A General Sketch of the European War Part 2

For the historical root of Austria-Hungary is German. Of its population (some fifty-one millions) you may say that only about a quarter are German-speaking (less than another quarter are Magyar-speaking, most of the rest Slavonic in speech, together with some proportion of Roumanian and Italian).

But it is from this German _quarter_ and from the emperor at their head that the historical growth of the State depends, because this German _quarter_ was the original Christian nucleus and the civilized centre, which had for its mission the reduction of Slavonic and Magyar barbarism. The Slavs of the Bohemian quadrilateral were subjected, not indeed by conquest, but by a process of culture, to Vienna. The crown of Hungary, when it fell by marriage to the Hapsburgs, continued that tradition; and when the Empress Maria-Theresa, in the last century, partic.i.p.ated in the abominable crime of Frederick the Great of Prussia, and took her share of the dismembered body of Poland (now called the Austrian province of Galicia), that enormous blunder was, in its turn, a German blunder undertaken under the example of Northern Germany, and as part of a movement German in spirit and origin. The same is true even of the very latest of the Austrian developments, the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The act was that of Vienna, but the spirit behind it, perhaps the suggestion of it, and the support that made it possible came from Berlin.

In a word, if you could interrogate the Genius of the Hapsburgs and ask it for what their dominion stood, it would tell you that for uninterrupted centuries they had stood for the German effort to repress or to overcome pressure upon the German peoples from the East. And that is still their role. They have come into this war, for instance, as the servants of Prussia, not because Prussia threatened or overawed them, but because they felt they had, in common with Prussia, the mission of withstanding the Slav, or of tolerating the Slav only as a subject; because, that is, they feared, and were determined to resist, Russia, and the smaller Slavonic States, notably Servia to the south, which are in the retinue of Russia.

We may sum up, then, and say that the fundamental conflict of wills in Europe, which has produced this general war, is a conflict between the German will, organized by Prussia to overthrow the ancient Christian tradition of Europe (to _her_ advantage directly; and indirectly, as she proposes, to the advantage of a supposedly necessary German governance of the world under Prussian organization), and the will of the more ancient and better founded Western and Latin tradition to which the sanct.i.ty of separate national units profoundly appeals, and a great deal more which is, in their eyes, civilization. In this conflict, Prussia has called upon and received the support of not only the German Empire, which she controls, but also the Hapsburg monarchy, controlling the organized forces of Austria-Hungary; while there has appeared against this strange Prussian claim all that values the Christian tradition of Europe, and in particular the doctrine of national freedom, with very much else--which very much else are the things by which we of the civilized West and South, who have hitherto proved the creators of the European world, live and have our being.

Allied with us, by the accident that this same German claim threatens them also, is the young new world of the Slavs.

It is at this final point of our examination that we may see the immensity of the issues upon which the war turns. The two parties are really fighting for their lives; that in Europe which is arrayed against the Germanic alliance would not care to live if it should fail to maintain itself against the threat of that alliance. It is for them life and death. On the other side, the Germans having propounded this theory of theirs, or rather the Prussians having propounded it for them, there is no rest possible until they shall either have "made good" to our destruction, or shall have been so crushed that a recurrence of the menace from them will for the future be impossible.

There is here no possibility of such a "draw" or "stalemate" as was the result, for instance, of the reduction of Louis XIV.'s ambition, or of the great revolutionary effort throughout Europe which ended with the fall of Napoleon. Louis XIV.'s ambition cast over Europe, which received it favourably, the colour of French culture. The Revolutionary Wars were fought for a principle which, if it did not appeal universally to men, appealed at least to all those millions whose instincts were democratic in every country. But in this war there is no such common term. No one outside the districts led by Prussia desires a Prussian life, and perhaps most, certainly many, of those whom Prussia now leads are in different degrees unwilling to continue a Prussian life. The fight, in a word, is not like a fight with a man who, if he beats you, may make you sign away some property, or make you acknowledge some principle to which you are already half inclined; it is like a fight with a man who says, "So long as I have life left in me, I will make it my business to kill you." And fights of that kind can never reach a term less absolute than the destruction of offensive power in one side or the other. A peace not affirming complete victory in this great struggle could, of its nature, be no more than a truce.

So much for the really important and the chief thing which we have to understand--the general causes of the war.

Now let us turn to the particular causes. We shall find these to be, not like the general causes, great spiritual att.i.tudes, but, as they always are, a sequence of restricted and recent _events_.

(5) THE PARTICULAR CAUSES OF THE WAR.

After the great victories of Prussia a generation ago (the spoliation of Denmark in 1864, the supremacy established over Austria in 1866, the crus.h.i.+ng defeat of France and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, with two millions of people in 1870-1), Europe gradually drifted into being an armed camp, the great forces of which were more or less in equilibrium. Prussia had, for the moment at least, achieved all that she desired. The French were for quite twenty years ardently desirous of recovering what they had lost; but Europe would not allow the war to be renewed, and Prussia, now at the head of a newly const.i.tuted German Empire, made an arrangement with Austria and with Italy to curb the French desire for recovery. The French, obviously inferior before this triple alliance, gradually persuaded the Russians to support them; but the Russians would not support the French in provoking another great war, and with the French themselves the old feeling gradually deadened. It did not disappear--any incident might have revived it--but the anxious desire for immediate war when the opportunity should come got less and less, and at the end of the process, say towards 1904, when a new generation had grown up in all the countries concerned, there was a sort of deadlock, every one very heavily armed, the princ.i.p.al antagonists, France and Germany, armed to their utmost, but the European States, as a whole, unwilling to allow any one of them to break the peace.

It was about this moment that Prussia committed what the future historian will regard, very probably, as the capital blunder in her long career of success. She began to build a great fleet. Here the reader should note two very important consequences of the great Prussian victories which had taken place a generation before. The first was the immense expansion of German industrialism. Germany, from an agricultural State, became a State largely occupied in mining, smelting, spinning, and s.h.i.+pbuilding; and there went with this revolution, as there always goes with modern industrialism, a large and unhealthy increase of population. The German Empire, after its war with France, was roughly equal to the population of the French; but the German Empire, after this successful industrial experiment, the result of its victories, was much more than half as large again in population as the French (68 to 39).

Secondly, the German Empire developed a new and very large maritime commerce. This second thing did not follow, as some have imagined it does, from the first. Germany might have exported largely without exporting in her own s.h.i.+ps. The creation of Germany's new mercantile marine was a deliberate part of the general Prussian policy of expansion. It was heavily subsidized, especially directed into the form of great international pa.s.senger lines, and carefully co-ordinated with the rest of the Prussian scheme throughout the world.

At a date determined by the same general policy, and somewhat subsequent to the first creation of this mercantile marine, came the decision to build a great fleet. Now, it so happens that Great Britain alone among the Powers of Europe depends for her existence upon supremacy at sea, and particularly upon naval superiority in the Narrow Seas to the east and the south of the British islands.

Such a necessity is, of course, a challenge to the rest of the world, and it would be ridiculous to expect the rest of the world to accept that challenge without protest. But a necessity this naval policy of Great Britain remains none the less. The moment some rival or group of rivals can overcome her fleet, her mere physical livelihood is in peril. She cannot be certain of getting her food. She cannot be certain of getting those foreign materials the making up of which enables her to purchase her food. Further, her dominions are scattered oversea, and supremacy at sea is her only guarantee of retaining the various provinces of her dominion.

It is a case which has happened more than once before in the history of the world. Great commercial seafaring States have arisen; they have always had the same method of government by a small, wealthy cla.s.s, the same ardent patriotism, the same scattered empire, and the same inexorable necessity of maintaining supremacy at sea. Only one Power had hitherto rendered this country anxious for the Narrow Seas: that Power was France, and it only controlled one-half of the two branches of the Narrow Seas, the North Sea and the Channel. It had been for generations a cardinal piece of English policy that the French Fleet should be watched, the English Fleet maintained overwhelmingly superior to it, and all opportunities for keeping France engaged with other rivals used to the advantage of this country. On this account English policy leant, on the whole, towards the German side, during all the generation of rivalry between France and Germany which followed the war of 1870.

But when the Germans began to build their fleet, things changed. The Germans had openly given Europe to understand that they regarded Holland and Belgium, and particularly the port of Antwerp, as ultimately destined to fall under their rule or into their system.

Their fleet was specifically designed for meeting the British Fleet; it corresponded to no existing considerable colonial empire, and though the development of German maritime commerce was an excuse for it, it was only an excuse. Indeed, the object of obtaining supremacy at sea was put forward fairly clearly by the promoters of the whole scheme. Great Britain was therefore constrained to transfer the weight of her support to Russia and to France, and to count on the whole as a force opposed, for the first time in hundreds of years, to North Germany in the international politics of Europe. Similarity of religion (which is a great bond) and a supposed ident.i.ty (and partly real similarity) of race were of no effect compared with this sentiment of necessity.

Here it is important to note that the transference of British support from one continental group to another neither produced aggression by Great Britain nor pointed to any intention of aggression. It is a plain matter of fact, which all future history will note, that the very necessity in English eyes of English supremacy at sea, and the knowledge that such a supremacy was inevitably a provocation to others, led to the greatest discretion in the use of British naval strength, and, in general, to a purely defensive and peaceful policy upon the part of the chief maritime power. It would, indeed, have been folly to have acted otherwise, for there was nothing to prevent the great nations, our rivals, if they had been directly menaced by the British superiority at sea, from beginning to build great fleets, equal or superior to our own. Germany alone pursued this policy, with no excuse save an obvious determination to undo the claim of the British Fleet.

I have called this a blunder, and, from the point of view of the German policy, it was a blunder. For if the Prussian dynasty set out, as it did, to make itself the chief power in the world, its obvious policy was to deal with its enemies in detail. It ought not, at any cost, to have quarrelled with Russia until it had finally disposed of France. If it was incapable, through lack of subtlety, to prevent the Franco-Russian group from forming, it should at least have made itself the master of that group before gratuitously provoking the rivalry of Great Britain. But "pa.s.sion will have all now," and the supposedly cold and calculating nature of Prussian effort has about it something very crudely emotional, as the event has shown. From about ten years ago Prussian Germany had managed to array against itself not only the old Franco-Russian group but Great Britain as well.

This arrangement would not, however, have led to war. Equilibrium was still perfectly maintained, and the very strong feeling throughout all the great States of Europe that a disturbance of the peace would mean some terrible catastrophe, to be avoided at all costs, was as powerful as ever.

The true origin of disturbance, the first overt act upon which you can put your finger and say, "Here the chain of particular causes leading to the great war begins," was the revolution in Turkey. This revolution took place in the year 1908, and put more or less permanently into power at Constantinople a group of men based upon Masonic influence, largely Western in training, largely composed of Jewish elements, known as the "Young Turks."

The first result of this revolution, followed as it inevitably was by the temporary weakening in international power which accompanies all civil war at its outset, was the declaration by Austria that she would regard the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina--hitherto only administrated by her and nominally still Turkish--as her own territory.

It was but a formal act, but it proved of vast consequence. It was an open declaration by a Germanic Power that the hopes of the Servians, the main population of the district and a Slav nation closely bound to Russia in feeling, were at an end; that Servia must content herself with such free territory as she had, and give up all hope of a completely independent State uniting all Servians within its borders.

It was as though Austria had said, "I intend in future to be the great European Power in the Balkans, Slav though the Balkans are, and I challenge Russia to prevent me." The Russian Government, thus challenged, would perhaps have taken the occasion to make war had not the French given it to be understood that they would not imperil European peace for such an object. The Prussian Government of the German Empire had, in all this crisis, acted perhaps as the leader, certainly as the protector and supporter of Austria; and when France thus refused to fight, and Russia in turn gave way, the whole thing was regarded, not only in Germany but throughout the world, as equivalent to an armed victory. Observers whose judgment and criticism are of weight, even in the eyes of trained international agents, proclaimed what had happened to be as much a Prussian success as though the Prussian and Austrian armies had met in the field and had defeated the Russian and the French forces.

The next step in this series was a challenge advanced by Germany against that arrangement whereby Morocco, joining as it did to French North Africa, should be abandoned to French influence, so far as England was concerned, in exchange for the French giving up certain rights of interference they had in the English administration of Egypt, and one or two other minor points. Germany, advancing from a victorious position acquired over the Bosnian business, affirmed (in the year 1911) her right to be consulted over the Moroccan settlement.

Nor were the French permitted to occupy Morocco until they had ceded to Germany a portion of their African colony of the Congo. This transaction was confused by many side issues. German patriots did not regard it as a sufficient success, though French patriots certainly regarded it as a grave humiliation. But perhaps the chief consequence of the whole affair was the recrudescence in the French people as a whole of a temper, half forgotten, which provoked them to withstand the now greatly increased power of the German Empire and of its ally, and to determine that if such challenges were to continue unchecked during the coming years, the national position of France would be forfeited.

Following upon this crisis came, in the next year--still a consequence of the Turkish Revolution--the sudden determination of the Balkan States, including Greece, to attack Turkey. It was the King of Montenegro (a small Slav State which had always maintained its independence) who fired the first shot upon the 8th of October, 1912, with his own hand. In the course of that autumn the Balkan Allies were universally successful, failed only in taking Constantinople itself, reduced Turkey in Europe to an insignificant strip of territory near the capital itself, and proceeded to settle the conquered territory according to an agreement made by them before the outbreak of hostilities.

But here the Germanic Powers again intervened. The defeated Turkish Army had been trained by German officers upon a German system; the expansion of German and Austrian political military influence throughout the Near East was a cardinal part of the German creed and policy. Through Austria the Balkans were to be dominated at last, and Austria, at this critical moment, vetoed the rational settlement which the allied Balkan States had agreed to among themselves. She would not allow the Servians to annex those territories inhabited by men of their race, and to reach their natural outlet to the sea upon the sh.o.r.es of the Adriatic. She proposed the creation of a novel State of Albania under a German prince, to block Servia's way to the sea. She further proposed to Servia compensation by way of Servia's annexing the territory round Monastir, which had a Bulgarian population, and to Bulgaria the insufficient compensation of taking over, farther to the east, territory that was not Bulgarian at all, but mixed Greek and Turkish.

The whole thing was characteristically German in type, ignoring and despising national feeling and national right, creating artificial boundaries, and flagrantly sinning against the European sense of patriotism. A furious conflict between the various members of the former Balkan Alliance followed; but the settlement which Austria had virtually imposed remained firm, and the third of the great Germanic steps affirming the growing Germanic scheme in Europe had been taken.

But it had been taken at the expense of further and very gravely shaking the already unstable armed equilibrium of Europe.

The German Empire foresaw the coming strain; a law was pa.s.sed immediately increasing the numbers of men to be trained to arms within its boundaries, and ultimately increasing that number so largely as to give to Germany alone a very heavy preponderance--a preponderance of something like thirty per cent.--over the corresponding number trained in France.

To this move France could not reply by increasing her armed forces, because she already took every available man. She did the only possible thing under the circ.u.mstances. She increased by fifty per cent. the term during which her young men must serve in the army, changing that term from two years to three.

The heavy burden thus suddenly imposed upon the French led to very considerable political disputes in that country, especially as the parliamentary form of government there established is exceedingly unpopular, and the politicians who live by it generally despised.

When, therefore, the elections of last year were at hand, it seemed as though this French increase of military power would be in jeopardy.

Luckily it was maintained, in spite of the opposition of fairly honest but uncritical men like Jaures, and of far less reputable professional politicians.

Whether this novel strain upon the French people could have been long continued we shall never know, for, in the heat of the debates provoked by this measure and its maintenance, came the last events which determined the great catastrophe.

(6) THE IMMEDIATE OCCASION OF THE WAR.

We have seen how constantly and successfully Austria had supported the general Prussian thesis in Europe, and, in particular, the predominance of the German Powers over the Slav.

We have seen how, in pursuit of this policy, the sharpest friction was always suffered at the danger-point of _Servia_. Servia was the Slav State millions of whose native population were governed against their will by Austro-Hungarian officials. Servia was the Slav State mortally wounded by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And Servia was the Slav State which Austria had in particular mortified by forbidding her access to the Adriatic, and by imposing upon her an unnatural boundary, even after her great victories of the Balkan War.

The heir to the Hapsburgs--the man who, seeing the great age of his uncle, might at any moment ascend the throne--was the Archduke Francis. He had for years pursued one consistent policy for the aggrandizement of his House, which policy was the pitting of the Catholic Slavs against the Orthodox Slavs, thereby rendering himself in person particularly odious to the Orthodox Serbs, so many of whose compatriots and co-religionists were autocratically governed against their will in the newly annexed provinces.

To the capital of these provinces, Sarajevo, he proceeded in state in the latter part of last June, and there, through the emissaries of certain secret societies (themselves Austrian subjects, but certainly connected with the population of independent Servia, and, as some claimed, not unconnected with the Servian Government itself), he was a.s.sa.s.sinated upon Sat.u.r.day, the 28th of June, 1914.

For exactly a month, the consequences of this event--the provocation which it implied to Austria, the opportunity which it gave the Hapsburgs for a new and more formidable expression of Germanic power against the Slavs--were kept wholly underground. _That is the most remarkable of all the preliminaries to the war._ There was a month of silence after so enormous a moment. Why? In order to give Germany and Austria a start in the conflict already long designed. Military measures were being taken secretly, stores of ammunition overhauled, and all done that should be necessary for a war which was premeditated in Berlin, half-feared, half-desired in Vienna, and dated for the end of July--after the harvest.

The Government of Berlin was, during the whole of this period, actively engaged in forcing Austria forward in a path to which she was not unwilling; and, at last, upon the 23rd of July, Europe was amazed to read a note sent by the Imperial Governor at Vienna to the Royal Government in the Servian capital of Belgrade, which note was of a kind altogether unknown hitherto in the relations between Christian States. This note demanded not only the suppression of patriotic, and therefore anti-Austrian, societies in Servia (the a.s.sa.s.sins of the Crown Prince had been, as I have said, not Servian but Austrian subjects), but the public humiliation of the Servian Government by an apology, and even an issue of the order of the day to the Servian Army, so recently victorious, abasing that army to the worst humiliation. The note insisted upon a specific pledge that the Servian Government should renounce all hope of freeing the Servian nation as a whole from foreign government, and in many another clause subjected this small nation to the most thorough degradation ever suggested by a powerful European people towards a lesser neighbour.

So far, though an extreme hitherto unknown in European history had been reached, the matter was one of degree. Things of the same sort, less drastic, had been known in the past.

But what was novel in the note, and what undoubtedly proceeded from the suggestion of the Prussian Government (which was in all this the real agent behind Austria), _was the claim of the Austrian Government to impose its own magistrates upon the Servian courts, and to condemn at will those subjects of the Servian king and those officers holding his commission whom Austria might select so to condemn, and that to penalties at the goodwill and pleasure of Austria alone_. In other words, Austria claimed full rights of sovereignty within the territory of her small neighbour and enemy, and the acceptation of the note by Servia meant not only the preponderance of Austria for the future over the Slavs of the Balkans, but her continued and direct power over that region in the teeth of national and religious sentiment, and in clean despite of Russia.

So strong was the feeling still throughout Europe in favour of maintaining peace and of avoiding the awful crash of our whole international system that Russia advised Servia to give way, and the Germanic Powers were on the eve of yet another great success, far more important and enduring than anything they had yet achieved. The only reservation which Servia was permitted by the peaceful Powers of Europe, and in particular by Russia, to make was that, upon three points which directly concerned her sovereignty, Austria should admit the decision of a Court of Arbitration at the Hague. But the time-limit imposed--which was the extraordinarily short one of forty-eight hours--was maintained by Austria, and upon the advice, as we now know, of Berlin, no modification whatever in the demands was tolerated. Upon the 25th, therefore, the Austrian Minister left Belgrade. There followed ten days, the exact sequence of events in which must be carefully noted if we are to obtain a clear view of the origin of the war.

Upon that same day, Sat.u.r.day, July 25th, the English Foreign Office, through Sir Edward Grey, suggested a scheme whereby the approaching cataclysm (for Russia was apparently determined to support Servia) might be averted. He proposed that all operations should be suspended while the Amba.s.sadors of Germany, Italy, and France consulted with him in London.

What happened upon the next day, Sunday, is exceedingly important.

The German Government refused to accept the idea of such a conference, but at the same time the German Amba.s.sador in London, Prince Lichnowski, was instructed to say that the principle of such a conference, or at least of mediation by the four Powers, was agreeable to Berlin. _The meaning of this double move was that the German Government would do everything it could to r.e.t.a.r.d the entry into the business of the Western Powers, but would do nothing to prevent Russia, Servia, and the Slav civilization as a whole from suffering final humiliation or war._

That game was played by Germany clumsily enough for nearly a full week. Austria declared war upon Servia upon Monday the 27th; but we now know that her intention of meeting Russia halfway, when she saw that Russia would not retire, was stopped by the direct intervention of the Prussian Government. In public the German Foreign Office still pretended that it was seeking some way out of the crisis. In private it prevented Austria from giving way an inch from her extraordinary demands. And all the while Germany was secretly making her first preparations for war.