A Higher Form of Killing by Diana Preston Read Free Book Online

particular the food and the women. A Parisian brothel owner proudly displayed the chair where he had habitually sat to select his woman for the evening. Now, as king, he showed himself a tactful diplomat. Following the entente with France, Britain moved toward a similar understanding with Russia, allied with France since 1892 in a marriage of convenience between autocracy and republicanism. The negotiations were protracted, fraught with long-standing suspicions and antagonisms on both sides, particularly about conflicting ambitions in Persia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, but in 1907 an entente was finally agreed.
    In 1904, the new Conservative British prime minister, Arthur Balfour, appointed Admiral Jacky Fisher as First Sea Lord, the professional head of the Royal Navy. The following year Fisher revolutionized the naval arms race by ordering the first of a new generation of battleships, the steam-turbine-driven, eighteen-thousand-ton HMS Dreadnought , which carried ten twelve-inch guns and rendered all other battleships obsolete at a stroke. Germany immediately set out to build similar ships of its own and to widen the Kiel Canal to allow them a swift and secure transit from their Baltic bases to the North Sea. Whether by coincidence or not, the work on the canal was finally completed on July 23, 1914, barely two weeks before the outbreak of war with Britain.
    In the midst of these developments Theodore Roosevelt, pressed by U.S. peace campaigners, used his and the United States’ emerging prestige to promote the convening of a second Hague Conference. Although none of the nations rushed to accept Roosevelt’s proposal, just as in the case of the first conference none felt able to refuse and so on June 15, 1907, delegates assembled again at The Hague. This time 256 men represented forty-four countries.
    By then Great Britain had a new Liberal government led by Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Roosevelt, becoming convinced that “aggressive” Germany “despises the Hague Conference and the whole Hague idea,” was concerned lest Campbell-Bannerman and his colleagues be “carried away by sentimental ideas” and so “go to any maudlin extreme at the Hague Conference.” He need not have worried. Although to please their Liberal supporters Campbell-Bannerman’s government proposed placing disarmament on the agenda, supported by Roosevelt for the sake of U.S. public opinion, Germany, Austro-Hungary, and this time Russia protested. When the British did raise disarmament at the conference itself, they did so very briefly and the topic was quickly disposed of, all agreeing that it was for the future when it would merit “further serious study.”
    The Hague Arbitration Tribunal had since 1899 successfully resolved a number of international disputes voluntarily submitted to it, the first being between the United States and Mexico over church property and another the Anglo-Russian dispute over the sinking of the British trawlers in the North Sea. During the 1907 conference, Andrew Carnegie laid the foundation stone for the new Peace Palace, which was to house Hague arbitration proceedings and for whose construction he had donated $1,250,000. Although at the conference every delegation expressed support for arbitration, they could not agree about what should appear on a list defining subjects to be compulsorily submitted to the process.
    With gas not having been used as a weapon and no significant research done on such use, the agreement prohibiting the use of asphyxiating gases remained in force with little debate. The development of airships and airplanes had, however, progressed considerably since the earlier conference. On July 2, 1900, spectators at Friedrichshafen on the shore of Lake Constance in southern Germany watched Count von Zeppelin’s cylindrical 420-foot-long Luftschiff 1 ( LZ1 )—the world’s first rigid dirigible airship with a frame of aluminum girders encased by fabric—as it was moved from the floating