Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War by Max Hastings Read Free Book Online Page A

the Kaiser’s personal appointees, heedless of the balance of representation in the Reichstag, with variable but critical influence from the army.
    The Hohenzollerns got everything wrong socially. The Crown Prince returned from a 1913 fox-hunting tour of England convinced – quite mistakenly – of Germany’s popularity with that country’s ruling class. His father, with his withered arm and obsession with the minutiae of military uniforms and regulations, was a brittle personality whose yearning for respect caused him to intersperse blandishments and threats in ill-judged succession. Wilhelm once demanded of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes:‘Now tell me, Rhodes, why is it that I am not popular in England? What can I do to make myself popular?’ Rhodes answered: ‘Suppose you just try doing nothing.’ The Kaiser hesitated, then exploded into heavy laughter. It was beyond his powers to heed such advice. In 1908 Wilhelm scrawled a marginal note on a dispatch from his ambassador in London: ‘If they want a war, they may start it, we are not afraid of it!’
    In the years before 1914 European allegiances were not set in stone: they wavered, flickered, shifted. The French entered the new century with a possible invasion of England docketed in their war scenarios, and in 1905 the British still had contingency plans to fight France. They believed for a time that Russia might abandon the Triple Entente and join the Triple Alliance. In 1912 Austria’s Count Berchtold indeed dallied with a rapprochement with St Petersburg, though this foundered over irreconcilable differences about the Balkans. The following year, Germany offered loans to Serbia. Many of the first generation of Rhodes Scholars at Oxford were young Germans, whose presence reflected British respect, even reverence, for their nation’s culture. And industry: until 1911, Vickers collaborated with Krupp on the design and manufacture of shell fuses.
    Though the Anglo-German ‘naval race’ grievously impaired bilateral relations, Chancellor Theobald Bethmann Hollweg and Lord Chancellor Richard Haldane made fumbling efforts to improve them, the former by seeking an assurance of British neutrality in the event of a continental war. Bethmann paid a domestic price for such advances, becoming mistrusted by fanatical German nationalists as an alleged anglophile. Meanwhile the Kaiser’s brother Prince Heinrich of Prussia, during a January 1914 conversation in Berlin with British naval attaché Captain Wilfred Henderson, remarked in idiosyncratic English readily comprehensible at any London dining table, that ‘other large European maritime nations are not white men’. This comment, which placed alike beyond the pale Russians, Italians, Austro-Hungarians and Frenchmen, won Henderson’s warm approbation. Reporting the royal remarks to the Admiralty, he wrote: ‘I could not help feeling that His Royal Highness had voiced in a peculiarly British way a view that is very prevalent in our own Service.’
    These words were thought sufficiently embarrassing to be expunged from a volume of such diplomatic reports published a generation later. But the Prince’s theme was pursued on an evening when German and British naval officers dined together, and the only toast offered was that of ‘the two white nations’. At the 1914 Kiel Regatta, some German sailorsswore eternal friendship to their visiting counterparts of the Royal Navy. The commander of Pommern told officers of the cruiser Southampton : ‘We try and mould ourselves in the traditions of your navy, and when I see in the papers that the possibility of war between our two nations must be considered, I read it with horror – to us such a war would be a civil war.’ Grand-Admiral Tirpitz employed an English governess for his daughters, who completed their education at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
    Yet if Germany admired Britain, it also sought to challenge her, most conspicuously through the creation of a fleet capable