(“No school any longer, only a smattering of talent; no group any longer, only individuals”)
⁴
. In short, France suffered from a crisis of confidence concealed by bursts of artistic energy in a decaying edifice of French culture and past glories, a few real, but most imagined. There was no industry or entrepreneurship, leaving wags of the day to joke, “Three Englishmen start a business, three Germans start a war, three Frenchmen start five political parties.”

Condescension and Self-Doubt

France's
mal
was a source of contempt for aristocratic Germans, who did not suffer France's lack of self-esteem. The Second Reich was willpower on steroids: “Since we have no Bismarck among us,” complained liberal historian Friedrich Meinecke, “every one of us must be a piece of Bismarck.”
⁵
No concept more penetrated the average intellect typified by Wilhelm II than that of will. Of course, along with will came power and triumph. No one—at least until Western liberals, especially American, of the late twentieth century came on the scene—set out to undermine their own societies and cultures. Even the liberal Left accepted the proposition that in Germany, “there is a single will in everyone, the will to assert oneself.”
⁶
One student announced, “We will conquer!…With such a powerful will to victory nothing else is possible.”
⁷
That
Kultur
—that self-esteem—derived in large part from war, a “life-giving principle,” as General Friedrich von Bernhardi labeled it in 1911. The author Ludwig Thoma, writing from Munich on the
eve of the conflict, recorded, “I was struck by the impression of how this courageous and industrious people has to purchase with its blood the right to work and to create values for mankind.”
⁸
Students in Bavarian universities were summoned to arms in August 1914 with the call, “Students! The muses are silent. The issue is battle…. [German
Kultur
] is threatened by barbarians from the east…and the holy war begins.”
⁹
The “desire for peace has rendered most civilized nations anaemic,” wrote von Bernhardi, an aspiration which was “directly antagonistic” to universal laws.
¹⁰

But even Germany possessed a powerful internal counterweight, a large number of socialists and working-class who did not always buy into the call of “will.” Kaiser Wilhelm sensed these undercurrents, and struggled to make sufficient incremental reforms to appease the more radical elements, while at the same time not threatening the established landed classes. The Second Reich suffered from deep structural problems and had seen chancellors come and go with increasing regularity, each unable to substantively address Germany's internal tensions. Germany had been united for less than forty-five years, and the nation was still young, vigorous, and finding itself with some difficulty in structure and means, but not in determining the ultimate goal.

At the outbreak of World War I, all across Europe, the young clamored for war, leaving for the front with enthusiasm as the older generation accepted the conflict with grim resignation and helplessness. Young French writers Charles Péguy, Henry de Montherlant, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle joined Germans Walter Flex, Ernest Wurch, and Ernst Jünger and Brits Robert Nichols and Rupert Brooke (who would die in action) in describing war as “purgative,” a “marvelous surprise,” “a fine thrill,” “a privilege,” or a “holy moment.”
¹¹
In contrast to later intellectuals, musicians, and celebrities of the Vietnam era, who pompously declared war vile and pointless, the European opinion makers wanted, as Arthur van den Bruck put it, “an insurrection of the sons against the fathers,” precisely
for
war. Afterward, when the casualty lists and endless graves blasted them with reality, these same energetic belligerents would sing a different tune—or rather, write a different verse. British writers and poets, especially, immersed themselves in the senselessness of the carnage, losing all enthusiasm for causes and even alternative outcomes. R. C. Sherriff, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Maurice Baring, and the aforementioned Nichols all turned to defeatism, nihilism, and gloom.

But that was only after four years of the most grotesque combat the
world had seen. Earlier, in 1914, attitudes were different. This was especially true in Germany, where belligerence was fueled by perceptions that others did not respect Germany properly, an attitude strengthened by alliances between the British and French. Affronts had piled up in the German mind. France had built the Suez Canal with virtually no German assistance: at first, even Britain opposed it until changes in the proposed tonnage rates convinced British investors to agree to a new protocol in 1873. But Germany, still organizing itself as a nation, played almost no role in the Canal and policies were dictated to her until the First World War. In 1903, Germans experienced a new slight when, after partnering with the British to collect Venezuelan debts, President Cipriano Castro had refused to honor his country's obligations, whereupon England, Italy, and Germany imposed a blockade. Castro gave in, but Germany emerged a loser when the British press ripped English politicians for “allying” with her. That incident was followed by a British insult involving the Baghdad Railroad in 1911. The project, designed to link Turkey and the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, was too large for German capitalists. When London investors seemed sympathetic—needing only government assurances—Parliament backed down in another public firestorm. German capitalists, thinking their financing was assured, had already laid two hundred miles of track when the financing was pulled, leaving investors with a train to nowhere.

Stumbling to Global Conflict

Both the Boer War, in which Germany supported the Boers behind the scenes, and the Moroccan Crisis (1905–6), where former antagonists Britain and France reached an accord, shocked the Germans and convinced the Kaiser that he was aligned against a constellation of enemies. “We shall be unable to make any overseas acquisitions,” he noted after the accord. “Against France and England an overseas policy is impossible.”
¹²
German resentment toward France and Britain was reignited with the Agadir Crisis of 1911, when a German attempt to gain a foothold in Morocco through “gunboat diplomacy” was thwarted high-handedly by the French (with quiet and reluctant support from Britain). After a settlement in which Germany gained territory in the former French Congo in exchange for territory near Cameroon and an acknowledgment of the French protectorate in Morocco, many Germans felt the game was rigged. The deal received sharp criticism from the German press.

Such developments were taken as insults to the German character. “We
must secure to German nationality and German spirit throughout the globe that high esteem which is due them…and has hitherto been withheld,” insisted Prussian general and military historian Friedrich von Bernhardi.
¹³
German resentment toward England, Russia, and France continued to build until 1914. After Austria delivered an ultimatum to Serbia, demanding an end to all anti-Austrian propaganda, a crackdown on Serbian dissidents, and the removal of anyone from military or government service who had anti-Austrian sentiments, the Kaiser received a telegram from his ambassador in Russia indicating Russia would support Serbia. Looking at it, he responded, “I have no doubt left about it: England, Russia and France have agreed among themselves—after laying the foundations of the
casus foederis
…through Austria—to take the Austro-Serbian conflict as an
excuse
for waging a
war of extermination
against us.”
¹⁴
Thus German paranoia, seemingly fully justified due to political, moral, and physical assaults from a perceived strangling circle of enemies, pushed the country over the brink.

The combination of insult and the alliance of Britain and Russia with France spurred even German intellectuals to build a case for war, viewing it as an unpleasant but inevitable instrument of national policy, which could spark national revival, even the resurrection of Europe. Although later many of them would sing a different tune, in 1914, observers looked forward to a time when “after the pain of this war there would be a free, beautiful, and happy Germany.”
¹⁵
War was like childbirth: bloody, but necessary to create new life. German writers described the onset of bloodshed as “liberation from bourgeois narrowness and pettiness” and “a vacation from life.”
¹⁶
Hermann Hesse lectured that struggle was “good for many Germans” and that “a genuine artist would find greater value in a nation of men who have faced death and who know the immediacy and freshness of camp life.”
¹⁷
Emil Ludwig, later a critic of martial sentiments such as these, harbored no such doubts at the moment of the first German offensive, when he was unabashed in his support for war: “even if a catastrophe were to befall us such as no one dares to imagine, the moral victory [of August 1914] could never be eradicated.”
¹⁸
Another novelist, Ernst Glaser, wrote of the world around him, “The war had made it beautiful.”
¹⁹
Art, poetry, philosophy—these were what the war was fought over, claimed another. “An aesthetic pleasure without compare,” said a character in a German novel, describing combat.
²⁰
War was an effort on behalf of Europe itself. “Let us remain soldiers even after the war,” said Franz Marc, “for this is not a war against an eternal enemy…. it is a
European civil war
, a war against the inner invisible
enemy of the European spirit.”
²¹
Where the British waged war to preserve traditional social values and civilization, Germany aspired to spiritual greatness as the protector and propagator of the “true European Spirit” much like it had been during the Holy Roman Empire. Germany was “propelled by a vision, the British by a legacy.”
²²