# The War That Ended Peace  ## Metadata - Author: [[Margaret MacMillan]] - Full Title: The War That Ended Peace - Category: #books ## Highlights - The growing interest in peace also reflected a shift in thinking about international relations from the eighteenth century: they were no longer a zero-sum game; by the nineteenth century there was talk of an international order in which all could benefit from peace. And the history of the century appeared to demonstrate that a new and better order was emerging. Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 Europe had, with minor interruptions, enjoyed a long period of peace and its progress had been extraordinary. Surely the two things were linked. Moreover, there appeared to be growing agreement on and acceptance of universal standards of behavior for nations. In time, no doubt, a body of international law and new international institutions would emerge, just as laws and institutions had grown within nations. The increasing use of arbitration to settle disputes among nations or the frequent occasions during the century when the great powers in Europe worked together to deal with, for example, crises in the decaying Ottoman Empire, all seemed to show that, step by step, the foundations were being laid for a new and more efficient way of managing the world’s affairs. War was an inefficient and too costly way of settling disputes. ([Location 5417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5417)) - Tags: [[pink]] - the experts generally assumed before 1914 that a war between the powers would lead to a collapse of international capital markets and a cessation of trade which would harm them all and indeed make it impossible for them to carry on a war for longer than a few weeks. Governments would not be able to get credit and their people would become restive as food supplies grew short. Even in peacetime, with an increasingly expensive arms race, governments were going to run into debt, raise taxes or both, and that in turn would lead to public unrest. Up-and-coming powers, notably Japan and the United States, which did not face the same burdens and enjoyed lower taxes, would be that much more competitive. There was a serious risk, leading experts on international relations warned, that Europe would lose ground and eventually its leadership of the world.6 ([Location 5432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5432)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Say, Angell offered by way of example, that Germany were to take over Europe. Would Germany then set out to ransack its conquests? But that would be suicidal. Where would her big industrial population find their markets? If she set out to develop and enrich the component parts, these would become merely efficient competitors, and she need not have undertaken the costliest war of history to arrive at that result. This is the paradox, the futility of conquest—the great illusion which the history of our own Empire so well illustrates.17 The British, so he argued, had kept their empire together by allowing their separate colonies, notably the dominions, to flourish so that all had benefited together—and without wasteful conflict. Businessmen, Angell believed, had already realized this essential truth. In the past decades, whenever there had been international tensions which threatened war, business had suffered and as a result, financiers, whether in London, New York, Vienna or Paris, had got together to put an end to the crisis “not as a matter of altruism, but as a matter of commercial self-protection.”18 ([Location 5492](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5492)) - Tags: [[pink]] - For all the growth in pacifist sentiments there was also wide and often bitter disagreement about how to achieve a peaceful world. Just as some argue today that the spread of democracy is the key—on the debatable grounds that democracies do not fight each other—so in the years before 1914 there were those, often French thinkers citing the great ideals of the French Revolution, who held that establishing republics and, where necessary, freeing national minorities to govern themselves, would ensure peace. ([Location 5598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5598)) - Tags: [[pink]] - As Alois von Aehrenthal, Foreign Minister of Austria-Hungary between 1906 and 1912, wrote to a friend, “The monarchies are against the international peace movement because the peace movement is against the idea of heroism—an idea essential to the monarchical order.”59 ([Location 5701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5701)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The fundamental weakness of the Second International was not merely national differences on strategy and tactics; it was nationalism itself. This too was masked by language; at every congress before 1914 speakers from all countries uttered noble sentiments about the international brotherhood of the working classes and no doubt most meant what they said. As early as 1891, however, a Dutch delegate to the Second International’s second congress had uttered the awkward but prophetic words: “The international sentiments presupposed by socialism do not exist among our German brothers.” ([Location 5882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5882)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Nationalism, it turned out, was not merely something whipped up and imposed on the rest of the nation by the ruling classes; it had deep roots in the different European societies. It manifested in the nationalistic songs of French workers or the pride which German workers took in their military service. ([Location 5887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5887)) - Tags: [[pink]] - in the years before 1914 there was an increasing tendency for European socialists to defend the possession of colonies on the grounds that the superior civilization was bringing benefits to the inferior one. Some German socialists went further still and argued that Germany needed more colonies for the economic benefits they brought the German working classes. ([Location 5898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5898)) - Tags: [[pink]] - in 1912 Charles Andler, a professor of German at the Sorbonne, known for his sympathies towards both socialism and Germany, brought into the open an uncomfortable truth. German workers, he wrote in a series of articles, were more German than they were internationalists and they would, if war came, for whatever reason, support Germany.97 ([Location 5912](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5912)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Pacifists across Europe tried to reconcile their convictions with their nationalism by making a distinction between wars of aggression and defensive ones. And surely it was right to defend liberal institutions, even imperfect ones, against autocratic regimes. French pacifists, for example, were always clear that the republic had to be defended just as their forebears had defended the French Revolution against its foreign enemies.102 In 1914 one of the goals of Europe’s leaders as the crisis deepened was to persuade their own populations that a decision to go to war would be entirely for defensive reasons. ([Location 5926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5926)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “There is something in warfare, in its story and in its paraphernalia, which profoundly stirs the emotions and sends the blood tingling through the veins of the most peaceable of us, and appeals to I know not what remote instincts, to say nothing of our natural admiration for courage, our love of adventure, of intense movement and action.”103 ([Location 5934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5934)) - Tags: [[pink]] - More importantly for the evolution of Germany and its army, he was in certain crucial ways a very modern man who understood that large organizations need such things as systems, information, training, and a shared vision and ethos if they are to succeed. If he had been born in another time and place, he could have been Germany’s Henry Ford or Bill Gates. As it was, he dealt as well as anyone could with the challenge faced by the officer corps of armies all over Europe: how to combine the values of a warrior caste with the demands of industrial warfare. The tensions that brought, however, were going to carry on into the Great War itself. ([Location 5951](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5951)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Armies had once been constrained in size by how many supplies they could either carry with them or forage as they moved along and limited in their reach by how far and how fast the soldiers could march. By the end of the nineteenth century, trains could take Europe’s much bigger armies over great distances and resupply them from the factories behind the lines which kept pumping out the materials, from weapons to boots, that they needed. ([Location 5965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5965)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The industrial revolution made it possible to have bigger armies and Europe’s population growth had enlarged the pool of manpower. Prussia was the first to tap the pool successfully; it used conscription to take recruits out of civilian society and give them several years of military training. It then returned its trained soldiers to civilian life but kept their skills sharp by putting them in reserves where they did periodic training. In 1897 Germany had 545,000 soldiers in uniform but another 3.4 million who could be called back to the army. ([Location 5968](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5968)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Moltke was one of the first men to grasp that the new age demanded new and much more elaborate ways of organizing. Armies had to draw up their plans, make maps, and collect as much information as possible beforehand because the time between mobilization for war and combat had shrunk dramatically. Before the nineteenth century, armies had moved slowly on foot. As Frederick the Great, George Washington or the Duke of Wellington sent out cavalry scouts to get the lie of the land and try to locate the enemy, they also did their planning. By the time he had confronted the enemy on the eve of battle, Napoleon had the disposition of his own troops and those of his opponent clearly in his mind; he could draw up his battle plans and give out his orders for the morning. That was no longer possible; the army that failed to do its planning well ahead of time was an army which would be useless. ([Location 5992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=5992)) - Tags: [[pink]] - When the elder Moltke told the Reichstag that mobilization timetables needed a single standard time to be implemented throughout Germany, it immediately agreed. ([Location 6007](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6007)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “The highest art of diplomacy is from my point of view,” said Moltke the Younger, “not to keep peace by all means but to shape the political situation of a state permanently in such a way that it is in a position to enter a war under advantageous conditions.”11 ([Location 6021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6021)) - Tags: [[pink]] - As war planning necessarily became more detailed and complicated another danger arose. The size of the plans, the work involved in creating them, and the work necessary to change them became arguments for not altering them. In 1914 when Austria-Hungary made a last-minute change in its troop movements, it meant hastily revising eighty-four boxes of instructions.12 Officers who had spent much of their working lives making the plans as foolproof as possible had, whether or not they realized it, a vested interest and pride in their handiwork. The thought of throwing out years of work and improvising was something the military in all the European powers instinctively recoiled from.13 Moreover, the military planners tended to get locked into focusing on a single scenario for war rather than a range. A staff officer in the railway planning office of Austria-Hungary’s army saw the danger that the military might concentrate on perfecting the plans for only one eventuality and not be prepared for a sudden change in foreign policy and strategic objectives. In his view the military never successfully reconciled the two demands: “on the one hand, to make plans as thoroughgoing as possible to obtain a maximum of speed to enable the high commands a basis for their first efforts; on the other hand, to be ready to fulfil the fundamental duty of the field railways, namely ‘to satisfy all demands of the leaders at any time.’ ” Did the systems, he asked, which had been created over so many years leave enough freedom of decision to the leaders? ([Location 6026](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6026)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The charge that the rigidity of the prewar plans created doomsday machines that once set in motion could not be stopped has had considerable currency as one of the causes, if not the main cause of the Great War. Yet, complex as they were, railway and mobilization schedules could be and indeed were altered in their details every year by the military as more information came in, new lines were opened, or strategic objectives were modified. And their overall goals could have been changed or alternative plans drawn up. After the war, General Groener of the German general staff’s Railway Section claimed that he and his men could have produced new plans in July 1914 to mobilize only against Russia and not France—and done so without a delay that would have been dangerous to Germany. ([Location 6042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6042)) - Tags: [[pink]] - What the plans did do to bring about the Great War was put additional pressure on the decision-makers by shortening the time in which decisions had to be taken. Whereas in the eighteenth century and even the first part of the nineteenth, governments usually had months to think about whether or not they wanted or needed to go to war, they now had days. Thanks to the industrial revolution, once mobilization started armies could be at their frontiers and be ready to fight within a week, in the case of Germany, or in the case of Russia with its greater distances, just over two weeks. The European powers had a pretty good idea of how long each of them would take to mobilize and be ready to fight. It was critical not to get too far behind in the process. A partially completed mobilization when the enemy was on the frontiers and already fully mobilized was the nightmare of Europe’s military and one which many civilians came to share. ([Location 6053](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6053)) - Tags: [[pink]] - once a neighboring power started mobilizing or even showing signs of preparations it was hard for its neighbors to resist mobilizing as well. Not to do anything could be suicide but mobilizing too late was seen as not much better. ([Location 6065](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6065)) - Tags: [[pink]] - While the increasing size of the continental armies obliged them to draw more officers from the urban middle classes, this shift did not lead to a greater enthusiasm and respect for technical or academic prowess; indeed the middle-class officers seem to have absorbed aristocratic values, in taking up dueling for example, not the other way round. ([Location 6095](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6095)) - Tags: [[pink]] - the war that Europeans were being asked to face by 1900 was different in significant ways from those of the past. The industrial revolution had produced weapons that were more powerful, more reliable and more accurate and their much greater range meant that soldiers often did not see the enemies they were killing. It was much easier to defend positions than to attack: as yet the technologies to overcome a strong defense, such as aircraft and armored vehicles, did not exist. As a French general reportedly said after the long-drawn-out Battle of Verdun in the Great War, “Three men and a machine gun can stop a battalion of heroes.” ([Location 6107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6107)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Soldiers in Napoleon’s time had muskets which, with good training, they could reload—standing up—and fire three times a minute, and which were only accurate up to forty-five meters. (That is why it had been both necessary and possible for soldiers to hold their fire until they could see the whites of the enemy’s eyes.) By 1870 the soldiers had rifles which were accurate up to almost half a kilometer; what is more they could load and fire six times a minute, and from the breech as they lay down, which meant that they were not exposed to enemy fire. By 1900 rifles were accurate—and lethal—over a greater distance, sometimes even up to a kilometer, and the new machine guns could fire hundreds of rounds a minute. The numbers had climbed and were continuing to climb all round: field artillery, which had an average range of just over half a kilometer in 1800, had almost seven kilometers in 1900; heavier guns, often mounted on railway undercarriages, had a range of ten kilometers. So attackers had to survive several kilometers of shell fire then several hundred meters of intense rifle and machine-gun fire on their way towards the enemy. ([Location 6113](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6113)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Bloch warned about this last, the zone of fire, and the growing advantage of the defense, and about the likelihood of stalemates on the battlefield that would last for months or years. Yet Europe’s military planners dismissed his work. After all, as a Jew by birth, a banker, and a pacifist he was everything they tended to dislike. ([Location 6122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6122)) - Tags: [[pink]] - European military observers had gone to the American Civil War of 1861–5 or to that between Turkey and Russia in 1877 and seen for themselves how a combination of well-prepared defensive positions including trenches in combination with rapid firing had devastated the attackers and caused much larger losses among them than the defenders. At the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, to take only one of many examples, the Union threw waves of soldiers against well-defended Confederate positions. All the attacks failed and the Union lost over twice as many soldiers as the Confederacy. It is said that the Union wounded scattered across the battlefield begged their comrades not to continue their fruitless attacks. ([Location 6134](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6134)) - Tags: [[pink]] - EUROPE’S MILITARY PLANNERS did their best to explain away the problems of the offense and the growing cost in terms of life. Recent wars had not, for example, been fought properly as the most advanced, European armies would fight them. “Those savage encounters do not deserve the name of war,” a European general said of the American Civil War to Bloch, “and I have dissuaded my officers from reading the published accounts of them.” ([Location 6154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6154)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Military history, which was treated with reverence in the European military as the source of wisdom about war, was called in to support the arguments.32 The battles with clear outcomes, Leipzig in 1813 or Sedan in 1870 for example, tended, however, to get more attention than inconclusive or defensive ones. ([Location 6162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6162)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: Bias towards clearly interpretable outcomes, throwing out data that doesn’t neatly fit the theory. Common cognitive bias - The reluctance of Europe’s military to come to terms with the new ways of war can be explained partly by bureaucratic inertia: changing such things as tactics, drills, or training methods is time-consuming and unsettling. The very cohesiveness armies demanded of their officers led to a collective mentality where originality and loyalty were prized less than being a good team player. ([Location 6167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6167)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Yet we should not assume that the military planners before 1914 were unique in their dogged insistence on the offensive; history and the present are littered with examples of the striking capacity of human beings to overlook, minimize, or explain away evidence that does not fit comfortably with deeply held assumptions and theories. What some historians have christened the cult of the offensive grew stronger if anything before 1914 in the thinking of Europe’s military planners (and to be fair in that of the Americans and the Japanese as well), perhaps because the alternative—that war had evolved to a point where there would be huge losses and mutual attrition without a clear victory for either side—was so unpalatable and so difficult to comprehend. ([Location 6176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6176)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Character, motivation, morale, these were widely seen before 1914 as the key ingredients for the success of the offensive. In stressing the importance of the psychological factor, the military drew on thinking current in the wider European society of the times. The work of Nietzsche or Bergson, for example, had awakened interest in the power of the human will. ([Location 6190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6190)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In the armed forces as well as in the militaristic organizations of civilian society such as youth movements, the emphasis on inculcating such values as self-sacrifice went beyond giving fresh advantage to the offensive in war. It was also as much about overcoming the deficiencies of modern society and reversing what many, especially in the old ruling classes, felt to be the degeneration of the race and the deterioration of society. For those officers from those classes, a decreasing number but still an influential group, the attempt offered a way back to what they felt was a better society and one in which their values were paramount. That distinguished Victorian soldier Sir Garnet Wolseley, from the Anglo-Irish gentry, a class which shared many of the values of the German Junkers, advocated conscription for Britain on the grounds that it was an “invigorating antidote” against the weakening effects of modern society: “National training keeps healthy and robust the manhood of a state, and in saving it from degeneration nobly serves the cause of civilisation.” ([Location 6205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6205)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The striking absence of serious planning before 1914 for a long war, whether stockpiling materials or drawing up measures to manage the economy, is clear evidence that civilian and military leaders in Europe simply did not want to confront that nightmare of defeat and social upheaval.50 At best they hoped that even a stalemated war of attrition would not last that long; on this the military across Europe agreed with Bloch, that the resources would run out and the war effort collapse. ([Location 6254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6254)) - Tags: [[pink]] - A general war, fought at the heart of Europe, was becoming thinkable. The impact of crises helped as much as militarism or nationalism to prepare Europeans psychologically for the Great War. ([Location 6270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6270)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: Crises served as “priming” for the Great War. They made people comfortable with the idea of multiple Great Powers taking sides in an issue. This became a new normal, and produced an environment predisposed to erupting into a massive war - Under Germany’s war plan in 1914, it needed to get troops into Luxembourg and Belgium before any declaration of war, and that indeed is what happened.53 And the plans themselves contributed to the international tensions by bringing armed forces closer to war readiness and encouraging an arms race. What may seem like a reasonable way of protecting oneself can look very different from the other side of the border. ([Location 6279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6279)) - Tags: [[pink]] - perhaps its greatest flaw was that it did not allow for what the great German theorist of war, Clausewitz, called friction and the Americans call Murphy’s Law; no plans on paper ever work as they are meant to once they encounter real conditions, and what can go wrong, will go wrong. ([Location 6311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6311)) - Tags: [[pink]] - As Schlieffen saw it, his duty was to devise the best military plan for Germany; he left diplomacy, which like most of the general staff he saw as useful merely for preparing the ground for war, to the civilians. Yet he did not see it as his responsibility to inform them in detail of what he was planning. ([Location 6427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6427)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The direction of Germany’s overall strategy and the coordination of the key parts, both civil and military, of the government needed a Bismarck but there was no one of his stature before 1914. Bismarck himself was in part to blame for leaving behind a system where the lines of control were not clearly drawn and where there was little will to draw them. The only institution capable of providing coordination and overall direction was the monarchy but Wilhelm was not the man to do it. ([Location 6435](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6435)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The two men rode side by side and Moltke revealed that the cause of his concern was Schlieffen’s retirement: “His Majesty insists on making me his successor and everything in me dislikes the thought of this appointment.” Moltke felt, he told Bülow, that he did not possess the right qualities for such a demanding post: “I lack the power of rapid decision; I am too reflective, too scrupulous, or if you like, conscientious for such a post. I lack the capacity for risking all on a single throw.”23 ([Location 6466](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6466)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The other key part of Schlieffen’s legacy was not a final plan but an overall strategic direction and method of planning. Year by year in the two decades before 1914, the general staff tested its plans in field maneuvers—some with thousands of men and their equipment—war games, or on paper. All were analyzed for issues, gaps, or shortcomings, and the results cycled back into the planning process. On April 1 every year, each unit of the German army had its updated plans and orders. “They have turned war,” Kessler rightly said of the general staff, “into a great bureaucratic business enterprise.”30 And, as with other great enterprises, there was a danger that process was becoming more important than broader strategic thinking and that fundamental assumptions including the need for a two-front war went unexamined and unchallenged. ([Location 6503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6503)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In 1914, even after the improvement in the railways, it still took twenty-six days fully to mobilize the armies in the European part of Russia while it took Austria-Hungary sixteen days and Germany twelve.75 That discrepancy was going to put additional pressure on the Tsar to order Russian mobilization early in the crisis that summer. ([Location 6744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6744)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Even if the worst did not happen, its geography presented Russia, as it had done for centuries, with a strategic choice of whether to focus ([Location 6768](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6768)) - Tags: [[pink]] - What France needed if a general war broke out was an early Russian attack on Germany in the east to take the pressure off French forces in the west. Over the years the French used their financial hold over Russia, which badly needed foreign loans, to persuade their ally to make a commitment to such an attack. ([Location 6817](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=6817)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The war plans of all the major continental powers reflected a deeply rooted faith in the offensive and an unwillingness to contemplate the alternative of a defensive strategy. ([Location 7016](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=7016)) - Tags: [[pink]] - While the military and their plans did not by themselves cause the Great War, their infatuation with the offensive and their acceptance of war as both necessary and inevitable made them put pressure on those making the decisions in moments of crisis. The military advice almost invariably tended towards war. ([Location 7021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=7021)) - Tags: [[pink]] - For the outside world, the divisions within the top German leadership were not apparent and the disagreements over tactics among them which led to Germany veering between bullying and reasonableness only deepened foreign mistrust of Germany’s intentions. ([Location 7157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=7157)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “If,” said the Kaiser later, “I had been told about this, I would have gone into it thoroughly and that idiotic Conference would never have taken place.”42 Although the French reluctantly agreed to the conference at the start of July, German pressure had put Rouvier’s back up; later that year he said to a close associate: “If Berlin thinks it can intimidate me, it has made a mistake.”43 French public opinion was also swinging towards greater firmness with Germany and an appreciation of the value of the Entente Cordiale. ([Location 7234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=7234)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: Germany overplayed its hand and exerted so much aggression that it pushed France back into the arms of Britain - He feared, like many of his contemporaries across Europe, that a major war would bring revolution but hoped for a peaceful evolution. “There are unpleasant years before us,” he remarked in 1911, adding that “we shall work through to something better, though we who have been used to more than £500 a year may not think it better.” ([Location 7265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=7265)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The growth of German power brought out the old British fear of a single nation dominating the coasts of the Netherlands, Belgium and perhaps even France, across which so much of Britain’s trade flowed. Germany’s control of the coasts would also put it in a position to invade Britain if it chose. ([Location 7420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=7420)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The French would do whatever it took to get Britain to commit itself. In 1909 they produced a carefully faked document, said to have been discovered when a French commercial traveler picked up the wrong bag on a train, which purported to show Germany’s invasion plans for Britain. ([Location 7488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=7488)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The first Morocco crisis of 1905–6 brought much greater cooperation and understanding between Britain and France but it also brought greater obligations. The crisis served as well to draw the lines more sharply between the powers in Europe. With the signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907, yet another line was drawn and another strand of obligations and expectations woven, this time between two former enemies. ([Location 7499](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=7499)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Europe was not doomed to divide itself into two antipathetic power blocs, each with its war plans to the ready, but as yet more crises succeeded the first Moroccan one, it became more difficult to change the pattern. ([Location 7506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=7506)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In the nineteenth century, the great powers, led by Britain, had propped up the “Sick Man of Europe” partly to prevent just such a dangerous scramble for territory. ([Location 7569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=7569)) - Tags: [[pink]] - UNDER AEHRENTHAL, HOWEVER, AUSTRIA-HUNGARY and Russia were going to fall out badly and perhaps irredeemably over the fate of the small and poor Ottoman province of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the western part of the Balkans. The policy of moderation and cooperation in the Balkans which had existed between the two powers lay in shreds, to the ultimate ruin of both. What they had long feared, armed confrontation in the Balkans, nearly happened in 1908, again in 1912 and 1913, and finally broke out in 1914 and brought most of Europe down with it. ([Location 7630](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=7630)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Milan managed to alienate Serbian nationalists by his subservience to Austria-Hungary and shock even his supporters by quarreling openly with his Russian-born wife in various Belgrade cafés. In 1889, by now divorced from her, Milan finally managed to abdicate in favor of his thirteen-year-old son, Alexander. Unfortunately for the family and for Serbia, the boy grew up to be a chip off the parental block. In 1900 he married an older woman with a very shady reputation. In 1903 both were murdered, along with the Prime Minister and the Minister of War, in a particularly brutal fashion by nationalist officers. Peter Karageorgevi?, from a rival dynasty, became King and, after some political turbulence, the intensely nationalist Radicals under the cagey and cunning Nikola Paši? took over the government which they were to dominate until the end of the Great War. The assassination not only set Serbia on a new path of confrontation with Austria-Hungary, it helped to build the chain of events which led to the summer of 1914. ([Location 7694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=7694)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Note: Such a domino effect of events leading to the beginning of WW1 - Conrad did find encouragement, however, in concluding that mobilization together with the German ultimatum had worked to make Russia and Serbia back down. Aehrenthal concurred: “a text-book example of how success is only certain if the strength is there to get one’s own way …”96 ([Location 8064](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=8064)) - Tags: [[pink]] - After he received the German ultimatum, the Tsar wrote to his mother: “It is quite true that the form and method of Germany’s action—I mean towards us—has simply been brutal and we won’t forget it.” Germany, he went on, was trying again to separate Russia from its allies, France and Great Britain: “Such methods tend to bring about the opposite result.” ([Location 8075](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=8075)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Unfortunately, such an understanding never came again. Europe was to enjoy a short three years of peace before the next crisis came and then the next. And with each crisis, the two groupings of Europe’s powers became more like full-blown alliances whose partners would support each other through thick and thin. ([Location 8122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=8122)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Political divisions between the right and the left had deepened and the monarchy itself, as the Daily Telegraph affair had shown all too clearly, was growing in unpopularity. The temptation for Germany’s new Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, and his colleagues to have a good international crisis to bring all Germans together in support of their government was considerable.8 According to Bülow, his successor longed for a dramatic success such as the one that Germany and Austria-Hungary enjoyed over the Bosnian annexation. Bülow, who came to resent and despise Bethmann as a weakling, also claimed that Bethmann said rather pathetically during the handover: “I shall soon get the hang of foreign policy.” ([Location 8207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=8207)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The problems inherent in the German governmental system were, if anything, worse than before. The Kaiser, his various entourages, and his favored ministers, were independent actors and frequently worked at counterpurposes to the Chancellor. The Reichstag was increasingly polarized and the Social Democrats were winning more seats almost every time there was an election. The taxation system badly needed reforming to produce the tax revenue the government needed for the armed forces and its social programs. In the wider German society the old conservative classes fought a determined rearguard action to defend their powers and position while the middle and working classes pushed for a greater share. ([Location 8239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=8239)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In yet another chilling example of how readily the top leadership in Europe was now taking the prospect of a large-scale war for granted, Hohenlohe warned that war was likely in the next six to eight weeks if the Albanian issues were not settled. ([Location 9084](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=9084)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In the year from the outbreak of the First Balkan War to the autumn of 1913, Russia and Austria-Hungary had come close to war on several occasions, and the shadow of a more general conflict had fallen across Europe as a whole as their allies had waited in the wings. Although the powers had in the end been able to manage the crises, their peoples, leaders and publics alike had become accustomed to the idea of war, and as something that might happen sooner rather than later. When Conrad threatened to resign because he felt he had been snubbed by Franz Ferdinand, Moltke begged him to reconsider: “Now, when we are moving towards a conflict, you must remain.”116 Russia and Austria-Hungary had used preparations for war, especially mobilization, for deterrence but also to put pressure on each other, and, in the case of Austria-Hungary, on Serbia. Threats had worked this time because none of the three countries had been prepared to call the bluffs of the others and because, in the end, the voices for maintaining the peace were stronger than those for war. What was dangerous for the future was that each of Austria-Hungary and Russia was left thinking that such threats might work again. Or, and this was equally dangerous, they decided that next time they would not back down. ([Location 9214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=9214)) - Tags: [[pink]] - On July 7, the day after the Chancellor had added his support to the blank check, the two men sat up late under the summer night sky at Bethmann’s old castle at Hohenfinow east of Berlin. Riezler was shocked by the older man’s pessimism as he lamented the state of the world and of Germany. German society, Bethmann felt, was in moral and intellectual decline and the existing political and social order seemed incapable of renewing itself. “Everything,” he said sadly, “has become so very old.” The future too looked bleak: Russia, “an increasingly heavy nightmare,” would grow still stronger while Austria-Hungary declined to the point where it was no longer capable of fighting with Germany as an ally. ([Location 10344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=10344)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Germany’s key leaders, such as Bethmann, may not have deliberately started the Great War, as has often been charged by, among others, German historians such as Fritz Fischer. Nevertheless, by taking its coming for granted, as something desirable even, by issuing the blank check to Austria-Hungary, and by sticking to a war plan which made it inevitable that Germany would fight on two fronts, Germany’s leaders allowed it to happen. ([Location 10351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=10351)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Russia’s growing power was a double-edged sword for France, which was in danger of becoming the junior partner. Worse still, Russia might become so strong that it no longer needed the French alliance.17 ([Location 10707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=10707)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The ties that had bound a peaceful and prosperous Europe over the nineteenth century now broke rapidly. Rail and telegraph lines were cut; shipping slowed down; bank reserves were frozen and international currency exchanges stopped; and trade dwindled away. Ordinary citizens scrambled desperately to get home in a world that had suddenly become different. ([Location 11549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=11549)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In 1914 Europe’s leaders failed it either by deliberately opting for war or by not finding the strength to oppose it. Over half a century later a young and inexperienced American president faced his own crisis and his own choices. In 1962 when the Soviet Union placed military forces on Cuba, including missiles capable of striking the eastern seaboard of the United States with nuclear warheads, John F. Kennedy was under intense pressure from his own military to take action even at the risk of an all-out war with the Soviet Union. He resisted, partly because he had learned from the previous year’s fiasco of the Bay of Pigs that the military were not always right but also because he had just read The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman’s extraordinary account of how Europe had blundered into the Great War. He chose to open negotiations with the Soviet Union and the world backed away from the brink. ([Location 11568](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=11568)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Although there are many myths about the Great War, in August 1914 the soldiers did indeed tell their families that they would be home for Christmas. At the British Staff College at Camberley where the graduating students waited amidst the usual garden parties, cricket matches and picnics for their orders, word came at last that they were to take up their appointments, most with the British Expeditionary Force that was going to the Continent. The college itself was closed until further notice and its instructors were also given staff posts; the authorities thought there was no need to carry on training more officers for a short war.4 The warnings of experts such as Ivan Bloch and Moltke himself or of pacifists such as Bertha von Suttner and Jean Jaurès that offensives would end in stalemates with neither side strong enough to overcome the other, while societies were drained of their resources, from men to munitions, were forgotten, at least for the time being, as the European powers marched into war. Most people, from those in command to the ordinary citizen, assumed that it would be short, like the Franco-Prussian War, for example, where it took the armies of the German alliance less than two months to force the surrender of France. (That the fighting then dragged on because the French people took up the struggle was another matter.) Financial experts, whether bankers or finance ministers, took it for granted that the war would have to be short: the disruption of trade and the inability of governments to borrow money as the international capital markets dried up would mean that impending bankruptcy would make it impossible for the belligerents to carry on fighting. As Norman Angell, in his Great Illusion, warned, even if Europe was so foolish as to go to war, the resulting economic chaos and domestic misery would rapidly force the warring nations to negotiate a peace. What few realized—although Bloch had—was that Europe’s governments had an untested but great capacity to squeeze resources out of their societies, whether through taxation, managing their economies or freeing up men for the front by using the labor of women, and that Europeans themselves had a stoicism and doggedness which could keep them fighting through the long years to come even as the terrible losses mounted. What is surprising about the Great War is not that European societies and individuals eventually buckled under the strain—and not all did, or not completely—but that Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary endured for so long before they collapsed into revolution or mutiny or despair. ([Location 11600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=11600)) - Tags: [[pink]] - As the German forces poured through Belgium and Luxembourg on their way into northern France, the German war plans appeared to be unfolding as they should. Not quite, however. Belgium’s decision to resist slowed the pace of the German advance. The main fortress at Liège fell on August 7 but twelve more had to be taken one by one. Belgian resistance also meant that Germany had to leave troops behind as it advanced. The German army on the great right wing which was to swoop across the Meuse towards the Channel and then swing south towards Paris and so bring a stunning victory was both weaker and slower than had been planned. ([Location 11620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=11620)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Industries, national wealth, labor, science, technology, even the arts had all been harnessed to the war effort. Europe’s progress, which it had celebrated so proudly at the Paris Exposition of 1900, had enabled it to perfect the means to mobilize its great resources in order to destroy itself. ([Location 11645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=11645)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Although the victorious powers had their share of upheavals—there were violent strikes and demonstrations in France, Italy, and Britain by 1918—the old order held there, for the time being. But Europe collectively was no longer the center of the world. It had spent down its great wealth and exhausted its power. The peoples of its empires who had largely acquiesced in rule from outside were stirring, their confidence that their foreign masters knew best shaken irremediably by the four years of savagery on Europe’s battlefields. New nationalist leaders, many of them soldiers who had witnessed for themselves what European civilization could produce, demanded self-government now and not in some far-off future. Britain’s “white” dominions were content to stay within the empire but only on the condition that they had increased autonomy. New players from outside Europe were taking a greater part in world affairs. In the Far East, Japan had grown in both power and confidence and dominated its neighborhood. Across the Atlantic the United States was now a major world power, its industries and farms stimulated to even more growth by the war and with New York increasingly the center of world finance. Americans saw Europe as old, decadent and finished—and many Europeans agreed with them. ([Location 11695](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=11695)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The Great War marked a break in Europe’s history. Before 1914, Europe for all its problems had hope that the world was becoming a better place and that human civilization was advancing. After 1918 that faith was no longer possible for Europeans. As they looked back at their lost world before the war, they could feel only a sense of loss and waste. ([Location 11709](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00CNQ9PFK&location=11709)) - Tags: [[pink]]