Leon Degrelle: HITLER BORN AT VERSAILLES

Introduction

For most Americans the globe-girdling catastrophe that we call the Second World War is now a matter neither of personal experience nor of memory, but of wood pulp and celluloid, books and films. Larger still is the majority for whom the cataclysmic First World War - once spoken of as "The Great War" - is ancient history, an antic prelude to what those who participated in it sometimes like to call "The Big One." For most of us, perhaps, the two wars compare as do contrasting movies from the two eras. Our image of the First World War is brief, grainy, silent, with black-and-white, herky-jerky doughboys "going over the top"; we picture the Second as panoramic, technicolor, reverberating with stereophonic sound and fury, armadas of ships and planes and tanks sweeping forward to destiny.

A further disparity may be found in the popular historical and political assessment, such as it is, of the two wars. The majority of Americans doubtless still believes that the key to the Second World War is a simple one: a.demonic megalomaniac, Adolf Hitler, rose up to lead Germany to world domination and instead led his people to well-deserved ruin. Yet the view of the First World War held by the Americans of today, it is safe to say, is rather more tepid than the white-hot feelings of many of their grandparents in 1917, when "100-per-cent Americans" agitated to "Hang the Kaiser!" and mobs sacked German newspaper offices and presses in the worst outbreak of ethnic bigotry in our country's history. For the contemporary generation the origins and course of the First World War are murky and obscure. Even the terrible hecatombs of the Western Front have faded into oblivion, and Kaiser Bill and his spike-helmeted Huns have long since been superseded by the Fuehrer and his goose-stepping myrmidons.

The evident lack of interest of even the literate American public in their country's first "famous victory" of this century has been mirrored to a certain extent by the professional historians of the Left-Liberal Establishment, which of course holds sway in the colleges and universities of not only American but the entire Western world. The professors have their reasons, however. The more competent among them are aware that shortly after the First World War, in a signal achievement of historical scholarship, Revisionist writers in this country and in Europe unmasked the mendacious propaganda disseminated by the British, French, Tsarist Russian, and American governments.

Professors such as Sidney Bradshaw Fay, Max Montgelas, Georges Demartial, and the incomparable Harry Elmer Barnes overthrew the historiographical and moral underpinnings of the verdict expressed in Article 231 of the onerous Treaty of Versailles, that Germany and her allies had imposed an aggressive war on the Triple Entente and thus bore all responsibility for the calamity. The Englishman Arthur Ponsonby demonstrated just as convincingly that the atrocity charges against the Germans, including such canards as a "cadaver factory" for soap and the like from the corpses of fallen German soldiers, were manufactured and spread by teams of talented fabricators, not a few of them, like Arnold Toynbee, reputable men of scholarship ostensibly dedicated to the search for truth.

The modern school of historical obfuscators, propagandists more than scholars, and thus cognizant of the need for a consistent pattern of German "guilt" and "aggression" throughout this century, long ago undertook to roll back and suppress the achievements of Revisionist scholarship on the origins of the First World War. Inspired by the German renegade Fritz Fischer, whose Griff nach der Weltmacht (Germany's Bid for World Power) (1961), they hailed with hysterical relief, they have dismissed with sovereign disdain the notion that powers such as France, the British Empire, Tsarist Russia, or Serbia might have been motivated by aggressive designs. The professors have employed a second sleight-of-hand trick against Revisionist findings. It has been their tactic to separate quite artificially the origins and course of the war from its result, the Paris peace treaties, above all that of Versailles, and from the ineluctable consequences which flowed from that result. For them, and for their public of university students and educated laymen, Versailles was an entirely justified consequence of the war, and Adolf Hitler sprang up either as a manifestation of the German nation's twisted "id" (Freud and his numerous epigoni and camp followers) or the puppet of the "Ruhr barons" (the Marxists), propelled along his way by something these professors are always careful to refer to as the "stab-in-the-back legend."

Our leftist educators have also been adept at evading an honest evaluation of the Red terror which swept across Central and Eastern Europe in the wake of the German collapse, although they have wept copious tears behind their pink spectacles over the crushing of Communist juntas in Bavaria, Berlin, and Budapest. The deliberate failure of the professors to make sense of the cataclysmic events of 1914-1920 in Europe has now been redressed, however, by a man of both learning and action, a confidante of statesmen and a worthy comrade of heroes: the Belgian exile Leon Degrelle.

Leon Degrelle, who was born in 1906 in the sleepy little town of Bouillon, now a backwater in Belgium's Luxembourg province, but once the seat of Godefroy de Bouillon, first Crusader king of Jerusalem, speaks in a voice few Americans will be familiar with. French-speaking, Catholic, European with a continental, not an insular, perspective, the man who nearly overturned his country's corrupt power elite in the 1930's thinks in a perspective alien to our (comparatively recent) intellectual heritage of pragmatism, positivism, and unbounded faith in the inevitability of "progress." Before all a man of action, Degrelle is in a tradition of vitalism, combining an inborn elan and chivalry with a hard-eyed, instinctual grasp of the calculus that determines politics - activity in relation to power - today foreign, for the most part, to the "Anglo-Saxon" nations.

It was precisely Degrelle's will to heroic action in the defense of Europe and its values that led him to raise a volunteer force of his French-speaking countrymen, many of them followers of his pre-war Rexist political movement, and to ally with his country's conqueror, Adolf Hitler, in a European crusade against Communism and Communism's citadel, the Soviet Union. Degrelle, who has matchlessly recounted his role in that struggle (Campaign in Russia: The Waffen SS on the Eastern Front, Institute for Historical Review, Torrance, CA, 1985), began the project to which this volume is the introduction in his late seventies. From the vantage point offered by decades of reflection in his Spanish exile, the former charismatic political leader and highly decorated combat veteran has undertaken nothing less than the thorough, searching, and (insofar as possible) objective account of the character and career of the man who once told him, "If I had a son, I would want him to be like you": Adolf Hitler.

Those inclined to dismiss Degrelle's objectivity in examing the life of his commander-in-chief with a supercilious sneer will shortly have the mandatory for Establishment scholars on so much as mentioning the dread name. Indeed, ample material for comparison already exists in the fawning name. Indeed, ample material for comparison already exists in the fawning biographical homages offered to Roosevelt and Churchill by their one-time courtiers and authorized hagiographers, not to mention the slavish panegyrics offered the Western leaders' ally and boon companion, Stalin, by his sycophants (not a few of them residents and citizens of the Western "democracies").

There are those readers who will fault this first volume of Degrelle's ambitious project, which demonstrates the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the bourgeois leadership of the West and their unavoidable responsibility for the rise of Hitler. Some will object that it might have been more scholarly, while others will quibble that it ought to have given recognition to more recent trends in the historiography of the First World War. Such criticisms miss the point of Degrelle's work, to reach the broadest interested and intelligent public with an approach the French have styled haute vulgarisation, which is to say, popularization of a high order.

Indeed Hitler: Born at Versailles, in encompassing the turbulent years 1914-1920, boasts a thematic unity that few but Degrelle could have brought to the period. For in chronicling the shady plots and complots of the European regimes before the war, the awful bloodbaths of the Western and Eastern fronts, and the fall of empires and the rise of Communism after the war, Degrelle is telling of the collapse of 19th-century Europe - its economic liberalism, its parliamentary democracy, its self-satisfied imperialism, its irrational faith in reason and progress.

He is, furthermore, hammering mercilessly at the puny successors of the Poincarés, the Lloyd Georges, and the Wilsons, the present-day "liberals" and "conservatives" who dominate in the governments and the academies and the media: skewering their baneful lies one by one.

Degrelle knows that there is little that is more contemptible than the posturing of our academics, who snivel their love of peace at every instance where it means supine acquiescence in the latest advance of Communism or of atavistic savagery under the banner of "self-determination" or some other such transparent lie, but who dilate with sanguinary enthusiasm over the "necessity" of the blood baths that marked the two world wars of this century. How the professors and the publicists love to chide Chamberlain and Daladier, the British and French leaders at Munich in 1938, for their "appeasement," in attempting to stave off yet another fratricidal war! Perhaps only a combat-hardened veteran like Degrelle, on intimate terms with the horrors of war, can be a true man of peace.

It is Degrelle's passionate desire for a Europe, and a West, united above the nationalistic prides and rancors of the past, which leads him to what for many Revisonists on both sides of the Atlantic will regard as his most controversial stance: his firm and sometimes strident condemnation of the balance-of-power policy of the British Empire. The reader should bear in mind that Degrelle's hostility is aimed not at the English, Scottish, or Welsh nations, but at the governments that have made British policy during this century, with such catastrophic results not only for the West, but for the people of Britain as well.

In any case this panoramic introduction to the life and times of Adolf Hitler, the key figure of this century, is a grand beginning to a project worthy of Degrelle, the Belgian who sought the Golden Fleece as the Caucasus in the service of his nation and his culture nearly fifty years ago.

Theodore J. O'Keefe
June, 1987

Author's Preface

An assassination which might have remained no more than an outra- geous incident in the history of terrorism has instead had a decisive and disastrous impact on the twentieth century. It provoked the "Great War" of 1914-1918; made possible the October Revolution of the Soviets in 1917; enabled Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and subsequently a Second World War; and above all, the confrontation of the two contemporary giants, the U.S.S.R. and the United States, with, as its issue sooner or later, a devastating Third World War.
What seemed at first a transient, if major, news story - the murder of Austria-Hungary's Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo in Bosnia on June 28, 1914 - would in several days be revealed as the fruit of a convoluted political plot. At first the affair seemed limited to Austria and Serbia, notoriously quarrelsome neighbors. But at the end of four weeks, it was clear that the Serbs, at the threshold of the Balkans, had been cunningly manipulated by Pan-Slavists in the imperial Russian court.
For its part, the Austrian government was joined to Germany by a political and military alliance. In turn, the Russian government was linked by a military treaty to the rulers of France, desperate to regain Alsace- Lorraine from Germany, which had annexed those provinces in 1871. Furthermore, the British establishment, incensed at the rise of Germany's economic power and the expansion of its fleet, had moved ever closer to France and its recent rival, Russia, in the previous few years. The stage was thus set for a cataclysm which would shake the White world with unprecedented fury.
Within five weeks, thanks to several bullets fired by a nonentity in a sleepy Balkan town, the great powers of Europe would be at each other's throats. Then, with neither the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia nor the Dual Alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary able to force the other to yield, the warring nations would find no other solution but to drag nineteen other countries into the slaughter. By virtue of promises as false as they were contradictory, the competing sides would offer the selfsame spoils of war in secret compacts with two and sometimes three different nations. Millions of people would be auctioned off, without their knowledge or consent, as booty for their nations' bitterest rivals.
To arouse anti-German hatred to a fever pitch, the powers of the Entente charged the Germans with the most shameful atrocities, stirring up a vengeful fury which, together with the short-sighted greed and stupidity of the victors, would result in the Treaty of Versailles. This treaty, which crushed Europe's foremost power, Germany, beneath a burden of shame and reparations, which amputated vital territories from the body of the nation, and rendered it defenseless against enemies within and without, at length was successful only in provoking a new and inevitable European war.
The intelligent minds of Europe foresaw the consequences of this treaty even before it was imposed. One of the principal negotiators, Britain's David Lloyd George, warned the treaty makers at Paris in 1919: "If peace is made under these conditions, it will be the source of a new war." And so it was, for without the Treaty of Versailles the rise of an unknown infantryman, born in Austria and hardened on the Western Front to absolute power in Germany would have been an impossibility. Adolf Hitler came into the world at Braunau-am-Inn, but politically he was born at Versailles.
June 29, 1919, the day the treaty was signed, not only ended the First World War - it began the Second.

Ambush at Sarajevo

CHAPTER I

Black Hand In Sarajevo

The twenty-eighth of June, 1914, was a warm and sunny day all across Europe. Few could have suspected that this outwardly tranquil summer day would be written in blood on the calendar of history, and that this fateful June day would be the precursor of so many blood-red June days for Europe in this century, from the conclusion of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919 to the surrender of France in 1940 to the "D-Day" landings of 1944 to the dismantling of the old European order at Potsdam in June 1945.
Nowhere on that fateful day did the sun's rays beat down more implacably than at Sarajevo, a sleepy Balkan town in Bosnia. The former seat of a province of the Ottoman empire, it was oriental in appearance, with white-minareted mosques towering over the winding streets of the bazaar. Administered by the Austro-Hungarian Empire since 1878, annexed outright in 1908, it was a place where little out of the ordinary ever took place.
On this day, however, the most important man in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was visiting. He was the heir to the Habsburg throne on which the ancient Franz Joseph sat, who, at eighty-six, after sixty-six years of rule, had been drained by illness and care. The archduke was a robust man, his breast jingling with medals, his helmet richly plumed, an ardent hunter who had filled the palaces and hunting lodges of Europe with his antlered trophies.
The heir had come to Sarajevo in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the Austro-Hungarian army, to observe maneuvers which were being carried out several miles away. Franz Ferdinand and his consort, Sophie, rode along the quay beside Sarajevo's Miljach River virtually unprotected on their way to the town hall. Their four-car procession was barely underway when a young terrorist aimed a bomb at the archduke.
The bomb glanced off the back of the archduke's car and exploded beneath the following vehicle, injuring two officers, one of whom was rushed to a nearby hospital. Franz Ferdinand and his wife, shaken but unhurt, continued on to the town hall, where the archduke angrily rebuked the mayor for his city's lack of hospitality. Then the little motorcade set off for the hospital in which the wounded young officer was being treated.

The lead car, in which the mayor sat, made a wrong turn, and the archduke's car followed it. The military governor of Bosnia, General Potiorek, alertly signaled the driver to back up and return to the planned route. As the driver braked, a young man stepped forth, took careful aim, and fired two shots into the open car.
One shot struck Franz Ferdinand in the neck. The other hit his wife Sophie, the Dutchess of Hohenberg, in the stomach. As she slumped against her husband, his green tunic covered with blood, he murmured, "Sophie, live for our children." The couple died within minutes after the attack.

***

The news of his nephew and heir's assassination was received by Emperor Franz Josef at his palace in Vienna, the Hofburg, with unseemly coolness. The old man bore a grudge against Franz Ferdinand, perhaps partially because the archduke had succeeded Franz Josef's own son, Rudolf, who died in a tragic dual suicide with his lover, Marie Vetsera, in the royal hunting lodge at Mayerling twenty-five years before.
More important, Franz Ferdinand's wife Sophie, although a countess from an old Czech family, was far inferior in blood and rank to the standards prescribed by custom and law for a Habsburg empress. When Franz Ferdinand married her in 1900, he was forced to renounce all possibility of either his wife or their future children assuming the Habsburg throne.
A morganatic marriage-unforgivable crime in the monarchical profession! To be sure, crowned heads are allowed mistresses and even bastards, perfectly permissible "amorous adventures." But if a Rudolf of Habsburg, a Franz Ferdinand, an Edward VIII of England, or a Leopold III, King of the Belgians, does not limit his choice to the princely game preserve of obligatory spouses, let him beware!
So it was that at the state funeral for Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Vienna, the slain couple rode apart, in separate hearses, the Archduke's a majestic affair decked in black plumes and drawn with black horses, trailed by a procession of dignitaries of state and court, Sophie's following behind, notably less magnificent. At the cathedral her coffin was laid out one step below that of her husband. In lieu of a crown, the coffin of the Archduke's wife was decked by the fan of a mere court lady. The old man was still ashamed of his nephew's consort, even in death.

Franz Josef had another reason for not being overly perturbed at his heir's violent passing. The archduke's political ideas and his notions for reforming the empire were anathema to the old monarch, who with each passing year grew ever more conservative.
In 1867 Franz Josef had been forced by circumstances (Austria's defeat by Prussia the year before) to grant the Hungarians an almost equal role in what became the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. In the following decades the Slays subject to Habsburg rule had begun to clamor for increased recognition, and Franz Ferdinand was known to be sympathetic to them, perhaps even willing to go so far as to institute a "trial," or three- way, monarchy.
To the reactionary Franz Josef, as well as to the proud Magyars, jealous of their prerogatives, trialism posed a grave threat to the empire. There were forces beyond the borders of the empire who found the archduke's ideas threatening as well.
Serbia across the Danube from Austria-Hungary, was the most vigorous and aggressive of the Balkan countries. Subject to the rule of the Ottoman Turks for centuries, many of their people converts to Islam, the Balkan lands-Serbia, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, and Greece-had achieved their independence over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Once free, they had devoted their energies to trying to dominate each other, squabbling over such inextricable intermingled ethnic and religious jumbles as Macedonia and Thrace with a barbarous zeal both murderous and indefatigable.
Briefly united in 1912, the Balkan countries had succeeded in liberating the remainder of the Balkans from Turkish rule, driving the Turks back to the outskirts of Constantinople, the last Turkish outpost on European soil. The following year the Serbs and Bulgarians had gone at one another with savage abandon, each determined to rule Macedonia. The hapless Macedonians themselves had borne the brunt of the struggle, thousands of them massacred, still more dragooned into the invading armies of the Serbs and Bulgarians. Serbia triumphed, for it had won the backing of a powerful patron, which was determined to use the small Balkan state as the fulcrum for its drive to the south and west-the mighty Russian Empire.
Defeated and humiliated by Japan in 1905, the tsarist imperialists had been thwarted in their drive to the east. Gone were the days of the previous centuries when the Cossacks swept invincibly across the crystalline snows of Siberia and the great Bear advanced into Alaska and down the California coastline. The Russian navy had been shown up as ponderously inefficient and outdated. After a bizarre adventure in the North Sea, in which Russian ships had fired on English fishing vessels in the belief that they were Japanese destroyers, the Russian fleet had sailed 10,000 miles only to be sent to the bottom by Admiral Togo's Japanese fleet at Tsushima Strait in May 1905. Russia's armies had been bested by the Japanese in Manchuria, with the resultant loss for the tsar of Port Arthur and the remainder of Manchuria.

Thereafter the imperialists of the Russian Empire had changed their strategy, seeking to exploit the hopes and fears of their Slavic cousins in the Balkans, preeminently the Serbs and the Bulgarians, whose countries offered ready access to the Adriatic and that age-old objective of the tsars, the multicolored domes and battlements of Constantinople, gateway to the warm waters of the Mediterranean.

***

In 1908, still smarting from their Far Eastern disaster, the Russian imperialists and their Serbian proteges had been forced to accept, at the Congress of London, the annexation by Austria-Hungary of Bosnia- Herzegovina, a Slavic territory to the west of Serbia and long coveted by the Serbs. Serbian control of the region would have brought their tsarist masters access to the ports of the Adriatic, but the Russians felt themselves too weak militarily to press the issue.
Chastened but undiscouraged, the imperialist circle around Tsar Nicholas Il-the "Pan-Slavists"-intensified its activity. Nicholas, dangerous precisely because of his weak will and his eternal vacillation, gave them free rein. The St. Petersburg regime stirred the already boiling Balkan cauldron ever more vigorously. Russian agents and Russian advisers gave the orders and supplied the wherewithal for the Serbs in their growing quarrel with Austria. As the Russian minister to Serbia, Nicolai Hartwig, indiscreetly remarked to the Romanian minister, Filaliti, on November 12, 1912: "Russia counts on making Serbia, enlarged by the Balkan provinces of Austria-Hungary, the vanguard of Pan-Slavism."
Hartwig, the tsar's ambassador, was the undisputed master of Belgrade, the man whom the French ambassador, Descos, called "the real sovereign of Serbia." Others referred to Hartwig merely as "the viceroy."
In theory the head of state was Serbia's king, Peter I, but King Peter, the grandson of a hog dealer, owed his accession to the throne to a cabal of Serbian plotters who had assassinated the previous king, Alexander Obrenovich, and his queen, Draga, in a grisly double murder in 1903. King Peter's family, the Karageorgeviches, had waged a running feud with their Obrenovich rivals for most of the preceding century, in one incident of which the chief of the Obrenovich clan had presented the carefully salted head of one of the Karageorgeviches to the sultan in Istanbul.
Peter I's prime minister, Nicolas Pashich, was a cunning and malleable man who had switched without undue fits of conscience from being Alexander's prime minister one day to heading the government of the king elevated by the assassins the next. He feared the firebrands who had murdered the royal couple; he was willing to serve as the tool of the powerful and influential Russians.

The interrogation of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassins in Sarajevo led, slowly and inexorably, to the implication of the highest councils of the Serbian regime. At first tight-lipped, the two terrorists, Chabrinovich, who had tossed the bomb which missed the archduke but wounded his officer, and Gavrilo Princip, who fired the fatal shots, denied any larger conspiracy. They let slip only one name. When asked who had taught them how to shoot they replied: "Ciganovich." In fact, Milan Ciganovich, an official of the Servian Railway and member of the secret terrorist group, "The Black Hand," was a personal agent of Prime Minister Pashich.

CHAPTER II

Europe Reacts

Had the Serbian government felt itself above suspicion, it would have immediately begun a public investigation of a grave crime in which five of its nationals had been involved. To refrain from an investigation or even from issuing a public statement could only strengthen the growing suspicion in Austria of official Serbian involvement.
In fact Pashich had known of the plot weeks before June 28th. As the English historian George Malcolm Thomson was later to write:
This tall, good-looking man, whose dignified beard and imposing presence disguised one of the cunningest foxes of the Balkans, knew about the projected murder almost as soon as it was planned. Perhaps he had heard about it accidentally, through some eavesdropper in one of the handful of Belgrade cafes where politics was discussed. More likely, an agent of his, a railway clerk named Gaginovich, who was also a member of the Black Hand, passed the news on to him. (The Twelve Days, p. 48)
Thus the conspiracy could have been thwarted in advance. In that case, however, Pashich would have certainly incurred the vengeance of the Black Hand. Since the bearded old politician valued his skin, he feared to quash the plot openly.
On the other hand Pashich was anxious to cover himself against any accusations of complicity from the Austrian side. He hit upon the expedient of delivering a veiled and delphic warning to the Austrians, which was delivered by the Serbian ambassador to Vienna to the Austrian minister of finance, Leon Bilinski, a Pole from Galicia, among whose duties was to administer Bosnia. Bilinski, who was no loyal supporter of the Austro- Hungarian empire (he was to defect during the course of the war), either made little of the Serbian ambassador's oblique warning that the archduke might meet with a mishap on his visit to Bosnia, or, if better informed, failed to act on the information. No protective measures were taken; Franz Ferdinand went to his doom.
Indeed, there was further Serbian involvement with the conspirators before the assassination: the Serbian crown prince, Alexander, had met with one of the killers in Belgrade.
Who had conceived and directed the operation? The culprit was none other than the chief of military intelligence, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrievich, a hardened terrorist and Russia's chief catspaw in the Balkans. As a young captain Dimitrievich had taken part in the murder of Serbia's royal couple eleven years before. Later he would scheme to assassinate Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II as well as the kings of Bulgaria and Greece. In the pay of Russia's ambassador, Hartwig, Dimitrievich doubled as the creator and leader of the secret Black Hand, which carried out the bloody work of Serbia and Serbia's Russian puppetmasters against Austria-Hungary.

***

In the immediate aftermath of the attack the Austrians suspected the role of the Serbian government, but nothing of possible Russian involvement. Through prudence, but also out of weakness, precious weeks were spent in a painstaking investigation of the crime, as far as was possible given its origins across the border.
Had Austria, virtually certain of Serbia's involvement, demanded an explanation after a few days, when European indignation was still at a fever pitch over the grisly crime, it could have easily brought the little Balkan state to heel without protest from the great powers. For provocations a hundred times less flagrant the British had shelled Copenhagen in 1801 and 1807. When France's envoy to Algiers was swatted with the dey's fan in 1830, the French landed troops and annexed the country. Vienna, however, was a capital of prating old men and dandified poltroons. Its emperor, Franz Josef, who still commanded vast respect and had immense influence, was a worn-out old wraith, no longer politically competent.
Franz Josef's foreign minister, Count Leopold von Berchtold von and zu Ungarisch, felt out of place as a diplomat or politician. Life to his taste was an endless round of plays and concerts, frivolous salons, visits to the races or rare book shops. Seldom seen without his high silk hat, he was a fastidious dresser as well as an avid scholar of the Greek classics. A shrewd observer wrote of him: "He was sincerely devoted to the country he served disastrously and with all the wisdom he could muster."
Count Berchtold, like his counterpart at the head of the Austro- Hungarian Imperial Army, General Conrad von Hötzendorff, a militarist fire-eater without the slightest hint of diplomacy, was all for chastizing the Serbs. Neither, however, could overcome the Austrian inertia. The first step Austria was able to take came almost a week after the shooting, when Franz Josef wrote to the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, on July 4, 1914, asking to consult with him before taking any measures against Serbia.

Wilhelm II, intelligent but neurotic, was a capricious individual. Inclined to annotate state documents submitted to him with vindictive interjections ("Toads! Crows! Jesuits!"), he often played the ham actor in transitory political melodramas, which, however, concluded without ill effect.
At Berlin on June 28 he had received the news of Franz Ferdinand's death with horror, for the two men were good friends. He replied to Franz Josef's note that he stood ready to fulfill his obligations as Austria's ally if it should emerge that Serbia had abetted or protected the assassins. Nevertheless, Wilhelm II had no intention of leading the German Empire into a European war, nor of expanding the incident outside the confines of the west Balkans.

The Kaiser, represented so often since as a hysterical ogre determined to crush everything in his path, was at the time so little disposed to prepare for war that he left on July 6 for a three-week cruise on his yacht, the Hohenzollern, bound for the Norwegian coast. Likewise, his ministers were off on vacation: von Jagow, the foreign minister, off on his honeymoon; von Moltke, the chief of staff, taking the cure at Carlsbad; Admiral von Tirpitz relaxing at Tarasp in Switzerland. The kings of Saxony and Bavaria had departed their capitals for their country estates.
Nor had the Kaiser or his ministers put in motion any preparatory measures before they left. There were no provisions for the stockpiling of grain: not a single ton of flour was purchased by Germany in July 1914. Indeed, even the leaders of the German opposition had left Berlin.

While the Kaiser and his government had little motive and less desire to plunge Europe into a fratricidal war, feelings were different among the leaders of France. Frenchmen still smarted at Germany's annexation of Alsace and part of Lorraine in 1871. At the Place de la Concorde in Paris, the statues of Metz and Strasbourg remained covered with crepe.
In 1914, I was just a boy of eight, born in the Belgian Ardennes across the border from France. Even there, in long, silent valleys remote from almost everywhere, the story of Alsace-Lorraine gripped our emotions. At the sight of the swallows returning from the south in springtime, we sang " `Tis a bird that comes from France," just as did the Alsatian children in their Prussian exile. Like the Frenchmen, we thought of Alsace-Lorraine with sorrow, of the Germans with rancor: the accursed Prussians would have to surrender it, even if it took force.
Germany, driving toward world economic and political power, its population growing by 600,000 each year, was little concerned with lording it over the French. Bismarck himself had never been enthusiastic about the annexation, and his successors were prepared to make concessions to France. Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, imperial chancellor in 1912, had offered to the French ambassador in Berlin that year, Jules Cambon, to negotiate with France as to the neutrality and complete autonomy of Alsace-Lorraine, but had been haughtily rejected.
France's ill will was manifest. The Germans preferred to delude themselves by hoping that time would salve France's wounds.

***

The official British reaction to the crime at Sarajevo was more guarded. The chief concern of Britain's imperial establishment was the steady growth of the German navy and merchant fleet, which Wilhelm II had been building up singlemindedly (in contrast to the prudence that would later be exercised by Hitler, who agreed in 1935 to limit the German fleet to 35 per cent of the Royal Navy).
In truth, for the English public, Belgrade, let alone Sarajevo, was an unknown. For Londoners Singapore, Hong Kong, even the Falkland Islands weren't far from the mouth of the Thames, but the Danube was a wild and unknown river at the end of the civilized world (just as Czechoslovakia was for Neville Chamberlain in 1938 "a remote country of which we know little").

In Belgrade, Prime Minister Pashich, with no small hypocrisy, caused a solemn Mass to be celebrated in memory of the departed archduke and his consort. With tears in his eyes, he beseeched the Almighty to receive with kindness His two servants, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. So cynical did this pose appear that the French minister at Belgrade, Descos, refused to attend.
Descos had long been suspicious of the intrigues of the Serbian government. He had observed the rapid growth of Serbia's army, which had doubled in size in the preceding year as tens of thousands of Macedonians were drafted into its ranks. Who was it who threatened the country?
The French ambassador had observed the corrupt business by which millions of gold francs in low-interest loans had flowed from France to Serbia, after the way had been prepared by Serbian bribes of influential Frenchmen, above all in the press. The French senator Humbert, publisher of Le Journal, personally received a 15 per cent commission on a big order of military footgear sold to Belgrade. Such an outlay demanded drastic economies in production: cardboard soles were substituted for leather, and the Serbian army would make its catastrophic retreat in 1915 barefooted.
The case of Senator Humbert was not an isolated one. Descos, already disgusted by these goings-on, requested to be relieved as ambassador: the hypocritical Mass for the dead had been the last straw. At the same time, Pashich had requested his recall, and Descos left Belgrade a disillusioned man.

Meanwhile, the Austrians were continuing their investigation of the Sarajevo attack. After learning the identity of Ciganovich, Austrian investigators quickly learned, courtesy of the Serbian government, that the plotter in question had mysteriously vanished. In Pashich's laconic phrase, "He departed for an unknown destination on the 28th of June." He would not surface for more than a year.
The ire of the Austrians grew slowly. Only after three weeks did the Austrian ambassador at Belgrade, Herr Giesl, appear before the Pashich government to present Austria's demand that a committee of inquiry be set up, to include representatives of both nations.
The Austrians couched their demands in harsh terms. First they stipulated an unequivocal Serbian condemnation of the assassination; second, a serious investigation of the crime, to include Austrian representatives.
The Serbian government naturally resisted. It was not merely a matter of Serbia's sovereignty, as Prime Minister Pashich claimed. As he himself was to confide to Dragomir Stefanovich, his secretary for foreign affairs (as well as his stepson): "If we accept this inquiry, they will catch us red-handed."
In the face of Austria's demands, Pashich did something almost unbelievable. He didn't merely procrastinate, or stonewall: he fled.
Every detail of this strange story has become known. When Ambassador Giesl presented himself at the Serbian Ministry for Foreign Affairs on July 23rd, bearing an official envelope for the prime minister, his secretary told the emissary tersely, "He has gone."
Asked where, the secretary replied, "To the country." It was impossible to reach him by telephone, according to the official, so the Austrian had no choice but to deposit his ultimatum with the secretary.
Meanwhile, Pashich was in Nish, eighty miles to the south. Appraised of the Austrian demand, Pashich, rather than return to Belgrade at once, jumped on a train that very afternoon and headed south for Salonika, in order to, as he told several friends accompanying him, "spend a few days there to rest incognito." As George Malcolm Thomson summed up the wily politician's behavior, "Pashish intended to be `out of touch' during the critical period when the ultimatum was accepted or rejected, both of those courses equally dangerous for him."
In Belgrade, however, the prince regent, Alexander, saw Pashich's responsibilities differently. He had the stationmaster at Nish telegraphed to order the prime minister's immediate return. Still Pashich persisted, boarding the train and continuing south. An hour's run down the line, the train was stopped, and Pashich again ordered to return to Belgrade at once. After several more hours of evasion, Pashich finally was able to screw up his resolve and head back to his capital.
On his arrival at Belgrade Station, at five o'clock on the morning of the twenty-fourth, Pashich, shaggy-bearded and glassy-eyed, did something quite revealing. Rather than report to the regent, he headed directly for the Russian embassy. It was clear where the real power in Serbia resided.

***

Russia, no more than Serbia, could afford to risk a thorough-going investigation of the Sarajevo conspiracy. As the tsarist empire's minister of foreign affairs, Sazonov, declared on July 24, on learning of Austria's formal demand, "This means war in Europe."
He was instantly seconded by France's ambassador to Russia, Maurice Paléologue, who hastened to Sazonov bearing President Poincaré's injunction to "Be firm! We must be firm!"
On the twenty-fourth Prince Alexander, the Serbian regent, sent the tsar an anguished appeal. The Russian response would reveal its committment to its Serbian stalking horse-or its lack of commitment. After a few hours, the telegram arrived. Pashich opened it with trembling hands. He quickly read it, and then exclaimed, "The good, the great, the gracious tsar!"
Serbia would not have to atone for its misdeed if Russia could help it.

On the following day, Austria's Herr Giesl again presented himself at the prime minister's office, a little before six in the evening. Pashich was there and he answered a firm no to Austria's ultimatum. The refusal was couched in refined diplomatic terms, and even offered several concessions, but the Serbs weren't ready to allow Austrian officials to conduct an inquiry on Serbian territory, even with the participation of the Serbs.
The Austrian ambassador politely took up his bowler hat and left to board the six-thirty train for Vienna. Diplomatic relations had been broken off. War was in the wind.

Ironically, three years later, for his own political purposes, Pashich would stage a showy inquiry and trial of the military men who had organized the assassination, a trial which would end in the execution of Colonel Dimitrievich and his henchmen.
At that time, in 1917, Pashich, his armies having been swept from the Danube to the Adriatic, after suffering 300,000 dead, would hit on the idea of a reconciliation with Austria-Hungary, now headed by a new emperor, Karl L Although Karl I was not adverse to a settlement, the whole affair would come to nothing more than the end of Dimitrievich and his confederates and a grim revelation of the cynicism of the Serbian leader.
Had Dimitrievich confessed in 1914, as he did in 1917, the Pashich government would doubtless have fallen. Neither Serbia, nor Europe, would be in ruins, however, as they were in 1917.
As Dimitrievich would reveal before his death, the real director of the conspiracy had been Russia's military attaché, Colonel Victor Artmanov, who had told Dimitrievich in the early stages: "Go ahead. If attacked, you will not stand alone."
In his testimony, Dimitrievich revealed that Artmanov had financed the plotters, and that he had not carried out the scheme until he had the Russian's final go-ahead.
As for Artmanov, he had left Belgrade well before June 28, the day of the killings. On that day he was in Zurich, and he continued a leisurely journey across Switzerland and Italy, all the while keeping a meticulous journal which would enable him to account for his time on any given day.

In St. Petersburg, the tsarist government made haste to prepare for war. On July 7, 1914-two weeks before Austria's demands were delivered to Serbia-orders had been issued to move troops from Serbia to European Russia. By the 25th they were already billeted in the military district of Moscow.
Had Austria been able to interrogate Dimitrievich with the dispatch later exercised by Pashich's men, she would have learned quickly that the Sarajevo affair and its rectification were no mere spat between its own sizeable forces and little Serbia, but that a five-million man army from Europe's most populous state stood ready to oppose the Habsburg empire by force.

After Dimitrievich's death (which several of the powers had tried to unsuccessfully to stop: Pashich couldn't tolerate that he still lived and talked), his memory faded for a quarter of a century, until it was revived and honored by Tito (Josip Broz), another terrorist, who modestly promoted himself to marshal. Dimitrievich became a national hero, as one of the martyrs of the future Yugoslavia. The man who fired the shots, Gavrilo Princip, has been similarly honored, and a monument now marks the spot where he stood and took aim in Sarajevo.
Thus was Austria-Hungary lured into the trap that became the greatest and most destructive war war the world had seen. The next step for the Russian provocateurs would be to draw Germany into the trap. By July 31, 1914, this, too, would be a fait accompli.

CHAPTER III

The German Dynamo

The average person in the West - whether European, American, or what have you - has long taken for granted that Kaiser Wilhelm II
bears the chief responsibility for the First World War. After all, at the end of the war, it was so otherwise reasonable a man as Britain's Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who, with victory in sight, announced that he and his allies would "Hang the kaiser!" Later Lloyd George would promise the House of Commons that the imperial culprit would first be driven through the streets of London in an iron cage, a promise which enabled him to win the elections of February 1919 handily.
Although Lloyd George and the mobs he appealed to, as well as Britain's allies and the revolutionary successors to Wilhelm's rule in Germany were cheated of their desire, Wilhelm's reputation was effectively hanged by the war propaganda of the day, and has remained on the gallows thanks to the writings of Establishment historians.
Such has been the stultifying effect of this propaganda that, although large numbers of people still believe the German emperor to have been a particularly baneful species of ogre, not one person in a thousand knows anything of Kaiser Wilhelm's actions in those times. The impression remains that eight million men died in the abattoirs of Flanders and Galicia thanks to the Kaiser alone.
The Versailles Treaty, which affirmed Germany's sole guilt for the war, could never have been imposed, of course, without the central thesis of Wilhelm II's villainy. One doubt about Wilhelm's alleged war plotting and the whole fradulent document would lose its force.

***

In fact, what role did Wilhelm II play in the outbreak of the war?
Truth to tell, on the day Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, the Kaiser hadn't been in Germany for days. He was still sailing the North Sea on his yacht Hohenzollern, a contented vacationer. Notified of the crime at Sarajevo, he had expressed his horror, and assured Emperor Franz Josef of his full support. Nevertheless, at the time he viewed the affair as merely a local one, in which Austria-Hungary, deprived of its heir to the throne and its army commander-in-chief in one stroke, had an understandably legitimate concern. Still unaware of what the Austrians would learn in their interrogation of the assassins, the Kaiser departed at the beginning of July, determined to spend the entire month at sea.
Had that impulsive ruler really wished to ignite a European war, he surely would have paid more attention to putting his plans in motion. But he allowed his chief of staff, von Moltke, to continue his stay at Carlsbad, while Admiral Tirpitz, commander of the navy, whiled away his leave at Tarasp.
Why, in any case, would Germany and its leader want war? By 1914, Germany had achieved economic preeminence on the Continent without firing a shot. As the French historian Lavisse remarked in an address delivered at the Sorbonne in April, 1917, referring to the years between 1871 and 1914, "At no time in history have we seen such a stupendous growth in work and wealth in any country in so little time."
Since 1870 Germany's population had increased by fifteen million people, while England held steady and France stagnated. The Germans no longer had to emigrate, for the country's prodigious growth provided work for all. The coal output had nearly doubled in the years between 1900 and 1910. The German metallurgical, chemical, and precision instrument industries were the best in the world. Everywhere German products commanded admiration, and its exports had doubled between 1910 and 1913, reaching a total of ten billion marks in that year.
These goods traveled to far-off places - China and the Americas - in German ships, for the merchant marine had entered the era of its greatest expansion, and the imperial colors waved over the seven seas.
German expansion was all the more impressive in that it was carried out in several decades without military conquest, a remarkably pacific expansion when compared to the bloody rise of such imperial powers as Britain and France, not to mention America, which gained its share of territory from Mexico.
The quality of Germany's product and the efficiency of German commercial agents won fearful jealousy, especially among the lords of British imperialism. As the eminent French historian Pierre Renouvin testified:
From 1900 on, Germany has had marked success. Thanks to the initiative of her commercial travelers, who endeavor to be aware of the new needs of their customers and to satisfy their tastes, and thanks to the easy terms that the exporters offer to their buyers, German commerce is in the process of taking the lead over British commerce in Holland, where Rotterdam is in effect an appendage of the Rhineland; in Belgium, where part of the business of Antwerp is in the hands of 40,000 Germans; in Italy, which buys metallurgical and chemical products from Germany; in Russia, where the Germans have the advantage of proximity and better knowledge of the country; and even in Serbia. The margin of superiority that the British trade has in the markets of France, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire is constantly diminishing.
The English producer and exporter is annoyed at everywhere coming up against these German tradesmen who do them out of a sale. The economic rivalry fosters a bad climate in public opinion that can not fail to have an effect on political relations. (La Crise européenne, p. 142)
Until then, the seas had been the almost private domain of the British Empire for two centuries, world commerce a British monopoly throughout the nineteenth century. Both Spain and France had been soundly thrashed for failing to accede to Britain's supremacy with good grace. Philip II of Spain and France's Napoleon had seen their dreams sunk along with their fleets by the Royal Navy.
Wilhelm II, by having the audacity to construct a merchant fleet able to service 70 percent of Germany's overseas trade, called forth the wrath of an arrogant monopoly, which twenty years later even Hitler would shrink from antagonizing. The queen of England expressed the Establishment's view when she complained that "William 1I is playing at Charlemagne."
For the most part, the British leadership was reluctant to give vent to its misgivings at the rise of Germany's industry and fleet. The Germans, for their part, cherished the hope that they could arrange matters with the British in some kind of gentleman's agreement.
The British response, however, was not encouraging, particularly on the matter of German colonial expansion to siphon off some of its burgeoning population. Every such effort was jealously opposed by Great Britain. Small neighbors such as Belgium or Holland could possess huge empires sixty or eighty times the size of the metropolitan territory; after all, they had long been considered to be Britain's dutiful satellites. Germany was a powerful rival.
That to effectively compete with the rising German economy required nothing more than that the United Kingdom manufacture products as well- made and as inexpensive as those of the Reich was lost on the British. Challenged, they felt threatened.
Solitary, haughty, and brusque, the British set about looking for allies against the German "menace." In 1904 Britain began a rapprochement with her hereditary enemy, France, when both nations had concluded the Entente Cordiale, which in reality would always remain the Mésentente Cordiale. Nevertheless, the fact that the ponderous John Bull and the light- limbed Marianne had opened the dance marked a turning point in history.
It would take the double disaster for the British Establishment of two disastrous world wars in this century to drive home the recognition that its world monopoly had at last ended, superseded by the uneasy condominium of the United States of America and the Soviet Union.

***

Despite an abortive British offer of Portuguese Angola to Germany in exchange for their discontinuing the build-up of their fleet, made in 1912, Wilhelm II refused to be dissuaded, and the shipwrights continued their work. This didn't mean that the Kaiser was striving for war, however. Indeed in 1905 he concluded a fraternal agreement with his erstwhile Russian rival the tsar, on his own initiative, while vacationing on his yacht off Denmark.
The tsar was by nature a gentle soul, dripping with good intentions. But he was weak-willed and neurotic, and he was constantly surrounded by a guard of Pan-Slav activists, bellicose grand dukes, and shadowy wire- pullers and manipulators of all sorts. Despite Wilhelm's intent to draw France into his cordial understanding with Russia, interests inimical to a Russian-German detente around the tsar succeeded in torpedoing the agreement within four months. The anti-German Franco-Russian entente of 1894 continued in force, and the Russian imperialists eyed Bohemia (in Austria-Hungary) and Galicia more greedily than ever. For their part, the French, bolstered by the hope of the support of Russia's massive army, schemed to retake Alsace-Lorraine.

CHAPTER IV

Ambition and Revanche

The French Republic had been obsessed with the loss of Alsace- Lorraine since 1871. At the National Assembly in Bordeaux in that year, Victor Hugo had trumpeted his undying allegiance to the cause of the lost territories. After him Déroulède, Barras, and Bourget led the literary chorus of revenge.
Noble as the French protest may have been, it didn't take much history into account - particularly that of its own country. France had been quite skillful in the past at annexing the territories of its neighbors. After all, how had Nord, Dunkirk, Lille, Arras, and Douai, all bearing the Germanic eagle on their escutcheons, become united with France? The same went for Roussillon, originally part of Catalonia, as well as Burgundy and Verdun, a German cathedral town until 1552. Toul had only become French in 1648, at the Treaty of Westphalia.
Alsace and Lorraine themselves had been acquired in the not too distant past. Lorraine had been German for a millennium. Almost 400 years before, Emperor Charles V had dreamed of making it a free and inalienable state, a buffer between France and Germany. The French had had other aspirations, however. In 1633 the French captured Nancy; one hundred thirty-three years later the remainder of Lorraine was seized and annexed. When the Germans retook the province in 1870, it had been French scarely more than a century.
The case was similar with Alsace. In 843 the Treaty of Verdun had made it part of Lotharingia. Twenty-seven years later, at the Treaty of Mersen, it had become the territory of Louis the German. From the twelfth to the fifteenth century it had been part of the Duchy of Swabia, and it had enjoyed a flourishing growth. Not until 1679, after French troops led by Marshal Turenne had bested the forces of the German Empire, did the Treaty of Nijmegen acknowledge French sovereignty over Alsace. Strasbourg would remain German until 1681, and the sizeable city of Mulhouse did not fall to France until it was seized in 1798.
To be sure, the last born - or the last stolen - is often the most beloved. Such was the story with Alsace-Lorraine. And there is no doubt that Alsace- Lorraine would have played a healthier role in European history if it had formed the core of a buffer state between the two rivals, rather than the jousting field of their armies for a thousand years.
Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II had at length come to realize that the issue of the "lost provinces" was an impassable barrier to Franco-German reconciliation, and in 1911 Germany had granted autonomy, within the Reich, to Alsace-Lorraine. This despite evidence of growing acceptance of German rule among the population of the provinces, to such an extent that the French historian Renouvin was forced to admit:
The citizens of Alsace-Lorraine are aware of the material advantages which accrue to them from the general prosperity of Germany; they no longer accept protest deputies, but send representatives to the Reichstag who take their seats with the German parties, both Catholic and socialist. (La Crise européenne, p. 138)

Not only with regard to Alsace-Lorraine, but in colonial matters as well, Germany had sought to appease France, but the French government had remained obdurate. Having conceded France control of Morocco in 1906, Germany received in return a thin strip of unproductive land in Equatorial Africa. Moreover, France's new British allies had exerted pressure on Spain to refuse Germany authorization to lay a submarine cable through the Canary Islands to establish telephone communication to the Central African colonies.
Undaunted, the German government had offered France close cooperation in 1912, as France's President Poincaré would later admit before the Chamber of Deputies in 1922: "It is beyond question that during the entire year of 1912 Germany made sincere efforts to ally herself with us for the common interest of Europe and the maintenance of peace," then adding, "but she wasn't ready yet."
There, then, was the truth. No matter how eager Germany showed herself to make concessions, as long as Alsace and Lorraine were not under the French tricolor there would be no rapprochement. Had other countries dealt with France in a like manner there would have been no reconciliation with Spain until France had ceded Perpignan back to Catalonia; no reconciliation with Belgium until France had returned the Nord region to its Belgo-Flemish fatherland. For the reconquest of its lost borderlands, however, France looked not for reconciliation but for military strength.

The alliance which France concluded with the Russian Empire in 1894 was a strange one. Paris and St. Petersburg were more than a thousand miles apart, a huge distance in those days before aviation. The French people and the peoples of the tsarist empire differed immensely. For the preceeding century the two nations' only meaningful contacts had been as enemies, when Napoleon had led his Grande Armée to Moscow in 1812 and when the French Zouaves had helped British troops occupy the Crimea in 1854.
For the moment, however, France and Russia's interests, or at least those of the ruling political elites, coincided. The French Republic needed several million extra soldiers, and Russia had them. Russia needed billions of gold francs to finance its Pan-Slavist and Far Eastern projects, and France was willing to supply them.
Neither party was naive about the implications of the deal. The French politicians felt no fondness for the tsarist autocracy, nor did the Pan-Slav Russian grand dukes have any regard for what they called France's "mobocracy." Yet the military ties grew increasingly closer, with formal and regular collaboration between the general staffs, joint military reviews, and visits exchanged by the two fleets. The shabby bargain would soon bear fruit.

France's drift toward open hostilities with Germany was strengthened by domestic political developments. In 1913 Raymond Poincaré, who had been minister of foreign affairs, was elected president of the French Republic. When Poincaré took over the Elysée Palace from President Faillières at the start of that year, Faillières is reported to have said, "I'm afraid that war is entering the Elysée behind me." In George Malcolm Thomson's view, "It is certain that the Lorrainer Poincaré felt no repugnance for war."
There had been opponents of France's party of revanche, some of them with great influence. Joseph Caillaux, a former prime minister and minister of finance, was a powerful politician whom Poincaré feared greatly as a rival. Jean Jaurès, the fiery socialist orator and pacifist, could rouse the masses like no other French politician. With Poincaré firmly in power, however, their voices were powerless to affect the French government's military and diplomatic machinations.
Poincaré was not a warm man; neither was he an eloquent or conciliatory one. He was rail thin, with the eyes of a stuffed owl. I knew him personally in my youth. I was astounded, on meeting him, at his shrill voice. He seemed a cold little man, his cheeks puffed out in congenital ill temper. With whiskers like an iron-gray shaving brush, he seemed a sly fox. He mistrusted other people and they mistrusted him. A lifelong hairsplitter, he crammed his political and diplomatic activity, his confidences, his parliamentary replies, and his memoirs with so many lies, subterfuges, evasions, and bits of nonsense that the sheer weight of it all was overpowering.
He seems to have been honest in his personal financial conduct, a rare virtue among men in politics, finance, and the press, who usually wallow in moral turpitude. Yet his dirty tricks in politics were numberless, and one can only wish he had mulcted a few hundred million francs from the public treasury rather than sent a million and a half Frenchmen to their deaths in the bloodbath of the First World War.

Poincaré could not seek war openly and officially, although secretly he strove for it with all his might. When the war came, he later said, it was a "divine surprise." Charles de Gaulle, who, with his hawk's eye, had no equal in looking into the subconscious of his fellow Frenchmen, wrote in La France et son armée: "He did not watch the tragedy approaching without a secret hope."
In 1912, however, Poincaré was unwilling to commit himself to the Balkan adventures of the Russian Pan-Slavists. He couldn't mistake Belgrade or Sarajevo for Strasbourg. That suited the Russians and they went to considerable effort to conceal their intrigues from their French allies.
In March 1912, unbeknownst to the French, Russia's ambassador and virtual plenipotentiary in Belgrade, Nicholas de Hartwig, had drafted the secret clauses of the treaty between Serbia and Bulgaria which stipulated the number of Bulgarian troops that were to be placed at Serbia's disposal in the event of a war with Austria-Hungary.
Poincaré was irked by his ally's secretiveness, particularly when his ambassadors could only elicit hypocritical denials from their Russian colleagues. Poincaré for a time remained poorly informed about Russia's Balkan moves, even more so than their mutual German enemy. He was kept in the dark about Russia's provisional redrawing of the borders of its satellite states in the Balkans prefatory to the wars of 1912 and 1913. Despite his caustic objections when he learned the truth, the president of France had to swallow the Russians' galling explanations as if they were after-dinner mints.
In 1913, after finally obtaining the text of a secret treaty between Russia and Bulgaria, he murmured to Sergei Sazonov, the Russian foreign minister: "I call to Monsieur Sazonov's attention that the treaty is a covenant of war not only against Turkey but also against Austria." (Poincaré, Les Balkans en feu, p. 113)
Sazonov responded in three words: "I must agree," but was no more forthcoming with information about Russia's aims in the Balkans.
The new president made every effort not only to prevent Franco-German understanding but also to antagonize Austria-Hungary, which, in his opinion, was too well disposed toward France.
For example, Poincaré had personally managed to torpedo a loan applied for on the Bank of France by the Austrians, who had an impeccable financial reputation. The French had previously lent out forty-five billion gold francs, one third of the total to Russia, on most generous terms. Serbia too had enjoyed a bit of this French largesse. Regardless of the fact that extending the loan to Austria would have greatly heightened French influence in the great Central European power, Poincaré was determined to give offense to that Teutonic ally of the hated Germans.
With the same churlish calculation Poincaré went out of his way to offend Wilhelm II. In early 1914, after Wilhelm had graciously invited the French minister, Aristide Briand, to a regatta at Kiel, Poincaré forbade Briand to attend, decreeing that "an interview of that kind is disturbing and outrageous."
Poincaré's diplomats on the spot repeatedly informed Paris of Germany's benevolent intentions toward France. At Berlin, Ambassador Cambon telegraphed Paris a confidence made him by Baron Beyens, the Belgian minister to Germany: "One fact that is absolutely certain is that the German chancellor wishes to avoid a European conflagration at any cost."
The brilliant socialist leader, Marcel Sambat, underlined Wilhelm II's essential caution in his book Faites la paix ou faites un roi: "The German emperor has braved ridicule and even the reproach of cowardice for twenty- five years."

As Russia continued to step up its intrigues in the Balkans, Paris grew better informed. Serbia was intensifying preparations against Austria. A coded dispatch dated March 28, 1914, was sent to his government by the French military attache at Sofia, reporting remarks that Ferdinand, King of Bulgaria, had made to his military leaders the previous day: "Let's not interfere with Serbia. Already the Serbs think they're big enough to defeat Austria. Before six months are up, they will attack her in alliance with Russia."
The French government was clearly unconcerned about the prospect of an Austro-Serbian war three months before Sarajevo. Rather than seek to mediate, France busily supplied Serbia with the credit to build up its stocks of arms and material. A big French loan in September 1913 provided the impetus. French money not only armed the Serbs, it made Serbian leaders wealthy.
As an example of the corruption spawned by the Franco-Serb-Russian politico-financial nexus, consider the affair of the Mauser rifles. On November 29, 1913, the secretary general of the minister of foreign affairs, Dragomir Stefanovich, drafted this letter to the French financier and press czar (Le Temps), Edgar Roels:
Gentlemen:
The matter of the rifles is urgent. Please consider it of the utmost urgency. Please tell me the earliest possible date the factory can complete the order. The price of the rifles can go as high as 80 francs apiece. (The commissions must be included in the price.) As I've told you, we are talking exclusively about the Mauser 7mm 1910 model. Since Mauser is in a cartel with the Austrian Steyr Works, we have misgivings about placing the order with Mauser here, as it will ultimately be Steyr which manufactures the guns, and it will be impossible to obtain the rifles if political conditions become complicated. That happened previously, in 1908. The shipment in question must be paid for from the proceeds of the loan made in France. Under no circumstances must anything be said to Mauser.
The Mauser rifles purchased by Paris arrived in February and March, 1914, in Serbia. For their troubles, the following Serbian dignitaries received commissions: Prime Minister Pashich, 4.5 to 5 per cent, depending on the purchase; Voivod Putnik got 3 per cent; the court grand marshal and the finance marshal each received a 1 per cent commission; and Serbia's generalissmo made out with 2 percent.
Such was the level of indecency reached by this sort of looting that after the war the Yugoslavian Democratic Socialist Party would be able to accuse Nicholas Pashich of personally having stolen a million gold francs given by Russia to Serbia. The Socialists would also accuse the former Serbian minister to Paris, M.R. Vesnich, of having made off with another million in gold francs that had been authorized during the war for the care of the Serbian wounded.

The Russians also set to work to draw Romania into the toils of her anti- Austrian agitation, for Romania was a crucial ally of Austria-Hungary, bound to her in a treaty that dated back to 1883.
Grand Duke Nicholas, uncle of the tsar, one of the most determined of the Pan-Slav warmongers, came to Bucharest to corrupt both the Romanian government and the royal family. He had immediate success with the Romanian prime minister, Take Ionescu. As Dragomir Stefanovich later revealed in his Memoirs and Documents of a Serbian Diplomat:

In December 1912, Take Ionescu met twice with Grand Duke Nicholas in the presence of our chargé d'affaires at the Russian legation. It was in the course of the second of these conversations that a definite amount was set for the allowance which would thereafter be paid to the Romanian statesman as the price of the assistance he proposed to lend to Russia's anti-Austrian propaganda. The sum was to be 5,000 gold francs each month.
Take Ionescu guaranteed the Grand Duke Nicholas that in the event of an Austro-Russian conflict, he and his friends, supported by the principal military leaders - in particular by Generals Filipescu and Averescu - would make it impossible for King Carol and his pro-German ministers to fulfill the obligations of the treaty of alliance linking Romania and the Austrian government since 1883.

lonescu's predecessor as prime minister, Marchiloman, managed to obtain and publish photographs of Ionescu's receipts. Ionescu, it was revealed, had also been subsidized by secret funds from Italy. And Ionescu himself had been subsidizing the French daily, Le Temps, and its agency in the Balkans: this money, of course, having come from the Russians, who themselves were being funded with huge French loans.
Stefanovich noted in his memoirs: "As far as we personally [the Serbian foreign ministry] were concerned, we were assured from January 1913 on that when the decisive moment came, Romania would march with us against Austria-Hungary."
The Germans were quick to catch on to the Russians' activity in Romania. In January, 1913, the German minister to Bucharest telegraphed Berlin: "The number of secret agents and spies that Russia has maintained in Romania for some months now is becoming prodigious. They are all concentrating their efforts on stirring up the country against Austria. 1 ask myself what they are driving at."
In his turn, the German ambassador in Athens, Count Kuadt, telegraphed on March 1, 1913: "Russian propaganda is seeping down to the bottommost strata of the Romanian population."
The Russians, who according to Ambassador Tschirschky, the German envoy to Austria-Hungary, had amassed a slush fund of a million rubles with which to bribe the Romanians, were ably seconded in their work by the French ambassador to Bucharest, Blondel. Blondel invited a steady stream of French politicians and journalists to Romania to spread the anti-Austro-Hungarian gospel, among them André Tardieu of Le Temps.
Tardieu was, in Paris, the close confidant of the Russian ambassador, Alexander Izvolsky, who wrote his foreign minister, Sazonov, in 1912, "I have an interview with Monsieur Tardieu every other day." Tardieu was a slippery and unscrupulous dealer who had intrigued with a German diplomat in Paris to set up an illegal rubber consortium in the Congo, which would have brought him millions through frontmen, until the financial watchdog of the French assembly, Joseph Caillaux, had blown the whistle.
Six months before Sarajevo, Tardieu was authorized to offer the Romanians Transylvania, a part of Austria-Hungary, in exchange for their cooperation. Publicly and provocatively Tardieu delivered a lecture titled "Transylvania is Romania's Alsace-Lorraine" in Bucharest.
On June 24, four days before the assassination of the archduke and his wife, Take Ionescu telegraphed Tardieu in code: "Agreement in principle all points satisfactory common interests concluded yesterday following conversation with Sazonov, Bratianu. On basis recognition our claims to Transylvania, Banat, Bukovina. Stop. All comments at present inopportune, latter follows by legation courier."
On the same day the Russian endorsed the French guarantees to Romania.

Later France's Georges Clemenceau would declare, "Of all the swine in the war, the Romanians were the most swinish." Perhaps this is a questionable judgment: there was swinishness all around at the time, particularly in the Balkans.

CHAPTER V

Poincaré and Caillaux

As determined as the French politicians were to make war, it was still necessary for them to stampede the mass of Frenchmen in the direction of war. Here politicians like Poincaré found the covert aid of Russian agents invaluable.
It was a strange but mutually beneficial arrangement. The Russians subsidized the French newspapers, which plumped for military and financial support of Russia, enabling the Russians to dispose of even more funds for bribery. The warmongers in French politics reaped the rewards of the endless press drumbeat of hostility against the Central Powers, Germany and Austria. There was little difficulty in finding newspapermen of sufficient venality to allow their headlines and editorials to be scripted by a foreign power. In fact, the problem for the Russians was to pick and choose from among the throng which crowded forward, hungry for bribes.
Arthur Raffalovich, the Russian finance minister's delegate in France, reported back to his prime minister, Count Witte, "Since it is impossible to buy everybody, it will be necessary to make a selection." He added, "Every day you learn to despise someone else."
From the outset in 1912, the Russian bribemasters ladled out hundreds of thousands of gold francs. An ever-increasing tempo of subventions soared to three hundred and fifty thousand gold francs per month. The total outlay finally reached the tens of millions.
After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they published secret documents revealing the extent as well as the particulars of the shabby business, among them another Raffalovich telegram, this one to Ambassador Izvolsky: "You will deliver this money by means of confidential direct payments person to person in recompense for the cooperation accorded you in Le Temps, L'Eclair, and Echo de Paris." (February 26, 1913)
One of Poincaré's allies wrote, of the publications in the pay of the Pan-Slavists, "An abominable list, where we see lumped together in the same activity and the same disgrace Le Figaro of Gaston Calmette, the Radical, the Journal des Débats, Henri Letellier's Journal, La République Francaise, Le Matin, L' Echo de Paris, and L 'Eclair; and dominating all the rest of the future peace negotiator and future president of the council of ministers, the foreign bureau chief of Le Temps: André Tardieu."
Tardieu, whom we have just seen at work in Romania, had been a particular feather in the Russian cap. Several years before, his paper had been quite sympathetic to Austria-Hungary; in a letter to St. Petersburg dated February 16, 1911, Izvolsky wrote: "In the newspaper Le Temps, Monsieur Tardieu makes use of every opportunity to show the Franco- Russian rapport in an unfavorable light."
A year later, the ambassador could write: "M. Tardieu has lost no time putting his pen at my disposal."

The Serbian government was not slow to enter the bribery game after the example of their Russian patrons. As Dragomir Stefanovich revealed, the Serbs provided key French newspapers with upwards of one and a half million gold francs in the two years before Sarajevo, "little gratuities," in the words of Prime Minister Pashich.
Serbian funds set up the influential Balkan agency of Le Temps, run by the ubiquitous Tardieu, which supplied French papers with a good ninety percent of their material from the Balkans. Russia's minister to Serbia, Hartwig, played a role in its direction, and the agency possessed its own code, which not even the French government could decipher.
In the face of this bought-and-paid-for press onslaught, the French public could not long remain unswayed. As one of Clemenceau's colleagues later wrote:

The most audacious claptrap and the most shameless lies, once they had been published and commented on by Le Temps, Echo de Paris, and the Journal des Débats - which at that time were considered by our ruling classes to be truly and scrupulously informed organs of the press, and hence worthy of complete confidence - were copied by all the provincial newspapers. They were taken for gospel by millions of both lower and upper middle class citizens, by retired persons, by workers and by peasants, who for twenty years saw their savings go in loans to Russia, 'friend and ally,' while waiting to sacrifice their lives for her.

Poincaré did nothing to obstruct the plans of the Russians to subvert France's free press. When Izvolsky had come to him in 1912 with an outline of his plan for corrupting the French press through bribery, he was quickly able to overcome his misgivings. Izvolsky's agent, one Davidoff, handled affairs with Poincaré, who murmured sanctimoniously, "It will be necessary to distribute [the money] as far as possible in successive small amounts and with a great deal of prudence and discretion."
Poincaré dealt with an even seamier character, Lenoir, whose job it was to hand over personally the bulging envelopes to the media masters.

Poincaré later explained rather piously that he might have met Lenoir only once, and in any case "never had occasion to talk with him." The fact that his Jewish finance minister, Klotz, soiled his hands more intimately in the sordid details hardly cleanses Poincaré, however. Klotz, who even demanded on occasion that the Russians make payments in advance, "because of the generally difficult situation of the French cabinet," would end his career scandalously after the war in a criminal court.

Despite the public's growing sympathy for Serbia and Russia, the French masses still had no stomach for war. Poincaré's policy was deemed too militaristic, particularly when the French president wished to extend the term of military service from two to three years in 1914. Despite a heightened press campaign, fueled by more Russian funds ("Klotz," Raffalovich reported to St. Petersburg, "demands a second slice: a big campaign is necessary for the three years [legislation] to be passed"), the plan was voted down.
The chief opposition to Poincaré's military plans was embodied, in the French establishment, by Joseph Caillaux. Caillaux, who died in 1944, is largely a forgotten figure today, but he was perhaps the most intelligent and competent French statesman of his time. Charles de Gaulle considered him the first European statesman to understand the essential role of the economy in public life. Like his adversary Poincaré, he was tough, imperious, authoritarian. Caillaux and Poincaré were born enemies, destined to collide with one another in the course of their careers.
Caillaux, unlike so many of the French, was not a die-hard anti-German. He respected Germany's military strength, and considered that the colossus across the Rhine could teach his own country important lessons about work, order, and modernization of industry. Caillaux believed that the two nations should complement each other rather than carry on a rivalry exacerbated by differences in temperament and psychology. Each had much to offer, and the two might arrive at a remarkable symbiosis.
All too late many Germans and Frenchmen have come to see that Caillaux was correct. Far better that the French should have ironed out their differences with Germans of the caliber of Otto von Bismarck, or even Count von Bülow, than that Adenauer, chancellor of a truncated Germany, and de Gaulle, president of a France come far down in the world, for all its pretensions, should have buried the hatchet after eighty years of disastrous enmity.
In 1914, it seemed that Caillaux stood a strong chance of winning the elections and attaining the office of president of the council of ministers, which would force Poincaré, president of the French Republic, to entrust a good deal of the business of government to him. Then what would have become of Poincaré's passionate designs for regaining Alsace and Lorraine?

Poincaré was bolstered in his struggle against Caillaux by the fact that many Frenchmen, just as adamant about the "lost" provinces, detested Caillaux for his reasonableness on the matter. At bottom the French are an extremely chauvinistic people. For them, the Belgians are the "little Belgians," who speak a strange gobbledygook. The Spanish are "semi-Africans," the English "arrant hypocrites," and the Americans scarcely better than semi-beasts.
The outside world is of little interest to the French; they have no need to know it. Charles Maurras, the most French of French intellectuals, at the age of forty had never visited French-speaking Belgium but once, on an excursion trip that lasted several hours. Pierre Laval, eleven times a cabinet minister, admitted to me that he had passed through Belgium only one time, via Liège in a sleeping car at night. To be sure, the French have seen enough of Europe in ten centuries of conquest: Brussels, Rome, Madrid, Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, twenty separate invasions of Germany. But those matters they're loath to discuss.
It was on just this aversion to foreigners and inability to see the other side of a political argument that Poincaré had based his political career. He had tirelessly agitated for a policy based on revenge and military strength. Caillaux had swum against the stream of popular chauvinism, and it had gained him millions of enemies.

In the vexed matter of the three years' military term, Poincaré's advantages in playing to popular fervor bumped against the equally tenacious solicitude of many Frenchmen for their freedom and their skins. It was fine to agitate for Alsace and Lorraine in the bistros, glorious to cheer at the Bastille Day parade along the Champs Elysées ... Personal sacrifice, at the cost of life and limb, required more thought.
Poincaré had to find some way to torpedo his rival. He found one in Caillaux's weakness for women. Despite his baldness, Caillaux had a winning way with the fair sex. Like many a French politician, he had cantered merrily from mistress to mistress. Indeed, as is the case with so many men in the public eye, the women ran after him. Hitler, who was quite prim in this matter, once showed me a drawer full of letters from beautiful women of all ages begging him to father a child for them. In love - Napoleon said it well - safety lies in flight. Many a time the emperor had to take to his heels.
Caillaux had not been so fleet of foot. After enjoying the charms of one of his admirers for a long time more or less in secret, he had married her. A pretty ash-blond named Henriette, who dressed stylishly. They were very much in love.
Nothing really to reproach there, certainly by today's standards. And Poincaré should have been the last to snoop around this little idyll, since his own gambols with a woman somewhat less than innocent had created a sensation, particularly when his lady love, after a decidedly unvirtuous career, had demanded that she and the old anticlericalist be married in secret before an archbishop. Nor would the man who was to be Poincaré's good right arm in the Operation Petticoat directed against Caillaux, Louis Barthou, win any awards for exemplary virtue.
George Malcolm Thomson has set the scene:

In the early spring days of 1914 Caillaux was a source of deep anxiety to President Poincaré. In May there would be elections; popular sentiment was running towards the Left. It would be difficult then to deny Caillaux the premiership. Caillaux, who in his boundless self-confidence believed he could strike a bargain with Germany! It would be the end of Poincaré's policy of rigid hostility to the power beyond the Rhine, of intransigence which only just stopped short of provocation. (The Twelve Days, p. 66)

Poincaré and his lieutenants devised a plan to wreck Caillaux's prospects involving, not surprisingly, the press. Le Figaro, directed by the formerly impecunious Gaston Calmette, who enjoyed lavish subsidies from the Russians (he left thirteen million francs in his will), began a campaign to destroy Caillaux with these words on May 10, 1914: "The decisive moment has now come when we must not shrink from any action, even though our morals and personal inclinations may condemn it."
In short, the newspaper had acquired Caillaux and his wife's love letters, written at the time she was his mistress. Caillaux signed himself Jo-Jo, Henriette, Ri-Ri. The letters were exactly the stuff that lovers have written one another across the ages, confessions of volcanic passion, sometimes in earnest, often believed, in any case never meant for prying eyes.
On May 16, when Ri-Ri cast her eyes on Le Figaro's front page, she discovered that the first of her Jo-Jo's letters to her was the day's feature story. It was mushy stuff: no intimate details were spared. The paper announced the rest of the letters would appear in forthcoming issues.
Madame Caillaux threw herself into the arms of her husband. Sobbing, she implored him, "Are you going to let these journalistic hyenas invade our boudoir?"

She had no mind to let them. After being turned away from an eminent Parisian magistrate, who shrugged his shoulders and offered, "That's the price of being in politics," she obtained a pistol, made her way to the offices of Le Figaro, where, upon gaining entrance to Calmette's office, she emptied all six bullets into her traducer.
In point of fact, Madame Caillaux should have aimed higher. The now defunct Calmette had been merely a hireling. As the news of Ri-Ri's revenge spread through Paris, an agitated Barthou rushed to his master in the presidential palace. As Poincaré later described the scene to the journalist P.B. Gheusi, Barthou collapsed on Poincaré's desk, terrified by the fatal consequences of the articles.
"I'm the one who wrote all the articles against Caillaux!" he exclaimed. "I'm to blame for the tragedy. I must punish myself!"
Needless to say, Barthou didn't punish himself. That's seldom the way in politics. He would be a minister several times over and remain the loyal henchman of Poincaré or whoever happened to be his patron at the time.
His wife arrested like a common criminal, Finance Minister Caillaux had little choice but to resign. The opposition, decapitated, posed no further threat to Poincaré's plans. Thereafter, Caillaux was a figure of ridicule, even in the streets of Paris. His wife's trial in July was a sensation, as Henriette swooned in her seat like a heroine in a classic tragedy. Her acquittal was anti-climactic. By July 27, 1914, the day she was vindicated, war was a matter of hours away.

CHAPTER VI

Remote Conspiracies

For the first two weeks in July President Poincaré waited patiently for his allies around the tsar to ready the Russian forces for war. The vast distances and relatively primitive communications of Russia made mobilization a more time-consuming business than in the compact and well- ordered nations of Europe, and the French leader was at first indulgent of the proverbial sluggishness of the Russian bear.
By mid-July, however, Poincaré had grown nervous. Anxious to see how the Russians were progressing and determined, in George Thomson's words, to "put a little steel into the spinal column of that powerful but dubious ally," Poincaré embarked at Calais on the cruiser France on July 15 for St. Petersburg.
Six days later he and his prime minister, René Viviani, were received with the pomp only an autocrat can muster at the Russian capital. At the tsar's summer residence, the Peterhof, Poincaré acquainted himself with the imperial family, particularly the tsar's four daughters, to each of whom he presented a diamond wristwatch, all the while eyeing them surreptitiously but calculatingly, mindful of the salacious gossip revolving around their relations with the sinister holy man, Rasputin.
Poincaré presented the tsar and tsarina with Gobelin tapestries and a set of gold fittings for the tsar's touring car. Soon the French president and the Russian emperor were in deep conversation, if the one-sided oration that the sententious little Poincaré delivered as the tsar sat silent and lackluster could be called a conversation.
Tsar Nicholas II was no man to lead an empire. Lethargic and vacillating by nature, under the thumb of his German-born wife, Alexandra, his every movement was protected by hundreds of guards, yet he had no one to guard him against the venal incompetents and flattering toadies who formed his official entourage. Goremykin, president of the council of ministers, was good for nothing more than curling up on the sofa with a third-rate novel, a cigarette dangling between his cracked lips. Maklakov, the minister of the interior, owed his prominence to his ability to amuse the young grand duchesses with his animal imitations: he'd play the panther and bound wildly about on the floor, while the girls cowered and shrieked in mock terror.

The minister of war, V.A. Sukhomlinov, was another dubious character, a compulsive gambler who was always in debt. Shortly before Poincaré's visit he had given an interview, "Russia Is Ready," widely published in the Paris press, which sparked a flurry on the stock exchange which Sukhomlinov was able to turn to his profit. One of his numerous creditors was in close touch with German intelligence.

The real powers behind the papier-mâché facade of the tsarist court were other men. Russia's foreign minister, S.D. Sazonov, had played the most important role in the Balkan intrigues of the previous decade. Alexander Izvolsky, formerly foreign minister and in 1914 ambassador to France, played a diplomatic role scarcely inferior to that of Sazonov. Then there were the grandees of Pan-Slavism, clustered on the general staff and in the high command, foremost among them the tsar's uncle, Grand Duke Nicholas, commander-in-chief of the army.
It was Sazonov with whom Poincaré conducted his most important discussions. Sazonov, ably assisted by his predecessor Izvolsky, had been and remained a hard bargainer. Two years before, Poincaré had insisted that France would not be drawn against her will into a war originating in the Balkans. Poincaré had told Sazonov at that time: "Don't count on us for military aid in the Balkans, even if you are attacked by Austria." In August of 1912, Poincaré had reiterated his government's position: "Should the occasion arise, we will fulfill our obligations. Don't rely on us, however, to aid you militarily in the Balkans, even if you are attacked by Austria, or if in attacking her you bring about the intervention of Germany." (Poincaré, Les Responsabilités de la guerre, p. 53)
Despite these and numerous other warnings, all of them calculated to insure that the outbreak of war be timed to French convenience, in July, 1914 Poincaré found himself dependent on the tsarist empire. The carefully laid plots of Sazonov and Izvolsky had entangled the French leadership: the road back to Alsace and Lorraine would indeed make a detour through Serbia, at a heavy toll.
Poincaré's conduct in St. Petersburg bore witness to his acquiescence in the Balkan entanglement. He busied himself in cheering up Serbia's ambassador to Russia, Spalajkovich, whom he told, "Have no fear. Serbia has a warm friend in our country." Spalajkovich, whose superior in Belgrade, the secretary of foreign affairs, once commented, "I always wonder whether Spalajkovich is more scoundrel than fool, or as stupid as he is crooked," became the first Serbian diplomat to learn of Poincaré's whole-hearted decision to commit France to Serbia and Russia, come what may.
The support for Serbia which the French leaders manifested in St. Petersburg was accompanied with a show of hostility toward Austria- Hungary. Prime Minister Viviani, while in the Russian capital, sent a directive to all of France's diplomats stationed abroad, which conveyed this statement made by Poincaré: "France will not tolerate Austrian interference in Serbian affairs."
At a diplomatic reception given by Poincaré in the Winter Palace, he made a shocking personal attack on the Austrian ambassador to Russia, Count Szàpàry, in terms that "left Count Szàpàry beside himself," as the Spanish ambassador, the Count of Cartagena, would later write in his Memoirs of a Diplomat.
Even Poincaré, stung by the shocked criticism that accompanied his diplomatic faux pas, later felt constrained to offer a limp defense of his outburst in his book L'Union sacrée, where he writes: "I pointed out to the ambassador that Serbia has friends in Russia who would no doubt be astonished to find her the target of harsh measures, and that surprise might be shared in other countries that were friends of Russia."
At the very least, Poincaré might have offered his regrets to the Austrian minister on the violent and brutal death of his country's heir to the throne. The remark, coming as it did at a diplomatic reception, testified not only to a lamentable lack of self-control but also to a positive willingness to give offense and provocation.

Besides his conferences with Sazonov and Izvolsky, with whom Poincaré had worked very closely in Paris, both on matters of diplomacy and more sordid business involving the cultivation of France's biggest journalists, Poincaré also met with Grand Duke Nicholas, commander of the Russian army. The grand duke was a giant, six feet seven inches tall, with a bearing as impressive as his height. Although well-known for his brutality, he was immensely popular with the rank and file, for, to the great delight of the muzhiks, he was prone to administer savage thrashings to even the most highly placed of his subordinates, or to deliver a swift kick to the ample behind of an offending general, thereby instituting a democracy of punishment that would be exceeded only by Stalin's mass purges of the officer corps in the 1930's.
Nicholas and his brother, Grand Duke Peter, were supported in their Pan-Slavism by their wives Anastasia and Militza, the fiery daughters of the king of little Montenegro, Nicholas. King Nicholas, a perpetual moneygrubber whose searches for a wealthy wife inspired Lehar's Merry Widow, ruled a state linked closely to Serbia historically and ethnically but which, under his rule, inclined toward placating Austria.
His daughters, heiresses to a long heritage of banditry and vendetta, were as bold as they were enchanting. They laughed at the toadying of the courtiers around the imperial family, and seemed always to be spoiling for a fight with someone. During the French state visit their preferred enemy was Germany, and the two spitfires quickly wrapped Poincaré around their little fingers.
At the banquet which the French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, was giving the tsar and his president, Alexandra and Militza themselves decorated the tables, setting bouquets of flowers everywhere. Before the sullen Poincaré they placed a gold candy box, which, when opened, proved to contain a half pound of earth from his native Lorraine, the focus of his ambitions for revenge throughout the course of his career.
To further stir Poincaré's blood, Grand Duke Nicholas staged a great military review on the parade ground at Krasnoye Selo. Together with the tsar they watched sixty thousand troops swagger by, massive men, barrel- chested and mustachioed, with shouts that evoked wolf packs bounding on the endless steppe. The horses of the cossacks thundered by as if maddened by vodka. Most inspiring of all for the French president, the Russian bands filled the air with French military marches - Le Régiment de Sambre et Meuse, Fiers Enfants de la Lorraine - until Poincaré was transfigured with pride.
At the end of the parade Poincaré ventured a prediction about the Russian forces. "They will be in Berlin by All Saint's Day," he forecast.
As to Russian troops in Berlin, the little lawyer from Lorraine was thirty-one years premature. Nor would the tsar or his relatives command them. But Poincaré had allowed himself to be convinced. Russia's five-million-man army would sweep aside the Kaiser's severely outnumbered forces and be watering their horses at the Spree in a few weeks. And by Christmas, Strasbourg and Metz would be French again.

Now that Poincaré and his diplomats were set on war, they would make every arrangement to camouflage the real circumstances of its onset: they would temporize, tell comforting lies, stage full-blown deceptions, even carry out forgeries - all matters in which well-trained diplomats excel when professional duty demands them. Such subterfuges, of course, would be so discreet that very few would even have an inkling of them; if worst came to worst, the perpetrators would deny them in shocked tones.
In this spirit, Poincaré, who left St. Petersburg for France on July 23, denied having come to any understanding with the Russians. According to him, "M. Viviani and 1 relaxed and rested." Strictly speaking, he'd learned nothing new: "We have no news, or practically none." As the historian Fabre Luce wrote, "Poincaré acted the role of deaf-mute."
The French president took great pains not to direct any potentially incriminating memoranda to the Quai d'Orsay. As the French delegation was preparing to board the France, while final embraces were being exchanged, Sazonov had scribbled the text of a final joint Russian-French declaration, then proferred it to Poincaré. The Frenchman gave a start on reading the draft: "The two governments have established a perfect correspondence of their views and of their aims for the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe, especially on the Balkan peninsula."
Poincaré wrote later in L'Union sacrée: "Viviani and I thought the wording, in which there was no mention of peace, would commit us too much to following Russia's policy in the Balkans. Accordingly we modified the draft so as to safeguard our freedom of action." (p. 279)
This hypocritical claim, belied by his every action at the time, Poincaré sought to bolster further by the claim that during the all-important days just before the outbreak of the war, "Everyone knew that M. Viviani and I were on the high seas, far from both France and Russia."
In politics, hypocrisy is a virtue. Unfortunately for the politicians, history is apt to pursue them, and reveal their self-serving stories and evasions for the lies they were. Poincaré's efforts to cover his tracks were soon exposed.
The British ambassador to St. Petersburg, Sir George Buchanan, a staunch opponent of Germany and an intimate friend of France's Paléologue, revealed Poincaré's secret arrangements with the Russians in his memoirs. Buchanan had learned of them from Paléologue shortly after Poincaré had sailed back to France.
Immediately after being apprised of the real situation, Buchanan wired London that Poincaré would shield the Serbs, that there was no longer any question of the French leader acting as a check on Russian Pan-Slavists, and that the French and the Russians had "solemnly ratified the commitments of the alliance."
On the same report Sir Eyre Crowe, assistant secretary in the Foreign Office, wrote this summary: "The time has passed when we might treat with France to keep Russia within bounds. It is clear that France and Russia have decided to throw down the gauntlet."

After Poincaré's departure Paléologue resumed his role as the most important Frenchman in Russia. During the last ten days of July he would carry out his role as master deceiver in a virtuoso performance.
Poincaré's last instructions to Paléologue, issued just before the France weighed anchor, were explicit: "It is imperative that Sazonov remain firm and that we support him." These words have been documented from several sources, most notably the records of secret Russian diplomacy which the Soviets, in the first flush of their revolutionary ardor, were so indelicate as to publish in Pravda in the winter of 1917-1918.
Despite his denials, Poincaré in fact maintained contact with both Paris and St. Petersburg on his return voyage. According to Paléologue, he himself had sent important information to his president on board the France, and had received additional instructions from Poincaré, including a telegram impressing upon him the need to "give full support to the imperial government."
French historian Fabre Luce, in his outstanding L'Histoire démaquillée, summed up the facts of Poincaré's return trip:
The travelers [Poincaré and Viviani] knew that the Russian government did not envisage a Serbian acceptance [of Austria's demands], which in any case depended on Russia, and had decided to mobilize against Austria in the event of an Austro-Serbian break in relations. Hence they knowingly cabled St. Petersburg a renewed promise of support. Poincaré, however, was bent on his role of deaf-mute, and the archives of the Quai d'Orsay would be manipulated so as to make it seem that communications with the outside world were held to an absolute minimum."

Some months after the beginning of the war, the French government would publish a collection of documents purporting to demonstrate its own innocent conduct and Germany's aggressive behavior in the period just before the war's outbreak. In that collection, called the French Yellow Book, there was more than one glaring omission, as would be revealed after the war.
Indeed, all the messages which passed between Poincaré and Paléologue as the French president steamed back to France would be either wholly or partially suppressed. Revealingly enough, the entire text of the agreement between Sazonov and Poincaré, in which Poincaré had gratuitously interpolated a deceitful reference to their mutual desire for peace, was missing from the Yellow Book. Fabre Luce remarks:

It is a curious thing that the telegram which, because of that addition, might be taken by naive readers as an indication of the pacific purpose of the travelers, was omitted from the first Yellow Book published by the French government. Was it done to make people forget that Viviani's addition didn't at all square with the policies actually followed during subsequent days? Or to keep up the fiction that the travelers had not been apprised of anything and had taken no action?

Again, the critical telegrams which Poincaré dispatched at Paléologue, ordering him to back the Russians to the limit, are not to be found in the Yellow Book. Later the French president would piously declare, "We know nothing of any remote conspiracies," echoing Paléologue, who made the brazen claim that since the head of state and the head of government were at sea, and since they were only imperfectly acquainted with the situation, they were unable to send him any instructions.

This sort of manipulation of the truth would be followed by numerous faked documents: texts of messages published with compromising passages omitted, invented passages inserted, and out-and-out forgeries. From the morning of July 24, 1914, not a single official text, either French or Russian, can be accepted at face value by a serious historian, unless it has been subjected to the most thorough-going scrutiny.
The student of history, in dealing with the outbreak of the First World War, finds himself inundated by a flood of lies and circumlocutions. Needless to say, at the time millions of naive people were led astray. Millions and tens of millions still believe the official falsehoods, long after they were revealed for what they were. Some of the most glaring deceptions have gone almost unnoticed, due to the vested interests of establishment politicians and court historians, who have made untruth a weapon of state in order to capture the masses, render them mindless, drive them into collective hysteria, and then frustrate any possibility that in calmer days they might learn from their mistakes and come to doubt the word of the power elite.
We shall learn how the story of the mobilization of the various national armies has been distorted, and how in particular the leaders of France and Russia faked the date of Austria's and Russia's mobilizations, driving eight million men to their deaths. It would not be until eight years after that fateful July of 1914 that Poincaré, driven to the wall by the League of Human Rights, would be forced to confess that the document which he had flaunted more than any other, the Austrian notice of mobilization, had been faked. His retraction would not restore life to a single one of the dead at Chemin-des-Dames, Verdun, or Tannenberg.

CHAPTER VII

Russia Mobilizes

It is a strange fact that Maurice Paléologue was charged almost exclusively with the conduct of France's relations with Russia. The French prime minister, Viviani, was also foreign minister, constitutionally Paléologue's superior; while Viviani was en route to and from St. Petersburg the minister of justice, Beinvenu-Martin, had been appointed acting foreign minister.
The truth is that Viviani had little authority. Poincaré viewed his prime minister with hauteur and suspicion, and often worked behind his back. Paléologue was contemptuous of his superior, of whom he said, "Viviani doesn't have the slightest notion of diplomatic affairs: he is as sluggish as a dormouse and the most foulmouthed of all our politicians." Shunted aside, treated with contempt, Viviani would go mad and end up in an asylum.
As for the interim foreign minister, J.B. Bienvenu-Martin, he played an almost non-existent role during his brief tenure. Abel Ferry, state secretary in the foreign ministry, wrote of him in his Carnets (Notebooks): "The minister comes in only forty-five minutes a day, and the mice do play." While Bienvenu-Martin stayed away, and Viviani was outmaneuvered, the foreign ministry swarmed with unofficial "diplomats," operators such as Tardieu, who considered the place his private preserve, wandering through the offices on the Quai d'Orsay with an elegant cigarette-holder protruding from his lugubrious fish-face.
The most powerful diplomat on the spot was not Viviani or Bienvenu- Martin, but the political director, Secretary General Philippe Berthelot. He was scarcely a force for an honest diplomacy rooted in mutual trust and conciliation: it was Berthelot who edited the Yellow Book.

No sooner had the France left the dock in St. Petersburg than Paléologue got to work. He invited Sazonov, the Russian foreign minister, to have lunch with him at halt' past twelve the next day, July 24. For the next three days the two men would confer almost without interruption.
At the luncheon meeting on the twenty-fourth, Paléologue duly transmitted to Sazonov the secret watchword he had just received telegraphically from Poincaré on the France: "Stand firm! Stand firm!"
The French minister was abetted by a second guest at the diplomatic lunch. Great Britain's ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, rivaled Sazonov in his enthusiasm for the Russian cause. Far from being a dispassionate and neutral emissary of Britain, Buchanan was a strong supporter of Grand Duke Nicholas and his Pan-Slav ambitions. At the lunch, when Sazonov and Paléologue urged him to support France and Russia, he replied unhesitatingly, "You're preaching to the converted."
Sazonov, who had just ordered Serbia's Prime Minister Pashich to reject Austria's sixth condition for a settlement of the Sarajevo affair - that a joint commission of inquiry be appointed - saw his hand immeasurably strengthened by this strong intimation of official British support. He stiffened his back yet more, urging Pashich that both he and the Serbian regent should leave Belgrade immediately in preparation for the hostilities. Pashich complied with that demand quickly enough, sending his family to Paris immediately.
On the twenty-fifth, Serbia made her counterproposal to Austria, accepting those demands which inconvenienced the Pashich government and its Russian patrons least, but turning down those central to the Austrian position. In accordance with Sazonov's orders, Pashich presented a counterproposal to the Austrian ambassador in which he declared that his government was willing to punish the culprits, but only after they had been proven guilty by an investigation which involved no Austrians. Doubtless this was an understandable position, given that Pashich knew full well who had organized the assassination plot, and that he walked to his offices every morning with the chief conspirator in the Balkans, Russia's minister, Hartwig.
As Pashich and his Russian mentors both knew, however, the Serbian rejection of Austria's demands meant war.

On the same day that Paléologue, Sazonov, and Buchanan had intrigued over tea, the Russian leadership, secure in its knowledge of the Serbian response to Austria on the next day, began to mobilize its ponderous armies. Sazonov laid a plan for regional mobilization before the tsar that afternoon, the twenty-fourth, which provided for putting the troops of the Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan military districts on a war footing.
Establishment histories speak of Russia's mobilization as having occurred a week later, on the thirtieth or thirty-first. The earlier regional, "preliminary" mobilization is dismissed as merely a defensive measure to forestall a rapacious Austria bent on crushing little Serbia. Generally glossed over is the fact that the Russian fleets of both the Baltic and the Black Sea were ordered to mobilize as well. Clearly this was more than a "regional" mobilization. The Black Sea was far from any of the actors in the Serbian crisis, and no canal linked the Baltic to the Danube.
Clearly, the Russians were taking aim at a plum long coveted by the imperialist ideologues of Russian expansion: Tsargrad, Constantinople, Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, a plum long worth more to the tsarists than all the plum trees in Serbia.
By mobilizing in the Baltic, just as clearly, the Russian expansionists were preparing to strike against Germany. By mobilizing the Baltic fleet, the Russians were presenting the Kaiser and his ministers with a provocation close to unacceptable.

Tsar Nicholas II was not a perfidious man. He wouldn't have hurt a fly, even if he had possessed the requisite energy. But he was little more lively than a corpse. A close friend said of the Russian ruler, "If you asked him an important question, he seemed to fall into a cataleptic trance."
Thus he was putty in the hands of advisers and ministers like Sazonov. The foreign minister quickly prevailed on him to endorse the plan for partial mobilization, which was then approved by the council of ministers at Krasnoye Selo on the twenty-fifth.
The regional, or "partial" mobilization begun by this decision was, in line with the military realities of the day, anything but partial. Once set in motion, mobilization proceeded according to fixed plans which couldn't be altered, and was all but irrevocable. The tsar knew little of strategy and tactics, and was blissfully unaware that he had committed his nation to a course from which there was no turning back when he complied with Sazonov's request.
Even then, there were Russian troops who had been feverishly set in motion weeks before the decision to mobilize on July 24, 1914. Twenty days before, the 60,000 troops who had so impressed Poincaré as they strutted to French martial music at Krasnoye Selo had been recalled from Siberia by the general staff. The snows of Siberia had melted during the brief northern summer. It was the boast of the general staff that the Siberian troops would be in Berlin before the snows returned to Russia's vast Asiatic expanse.

***

On July 25, Grand Duke Nicholas entertained at a grand military banquet. There the Germans first got wind of Russia's ruler's decision for war. General von Chelius, the Kaiser's personal military representative at the court of the tsar, had been seated beside Nicholas's chief equerry, Baron Grunwald, an old friend. When the toasts were being made, the Russian marshal looked gravely at the German, raised his glass to him with deep emotion, and said, "My dear comrade, I am not authorized to tell you what was decided at noon today, but it was very serious."
Then, placing his hand on von Chelius's arm, he added, "Let us hope that we shall see each other again in better days."
It was goodbye, then. The Russian officer could scarcely have been more explicit. He knew that a war was on the way, and he was taking leave of his friend, hours before the Serbians would present their rejection to the Austrians.
It was Grand Duke Nicholas who was the star of the banquet, however. Before two thousand newly minted officers from the military academy at St. Petersburg (all hastily commissioned hours before), the Russian commander-in-chief put on an exuberant theatrical performance, calculated to rouse the Russian soldiers to a fever pitch of bellicosity. The hall was flooded with joyous song, to the accompaniment of glasses, emptied of vodka, being smashed on the floor in the Russian manner.

Yet another Russian was rejoicing in St. Petersburg that day. Alexander Izvolsky, who had schemed for a war since 1906; who had set another river besides the Seine flowing into Paris, a river of gold; who had bribed and corrupted the press, was on the scene to see his labor finally bear fruit. He had returned to his capital to keep watch lest Poincaré slow things down through any adherence to diplomatic or legal formalities.
He needn't have worried; Sazonov and Grand Duke Nicholas did their work well. Now it only remained for Izvolsky to return to Paris, to observe the final French preparations and to stand ready to push the French leaders over the brink if they showed last-minute signs of hesitation.
On the evening of the twenty-fifth, Izvolsky boarded the train for Paris. His French colleague, Paléologue, tossing discretion to the winds, accompanied him to the station and to his personal railway car. Izvolsky, square-faced, with the features of a Kalmuck, beamed. With a triumphant cry, he assured the Frenchman, "This time it's war!" Then both men kissed each other in the Russian fashion, on the mouth. Shortly afterward, the Russian ambassador's train set off for Paris.

The next morning Paléologue telegraphed Paris to inform his government that the Russian mobilization was under way. Neither on that day - the twenty-sixth - nor on any succeeding day did the French leaders remonstrate with the Russians or seek to inhibit their actions in any way, thereby supplying further evidence of the Poincaré government's collusion with the Russian imperialists. Needless to say, the Yellow Book's editor chose to omit this telegram from its allegedly comprehensive documentation of the origins of the war.
For some years Poincaré believed that by eliminating the incriminating evidence from the government's official account of the events of July, 1914, he could wash himself clean of any suspicions and accusations. His pedestrian mentality failed to anticipate that the cataclysm he was calling forth by his secret machinations might bring about fundamental changes in the political order in which he had learned to serve himself so well. Ten years after the war, Sergei Dimitrievich Sazonov, the Russian foreign minister with whom Poincaré had so cleverly arranged the war, found himself in exile from his native Russia, which lay in ruins, chastized by a more fearsome knout than any of the tsars could ever have hoped to wield. The collapse of the old order had left him with little appetite to cover up Poincaré's doings, and in his Sechs Schwere Jahre (published in English as Fateful Years) he revealed the truth about Paléologue's telegram to Paris, and another historical lie crumbled into rubble.

Izvolsky arrived in Paris on the twenth-ninth. The telegram had preceded him, of course, and Poincaré was well prepared to cooperate with the Russian ambassador when the envoy presented himself at the Elysée Palace. The French president was secretly delighted by the unscrupulous measures the Russians had been taking to force the issue with Germany and Austria. Poincaré craved war even more ardently than the Russians. After two years of striving, he was about to get his wish.

CHAPTER VIII

German Restraint

The Russian leaders had in the beginning believed, with no small naiveté, that their mobilization could be carried out in secret, affording their lumbering armed forces a week or so extra in which to assemble the millions of draftees and march them to the German and Austrian frontiers.
Within twenty-four hours the word was out, scattered to the four winds. The indiscretions had been numerous, from Grunwald's hint to the German von Chelius at the banquet at Krasnoye Selo to Izvolsky's indiscreet behavior at the railway station. The newly commissioned young officers from the military academy were less than reticent, and Grand Duke Nicholas, his chest puffed out, was already playing the braggart soldier to the admiring ladies of the Russian capital.
As the Bolsheviks were to demonstrate by their publication of the Russian diplomatic archives concerning Franco-Russian relations between 1910 and 1914, the tsarist regime continued to mistrust its French allies down to the very outbreak of the war. The offer of so much French gold and blood in addition to the tsar's gaining mastery of Constantinople, the Balkans, Ruthenia, those parts of Poland in German and Austrian hands, and Bohemia as well, struck the Russians as generous indeed, even if compensated for by the rerun to France of Alsace-Lorraine.
To make sure that France would not at the last moment withdraw from her commitments, the Russians speeded up mobilization to the best of their abilities. The faster they moved, the more certain France's cooperation, but all the more likely that word would reach the Pan-Slavists' prospective enemies. And already suspicion was rising across the border, in Germany.

On July 25, Kaiser Wilhelm was still at sea aboard his yacht Hohenzollern, unaware of the Russian decision to mobilize and the Serbian rejection of Austria's demands. In Berlin, the German government was beginning to receive disquieting news from St. Petersburg.
Before that, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg had been slow to credit the Russian involvement in the grisly affair at Sarajevo. Although aware of Russian machinations in the Balkans, it seemed to him inconceivable that the tsar would make common cause with regicides.
It was his predecessor, Prince Bernhard von Bülow, who opened his eyes on this matter. With malicious delight, von Bülow recounted the story of how in 1814 Tsar Alexander I had urged Louis XVIII to find a job for Savary. The king had said that that was quite impossible, since Savary had sat on the revolutionary tribunal which had sentenced Louis XVI to the guillotine. "Is that all?" exclaimed the tsar, "and I dine every day with Bennigsen and Uchakov who strangled my father!"
At the beginning of July 1914, Bethmann-Hollweg had been present at a conversation between the Kaiser and his minister of war, General Falkenhayn. The general had asked, "Is it necessary to begin any sort of military preparations?"
As we have seen, the Kaiser answered in the negative; "I am completely opposed to that," adding, "Have a nice summer," after which he sent his minister off to the country.
As Prince von Bülow was later to relate, on the next day, "just as he [the Kaiser] was about to leave for Kiel and his cruise to the north, he received representatives of the army and navy general staffs and informed them that Austria was going to demand an accounting from Serbia for the Sarajevo murder, but that there was no reason to fear a serious conflict, and it was hence unnecessary to begin military or naval preparations."
To be sure, blustering as was his habit, Wilhelm II had fired off a broadside of bad names at the Serbs and expressed the wish that Serbia be soundly thrashed for its crime. Nevertheless, he had made clear that punishment was entirely the business of the Austrians.
Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg was a good deal less warlike than even his sovereign. Even after he received word that Poincaré was heading for Russia, and was informed of the French press's far from hostile coverage of the Sarajevo assassins, he did nothing. Sitting alone sphinx-like in his Berlin office, he kept silent, reading his Plato, secure in his belief that the war, if it broke out, would be confined to the Balkans.

***

Nevertheless, some German officials became apprehensive early in July. Count Wedel, a counselor to the political section of the foreign affairs ministry, telephoned Berlin from Norderney in the East Frisian Islands, where he was vacationing, to ask if he should return to his post. He was told that his vacation need not be interrupted; it was only a false alarm, and everything would be all right.
State Secretary Delbrück, also on vacation, grew apprehensive ten days after Sarajevo. On July 9 he returned to Berlin, and suggested to Bethmann Hollweg that it might be wise to set in motion the contingency measures that had been formulated several years before in the event of a threat of war. The measures include big purchases of grain on the Rotterdam exchange, and Delbrück urged this with particular insistence. Indeed, the French had begun stockpiling flour as early as January 1914, with special funds provided by the military.
Bethmann-Hollweg remained calm in the face of Delbrück's entreaties. "For Germany to perform the slightest action which could be taken as a preparation for war would be out of the question," he replied.
Still worried, Delbrück had taken his case to the foreign minister, Gottlieb von Jagow, and then the treasury secretary, Kuhn. He was rebuffed each time, and finally ordered to resume his vacation. He wouldn't return until almost two weeks later.

***

It was Montaigne who wrote, "All the troubles in this world arise from stupidity," yet Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg was not a stupid man. Fluent in the classical languages, a lover of Beethoven, he was a very capable administrator, with a genius for paperwork. In the tangled thicket of intrigue which surrounded the Sarajevo affair, however, he was completely lacking in astuteness.
Indulgent toward Austria-Hungary, he imagined that her leaders would restrain their indignation and, if they couldn't work out a settlement with Serbia, at least confine themselves to a war limited in area and aim. Doubtless he should have made very clear to the Austrian government that Germany, sympathetic as she was to Austria's outrage, would not allow herself to be dragged into a war over Sarajevo. Bethmann-Hollweg should have communicated the fact that the Kaiser's sympathy was that of a friend and of a monarch, not that of a warlord or a geopolitician seeking to alter fundamentally the borders and power relationships in any part of Europe, including the Balkans.
Yet the German chancellor let things slide during the vital first three weeks in July, The Austrians prepared their ultimatum, and the Germans, niether distancing themselves from it nor supporting it, likewise neither prepared for war nor for peace.

***

The revelation provided von Chelius by Baron Grunwald on July 25 struck the chancellor's office like a bomb. More bad news poured in. German sentries on the East Prussian border reported the Russians tearing down their customs buildings and uprooting barrier fences.
From St. Petersburg came further word of military preparations under way in Kiev and Kharkov. Grand Duke Nicholas had paraded his cavalry from Krasnoye Selo through St. Petersburg. The sixteen squadrons of Guards, Cossacks, cuirassiers, and dragoons in full battle array made a fearsome sight, and the thousands of trotting hooves, the bugle fanfares, and the glittering regimental colors stirred the hearts of the St. Petersburgers and the fears of the foreigners, at least those who were diplomats from countries less than enthusiastic about Russian imperialism.
Germany's ambassador, Count Pourtalès, paid a call on Sazonov.
"You are continuing to arm?" inquired the German diplomat.
"Just some preparatory measures... in order not to be caught short. It's not a question of mobilization," responded Sazonov.
"Such measures are extremely dangerous. I fear they may provoke countermeasures from the other side," retorted the German.
In a few hours, news of this conversation was contributing to the growing furor in Berlin. Bethmann-Hollweg was panic-stricken when he realized that the enormous Russian empire was readying for war. Galvanized to action at last, on July 26 he sent a telegram to his ambassador in London, Prince Lichnowsky, instructing him to call on Britain's foreign minister, Sir Edward Grey, and ask him to intervene immediately with St. Petersburg against a Russian mobilization in any form.
Bad show: Sir Edward had gone fishing that Sunday. It was the season when the trout were at their fattest and most beautiful. Grey had once written, "For myself I know nothing which equals the excitement of having hooked an unexpectedly large fish on a small rod and a fine tackle."
Prince Lichnowsky caught nothing that day. He was forced to wait until Monday to convey his chancellor's message.
At the same time, another fisherman was spending the last few hours of his yachting vacation at sea. Kaiser Wilhelm was worried and angry. He considered the actions (or lack of action) of his chancellor deplorable. He had finally been notified of the developing crisis, but he still awaited the text of Serbia's reply to Austria. Vienna had tarried a day after receiving the note before informing Berlin of its content. Von Jagow, the German minister of foreign affairs, would only see the text on July 27, two days after it was delivered to Vienna.
Wilhelm II landed at Kiel on the twenty seventh, and arrived in Potsdam on his special train several hours later. There he met the hapless Bethmann- Hollweg and favored him with a withering glare. The chancellor, stammering in confusion, offered his resignation on the spot.
The Kaiser coldly refused it. "You have cooked this broth. Now you are going to eat it," he told Bethmann-Hollweg.

The next morning Kaiser Wilhelm had his first look at the text of the Serbian reply, at seven o'clock in the morning. He was not overly dismayed: he believed that the assassins had to be found and punished, but it still didn't seem as if war were inevitable.
He learned that the British were considering proposing that the Austrians occupy Belgrade until the crisis was resolved. Far-fetched as that may have seemed, it still offered hope that a solution short of all-out combat might be found.
There seemed an additional ray of hope from Vienna. Kaiser Franz Josef had let fall a remark which seemed to hold open a possibility for peace. "After all," the Habsurg had said, "breaking off diplomatic relations doesn't have to be a casus Belli."
Kaiser Wilhelm took just an hour to work out a plan for a provisional peace between Austria and Serbia, along the lines of the thinking in the British foreign office. After a horseback ride in the park, he returned to his desk to write down his proposal in more definite form. It called for a temporary occupation of Belgrade by the Austrians, to insure the good faith of the Serbs in rooting out the conspiracy that had murdered Wilhelm's friend the Archduke.

CHAPTER IX

The Word of a King

Meanwhile, in Britain, opinion was mixed as to what to do about the gathering storm over the Continent. The animosity toward Germany which had been provoked by the rising German economic challenge had not decreased, nor had concern over the growth of the German navy and merchant fleet.
Nevertheless, an important sector of public opinion and the press opposed British entry into war, especially if Russia might profit by it and be emboldened to strive for hegemony in Europe. The Manchester Guardian prepared a powerful editorial against the war, in which it stated: "We should first of all have it definitely understood that if Russia and France make war, we will not follow them."
The Times saw the danger on another front. In a clear-sighted prophecy that is now more valid than ever, it admonished: "A general European war would guarantee that the economic future would belong to the American continent, particularly to North America."
The threat of the supremacy of a massive and primitive tsarist Russia, which Britain had felt compelled to oppose on the battlefields of the Crimea sixty years before and which it had warily confronted along the boundaries of its Indian raj for several decades, occupied Britons more than the distant threat from their American cousins, however. Writing in the Times, Norman Angell predicted that:
The object and effect of our entering this war would be to ensure the victory of Russia and her Slavonic allies. Will a dominant Slavonic federation of, say, 200,000,000 autocratically governed people with a very rudimentary civilization but heavily equipped for military aggression be a less dangerous factor in Europe than a dominant Germany of 65,000,000? ... The last war we fought on the Continent was for the purpose of preventing the growth of Russia. We are now asked to fight for the purpose of promoting it.
With public opinion far from enthusiastic about a possible alliance with Russia, the United Kingdom's politicians had to tread lightly, even though the idea of cutting Germany down to size had great appeal for them.

Despite Britain's long-standing ambition to control the Continent, one can't very well claim that the British ruling class was cut out to rule Europe by reason of its exceptional superiority. The illustrious William Pitt, no matter his accomplishments, and disregarding his sorry end (he died at forty-seven from his penchant for tippling port wine), can scarcely be compared to Napoleon.
In fact, more than one British statesman has been noteworthy for his lack of intellectual accomplishment, from the stodgy Edward Grey, foreign secretary in 1914, to the much ballyhooed Winston Churchill, an academic failure.
At Balliol College, Oxford, Grey was sent down by the Master, Benjamin Jowett, who wrote in the minute book, "Sir Edward Grey, having been repeatedly admonished for idleness and having shown himself entirely ignorant of the work set him in vacation as a condition of his residence, was sent down, but allowed to come up to pass his examination in June."
His academic redemption notwithstanding, Grey never achieved a proper understanding of the nations of the Continent. Like his people, he knew Europe only as a tourist, passing through in his sleeping car enroute to India. He had set foot in Paris just once, a member of King George V's retinue during a state visit. He thought "foreigners" strange beings, "terrible schemers," and once expressed the opinion that "foreign statesmen ought to receive their education in one of England's public schools."
According to Sir Edward's lights, had Wilhelm II, Poincaré, Nicholas II, Franz Josef, and even the redoubtable Pashich been cast in the Etonian mold, Europe would have acquired a sure harmony, particularly if each of the Old Boys had rendered homage to His Britannic Majesty. As an English observer wrote, "Sir Edward had the inborn conviction of the nineteenth century Englishman that England's role in Europe was that of a president who convoked conferences and cast the deciding vote."
This impeccable Englishman, with his umbrella and top hat, who fished enthusiastically and catalogued the birds he watched in his garden, was charming and agreeable in his private life. But as a custodian of the Empire, he was a different man, watchful and jealous of whoever might attempt to raise himself to the dizzying heights reserved for Britain alone. For him, in the end, British supremacy was all that counted. The Irish, the Boers, the Highland Scots, all of them and millions of others had challenged it at their peril. Now, although Grey could never have recognized it, this unique combination - breadth of power and narrowness of outlook - for the first time became a trap not only for Britain's rivals on the Continent but for Britain and its empire as well.

***

While Grey was off fishing on Sunday, the twenty-sixth, his interim secretary of state, Sir Arthur Nicolson, had invited the ambassadors of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia to a conference in which they could begin preliminary conversations to defuse the Serbian crisis. By an amusing coincidence, all three ambassadors were related, all of them cousins: Mensdorff, the Austrian; Benckendorff, who despite his German name was Russian; and Lichnowsky, a German with a Slavic name (his father had had to flee Austria after a duel in which he killed a Hungarian nobleman).
Lichnowsky was an odd ambassador. He and his wife detested the Kaiser, a fact which his wife had once confessed to Mrs. Asquith, the wife of Britain's prime minister. Like his cousins he was worldly and vain, and in fact had been commissioned by the Kaiser to keep the British entertained and diverted while the Reich built up its fleet.
The three ambassadors were unable even to meet, for their governments shared a mistrust of what the three cousins might intrigue while meeting in distant London. Nevertheless, the fact that the British government had attempted to arrange such a conference, to the exclusion of France, fostered a brief hope that all was not yet lost.
In Austria, the most aggrieved of the great powers, there was still sentiment for a settlement. The breaking off of relations with Serbia had caused more fright than enthusiasm.
Count Berchtold, the foreign minister, was shattered by the development. A contemporary wrote of him: "Berchtold was perhaps the most frightened man in Europe that afternoon. He had thought to terrify the Serbians. The latter, sure that the Russian colossus, their secret ally, would support them to the hilt in case of trouble, had not given in. It was then that Berchtold became terror-stricken."

***

Meanwhile, a meeting between his brother, Prince Heinrich, and his cousin, George V, at Buckingham Palace had given Kaiser Wilhelm another straw to grasp at. The two royal cousins had passed an hour that Sunday morning, during which George had advised the prince to rejoin his brother in Berlin without delay. When Heinrich asked the king what Britain planned to do, George replied, according to the report Prince Heinrich made to the Kaiser, "We shall try all we can to keep our of this and shall remain neutral."
According to notes he made of the talk, George V had a different version of his answer:
I don't know what we shall do. We have no quarrel with anyone and I hope we shall remain neutral. But if Germany declares war on Russia and France joins Russia, then I am afraid we shall be dragged into it. But you can be sure that I and my government will do all that we can to prevent a European war.

Whether the two cousins misunderstood each other or King George retreated from his word under pressure is difficult to determine. When the Kaiser heard his brother's version, however, he was transported, in George Malcolm Thomson's words, "by sentimental and monarchical enthusiasm. Here was something infinitely more significant and precious than the huckstering of the politicians. The Lord's anointed was speaking to his peer over the confusion and the turmoil. `I have the word of a king!' cried Wilhelm. `That is sufficient for me.' "
Unfortunately for Europe, even if Heinrich had understood correctly, kings and their word no longer had much weight. Precisely the kind of politician Wilhelm despised, a man slippery and ambitious beyond measure, was about to make his debut on the stage of international affairs.

***

As Grey was returning from his angling expedition, Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty was swinging into action. He was a born swashbuckler, something of a fantast, who ever since his adolescence had been on the lookout for strife and mischief around the world, from Cuba to the Transvaal, from the Sudan to the Afghan border. The smell of gunpowder worked on him as an aphrodisiac might affect another man. He was already quite a drinker and had something of a stammer. His name was Winston Churchill.
That Sunday morning he had accompanied his family to the beach at Cromer. The news sent him hurrying back to his desk at the Admiralty. Even before he left the beach he telephoned Prince Louis of Battenberg, the First Sea Lord, and asked him to order the British fleet in the Channel not to disperse. In his office, brandishing a cigar, he drafted a communique announcing to the world England's first tangible intervention in the military preparations leading up to the war. No German ships were in sight, nor did the Germans have any plan to send their fleet into the Channel. By this provocative gesture Britain had cleverly aligned itself with France. As one of Churchill's supporters exclaimed, "Churchill's orders to the fleet will surely be understood in Berlin."
Some men continued desperately to search for ways to stave off war. Ambassador Lichnowsky telegraphed Berlin the desire of the British government that Germany put a brake to the Austrians.
Wilhelm was receptive to the British request. He had become convinced that Austria had carried its demands too far, and in any case the revelation of an unbreakable Russian-Serbian alliance made compromise imperative. He noted in his journal: "Our loyalty to Austria is leading us to political and economic destruction."

Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, however, could not break his habit of temporizing. After receiving the British offer, which was rather conciliatory to the Austrians since it proposed that Austrian forces be allowed to occupy the Serbian capital temporarily, he communicated it to the Austrian foreign ministry only after some delay with great reluctance.
In this matter, perhaps Sir Edward Grey might be reproached as well, in view of his reluctance to deal with the Austrian foreign minister, Count Berchtold, directly. Certainly the snail's pace at which Grey and Bethmann- Hollweg set about trying to contact the Austrians for peace stands in sad contrast to the speed which Churchill began mobilizing the Royal Navy for war. Instead of the matter of minutes that it would have been for the transmittal of Grey's vital proposal directly to Vienna, the British proposal arrived there some fifty hours after Serbia's rejection of Austria's demands.
Bethmann-Hollweg managed also to sabotage a last message from the Kaiser to the Austrians, delaying its dispatch for nine hours on July 28 in order to insert changes that enlarged the area to be occupied by the Austrians to include neighboring territory mentioned nowhere in the British proposal of two days before. By the time the telegram arrived, night had fallen in the Austrian capital. Kaiser Wilhelm's proposal would have to wait until the next day to be read. Then it was too late, for Berchtold had already decided for war.
On the morning of July 28, Berchtold composed and sent this note to the Serbian government: "The royal government of Serbia not having replied in a satisfactory manner to the note delivered it on July 23, 1914 by the Austro-Hungarian minister at Belgrade, the imperial and royal government finds itself under the necessity of safeguarding its own rights and interests, and of resorting for that purpose to force of arms. Austria-Hungary thus considers itself from this moment in a state of war with Serbia."
The effect of Austria's declaration of war in London was disastrous for Germany. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Haldane, saw the hand of the Prussian militarists, soon to be a world-wide bogey, in Berchtold's act. "The German General Staff is in the saddle," he announced.
Sir Edward Grey, deeply angered, offered the opinion that "something diabolical is brewing in Berlin," as much a self-deception as it was a deception of the British people.
In Berlin Bethmann-Hollweg was harshly reprimanded by Kaiser Wilhelm. He was deeply shaken by Austria's declaration of war, which he had in no way desired, despite his attempt to toughen their position against the Serbs. On a diplomatic dispatch which had been sent from London, he wrote: "Austria's duplicity is intolerable. They refuse to give us any information."

At three o'clock on the morning of the twenty-ninth, after some hours pacing the floor in his office on the Wilhelmstrasse, he drafted a telegram to his ambassador in Vienna. He ordered him, very succinctly, "to speak with Count Berchtold immediately and very emphatically."
A serious war was still not inevitable. Sir Edward Grey ordered his ambassador to call on Sazonov in St. Petersburg and counsel moderation (a far quicker and more direct approach than he had taken with the government of Austria-Hungary.)
Austria, for its part, was still floating trial balloons. It would take fifteen days for the Austrians to mobilize. Only then could they invade Serbia.
Better than anyone, Wilhelm II knew there was time to negotiate a peace. He attempted to appeal directly to his cousin Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg, at the very time when Britain's ambassador was telling Sazonov, "1 have come to implore you not to consent to any military measure that Germany could interpret as a provocation."
Sazonov was not to be so easily moved, however. He had been conferring with France's Ambassador Paléologue for the previous four days. Paléologue told him, "War may break out at any minute. That eventuality should govern all our diplomatic actions."
Sazonov was only too happy to reassure the Frenchman. "Our general staff is becoming impatient," he repeated, again and again.

CHAPTER X

Damning Documents

The discussion which Poincaré had conducted in St. Petersburg with the Russian ministers and generals had been a good deal more than exhortations and flowery encomiums. They had been extensive, detailed, and specific.
The Russians sought sanction for their desire to stream south to Constantinople, a move to coincide with their crossing the Caucasus into Armenia. After that, they coveted Jerusalem as well as the Suez Canal. The French would agree to these aims, but not until 1917, a week before the tsarist government fell.
In July 1914, the French leadership had other ideas for the employment of the Russian army. Although Poincaré did not oppose the Russians' dreams of expansion to the south outright, he insisted that the Russians launch a major attack against the Germans in East Prussia, to pin down the bulk of the German army far from French territory.
Sazonov and Grand Duke Nicholas entertained just the opposite notion. To them France's mission was to wear down the Germans on the Western Front, so that Russia might have a free hand in the south and east. Each side attempted to conceal the selfishness of its own designs, and tried to lure the other through affecting shows of magnanimity into bending to its will. Neither was deceived.
At the same time, the Russians were busy advising their Serbian protéges on what to do when the war broke out. On July 24 Sazonov conveyed several suggestions to the Serbian ambassador, which were immediately telegraphed to Belgrade. One recommendation was that the Serbians evacuate their capital at once. Twenty years later, Pashich's son-in-law Stefanovich published a photocopy of the telegram:
Council Presidency, Belgrade, attention Pashich. Extremely urgent. Secret. Outcome council of ministers held today, 3 hours, chaired by tsar, Krasnoye Selo. Stop. Sazonov charges me inform you general mobilization ordered as agreed in military districts Odessa Kiev Kazan Moscow with mobilization Baltic and Black Sea fleets. Stop. Order sent other districts step up preparation general mobilization. Stop. Sazonov confirms Siberian divisions concentrated behind Moscow Kazan. Stop. All military school students promoted officers all officers on leave recalled. Stop. Sazonov asks we draft reply ultimatum in very conciliatory terms but categorically reject all points especially sixth [the one that demanded a joint commission of inquiry] damaging our prestige. Stop. Tsar desires immediate mobilization but if Austria begins hostilities we must draw back without resisting in order to preserve military forces intact and await developments. Stop. Sazonov will have conference with Paléologue and Buchanan in order to settle basis common action and means furnishing us armaments. Stop. Russia and France maintain attitude Serbian-Austrian conflict not local conflict but part large European questions that only all powers can resolve. Stop. Competent circles here express great annoyance with Austria. Stop. Watchword is war. Stop. Entire Russian nation eager for war great ovations in front of legation. Stop. Tsar will reply personally telegram prince regent. Stop. Spalajkovich. (Telegram order number: 196/8; date: July 24, 1914; references: Serbian diplomatic archives, Council Presidency, signatures Pacu/Pashich; cabinet 19, file 11/B, folio 7 "Petersburg", July 2-15 to July 18-31, 1914).
This telegram has been verified by two different sources. A copy was also sent to Paris, as well as to the Serbian legation in London. There the second secretary of the legation, Petrovich, whose duties included decoding messages, made a clandestine copy of it. Petrovich was hounded by agents of the Serbian secret service until he committed suicide, but not before he had handed over the documents to a second party for safekeeping. Twenty years later, the Petrovich copy was reproduced in facsimile in London (Black Hand over Europe).
Since the Serbian archives were never published in a form like the French Yellow Book (and the various other collections issued by the belligerents during the war and after), either by Serbia or its successor, the Yugoslavian government, authentication of the Serbian documents published by Stefanovich, Petrovich et al, has been difficult. The fact that a good-sized collection, scrupulously indexed, was published by a leading functionary of the Serbian ministry of foreign affairs, however, makes it impossible to simply ignore the documents, as some writers have attempted to do.
During the 1930's in France, works which dealt with the Serbian documents were promptly removed from circulation, a condition which holds true today. Henri Pozzi's Les Coupables (The Guilty Ones), for example, published in 1938, became a best-seller and then disappeared seemingly without trace. There isn't even a copy available in the National Library in Paris, nor in the Library of Political Science, where the critical study of potentially invaluable foreign policy documents is surely a priority.
If the documents are not genuine, let them be exposed. Interestingly enough, however, when they began to appear in France, the press fell silent. Only the Parisian weekly, Je suis partout, and the very important political daily, L'Action francaise, devoted any attention to them. André Tardieu, the press czar and Balkan intriguer who was deeply implicated by the Serbian documents, maintained an uncharacteristic silence on their publication. The great French historian and former minister, Benoist-Méchin, believed them genuine. Fifty years after they appeared, the Serbian documents are more important than ever in unraveling the web of conspiracy and collusion which unleashed the First World War.
Further transcriptions from the Serbian telegrams: Telegram 194/8, sent on July 22, 1914, while Poincaré was still in St. Petersburg, by the Serbian
minister to the tsar:
President of the council, Belgrade (attention Pashich). Extremely urgent, secret. Sazonov asks we intensify maximum military preparations, but avoid any public demonstrations before preparations completed. Stop. Sazonov negotiations with Poincaré-Viviani very difficult. Stop. Both opposed any measure or agreement capable dragging France into war for French concerns or interests not involved. Stop. Attitude President Republic toward Szàpàry causes immense sensation official and diplomatic circles. Stop. Sazonov insists France must now know military arrangements in process under any pretext. Stop. Transfer Siberian troops Europe ended. Stop. Mobilization large military districts will be ordered immediately departure Poincaré-Viviani. (Reference: Serbian diplomatic archives; Council Presidency. Sub/signatures Pacu/Pashich, cabinet 19, file 11/B, folio 7: "Petersburg," July 2-15 to July 18-31, 1914.)
Another telegram from Ambassador Spalajkovich to Pashich, Telegram No. 197/8, shows how Sazonov made a point of telling the over-inquisitive Paléologue a provisional lie as long as Poincaré had not yet crossed the Baltic. It read:
President of the council, Belgrade (attention Pashich) - extremely urgent - secret. Paléologue this evening asks Sazonov whether rumors mobilization military district Odessa Kazan Kiev Odessa and two fleets conform truth. Stop. Expressed sharp displeasure if action liable to provoke grave complications ordered unbeknownst France. Stop. Sazonov issued formal denial. Stop. Confirms necessity you avoid slightest indiscretion. Stop. Sazonov will inform Paléologue immediately Poincaré-Viviani depart Scandinavia. Stop. Notify Vesnich Gruich - Spalajkovich. (Reference: Serbian diplomatic archives, Council Presidency, sub Pacu/Pasic, cabinet 19, file 11/B, folio 7 "Petersburg," July 2-15 to July 18-31, 1914.)
A third secret telegram, dated July 25, 1914, this time to the Serbian ambassador at Paris, Milenko Vesnich, was sent from Belgrade by the Serbian government to avoid, by request of St. Petersburg, any indiscretion concerning military preparations in progress. It read:

Belgrade, July 21-25. Serbian legation, Paris (attention Vesnich). Extremely urgent-secret. Pending new instructions withhold all information re: measures taken her or Petersburg. Stop. Affirm situation serius but by no means desperate despite violent ultimatum. Stop. Insist on our profound desire conciliation and confidence in results intervention great friendly powers. Stop. Absolutely necessary public opinion French parliament be unaware all military preparations here and Petersburg. Stop. In conformance with the tsar's desire we are accelerating mobilization have started transfer Nish archives, treasury, official services. Stop. Evacuation Kragujevach arsenal concluded. Stop. Inform Tardieu/Berthelot agreement Sazonov reply ultimatum conciliatory form negative substance. Stop. War certain. Stop. Urgent facilitate voyage London where security Madame Pashich and Pacu family. [This telegram, registered at Belgrade as the point of origin, under No. 432/VP/14, arrived at Paris "a little before noon" and was registered under No. 291/3, BP 31.] (References: Serbian diplomatic archives, Council Presidency, sub Pacu/Pashich, cabinet 17, file 8/PV, "Paris" folio 9, July 2-15 to July 18-31, 1914)
One of Pashich's colleagues, who was on a mission to France, wrote an astonishing note demonstrating the degree to which the Serbian government withheld information from the French government while at the same time confiding vital secrets to certain private citizens in Paris:
Telegram 432/VP/14, received by Vesnich, the Serbian ambassador, a little before noon on July 25, 1914, was communicated by him in the afternoon to André Tardieu and to the administrator of the Balkans Agency, Edgar Roels. When Vesnich, coming from the Quai d'Orsay, entered Roels's agency [then located on the Rue Tai bout], he looked like a sleepwalker. His emotion was so great he appeared to be choking.
"It's war!" Bochko Cristich said to me a few moments later, "and sure victory for our two countries. Roels and Tardieu told it to the minister."
Bochko Cristich was a Serbian diplomat, an attaché in Paris, who would later become Yugoslavia's minister at Athens.
Besides the Serbian documents published by Stefanovich and others, there have been other disclosures from the Serbian side which have cast light on the activities of Pashich and his government. Noteworthy among them have been the sensational revelations of Ljuba Jovanovich, the former Serbian minister to Vienna. Jovanovich, as a diplomat, had access to the secret archives in Belgrade. Some years after the war he revealed that Spalajkovich had sent a supplementary telegram from St. Petersburg on July 24, 1914, which included the words, "A drastic decision is expected at any moment."
Later the German historian Webersberger would publish a copy of a scrap of paper written in Pashich's hand "noting the registration of the guns of the Sarajevo conspirators and indicating the man responsible for their conveyance: Tankosich." As was mentioned earlier, Voya Tankosich was a personal agent of Nicola Pashich.
While the documents issued by the Soviet government after the Revolution include a great many items damaging to the tsarist claims of innocence in the matter of plotting for war, there are a good many gaps in the record, particularly pertaining to Serbia. While Russian designs on Istanbul and thé Straits, the close relations and mutual deceptions of Izvolsky and Poincaré, and the systematic bribery of the French press are detailed by a wealth of documents, one will search in vain for material on the intrigues of Hartwig in Belgrade, culminating in the double assassination at Sarajevo. Those documents are missing.
There is a simple explanation. Between the revolution which resulted in the Kerensky government in March 1917 and the Bolshevik takeover in October of that year, a Major Verkovsky had been named minister of war. This same Verkovsky had been Colonel Artmanov's righthand man in Belgrade, helping out with, among other things, the plot which culminated at Sarajevo. With several months of access to the Russian archives, he was able to eliminate anything detrimental to himself.

***

Serbia and Russia had a rival when it came to doctoring and suppressing official documents, of course. That was France, where great efforts were expended to bring the diplomatic sources into some kind of congruence with the official propaganda.
From the first telegram of Ambassador Paléologue on the July 25, 1914, the official texts have been calmly and completely changed upon arrival. Historian Fabre Luce writes:
The brief text in which Paléologue reported the Russian mobilization was replaced with a fictitious text, accounting for that decision as the result of the Austrian general mobilization and German military preparations. The addition underlines the fact that these justifications could not have been given in the ambassador's telegram. And for a good reason: at the time Paléologue sent his telegram, the Austrian general mobilization had not yet been ordered. (L'Histoire démaquillée, pp. 90f.)
Luce continues:
All that it took to reverse the order of the mobilizations was one turn of the clock: then, without changing the hour, a morning telegram had been turned into an evening telegram. This falsification was done at the outset: the archives commission established that the register of the telegraph service bore an incorrect time notation.
The French historian further adds:
The drafts of the telegrams sent during that period frequently have corrections, excisions or additions, written between the lines, usually in pencil and for the most part in the same handwriting as the original. An examination of the documents by the commission of archives indicated that these corrections had almost always been made after the event. Certain telegrams underwent curious delays, either when sent or after arrival. The one that officially informed Paris of Russia's general mobilization took nearly ten hours to arrive at its destination. It was inserted between two other less important telegrams which took, respectively, two and four hours. So many precautions taken to dupe the researcher at last call his attention to the very thing it was intended to hide from him.
Europe in 1914 was a minefield of diplomatic booby traps of the French and the Serbs through which extreme care was needed to pick one's way. Of the two, the Serbians were the cruder, content simply to eliminate any document which might cause them trouble.

CHAPTER XI

A Tsar Gives In

It was not until July 26, 1914, that the tread of marching troops in St. Petersburg echoed in Berlin, when imprecise rumors as to the tsar's decision to mobilize a million soldiers began to reach the German capital.
Bethmann-Hollweg immediately informed the British government of his concern. In Vienna, two days later, the situation had deteriorated still further thanks to the delay in the arrival of the conciliatory messages of Wilhelm II and Sir Edward Grey. The Dual Monarchy was rattling its sword with a declaration of war that sober heads recognized was largely rhetorical: it was still likely that all that would come from it would be the dispatch of a few old tubs down the Danube to lob a few shells at Belgrade, already abandoned by the Serbian government at the order of their tsarist masters. If the Austrian government really meant business, the two weeks it would take to mobilize the Austrian army would allow ample time for negotiations.
The Russian Pan-Slavists, of course, had no intention of seeing their carefully laid plans for a Balkan conflagration thwarted. The idea that a last-moment intervention by wiser heads might upset their plans filled them with fear and rage.
On July 28th Sazonov called on Tsar Nicholas and obtained two ukases which he promptly forwarded to General Yanushkevich. The first decreed the mobilization of the four military districts of Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and Kazan, as had already been provided for on July 24, 1914, and put in motion by the Russian general staff. Now it had the official sanction of the Russian autocrat.
The second decree ordered a general mobilization, which followed, as we have shown, inexorably from a partial mobilization according to the planning of the general staff. The tsar, who was as poorly informed about the military strategy of his generals as he was about many affairs in his realm, was unaware of this. He had been led, unwittingly, into a trap from which he could no longer extricate himself, a trap which would see him and his family slaughtered and the Romanov dynasty expunged from Russia.

As everyone in St. Petersburg and Paris knew, mobilization meant war. From the first day of the Franco-Russian Alliance in 1894, this was understood.
The statements of the principal actors in the drama confirm it. General Obruchev, the Russian chief of staff at the time of the treaty, said, "Our mobilization should immediately be followed by acts of war."
The tsar (at that time Alexander III) concurred: "That is just as I understand it."
General Boisdeffre, who represented France in the negotiations, was equally explicit: "Mobilization is the declaration of war."
René Guerin, the great French intellectual and patriot, who co-authored Les Responsabilités de la Guerre with Poincaré, wrote: "If my declared enemy aims a revolver at me, and if I know he is a good shot, I must conclude that he wishes to kill me, that he is going to kill me. Should I wait until he had fired to be certain of his intentions?"
On July 28, 1914, the tsarist empire drew its guns. General Dobrorolsky, commander-in-chief of the Russian mobilization, was quite definite about it. As far as he was concerned, from the reception of the order to mobilize the march of events would be "automatic and irreversible."
"I was called upon to set fire to the woodpile of the world," he would state, without batting an eye.
The tsar, when he had allowed his minister, Sazonov, to extract the two mobilization orders from him, murmured, "Think of the thousands and thousands of men who are going to be sent to their deaths."
He badly underestimated the coming slaughter.
In Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm stood firm even as events hurtled toward disaster, still refusing to accept war as inevitable. No longer able to meet face to face with Nicholas, whom he might well have swayed, as he did once before, he had only the telegraph as his last resort. The tsar was now effectively the prisoner of his generals and his ministers. Behind them lashing them on, stood the French ambassador Paléologue, egged on by Poincaré.
The German leaders tried in vain to budge the emperors of Russia and Austria. Wilhelm bombarded Austria's Franz Josef with telegrams urging negotiations with the Russian leadership. The kaiser sent similar messages to the tsar.
Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg exerted all his powers of threat and persuasion to convince his opposite number in the Austro-Hungarian government, Berchtold, to accept England's proposal that Belgrade be temporarily occupied by Austria while the great powers negotiated a solution to the impasse. He telegraphed his ambassador, Count Tschirschky: "We are, of course, completely prepared to do our duty as an ally, but we must refuse to let Vienna draw us into a worldwide conflagration, in disregard of our advice. I urge you to speak to Count Berchtold immediately and with great emphasis."
Sixteen years later, Poincaré would acknowledge that Berchtold had replied to this affirmatively, and that he had been ready to waive compensation: when questioned by Tschirschky, who had received his instructions, Count Berchtold proved willing to declare that Austria made no territorial claims." (Poincaré, Les Responsabilités de la Guerre, p. 167)
The message of Wilhelm II which reached Nicholas II at that time was equally emphatic: "I am using all my influence with the Austrians to get them to seek some basis of agreement with you without any mental reservations."
Even in Wilhelm's absence his entreaties made a powerful impression on the tsar. Nicholas roused himself sufficiently to quit his apartment and descend to the front hall, where the only telephone in the palace was located. Mouth close to the receiver, he ordered the chief of the general staff, General Yanushkevich, to rescind the order for general mobilization immediately, retaining only the order for partial mobilization.
Yanushkevich, reinforced by Sukhomlinov, the minister of war, dared to call the tsar back to the telephone. According to them, a "regional" mobilization would throw the army into disorder, and make it impossible to carry out a general mobilization, the only mobilization that could be of any military value in the circumstances.
The tsar's change of heart was all the more impraticable for the general staff because the general mobilization, unbeknownst to the tsar, was already under way. France's military attache in Moscow, Captain Laguiche, had learned on July 26th of Russian measures for mobilization in progress as far west as Warsaw, and informed his government by telegraph.
By July 29th, the general Russian mobilization was being carried out almost openly along the Prussian border. One of General Dobrorolsky's reports noted: "In the Suwalki district, which abuts the border of East Prussia, the general mobilization had already begun." (L'Histoire démaquillée, p. 66)
During the night of July 29-30, 1914, there ensued a crossfire of almost unbelievable telephone conversations.
First the tsar himself, in a completely uncharacteristic interference for that weak-willed ruler, had called the chief of the general staff. Immediately afterwards Yanushkevich, instead of obeying his tsar, rang up the minister of war, Sukhomlinov.
"What shall I do?" he asked the minister.
Sukhomlinov replied immediately: "Don't do anything!"
At the other end of the line, the chief of the general staff exclaimed "Thank God!" The direct, personal order of the tsar had been circumvented.
The next morning, July 30th, Sukhomlinov lied to Nicholas, informing the tsar that he had complied with the order to cease the general mobilization and restrict the army's preparations to regional mobilization. In fact he was doing exactly the opposite.
In 1917, when Sukhomlinov would stand trial for his numerous failings, he would confess publicly that "the following morning I lied to the tsar. I told him that the partial mobilization was limited to the command posts of the southwest."
That morning it was also Sazonov's turn to lie to Nicholas. He explained to his sovereign that Austria was already carrying out military operations on Russian soil. This was totally untrue, as Sazonov was well aware, but it was needless to say highly persuasive to the vacillating monarch. The tsar sent Kaiser Wilhelm the following pathetic telegram: "I foresee that I am soon going to be overcome by the pressure being put on me, and I shall be forced to take extreme measures leading to war."
Sazonov, pressing his advantage, routed the tsar from his chambers, where he and the tsarina were tending their son, the little hemophiliac crown prince. Tsarina Alexandra, nerves at the breaking point, sought to counsel her husband not to give in, for she loathed the Grand Dukes and their Pan-Slavist obsession.
Then Sazonov let fly the arrow that would strike this proud but devoted wife and mother to the quick. He told her, "You are asking the tsar to sign his own death warrant."
This threat, scarcely veiled, had been confirmed by George Malcolm Thomson, who wrote, "Nobody should put aside as impossible any wild outcome of those feverish hours in the tsar's palace by the sea." It was blackmail by threat of assassination.
The tsar received a final telegram from the kaiser: "My ambassador has instructions to draw the attention of your government to the serious dangers and consequences of a mobilization. Austria-Hungary has mobilized only against Serbia and only a part of her army. If Russia mobilizes against Austria-Hungary, the role of mediator which you have accepted in accordance with your express wish, will be threatened, if not rendered impossible. The entire weight of the decision now rests on your shoulders.

yours to bear the responsibility of war or peace. Willy."
The burden of decision was crushing Nicholas II. His evasions at an end, he now received the war party in is office. Ushered in, they lined up facing the tsar, the Minister of War, his generals, the civilian officials.
Sazonov, speaking clearly and decisively, challenged the tsar: "I don't think Your Majesty should hesitate any longer to make the decree of general mobilization effective again."
Again the tsar murmured his argument: "Consider that it means sending tens of thousands of men to die."
Sazonov: "The halting of our mobilization would upset our military organization and disconcert our allies."
Another imposture of Sazonov's, by which he implied that the French would be shocked at the tsar's torpor and think that he was violating the terms of their alliance. At that moment, of course, Poincaré, just returned from his journey, was playing the role of the innocent in Paris.
Finally everyone fell silent. The tsar, eyes bulging, his face a sickly yellow, made no reply. He stood motionless, as if petrified.
Suddenly General Tatishev broke the silence: "Yes, it is a difficult decision."
The tsar started as though he'd been slapped. He paced back and forth, and then looked straight at his audience. "I am the one who decides."
And he decided. He ordered Sazonov to telephone Yanushkevich that he was again signing a decree for general mobilization.
Thomson has fixed the scene forever: "The tension in the room broke. Sazonov rose, bowed, and almost ran to the telephone on the floor below. He passed the order triumphantly to Yanushkevich, adding, `Now you can smash your telephone.' "

CHAPTER XII

Tragic Farce

At the very time when Tsar Nicholas was yielding to the pressures of the war faction, President Poincaré was landing from the cruiser France at Dunkirk early on the morning of July 29th. His return trip to France had been occupied with laying a smokescreen of alibis against any accusations that he was plotting war.
Paléologue had delayed dispatching telegrams to Paris after the proclamation of the Russian general mobilization, and in some cases had refrained from sending telegrams at all, in order to maintain Poincaré's facade of ignorance as to what the Russian war party was doing. On July 26th Paléologue had held up the transmission of the French attache, Laguiche's, telegram reporting on the clandestine beginning of mobilization.
Nevertheless, when Poincaré was met by Minister Renoult in the presidential train at Dunkirk, the president told his minister, "It can't be settled peaceably." For someone who claimed to have heard nothing for six days, he seemed awfully certain.
Poincaré's bald endorsement of war was in fact not a true statement. Even as he spoke, efforts to calm the situation were under way in Vienna and even in St. Petersburg. The Kaiser's entreaties and those of his chancellor had begun to sway Franz Josef and Berchtold. Count Berchtold had modified his demands on Serbia and was now willing to consider dropping the Austrian government's demand for a joint Austrian-Serbian investigation into the assassination of the archduke. According to Fabre Luce: "It was no longer a question of mere camouflage. No! A note written in Berchtold's hand shows that even on that day, July 30, 1914, he was disposed to compromise on the Serbian investigation, if Russia, on her part, accepted the provisional Austrian occupation of Belgrade." (L'Histoire démaquillée, p. 75.)
Sometimes danger has a calming effect. Never, perhaps, since the crime of June 28th had the parties been so close to a settlement.

***

When Poincaré arrived in Paris on the morning of the twenty-ninth, he was met by a triumphal reception at the St. Lazare station, one that had been prepared by his aides but which was none the less fervent. Tens of thousands of Frenchmen, stirred to a fever pitch by a chauvinistic press, jammed the sidewalks along the route to the Elysée palace, acclaiming the president as if he were Napoleon returned in triumph from Elba. The crowd surged to the Place de la Concorde to mass in front of the black-draped statues of Metz and Strasbourg. Had Poincaré not been a staunch Freemason, they might have offered him a Te Deum at Notre-Dame Cathedral.
He received a secular beatification in any case. Strange, this excitement in view of Poincaré's protestations of ignorance at the rush of events during his cruise; strange, that patriotic crowds should heap acclaim on this allegedly befuddled traveler. The man in the street, at least, had instinctively penetrated Poincaré's alleged fog of ignorance and loved him all the more for his imposture.
But now the hour approached in which, after two weeks of subterfuge, it would be necessary for Poincaré to strike the final blow for war, all the while conveying the impression that he had none but peaceful intentions.
Immediately after his triumphal march from the station to his palace Poincaré summoned three men to the Elysée: his premier, the complaisant Viviani; Great Britain's ambassador, Sir Francis Bertie; and the consummate wirepuller from Russia, Aleksandr Izvolsky. The French president and the Russian ambassador went to work on the urbane ambassador from Britain, dressed like a banker from the city with his pearl gray silk hat and his elegant green-lined umbrella. It was a strange session: the two long-time conspirators, Poincaré and Izvolsky, were forced to disguise their joint machinations of the immediate past while at the same time feigning an entirely false amity.
The truth is the two men hated one another, as was to emerge from their statements and writings after the war. Izvolsky would claim that Poincaré was a liar who had deceived everyone (he wasn't alone in his sentiments; Poincaré's minister of the interior, Louis Jean Malvy, would describe his former president as "an egoist, a double-dealer, and a coward"). In 1922, before the Chamber of Deputies, Poincaré would claim that every French minister knew he had never trusted Izvolsky. He would also write, with something less than veracity, "If T had been able to read the telegrams he [Izvolsky] was sending his government, I'd no doubt have noted many passages in them that would have justified the instinctive mistrust that he inspired in us, in my colleagues and me." Thus the men who had schemed together to corrupt public opinion in France on one another!
The British ambassador wasn't buying their cajolery. He made no commitment. As always, he replied that he would refer the matter to his government.
It was at this meeting, however, that Poincaré gave Izvolsky categorical assurance of France's support for Russia's mobilization, an assurance for which Poincaré was to sidestep the responsibility after the war. When the collaborator on Poincaré's account of the origins of the war, Guerin, asked Poincaré about the outcome of that meeting, the former French president replied simply, "Ask Malvy."
Minister Malvy was well aware of what transpired at the Elysée palace that afternoon. That evening he called on his friend Joseph Caillaux in a highly agitated state to convey the news, writing down the conversation on the spot.
Malvy: "Russia asked us if we could mobilize. We answered yes. We have committed ourselves to support her."
Caillaux: "Then you are going beyond the conditions of the alliance!" Malvy remained silent.
Caillaux: "Of course, you made certain of England's agreement?" Malvy: "There was no question of England." (The British ambassador had left the meeting before the question arose.)
Caillaux: "Scoundrels! You have started a war!"
The Soviet Black Book would include the text of the telegram which a gleeful Izvolsky sent to Sazonov that afternoon after leaving the palace: "France is in full agreement with us!"
It was that telegram which Sazonov used the following day to overcome the resistance of the tsar to the definitive unleashing of the Russian war machine.

***

Had Poincaré been sincerely for peace he might still have restrained the Pan-Slavist warmongers around the tsar, even as Kaiser Wilhelm and Bethmann-Hollweg were exerting all their powers of persuasion to restrain their allies in Austria-Hungary. Germany had no desire to go to war with France, but the nature of the Reich's encirclement by France and the mighty Russian empire made a desperate German offensive against France a necessity if hostilities seemed unavoidable, as they would if the Russians mobilized. Such was the trap that Poincaré and the Pan-Slavists had laid for Germany.
Laying a trap for Germans was of course not an obligation imposed on the French government by its agreement with the Russian leaders. France's president, had he been willing, might have declined to aid the Russians in their plot against the Germans, just as the Russian government declined to pledge its unconditional support to France in the Moroccan affair two years before. At that time Izvolsky had indicated to the French that "Russia remains true to her alliance without question, but she would be hard put to persuade the Russian people to go to war over Morocco. Moreover, our alliance is only a defensive one." Or, as Tsar Nicholas had expressed it to the French ambassador, "I don't envisage a war except for totally vital interests."
For Poincaré, however, the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine was a vital interest, and provoking a German attack, which would eliminate the need for troublesome debates in the French assembly, was the way to attain it. His crafty, stealthy maneuvering, carried out with the knowledge of a handful of trusted political henchmen, was a marvel of hypocrisy and efficiency on the Machiavellian model. Poincaré would have his war, and Germany would bear the brunt of the world's moral outrage.
Poincaré's secrecy led to a night of comical and frantic misapprehensions for two of his ministers. At a little past midnight the French minister of war, Adolphe Messimy, was awakened at his house. He had a visitor, and an obstreperous one at that: Colonel Ignatiev, the Russian military attache, who'd obviously had quite a bit to drink. The colonel was bringing the official message from the Russian government, one of thanks for France's support for Russian mobilization. Rubbing his eyes, Messimy - still unaware of Poincaré's assurance that afternoon - tried to conceal his astonishment. He immediately telephoned Viviani, who replied volubly.
"Mon Dieu!" he exclaimed. "It is evident that the Russians are sleepwalkers and drunkards. I've just had Izvolsky here. Tell Ignatiev to avoid fireworks at any cost."
Was Viviani's astonished indignation genuine? Was the premier oblivious to Poincaré's machinations and Paléologue's activity in St. Petersburg? To be sure, Paléologue's telegrams had been arriving late, sent by a circuitous route to support Poincaré's claims that the French government had been in the dark while Russia mobilized. But one historian believes that Viviani's amazement was a pose.
Fabre Luce writes:
He [Viviani] wasn't suffering so much from the annoyances of being roused in the middle of the night as from finding himself under the necessity of assuming the responsibility that he had to avoid. What did "those Russians" need an official confirmation for? Couldn't they take the hint that the support given them unstintingly at St. Petersburg remained valid? What blockheads! The telegram sent from the armored cruiser, and the promise of support, renewed the day before in Paris, wasn't enough for them then. Thoughts such as these must surely have passed through the mind of the president of the council of ministers, who was also the minister of foreign affairs.

Viviani was handed a telegram by Izvolsky. It came from Sazonov and included the words, "I express our sincere thanks to the French government for the official declaration that we can count on the full cooperation of our ally."
But the telegram went beyond the terms of Poincaré's muttered assurances to lzvolsky. It continued, "We have now only to speed up our armament and face the imminence of war." Clearly Viviani hadn't been informed of everything! Off he hastened to the Elysée Palace, where the president of France was in his turn routed from his slumber and forced to dress hurriedly. Poincaré was in no mood to calm Viviani. He snapped, "We'll take that question up at the council meeting, in a few hours," and then went back to bed.
Back at Messimy's residence, Ignatiev was demanding an official reply to his minister's telegram, and, fortified by inebriate impetuosity, refusing to leave before he got one. Messimy, trying to temporize, told him the Russians would have to slow down their mobilization. Ignatiev replied vehemently, with an appropriate metaphor, under the circumstances: "You don't mobilize by degrees, the way you drink a cocktail."
Fishing for a formula that would enable him and his colleagues to evade responsibility, Viviani hit on the idea of a "secret" Russian mobilization. He told Messimy to inform the colonel that Russia should mobilize its southern army corps provided France wasn't informed. To Sazonov, Viviani telegraphed that France acquiesced in Russia's "precautionary and defensive measures," thereby giving Germany no pretext to mobilize. Again the French leaders had played into the hands of Russia's warmongers.
Fabre Luce had described the scene and its implications well.
Messimy and Ignatiev embrace each other silently, and the Russian will later remark: "I was like a man who has a great weight lifted from his shoulders." Apparently, despite all the assurances received, he had wondered right up to the last moment whether France, a country with a peace-loving majority and a signatory to a defensive alliance, was really going to accept the mobilization- aggression on the part of Russia, and now, yes! The Rubicon was crossed.
The French leaders made a choice, but they tried to hide their decision. They played with the idea of a secret mobilization, when ordinary good sense and the statements of the Russians confirmed that it was impossible. Paléologue knew it: a Russian document attested to it, but he pretended to enter into the game and telegraphed, on the evening of the 30th, that the Russian government has decided `to proceed secretly with the first steps of the general mobilization.' The government had quite simply proclaimed that mobilization. (L'Histoire démaquillée, pp. 70f.)
It was this French assurance of support that had enabled the Russian ministers and generals to pressure theTsar, to continue mobilizing against his order, and at last to cut off his telephone so that he couldn't go back on his final decision for war.

On the same night General Count Helmut von Moltke, chief of the German general staff, was living through increasingly anxious hours. He risked nothing less than the loss of the war if he let the Russians steal the march and mobilize to overrun Germany. Now everything indicated that their mobilization was under way.
The nephew of the great Moltke, Bismarck's right arm, victor over Austria and France, this younger Moltke lacked the temperament and willpower of his illustrious uncle. He admitted, "I lack the power of rapid decision. I think too much. I don't have the temperament to risk everything on a throw of the dice."
Outwardly the general cut a magnificent figure, as impressive as Michelangelo's Moses, but he was at least as much an aesthete as a fighting man. He read a great deal, preferably weightier authors like Nietzsche and Carlyle. A fervant admirer of the Flemish writer Maeterlinck, he had translated that author's Pelléas and Mélisande into German. He painted and played the violin, and, influenced by his wife, dabbled in the murky waters of theosophy.
Unlike other Germans, such as Count von Bülow, he feared Russian expansionism. Moltke was traumatized by the prospects of millions of hardy Russian serfs, their immense realm stretching from the Memel to Vladivostok, inured to privation and trained to blind obedience, falling like an avalanche on a Germany already menaced by a powerful French army, the two forces outnumbering the German army by four to one.
Moltke saw the Russian strength growing from year to year. Russia's chief weakness, the poor network of transportation and communications which served its vast territory, was being steadily improved thanks to a massive influx of French francs arranged by Poincaré. A major new railway network was growing towards Prussia and in a matter of several years would enable the rapid and orderly transfer of millions of troops to Germany's Eastern border.
As of July 1914, Russian military progress toward Germany was still slow and cumbersome. Railway tracks and roadbeds were still inadequate, and travel over them was slow and jolting. The great majority of Russian troops would have to advance over poor roads on foot. Nevertheless, Russian measures for war had been progressing for weeks. The Siberians had been called to European Russia, and the army groups of the West were moving toward the frontier.
Germany's only strategic plan, the Schlieffen plan, anticipated forty days of fighting against the French, to be carried out by the great bulk of Germany's armies. Only then could substantial forces be shifted to the eastern front. Every day that passed now eroded the Germans' margin of safety in the east. To the German generals, every day spent negotiating with the Russian leaders, while the Russian armies continued to mass and to move forward, brought their nation closer to military disaster.

CHAPTER XIII

Death of a Pacifist

Each day the dispatches received in Berlin from the German diplomats in St. Petersburg were more disturbing. On July 30, 1914, a telegram from the ambassador, Pourtalès, dispensed with all further doubt. It listed, one by one, the districts in western Russia where mobilization was in full swing.
In the Warsaw district, at that time near Germany's eastern border, and in Suwalki, on the threshold of East Prussia, the progress of the Russian mobilization couldn't be concealed. German spies and informers, as well as the German consul at Allenge, stressed the imminence of Russia's advance. Preparations were visible even from the German sentry boxes on the frontier, across which the Russian troops were hastily demolishing their border outposts, and from which flames now blazed in the night.
By that evening Moltke had confirmed from reliable sources that the Russian mobilization was effective and total. The next morning he telegraphed his colleague in Austria, General Conrad von Hötzendorff:
"Mobilize! Germany will mobilize with you!"
Even then the kaiser was still seeking to steer Austria's Franz Josef toward negotiation with the Russians. The Austrian emperor's foreign minister, Berchtold, was confused by the conflicting messages from Berlin.
"Who is in command at Berlin?" he exclaimed. "Von Moltke or the Kaiser?"
To be sure, von Moltke had temporarily exceeded his perogatives. But on that morning Pourtalès had been able to confront Sazonov in St. Petersburg with a public mobilization poster. Time was growing short for the Germans, and even Kaiser Wilhelm was losing faith in a peaceful solution. The message of the tsar, that he could no longer resist the pressures of his advisers, had reached him on the 30th, and Wilhelm had conceded, "My mission as a peacemaker is over."
Meanwhile, in Paris, Poincaré was about to be rid of the last consequential French opponent of his war schemes. Jean Jaurès, leader of the French socialists, and president of the Second International, was a cultivated man. He was well versed in the Latin and Greek classics, and had learned Spanish to read Don Quixote in the original, as well as English to tackle Hume and Shakespeare. A magnificent orator who, despite his piercing blue eyes, hailed from the south of France, he lived a respectable, indeed bourgeois life. He had none of the venality which had enabled so many French politicians to pile up private fortunes from their public (and not so public) activities.
On July 29th in Brussels, Jaurès had made a last effort to stop the war by addressing a great convocation of socialist leaders from all over Europe, gathered under the auspices of the Second International at the Royal Circus, a vast stately hall where this writer would address the Brussel's public for the first time thirty years later. That day Jaurès was particularly moving, for to him, the peace of Europe had never been more menaced since the Napoleonic wars of a century before.
Great cries of "Down with war!" had rung out at the conclusion of his speech, many undoubtedly from the same throats that would a few days later give their passionate assent to war in parliaments and national assemblies across Europe. Jaurès left the hall with heavy foreboding despite his tumultuous sendoff. He had time to see the Flemish Primitives in all their splendor at the Brussels Museum before catching the train to Paris.
In Paris Jaurès proceeded directly to the Foreign Ministry to try to exact a promise from Viviani that the government would try to calm the Russians. When he learned that Poincaré had just given full support to the Russian mobilization, he warned Viviani:
"You are victims of Izvolsky and of a Russian plot. We are going to denounce you feather-brained ministers, even if we're shot at."
As Jaurès left the building on the Quai d'Orsay he encountered lzvolsky. Staring him hard in the face, he said, "This scum Izvolsky is going to have his war."
That evening Jaurès read in a newspaper: "If France had a leader who was a man, Jaurès would be put up against the wall at the same time as the mobilization posters."
Shaking his head, he said under his breath, "We must expect to be assassinated at the first street corner."
That same night a young man was snooping around Jaurès house at Passy. When Jaurès approached with several friends, the young man, whose name was Raoul Villain, asked an onlooker which one was Jaurès. On learning, he slipped away into the darkness.
On the next morning, while the streets of Paris teemed with demonstrators and frightened holders of bank accounts (withdrawals of more than fifty francs from checking accounts had just been forbidden), Villain searched for his prey. Unsuccessful at Jaurès newspaper office, Villain finally traced the great socialist leader to his cafe, the Croissant.
Then Jaurès sat admiring a photograph of a journalist friend's granddaughter. The window behind his table was open, only a curtain separating Jaurès from the street. Imperceptibly a hand pushed the cloth aside. Then there was a flash, and two shots split the air. Jaurès slumped over his plate. A woman screamed, "Jaurès has been killed!," and the last great opponent of the war joined those slain at Sarajevo.
The rumor ran through Paris that Jaurès had been shot by a tsarist agent, forcing the government to blockade the Rue de Grenelle, where the Russian embassy stood like a citadel and where the Russian secret police, the Okhrana, had its Paris headquarters (the Russian embassy today houses the offices of the Okhrana's far more powerful successor, the KGB). No evidence was ever produced that the Russian secret service was behind Jaurès's assassination, and it is likely that Villain, the son of a madman, a fanatical nationalist whose mind had been inflamed by the stridency of the warmongering press, acted alone. Nevertheless, his bullets were as effective against the last great voice against the war in France as had been those of the Russian conspirators' hirelings against the archducal couple in Sarajevo.
On the same day that Jaurès was gunned down Poincaré succeeded in having Caillaux, his erstwhile opponent, who had been brought low by Calmette of the Figaro, hustled out of Paris by two policemen. Now the road to Berlin lay open.

CHAPTER XIV

The Lies of Politicians

The atmosphere in Berlin on the morning of August 1, 1914, was one of deep gloom. Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg paced the carpeted floors of his office in long strides, scarcely comprehending what was going on, looking at the future with deep foreboding.
According to Malcolm Thomson:
As the evening wore on, gloom deepened in the Foreign Office in Berlin. When Theodor Wolff of the Berliner Tageblatt looked in he found a silence like the grave in the midst of which diplomats brooded in the old-fashioned armchairs. The old Hungarian nobleman Szögyény, who was the Austrian ambassador, looked like one from whom despair had drained the last drop of blood. Jagow [the German foreign minister] padded in and out with a fixed, ambiguous smile.
In Vienna Chancellor Berchtold was scarcely in a better state. Impeccable as ever in his detachable collar and cravat fixed with a pearl stickpin, he was stuffing himself with sleeping pills. He had failed to detect the Russian hand behind the Serbian conspiracy, rendering his bluster at the Belgrade government less than useless. The German Kaiser found his imprudence unpardonable. Would that he had watered his fine Tokay wine a bit during that fateful July! It would have been much better to be clear-headed. Now it was too late: the Russian army would soon be crossing the borders of Austria-Hungary.
In St. Petersburg, the leaders of the war faction were assailed by a last flurry of panic. The Great War was really on. Sukhomlinov, the minister of war, was quaking in his boots. He had set up a number of icons and votive candles on his desk, and crossed himself frequently.

Perhaps alone in a calm state, Wilhelm II refused to order the German army to mobilize, despite von Moltke's anguished pleas. Although, as the Franco-German commission on the origins of the war was to recognize in 1935, "the Russian general mobilization created a new fait accompli that urgently called for a German decision," it was not until seven o'clock on the evening of July 31st that the Kaiser went so far as to decree a state of Kriegsgefahrzustand, a "status of war alert," which was still only a preliminary measure to mobilization.
Kriegsgefahrzustand-a rumbling, ominous Teutonism, which propagandists in France immediately seized on to conjure up images of Hunnish hordes set to swarm across the border. Their leader, Tardieu, who was fluent in German, mendaciously assured the populace that the word meant that the Germans had just declared a "state of war," unleashing nationwide hysteria. How could France hesitate to fly to arms, if Germany was already on the march?

Alone of the French leaders, Abel Ferry, under-secretary of state, an honest patriot who would die in battle, had recognized his superiors' maneuvering for what it was. In his notebook he wrote: "The web was spun and Germany entered it like a great buzzing fly."
Kaiser Wilhelm was thinking along similar lines. On the same day he reflected, "The net has fallen on our heads." Germany had blundered into the trap. Fabre Luce would later write:
"This whole history unfortunately leaves no room for any doubt. France didn't enter into war following an obligation of honor, as our rulers have often pretended, but, on the contrary, in violation of the treaty of defensive alliance which she had concluded with Russia, and of the republican constitution of 1875."

On August 1st, at six o'clock, the German ambassador, Pourtalès, called on Foreign Minister Sazonov to gain an answer to Germany's plea that Russia halt its mobilization. Sazonov replied, "Our mobilization must be continued. That understood, we are prepared to continue negotiations." Negotiating now, while continuing to mobilize, was only a Russian means of playing for time.
Pourtalès pressed the point: "I repeat, Excellency, will you stop your mobilization?"
Sazonov remained immobile, his eyes intent. Pourtalès repeated his question, once, twice.
Sazonov answered, "I have no other reply to give you."
Pourtalès offered a sheet of paper in a trembling hand, then began to sob. Germany had declared war on Russia.

In spite of everything the German ambassador in Paris, Baron von Schoen, made a last offer on July 31st to avert war between France and Germany. As everyone recognized, Russia unaided would be no match for Germany and Austria-Hungary.
The baron brought his government's final proposal to Viviani: if France remained neutral, Germany would also remain neutral. It would afterwards be claimed that the German government had demanded at this time that the great French fortresses of Toul and Verdun be turned over to Germany as a guarantee of French neutrality, since the French were later to decipher a telegram to Schoen to that effect, but in fact the ambassador made no mention of such a demand and the French were unaware of it at the time.
Viviani's answer to the German ambassador had nothing to do with the right and high principles with which French spokesmen were wont to couch their official rhetoric. It came in seven cold words: "France will be guided by her interests." In this case, of course, France's interest meant cutting her powerful German rival down to size and seizing Alsace and Lorraine once more.
Poincaré's public declaration was more in keeping with the flowery hypocrisies of the Third Republic: "At this hour there are no longer any parties, there is only France, peace-loving and resolute; there is only France eternal; there is only the Fatherland of Right and Justice."
Right had a broad back, and Poincaré would ride it for several years.

The day before, Austria-Hungary had attempted a last appeal to the French government, presented by emissaries from neutral Romania and Switzerland. Romania's Lahovary and Switzerland's Lardy brought the proposal to the Quai d'Orsay, where Secretary General Berthelot coldly rejected it. "It is too late," he said. "It is no longer possible to set matters straight." Later it would emerge that Berthelot had not even bothered to transmit the Austrian proposal to his chief, Viviani.
Meanwhile the French generals, no less than their counterparts in Russia, were pressing for a swift mobilization. General Joffre reported that every twenty-four hours' delay in mobilizing would mean a pullback of fifteen to twenty kilometers - which would have left the French army at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in a month's time.
The generals shortly had their wish. At 3:45 p.m. on August 1st, Messimy, the minister of war, transmitted the order for general mobilization to the deputy chief of the general staff, General Ebene. Posters bloomed colorfully throughout the cities, towns, and villages of France, as if an electoral campaign were under way. It would be a landslide for death.

Once again the Poincaré government would manufacture a face-saving lie. Like their allies in Russia, who claimed to have begun mobilizing only after Austria had begun, the Poincaré government claimed that it was Germany which had forced their hand by mobilizing first. The fact of the matter is that the German order to mobilize came at five o'clock in the afternoon, fifteen minutes after the French order (Berlin and Paris are in different time zones).
These lies would be told and retold over the years, sturdy bricks in the edifice of German war guilt. Although Poincaré would be forced to admit in 1923 that indeed the Russians had mobilized before the Austrians , he would claim that he had been honestly mistaken. Even so, standard works in France, such as Bonifacio's Manual of History, the mainstay of French students, continued to date Russia's mobilization from July 31, 1914 forty years after the war.
So it is with the lies of politicians, especially victorious politicians. Their lying declarations command widespread belief at the time; when, much later, rectification is made, most people are no longer interested, especially when the truth appears only in the thick and recondite works of historical specialists.

In fact, so nervous was Poincaré about the prospect of Germany not mobilizing at an opportune time for French propaganda that he proposed to his ministers that France contrive an incident on the German border. Although the council rejected it as too provocative and dangerous, Malvy revealed Poincaré's proposal after the war. As Fabre Luce summed up, "At the beginning of August 1914, Wilhelm II, by hesitating to attack France for the moment, was jeopardizing the script. Hence the notion put forward by Poincaré to the council of ministers to create a border incident, so that he would not have the parliament discussing his interpretation of the Franco-Russian treaty of alliance."

CHAPTER XV

A Sudden Zigzag

How came the emotion-laden final act. Millions of Russians were under arms. Great masses of French plowmen and mustachioed vinegrowers (at this time 47 per cent of the French were still farmers) streamed to the railway stations, forming a great river of olive drab. To the cheers of millions they entrained in coaches daubed with "On to Berlin!" In Vienna, throngs roared "Death to Serbia!," and the Germans of Berlin roared their anthem with no less ebullience.
Only Great Britain, among the great powers of Europe, still wavered in official indecision. The government of Herbert Henry Asquith was profoundly divided over whether to join the revanchistes of France and the Pan-Slavist imperialists of Russia or to maintain Britain's splendid isolation and cultivate its far-flung empire. In the end, the British leadership, blind in its lordly arrogance, would let its short-term resentments over Germany's burgeoning economic power prevail over its long-term interests in checking the growth of the colossus which stretched from Warsaw to Vladivostok.

Perhaps the key issue for the British leadership was its consternation at the expansion of the German navy and merchant fleet. This fear was magnified by Kaiser Wilhelm's tendency to bluster, but in reality his bark was worse than his bite. Britain's leaders might have learned this from the American political manager and wirepuller, "Colonel" Edward Mandell House, Woodrow Wilson's eminence grise, who talked to Wilhelm while on a fact-finding mission in Europe at Wilson's behest in June 1914. House, certainly no Germanophile, reported that the Kaiser had impressed on him with great urgency that he was building his great fleet not to oppose England, but to increase German prestige on the high seas, as well as to promote German commerce.
Wilhelm stated: "I want peace, because the interests of Germany require it. Germany was poor, but now she is in the process of becoming rich; and a few years of peace will make her quite rich."
Great Britain's foreign minister, when communicated these sentiments by House, was impressed by them. Grey admitted to House that "the Germans need to maintain a navy that is proportionate to the importance of their commerce and big enough to defend themselves against a combined attack by the Russian and French fleets." House doubtless also told the British diplomat of Wilhelm's desire to end his naval construction program after those ships under construction or already planned were built.
In the eyes of many Britishers, however, each German ship completed was one too many. Nothing struck at the British sense of self-esteem and self-preservation more acutely than any perceived threat to British domination of the world's oceans. Wilhelm hadn't the sensitivity and tact to recognize that, as a far more clever player of the diplomatic game, Adolf Hitler, did in 1935 when he conceded British naval superiority vis-à-vis Germany.
The traditional disregard of the average Briton for affairs on the continent also weighed against the Germans. Magnificently aloof, they paid little heed to the implications of the assassination in Sarajevo, which, as House brutally put it, aroused in Britain "no more stir than a tenor singing in the middle of a boiler shop."
In the end, it all came down to the hoary balance of power game, by which Britain's rulers had promoted a divided Europe, no matter what the cost to the West, for three centuries. The clever, urbane, and slippery Grey drawled at a cabinet meeting as the Sarajevo crisis heated to a boil, "That would be a stroke of luck, having the Germans and Slays go at each other." Prudently he had added, "The game could become dangerous."
A few voices warned of the dangers of the growth of the tsarist superstate. House had pointed out the danger of a too powerful Russia, as well as Germany's value as a buffer. The Liberal leader, John Morley, one of Britain's most upright ministers, was of like mind. He asked:
"What would happen if Russia should be victorious in the long run? Have you ever thought about that? If Germany is defeated and Austria is defeated, it will not be England and France that will occupy the first place in Europe. It will be Russia. Will Western civilization get any advantage out of that?"
Stalin would finally answer that question in 1945.
Despite the case for non-intervention, the Asquith government was dominated by a fear of offending the regimes of France and Russia. Grey neglected to communicate with the Germans to the end of negotiating peace because, in his words, "I prefer to refrain from sending any official communication, written or verbal, for fear of offending the French and the Russians, should either of them get wind of the matter." He said it again to his cabinet: "England must necessarily act with prudence for fear of offending the feelings of France and Russia."

For fear of offending the members of a defensive alliance in which Great Britain was unquestionably the key member, 947,000 men of the British Isles would go to their deaths.
Kaiser Wilhelm's last, chimeric hopes for peace, with England as with Russia, came down to the reigning monarch. In Britain it was George V, Wilhelm's cousin, scion of a royal family not noted for its powers of intellect. George was a decorous mediocrity, timorous and a bit on the deceitful side, a fragile hope to take a stand for peace, particularly in a nation in which the powers of the sovereign were so carefully circumscribed.
We have noted the fiasco of George V's promise to Wilhelm's younger brother, Prince Henry, stating quite plainly that Great Britain would observe neutrality. Although Wilhelm was beside himself with joy when he received the news ("I have the word of a king!"), Churchill, as we have seen, already had the fleet steaming for the Channel.
On July 29, 1914, Grey sent for Germany's ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, to shake him with this message:
"A European catastrophe is to be feared from one day to the next. If the conflict remains limited to one between Austria and Russia, England will be able to stand aside; if not, England will no longer be in a position to remain neutral indefinitely."
He continued, "It is far from my thought to express a threat. I simply wish to spare you a deception and to avoid, on my part, the reproach of having been lacking in sincerity."
For all Grey's protestations of sincerity, he had sent messages to all the embassies informing them of the virtual end of British neutrality even before receiving Lichnowsky.
That evening Asquith told his wife that he had dispatched telegrams to all parts of the empire, informing the governments and administrations to prepare for war. Wickham Steed, editor of the Times, returned to his office from a confidential cabinet interview with the words "Everything is lost" on his lips. For the former prime minister, Arthur James Balfour, the sight of passersby promenading down Cockspur Street was a bitter one. "War is rushing down upon them," he said to himself.

Wilhelm II received Lichnowsky's report of his conversation with Grey with outrage, and unleashed a series of rich imprecations against perfodious Albion. He quickly recovered his equilibrium, however, and began to study what measures remained to keep the peace. He knew of Russia's ongoing mobilization, but Poincaré's maneuverings were as yet a secret. His last card remained the unlikely intervention of his cousin, George V.
That sovereign was sleeping when his prime minister, Asquith, asked to be received. The king, once roused, threw on his dressing gown and applied himself to replying to his cousin's plea for neutrality in terms with which his ministers could agree. The text of the telegram bore a last hope for peace.
The German ambassador reported to Berlin that Grey had promised not to intervene if Germany did not attack France, and asked for a German statement on that matter. Lichnowsky informed his government that he had promised that to Grey, as he had been authorized, and that Grey would communicate the statement to the cabinet.
A telegram is of value only when it is received, however. Lichnowsky was only able to send it from London on the morning of August 1st, after a ten- hour delay, and it arrived in Berlin another five hours later. The wasted fifteen hours seem almost certainly accounted for by the delaying tactics of the anti-German faction in the Asquith government and in the British Establishment. Nevertheless, when the news finally arrived, it seemed a providential opportunity to stave off war.
Ominously enough, however, when news of the British government's apparent reversal of policy was telegraphed to the British ambassador in Paris, Sir Francis Bertie, the ambassador failed to inform the French government. Bertie, a supporter of Poincaré's policies, was in open rebellion against his government. As the hours wore on, and the telegram remained undelivered, the British government made a sudden zigzag in its course, as it had done so often in the past. This time it was George V, last repository of the tenuous hopes for peace in Europe, who was thrown overboard.

CHAPTER XVI

Britain on the Brink

Kaiser Wilhelm received word of the offer of British neutrality as he rode in a magnificent cavalcade from his palace at Potsdam to the palace in Berlin. The Kaiser was resplendent in full military uniform, his Junoesque wife beside him in the open carriage dressed in a stunning purple gown. As the cheers of Berliners resounded at the entrance to the palace, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and his undersecretary of state, Jagow, rushed up with the telegram.
Reading it swiftly, the Kaiser burst out joyfully, "Some champagne! This deserves champagne!"
Only one man in the palace restrained his enthusiasm. When Wilhelm grasped him by the shoulders, and told him to halt the army's westward advance, General Count von Moltke turned white. He stammered, "But that's impossible! The entire army would be plunged into frightful confusion, and we'd have no chance of winning the war!"
Indeed, it was true: a dreadful mess did loom. The well-oiled German war machine was just springing into action. Hundreds of thousands of troops were boarding trains about to depart for the west. The conductors awaited the final signal. Every station had its plan; every engineer his precise instructions; the schedules had all been determined long in advance. Now von Moltke had been ordered not only to stop the movement westward, but to turn it completely around: Germany's armies were to advance eastward against Russia.
Moltke's protests were unavailing. He told his emperor, "If I can not march against France, I can not assume responsibility for the war," to which Wilhelm shot back, "Your uncle would have given me a different answer!" Moltke was visibly disturbed; in the office of his aide-de-camp he suffered a collapse. Nevertheless, he transmitted the Kaiser's order to the vanguard of the German forces, the 17th Division, which was about to advance into the neutral Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and cross into France.
Before Moltke's order could become effective, several units of the 17th's vanguard had crossed the border. It was seven o'clock in the evening, and sixty German troops were seizing the railroad station at the little town of Trois Vierges and tearing out the telephone and telegraph facilities. Half an hour later, frantic German couriers were able to reach the little advance guard and bring them back across the border, after telling the harried Luxembourgers that it had all been a regrettable mistake.

Could the fragile truce hold? That evening Wilhelm telegraphed his reply to the British. He informed the Asquith government and King George that while he could not halt Germany's mobilization on either front, he would refrain from attacking France if that nation pledged its neutrality, to be guaranteed by the British.
A few hours later came a crushing message from King George: Britain's previous offer had been no more than the result of "a misapprehension." The text ran:
"In reply to your telegram which I have just received, I think there must be some misapprehension with respect to a suggestion made during a friendly conversation between Prince Lichnowsky and Sir Edward Grey that afternoon when they were discussing how an actual combat between the German and French armies could be avoided while there was still some chance of agreement between Austria and Russia. Sir Edward Grey will undertake to see Prince Lichnowsky early tomorrow morning to see if there is a misapprehension on his part."
Another stunning blow! For the second time in a matter of hours, Germany's military preparations were upset. At seven o'clock the momentum had been changed from west to east. Now at eleven, the armies had to swing around ponderously toward the west again.

The Kaiser, who had retired for the night, had to be roused from bed. Sitting at the edge of his bed in his drawers, he registered Moltke's embarrassment and threw a military greatcoat over his shoulders. He told his chief of staff, "Now you may follow your own counsel. March on Luxembourg." The German army had now fallen half a day behind the French.
Meanwhile, across the Channel, Churchill had taken it on himself to mobilize the entire Royal Navy. Despite the lack of authorization by the cabinet, Grey supported the First Lord of the Admiralty. He confided to Churchill that he had told the French that Britain would not permit the German fleet to enter the Channel. All this while Wilhelm was rejoicing at the receipt of George V's peace offer.

In overcoming the resistance of substantial sections of the British public to an intervention in the war on the Continent, the British war faction and French diplomacy had beaten some powerful foes. Substantial interests of big capital, including the Jewish investment bankers, led by the Rothschilds, were for their own reasons not eager for British participation. Liberal voices, particularly powerful in the press, were strong in opposing any alliance with tsarist Russia.
Yet the deft diplomacy of Poincaré, represented in England by Ambassador Jules Cambon, had easily eclipsed that of the Germans, just as Paléologue in St. Petersburg had relegated the German Pourtalès to the role of a helpless onlooker. Cambon was adept at stoking the vacillating Grey's fears of the incubus of "Pan-Germanism," and he dared to stand up to Grey when Grey tried to treat him condescendingly. Patient, scheming, he was able to wheedle from Grey the critical promise that Britain would permit no German ships to enter the Channel.
In contrast, Germany's Lichnowsky, a caricature of an old-fashioned dandy, was ineffective and uninspiring, more fit to take tea with the bevy of aging duchesses he and his wife cultivated than to present forcefully his country's policy to the British. Like his colleagues in Russia, he wound up weeping at the outbreak of the war, while his wife wept in the arms of Mrs. Asquith.

At the critical cabinet meeting on August 2nd, the Liberal Lord Morley, the lord president, an opponent of war, had laid his cards on the table at the outset. "Winston, we're going to beat you, you know," he remarked amiably.
Churchill merely smiled. He knew of Grey's promise to Cambon, and he knew which way the wind was blowing. Then he asked, "What reply should Grey have given Paul Cambon, the ambassador of France, when he asked what England would do if the German fleet attacked French ships or ports in the English Channel?"
One by one the ministers replied. Morley and his allies spoke with little force, while Asquith, Grey, and Haldane, the Lord Chancellor, made their arguments vigorously. One after another, the Liberal opponents of the war backed down, several offering to resign, while opportunists like the crafty David Lloyd George calculated the benefits of a reversal in their stand.
By the morning of the 3rd, Morley had resigned, along with three other ministers. Lloyd George, having "drunk at that well of martial enthusiasm," in Churchill's phrase, stayed. The cabinet opted for war, but not in high spirits. The House of Commons remained to be convinced.
Grey's speech before Commons on August 3rd was a masterpiece of dissimulation. Feigning ignorance of the details of the treaty joining France to Russia, he concentrated on the alleged threat to Britain posed by German ships streaming into the English Channel. He told the House:

My personal point of view is this: the French fleet is in the Mediterranean. The coasts of northern France are absolutely without protection. We can not stand aside with our arms folded if a foreign fleet comes to bombard these unprotected shores.

He then informed the Commons of his fait accompli of the day before: the promise to Cambon. According to Malcolm Thomson, "No one breathed a word. If anyone in that vast audience listening to Sir Edward took exception to this moral blackmail, he kept silent."
Only Ramsay MacDonald, head of the Labour Party, future prime minister, raised a doubt. "We'd offer him our lives if the country were in danger. But he didn't persuade me that it is."
The session adjourned, with Great Britain on the brink. In a few hours, there would be a new lure for wavering ministers and M.P.s.

CHAPTER XVII

"The Most Colossal Folly ... "

The advance of German troops across Belgian territory would furnish Liberal turncoats like Lloyd George with an occasion for pious indignation that was typical of the British Establishment. Britain's leaders well knew that Germany's only possible strategy against France necessitated the violation of Belgium's neutrality. Great Britain was no stranger to the use of force and the abrogation of treaties to advance the aim of its elite, everywhere from Ireland to Hong Kong. France had violated or laid plans to violate Belgium's sovereignty twenty times throughout her history.
The man most concerned, Belgium's King Albert I, would lash Poincaré after the war in these words: "I am most fond of Mr. Poincaré, who continues to talk as though all the overweening ambition and evil were on one side, whereas just a few days ago he stated that it was only because of his `veto' that the French general staff had not invaded Belgium in 1914, and that he deeply regretted it!"
In fact, Germany saw herself hemmed in between two giants about to crush her. The Manchester Guardian had enough courage to write on August 3, 1914:
"We shall pass no harsh judgments on what a man or a nation does when it's a matter of life or death."

However imprudent Kaiser Wilhelm II had been in his choice of words, he had done everything in his power to avert a war, while Churchill and his allies strove ceaselessly to bring on a bloody conflict that would leave Europe prostrate. At their behest, on the evening of August 3rd, at seven p.m., Britain's ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen, presented himself at Bethmann-Hollweg's office in Berlin and demanded that Germany respect Belgian neutrality by retreating from the country, on pain of war with Great Britain.
The next morning in London Lichnowsky received his passport and the United Kingdom's declaration of war at one and the same time. The document stated that the German Empire had declared war on Great Britain, a complete misstatement of the truth, which brought a hurried substitution of the corrected document for the inaccurate one by a secretary from the Foreign Office.

On the 4th the Manchester Guardian ran a full-page appeal by the League for Neutrality on the theme: "Englishmen, do your duty and keep your country out of an evil and stupid war."
Mrs. Asquith noted that "Winston Churchill was looking very happy." General Sir Henry Wilson predicted, "In four weeks we'll be at Elsenborn."
"Three weeks," retorted the French general Berthelot.
Other predictions were being made by more perceptive minds. Josiah Wedgwood prophesied, "You will see something much more important than a European war. You will see a revolution."
Before the Russian Duma, an obscure delegate named Kerensky cried, "After you have defended your country, you will liberate it."
In the far north of Siberia, on the banks of the Yenisei, a convict laid traps for foxes and field mice in the snow. Unknown to anyone in the West, he echoed the sentiments of the leftists in the Duma: "The tsar's war will be the proletariat's good fortune." His name, among revolutionaries, was Josef Stalin.
The men who would lead the "October Revolution" had left Russia and were living abroad, watching and waiting. Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Trotsky, was living in Vienna. Warned by the Austrian Socialist Viktor Adler that he would be interned the next day, he fled to Switzerland on August 3rd. He would soon be joined by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin, at that time holed up in Austrian Poland. Lenin would spend most of the war living across from a sausage factory in Zurich. From there he would set out in March 1917 towards world revolution and history.

The vast majority of Europeans gave little thought to the possibility of political and social cataclysm triggered by the war. The masses marched off to massacre with patriotism in their heads and savagery in their hearts. Years after the carnage, most of them would he no wiser. As the eminent French Senator d'Estournelles would exclaim before the International Court at The Hague in 1921, "Our public opinion has been so saturated with official lies that people can't wake up to the light and see the truth all at once. They wouldn't believe it!"
As early as October 1916, Woodrow Wilson would write, "The singularity of the present war resides in the fact that its origin and its objectives have never been revealed. History will have to search a long time to explain this conflict" (Bullitt, President Wilson, p. 280)
But Wilson, too, would lead his countrymen lemming-like into the carnage.

Naturally the victors had little desire to see the web of subterranean maneuvers, and the brazen lies which they had told in order to lead their peoples into war exposed. Nor did they wish to see overturned the harsh peace they imposed on the defeated, lest they be denied the billions of marks in reparations they had planned to exact. "If the Germans are proved innocent," asked Poincaré, "why should they want to pay war damages?"
Yet not long after the war a growing consensus of honest scholars, from the victorious nations as well as the vanquished, would give the lie to the claims of Germany's exclusive guilt, which had been incorporated into the Versailles Treaty, as well as to the pretense of French, British, and Russian innocence. On his own country the French historian Fabre Luce would pronounce the verdict, "France isolated herself in a lie."

On August 4, 1914, the actors were all arrayed on the stage of Europe, the just mingled with the unjust, the artless with the false. First the tsar, hanging his head, glassy eyed, and bedecked with ribbons-he was not responsible for much; he was merely the front man of Pan-Slav firebrands: the grand dukes, the Sazonovs, and a whole ruck of certified scoundrels like lzvolsky and Hartwig. Beside the Russian monarch, the oft grumpy tsaritsa in her wimple, the fine-looking grown daughters afflicted with hysteria, and a hemophiliac child, all of whom, buffeted by misfortune, would, in 1918, pay for the Russo-Serbian trap of June 28, 1914 by being horribly massacred by a Bolshevik murder squad.
Opposite, in his plumed eagle-helmet, was Wilhelm II, who had been more relentless than anyone in his efforts to prevent war. He would be tossed onto the scrap heap of history as a scapegoat, as a leper to be stoned and charged with the crimes of the real instigators.
In the background, artfully blurred by fog, the last one to arrive was Britain's George V, who lacked nerve, standing beside Churchill, who had it to burn, and who was scenting battle as if preparing to enjoy a savory and sumptuous repast.
The massive Pashich, ever cautious, was hiding the revolver of Sarajevo under his dirty beard.
One lone Frenchman, the most brilliant of Frenchmen, the future Marshal Lyautey, had started back, horrified at seeing the ghastly spectacle about to begin.
"They are completely insane," he had exclaimed on receiving the order from Paris to be ready for full-scale action. "A war between Europeans is a civil war. It is the most colossal folly the civilized world has ever committed!"
The vicious treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany would finally bring to the chancellorship of that nation, on January 30, 1933, a volunteer infantryman of 1914. It would raise him to power and bring on the sequel. That sequel would be the Second World War, the accursed and ineluctable fruit of the First World War.
But before everything else there had been the two revolver shots of Sarajevo. They destroyed forever an entire world.

The False "War of Right"

CHAPTER XVIII

The Road to France

On the fourth of August, 1914, several German uhlans, black and white pennants fluttering at the tips of their lances, crossed into Belgian territory. Their passage did not go unnoticed. In a nearby thicket, a Belgian lookout hastily scrawled a few words on a leaf from his notebook and then fastened his message to the leg of a carrier pigeon. The bird took wing, circled the thicket once, and then made for Liège. The First World War was under way.
The rival camps were secure in the belief they had anticipated everything to perfection. Absolutely nothing, however, would transpire as it had been set down in the meticulous plans of the general staffs. The French would not take Berlin, nor would the Russians. The Germans would be denied Paris. Although each side lunged at its opponent, sure of victory within two months, two months later the Russians would be reeling beaten from East Prussia, and the Germans and French would be digging the trenches in which they would be buried for four years, amidst a sea of mud and tens of thousands of rotting cadavers. From time to time either side would mount an offensive, squandering hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides, but the thrust would peter out after a few kilometers.
By November 1 the Russians, who had brought along their dress uniforms for the triumphal parade through Berlin, would have lost half their men. Their artillery would be out of ammunition and much of their infantry armed with clubs instead of rifles. Three years later, the austere, aristocratic face of their ruler, the tsar, would be replaced by the non-Russian features of Vladimir Lenin. With the tsar would go the old order of Christian Russia, submerged beneath a tidal wave of red flags.
Before Sarajevo the Russian minister of war had smugly predicted, "A nice little war would spare us a revolution." In the end, it would be Lenin and his Bolshevik henchmen who would spare the grand dukes their estates, the financiers their profits, and the Russian people their freedoms.
In Central Europe an identical revolution would come close to succeeding. France would barely escape it at the time of the mutinies of 1917. Germany would bear the brunt of the Red thrust during the winter of 1918-1919, on the heels of her defeat. The heart of Europe was on the brink of sovietization in those dark days, even as the victorious opportunists of Versailles carved away at it.

Scarcely a man in Europe would have dreamed of such an outcome on that sultry fourth of August, 1914, as the homing pigeon winged off from the thicket, gray-golden in the gleaming dawn, while the pennants of the invaders fluttered over the yellowing wheat field in the last moments of peace.
Germany, as she marched westward, deployed a powerful, well-oiled military machine. The German strategy had been mapped out, in all its particulars, with meticulous exactitude. The German army would cut a long, straight furrow across Belgium, then swing down to the south between the Escaut and the Meuse, heading for the Marne and Paris. The advance had been timed beforehand as precisely as the stages of the "Tour de France" bicycle race. In thirty days, the Germans would enter Paris and the Kaiser would sleep in the palace at Versailles, while a million or two prisoners would slowly make their way in orderly ranks toward the receiving camps across the Rhine.
The German armies were no stronger than those of France and Britain opposing them. The myth of German military superiority on the Western Front was laid to rest by General Mordacq, the former chief secretary of Georges Clemenceau, in his book Légendes de la Grand Guerre. The respective strengths in August 1914 were as follows: 78 French infantry divisions as opposed to 76 German; 4,582 French artillery pieces to 4,529 German guns; 2,260 French machine guns against 1,900 German. In manpower and materiel, neither side possessed a decisive advantage.

The eastward advance of the French armies had glittered as flamboyantly as the sun of those harvest weeks. At that time I was a small boy, eight years old, and I can still see the Bretons, the Parisians, the men of Provence marching up the road from France. The road ran through the outskirts of my little Belgian home town, Bouillon, along the Semois River, and the wooded valleys echoed to the cadence marked by the drummers marching eight abreast.
One after another the units halted along the banks of the Semois and set up camp under the plum trees. For two weeks it was like a festival, as the cooks prepared french fries without stint and the songs of Botrel, the great French bard in those days, resounded on pianos brought from the houses of the townspeople. Soldiers and civilians strolled under the hornbeam trees along the river or danced the farandole, devoid of cares.

Occasionally an officer would inquire about the mysterious forests stretching east beyond our little valley. Despite the fact that for years France's leaders had schemed with the tsarist government of Russia to start a war against the Germans, its army had no road maps. We children were given the task of tearing the maps from piles of railroad-schedule books, to which we applied ourselves conscientiously.
But of what use would they really be? No trains crossed our region and the maps indicated only the railroad lines, not the roads; our region was represented only by a completely blank space.
We did little traveling in those days. The hill that bounded our valley to the east was called the Point du Jour (Daybreak). There our world began. The hill that closed the valley on the west was named Le Terme (The End). There Our world ended. Beyond was the unknown, the blank space on the map. But it was there that the tens of thousands of French soldiers who had been occupying our district since the beginning of August would have to march to meet the Germans. But no one gave a thought to the morrow; they sang, and bathed in the river; it was a splendid vacation for the French troops.
There were two or three little alarms. On several occasions a few uhlans were seen coming down through the thousands of oak trees toward our little town. They quickly disappeared. They must have had maps showing more than blank spaces, because they used forest trails that were hardly known even to our woodcutters. Germans stalking around, their pointed helmets sticking through the branches, had to cause concern. Why did they venture so far from their own country? The broad expanse of the Belgian Ardennes and the entire Grand Duchy of Luxembourg lay between Germany and us. Here they were on our doorstep. Why didn't our Frenchmen go meet them? What was war anyhow?

On August 15, 1914, we were witness to a great spectacle. A German airplane had come to bomb the French troops camped in our little town. We all rushed pellmell to a big tunnel carved in solid rock under the enormous medieval castle where nearly a thousand years ago Godefroy de Bouillon, the leader of the First Crusade, had lived. Wide-eyed, we watched the aerial bombardment from the entryway. A fantastic sight-stones were falling from the sky and ricocheting off the big blue paving-stones! Happy times those, when a man was content to throw good honest stones at his terrified enemy.
The plot thickened. A French airplane appeared, one of the 140 France Possessed in 1914. I witnessed the first aerial combat of my life. The German began firing a short cavalry rifle, as did the Frenchman. They turned and flew at each other again, firing their weapons, then swiftly turning round again. At last the rifle fire ceased, ammunition expended, neither side having inflicted any damage. The two heroes disappeared over the horizon. We streamed back out of the tunnel proud to have witnessed so memorable an event.
Eleven days after the start of the war, things were unchanged. No Belgian newspapers had reached Bouillon since August 4. A few French officers had newspapers from their country, however, and they summarized the news for us. The Germans, the Intransigeant of August 14 explained, were surrendering to anyone who gave them a slice of bread and butter. Their cartridges and their shells were worthless, never killed anybody. The Russian Cossacks were only five days' march from Berlin, according to Le Matin. The Germans were collapsing everywhere. The crown prince had committed suicide. Forty thousand Prussians had been taken prisoner at Liège alone.
Would the war consist entirely of eating heaps of french fried potatoes? Everyone seemed to think so in our little valley.

Those first carefree weeks did not much square with the morale that had stirred the French people for four years before the war, the martially thrilling legend of Alsace-Lorraine. Since 1870 their political leaders had extolled offensive war, the "moment divine" of M. Poincaré. Then came two weeks of peaceful vacationing. The French officers en route to Berlin were not sending out reconnaissance patrols; not once in fifteen days did they conduct a single drill to keep the troops on their mettle.
Since those days I have taken part in major battles in Soviet Russia between 1941 and 1945, and I have commanded important units. I still take my head in my hands whenever I think of that war of my childhood, in 1914, in which the future combatants were content to watch the war as if gazing at trout streaming by from atop an old bridge.
To have wanted the war so much, to have it within reach from the beginning of August 1914, and then to sit crammed in a valley lost in the depths of a great forest for two weeks! What were they waiting for?
On August 20, 1914, the great call to battle finally sounded. Suddenly the bugles were calling the units to form and move out. The Fourth German Army, under the command of the Duke of Wurttemberg, had crossed the entire Ardennes, advancing to within twenty kilometers of our dark valley. Loaded down with enormous packs, our nice vacation friends - fifteen thousand to twenty thousand of them - marched off gaily to do battle in our mountains, officers in the lead, armed with our useless railroad maps.
For a few hours our little town of Bouillon seemed strangely deserted and silent. Everyone watched the sky to the east. That was where the Prussians had to be. That afternoon, the heavy sounds of artillery fire began to rumble across the distant sky, like thunderheads rolling in.
It was not until the following dawn that we saw the first carts coming down fromood Ardennes followed. Wounded harvest wagons driven by g d d Frenchsoldiers, closely packed together, lay on the rough planks. Some of them, for lack of bandages, had plastered dirt on their wounds to stop the bleeding. Such was the ambulance corps of an army that had been preparing for an offensive war for forty years. There wasn't even a field tent to shelter the casualties. The blood-stained survivors were unloaded in the old municipal poorhouse, where there was nothing available except our mothers' shredded linen. By nightfall several thousand men had been crammed into the building. The wounded less severely told how the enemy had cut them to pieces.
The morning before, they had arrived utterly exhausted at a village named Maisin. The Germans were waiting for them, lying hidden right at the edge of the oak groves, sighting down their machine guns. The French troops had charged in their red trousers across the neighboring fields, the little fields of our poor countrymen, surrounded by tight barbed-wire walking wounded told how the enemy had cut them to pieces.
The morning before, they had arrived utterly exhausted at a village dead would be buried in a common grave. Throughout the length of the Ardennes, one the border of France, it had been the same. The well-known writer, Henry Psichari, had fallen in one of our woods, near Rossignol, sword in hand, a rosary fastened to the hilt. Many bodies of wounded men who had dragged themselves under the thick foliage before dying would, years afterward, be found under the deep forest oaks.
The French retreat was just as disorderly as the botched combat. Late on the night of August 23, 1914 there came a loud knocking on our door. I ran to my mother, who opened an upstairs window. Soldiers were stretched out on the bare ground, clear to the end of the street, as if they were dead.
A voice rang out-I can still hear it-almost beseeching, the voice of a young officer.
"The road to France, Madame!"
Neither he, nor his soldiers, knew the road back to France.
No maps. No reconnaissance. Nonexistent communications. Surrender. Fear. That was France in August 1914. A charming, carefree, terribly chauvinistic people that, thanks to an astounding lack of preparation, was brought to a frightful state of emasculation. In one month, at the height of harvest time, seven hundred thousand Frenchmen would fall, dead or wounded.

Then a last-minute miracle-for it was a miracle-came: the reversal of the Marne. The battle was impromptu and makeshift, despite the careful planning of the General Staff in Berlin. It would save Paris, from which IV Poincaré, his government, and five thousand Parisians had already fled i panic.
The retreat had been general on all fronts.
On the Lorraine front, launched by Joffre on August 8, 1914 in application of plan XVII, the French troops had thought themselves masters of Mulhouse, but the German Seventh Army, hidden in the forest of the Hardt, had trapped them. Almost surrounded, the French had no choice but to beat a retreat with all possible speed. In the Saar and to the north of Verdun, the French suffered an identical defeat.
Joffre, the French commander-in-chief, had made a serious mistake. He had underestimated German strength on the western front by a third. Since the French had possessed the detailed plan of the enemy high command, the Schlieffen plan, for eight years, Joffre had no excuse. He hadn't fortified the Franco-Belgian frontier to the northwest, between the Meuse and the North Sea, where-as was set down in black and white-the German army planned to storm through in the event of war. In complete contrast, the efforts of the French armies had been directed primarily towards the eastern front, where the Prussian plan projected no breakthrough.
The obsession with Alsace-Lorraine not only addled the thinking of Poincaré and the warmongers in his entourage, it also befuddled the high command. Unprepared, poorly commanded, and inactive for fifteen days while the enemy hemmed them in on all sides, the French armies not onl: suffered a terrible blow in the Ardennes, but at the same time were cut to pieces in a second theater, between the Meuse and the North Sea, in the great battle of Mons-Charleroi.

General Lanrezac, a native of Guadeloupe, who commanded the Sixti Army at Mons, showed himself a poor tactician, although he had been professor of tactics at the War Academy.
He failed completely to understand the tactics of General von Kluck, th( commander of the German First Army, who should have been an oper book to him, as to Joffre, for the preceding eight years. The Germans hac rushed straight at Brussels, capturing the Belgian capital on August 14. The Schlieffen plan then called for a great sweep to the south in the direction 0! Paris. Clearly, the Germans would pass to the north of Mons.
The German Second Army, that of General von Bülow, attacked a Namur and Charleroi on the same day. Lanrezac knew the enemy's route it advance, and he must surely have been aware that he risked being caugh between von Kluck and von Bülow if he did not extend his formation to the left. Yet there he was, on August 15, marching up from Phillippeville anc Marienbourg towards the Sambre river and taking position there as if the German Second Army were the only one in existence.
When the battle began on August 21, von Kluck was able to attack in an area virtually unprotected by Lanrezac, on his left wing, where he was supported by no more than four British divisions. By the next day von Kluck's army had punched through to occupy Mons.
A little later Lanrezac was outflanked at the outermost point of his right wing, this time by von Hausen's Second Army, which had leap-frogged across the Meuse. A few hours later Lanrezac found himself virtually surrounded at Mezières. He ordered a desperate retreat. Disaster was at hand.
"The fear instilled in me during the preceding days as to the offensive capability of our troops in the field were yesterday confirmed," General Joffre wrote to Poincaré.
He didn't hide the reasons.
"We have no choice but to accept the evidence; our army corps, despite their numerical superiority, did not show the hoped-for offensive qualities in the field."
General Joffre, at small cost, was clearing his own name at the expense of his soldiers. Lanrezac had not had the advantage of superior numbers at Charleroi. Joffre had miscalculated the enemy's long foreseeable movement of three German armies (von Kluck, von Bülow, and von Hausen) against Lanrezac, instead of just one. Moltke had arrayed thirty German divisions against fourteen French divisions, four British and one Belgian (at Namur). As we have seen, the Germans and the French disposed approximately equal forces on the western front. The essential was that they be deployed judiciously. Here, the error of the French command was monumental.
That was not the only explanation, however. In the battle of the Belgian Ardennes, the French forces had enjoyed a numerical advantage (160 French battalions against 122 German battalions), and they had nonetheless been routed there, as elsewhere, and almost annihilated.
"Ineptitude of the commanders in handling their units. Lack of troop training, absence of coordination between units moving in parallel. These among many findings boded ill for the future of the French army." That was the verdict of historian Marc Ferro (La Grande Guerre, p. 96).

Thus it was on August 24, 1914 more than a hundred thousand redtrousered corpses lay in the woods and amid the newly harvested crops of the Ardennes and the area between the Sambre and the Meuse.
The survivors were taking to their heels.
"The road to France, Madam."
As a million French soldiers were fleeing toward France, four German armies swooped southward: the first through Valenciennes, the second through Maubeuge, the third through Rethel, and the fourth through Sedan. They were supported on their left wing by the Fifth Army, which under the command of the crown prince, was racing forward via Luxemburg and Longwy. In less than a week the Oise and the Aisne had been crossed, and the German First, Second, and Third Armies were across the Marne. Von Kluck was only an hour away from a nearly deserted Paris, which he disregarded, striking toward the southwest to join up with the Fifth and Seventh Armies of Crown Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria and General von Heeringen, which were coming down from the Saar and from Alsace in the direction of the Seine.
"In five weeks this whole business will be finished," von Moltke declared at the end of August.
Yet six weeks later it was he who would be finished, dismissed from his post and morally shattered. The German armies, after a headlong retreat, would hastily dig hundreds of kilometers of trenches from Nieuport to Verdun, endless cadaver pits in which they would stagnate for four years.
Why all of a sudden, when there seemed nothing left of the Gallic cock but a few feathers, was the German, eagle exulting in its victories, checked at its zenith and then pushed back?

***

The battle of the Marne, strange as it may seem, was not won at the Marne, but two thousand kilometers to the east, on the outskirts of a little German town named Tannenberg, in East Prussia.
There the Russians suffered a bitter reverse. But at the same time that the Germans defeated the tsar, they defeated themselves. Without Tannenberg, there would have been no defeat on the Marne.
First the dates: German victory at Charleroi, August 22-23, 1914; German victory at Tannenberg, August 26-29, 1914. In the intervening three days General von Moltke would commit the fatal error that made possible the French victory on the Marne ten days afterwards.
The entire German strategy rested, as we have seen, on the elimination of the adversary in the west before facing the Russian foe in the east. A two- front war seemed unthinkable for Germany. France's army was equal in numbers to Germany's, and the tsar had mobilized five million soldiers, a figure that could be increased to ten million.
The political and diplomatic strategy of France's Third Republic for a quarter of a century had consisted precisely of entoiling Germany in the dilemma of fighting two great wars simultaneously-which would almost certainly mean losing them both simultaneously. A Germany forced to dispatch half of her forces to her eastern border should be defeated in the west by the French, who had been excellent soldiers for centuries. She was virtually condemned to defeat if she faced the French armies outnumbered two to one. Even if Germany could sustain a two-front war a rapid solution on either front would be impossible. A long war would require raw materials which Germany did not possess, whereas the French and the Russians did have or could import them.
The German high command, increasingly uneasy at the burgeoning military strength of the Russians, and the growth of their strategic network of railroads, thanks to French loans, in the direction of Prussia, had come to the conviction that it was imperative that Germany fight only one war at a time.

***

The Russians first? Or the French first?
It could not be the Russians first, because the Germans would scarcely have penetrated the vast expanses of Russia - ten thousand kilometers between the Baltic and the Pacific Ocean - before the French deployed their forces against a Rhine only half defended. The French mobilization, facilitated by an exceptionally dense railway network, would be completed, according to the general staff, in seventeen days. Immediately thereafter, opposed by a greatly reduced German army, the French, without much difficulty, might even be able to reach the imperial palace in Berlin, as Poincaré hoped, "by All Saints' Day." To von Moltke, allowing such an avalanche to sweep down on the German Reich would be suicidal.
Should the Eastern Front be initially ignored? Should Germany act only in the west, and not oppose the advance of the Russians until mid- September 1914? Leave German soil undefended against the Russian invasion except with a simple screen of a few divisions during the six or seven critical weeks? It would be necessary to break through and destroy the French front in a matter of weeks. It meant taking a terrible risk.
The only factors on which Germany could reasonably count to offset the danger were the immensity of Russia's territory, her still inadequate railway network, and her miserable roads. To transport several million men over thousands of kilometers, together with their gear and enormous quantities of war materiel, especially artillery, would take Russia a month or more. By the time the Russian enemy was finally ready, the German army, it was hoped, would have crushed the French and could then be transferred in force to East Prussia, or at least to the Oder river.
It was with this scenario in mind that General Schlieffen, chief of staff of the German high command, had prepared his famous plan, which, unknown to anyone in Berlin, had come into the possession of the French Army in 1906, thanks to a traitor bought for sixty thousand francs. France's leaders therefore knew the strategic implications of it exactly. Fortunately for the Germans, this plan hadn't much concerned the French command. Perhaps they hadn't believed it. The plan was relegated by the French to a file of dusty old records.
History is filled with such missed opportunities. It would happen again in the Second World War: the French, Belgians, and Dutch, informed in advance of the German offensive of May 10, 1940 by an anti-Hitler general and by the Dutch embassy in Berlin, would take no heed of the warning, Stalin, told of the imminent German attack of June 22, 1941 well ahead of time by Churchill, immediately before by two deserters, would take no account of the warnings. Hitler, in turn, would fail to act on important, detailed information furnished by the Turkish spy, "Cicero," concerning the future Allied landings in France in 1944, information that Churchill had passed to Stalin via the British embassy in Ankara.
Human intelligence often stumbles in the night imposed by its blindness.

The lethargy of the French almost certainly freed von Moltke from a grave risk in August of 1914.
There was another problem, however: the necessity, which seemed to him inescapable, of crossing Belgium to get to Paris. The historical reality has been that ill-fated Belgium has never been respected by anyone. The leaders of the French Revolution and Napoleon attached no more importance to her than to one of their assignats. General Joffre himself had stated that a war against Germany was inconceivable unless the French armies made a dash through the Belgian corridor. In 1940 it would be the same with Gamelin. In a way, Belgium forms an unavoidable passage. For two thousand years the Belgians have been walked over by Caesar's Romans, the Celts and the Germans, the Normans, Spaniards, Austrians, the French, the Dutch, Wellington's British, the Prussians of Blucher, the Cossacks of Alexander I. Belgium is the warrior's gangplank.
In August 1914, the Belgian gangplank was being crossed once again. Each time, Belgium's invaders had produced good excuses.
Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, at the beginning of August 1914, was concerned enough about Belgium's plight to announce to the Reichstag on the first day of the invasion that Germany would make good any damage done. Which didn't in the slightest prevent the British and the French-who had done the same thing themselves a number of times-from tearing their hair in hypocritical indignation.
The Germans had a stern choice: either to ignore the rights of the Belgians, or to blunt their offensive against the French and lose the war. In scales weighted with the destinies of such mighty nations, the Belgians didn't count for very much.
By invading Belgium so cavalierly (uhlans in the vanguard), the Germans gave the Allies occasion to raise a great din of propaganda. At the same time they allowed the British imperialists to assign themselves the virtuous and almost unheard-of role of defender of the oppressed.
The only way the Germans could extricate themselves from the political consequences was by a quick victory. At the end of August 1914, everything led them to believe they would succeed. The French had been in flight for a week. According to von Moltke's schedule, he would be victorious as early as mid-September; then he would be able to transfer his forces to Potsdam or Königsberg and administer the final blow to the Russians.

However hazardous this double plan was, it could have been realized if the Russians had not begun to organize weeks in advance with a pre- mobilization and if von Moltke had proved himself equal to the task at the moment of great decision.
The bold stroke of the Germans in the west could only succeed if the French could be conquered within thirty-five days. By August 24, 1914 that victory was in sight. The French armies had been beaten everywhere in less than three weeks.
In the west, therefore, the German strategy and tactics were winning.
In the east, on the other hand, and at nearly the same time, expectations seemed to be unraveling. The Russians had been astute. Their leaders knew, even better than the German general staff, the shortcomings of their mobilization plan and the slowness imposed by the distances involved. They had also tried to shorten the delays by resorting in great secrecy, as we have disclosed, to partial mobilizations in advance.
When the Russo-German war began in earnest they had anticipated the Reich's generals by several weeks. The Russian generals had brought their Siberian troops to the West twenty-four days earlier.
Moreover the Pan-Slavic clique had been hounded every day by Poincaré, who wished to see their armies in combat even before he had engaged his own troops in the Ardennes and at Charleroi. He complained of a lack of collaboration by the tsar regarding a single day's delay:
"The Russian offensive which was announced for this evening (August 13, 1914), and which was to contribute to the relief of our front, was unfortunately postponed until tomorrow or till Sunday morning." (Poincaré, L'Invasion, p. 89).
The French president sent all possible intermediaries to the rescue.
"Sir George Buchanan was charged with pointing out to Sazonov that it was of the utmost urgency to support us in the fight against Germany, with M. Doumergue and our general staff stressing the same point of view."
Because of such nagging insistence, and although they had concentrated only a part of their troops at the border, on August 14, 1914 the Russians entered German territory two or three weeks in advance of their schedule. By the next day, August 15, the Russian armies were already advancing deep into East Prussia. On August 20, 1914, they trounced the meager forces of German General Prittwitz at Gumbinnen.

The situation was serious for Germany, because the German troops in the East were very few in number. They constituted only a fragile screen, nine divisions in all, scarcely a tenth of the German divisions that, on that same day, confronted the French in Belgium.
The Russians opposing them, even though not at full effective strength, were three times their number: twenty-nine divisions. Even so, their superiority over the nine German divisions was questionable. They had been thrown into action too hastily; they were poorly equipped; their commanders were far from military geniuses.
That would soon be apparent; a week later, Hindenburg and Ludendorff would annihilate them.
Whatever the uncertainty of the moment after the defeat at Gumbinnen, it was essential that von Moltke remain calm and hold more than ever to the Schlieffen plan, which required meticulous execution. Even if the Russians reached the Oder, even if they conquered Berlin, only one consideration was uppermost in the plan: eliminating, by using a maximum of force, the French obstacle in the west. Then, and only then, were they to turn back on the Russians, however far they had come, whether Magdeburg or Munich. In war, the important thing isn't avoiding retreat; the goal is to win the final battle, even at the cost of temporarily giving up a vast amount of terrain, or risking extreme peril. Strategically, space is not a taboo, but a tool.
For Moltke not to be alarmed at the news of the premature Russian offensive, he needed to have nerves of steel. He didn't have them. Unlike General Joffre, his French counterpart, he was not a commander who remained unmoved when the tornado strikes. In circumstances so extraordinarily difficult, involving two enormous fronts two thousand kilometers apart, William II should never have entrusted such crushing responsibilities to an amiable and philosophical esthete who had the shoulders of a solid and invincible Prussian officer, but was hesitant, fumbling, and filled with fears.
When von Moltke received the unpleasant news on August 20, 1914 of the Russo-German battle of Gumbinnen-which was actually more of a skirmish than a great battle-he was completely unnerved. Although he had the victories of Mons, Charleroi, the Ardennes, and Champagne well in hand, he imagined Germany's situation a desperate one. Panicked, on August 25, 1914 he took a totally inappropriate step: he withdrew two army corps, the Eleventh and the Reserve Corps of the Guard, from the wing of his armies advancing on Paris.
His colleagues warned him of the danger, because the two army corps

The Rwere absolutely indispensable if the French army, in full retreat, was to be annihilated.
It would be noted instantly in the enemy camp.
"It is a grave decision and a gross error; the German commander-in-chief is weakening the very armies he's asking to make the decisive effort." (Renouvin, La Crise européenne, p. 244).
General von Moltke had already committed a grievous error eight days earlier when he sent six reserve divisions to Lorraine. At that time he should have put them in action in support of his offensive forces in order to carry the decision. In Lorraine he had no real need of them: the Fifth and Sixth Armies had easily wiped out the French attempts to advance and quickly turned them into a retreat.
The second error was catastrophic. The battle of Mons-Charleroi ended on August 23, 1914. The Germans were in position to finish off the French in two or three weeks. At the very important moment when it was imperative to strike the final blow, von Moltke snatched 150,000 soldiers from his offensive against Paris and sent them off in three hundred trains in the direction of the Vistula on August 26, 1914.

Without Gumbinnen, there would never have been a French victory of the Marne.
Quite possibly, but the astounding fact is that the diversion of those two army corps served no purpose whatsoever. At the hour when the three hundred trains departed, the Russians were being utterly destroyed. The dates are startling. On August 26 Moltke gave the order for the two army corps to depart for the east; on the following day, August 27, more than a thousand kilometers from the railway platforms of Belgium, the battle between the Russians and Germans at Tannenberg took place. And what a battle! In three days, Hindenburg and Lundendorff totally annihilated the Russian army of Samsonov, which was three times larger than their own forces. It was a total rout: tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were killed, 92,000 taken prisoner, 350 cannon captured. Samsonov, the Russian commander-in-chief, was so crushed militarily and in spirit that he committed suicide.
Thus not a single one of the 150,000 German soldiers redirected by von Moltke from the offensive in France to east Prussia took part at Tannenberg. On that fateful day their 300 trains were still chugging through the Belgian province of Hainaut. Their absence would be fateful when the First and Second Armies, weakened by that enormous levy, would hold the fate of the war in their hands a few days later southeast of Paris.

CHAPTER XIX

Feet of Clay

General von Bülow (a member of an extraordinary family of diplomats and military men: more than one hundred Billows would take part in the war, and seventy percent of them would be killed or wounded) and General von Kluck continued to pursue the fleeing French at full speed. However, von Kluck, suddenly stripped of 150,000 elite troops, had to rein in his right flank, which would have swept to Pontoise, to the west of Paris, between the French capital and the Atlantic. He pulled back towards Meaux, to the east of Paris, where it was still entirely possible that, once across the Marne, he might link up with the German Sixth and Seventh Armies to General Joffre's rear.

The Germans advanced on all fronts for some days. Almost immediately after the German victory at Charleroi on August 26, the First British Army Corps was severely beaten at Le Cateau by von Kluck. On August 29, 1914, the defeated Lanrezac tried courageously to aid the fleeing British, but the latter demurred. They had suffered terrible losses: 100,000 men in one month. Now the British wanted only to return by forced marches to the ports of Dunkirk and Calais.
An old habit: at Waterloo, when Wellington was in doubt as to whether he could repel Napoleon's attack, he prepared for a retreat through the forest of Soignies, between the battlefield and Brussels, and had already sent relays ahead to the northwest in order to be able to reembark his army without too much disorder if the emperor won the day.
Similarly the British commander, Marshal French, in the days of August 1914, felt a raging desire to cut and run. He was more drawn to London fogs than to spiked helmets.
Ferro, the historian, tells us (La Grande Guerre, p. 104): "French wished to save what was left of his army; and, judging the French [marshals] incapable of pulling themselves together, he had thought of reembarking."
It was with difficulty that Lanrezac coaxed the British troops back into the retreating columns.

Meanwhile, General von Kluck had reached Noyon. He was advancing on Ferté-Milon and on Compiègne. By August 31 he was very close to cornering the French armies southeast of Paris. He had passed the valley of the Ourcq and reached Chateau-Thierry, pressing hard on the heels of the French, who crossed the bridges of the Marne before him, barely escaping him. In one week the armies of von Kluck and von Bülow had reached the heart of France, on foot, because troops at that time still had to rely on their legs to get any place while campaigning.
Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers had taken the crossings of the Aisne and the Vesle at bayonet point beneath the hot August sun. They had come, as Corneille had once said, "to the verge of a total victory," just a few tens of kilometers from Paris. Their eyes sparkled with joy. In another week they would be able to close the trap in the rear of "the main body" of the French army. Von Moltke's order of the day of September 2, 1914 was for his troops to strike the knockout blow.

For three weeks the French public had learned next to nothing of the front. At the start of August 1914 the chatterboxes of the press, so convincing when it was a matter of getting their readers to underwrite the Russian loans, were bursting with wondrous details about the new super weapon: a slice of French bread and butter that, like a magnet, would draw the famished Huns to it as one man.
The newspapers hushed up almost completely the disasters of the Ardennes and of Charleroi. On August 28 they finally revealed that the enemy's cavalry was at the Marne, then, the next day, that the French capital itself was threatened, and on that day Poincaré's government fled with its tail between its legs.
That news started the headlong flight of a half-million Parisians, heading helter-skelter towards the south.
Poincaré and his gang, absconding from the Elysée, took refuge in Bordeaux and didn't show their faces in Paris again until three months later, in November 1914, when the big scare was over.

The commander-in-chief of the French armies, General Joffre, was a man as calm as a locomotive sitting in a railroad station.
He was so dull of eye one never knew whether he was awake or asleep. A massive man and a monument of serenity, he was a big eater and slept a great deal. Some said he was "an incompetent dullard." Whatever the case, he was unshakable, "constant in his faults," and proceeded slowly. Charles de Gaulle would write, "having badly engaged his sword, he knew he couldn't lose his balance."
One more week of retreat, and the German First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Armies could easily join up behind his troops in Champagne. His meals did not suffer because of it, nor did his sleep; he was supremely calm, and without a single unnecessary word set up his chessmen again each time he was overwhelmed, putting his military pawns back in place. He vowed resolve even while retreating.
From Joffre's directive of September 1, 1914: "The flanking movement carried out by the enemy on the left wing of the Fifth Army, and not sufficiently arrested by the British troops of the Sixth Army, makes it necessary for our entire formation to wheel around its right side."
After the thunderclap of the two great defeats of August 24 and 25, Joffre drew from the less threatened sectors those elements which would permit reorganizing of the Fifth Army to new strength. He entrusted the reorganization to General Maunoury. His mission: stop the rout before Amiens by August 27. It was too late for that. The army was only able to re-assemble well into the rear of the town.
Militarily, Paris was almost defenseless at the end of August 1914. The capital was only sketchily protected by worthy territorials, who were more liberally endowed with rheumatism than with military equipment. Its air defense was limited to a total of nine planes, three of them Voisins, and to two 75mm self-propelled howitzers.
General Gallieni had been named commander of Paris by the fleeing politicians. In poor health (he would die two years later), he was a competent and clever officer, far superior to the placid Joffre, whom he treated, moreover, with a condescension that was rather irritating. But he was the man whom France needed that week. To calm the Parisians who hadn't fled, he had his brigade of grandpas march through the city ten or a dozen times. From near Amiens he drew seven regular divisions of the new army formed on August 27, which were reinforced on September 1 by two divisions from the Fourth Army Corps retreating from Sainte Menehould. In the end, he had fifteen divisions.
The Germans continued their dash to the southeast of Paris, but now on their right flank fifteen French divisions under a bold and dynamic commander were watching for the false step that would enable an attack precisely where the enemy were missing the 150,000 men suddenly sent to the Eastern front.

Moltke's headquarters was far from the battle. That would prove to be another big mistake on his part.
Instead of installing himself at Laon or at Soisson, or at least at Charleroi, from where he could follow the fighting from fairly close at hand, in an era when communication was still slow and unreliable, he set up his headquarters in Luxembourg, a few miles from Germany.
His armies advanced some three hundred kilometers with impunity while he sat glued to his armchair in the old feudal town nestled beneath a somber castle. His messengers had to spend hours of travel on bad roads in cars that endangered the driver if he exceeded sixty kilometers per hour to reach the front.
His remoteness from the action would be one of the major causes of the defeat von Moltke was to suffer a week later at the Marne, a river he would never see.
Isolated, entirely dependent upon the belated reports of messengers, von Moltke sent back orders that reached the front line hours late, and dispatched delegations top-heavy with second-rate staffers. The latter, mandated by von Moltke to make immediate decisions in his name, had to be obeyed by the army generals who, right there on the scene, were better informed. They were thus not directly in command, which meant that they were not in command at all. Their commander was an aged Thor sitting on high in the clouds of Luxembourg, and he would not descend from his throne until he had been dismissed.
Von Moltke wouldn't open his eyes to the danger until too late. Joffre had assembled troops of the First Army before Paris. Still retreating, in order to gain time, the French generalissimo added reinforcements from his armies in Lorraine, where the danger was less obvious.

Moltke would not be informed of the French reinforcement from Lorraine until September 4, 1914. It would be September 5 before he, too, decided to bring up two army corps from the Lorraine front to reinforce the German offensive, now at the end of its momentum. These two army corps, like those which were diverted to the Eastern front, would not serve any purpose either, spending the decisive days traveling, forty to a car, in cattle cars.
Von Moltke got no clear idea of the maneuver the French were preparing before Paris until a week later.
Panicky Moltke finally discerned the threat: "It must be assumed that the enemy is assembling heavy forces in the region of Paris and bringing in new units in order to defend the capital and to threaten the German right flank."
The German right flank was von Kluck's army. Following orders, he had advanced farther and farther to the south beyond the Marne, well in advance of the thrust of von Billow's Second Army.
The objective was now almost within reach:
"In conformity with the orders they had received on 4 September," writes the French historian Renouvin, "the German Fourth and Fifth Armies were trying to open a road to the south in order to join up with the armies of Lorraine that were trying to force the passage of the Moselle and the Meurthe. It was there the German command was seeking the decision."
Von Kluck had deliberately shot ahead and was within an ace of victory. Twenty-four years later Rommel would do the same thing, but in each case the risk was great. Only one of von Kluck's army corps, the Fourth Reserve Corps, on the Ourcq, guarded his right flank which was threatened by Paris.
Gallieni badgered Joffre. He pointed out the possibility of striking a slashing blow right at von Kluck's rear. He could count on his fifteen divisions, the British, and General Lanrezac's Fifth Army, now commanded by the future marshal, Franchet d'Esperey.
The British had finally consented to back him up, without enthusiasm to be sure, and after anguished debate: Marshal French did not agree. He considered giving battle premature and preferred to continue the retreat, falling back behind the Marne; moreover, he was not ready to take part in a battle where he would have to engage all his forces at one time. Joffre, who wished to have done with it, decided to throw his sword into the balance and went to see French. With ill-concealed emotion he said:
In the name of France, Marshal French, I ask you for your total assistance. This time, the honor of England is at stake." There was tension in the air. Joffre knew that Murray, French's assistant, was opposed to the counteroffensive. A heavy silence ensued. French replied almost inaudibly: "I will do all I can. (Ferro, La Grande Guerre, pp. 10f.)
Joffre breathed a sigh of relief.

***

The French divisions assembled for the counterattack now numbered twenty-eight. The Germans would be able to oppose them with only fourteen divisions in the Paris area. From one against one to two to one! An opportunity for a flanking maneuver such as is rarely offered in warfare had arisen.
After long reflection and hesitation, Joffre made his decision on September 4. He was going to play his secret card.
The French generalissimo's order of the day:
"It behooves us to take advantage of the risky situation of the German First Army and concentrate the efforts of the Allied armies on the extreme left flank against it."
Gallieni proposed attacking Meaux. During the entire day of September
5, he pressed his luck north of the Marne grappling with the flank-guard (the Fourth Reserve Corps) of von Kluck's army. The next day, September 6, the offensive began. For three days it would be a fight to the death.

France, indeed, was deciding whether she would live or die.
Von Kluck defended himself with firmness and valor. But in bringing his army corps to the north bank of the Marne, he drifted away from von Bülow, his neighbor. Across a gap of fifty kilometers they were linked only by a screen of cavalry.
"The German generals," we read in Renouvin (La Crise européenne, p. 249), "didn't overlook that danger, rather counting on their offensive to protect them from it. By means of a vigorous attack on both extremities of the combat front they intended to seize victory before the breach was wide open. Kluck brought all his effort to bear on his right wing on the Ourcq plateaus, where he sought to outflank Maunoury's army from the north. Bülow hurled his left wing across the marshes of Saint-Gond against Foch's army. On the morning of the 9th, those attacks, despite the stubborn resistance of the French troops, still looked most promising."
The Germans, an ancient people of disciplined soldiers admirably trained in defensive as well as offensive warfare, returned blow for blow despite their numerical inferiority. To relieve his right wing, von Moltke had sent the crown prince into action with all his forces. The kaiser's son had been on the point of capturing Verdun, which Joffre had already authorized Sarrail to evacuate.
To the north of the Marne, Bülow was grappling, still victoriously, with Foch's attacks.
"The battle," Ferro relates (La Grande Guerre, p. 101) "raged for several days, with the adversaries trying to maneuver on the wings. Threatened on his left side, Bülow had to call on the armies of the center: von Hausen drew nearer to him and assisted him in closing the breach. Farther off to the east, the French had gone on the offensive as well, but it was the Germans in the last analysis who led the operation."
The withdrawal to the right bank of the Marne was accomplished by von Kluck in perfect order:
"That same day, Maunoury narrowly escaped being overwhelmed by von Kluck, and Gallieni was forced to requisition the Parisian taxis in order to send him reinforcements without loss of time" (Ferro, ibid).
That episode has become famous; it is the Epinal image of Gallieni. Seeing that the offensive was in danger of taking a bad turn, the quick- witted Gallieni rounded up every ramshackle conveyance in Paris, loaded in all the soldiers who were still left in the capital, and rushed them in the direction of the enemy. It was the first motorized expedition in history.

An unknown then entered on the scene. A mere lieutenant colonel, a German named Hentsch, his own authority, in comparison with that of the two army commanders, was non-existent. But as von Moltke's personal emissary h commander-in-chief.e had been empowered to issue orders in the field in the name of the Generals von Kluck and von Bülow, lacking direct instructions from their chief, were trying to coordinate their operations. Von Moltke should have been in a position to give the necessary orders at once.
Ex-Chancellor Prince von Bülow wrote:
Moltke should have allowed the three armies of the right wing to obtain their own information on the spot and thus assure strategic unity. Instead of taking that course, at the decisive moment, on 8 September, he sent a section commander from his staff, Lieutenant Colonel Hentsch, authorized him to make decisions, mentioned the possibility of a retreat in the last verbal instructions he gave him, and even added some indication of the direction of a possible retreat. Of all the officers on his staff, Hentsch was the most susceptible to doubts, and it was for precisely that reason that he had the sympathy of his chief. Hentsch held the fate of the battle in his hands - and the fate of campaign, army, and country as well; and when he received an unfavorable impression of the situation in the headquarters of the Second Army, he recommended to Field Marshal General von Bülow, the commander of that army, that he retreat towards the northeast. Immediately afterwards he proceeded to General von Kluck, the commander of the First Army, and similarly urged him to pull back. (Memoirs, pp. 171f.)
At that crucial moment, a mere lieutenant colonel who had just stepped from his liaison car was making the strategic and tactical decisions of the battle.
Ferro (La Grande Guerre, p. 102) stated: "Lieutenant Colonel Hentsch, given complete authority by Moltke back at general headquarters in Luxembourg ordered von Kluck and von Bülow to carry out a general withdrawal."
Renouvin, the French historian, after interviewing various German historians after the war, reported their conclusions:
The German armies were on the point of victory. Even on the right wing they were very close to success. Kluck on the Ourcq and Bülow on the Saint- Gond marsh were in a position to smash the enemy and should have been given a few more hours: that would have been enough to change the outcome. The man responsible for the defeat was Lieutenant Colonel Hentsch, Moltke's deputy to the army commanders. He lacked the necessary firmness of character. When one last effort was all that was needed for victory he thought the troops beaten.

As with all victories and all defeats, discussion could go on forever.
Excuses of misfortune change nothing. "Misfortune," said Napoleon, "is the excuse of incompetents and blunderers." The French attack at the Marne was courageously conceived at a time when the situation was nearly desperate. Joffre, indifferent to adversity, and with remarkable imperturbability, issued his orders with sang-froid. Maunoury, during those days, lit up the battle of the Marne with his brilliance. Wars abound in the unforeseeable, but the excellence of the French command was a reality.
The victory did not bring total salvation; the proof is that the war quickly bogged down on the Western Front for four years. The battle of the Marne saved France from a catastrophe which would probably have destroyed the military strength of the country for a long time to come. But France was spent and at the limit of her resources. It would take her four years to recover.
The chief contribution to the salvation of France had been the pitiful leadership of von Moltke, the German commander-in-chief. He never went near the field of battle; his information was always late, as were his decisions, which were nearly always based on indirect information. So delicate were von Moltke's nerves that he was given to crying at moments when it was imperative he have nerves of steel.
Prince von Wendel visited Moltke's general headquarters in Luxembourg during those crucial days.
"When I was presented," the visitor recounted, "I was appalled at the appearance of the chief of the general staff, slumped down at his desk with his head in his hands. When Moltke raised his eyes, he showed me a pallid face wet with tears."
"I am too heavyhearted," von Moltke confessed. William II, who was ignorant of military realities and who never exercised his power as commander-in-chief of the army from 1914 to 1918, had made a poor choice in the commander of his troops. At the end of a month and a half he would find it necessary to replace Moltke.
"He succumbed under the weight of his responsibilities," Prince von Bülow would later say. "At the crucial moment, the reins slipped from his weak hands. The staff and junior officers prevailed. The high command failed in its task."
Bülow recalled an aphorism from the past: "More than two thousand years ago a Greek philosopher taught that an army of deer commanded by a lion was superior to an army of lions commanded by a deer."
In August and September of 1914 Moltke had an army of lions at his disposal. Marshal Foch would say of it that "it was the best army the world had ever seen." But the commander of the lions had acted like a deer. Instead of keeping a stout heart, he had defeated himself.
Could he have acted otherwise? The answer is yes. For a moment, he even thought of doing so. Then, weak-willed, he gave up, and on September 10, 1914 he ordered a general withdrawal. It was an unnecessary move, for the Allies had discontinued their offensive.
"The French and the English," stated Prince von Bülow, "felt so little like victors that they did not harass the Germans as they retreated."

The French, like the Germans, were on their last legs. From the Meuse to the Marne they had left hundreds of thousands of men lying dead and wounded. Both armies were at the end of their strength. The French artillery had, in just a few weeks, expended half of its ammunition reserves. Ammunition was stingily supplied: not even five million shells on the first day of hostilities, although French guns would fire three hundred million in the next four years. Machine guns, the only effective weapon for fighting at close quarters in a war in which from the first day millions of men faced each other, were almost nonexistent.
The French air force consisted of 160 planes. The pilots were still armed only with rifles-and almost never hit anything. Tanks had not yet been developed.

The only true weapon during those first five weeks of the war of 1914 (August 4 to September 10) would be human flesh: the French army, before the end of 1914, would see its casualties rise to 900,000 (300,000 killed). They would continue to grow. The final cost of the war to the countries involved would be eight million dead and thirty-two million wounded.
Meanwhile, in mid-September 1914, the French army, after a successful counteroffensive lasting a few days, found itself winded and unable to exploit its brief advance. By September 17, 1914 it was over. The French pursuit had been halted at the Aisne.
General de Castelneau, mustachioed old gentleman of strong Catholic faith who had been put in command of a new French army, tried to take Amiens. His counterattack was brief: he was thrown back at the Somme. General Maud'hui, who had launched an attack with fresh forces between Bethune and Arras, was no more fortunate, and was driven back to Albert.
The Germans took only fifteen days to break up the French counteroffensive.

Joffre tried once again to pull his forces together. The British expeditionary corps, after sending off several hundred thousand dead and wounded to the cemeteries and hospitals, received reinforcements from Great Britain. The Belgian army had evacuated Antwerp and could be used again. Foch was ordered to join forces with both the British and the Belgians to extend the offensive northward.
He was an optimist. During the battle of the Marne he had thought it won. "The war is practically over," he wrote at the time to Clemenceau's brother.
Since he was still convinced that he would be able in short order to march into Berlin on horseback, he was entrusted with an operation that might build on the victory of the Marne: encircling the Germans with the left flank of the Allied front. The objective was Ostend and the North Sea. With his left Foch planned to skirt the German right.
He had been given solid French divisions from various sectors. In addition to the survivors from the Belgian army and the British expeditionary corps, he had sailors from the French navy at his disposal, to be used as infantry on this occasion.
The Germans, despite being compelled to give way somewhat by Joffre, were not really beaten. They had given up a bit of terrain north of the Meuse, but they still occupied the richest and most strategic regions of France. The new commander of the German army, General von Falkenhayn, had been reinforced by 200,000 new soldiers, a great many of them volunteers, the elite of the German university youth.
The French and Germans alike would fight furiously for several weeks. Result: a draw. Foch would not get to Ostend. Falkenhayn would not get to Calais. The Belgians, outflanked at the threshold of the North Sea, opened their floodgates, inundating the field of battle. The battle veered off towards Ypres. Falkenhayn sent his regiments, manned by students burning with intense patriotic fervor to attack the Flemish village of Langemarck. There they were massacred by the thousands.
The British commanders readied a second time to scurry off towards their ports. The billowing sea tempted them, and Foch was hard pressed to get them to stay on French soil. Yet his famous hook hooked nothing. By mid- November 1914, it was evident to the Allies as well as to the Germans that they were both stalemated. Each failed in turn, reaping nothing but tens of thousands of additional deaths. Poincaré's victory parade of 1914 was at an end.
On 29 November 1914, one of the most brilliant generals of the French army, shocked to hear high-ranking French officers at a meeting of the general staff at St. Pol advocating renewed, murderous attacks by their exhausted troops retorted furiously: "Attack! Attack! It's easy to say, but it would be like knocking over a stone monument with your bare hands."
A British military critic commented, "Their attempts were no more effective than a mouse nibbling at a strongbox. But the teeth being used were the living strength of France."
Poincaré's "divine moment" was about to turn into a four-year long French martyrdom. Several million Germans and Frenchmen, bloodied troglodytes of the twentieth century, would thenceforce live buried in holes-haggard, helpless, hunkered down under a rain of hundreds of millions of kilos of death-dealing machine-gun bullets.

The Russian government, on the other side of Europe, did not march triumphantly into Berlin by All Saints' Day of 1914.
The victory of the little German army-the protective screen of nine divisions-which triumphed over Sazonov at Tannenberg, was completed during the same days as the battle of the Marne by another Russian disaster suffered by General Rennenkampf at the Masurian Lakes. The Russian losses were twice those of their German assailants.
Nevertheless, the Russian soldiers fulfilled the role assigned to them by Poincaré of diverting part of the Reich's troops toward the east, although they paid an extremely high price for that support. Russian blood was also costly to the Germans. Weakening their offensive in the west had caused their drive against Paris to fail, and the Germans lost their chance to destroy the French army.
The Russian armies harvested nothing but disasters. They offered a stiff opposition to the Austrians, beating them in several important local battles, but gained no decisive result. Russian forces were not able to penetrate to the Hungarian plain, nor were they able to join up with the Serbians, their steppingstone to the Balkans. That was the essential thing for the Russians, the very purpose of their Pan-Slav war. They had demonstrated that left on their own they would probably never reach Belgrade, let alone Constantinople.

***

The Russian armies had scarcely engaged in their first battles before Slav imperialism would be revealed as an enormous bluff.
The giant had feet of clay. Russia's military command, and her political administration as well, were dens of insatiable grafters who had embezzled away a large portion of the French credits obtained to reinforce Russian military strength. Stocks of materiel supposed to have been supplied by the billions of gold francs from Paris were non-existent or comprised of defective goods. The commissions charged by the French and the depredations of Russian embezzlers had completely sabotaged quality.
By the second month of the war, September 1914, many of the Tsar's troops lacked rifles, and their artillery had run out of ammunition. The following are samples of SOS messages sent from the Russian front to the responsible officials of St. Petersburg and of general headquarters:
Telegram No. 4289, September 19, 1914: "Ministry of War. Secret. Personnel: the field echelon on the road, 150 rounds per gun. The regulating station echelon, none. Backup supplies are exhausted. The general reserve depots are empty."
Message of September 20: "From the commander-in-chief to the Minister of War. Cabinet. Secret. Staff, section one, No. 6284: if our expenditure of artillery ammunition continues at the same rate, our total supply will be expended in six weeks. It is therefore necessary that the government face the situation as it is: either the manufacture of artillery ammunition must be considerably increased, or we shall have no means of continuing the war after the first of November."
Telegram to the commander of the army, September 25, 1914, No. 6999: "Secret. Personnel: Backup supplies at present exhausted. If expenditure continues same rate, impossible to continue war for lack of ammunition within fifteen days."
It had been that way almost from the first contact with the Germans. Marc Ferro (La Grande Guerre, p. 110) wrote: "As early as the month of August, the Russian General Rennenkampf made demands on his minister of war for 108,000 shrapnel shells, 17,000 high-exposive shells, and 56 million cartridges; he was offered 9,000 shrapnel shells, 2,000 high- explosive shells, and 7 million cartridges."
Stocks should have been at maximum before the Russians marched. They had been increased only once after the war's beginning. Even then, shipments were eight times less than what was needed in cartridges and twelve times less in shrapnel shells.
An English officer attached to the Russian army could only note: "The battles of the Third Army were nothing but massacres, because the Russians attacked without artillery support."

The little that the Russian troops had brought along was shockingly defective. At Tannenberg, the Russian machine guns almost all jammed at the end of a few hours. A third of the cartridges failed to fire. Half the artillery shells did not correspond in caliber to the artillery pieces.
Renouvin, the French historian, wrote these startling lines:
"In Russia, the crisis in materiel is alarming. The troops lack rifles: the supplies laid in before the war have barely sufficed to cover the losses of the first two or three months ...The factories are not even manufacturing the guns necessary to equip the reinforcements."
It was the same with machine guns:
"The infantry has never had the number of machine guns provided for by regulations, and production is not sufficient to cover losses."
As for the artillery:
"The replenishment of artillery ammunition shows a heavy deficit: the army asks for a million and a half shells per month; the industry is providing it with 360,000." (La Crise européene, pp. 274f)
"The Russian army," Renouvin concluded, "is worse off than it has ever been..."
Soon half the Russian infantrymen would be armed only with clubs. General Denikin would write these haunting lines from the front:

"Two regiments were almost completely destroyed by artillery fire. When after a silence of three days our battery received fifty shells, it was immediately made known by telephone to all the regiments and all the companies, to the joy and relief of the men."
After listening to the complaints of Grand Duke Nicholas in the latter's command car-the grand duke now pallid and emaciated, his features drawn- Ambassador Paléologue, the French firebrand of St. Petersburg, sent the following dismaying note to his boss, Poincaré:
"This evening I see the Russian army as a paralyzed giant, still capable of striking formidable blows at adversaries within reach, but powerless to pursue them."
By then, half of the Russian army had already been put out of action - more than two million casualties, 834,000 of whom had been killed.
Like the Russians the French government at the end of a month was forced to beg for guns, cartridges, and cannon from all over the world, from Portugal, from Spain, and even from Japan.
Telegram from the French ambassador at Tokyo, No. 36, September 1, 1914: "Japan is willing to sell us 50,000 rifles and 20 million cartridges, whereas we most urgently asked for 600,000 rifles."
A personal confession by Poincaré:
"By September 8 there were only 200 75mm guns in reserve. Fifty batteries had been ordered from Creusot, but the firm took four months to complete the first four." (Poincaré, L'Invasion, p. 264)
"Millerand hoped that we'd be able to buy the batteries in Spain and in Portugal." (Poincaré, op. cit.)
"The model 1886 rifle was being manufactured at the rate of 1,400 per day." Fourteen hundred rifles for an army of more than two million men. And rifles, moreover, of a model already more than a quarter of a century old.
And this:
What struck Joffre was the shortage of ammunition. Jean Retinaud writes: "They went off to war with a supply of 1390 rounds per 75mm gun. The supplies have fallen to 695 rounds, and only 10,000 rounds are being manufactured per day (for more than 3,500 cannon). Joffre is so concerned about it at this point that the only document he carries with him all the time, the one thing he is never without, is a little notebook in which the exact ammunition count is kept." (Ferro, La Grande Guerre, p. 105)
Ten thousand rounds for 3,500 cannon; that boded less than three rounds per day per gun in the future, hardly enough to bracket a target!
Joffre went so far as to have the number of rounds fired by the combat units reported to him daily. Here is his order:
"Every evening, or every night before ten o'clock, each army will inform
me by telegram of the number of rounds used during the day."
Such was the abyss out of which he would have to climb, with infinite
difficulty, while a million French soldiers fell. The essential manufactures would only be achieved by recruiting hundreds of thousands of coolie factory hands in Asia. Only then would it be possible to rebuild a viable French war industry, sufficient to assure the supply of ammunition to the front.

In truth, everyone had lost in 1914. No army had remotely achieved its objective. The richest provinces of France, representing 85 percent of her economic resources, were in the hands of the Germans: 40 percent of her coal; 80 percent of her coke; 90 percent of her iron ore; 70 percent of her foundries; 80 percent of her steel; 80 percent of her equipment.
That despite the Marne, a transitory victory that succeeded only in pushing the enemy back from one river to another.
At the end of 1914 it was impossible to imagine when France would recover its lost territory, let alone Alsace and Lorraine. Rain and snow fell endlessly on two million bronchitic soldiers buried, chilled to the marrow, in long, muddy trenches.
A hundred meters from the French, the barbed wire, machine guns, and cannon of another two million soldiers, Prussians, Württemburgers, Saxons, and Bavarians, barred all access to the north and east. There was no hope of dislodging them from their positions at the beginning of that unlucky winter. Would they ever be driven out? No one ventured any longer to predict. France's wonderful war had stink into a morass of millions of bleaching bones.
Britain's leaders had no more cause for rejoicing. A hundred thousand Tommies had fallen. The rest were floundering in a foreign land, chilled by the North Sea booming behind them, demoralized by the shells falling on their flat helmets, inverted soupbowls on which the shrapnel rang like sleigh bells. Hindus came to the rescue of the British. And New Zealanders. And Australians. All were bewildered at having to fight and die for local quarrels they knew nothing about. What could a Flemish village with a collapsed bell tower mean to a citizen of Sydney? And whose interest was he really defending in those putrid marshes? The war seemed prehistoric and absurd to all of them. Marshal French was right, they must have said to themselves, in wanting to lead them out of this vile mud and regain the tranquility of their native hearths in England or Scotland.
The Russian leaders had foundered even more completely than the British and the French. They had learned in that autumn of 1914 that they could never win with only their own forces, and that this war, which they had envisioned as the annihilation of the Germans by the French, had turned into a gigantic slaughter of their people. Now, they were running short of everything: arms, materiel, men.
Despite Austria-Hungary's weaknesses, Germany would pound Russia harder every day with her enormous iron mace, as the Teutonic Knights had done hundreds of years before. The long-suffering Russian people would in the end escape from the clutches of the rabble-rousing grand dukes. Imperial St. Petersburg already knew it, sensed it, and even smelled the catastrophe.
For the Serbs, although they had been able to contain and even repulse the Austrians in the beginning, the battles had served no purpose. Germany was watching and could invade Serbia at any time. Russia had come to a standstill in her campaign to reach Serbian territory; she would never succeed.
For the Allies 1914 was marked by catastrophe.

On the German side it had been the same.
The kaiser's victory in the west, almost achieved by the end of August 1914, had sunk beneath the waters of the Marne. To win the war with Russia, Germany needed to have finished the war with France in no more than seven weeks. Germany had defeated neither France nor Russia, and she found herself irretrievably involved in wars on two fronts, which in 1914 had seemed impossible. She found herself in the middle of a double conflict.
In the west, German armies had occupied a considerable territory in vain; the Germans were condemned to immobility, exactly like the French, the British, and the Belgians opposing her.
In the east, Germany had warded off a savage invasion. The Russians had only rudimentary weapons to fight with, and sometimes none at all; but there were millions of them who would march en masse to death. Vast reaches of space stretched away towards the Urals and the Yenisei. To venture there would be to drown, to be swallowed up, to be frozen.
The Austrians, who might have been able, that August of 1914, to chastise the Serbians if they'd had only dealt with them, had suffered one reverse after another, like a blind man stumbling from one pothole to the next.
All of them, absolutely all of them, had failed. The future loomed before them like a great wall that could no longer be broken through or scaled by any of them. The warring governments would have to invent myths and pretexts, to offer fabulous material advantages in order to lure millions of other men to replace the fallen combatants and die like them.
How would they be able to convince some, cajole others? In the name of what?

CHAPTER XX

Armed with Hatred

Instead of rifles, machine guns, and cannon, which in the last analysis accomplished nothing, the leaders of the Entente would resort to the weapon of the powerless: hatred.
Hatred is the spice that makes a rotten or tasteless political stew almost acceptable. The allied governments would use it to season every bellicose appeal, every chauvinistic tirade, and every line churned out by the propagandists, so that every foot soldier mired in mud, or foreign replacement they sought to draw into their hellish cauldron, would firmly believe it was a matter of his own honor and the dignity of mankind that Germany be crushed, and that the sadistic Kaiser, that sawed-off dwarf grimacing beneath his crested helmet, be boiled in oil.
Before August 1914, the propaganda-peddlers had depicted the German people as a tribe of cannibals. Even Maurras, the most cultured French politician of his time, would be so carried away as to denounce "the innate savagery of the instincts of flesh and blood" of the Prussians, while Bergson, the eminent philosopher, would discover "in the brutality and cynicism of Germany, a regression to the savage state."
Clemenceau would write (Grandeur et misère d'une victoire, p. 334), "I wish to believe that civilization will carry the day against savagery, and that is sufficient for me to rule out the German from a life of common dignity." He added:

The insufferable arrogance of the German aristocracy, the servile genius of the intellectual and the scholar, the crude vanity of the most well-adjusted industrial leader and the exuberance of a violent popular literature conspire to shatter all the barriers of individual as well as international dignity.

William II, of whom the French military attaché in Berlin had written, "1 am absolutely convinced that he is for peace," in the writings of this same Clemenceau became "an unnameable piece of imperial degradation"; and Germanic civilization became "only a monstrous explosion."
The following effusion is typical of the crude nonsense of which the most celebrated French politician of the First World War talked when he was describing the German people:

Every now and then I have entered the sacred cave of the German religion, which, as we know, is the beer-garden. A great nave of stolid humanity where may be heard swelling amid the stale odors of beer and tobacco and the familiar rumblings of a nationalism sustained by the bellowing of a brass band and carrying to the highest pitch the supreme German voice: "Germany over all!" Men, women, and children, petrified before the divine will of an irrepressible power, foreheads lined, eyes lost in a dream of the infinite, mouths twisted by the intensity of desire - in great gulps they all drink the celestial hope of unknown fulfillment.

That was the way a government leader in France represented Germany in the twentieth century. Despite the fact that "Germany over all," Deutschland über alles, in no way meant a Germany over everything and everyone, but merely over the numerous petty regionalisms that in the preceding century were still often opposed to a unified German nation.. state. Educated people knew that. For Clemenceau however, the most important nation of Europe was just a conglomeration of buffoons, gluttons, and drunkards capable only of the "eternal violence of fundamentally savage tribes for purposes of depredation by every means of barbarism." (Clemenceau, p. 88)
Once the war began, in August 1914, it was a matter of fanning this bitter scorn to white heat, then transforming it into irrepressible hatred. Colonel de Grandmaison even exclaimed: "Let us go too far, and that will perhaps not be enough."
Apocalyptic pictures were painted of German heinousness so that every soldier would be truly convinced that he was fighting against the supreme horror, against "evil." The campaign quickly spread abroad, in order to arouse the terrified indignation of the whole world against the Reich and, above all, to bring about the foreign military enlistments that would end in glorious non-French deaths in Champagne, in Flanders, and in Artois.
The most fantastic of all the calumnies launched was the story of the cut-off hands. Today no supporter of the Allies of 1914-1918 would dare to drag out that moth-eaten canard, so thoroughly has it been refuted. Yet that sinister tale went around the world. According to the Allied propagandists, in August of 1914 the Germans cut off the hands of thousands of Belgian children. Descriptions of these abominations found their way to the uttermost ends of the earth and were a factor in the U.S. entry into the war in 1917. In Italy, in 1915, the shops selling church ornaments sold statuettes of a little Belgian girl with her hands cut off, holding out her arms all bloody to Christ's mother: "Holy Virgin, make them grow again!"
Benito Mussolini himself told me one day how one of the most important political figures on the side of the Allies, Emile Vandervelde, had used that argument on him to convince him of the allies' righteousness and Italy's duty to join the war. Here, word for word, is what the Fascist leader told me years later, when he was at the summit of his glory:
One fine morning in the spring of 1915, Emile Vandervelde, head of the Belgian socialist party and then president of the Second International, came to see me. The Allies sent him to me as they already had Marcel Cachin, the future head of the French communists. Back then, we were party comrades. I received him. He reeled off his arguments in favor of Italy's participation in the war on the side of the Allies.
It was then that he began to explain to me in great detail the story of the children with their hands cut off by the Germans. That made an impression on me, and he realized it. "Mussolini," he said to me, taking me by the coat, "you're an upright man. Do you really believe we can let such frightful crimes go unpunished, and that you don't have an obligation to join us to fight the country that commits such atrocities?"
He stopped, looked at me as though he had been crucified.
I reflected an instant. "Yes, Vandervelde, what you tell me is appalling. It is obvious that such monstrousness must be suppressed. But tell me yourself, Vandervelde, have you witnessed a single case of cut-off hands? Have you seen any? Do you know any men of complete reliability who have seen it?"
Vandervelde drew himself up, quite taken aback. "Mussolini, your question astonishes me. This affair is so obvious to me that I've not given it a thought. No, I do not know of any case personally, that's true. But there have been thousands of them. You shall see, I'll bring you a complete file."
Two months later Vandervelde turned up in Italy again. Something appeared to be preying on his mind and he was anxious to speak to me at once. "Mussolini, you remember our conversation about the cut-off hands. I shouldn't like to be dishonest, nor to have tried to mislead you. I promised you I would, and I did make a search. Ah well, here it is. I interrogated people everywhere, and I didn't find a single case. Nowhere did anyone tell me where I could find someone who knew of a case. I let myself be influenced. But I don't want you to believe that I wished to influence you in turn. That story, I am now convinced, is without foundation. I owed you the truth. There it is."
Vandervelde was propriety itself. Learning that he had been deceived, he recanted. But he was one of the very few Allied propagandists to do so throughout the First World War, or afterwards. That gigantic slander in particular poisoned the minds of millions of persons of good faith. Since the war, Allied historians have had several decades to repeat Vandervelde's investigation on a scientific basis. No one has ever found a single child, Belgian or otherwise, who had his hands cut off by the Germans.
As if after the defeat of Germany in 1918, one mutilated youngster wouldn't have been exhibited all over the world if he could have been found! Nobody. Nothing. A complete lie.
It is often said that where there's smoke, there's fire. There had not been any fire, nor even any smoke. The slander had been made up out of whole cloth, with supreme propagandistic cunning to besmirch the opponent and make him hated.
Since then, there have been many other examples of this sort of base atrocity propaganda, but this remains a classic case of a total, enormous lie spread throughout the entire world, painting a people black for years afterward.

There was also the story of the candy. In 1914, if one was to believe the Allied propaganda, the Germans had handed out poisoned candy everywhere, as if they had been confectioners rather than soldiers. In 1940 this anti-German myth would be served up for a second time. In May of 1940, Le Figaro, the most responsible newspaper in France, would even give the exact dimensions of the poison candy (17 by 17 by 5 millimeters) on its front page. To be sure, none of this famous candy ever put in an appearance either on Figaro's table or anywhere else. It was a particularly idiotic tale. It is hard to know how poison candy could have helped the Germans in their offensive in 1940 or in 1941.
Those sugary fabrications served up a thousand times in the French and then in the world press, like the stories of the cut-off hands, did more damage to the Germans than a million shells. The great majority of people are naive and will believe anything when it is printed in black and white. The story will be repeated and repeated ad nauseam. It becomes a mass hallucination. Almost inevitably the hearer is stirred to a fever pitch and completely convinced.
The propaganda of the Allies was awful in its cynicism, in its unlimited exploitation of lies so flagrant they would have been unbelievable in normal times. Decent men let themselves be hoodwinked just like the rest. Misled totally by such compelling falsehoods, millions of naive people began to snarl in hatred.
During my youth, I believed in those lies totally, just as I believed the historical lie of the exclusive responsibility of the Germans for the Great War. On the other hand, the Pan-Slav provocateurs, and swindlers like Poincaré, were to us heroes comparable to heroic and chivalrous knights. From Paris and Brussels down to the tiniest hamlet of Belgium or France, we were all overwhelmed by that mendacious propaganda. It was so intensive that it was impossible not to believe it. The Germans were monsters-that had become dogma.

Yet those of us in the occupied areas, with front-row seats so to speak, saw the Germans at close range. They were often courteous and generally affectionate to the children. No doubt they were thinking of their own children.

I remember especially Christmas, 1917. German officers had requisitioned all the good rooms in the large house in which I was born. We seven children had to move into the attic, up under the roof.
For us little Christians, Christmas meant the Nativity scene, represented by a creche. Consequently we were intrigued by the passage through the great family hall of a fir tree, which an officer then set up in his room. He was a plump little man, round as a barrel from my parents' brewery. By peeking through the keyhole of the door to the German's room, we saw the tree all ornamented with stars, with colored lights, and with packages.
On Christmas Eve the officer, for the first time in the six months he'd been staying with us, gave a few little knocks at the entrance to the living room. He addressed my mother ceremoniously: "Madam, it is Christmas, and I have made up a few little gifts for your children. Will you permit them to come and take them off the tree?"
My mother was very gentle. She spoke German, and was not eager to offend the foreigner. Nevertheless we children, bewildered, heard her say solemnly: "Monsieur, you well know that our countries are enemies. Please understand that our children can not possibly receive presents from an enemy." The poor man made a polite little bow and withdrew. We, the little ones, who had glimpsed the mirage through the keyhole, were crushed. That's the way things were-one didn't associate with the enemy even if, like my youngest sister, Suzanne, you were only six years old!

***

The longer the war continued, the more we were all affected by the world-wide wave of hatred. We believed any story whatsoever. We were eager to believe.
For some years those improbable calumnies left a mark on me, even when I was studying at the university, when the most elementary examination of history ought to have enlightened me. The atrocity lies were poured into our skulls like molten metal. Even long after the defeat of William II, a large placard on the door of my parents' home continued to proclaim: "Nothing from the Germans, nothing to the Germans."
For all that, 1 one day got an unexpected glimmer of the genuineness of these sentiments. In 1919 my father ordered some new tuns to replace the copper equipment of our brewery, which had been turned into ammunition by the Germans. Not manufactured by the Germans, naturally, those monsters who cut off hands and poisoned candy, but from our dear allies, the worthy British. On the day they arrived, the entire local population accompanied the wagons transporting the enormous vats, which were brilliantly bedecked with ribbons. Curious, and struck with wonder at their size, I examined them with pride, until I discovered graven in the metal a large inscription which left me flabbergasted: "Made in Germany." Less naive than ourselves, our valiant British allies had, for a nice commission, fobbed off on us equipment manufactured by those spurned and sickening Germans, whom we had thought forever expelled from humankind.
No doubt the British had never felt constrained to put much credence in the severed hands of Belgian children and in the murderous candy.

These bloody legends were augmented by many others of the most varied kind. Another one which stirred the conscience of the world was the affair of the Belgian snipers.
There is certainly no question that the Germans went all out in combat. That was the way wars were fought in those days, the military manners of the age. If soldiers were fired on by villagers, the village paid for it. Houses went up in flames. The presumed civilian aggressors - violators of the rules of land warfare of that era - were hunted down and often killed. The British had been no less quick to act in their campaigns in India, nor the Americans in their march westward, nor the French of Napoleon during the campaign in Spain, to judge by the atrocities immortalized by Goya. In the course of their dash across Belgium in August 1914, the Germans unquestionably killed a certain number of civilians who were not necessarily innocent and not necessarily guilty. The settling of accounts took place on the spot, in the heat of the moment.
The Germans explained that when they were ambushed by civilians, they simply had to counter with severity. For me, a youngster eight years old, one case was beyond dispute. In my little town of Bouillon, a neighbor took up a perch, armed with his rifle, atop a tall fir on the main road and fired on the Germans when they came into view. Three days later two other citizens of Bouillon fired on other enemy soldiers. So there were instances of Belgian sniping, at least those two. But to have spoken of it would have constituted a kind of treason.
In August 1914 it was necessary to assert that not a single civilian had opened fire from ambush. The Belgian people had not taken any part in the sniping, nor fired on a single advancing German. Here, too, the contention took on the aspect of dogma. The Legend of the Snipers: that was the title of a hefty book sold throughout Belgium after the war.

This tale of the massacre of completely innocent civilians thus became another international catch-phrase of Allied propaganda.
It took a very simple idea on the part of a German of rank who had been exasperated by these accusations to set matters straight. He was the Baron van der Lancken, a diplomat and very well known in Parisian society before 1914. Before him, no one thought of consulting the essential records, the files of the Germans who were wounded. In the military hospitals every wounded man had a chart on which the nature of his wounds was noted. Van der Lancken made an exhaustive investigation of all the charts of the Germans wounded in Belgium in August 1914. He discovered that hundreds of the men had been wounded not by bullets or shrapnel, but by shotgun pellets! Everything was now clear. Those hundreds of Germans wounded by buckshot, as if they had been wild game, couldn't have been shot by French or Belgian or British soldiers; someone had to have fired at them with guns intended for the Sunday hunt. Hence the countermeasures, the ravaging of a few villages and towns where civilians had rashly shot at the Germans in contravention of international law.
The Hague Convention was quite explicit: only soldiers who were recognizable as such were allowed to bear arms. Civilians were excluded from combat unless they wore a uniform or at the very least some distinctive and very obvious sign. Otherwise the use of a weapon was and is grounds for execution.

There was in Belgium a secondary category of impromptu combatants not authorized by the international conventions: the civil guards.
The latter formed a sort of town militia that was prohibited from taking any part in the war. That express prohibition was emphasized to them on August 4, 1914, the first day of hostilities. Some of them did not comply and, armed with their old service rifles, here and there fired on the invaders, provoking bloody reprisals.
The newspaper of these local guards moreover had a provocative name: Le Franc-Tireur (The Sniper). But a sniper automatically places himself outside international law if he is not normally a member of the military units provided for by law in the event of war.
It would be the same in 1940-1945, when Germans were many a time killed in Belgium, in Holland, and in France by members of the "resistance"-men disguised as civilians, indistinguishable from the general population, who disappeared once they had struck. Such attacks were outside international law. When irresponsible men commit them, such illegal acts are sometimes dearly paid for, often by hostages in lieu of the attackers, who have disappeared. The primary culprit is the non-soldier who fires, wounds, or kills, not the soldier who takes justified reprisals. Such was the general case with regard to the civilians killed in Belgium in 1914.

Every conceivable story was used to build up hatred during the course of the First World War. The Germans had been so barbarous, if you can imagine it, that they had everywhere deliberately cut down the apple trees of France.
An accusation ridiculous on the face of it, but for a few less trees in the orchards of France or a few apples missing from the fruitseller's window, a hysterical campaign would be unleashed with repercussions clear to the coral reefs of Australia and the glaciers of Greenland.
What interest could the Germans possibly have in depriving the French of a few apple tarts? If it had been a question of corn or cattle, well and good; the Allies had no compunctions after the armistice of 1918 about requisitioning foodstuffs, including herds of cattle, in a starving Germany against which they had long maintained the cruelest of blockades. But apples?
The stories of devastated orchards made no sense. The Germans, to be sure, now and then cut down trees that interfered with their artillery fire. All the armies of the world would do the same thing. In January 1983, in Lebanon, months after the cessation of hostilities, the Israelis were still cutting down groves of poplars that form a screen south of Beirut, limiting the field of vision at the approaches to the airport. In no way did the Germans commit graver crimes in chopping down a few fruit trees that were in the way. No matter. The few apples the French didn't get to bite into would be one more weapon in the arsenal of Allied propaganda. Not since Adam and Eve has a story about apples created such a hullabaloo.

***

That is not to say there were no Germans here and there capable of violence. There are savages in all countries; humanity is not a host of angels. The French, the Belgians, the British, the Americans, too, had their sadists who committed war crimes as often, and sometimes more, than the defeated Germans. The only difference is that the victors came out of the affair with glory, and instead of being condemned to death, reaped decorations, promotions, and liberal pensions.
Three quarters of a century after the First World War, the accusations of cut-off hands, of civilians killed, of apple trees destroyed, which created such a stir at the time, appear almost insignificant today. What do they amount to alongside, not the legends, but the facts that the world has known since then? Facts such as the frightful terrorist bombings of Hamburg and Dresden and so many other German cities during the Second World War, bombings in which hundreds of thousands of defenseless civilians were carbonized. Or such as the atom bombings of the civilian population of a Japan that asked only to surrender.
Each time the goal has been to create hate and counterhate, an overriding objective in 1914 especially. In the month of August the war had ground to a halt, and it was necessary to keep the weary or disheartened people in a state of frenzied excitement. Hatred, the number one weapon, fired man's mind. What did it matter if there wasn't a word of truth to the horrifying stories? The propaganda rendered the Germans hateful: that was its only aim.
The waves of that anti-German hatred still roll after three quarters of a century. Not that men still talk of cut-off hands; most people have never heard that tale. Young people look at you in amazement and even suspicion if you tell them about it. The stories of the snipers and the apple trees are no longer remembered either.
Some people occasionally remember that Belgium, so often raped in the course of her history, was violated once again on 1914 by the Germans in their mad dash towards Paris.
The particular hatreds created then no longer have their old vigor, but a dark and profound aversion to the Germans has stolen into the minds of millions since those days. Without genuine reason they hate the Germans. They recognize that the Germans are first-rate as regards their factories and in their business dealings; that they gave the civilized world Goethe, Schiller, Darer, Kant, Nietzsche, and Wagner. But for millions of non-Germans, the Germans are brutes, capable of anything.
That summary judgement, born of the invented horrors laid to the Germans in 1914, has remained in the subconscious of the public. Let the occasion arise again, and that mentality is reborn at once, as we saw in 1940-1945. Anything at all will be believed if it is charged to the Germans.
Whether it's a question of gas chambers in which, to believe the figures of the accusers, the victims would have to have been crowded together thirty-two persons per square meter twenty-four hours a day; or whether a description is being given to you of the crematory furnaces which, if they had to burn up all the bodies assigned to them by the Jewish propaganda, would still be working at full capacity in the year 2050, or even 2080.
When it's a matter of denigrating Germans, nothing need be verified. Any testimony whatsoever, whether from liar, conman, swindler, or whether or wrested from an accused person by torture, is swallowed with rapture. It has been decided in advance that Germans can't ever have been anything but dreadful cutthroats.
Countless persons still unconsciously carry around the old complexes born of the hocus-pocus of 1914, accepting everything as true, however improbable, unreasonable, or even grotesque, without weighing or studying a thing. "Those German monsters!," they think. And the matter is settled.

***

The strangest thing is that this hatred of the Germans is unique.
Since 1789 French governments have far surpassed the Germans in horror.

Napoleon didn't send the inhabitants of occupied countries to work camps but to the hecatombs of his subsequent campaigns (196,000 soldiers were conscripted by force in Belgium alone). In Spain the French armies committed horrible atrocities. But no disparaging memory of the French nation is cultivated.
It is the same with the British establishment, who steeped the whole world in blood in the course of subjugating its colonies and even carried out the total annihilation of a race in the mass murder of the Tasmanians.
And the same is true of the American politicians, who took half of Mexico at the point of a gun and enslaved millions of blacks, and who exterminated hundreds of thousands of Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki with frightful cruelty. If Truman and his backers had accepted Japan's surrender offer, instead of demanding "unconditional surrender," all those lives would have been spared.
When it is a question of non-Germans, such slaughters are the misfortunes of war. As news items they are forgotten after a few decades. But for the Germans, the ordeal of their "war crimes," true or false, is never over. Germany's sins, real or invented, are to be publicized until the end of time.
The persistance of this hatred illustrates the force, and the frenzy, with which public opinion was poisoned by the Allied governments between 1914 and 1918, in order to stir up their people at home to fight and to recruit a maximum of cannon fodder from abroad. And to the extent to which the public was led astray in the Allied countries, the political and moral foundations of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 were inexorably established.
By eliminating or inventing diplomatic documents - the tsarist bureaucracy destroyed or faked some eighty per cent of its foreign policy documents from 1914 to 1917 - the Allied leadership convinced the world that the horrible Germans were solely and totally responsible for the war of 1914. On the day of reckoning, June 28, 1919 at Versailles, the barbarous Germans would pay the price of their total responsibility for the war. The Versailles Treaty of 1919, in the same spirit as the war, would be the Treaty of Vengeance against German crimes, for which no punishment would be sufficiently severe.

***

But it would be a long and bloody road to Versailles. At year's end in 1914, on the mud and snow-clogged European fronts, millions of men worn out from suffering no longer had even the strength to imagine how they could ever extricate themselves from the mire in which the corpses of their enemies and their companions rotted by the tens, the hundreds of thousands.
If the leaders of the slaughter intended to prolong the war at all cost, it would be necessary to procure immense quantities of raw materials, the stockpiling of which no one had given a thought to before the hostilities, since the war would certainly be of short duration.
Above all it was imperative to obtain millions of new soldiers, at little or no cost, no matter where or how, in Europe or outside of Europe, without regard for men's opinions, their freedoms, or their lives.
From 1915 on, many peoples subjected to this slave trade would be sold at auction. Twenty-seven countries would be dragged into that insanity, to be sure in the name of Right. In the name of Right, 32 million men would be maimed; from 1915 to 1918, 8 million dead would lie scattered and mangled in filthy mud all the way from the Yser to Mount Sinai.
The quest for future cannon fodder began. First Turkey, then Italy, would be dragged into the affair.

CHAPTER XXI

Debacle on the Dardanelles

The Russian Pan-Slavists, in greater distress than the others, were the first ones to demand the intervention of Italy.
Despite the weakness of Austria-Hungary, the Russian army had not been able to smash her. By 1915 only the creation of a new front on the northern extremity of Italy could offer the likelihood of providing the tsarist regime some relief. If intervention by the Italians could be achieved, part of the Austrian forces on the eastern front would have to be transferred immediately to the new field of battle in the Tyrol. That would mean hundreds of thousands fewer combatants facing the Russians and Serbians. "Right" had nothing to do with these plans.
Italy was not threatened by anyone. On the contrary, the later Italy entered the European conflict, the fewer deaths the adventure would cost.
But the Pan-Slavists could not wait, as is shown by the astounding remarks that Grand Duke Nicholas had charged Ambassador Paléologue with transmitting to Poincaré at the end of 1914, after only a few months of war.
The grand duke's warning was as sharp as a saber thrust:
"I must speak to you of serious matters. 1 am not talking to you now as Grand Duke Nicholas but as a Russian general. 1 am obligated to tell you that the immediate cooperation of Italy and Romania is an imperative necessity."
The former warmonger-in-chief of July 1914 had added:
"I say again and I emphasize: of inestimable value."
Yet the Russian government had nearly half a million more soldiers at its disposal than the Austrians and Germans combined. At one time the tsarist regime disposed of twice as many. At the end of January 1915, she mustered 1,843,0(30 soldiers against 1,071,000 German and Austrian troops Combined. But already Russia's leaders felt the ground giving way. That the Austro-German pressure be reduced was imperative.
Otherwise, though hardly into the war, Russia stood to lose it.

***

The situation of the western allies was scarcely less perilous.
Despite the costly victory of the battle of the Marne, which had represented no more than the reconquest of a department, the French high command had persisted in its wish to return to the offensive in the dead of winter. On December 16, 1914 it had tried to break the German front in Artois, and had been unable to drive a wedge in anywhere.
From December 20 to January 30, 1915, it attacked again, this time in Champagne. A second defeat. The attack was resumed from February 16 to March 16, 1915. A third defeat. Miserable terrain, abominably wet. Impossible to make any headway. The artillery was inaccurate: on several occasions the French guns fired on the French infantry. No advance, and a terrible massacre on the German barbed-wire entanglements, which were uncrossable.
Yet the lesson of this triple carnage would have no effect. In May and in June of 1915 French, English, and even Canadian troops would again be sent off to the slaughter. The maximum ground gained would be a kilometer at one point, four kilometers at another.
In September 1915 the British and French would give that back for the fifth time in less than ten months. Then the command would double the stakes, mounting two offensives simultaneously, in Artois and in Champagne.
Joffre's order of the day: "Allow the enemy neither rest nor respite until the achievement of victory."
But as he confessed to the King of Belgium: "It may succeed and it may not."
It didn't. The British command counted on winning through a surprise weapon: poison gas. But the winds were unfavorable, and the gas rolled back upon their own troops. In Artois it was impossible even to cross the first river, the Souche. In Champagne the Germans cleverly slipped away, settling down four kilometers to the rear in a second line of positions. The. French would bang their heads against a stone wall there for eleven days. Finally they would have to end their useless attacks and dig in once again.
"At whatever cost," Joffre had said.
They were learning the cost: 400,000 dead or taken prisoner and a million wounded or evacuated due to illness. British losses were of similar proportion. The front had become a deathtrap. A different tack was needed, some pretext or other to bring about additional fronts on which new, foreign armies would bear the brunt instead of the French and British armies. The Tommies and poilus had been bled white five times in succession in a matter of months and were at a point of an exhaustion which could prove fatal.

***

The Russian and Anglo-French political interests thus coincided. The winning over of Italy was of great importance. An Italian front would provide a safety valve, and Italy represented a source of several million new soldiers, a magnet that would draw enemy forces to the Tyrol and to the Adriatic.
Italy's support was all the more indispensable because Germany herself had been reinforced by Turkey. Turkey, as a matter of fact, had entered the war against the tsarist expansionists on October 29, 1914.
Just before Britain's declaration of war on August 4, 1914, Germany had been able to slip her two splendid cruisers, the Göben and the Breslau, through the Straits and past Constantinople as nimble and quick as two flying fish. A few days earlier they had still been in the middle of the Mediterranean. In the course of a sensational odyssey, they had been able to elude the Allied ships pursuing them, making sport of them thanks to their speed. Since then thay had bottled up the Russian fleet, preventing the Russians from exporting wheat and receiving war materiel.
On August 29, 1914 they had boldly bombarded Sevastopol, Odessa, and Novorossiysk.
One important advantage for Germany: with Turkey in the war, considerable Russian forces would be drawn to the Caucasus and held there. Another outstanding consideration: Turkey was Muslim, the sultan the spiritual leader of Islam. Turkey might thus stir up all the Islamic countries then under British control and foment rebellion in them. At that time Turkey extended almost to the Suez Canal: her armies would perhaps even be able to reach it and cut that vital artery of the British Empire.

***

The Allies, conscious of the danger, had tried everything since the beginning of August 1914 to counteract German offers. The British and the French had gladly made the Turks extraordinary concessions in Thrace and in the Aegean Sea in order to win them over to their side, or at last to keep them neutral. But the Russians had gone to war on August 1, 1914 precisely and primarily in order to win Constantinople. Consequently, the Russian expansionists not only didn't dread a war on the part of the Allies against the Turks - they longed for it. Thus the Anglo-French-Turkish negotiations ran completely counter to their own intentions. Sazonov replied to the Anglo-French negotiators that in allowing talks he desired only "to gain some time without making any declarations which would bind us to anything."
Britain, anxious to make an alliance with Turkey, had gone so far as to offer to guarantee her the integrity of her territory - hence of her capital, Constantinople, the number-one objective of the Pan-Slavs. At the same time, however, with a hypocrisy worthy of centuries of duplicity, the British establishment had informed the Russians in great secrecy that "the guarantee was valid only for the duration of the war in progress," and that "Russia would always be able, after the conclusion of the general peace, to resolve the question of the Straits to her own satisfaction" (Renouvin, La Crise européenne, p. 263)
The Russians, knowing the British and sensing the trap, demanded a written pledge of unlimited duration, which put an end to these duplicitous negotiations. The parleying had lasted no longer then it would have taken an ox to cross the Bosphorus. It hadn't been viable; the Anglo-French aims and the Russian aims were completely antithetical. When it had come to the bidding, Germany had won.
The Pan-Slavists, their pretensions unscathed and the game of the perfidious British establishment countered, were no better off: for they were now faced with another front right in the middle of the Caucasus. This made it all the more imperative for them to mitigate the new danger by creating another Allied front in Italy or Romania.

***

In autumn, 1914 the Japanese were able to provide the Allies with a measure of compensation for their misadventures with the Turks; on August 23, 1914, the Japanese, on the other side of the globe, entered the war against Germany. The internal quarrels of the Europeans were no more to Japan than a news story from a faraway land. The only importance of the war in their eyes was the opportunity it afforded them of seizing Germany's indefensible territories in the middle of the Pacific, and in the Far East, in particular the outstanding naval base of Kiaochow in the Shantung province of China. The Germans, their hands full in Europe, were at a loss to defend Far Eastern possessions ten thousand kilometers from Berlin while their lives were at stake at Chateau-Thierry on the Marne at the end of August 1914. On November 7, 1914, the handful of Germans defending Shantung was obliged to capitulate. At the same time Japan seized the port of Tsingtao.
The Allies, especially the French, naively imagined that the Japanese, their pockets thus effortlessly filled, would immediately come running to the West as intrepid "knights on the side of Right." Unbelievably ingenuous, the French and British leaders asked the Japanese to form an expeditionary corps of three or four army corps for that purpose. That would have brought hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers to the European fronts. "We must not overlook any means," French Minister Delcassé declared.
In fact, the Japanese would not be seen in Paris until forty years later, after two world wars. Their weapons would then be autos, cameras, and video cassettes.
A note from the Japanese government politely informed the Allies that apart from one or another symbolic mission, its troops were assigned to their home territory and did not intend to take part in foreign conflicts of whose causes they knew nothing.
The French politicians simply couldn't understand. The Japanese prime minister had to explain it to them a second time: "What is the need of sending Japanese troops to Europe if we have no direct interest there?"

***

It was Churchill, imaginative to the point of extravagance, who furnished the first new field of battle. He had already dreamt of a landing in Schleswig, then in the Adriatic near Pola. Now he fixed his gaze upon Europe's other extremity, the Dardanelles. It was a way of chastising the Turks for not responding to British promises and for having preferred those blockheaded Germans. The Germans had been on the best of terms with the Sublime Porte for some years. In Anatolia, before the war, they were constructing a railway line intended to link Germany and Baghdad. Thanks to the new railroad, Turkey was opening up her territory to European trade.
In exchange, German industrialists had obtained mining and oil concessions on both sides of this Asian railway line. There remained only nine hundred kilometers of rail to throw across the desert, and Berlin would have a balcony on the Persian Gulf. For the British bankers of the City the intrusion of the Germans into the Near East was poaching. The Gulf belonged to them. Hurling a British army at the Turks would drive off competitors, and assure their monopoly on petroleum, which in 1914 was as British as whiskey was Scotch. Finally, forcing passage of the Straits would enable them to join up with the Russians.
"It is hard to imagine an operation offering more hope," Balfour prophesied.
Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, was so sure of entering Constantinople, like the Ottomans in 1453, that he proposed naming his expeditionary force the "Constantinople Expeditionary Force."
On January 28, 1915, the British government ratified his plan. There was grumbling in the ranks however. Lord Fisher, his assistant, was convinced that without the complete support of the Greeks - who were clinging to their neutrality - the operation would be a monumental failure. But to rope the Greeks into the campaign meant bringing them to Constantinople, which they were as anxious to conquer as were the Russian Pan Slavists. That ran the risk of seeing an "archon" (as in the time of the Byzantine empire) set himself up there instead of the tsar. George V had promised the city to his St. Petersburg cousin, who was absolutely determined to be another Basiliscus. So it would be necessary to dispense with the Greeks temporarily.
There was another complication. The Allied generals, whose forces had taken a terrible beating on the French front, refused to furnish any contingents. Churchill, who would have ousted the Eternal Father from his celestial throne if he had found him at all hesitant, wasn't disconcerted in the slightest by something so minor. He wouldn't even consult with Joffre, nor with the French, whom he knew to be hostile to his plan. He decided that he would open up the Sea of Marmora with his fleet alone.
The Turkish forts at the neck of the Straits? The artillery of Churchill's fifteen cruisers and battleships would blow them to bits. The channel? His dredgers would clean it out like a swimming pool.

The French fleet would take part, too, in this great nautical junket. Only the Russians, smelling Greeks everywhere, and at bottom distrustful of this British plan, refused to participate. Yet, the prize having been promised to them, they more than anyone else should have been interested in the project's success.
Churchill was so enthusiastic that Lord Kitchener, though not convinced, finally agreed like everyone else, but with an odd reservation: "One of the merits of the plan is that if it doesn't meet expectations, it will be possible to break off the attack."
Churchill, a cigar in his fist like the lance of Patroclus, sounded the call to action on March 18, 1915. Under the command of Admiral Carden, the magnificent British fleet, augmented by French ships, fell into line at the entrance to the Straits. The Turkish batteries, camouflaged on the nearest hills, were soon silenced. The Turks' German advisers had planned the defense very well, however. The shores were sown with traps and the water with mines. The big Allied warships hit them one after the other, and each one sent a thousand or two thousand sailors to the bottom. Breaking through was impossible. It was a Trafalgar in reverse. The bombardment continued for five days. A number of Turkish batteries were destroyed, but since no landing forces accompanied the expedition, it was without success.
The German and Turkish losses were insignificant, 200 men in all, while strewn in every direction were the bodies of thousands of Allied sailors, floating like buoys in the shining seas.
Without landing troops, it was useless to try again to pass through the channel. Each attempt meant sending cruisers and destroyers to the bottom, their admirable crews standing at attention at the moment of their death. Churchill had showed himself nothing but a braggart, and a gravedigger of English and Scottish sailors. It was necessary to withdraw, albeit painfully and with difficulty. A third of the expedition's men and some of his Majesty's finest warships lay strewn about the bottom of the Dardanelles forever.

This disaster inflicted on her fleet by a few Germans and Turks was intolerable to the pride of Britannia, ruler of the waves. It had to be answered. What had been lacking was support from ground forces. Therefore, despite all Churchill's promises that the fleet alone could clear the sea, an expeditionary corps was mounted, with the task of pinning down the Turks along the Hellespont.
As always with Churchill, it was begun in an improvised fashion. There had been no careful preparation by the combined staffs. Thirty thousand men were to be landed in confusion; and it was they who would be pinned down, not the Turks, whom the German tacticians maneuvered in masterly fashion. The luckless French and English soldiers on the beaches died of thirst, shot, shell, and then typhus. They had to be reinforced: five new divisions were landed on the scorching sands at the foot of the enemy fortifications, where they in turn were cut to pieces by high-angle fire. In London, generals and admirals hurled abuse at each other. A cabinet crisis ensued. The Allied soldiers on the Straits were at death's door, and again new divisions were sent in piecemeal. Thousands of Australians were thrown into the breach.
Like the French in the Belgian Ardennes in August 1914, the Allies did not even have good maps of the region. There were no hospital ships, even though a whole army lay dying under the torrid sun without food or supplies. Troops were landed and landed again, only to be decimated each time. Nearly half a million men would follow one another to that hellish shore: 145,000 would be killed or wounded there.
The survivors, heartsick to the point of nausea, could be thrown back into the sea by the Germans and Turks at any time.
It was even decided in London to divert and recall the relief convoys, including the clothing sent to withstand the winter. Three weeks later the cold and snow swept down on the unfortunates: two hundred died of the cold; five thousand had their feet frozen. It was one of the great tragedies of the war. After the Somme, Artois, and Champagne, in 1915 yet another dreadful disaster for the Allies.
Churchill extricated himself by having himself sent on a staff mission to France, where he was tolerated for only six months.
As for the expeditionary force, it was impossible to bring back from the Dardanelles the defeated troops, who, ravaged by typhus, were skeletal. One had to save face. Salvation was Salonika, a large Greek port, hence neutral. Allegedly the British had entered the war on August 4, 1914 because of the violation of Belgian neutrality. Greece was as neutral in 1915 as Belgium had been the previous year. She was nonetheless to be violated in her turn. Such was the "War of Right."
In August, 1915, despite the protest of the king of Greece, Constantine I, the Allies landed with their rifles, their cannon, and their dying on the "neutral" docks of Salonika.

CHAPTER XXII

Italy Joins the Fray

Even before Salonika, grimacing War had dragged Italy into its dance of death. Did the Italian people want it? The historical evidence available today enables one to answer with a flat no.
Even Mussolini, who was the Allies' outstanding supporter in Italy in 1915, had taken a stand against any participation in the conflict at its outset. "Down with war! The time has come for the Italian proletariat to keep faith with the old watchword: not a man, not a cent." The extremist of 1914 would a little later become one of the most severely wounded soldiers of the Italian campaign, hit by dozens of shrapnel fragments.
With the formation of the Triple Alliance (Germany-Austria-Turkey), it had been thought that Italy would be persuaded to enter the war on the side of the Alliance, to whom she was bound by treaty. But in 1914, as again in 1939, Italy, the land of Macchiavelli - i.e., sensibly perspicacious - cared little for pretty sentiments, which often camouflaged cold calculation, and didn't pretend to be overly troubled by problems of conscience.
What problems? The others had hardly been troubled by them in 1914. Wasn't it strictly its own self-interest that had prompted the Russian government to convert the Balkans into a shield? Was it not strictly in their own interest that the French politicians had made such use of the Russian cannon-fodder to regain Alsace-Lorraine? Was the British establishment not motivated by interest when it used the pretext of the violation of Belgium in order to trip up a dangerous naval and business rival? "Right" is rouge that is put on for effect. Why should not self-interest, the law of nations, have been the barometer of the Italians as well?
In international parleys Italian politicians have no equals for maneuvering, protesting loudly, becoming indignant, throwing their arms in the air, and all but crying, as if the other negotiators were strangling them and murdering them. Comedy or tragedy, they play both roles to the hilt.

When the Italian government declared its neutrality on August 3, 1914, it was motivated by just one idea: to cash in on that neutrality. Not to let anyone play on its sympathies, but to see which side would offer the most. Salandra, president of the Italian council, didn't mince words. He automatically put aside "every preoccupation, every preconceived notion that was not exclusively inspired by the exclusive and unlimited devotion to the fatherland, by the sacred interest of Italy" (October 16, 1914).
But at the end of the autumn of 1914, what was the "egoistically sacred" and "exclusive" interest of that delightful country? To achieve its interest, was it absolutely necessary to take up arms in favor of one of the sides?
"I believe," sagely declared Giolitti, former president and a liberal in temperament, "that under the present conditions in Europe, we might obtain something appreciable without war."
That "something appreciable" was the Italian Trentino. The sons of Romulus and Remus had the teeth of a she-wolf, like their patroness of twenty-five hundred years before. Many remembered ancient Rome, mistress of the world. Some of them, like Gabriele d'Annunzio, dreamed theatrically of a grandiose immolation of the Italians: "They will have to suffer resplendent blood letting, to soothe a radiant grief!"
The Italian Trentino was a reasonable demand. For people of the same race and blood to be reunited was just as sound.
Overdoing it and swallowing up foreign peoples against their will, on the other hand, was in keeping neither with the "Right" so highly praised, nor perhaps even with wisdom. Many are the nations in history that have suffered from an indigestion of alien peoples.
What would be Italy's choice?

And what was Vienna going to offer? At the outset, the Austrian government had dragged its feet. Then Franz Josef warmed up to the idea of turning over the foothills of the Southern Tyrol to Italy. Austria was even disposed to let her port of Trieste be turned into an independent state. As for Albania and the Turkish islands of the Dodecanese, Austria would give the Italians carte blanche.
Without firing a single shot, Italy was thus able to make not merely appreciable but considerable gains. To obtain the Austrians' cooperation, Wilhelm II, who had no wish to see another enemy fall upon him, brought great pressure to bear on Vienna. He sent his former chancellor, Prince von Bülow, as a special plenipotentiary to Rome. Von Bülow was an Italophile and an Austrophobe, and the intimate friend, as was his wife, of the Italian Queen Mother. Until the last week of his stay, that is to say until May 21, 1915, he tactfully endeavored to keep Italy at peace, while striving to satisfy her territorial demands. On May 9, 1915, Prince von Bülow, accompanied by the ambassador of Austria-Hungary himself, confidentially presented the Italian government with the following note:
"Austria-Hungary is prepared to cede that part of the Tyrol inhabited by Italians, Gradisca, and the west bank of the Isonzo insofar as it is Italian; Trieste is to become a free city within the Austro-Hungarian empire, with an Italian university and town council. Austria recognizes Italian sovereignty over Valona and states that she has no political interest in Albania."
"Fatte presto [hurry it up]," King Victor Emmanuel told von Bülow on several occasions when this very important offer was finally delivered to him. But without its being known in the embassies, the irretrievable had already taken place. Two weeks earlier, on April 24, 1915, Italy had come to a secret understanding with the Allies in London.
Victor Emmanuel had kept up appearances. When von Bülow had come to deliver to him personally a letter from William II ardently imploring him to remain faithful to their friendship and their treaty, the king of Italy had spoken of his duties vis-à-vis public opinion, the majority of the country, and the parliament.
In fact, no party in Rome had a majority in the spring of 1915. Only the common people, heavily subjected to Allied propaganda, had made clear their feelings. The Italian minister of the interior himself had clearly recognized it: "If there were a plebiscite, the majority would vote against war."
Giolitti, who was also against the war, had received the support of a large majority of the deputies: 320 out of 508. In a gesture absolutely unprecedented in a parliamentary government, those 320 deputies had come one by one to deliver their calling cards to the personal residence of the head of the neutralist party, in order to signify their refusal to side with the Allies. Salandra, the prime minister, felt himself so repudiated that he resigned. The labor unions, for their part, were massively opposed to entering the war. As for the people themselves, in reality they could hardly manifest their will democratically, because in 1915, seventy-eight per cent of the Italians still did not have the right to vote. At that time, an Italian had to possess a school diploma in order to vote. Thus less than a fourth of the citizens were voters.

How, then, was Italy's entry into the war brought about? With the help of street riots carried to the point of direct violence, fomented by bands of guerrifondigi [warmongers] who, by a wholesale breaking of windows, had forced their way into the Italian parliament to cries of "Viva la guerra!"
Allied funds, principally French, had been distributed in Rome with extreme generosity. The newspapers, showered with subsidies even more openly than the warmongering French press of 1914, had whipped up public feelings. Mussolini had founded a newspaper that was destined to become famous: II Popolo d'Italia. The future fascist leader had made it an inflammatory sheet, exciting both a fury for war among his socialist readers and patriotism among the irredentists who dreamed of replanting the old fasces on a maximum of the lands of the old Roman empire. D'Annunzio, with a bald skull atop an overexcited brain, and his lyre in hand, provided the epic tone.
This warmongering movement also enjoyed the extremely active support of Freemasonry. All these interventionists combined constituted no more than a minority, but they raised a din like the geese of the Roman capitol of old. No one else could be heard. They took to the streets, screamed, created havoc. Victor Emmanuel, frightened by the broken windowpanes of the parliament building, refused Salandra's resignation.

***

Salandra played only a modest role in this whole affair. He was a mediocre politician without any real power. The real wirepuller was a very bizarre Italian named Sonnino: a Jew born in Lebanon of a Jewish father and a Welsh mother. Another strange characteristic: his mother had made a Protestant of him, quite surprising in a country where almost everyone was a Catholic. Jew, Levantine, Protestant, half-Welsh, Sonnino would be the standard-bearer of internationalist Italy.
The Austrian offer, however, offered the Italians considerable territorial advantages on a golden platter, and without a single one of their soldiers having to suffer a scratch. It was presented rather reluctantly, moreover, by the Austrians, who complained, not without reason, at the blackmail, but who, at the imperative urging of William II, had to resign themselves to yielding.
Giolitti had asked "parecchio" (plenty). In the end, Italy was going to come away with all of the South Tyrol and an autonomous Trieste, as well as recognition of her freedom of action in Albania and the Dodecanese, without giving up a single lira or shedding a drop of blood.
"Italy is following a policy of blackmail against us that has no parallel in history," Bethmann-Hollweg moaned, all the while he was giving in to it.
But they were at an auction sale. Sonnino would sell Italy to the highest bidder. The Italian people, inflamed by the Allied propaganda, gave no thought to the possible cost of this foreign largesse. For the Allies were offering everything: the Italian Trentino most certainly, but the German Trentino as well, which would mean that hundreds of thousands of non- Italians would be absorbed by a foreign land without their consent. That, of course, was strictly contrary to the principle of self-determination for which the French and British politicians later claimed to be fighting.

The people living along the shores of the Adriatic, similarly offered to Italy by the Allies, were to suffer the same violation of their "right." Who asked the opinion of the inhabitants not only of Istria, but of Dalmatia? Of Albania? Of the entire string of coastal islands? They numbered in the millions, these largely Slavic and Albanian peoples whom the Allies were ready, out of self-interest, to turn into Italian citizens.
It was for many of these South Slays that the assassins of Sarajevo had unleashed the great European carnage on June 28, 1914. It was to assure a Slavic expansion as far as the Dalmatian ports in question that Russia's Pan-Slavists had begun the military phase of the war. Now these territories were to be given to the Italians on the pretext that some emperor or other had had his villa there two thousand years ago, and that some thousands of Italian fishermen and shopkeepers had gone ashore one day and taken residence there. But why, in that case, not promise Lyon, the native city of the Emperor Claudius, to Italy as well? Or Seville, the birthplace of the Emperor Trajan? Or even Paris, the ancient Roman Lutetia? And what of London, which Caesar had conquered?

Russia, for her part, wanted no part of such an award of Balkan territory to Italy. Her leaders opposed it with all their might. But the front was collapsing, and Grand Duke Nicholas feared imminent disaster. So Russia had to accept it for the time being. In fact, however, she was determined to sabotage the Allied offer and nullify it at the first opportunity. And that was how it turned out. The Serbians, in 1919, would be the big winners in the Balkans. The Allies' promises, despite the treaties duly signed, were thus empty, a fundamentally immoral game that made a caricature out of the so edifying declarations made by the "defenders of Right" in 1914.

What is left to add about the territories in Asia Minor that the Allies offered to Sonnino as extra booty? The Italians had demanded, in addition to the shores of the Adriatic and the German Brenner pass, that they be granted Cilicia, Southeast Anatolia, Southern Cappadocia, and the region of Smyrna as an Asian gift. But the Greeks, when the Allies were begging for their intervention the following year, would surely demand in their turn similar annexations in Turkey! Likewise the Russians, who had entered the auction room first, on August 1, 1914. For their part, the British and French had already secretly chosen the morsels they would cut from the Turkish spoils for themselves. To the Arabs, finally, in order to entice them into the caravan of death, camels in the lead, the British in great secrecy had promised that the territories they inhabited would be converted into Arab states. Thus the same booty in the same area had been promised three, four, and five times. And by what right? All the inhabitants were Turkish subjects, i.e. were non-Europeans. Had they been consulted? Were they, the ones primarily concerned, willing to be auctioned off like chattels? Did they even have the slightest idea of these barter-treaties concluded behind their backs?
It was of no importance to the politicians. They were sold to the Italians, or more precisely to Sonnino, who, through his father, had a bit of the Levant in him. In order to cement the deal, the Allies committed themselves to grant him even more territory, because, of course, they planned to snap up and divide the German colonies in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. To bring Italy into the war, they would have promised Vancouver and Valparaiso to Sonnino if he had wanted them.

These treacherous dealings would result in appalling disputes after the war. In 1918 and 1919, Clemenceau would heap insults upon Italy. But in 1915, Italy had to be seduced at any price, especially if the price could be paid by others. The Allies, if they wished to crush Germany, had an absolute need of another one or two million soldiers and a new battlefront, in order to take the pressure off the paralyzed western front, and to save Russia, whom the Austrians and Germans had by the throat, from utter disaster.
Thus, on April 26, 1915, was signed the secret Italo-Allied treaty, would be known to history as the Treaty of London. Italy pledged to declare war within a month. On May 21, 1915, it was done.
In the course of the first weeks the Italians advanced to the Isonzo and then, in October 1915, to Lake Garda. They were able to enjoy a few local successes after that. But they were poorly armed and poorly commanded. At Caporetto they would suffer a crushing reverse. They would even be hurled back beyond the Piave.
"But they're fleeing, my lions!," Marshal Cardona would cry. French units would have to rush to the rescue. In the end, instead of being aided by the Italians, the Allies would be forced to aid the Italians. In a word, they had violated the most elementary rights of peoples in the Treaty of London of April 26, 1915, only to embroil themselves in new complications, military complications that would quickly be followed by nationalistic animosities. The Italians would no longer be able to stand the French. The French, in turn, would hate the Italians.
The intervention of Italy in the war in 1915 had no more effect than a sword thrust into water, or rather into a mire of blood. An evil business from the start, it turned into a military disappointment. The Allies gained nothing, and it cost Italy the blood of her people. For a long time the Italians would detest the French and the British. Out of that great blighted hope, Fascism would be born.

CHAPTER XXIII

More Balkan Intrigue

Italy's entry into the war was no more than a small beginning. After Italy, some twenty other countries would be snared in the traps set out by Messrs. Poincaré and Asquith.
Meanwhile, the Germans and the Austrians, on their guard, had won over another Balkan country, Bulgaria.
Bulgaria's strategic position was important. If she entered on the side of the Germans, she would immediately assure them and the Austrians contact with their new allies, the Turks. On the other hand, if she swung to the side of the Allies, she could be the decisive base for the offensive of the Russians against Constantinople, their chief objective. She could form a geographical link for the armies of the tsar with those of Serbia, their satellite in the Balkans.
The idea of having an additional adversary, one the size of Bulgaria at their throat was bound to cause enormous worry to the Russians, who had been somewhat relieved by Italy's entry into the war.
Bulgaria was thus, for friends and enemies alike, a country whose collaboration seemed essential.
Bulgaria's leaders knew it. In August 1914 the country at first stayed quietly in its corner. Officially Bulgaria remained neutral - it was a time to see who would offer the most. Just as Sonnino had done on behalf of Italy and as the Romanians, who would be the last to decide, would do! The Bulgarians coldly calculated the advantages offered them by the rival bidders.
They felt themselves to be Slays. But they also had the blood of Mongols and Turks in their veins; and crossbred as they were with Greeks and even Germans, they were now for Constantinople and now against her. One of their kings had married the daughter of the Byzantine emperor, but then again, Basil II, called the "killer of Bulgarians," had taken 15,000 of them prisoners and pulled out their eyes as casually as if he were going through their pockets, 900 years before. And Bulgars have long memories.

In October of 1912, Hartwig, the Russian ambassador in Belgrade, had organized the first Balkan war.
He had launched the Greeks, the Montenegrins, the Serbs, and the Bulgarians in an assault on the decrepit Turks. The Bulgarians flattened the Turks at Kirk-Kilisse, at Lule Burgas, and finally at Adrianople. They approached the minarets of Constantinople.
That was too much for the tsar of Russia. King Ferdinand of Bulgaria was not an unpretentious person. Just like his great patron in St. Petersburg, he dreamed of capturing the capital of the Bosphorus and of proclaiming himself emperor there. Of course that wouldn't do at all for the tsar. Constantinople was a Russian monopoly, a fief that the tsar had reserved for himself.
The Serbians, too, were seized by jealousy to see that there were now two strong countries in the Balkans, when they definitely intended that there should never be more than one: their own.
The result was the Treaty of London in May 1913, which legalized Bulgaria's conquests. It had hardly been signed when the second Balkan war broke out in June, the following month. All the peoples between the Danube and the Aegean Seas had been whipped up by the Russian government, and they fell on ambitious Bulgaria tooth and nail. The Romanians, the Greeks, the Montenegrins, the Serbs, descended upon Bulgaria. Even the Turks, who had been the common enemy a year earlier, joined in. The Bulgarians were easily defeated. In August 1913, the Treaty of Bucharest stripped them nearly to the skin: in the west, the Serbians took Macedonia; the Romanians took Dobrudja from Bulgaria in the north; and in the south the Bulgarians had to surrender to the Turks Adrianople, the Hadrianopolis of two thousand years ago, founded by Hadrian, the native of Seville who had become emperor of Rome.
After that beating, Bulgaria, however completely Slav she might be, no longer harbored feelings of solidarity, but rather enmity, towards the Serbians, who had wasted no time carrying out frightful massacres of the Macedonians, no sooner than they had been wrested from their union with the Bulgarians. As for the Russian leaders, they had allowed Bulgaria to be nearly annihilated to assure their own claims on Constantinople, Bulgaria no longer saw them as protectors but as dangerous enemies.

The British and French governments wished to block without fail an alliance of Germany and Turkey, which would unite their enemies from the border of Denmark clear to the heart of Asia Minor, where British interests were dominant.

Winning over Bulgaria appealed to everybody because she had become militarily strong: the nation had at its disposal half a million soldiers who were generally known to be very good fighters.
To convince Bulgaria, however, the Allies would have to guarantee absolutely the restitution of the regions that the Romanians and the Serbians had taken the year before. The French politicians favored this approach: it was easier to give away what belonged to others. Macedonia was not Alsace.
With France, then, Bulgaria could easily come to an agreement - at the expense of her neighbors, as we learn from the confidential telegram of the French embassy in Bulgaria, dated November 19, 1914 (No. 99 of the archives of the ministry of foreign affairs in Paris):
Bulgaria is ready to grant us her complete assistance in exchange for guaranteeing her the acquisition of Thrace as far as the Enos-Midia line and the return of all the Macedonian regions, possession of which had been promised her by the Serbo-Bulgarian treaty of 13 March 1912.
By any reckoning, those restitutions cost the French less than a bottle of Calvados. But the Serbians? And the Romanians? And the Russians?
The Russian government demanded Constantinople as their chief war compensation which Bulgaria also coveted. The interests of the Bulgarians and the Russians were in absolute conflict.
On the other hand, the Serbians were unconditional supporters of the Russians. They were the battering ram the Pan-Slays meant to drive into the southern flank of the Austrians. It was thanks to the Serbians and partially for the Serbians that the Russians, after the double crime of Sarajevo, triggered the European war. How could they dismantle the Serbian bastion for the benefit of the Bulgarians, their direct rivals on the Bosphorus?

No matter. The Russian Pan-Slays could no longer afford the luxury of playing swashbucklers. They were in dire straits. The Germans had trounced them severely. Their commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, feeling lost, clamored for the intervention of other countries, Italy to start with, as we have seen. His minister of war was sending him scarcely a quarter of the artillery shells his batteries at the front needed if they were to avoid annihilation.
"I ask for trainloads of ammunition and they send me trainloads of priests," the grand duke sneered. He would plainly prefer the Bulgarians to the priests. But Sazonov blocked everything: "At a pinch he would accept some partial retrocessions in Macedonia," telegraphed Ambassador Paléologue, who remained very cautious. "M. Sazonov had just put forth some other diplomatic plans."
Promising King Ferdinand "some partial retrocessions" was not very much, especially since the Germans were in a position to promise a good deal more. It wouldn't cost them a pfennig to offer the Bulgarians the return of so oft partitioned Macedonia.
Paris, impatient, prodded the Russians mercilessly. The Russian Pan- Slays decided to make the Bulgarians an offer, "subject to acceptance by the Serbians." It was plain that the Serbian answer would be no. Old Pashich hadn't covered up the Sarajevo killings and provoked the war of 1914 just to go soft for the benefit of his enemy of 1913.
At the beginning of the negotiations of August 10, 1914, he had telegraphed his embassy in Paris: "Serbia didn't go to war three times in the last two years to bring about consequences which would make Bulgaria the dominant power in the Balkans. She prefers anything to such a humiliation."
Months went by and Bulgaria, despite everything, remained fairly well disposed to the Entente. But how to convince the stubborn Serbians? France and Russia made a joint representation to Pashich. The only answer they would receive was a flat refusal: "Not one centimeter of Macedonia will become Bulgarian so long as I can prevent it."

In these negotiations Russia played a strange role. She let the Serbs know that she was not a participant in the French demarche, and that though "constrained and forced into it, in reality she disapproved the granting of any concession to the Bulgarians."
If the tsarist clique paid lip service to it today, tomorrow it would do its best to destroy the agreement. On March 4, 1915 the tsar declared to his minister of war: "My decision is made: Thrace and the city of Constantinople must be incorporated into the empire." (telegram from Paléologue, No. 361)
Paris multiplied her promises in vain. The French swore that what Serbia abandoned in Macedonia she would recover a hundred times over on the Adriatic, the same gift Paris was offering to the Italians!
The Serbs, sly and mistrustful, did not wish to consider concessions to Bulgaria until after they had wrested from Austria all the booty they were demanding.
"No concession to Bulgaria relative to Macedonia will ever be considered by us before we have achieved the sum total of our aspirations at Austria's expense." (Pashich December 23, 1914)
It was useless, therefore, for the Allies to prolong a discussin that was falling on deaf ears. "To insist would be to risk offending Serbia with no chance of success." (Poincaré, L'Invasion, p. 514)
The verbosity of the Serbians would grow ever more extravagant. They would grandiloquently propose to charge right through the territory of the troublesome Bulgarians.

"We are prepared," Pashich asserted, "to occupy Bulgarian territory and thus destroy the military forces of Sofia."
When some months later Pashich found himself with his backside in the waters of the Adriatic, it would be because he had asked for it.

***

Having been thus spurned, it was inevitable that the Bulgarians would side with the Germans. On August 1, 1915, Colonel Gantscher brought the Bulgarians everything they had lost and more besides. They even saw to it that there was liberal bribery in Sofia, because the Balkan negotiators, as we know, always waged the noble "war of Right" with purer hearts when it was paid for in cold cash. The Bulgarian finance minister, M. Tuchev, had already accepted, with eyes half-closed, a little Berlin gratuity of four million gold marks. This very important leader helped the Germans relieve themselves of a bit of their financial surplus. Such little gifts aided comprehension. The Germans and Bulgarians understood each other better and better. The pleasant comedy of neutrality went on for another month. At the end of September 1915, the German Marshal von Mackensen, a Death's Head Hussar - whose high black kepi with skull and plumes still occupied a place of honor at his estate in the neighborhood of Stettin from which, in April 1945, I directed our battle for the Oder - mustered ten splendid German divisions south of the Danube. They would be supported by four Austro-Hungarian divisions. The vise was closing. Could the Allies not see it?

On the Austrian front, the Italian intervention had only led to mediocre results. It had been necessary to transfer only two Austro-Hungarian divisions from the Galician front to the defense of the mountains of the Tyrol. The Italians had 312 battalions at their disposal, the Austrians 147. Nevertheless, Austrian losses were limited to a few villages and a few support points. Grand Duke Nicholas, who had counted on the avalanche of 37 Italian divisions to greatly relieve his front, found himself in a worse state than ever. The Russian front had been penetrated at Görlitz on May 4, 1915, and driven back to the San. The following month, the line of the San and also that of the Dniester were overrun. On June 22, 1915 Lemberg fell. In July followed a new defeat, the capture of Warsaw in Russian Poland. In August, the Nieman line was broken: the Germans reached the Berezina, site of Napoleon's brilliant salvation of his retreating army.
Pro-Allied historian Renouvin sums it up: "The results of the campaign were grave. The Russian armies had abandoned all of Galicia, all of Poland, all of Lithuania. At the center of the front, their retreat exceeded one hundred and fifty kilometers. They had suffered enormous losses from May to October: 151,000 killed, 683,000 wounded, and 895,000 taken prisoner - that is, nearly half of the combat effectives." (La Crise européenne, p. 311)
Millions of useless conscripts vegetated in the rear depots, "rough louts" who could not even be trained because no rifles were available.
In such circumstances, could Russia afford Bulgaria as an additional enemy?

***

The Western Allies hadn't accomplished much more. In Artois, despite the fact that they massed 29 Anglo-French divisions against 13 German divisions, and in Champagne, where 39 French infantry divisions faced 17 divisions of the Reich, they had suffered a cruel defeat: almost twice as many dead as the Germans (250,000 against 140,000) for virtually nothing. Joffre himself had been forced to announce on October 7, 1915 "a protracted posture of defensive operations."
The Anglo-French disaster at the Dardanelles and the frightful massacre of the Allied troops at Gallipoli at the end of 1915 had made it necessary to find a refuge for the survivors at Salonika. Greek neutrality was violated when the British set up a puppet leader, Venizelos, a cunning Cretan.
Things were going from bad to worse for the Allies. The British were making one last official effort to try to hold the Bulgarians to their former neutrality. They had offered the Bulgarians Macedonia as a war bonus, without the knowledge of their Serbian allies, exactly the way French politicians, in August 1939, would secretly concede to the Soviets the right of passage through Poland, when the latter country was categorically opposed to it.
To support his proposal, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, in a speech to the House of Commons, embarked on an astonishing encomium of the Bulgarians. It was October 1, 1915. The Russians were engaged in an operation that was diametrically opposed. After keeping the Allies in the dark up to the last moment, on their own initiative they presented the Bulgarians with an ultimatum, demanding that they break off diplomatic relations with the Germans, an indication of how sincere was the understanding between the Anglo-French and the Russians. One said white, and the other did black. Nothing remained for King Ferdinand of Bulgaria but to send the tsar of Russia back to his prayers. On October 6, 1915 Mackensen and the Bulgarians attacked Serbia: 300,000 soldiers in all, more than half of them Germans.

***

The 250,000 Serbians, so provocative in 1914, when they had only the unprepared Austrians to face, panicked at the onslaught of the Germans. They appealed for French and British aid, but their allies would not send them so much as a handful of infantrymen. Belgrade fell the first day. Thereafter the Serbians fled towards the Adriatic. It was only after a month of unbroken rout that the Allies decided to send General Sarrail from Salonika with 80,000 British and French troops towards the last Serbian valley, almost on the border of Greece; but they didn't put to flight so much as a single Macedonian partridge.
They became bogged down, then were pushed back. The routed Serbian army was unable to join up with them. The Serbs didn't reach the Adriatic and the famous Albanian coasts that had been promised to everybody until mid-December. Devoured by typhus, the Serbs no longer had either munitions or supplies. "Leba! leba!" ("Bread! Bread!"), they cried on approaching every hamlet. With them rode the old king, Peter II, in a vehicle drawn by buffaloes. Everywhere they left behind emaciated cadavers.
The Italians, who had occupied Valona, drove the last survivors towards the mountains of Greece, because, for a second time, Greek territory had been violated by the Allies at Corfu. There they left Pashich shaking in his beard and already about to betray them. The miserable old fox would soon send emissaries to Switzerland to begin negotiations with the new Austro- Hungarian emperor, Charles I, and obtain pardon for the Sarajevo double assassination. As a sign of his good faith, he would have the organizer of the crime, Colonel Dimitrievich, shot as a scapegoat.
The forces of the Entente would again attempt a Serbian rescue operation in the region of Dedeagach. There they would be almost surrounded by the Bulgarians. Germany now crossed the vast area between Berlin and Constantinople at will. Her specialists reinforced the Turkish troops on the Near Eastern battlefield clear to the threshold of the Suez Canal.
It was there, hard by the Red Sea, that the British would now try recruiting new candidates for death - this time among the Arabs.
Except for the Rumanians, who were delaying their decision, everyone in Europe who could be sent into the fire had already been tossed into the frying pan. Millions of additional soldiers were needed, workers as well. The time had come to recruit foreigners en masse.

CHAPTER XXIV

Cannon Fodder from the Colonies

An enormous flood of humanity, equal in numbers to the French and British armies of 1914 (2,300,000 men in the month of October 1914) was about to pour out onto all the battlefields of the Allies, from Africa, from Asia, and from Oceania. The gleam of their countenances, yellow, copper, black, would be reflected on all the seas of the world. Not even included in these droves were the considerable armies raised in Canada, in Australia, in South Africa, etc., often with the descendants of conquered French, Irish forced laborers, and dispossessed Boers. The Boers, descendants of Dutchmen and French Huguenots, comprised half of South Africa's population. Canada's people included several million descendants of old French settlers. Australia had been built with the blood and sweat of Irish people forcibly brought by the British. They may have been European but had nothing to do with continental quarrels and the political machinations of the very British who had oppressed them.
What New Zealander, indeed, could have said in July 1914 whether Sarajevo was a Balkan first name or a brand of Russian caviar? And Mulhouse? And Strasbourg? What Boer from Pretoria, what Australian Irishman could have explained why those towns should be German rather than French, or French rather than German?
Sending them to die by the tens of thousands in the stinking mud of Artois was already morally indefensible. But what of the Senegalese? Or the Blacks turned gray with cold in the chalky trenches of Champagne, and the Malagasies transported like livestock by sea for a month or longer in order to be cast, stupefied, into the barbed wire entanglements of the Chemin des Dames - what about them?
What could they understand of the war? What could a German possibly mean to them? And in what way was he different from a Frenchman? Why was he ordered to kill the one rather than the other? And above all, why must he be killed for them?
How many of them died? A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand? Who bothered to count? To put those 850,000 luckless wretches through four years of carnage was an abominable genocide, all the more odious in that the ones who recruited all this colored cannon fodder pretended to be their defenders.
In the recruitment of coloreds, the British Establishment had beaten all known records, siphoning off more than a million Hindus towards their battlefields - or, more precisely, towards the satisfaction of their interests. Exactly one million one hundred thousand. Destitute men recruited in their arid land with tremendous doses of crude and varied propaganda. Men who wouldn't kill a skinny cow, nor even a fly, were blindly going out to get themselves killed by the hundreds of thousands. Anywhere there was a penny belonging to His Majesty, or a barrel of British oil, or a leak in the maritime monopoly imposed on the world by London, these poor devils in their knee-breeches, speaking eight hundred different languages and marching behind a British swager stick, would he used ruthlessly.

***

The Hindus, thrown in great numbers onto unknown battlefields, and the colored subjects of the French colonies, had rapidly been followed by other masses of humanity.
Noncombatant workers were brought to the factories of France and the United Kingdom to turn out millions of artillery shells, which the Western Allies scattered over their battlefronts in a rain of death. These workers had been rounded up in the colonies: for example, the future Ho Chi Minh was brought in from Tonkin. A great many others had been recruited in China: for example, the future Chou En-Lai. In all three, million non-Europeans, for whom the quarrels of Europe were as indecipherable as Sanskrit to an Andalusian vinegrower, were brought to swell the ranks of Europe's armies and workers.

***

Senegal, Madagascar, Tonkin, India, and China had not been sufficient for Europe's needs.
As early as 1915 it had been necessary to bring the Arabs as well into the ranks of the British. The Muslims had then been promised the reward of the Crescent, that is, a great independent Arab kingdom from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, if they joined up with the Allies, and especially with the British troops.
The Arabs could be either very dangerous or eminently useful. Turkey, on the side of the Germans since 1914, was the keystone of Islam. The caliph of Istanbul was its spiritual leader. The Turkish empire stretched from Thrace and the Bosphorus to the approaches of Egypt. Tens of millions of Arabs were united with Constantinople in the same active and passionate faith.
Even beyond the Near East, the spiritual influence of Turkey extended to the most distant colonies of the British Empire, especially to the Indies, where there were more than a hundred million devout Muslims.
If the British diplomacy proved to be clumsy, the rulers of the Empire could anticipate dangerous agitation, insurrections, and revolts fomented in the very heart of their empire. An "Islamic holy war" would do them more harm than a hundred thousand German combatants on the western front.
To gain an alliance with those hundreds of millions of Muslims (two hundred and fifty million then, eight hundred million today) and most especially with those who lived in the bosom of the Turkish empire, was therefore of the utmost military and economic interest to the British. The extraction of petroleum - the blood of the modern world - was undergoing an ever greater development in those countries, where it constituted a sort of private preserve of British interests.

***

As early as 1915 some particularly clear-headed British agents attempted to bring off an agreement with the Arabs.
The Arab chiefs who exercised politico-religious power in the torrid lands of Arabia, Syria, and Mesopotamia were nomads first and foremost, without much political importance. They prayed to Mecca and traveled from oasis to oasis on their camels. They lived frugally, eating in those days less caviar and paté de foie gras than dates. In 1915 they were poor and doubtless happier in their deserts than they would subsequently be in their caramel-colored palaces in Monte Carlo, Geneva, California, and Marbella, or in their gold-plated Mercedes at two million dollars apiece.
The game of tempting those hardy warriors who lived only for their faith, was made easier by the fact that the British had a man on the scene throughout the war, a clever political representative, T.E. Lawrence, who was discreet, realistic and possessed imagination: he was like a skinny Churchill without the cigar and the cognac. He had been a pupil in France of the Jesuits, the best teachers in the world.
Dry as a camel's tail, Lawrence had lived for years among the tribes of the Near East, worming his way into the hearts of the Bedouins, sharing their lives, their dates, their tents, and even homosexual relations with some of them. To hear him tell it and to see him dig up piles of stones, he was an archeologist. In reality he was a British spy.
He had learned all the Arab dialects and lived as frugally as a camel- driver. He would become the great man of Anglo-Arab fraternization: he probably believed in that in all honesty, because in his own way he was a paladin. He would later renounce all honors and official duties when he saw that Britain had hoodwinked his proteges. Returning to England in disgust, he would die there in a highly suspicious motorcycle accident.

In 1916 the plan was definite: Lawrence was going to tip Turkish Arabia into the British camp.
Throughout 1915 there had been great danger. The only possibility that presented itself to the British at that time was the Arab region of Hejaz, bordering the Red Sea, an area that was infertile and sparsely populated. Its coast was inhospitable, dominated by the winds of the desert and the burning sun. But in the matter of religion, it was of decisive importance. Its capital was Mecca, the millennial town of the prophet, the religious center of the Muslims. The second town of Hejaz, almost equally famous, was Medina. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims came to Mecca each year. It offered an exceptional opportunity for a propaganda coup.
The emir who ruled the Bedouins of Hejaz, if he took a stand against Constantinople, would be able to transform the conditions of the Anglo-Turkish conflict completely. He was named Hussein. He wasn't very rich, and a few felicitous subsidies facilitated the initial British contacts. The money wasn't everything, however. The Arabs were by nature quick to take offense; independence was their life. They had always lived free in their deserts, cleaving to the sand and the wind. They had once possessed one of the greatest empires in the world, from the Ganges to Narbonne. Cordova had sheltered one of their most marvelous mosques; Sicily, their most elegant court. The memory of that great past hovered in the mind of every Arab like the perfume of a secret and everlasting vine of jasmine.
The Colonial Office did its best to court the Emir Hussein. On June 15, the British promised him in writing the reconstitution of a great unified Arab state as soon as the Turks had been vanquished with the collaboration of the Muslims. At the time, the British were generous in fixing the boundaries of the future state. It was no small country: from Mecca to Damascus, from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. Under those conditions, the military alliance was worth a try. Sir Henry MacMahon, British high commissioner of the Indies, and Emir Hussein established the nature of that "great Arab kingdom," in an exchange of ten letters. From November 4, 1916 on, Hussein would be considered king of the new free Arabia. The British pledge was categorical, though secret, as was everything the British government signed.

It was almost too beautiful. The Adriatic had already been promised to the Italians by the Treaty of London, which was also secret, whereas in fact that territory had been considered a fief of the Serbo-Russians since the beginning of the war. With an equally imperturbable commercial sense, the British had offered Macedonia to the Bulgarians in 1915, whereas by verbal commitment it belonged to their Serbian ally. In the same fashion, the territories granted and guaranteed to the Arabs in 1916 would be granted and guaranteed by these same Britishers in part to the French and in part to the Italians. Even the Jews would be guaranteed part of the spoils, Palestine, which had already been allotted to the Russians.
Moreover, these generous distributors, with the same jealous secrecy, and behind the backs of the Arabs, who were theoretically satisfied, had allocated to themselves the most savory morsels of this same Near East, notably those where petroleum flowed even more bountifully than the milk and honey of the Bible. A sextuple distribution!
Each one was carried out on the quiet, with the Greeks ignorant of what had been promised the Italians, the Italians unaware of what had been awarded to the Russians; nor did the Russians know what had been assigned to the French, nor the Arabs what had been promised to the Jews.
The British had concluded each agreement without the knowledge of any of the other confederates. That made seven separate competitors and beneficiaries who would collapse screaming when they discovered at the Versailles table in 1919 that there were no less than seven dinner guests invited to eat the same dish at the same time.

***

Moreover, the British Establishment had no sooner promised Hussein, the newly-minted monarch, sovereignty over an Arab kingdom three million square kilometers in area (six times the size of France) than on March 9, 1916 they personally secured magnificent possessions for themselves in the same territories. The signatories of that pact, once again a secret one, were the Frenchman, Georges Picot, and the Briton, Sir Mark Sykes, whence the name of the Sykes-Picot treaty. The British, then, magnanimously allotted themselves the petroleum of the Tigris and Euphrates area. The French were awarded the administration of the coasts of Lebanon and a preponderant influence in Syria, so "preponderant" that it would be established on the day of reckoning in 1919 with cannon fire.
Those agreements annihilated the commitment solemnly accorded to Hussein of a "great Arab kingdom," which was thereby deprived of its most important territories. The British would end up by bringing an unexpected wolf into the secret sheepfold: the "Balfour Declaration" of 1917, which the Allies judged indispensable if they wished to obtain the support of Jewish finance and the Jewish press in the United States and force Woodrow Wilson's hand. It would grant the Zionists a "homeland" at the expense of the Arabs and assure to each Jewish immigrant a keg of powder that would work wonders at the proper time.

"This triple play of the Foreign Office," wrote the Belgian historian de Launay, "the starting-point of the contradictions in British policy in the Levant, was to be fraught with consequences."
It would be half a century before the Arabs would succeed more or less in unraveling this sextuple web of closely woven threads in which the British, between 1915 and 1918, had imprisoned them from head to foot.
Despite the fact that the Arabs made up more than ninety percent of the population of Palestine in 1918, they would never succeed in throwing off the Israeli web woven by Balfour.
For the moment, and that was all that interested the British in 1916, the entire Arab world, mounted on their swift camels, brandishing daggers and knives, hurled themselves on the Turks, with Lawrence, who had become the intimate friend of the son of King Hussein, the Emir Feisal, at their side. The latter was a splendid prince, as impressive as a prophet when he appeared, wrapped in his white djellaba and armed with his dagger set with diamonds. He and Lawrence attracted new allies. They didn't lack for pounds sterling: British banknotes for Muslim lives. Thanks to those funds, they acquired confederates, stirred up the tribes, and assembled that desert army that British diplomacy alone would never have succeeded in raising. In addition to cunning and courage, they had physical stamina, those warriors; though eating little, they were always combat-ready, tireless, indefatigable. The Arab people, now often painted as ludicrous revelers, were then noble, loyal, trusting, and hospitable. The United Kingdom used them much and misused them even more.
Without them, how far would the British imperialists have gotten in their riding breeches?
In the end, poor Feisal would lose out, and would even be driven from Mecca by his Saudi rival, ibn-Saud, another magnificent warrior. But British gold, as it had done in Europe for centuries, paid all rivals indiscriminately in order to get them to kill each other advantageously. Europe was dying due to British duplicity and Arabia was on the point of dying, too.
In the fight against the Turks, the Arabs furnished the British with splendid reinforcement troops from 1916 to 1918.
When facing the Turks in 1916, the British, just like the French, had seen their big cruisers go to the bottom in the neck of the Sea of Marmora and their soldiers die by the thousands at Gallipoli of misery, cold, and typhus. The route from the Suez Canal to Aleppo was open in 1917 and 1918 only because some tens of thousands of Muslim warriors throughout all of Arabia heroically carried the colors of the hope of the prophet at the end of their lances.
Those colors were not exactly the Union Jack! Nor in the course of those battles did one see shining the six-pointed star that now floats autocratically over Jerusalem! The Allied war of "Right" in Arabia, as elsewhere, was the Cannon Fodder from the Colonies omnipotent war of Force.
The Europeans ruined themselves morally in the eyes of foreign peoples, especially the Muslims, by stooping to these base plots, flinging showers of lying promises everywhere, cynically hoping to obtain fraudulent dividends.
Sooner or later Europe would pay for this, and see the mirage of too easy swindles vanish in the burning air of those marvelous countries.

CHAPTER XXV

The Slaughter Drags On

Meanwhile, on the battlefront of Western Europe, the gigantic hecatombs of 1915 had not sufficed. The Europeans were going to remedy that by massacring each other more stupidly than ever.
At Verdun in 1916, besides a million wounded, 336,000 Germans were killed, as well as 362,000 Frenchmen. Each bled the other white. On February 21, 1916, on the first day alone, the artillery fired more than a million shells, burying thousands of soldiers alive.
Along the front there was no longer a spadeful of earth that could still be plowed. One no longer bothered to take the weapons from men who had been buried upright. Photos were taken; one moved on somewhere else.

Somewhere else was Artois, since each commander wished to have an offensive to his credit. Falkenhayn had had his offensive at Verdun. Joffre, almost at the same time, began to prepare his own offensive on the Somme. He knew that only by burying the enemy under hundreds of thousands of shells would he be able to cross whatever remained, if anything did remain.
The home front made unprecedented sacrifices. Vietnamese and Chinese machinists worked until they dropped. On the first of July 1916 the bugles sounded the coming victory. The artillery barrage surpassed anything ever seen before: a gun fired every eighteen meters. It was like a forest of steel and resulted in rows on rows of crosses in the cemeteries.
Bled white at Verdun, the French were forced to reduce their profligacy in human lives. At first Joffre counted on launching an attack with 42 divisions. Then in March it became necessary to reduce the number to 34; in May, to 32. Even at that, there were a great many colonials among them. On the other hand, the British reinforced their contingents: 26 divisions. Thousands of cannon and hundreds of thousands of exhausted men stretched out across a breadth of thirty kilometers.
For six days the artillery inflicted an annihilating fire on the Germans. Then French and English troops were sent to the slaughter. In those days soldiers were still loaded like mules - sixty-five pounds on their backs to engage in hand-to-hand fighting! At the third German line of defense, they collapsed from exhaustion.
"The Franco-British," wrote Marc Ferro (La Grande Guerre, p. 150), "did not get past the insignificant villages of Thiepval, Mametz, Combles, and Chaume. They were fighting two against one, but the Germans had carefully constructed underground blockhouses that made their defense in depth invulnerable. The Allied attempts of 20 July, of 3 September, and of 20 September 1916, failed like all the rest."

And the price of these useless battles?
The figures were dreadful. By the second day the British Command had already lost forty thousand Englishmen. One might think that would be enough. But no. Attack after attack! Each time throwing away tens of thousands of men.
"At the end of the battle," Ferro adds, "the British had lost 419,654 men; the French, 194,451; and the Germans, 650,000."
The brief offensive of the Somme had taken more than one million two hundred thousand victims. Two million dead and wounded in only two battles in France in 1916! And who would benefit?
Joffre was replaced by a general named Nivelle, who would only increase the losses in 1917 and be brought down in turn.
All along the front the bodies of those who had died in vain lay rotting between the lines by the tens of thousands.
"The infantrymen, mowed down by machine guns," one soldier related, "lie face down on the ground, drawn up as though at drill."
The rain fell on them inexorably. Bullets broke their bleached bones. Rats swarmed under the faded uniforms; "enormous rats, fat on human flesh," in the words of an on-the-spot witness, who continues: "The body displayed a grimacing head devoid of flesh, the skull bare, the eyes eaten away. A set of false teeth had slid onto the rotted shirt, and a disgusting animal jumped out of the wide-open mouth."

***

Was a less atrocious solution at least being approached anywhere else? What was happening at the Italian front?
There, too, the Allies had wished to fight it out, but Austria had cut the ground from under them. On May 15, 1916 she captured Asiago and took 30,000 prisoners. Then she marked time.
After a conference at Chantilly, Allied plans fixed the dates for a triple offensive: first in France, and when success had been attained there, afterwards in Italy and in Russia.

On the Italian front the attack took place on August 28, 1916. They would make four tries at it. On the first try they captured Gorizia, a quiet provincial seat where, strangely enough, in a convent are to be found the remains of the last legitimate pretender to the throne of France, the Count of Chambord. The Italians, who had a larger force than the Austrians, carried the position valiantly. But they could go no farther. A second offensive, in September 1916 failed. Then a third one in October and a fourth in November. They were stopped at Gorizia.
The cost: for the Italians 75,000 casualties, and still more for the Austrians. There, as in France, the offensives of 1916 had not even served the grave-diggers, who suffered enforced unemployment thanks to the machine-gun fire.

***

That left the Russians.
There, a surprise! When everyone was failing, the Russians were going to succeed!
On August 16, 1916, at the worst moment of Verdun, General Brusilov, tough as a Cossack hetman and a capable leader (among so many who were sluggish and of ill repute) launched an attack through Galicia. He had prepared his attack intelligently, assembling a heavy concentration of artillery that finally had sufficient ammunition. The Austrians had stripped themselves of part of their troops and heavy artillery in order to carry out their offensive of May 15 against the Italians. If a Russian offensive fell upon them on the east, they would not be able to resist.
A week after Austria had attacked toward Asiago, Brusilov charged into the Austrian lines. He was going to reconquer all of Bukovina and part of Galicia. The results were extrordinary: more than 400,000 prisoners!
A hard blow for the Austrians. A thousand of their cannon had also been captured. They had lost 25,000 square kilometers of territory (compared with the insignificant eighty square kilometers won by the French at Peronne).
That would be the Russians' biggest victory, and their last as well. Brusilov's right wing, facing Prussia, had not been able to take the offensive. There it had run up against the Germans. The Russians on the right were brought to a halt, then cut to pieces.
Brusilov, fortunate as he had been, had his horse shot from under him. Once again, the offensive had accomplished naught, despite its initial success. The Russian army was weary, practically falling apart; revolution was already rumbling, as the ground rumbles and smokes before a volcano erupts. The soldiers deserted in droves. At Kovel the Germans annihilated the Russian army. Russia's great opportunity was gone.

***

It was then, however, that the last Balkan country not yet involved entered the war.
In May 1916, when Brusilov was badly mauling Austria, Romania thought her hour had come. Its government had waited for two years, not making a bid until it was sure of winning. Now the politicians thought they could move. But a month was lost putting the finishing touches on the declaration of war. It was already too late. Brusilov was no longer winning. he first retreated, then was swept away. To join up with him was to board not a victorious cruiser but a sinking tub.
Clemenceau's famous words are well known: "Among all the swine in this war, the Romanians have been the worst."
They had extorted from all competitors both the possible and the impossible, concessions of territory, loans, and bribes. As in the case of the Italians, the French and British had promised ten times as much as the Germans. But the business with the Reich had been for along time a flourishing one. The Romanians had found it in their interest to play for time.
Brusilov, swooping down like a hurricane, was definitely precipitating the downfall of the Austrians, they thought. It was all over, and it was imperative that they not wait an instant longer.
"The lion you think dead might just make a second Serbia out of Romania with a single swipe of its paw," the Austro-Hungarian minister of foreign affairs retorted at the final moment to his Romanian colleague.
The latter didn't believe him. On August 27, 1916 Romania declared war.
In three months she was to be totally annihilated. On November 27, 1916 the victorious German army, let by Marshal von Mackensen, entered the empty streets of Bucharest to the shrill sound of fifes.

CHAPTER XXVI

Rout in the East

Romania nevertheless, had been a considerable morsel: 15 divisions, 560,000 men; five times the numbers of the British infantry on August 4, 1914.
Geographically and strategically, her position was essential. Romania had been able to prevent the Russians, after August 1, 1914, from swarming into the Balkans. Had she been united with St. Petersburg from the onset of the war, she would have assured Russia's linkup with the Serbs and made it possible either to bring the Bulgarians over to the side of the Allies or to annihilate them, thus opening to Russia the road to Constantinople.
That was why the Russians had done everything in their power to break up the defensive military pact which bound Bucharest to Vienna. Russian activities to corrupt the Romanians had been considerable.
"Deciphered communications revealed to me many times what was going on," Poincaré confessed. He had received M. Take Ionescu, the most notorious of the Romanians bought by the tsar, in his private residence in the Rue du Commandant Marchand. The Romanian doorway to the Balkans was worth its weight in solid gold. The Russians had declared. themselves ready to grant them everything: Transylvania, Banat, half of Bukovina. This generous promise of spoils seemed rather dubiously optimistic to Poincaré. He wrote (L'invasion, p. 33): "These sales on credit of eastern populations and the pelts of live bears are a bit hazardous and childish." But the words are certainly apt: sale on credit of populations; populations were "sold on credit" to attract allies. M. Poincaré himself agreed to those sales unqualifiedly. They involved several million people; Transylvania alone had 3,700,000 inhabitants.
Since the Romanians had dawdled so, the Germans, with their habitual sense of organization, had been able to prepare for the counterthrust. They'd had the time to bring back some excellent divisions from the Russian front, which had been in a state of suspended animation for a month, and these, together with the Austro-Hungarian divisions, had been massed in Hungary in two great armies. The greedy Romanian politicians, thinking only of easy annexations, had stupidly massed almost all their troops at the same point, at the foot of the Carpathians in Transylvania. Even at one against two, as was the usual situation throughout 1916, the disciplined, elite German soldiers always won. It would be the same in the Carpathians. In eighteen days, from September 25 to October 13, 1916, 400,000 Romanians were swept aside, engulfed as if a tidal wave had overflowed them. The link-up of the German armies would be just a matter of tactics. On December 6, 1916, at Orsova on the Danube, they captured the last Romanian troops still offering resistance. The rest were no more than a horde fleeing towards the east.
One more ally smashed to smithereens. The bad faith, the "sale of peoples," the annexations, which were wrong by any standard, had only served to aggravate the western reverses of the Entente, now painfully parapeted behind their hundreds of thousands of dead at Artois, Champagne, and Verdun. For the Russians the Romanian debacle was going to be the straw that broke their back once and for all.

The last hope of the tsar had crumbled.
"The government," a delegate to the Russian congress of the union of towns declared, "has fallen into the hands of buffoons, sharpers, and traitors." In the Duma, on December 26, 1916, the socialists called openly for revolution: "If you continue to fight this government by legal means, you are like Don Quixote, who tilted at windmills."
That same evening, Rasputin, the great favorite of the tsaritza, the corrupt and omnipotent colossus, was poisoned, bludgeoned, machine- gunned, and thrown headfirst into the Neva through a hole chopped in the ice.
The beaten troops were no longer willing to fight. The trains of pious priests had been derailed. The famished people readied their hammers and sickles.
The last prime minister, Prince Galitsin, was an impotent old man. The minister of the interior, Protopopov, was a dotard who suffered from complete paralysis.
"At any moment" the British ambassador wrote, "Russia may burst into flames."
Another three months and the tsar would take the final plunge.

The tsarist regime had finally become aware that it was sinking in quicksand. Its head and arms were still afloat, but the sea of blood and mire would soon swallow them up.
Germany, on learning of the coming collapse, had tried discreetly to offer the tsar a helping hand. The Kaiser was his first cousin. Wilhelm II had never wished to make war against him. Besides, he more than ever needed all his forces on the western front in 1916. Negotiations got quietly under way.
When the coded telegrams from the Romanian legation, which were deciphered in Paris, suggested the danger of a Russian withdrawal, the French and the British politicians were terrified. Clemenceau roared, "Then we are goners!" It was imperative to quell immediately any possibility of a German offer and to offer more themselves, to promise so many benefits that the beneficiary, overwhelmed by the wealth of the gifts, could not refuse. The system had worked well with the Italians, the Romanians, and the Arabs.
The draft of a Franco-Russian treaty was drawn up by the secretary- general of French foreign affairs, Berthelot, the eminent Paris collaborator with the Balkan countries, who was said to have personally composed the text of the Serbian refusal of a joint committee to study the crime of Sarajevo. In 1916, in a new offer, Berthelot awarded the Russians the Austrian crown territory of Galicia, Hungarian Ruthenia, that part of Poland ruled by the Germans, and Constantinople and the Straits. Armenia as well, which had already been promised to the Armenians. Plus a large part of Asia Minor, including the Holy Land, which had been granted earlier to the Emir Hussein.
With that document the French government cancelled its promises of independence, previously given with great fanfare to the Czechs, the Ruthenians, and the Poles. As the Pan-Slays had anticipated even before 1914, they would be reduced to the role of subjects in three Russian viceroyalties entrusted to three grand dukes.

When Ambassador Paléologue received the text in St. Petersburg, with orders to transmit it immediately to the government of the tsar, he exploded with indignation and sent Paris the following telegram, which is almost humorous in view of the fact that this French diplomat had unquestionably urged a war of conquest with Alsace-Lorraine as the prize:
"Our country is not waging a war of conquest, but a war of liberation, a war of justice." And Paléologue added: "Our British and Italian allies will never go along with us, will never consent to such an increase in territory, an increase that will extend Russian power clear to the Mediterranean, clear to the Suez Canal."
It was then necessary to send a French mission to Russia posthaste, so fearful was Paris that St. Petersburg would make peace with Germany behind its back.

Like Paléologue, the French minister, Ribot, refused to preside over the mission. Finally, the presidency of the mission was entrusted to the colonial minister, a pudgy little man from the south of France, not very polished, named Gaston Doumergue.
In return for the enormous territories the Pan-Slays were receiving, he was supposed to persuade the tsar and Sazonov at St. Petersburg to sign the following text, containing the official commitments Russia was making to France:
Alsace-Lorraine will be returned to France unconditionally, not with the reduced boundaries set by the Treaty of Vienna, but with the boundaries it had prior to 1790.
Its borders will extend as far as those of the ancient duchy of Lorraine and will be drawn in accordance with the wishes of the French government in such a way as to reincorporate in French territory all the iron and steel works of the region as well as the coal fields of the Saar valley.
All other territory situated on the left bank of the Rhine that is now part of Germany will be completely detached from the latter country.
Any such territory not incorporated into the territory of France will be formed into a neutral buffer state.
Nicholas II warmly encouraged Doumergue: "Take Mainz, take Koblenz, go as far as you like" (Marc Ferro, La Grande Guerre, p. 241).
When the mission was over, little Gaston, grinning from ear to ear, triumphantly stated to the press (Petit Parisien, Figaro, Le Temps): "We have a closer and more cordial understanding than ever! Russian collaboration has not failed and will never fail."
This on March 6, 1917! A week later to the day, on the stroke of midnight, the tsarist regime would go up in smoke. Little Gaston had shown a shrewdness and farsightedness that was nothing short of stunning.
Briand, for all his astuteness, had been even less perspicacious than little Gaston. Historian Ferro writes:
The Russians considered that the Straits comprised the compensation offered in return for Alsace-Lorraine. In return for the left bank of the Rhine, they wanted liberty of action on their western border: that is to say that France should abandon the cause of Polish independence. Briand hesitated before acquiescing, but he resigned himself to it on March 10, 1917. (La Grande Guerre, p. 242)
Thus Briand, too, agreed to the treaty, but "without England's having been informed."
Once the French had crossed the Rubicon, the British would growl, but there was nothing they could do except acquiesce. The year 1916 had seen the battlefields of France strewn with the bodies of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers, and the waters of the Dardanelles dotted with the drowned sailors of their fleet. For Russia to abandon them would mean that the entire might of Turkey would be able to swing round on them on the Euphrates as well as in the Sinai. Like the others, the British rulers told themselves that promising wasn't the same as giving. All of them would be as slippery as eels when they were called to account for their promises at Versailles in 1919.

In March of 1917 the Russians and the French were equally blind.
On March 8, 1917, in starving St. Petersburg, the mob broke into the butcher shops, grocery stores, and bakeries and cleaned them out. Protopopov, the minister of the interior, learned of the incidents without emotion, saying, "If there is going to be a revolution in Russia, it won't be for another fifty years."
Reminiscent of the tsar, who, two days before the war, had written in his personal notebook, "Today we played tennis. The weather was magnificent." And on the following day: "I went for a walk by myself. It was very hot. Took a delicious bath." Happy the empty heads that don't even feel the hot breath of passing cannonballs.
Minister Protopov's "fifty years" would last just four days. On March 12, 1917, the Russian government, abandoned by the troops, disappeared. The duma and the St. Petersburg Soviet on March 14 set up a provisional government. Apparently it was not yet more than halfway revolutionary. For its president and figurehead it had Prince Lvov. Princes always abound in revolutions. Sometimes they are named Philippe Egalité, are fanatics, vote for the decapitation of their relatives, and afterwards, as a well- deserved thank-you for services rendered, are themselves made a head shorter.
To counterbalance the princely crown of Lvov, a Jewish socialist was appointed to the impromptu government: Aleksandr Kerensky.
On May 13, 1917 the tsar's train was blocked by rioters. On the night of May 14 he abdicated, then went to bed. "I sleep long and moderately," he wrote calmly in his imperial notebook.
For a moment he would still try to have his son accepted as regent of the empire. Then Grand Duke Michael. The latter would be Michael II for a few hours, then abdicate in turn. Then came the republic.

***

The Allies wanted to believe in that new republic.
"Perhaps it is the renewal of Russia," commented Briand.
London and Paris made haste to send eager delegations. Several cabinet ministers and some socialist deputies went running to the new Mecca, notably wealthy Marcel Cachin, the future leader of the French Communists. They were overflowing with the eloquence and enthusiasm of fraternity. They even went so far as to approve imprudently the formula of the Soviets, "Peace without annexations or requisitions."
The slogan didn't correspond to the agreement signed by the tsar just before his overthrow, allotting hundreds of thousands of kilometers of territory. In that treaty, endorsed by both parties, the tsar delivered almost the whole of Germany to French ambitions. On the other hand, the Cossacks were to be able to ride clear to Jerusalem.
The new Russian republicans would at most allow a referendum in Alsace-Lorraine, "under the control of an international commission."
Another affirmation which was very little in line with Allied policy: "The responsibility for the war lies with all of us."
What then of the horrible Kaiser solely responsible, and the gibbet already prepared for him?
The illusions were stubborn, and they became ever more dizzying. The Allied delegates rushed to embrace the leaders of the revolutionary government. They parted from their new brothers with tears in their eyes.
"They set out as shameless partisans," Ferro tells us, "concerned about the interests of their governments, and they returned from Russia singing the glories of the fatherland of the revolution." (La Grande Guerre, p. 332)
With an eye to keeping up appearances, the Russian minister of foreign affairs had made it a point to be soothing in his messages to the Allies. His foreign program: "To combat the common enemy to the finish and without hesitation" and to respect "the international obligations incurred by the fallen regime in a steadfast manner." Prince Lvov having been liquidated without delay, Kerensky became minister of war. He left to harangue the troops at the front. The peasant soldiers thought only of deserting the army and getting back to their villages in time to obtain their share of the distribution of land, the only point in the revolutionary program that interested them. The military command fell apart; some generals were assassinated; others vanished.
With a glorious lack of comprehension, Nivelle, the French commanding general, nonetheless demanded that the disintegrating Russian army go back on the offensive.
In Paris, the future Marshal Pétain, always calm and clearheaded, retorted with extreme skepticism, "The Russian army is nothing but a façade. We must be prepared for it to collapse as soon as it makes a move."
Miraculously, it did move. The Russian offensive demanded by Nivelle got under way on July 1, 1917, on a forty-kilometer front: 23 divisions commanded by Brusilov, the perennial prime mover. The first day yielded astonishing results; his troops defeated the first line of Austro-German forces. But there wasn't a second day. Brusilov had taken 10,000 prisoners; they would be the last. Old Pétain was right. Some Russian divisions refused to attack. There was "no way to compel the troops to fight," Brusilov acknowledged.

The enemy counterattacked; this time it was the Germans, the soldiers par excellence, driving the Russians in a frantic flight through Galicia, which was completely lost in ten days, with 160,000 killed, wounded, and taken prisoner. A month later, General von Huffier would have only to give the Duma a little shove to take possession of Riga.
It was a rout.
In France, too, it would soon be close to a rout.

CHAPTER XXVII

Trembling Resolve

The Allied attacks which, it was anticipated, would bring the Germans to their knees in 1917, were to be three-fold.
First, the attack of the Russians. Once the tsar had fallen, Brusilov had valiantly delivered his knockout blow. But the attack had shattered against the enemy.
The Italian attack hadn't come to much in the course of the spring. Prime Minister Rosselli (who in the world still remembers that name?) was a decrepit old man, a spark barely alive. In the parliament, the socialists were rebellious. "It's not tolerable for the Italian people to have to face another winter of war," they declared, already feeling cold months before Christmas.
As in the preceding year, it was the Anglo-French front which would have to deliver and, if necessary, receive the big blow.
The new commander-in-chief, Nivelle, didn't intend to be satisfied with "pecking away at the front." He wanted a breakthrough battle.
Lyautey, Pétain, and even Painlevé, the minister of war, put scarcely any credence in an attack. Nivelle played the prima donna: "We shall break through the German front whenever we wish to."
The tactics he envisioned were to attack a weak point by surprise. In one day, he asserted, or at most two days, the German front would be broken, and "with the breach thus opened, the terrain will be clear for us to go where we will, to the coast of the North Sea or to the Belgian capital, to the Meuse or to the Rhine."

Nivelle was opposed by Marshal von Hindenburg, the powerful and unshakeable German military commander. He was seconded by General Ludendorff, the true military genius of the First World War.
They were not about to give the French either a weak point or a chance of surprise. They knew that strategy must not stifle tactics. They had suspected the plan of their adversaries, which in any case had been announced with great fanfare by the newspapers.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff, silently and with the greatest of care, had prepared huge, impregnable concrete positions twenty kilometers back. Just before the French offensive, they fell back to these lines with great stealth, The terrain in front of the Germans was now desolate, virtually impassable, and flooded over a wide area.
The best officers of the French general staff were worried. The offensive was being lured into a trap. Nivelle, however, was cockier than ever: "If I'd been giving Hindenburg his orders, I'd want him to pull back just as he's done."
Now that the Germans had made things so easy for him, he launched the attack on April 9, 1917. The Anglo-Canadians went over the top first, then the French. The attack extended from the Oise to La Montagne de Reims. The most famous battle position would be Chemin des Dames.
Years later I passed through that ghastly landscape. Human skulls still lay around all over. Tourists used to carry them away in the luggage-racks of their bicycles. 40,000 men were killed in the first few dozen hours.

Nivelle thought he could carry the day by hurling tanks into the battle, makeshift tanks in which the gasoline storage was placed forward.
In one afternoon, 60 of the 120 tanks burst into flames. The crews were burned alive.
After three days, the Allies had to break off the battle without having overrun even a single one of Hindenburg's bunkers. The returning soldiers were in terrible condition.
An officer who witnessed their return from the front wrote, "I have never seen anything more poignant than the two regiments streaming along that road in front of me all day long.
"First there were skeletons of companies, sometimes led by a surviving officer supporting himself with a cane. All of them were marching, or rather advancing with short steps, knees giving way, and zig-zagging as though intoxicated. Then came some groups that were perhaps squads, perhaps sections, you couldn't tell. They went along, heads down, despondent, weighed down by their gear, carrying their blood- and dirt- soiled rifles by the slings. The color of their faces scarcely differed from the color of their uniforms. Mud had covered everything, dried completely, and then been soiled afresh with more mud. Their clothing as well as their skin was encrusted with it. Several cars came driving up with a roar, scattering this pitiable flood of survivors of the great hecatomb. But they said nothing. They had lost even the strength to complain. An unfathomable sorrow welled in the eyes of these veritable war-slaves when they came in sight of the village rooftops. In that movement their features appeared taut with suffering and congealed with dust. Those silent faces seemed to proclaim something awful: the unthinkable horror of their martyrdom. "Some territorials who were watching beside me remained pensive. Two of those territorials silently cried like women."
Thus ended, in April 1917, General Nivelle's race to Ostend and the Rhine.

The British Marshal Haig had thought he would do better than his French colleague. He launched his attack between Cambrai and a Flemish village with a complicated name: Passchendaele. He was assisted by Belgian troops and by a French contingent.
Marshal Haig, too, thought to carry the day with a massive assault by his tanks. They penetrated the first German line of defense just in time to be turned into an enormous inferno. There, too, half the tanks were hit squarely in the fuel storage section and destroyed amid the screams of crews being roasted alive in their flaming coffins.
Afterwards it was the usual butchery. Passchendaele was one of the biggest slaughterhouses of the war. The number of English, Scottish and Irish who were killed or wounded there is well-nigh incredible: 400,000, "for nothing," the historian Ferro adds. None of which would keep Joffre, the French general, from writing with reference to his British friends, "I should never dare leave them to guard the lines; alone, they would be routed." Or Pétain from adding, in 1917, the year of Passchendaele: "The British command is incompetent."
As may be seen, among the Allies brotherhood reigned.

The news from Italy did not gladden the Allies.
In the Lizenzo valley, amid rock walls a thousand meters high, the Germans and Austrians during those months were in top form. They had finished off the Russians. They occupied all of Serbia and Romania as well.
For the first time, Hindenburg and Ludendorff had agreed to second the efforts of the Austrians, by giving them 37 German divisions. Certain moves of the new Austro-Hungarian emperor, Charles I, disturbed them, and by reinforcing him they hoped to restore his enthusiasm.
Seven German divisions would serve as the battering ram of the attack. Two traitors had communicated the Austro-German offensive plans to the Italian General Carmona several days in advance. Despite the fact that he had 41 divisions at his disposal, General Carmona was worried about "symptoms of a growing spirit of revolution among the troops." It was already October 14, and snow was falling. In three days the principal peaks had fallen to the Germans. From then on the valley was open. The disaster of Caporetto was under way. Some Italian units heroically sacrificed themselves, but others surrendered in entire divisions. Countless deserters turned tail and fled. The Tagliamento was crossed. The Italian army couldn't pull itself together until it reached the Piave. The results were added up: not too many had been killed, about 10,000. But the number of Italian prisoners taken was immense: 293,000.
Moreover, 3,000 cannon-half of the entire Italian artillery forces-had been lost, and more than 300,000 rifles, 73,000 horses and mules, and the principal food and supply depots.
Caporetto meant the complete loss of morale in Italy.

The phenomenon was not limited to the Italians. Armies everywhere were grumbling. The soldiers had suffered too much. They had seen too many massacres. In Russia they had set off an explosion, but it was plain that in France, too, there was danger that mutinies would break out and the front give way.
In August 1914 the deluded people had embarked enthusiastically on "a short war" that would be not so much hard work as a romp. At worst, the French and the Russians would meet on the banks of the Spree at Berlin within three months!
As may be seen in photos of the period, in Berlin, Vienna, London, and Paris a popular delirium held sway. At Munich a young fellow named Adolf Hitler fell on his knees to thank the heavens for that stroke of good luck. The thousands of trains and the first columns of trucks bore destination points chalked on them in big letters: Berlin for the French; Paris for the Germans. It was going to be a fine trip. But it had finally gone off the tracks.
The common people knew nothing at all, neither how horrible war is (and it had reached new heights in the West during the past half century), nor how Freemasonry had directed their members in high office to use all possible subterfuges, lies and diplomatic forgeries to pursue interests alien and detrimental to them, the majority of common people.
The Sazonovs, the Balfours, the Poincarés, with cynicism and hypocrisy, were leading the people to genocide.
There had been the great massacres of 1914, then those of 1915, then those of 1916. Now it had started all over again, for the fourth time, in 1917. More than half the conscripts of 1914 were dead. Whatever their country, men wanted no more of it.

There was great misery on the home front as well. The women were exhausted by the difficult job of cultivating the fields in the absence of the men, substituting their feeble strength for the hundreds of thousands of requisitioned horses; and with turning out the millions of artillery shells in the war factories alongside alien laborers from the colonies. People were cold and hungry.
In the beginning the masses had been in complete agreement, because in those days the patriotism of the people was a thousand times more active than it is at present. The working man was a nationalist. The average middle-class person got a lump in his throat when a military band passed by. The socialist deputies, too, had voted for war, the French as well as the German. The ballyhoo in the press had roused the people. Anyone who had protested against the war in 1914 would have been lynched.
That was no longer the case in 1917.
The slaughters of 1917 brought the soldiers to the end of their morale. Many French units rebelled. In each of sixty French battalions or regiments several hundred men on separate occasions flatly refused to return to combat. At Soissons, two regiments which had mutinied attempted to march on Paris. The Internationale was sung and red flags were waved. It was St. Petersburg in miniature. It wasn't a general revolt, but there were more than forty thousand mutineers nonetheless, who for several days made it almost impossible to maintain order. The military leaders had to resort to reprisals. There were thousands of arrests: 3,427 men were sentenced, 544 of them condemned to death. Most horrible of all, soldiers had to shoot their comrades. There were 116 executions.
Without thousands of imprisonments, the war in the west would have been irretrievably lost by the Allies, just as in Russia, and France would have been engulfed in revolution.

It was the same everywhere.
By hurling their countries into a war of conquest, or of reconquest, in 1914 (Alsace-Lorraine on the one side, the Balkans and Constantinople on the other), the warmongers had destroyed the foundations of Europe. Her economic basis was shattered. Her peoples were decimated. International order had been struck a direct blow.
Only the firm grip of certain statesmen, who had no use for democratic whims, here and there stemmed the catastrophe. Thus Clemenceau, who came to power on November 14, 1917, hatchet in hand, quelled dissent ruthlessly.
"I'll burn everything, even the furniture," the fearless old man of seventy-six years declared. "Neither treason nor half-treason, just war! Nothing but war!"
The so-called "war for freedom" could not be won except by muzzling freedom. The Radical Clemenceau, forcing the panic-stricken parliament to turn to him, became the absolute master of France in 1917. He immediately crushed all antiwar opposition, imprisoned his defeatist adversaries, shot those who were traitors or who looked like traitors to him. Even Poincaré, the Masonic provocateur of 1914, who had had no choice but to go along with Clemenceau's nomination, had been shut up in the gilded cage of the presidential palace, after having had a muzzle clapped over his mouth.

In the beginning the Socialist party (a third of the German deputies) had acted patriotically. Then its extremists had organized strikes in the war factories, turning thousands of workers away from their jobs. The strikes had seriously impeded production. As for the army, the most disciplined army in the world, it remained and would remain brave and orderly right up to the last day of the war. But the German political arm would not have its Clemenceau.
Wilhelm II kept far away from his troops. He was neither a strategist nor a tactician. He was enthusiastic when his troops were moving ahead, dismayed at every defeat. "Pray for us," he telegraphed at the moment of the Marne to his worthy empress, who was busy with her knitting.
Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg totally lacked the psychology of a fighting man. He had been replaced by a completely unknown functionary. Michaelis, who had formerly been in charge of the replenishment of stores in Prussia. A third chancellor had succeeded him, a man named Hertling, a Bavarian member of the "Society of Resolute Christians," and an aged bibliophile. Power, to him, instead of being a marvelous instrument of direct, complete, and decisive action, was a "bitter chalice." He didn't drink it for very long. Arteriosclerosis deprived him of his cup. He went from one fainting fit to another. At last he received extreme unction "in a cloud of incense."

Things were worse still in Austria-Hungary, where four successive chancellors, Berchtold, Martinitz, Seidler, and Esterhazy, succeeded each other in the space of a year.
Germany's great misfortune was this: if the French had had a Hertling (a resolute Christian floating in incense), as council president; or if they had simply kept their Vivianis, Ribots, and Painlevés (hesitant, shaky, tired old democratic nags), or if, on the contrary, the Germans had possessed a political leader like Clemenceau, cleaver in hand, the fate of the world would have been different.
Clemenceau had been called the father of victory, and he deserved it.

Without him, despite the immense sacrifices of the French soldiers, there would have been no victory for France. She would have gone down, if at the height of military disaster, she'd had no one to lead her but a bearded little hypocrite like Poincaré, Europe's most efficient gravedigger.
Since 1914, France had been beaten every year. "One more hemorrhage like Verdun, and France will fall in a faint," the newspaper L'Heure had seen fit to write. Out of the 3,600,000 men of 1914, there remained only 964,000 surviving combatants at the end of 1917; 2,636,000 were dead, wounded, prisoners, or missing.
More than ten of the wealthiest departments of France had been occupied for nearly three years. War profiteers were arrogantly living the high life. Financially, France had been bled white. It had been necessary to issue sixty billion francs in bonds for the national defense. As far as loans went, some had been covered only to the amount of 47.5 percent.
Small investors, their heads turned by the hired press, had laid out billions in the Russian loans before 1914, and now found themselves ruined.
As for agriculture, it had declined thirty to fifty percent (fifty-two percent of the French soldiers were peasants). Prices had already gone up 400 percent and would reach 600 percent by the end of the war. The bread was vile, but censorship prohibited anyone from writing that "the mixture of corn and wheat flours can cause alopecia." Syphilis was ravaging the country, but there, too, the censors were vigorously plying their scissors.
The information blackout, ordered by narrow-minded and despotic military men, was unbelievable. Prefects could send reports to their ministers only after they had been submitted for censorship. The ignorance in which the civilian members of the government were left was such that the president of the council once learned only from his florist that the army general headquarters was moving from Chantilly.
It was imperative that the public be completely ignorant of anything that might awaken its suspicions, such as, for example, the news that serious mutinies had taken place or that two million Hindus and blacks were being used on the battlefields. Or that anti-colonial troubles had taken place in Senegal, Dahomey, and Annam, following protests against the deportation of native workers and soldiers to Europe. Or that without the labor of women, there would be a shortage of artillery shells at the front. It was only in a small informal meeting that Joffre had seen fit to state that "if the women working in the factories were to stop for twenty minutes, France would lose the war."

On the other hand, the press abounded in marvelous pronouncements aimed at stirring the masses. General Fayolle: "Joan of Arc is looking down on us from heaven with satisfaction."

La Croix: "The history of France is the history of God."
Lavedan, member of the Academy: "I believe by the power of all that is holy in this crusade for civilization. I believe in the blood of the wounds, in the water of benediction. I believe in us. I believe in God. I believe. I believe."
If Lavedan still believed in that wonderful jumble, soldiers believed less and less "in the blood of the wounds," and the public had more and more doubts about the regenerative effects of "the water of benediction." Far from benediction, what France was experiencing in 1917 was hunger, hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans, and millions of soldiers ground up in the mill of trench warfare.
British censorship was no less fanatical and idiotic. On its orders, the press asked that the works of Wagner, Mozart, and Richard Strauss be outlawed. Leon Daudet in Paris titled an article "Down with Wagner." Darer and Cranach narrowly escaped being taken down from the walls of the Louvre and the British Museum.
Now, after three years of war, in France as well as in Germany, socialist and syndicalist leaders, who were only a handful in 1914 but were many in 1917, spoke against these prohibitions and tried, despite a thousand complications arranged by the police, to rescue public opinion from this appalling state of affairs.

Some of them were undoubtedly ringleaders ready to serve any cause, with an eye to making a row, and often hired for that purpose. For example, the Communist agitators of Berlin. In 1915, after two previous meetings in Bern, a pacifist conference had been held at Zimmerwald in Switzerland. It brought together a total of thirty-eight delegates, but an attempt at Communist infiltration had been evident. Lenin, Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev were there, teeth bared like Siberian wolves.
The following year, the son-in-law of Karl Marx, Longet, and his followers held a pacifist demonstration at the French socialist congress of April 16, 1916 which attracted much attention. Their motion demanding a peace with no annexations obtained a third of the ballots: 900 votes against 1800.
Another conference was held at Kienthal. Its manifesto already had the tone of the October 1917 harangues at St. Petersburg:
Proletarians of Europe! Millions of cadavers cover the battlefields. Millions of men will be disabled for the rest of their days. Europe has become a giant human slaughterhouse.
Above and beyond the borders, above and beyond the fields of battle, above and beyond the devastated countryside, proletarians of all countries, unite!

At Kienthal, Lenin's proposal to turn the war of nations into civil war triumphed, receiving two thirds of the votes. On February 18, 1917, the committee set forth its plan of battle to the proletariat: to turn their weapons not against their brothers, the foreign soldiers, but against imperialism, the enemy at home.
One astonishing note: a million copies of that antimilitarist manifesto were distributed in Germany; in France, on the other hand, only ten thousand copies could be distributed in secret.
In Paris, anyone who was not for the war was a traitor, so much so that the syndicalist leaders were all given a special physical examination by a review board. None of them, however bowlegged, escaped induction. The chief of the Second Bureau, Colonel Goubet, saw to it that special treatment was reserved for them, ordering them "to certain Saharan regions where the rolling of roads coincides with the shaping of character, and from which one does not always return."
The wish was expressed clearly and elegantly.

***

Pacifist propaganda during the First World War was above all the work of the left and especially of the extreme left.
The industrialists, the financiers, and the middle classes should have been more concerned than anyone about the senseless destruction of wealth as well as the massive elimination of the cream of the labor force, the youth.
The conservatives, on the contrary, during those four years lived in a hermetically sealed world of claptrap and illusions. It was the intellectuals, from Barrès to Paul Bourget and Henri Massis, who most eloquently praised the extraordinary benefits of the war and most execrated the savagery of Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and the other German barbarians.
Alone in this tumult of hate, Romain Rolland published his Au-dessus de la mélée [Above the Battle] which for all its title was nothing but a long lyrical sigh in favor of peace.

The men of the left, French or foreign, were not necessarily agents of Moscow and enemies of society. Often they were simply friends of mankind.
One of the latter was Camille Huysmans, secretary-general of the Second International, a Belgian with the long ringed neck of a restless boa. He was intelligent, caustic, cynical for its shock value, and profoundly tolerant. In 1917, Kamil - he was called that in Antwerp-had urged pacifism along rational and strictly logical lines. The previous conferences in Switzerland had been too impassioned, and above all too much controlled by Lenin and the other Bolshevik theoreticians, for whom the world was an object to be manipulated cold-bloodedly. A serious conference was needed in which the adversaries would meet again to deal in depth, without prejudice and without intemperate language, with the possibility and the conditions for a peace of reconciliation. As secretary-general of a Second International stricken with paralysis, Huysmans dreamed of restoring to the International the use of its limbs. It was in that spirit that in 1917 he convoked what has been called the Stockholm Conference. There the direct representatives of the enemy peoples were to get to know each other, exchange views, and weigh the chances of a "peace without annexations or indemnities."
Was such a peace possible? Would it be possible to end a war in which all had been partly responsible, in which neither side, despite several million dead, had achieved decisive results, or seemed in a position to do so?
The matter was worth discussing. It was not discussed, however, and for a good reason: those principally concerned, the French delegates, had been forbidden to attend the conference, the Paris government having refused to grant them the passports that would have enabled them to make the trip.
The French government did not want anyone talking peace in any way, shape, or form. To talk of peace would be to make concessions, to admit to a few faults, to renounce certain claims.
One could imagine that in similar negotiations the enemy, especially the Germans, who had been the big winner up to that point-would not grant everything, acknowledge everything, deliver everything. But was it really unreasonable to be reasonable? In 1917, there were already seventeen million men dead, wounded, or taken prisoner. Trying to save the lives, blood, and freedom of millions more who would be lost if the war continued, was that really so criminal? Wasn't all that blood worth a few sacrifices, a few blows to one's ego?
Many delegates came to Stockholm but the most important, the French, were not there, kept at home by their police, who would thenceforth consider them dangerous suspects.

Even a man like Camille Huysmans, who was not French, became the object of a relentless persecution by the French police after the Stockholm Conference. They whipped up campaigns to discredit him everywhere. He was "the man of Stockholm," paid of course by the Germans. The newspapers repeated it over and over without letup. He was so defamed that after the Allied victory in 1918 his own followers, who were ashamed of their leader, barred him in Brussels from access to the Maison du Peuple.
For ten years he suffered a persecution that was comparable to the ordeal, in France, of M. Caillaux. Even before 1914 Caillaux had understood that the French and the Germans were interdependent, and that it was necessary to effect a reconciliation with the Germans instead of fighting them. For his effrontery, he was repudiated for several years. Camille Huysmans had to expiate his bid for peace for a longer period: ten years.
It was then that King Albert I, the Roi Chevalier of the Allies, summoned Huysmans to his palace at Brussels.
Up to that time the Belgian monarch had refrained from speaking. The passions and the hatreds were such that to say anything slightly favorable to "the man of Stockholm" would have been to commit suicide. In 1917, before going to the Stockholm Conference,

The Road to France	Feet of Clay	Armed with Hatred
Debacle on the Dardanelles	Italy Joins the Fray	More Balkan Intrigue
Cannon Fodder from the Colonies	The Slaughter Drags On	Rout in the East
Trembling Resolve	Stabs at Peace	President Wilson, "Colonel" House
America Chooses Sides	Big Business	The Lusitania Affair
Wilson Wavers	"He Kept Us Out of War"	A Home for the Jews
The "Zimmerman Telegram"	Revolution in Russia	Lenin Returns to Russia
Flight to Finland	Red October	Brest-Litovsk
Ludendorff at the Gates	14 Points and an Armistice

The Armistice: a Fraud	British Demagoguery	The Morass of Paris
The Soviets in Germany	Populist Noske Takes on Communism	First Weeks in Paris
A Comedy	The Sabotage of Disarmament	Soviet Republics in Germany
The Communists in Budapest	Germany Crushes Communism	The Alsace-Lorraine Booty
The Rape of Saarland	France in the Rhineland	The Rhineland Occupation
The Rhineland Republic	Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland	Lenin Saved
The Allies and the Soviets	The Hypocrisy of Allied Intervention	The Allies Betray Kolchak
The Death of Russia	Ukrainians and Jews	Danzig, the Corridor and Silesia
The Oder Plebiscite	Czech Rapacity	The Dismemberment of Austria-Hungary
Nine Million New Serbs	Central Europe	The Dardanelles and Venizelos
The Near East Blindfolded	The Liberation of Bavaria	Big Money
Blind Reparations	Germany Alone Is Guilty	"Everything Was Horrible"
Versailles Gave Birth to Hitler	Hitler, Born at Versailles

Black Hand in Sarajevo	Europe Reacts	The German Dynamo
Ambition and Revanche	Poincaré and Caillaux	Remote Conspiracies
Russia Mobilizes	German Restraint	The Word of a King
Damning Documents	A Tsar Gives In	Tragic Farce
Death of a Pacifist	The Lies of Politicians	A Sudden Zigzag
Britain on the Brink	The Most Colossal Folly