Tuesday, November 11, 2008
The End Of The World
All right, all right, I'm back.
There's been a lot of moaning about the imminent end of the world due to the election of Barack Obama and the fattening of the Democrats' Congressional majorities. I've done a bit of it myself, though not here. And however tired you might be, Gentle Reader, of the veh-is-uns coming from the Right, there are precedents, even recent ones, that suggest that our fear for the future of the Republic is not hallucinatory.
This evening my thoughts are about one such catastrophe.
Much human misery has been blamed on impersonal forces and acts of nature. In truth, human misery is caused almost exclusively by humans. There are exceptions -- hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, the Sun going nova -- but their total impact on the state of Mankind is dwarfed by our ability to afflict one another.
Broadly, we cause ourselves to suffer in two ways:
- By doing what we shouldn't;
- By not doing what we should.
The first of these is easy to understand. More, we find it easy to make it relevant to human ills on an individual scale. A man who drinks to excess, who gambles away his earnings, or who dallies adulterously and so loses his wife has all too clearly brought about his own undoing. The second mechanism is almost as easily grasped, but we acknowledge its significance less readily, and less personally, than the first...because the damage done tends not to be confined to him who shirks his duties.
The misery caused by irresponsible statesmen is greater in magnitude than any other kind. It's less often acknowledged than any other kind, as well.
World War I was a rulers' war. The peoples of Europe were largely pacific in outlook. They knew themselves to be the most fortunate persons ever to have walked the Earth. The peace that followed the Congress of Vienna had allowed Europe to become opulent beyond all powers of foresight. They stood at the pinnacle of Christian-Enlightenment classical liberalism; no matter which way they looked, no obstacle to the achievement of a temporal Utopia could be seen.
Except for war.
Five powers stood at the crux: England, ever anxious to maintain financial and commercial access to the markets of the Continent but disinclined to involve itself deeply in other ways; France, despite its 1870 defeat by the German Empire, richer and more elegant than ever before, but still smarting from the loss of Alsace and Lorraine; Germany, boiling with pride over its industrial and military achievements, yet stung by its exclusion from the colonial adventures of the era; Russia, roiled by revolutionary currents and uncertain of its relationship to the rest of the First World; and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a ramshackle conglomeration of mutually detesting small ethnicities forced into a single polity by a long series of jokes of Fate.
In each of these, one man, or a small group, held the tiller of events: the power to plunge a nation into war, or to pledge it to peace. And all of them chose war.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Prinzip, a Serbian national associated with the "Black Hand" terrorist group, gave Conrad von Hotzendorff, the de facto ruler of Austria-Hungary, the pretext he needed to commence an offensive against Serbia, which he had long desired to undertake. As Serbia was unofficially a protectorate of the Russian Empire, Hotzendorff's offensive posed the Russian Stavka, dominated by V. I. Sukhomlinov and N. N. Ianushkevich, with the question of whether or not to mobilize, Czar Nicholas II Romanov being essentially useless.
But Austria-Hungary was allied with Germany and Italy. Serbia's relationship with Russia, and Russia's 1895 mutual-defense treaty with France, suggested to Kaiser Wilhelm II that the moment had come to smash France forever. Wilhelm's frequent cries of Einkreisung! (Encirclement!) against the Franco-Russian alliance had been treated casually by Europe's diplomatic corps. He was impressed by Anglo-French pacific sentiment, and believed Germany's superior martial tradition would inevitably carry the day against them. Outside of Germany, no one was aware of how elaborately Germany's master military mind, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, had planned for that day.
The Schlieffen Plan for war on France involved a monstrous enveloping invasion through Belgium: nearly two million men marching as far to the west as they could, to sweep around an expected French thrust into Alsace and Lorraine and take it in the flank. Indeed, Schlieffen invited that thrust, by deliberately leaving a weak force before it, with orders to pull back slowly and thus tempt the French armies forward. His strategy hinged on the envelopment of the French by the three armies of the "right wing." As for the intervention by Russia on the Eastern Front, he posited a holding action sufficient to keep the Russians at bay until the armies victorious in the West could be redirected against them.
Amidst all the ambitions and uncertainties of the moment, there was a single card whose fall no one could predict: England. In 1904, England and France signed an "entente" of nebulous mutual obligation; no one was quite certain whether it constituted a military alliance, or under what conditions it would call England into the field. Given her inclination to stay out of Continental affairs, it appeared likely to many that England's masters would feel no obligation to commit its tiny army, a mere 110,000 men, to confronting a German invasion of France. But England was a guarantor of the neutrality and security of Belgium, owing to a 1834 treaty to which France and Germany were also signatories. The impact on English sentiment of Belgium being overrun by German forces was something no one could gauge.
Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister of England, was pacifically inclined, but his influence on matters was far less than that of Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, and First Lord of Admiralty Winston Churchill. Both these men wanted England in the field against Germany: Grey out of loyalty to Belgium, Churchill out of desire to destroy Germany's growing High Seas Fleet. In France, Premier Rene Viviani was pacifically inclined -- he directed all French forces to maintain a ten-kilometer distance from the French border to minimize the possibility of an accidental outbreak of hostilities -- but was of less moment than Chief of Staff General Joseph Joffre, who was ardent for war and completely certain of French victory.
Five armies mobilized. Five nations thrust their men at arms forward. Four years later, Europe was a smoldering ruin. Twenty million corpses littered its battlefields. Four empires had fallen. All the maps had to be redrawn. Confidence in Mankind's future had been decisively shattered. And all of it could have been avoided had seven men decided they preferred peace.
They preferred to end the world.
The usual reasons put forward for World War I are wild nationalism and the instability created by the two great alliance systems of Europe. Yet seven men could have prevented the calamity. Seven men, high in the councils of state, had the power to pitch their nations into chaos, or to preserve the peace of the world. All chose war.
Nationalism counted only for cannon fodder. Once war was declared, young men rushed to the colors in each of the five nations. But had those seven statesmen and generals resolved upon peace, what would nationalism have meant then?
The alliances, equally often credited with precipitating the war, gave some decision makers justification for thinking they could prevail over their foes. Conrad von Hotzendorff believed the protection of Germany would forestall Russian intervention in Serbia's defense; Kaiser Wilhelm II believed England's reluctance to fight would undermine France, guaranteeing German victory in the West. But had Wilhelm refrained from guaranteeing Germany's support to Austria-Hungary, as Italy did on the grounds of Austria-Hungary's aggression, Russia would not have mobilized. Had he accepted the counsel of his Chief of Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, Germany would not have struck France. The alliance system would have stabilized the Continent, limiting the conflict to Austria-Hungary and Serbia. Europe had tolerated small wars since 1815 - Crimea and the 1870 Franco-Prussian war -- without going generally insane. There was no imperative reason why the conflict in the upper Balkans should have eventuated otherwise.
But the masters of Europe chose war. The rest is history.
Today is Armistice Day: the anniversary of the day, ninety years ago, when the cease-fire agreement between the warring powers was signed. Twenty million men had died in the four years of fighting. Europe was so enervated from combat that the great influenza plague of 1918 - 1919 would carry away twenty million more. Though the 1919 Treaty of Versailles nominally brought territorial and material gain to the victorious Western Alliance powers, ultimately all would lose.
The attribution of the First World War to nationalism and alliances is an ordinary response of modern historians to a massive catastrophe. The tendency among them is to avoid all thought of personal responsibility for something so large and terrible. Similarly, few historians place the blame for World War II on the personalities, motives, and machinations of Hitler and Stalin; they prefer to blame the tensions and resentments created by the Versailles arrangements, the economic strains that beset the Soviet Union, and France's attempts to separate the Rhineland permanently from Germany.
But neither war can honestly be attributed to sociological or economic forces. In both cases, war was the conscious decision of a small number of men, encouraged by the failure of others to oppose them sufficiently firmly.
On Armistice Day of all days, it is right and proper to recall the power of the individual will in these matters: both the will to conquer and the will to remain free. Not to do so has cost many millions of lives. Not to do so gave rise to two terrible totalitarianisms; one killed six million helpless Jews, while the other subjugated half of Mankind and took forty-five years to defeat. Not to do so could be the ruin of our nation. It ruined the nations of Europe not once but twice.
Do our recently elected federal officials understand that?
