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of the Western Front have faded into oblivion, and Kaiser Bill and his spike-helmeted Huns have long since been superseded by the Fuehrer and his goose-stepping myrmidons.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

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

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