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A summer Sunday, 1914.
All across Europe, the bells were peeling,
calling men and women to church.
Sunday - the Lord's day and a day of rest.
It was a world of firm beliefs.
The established order was not widely questioned.
Father at the head of the family.
The monarch at the head of the nation. God in his heaven.
Sunday after church was a day of quiet pleasures.
# Little Dolly Daydream Pride of Idaho
# So now you know And when you go
# You'll see there's something on her mind - don't think it's you
# Cos no-one's gonna kiss that girl but me. #
In the Bois de Boulogne, the Tiergarten or Rotten Row,
the aristocracy displayed themselves.
Carriages, servants, dazzling clothes.
Material progress had marched swiftly in the peaceful decades before 1914.
It was a world of novelties clashing with established ways.
Wireless and telephones, motorcars and motorcycles,
electric light and electric trains, submarines and airships.
A world humming with new energy and power.
But under the smiles and relaxation, it was a world of tensions.
The old order, with its economy based on land
and its society based on owning land,
was in conflict with the new order of industry and teeming cities.
Industry had uprooted populations, expanded them beyond belief,
tempted them, enriched them... and impoverished them.
The peace of Europe in 1914 was a fragile thing.
"On the idle hill of summer
"Sleepy with the sound of streams
"Far I hear the steady drummer
"Drumming like a noise in dreams."
In the Germanic empire, lying across the heart of Europe,
a clash of old and new was obvious.
Under the leadership of Prussia, under Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor,
Germany had emerged as a nation and as a world power.
In 1871, her 39 separate states, after centuries of discord,
had united at last.
FANFARE BLOWS
The kings of Saxony and Bavaria,
the princes, dukes and electors of Brunswick,
Baden, Hanover, Mecklenburg, Wurttemberg, Oldenburg,
all paid allegiance to the King of Prussia, the Kaiser.
This unity fulfilled a deep wish in German hearts.
It gave them a sense of destiny.
Even the leadership of Prussia was better than insignificance.
With unity had come an upsurge of energy and expansion.
In 1871, there were 41 million Germans. In 1913, there were nearly 68 million,
an increase of more than half.
And more than half of them were living in towns and cities.
But it was not merely an expansion of population.
Economic strength in the early 20th century was based on steel and coal.
Germany had made great strides with both.
Steel production multiplied by 12 in 30 years.
Coal production multiplied by nearly 5 in 30 years.
- Manufactures multiplied by 4. - Exports multiplied by 3.
Exports of chemicals multiplied by 3.
In 30 years, Germany's share in world trade had risen by a third.
Now, in 1914, Germany was, after America,
the most powerful industrial nation in the world.
The epitome of her industrial might lay in the firm of Krupp.
Essen, where the first Krupp factory was built, became by 1902...
A great city with its own streets, its own police force,
fire department and traffic laws.
There are 150 kilometres of rail, 60 different factory buildings,
8,500 machine tools, seven electrical stations,
140 kilometres of underground cable and 46 overhead.
Germany delighted in the prowess of Krupp's.
When Alfred Krupp died in that year, the Kaiser attended his lavish funeral
and called him "a German of the Germans."
In 1914, the firm employed 80,000 workers.
They lived in Krupp houses, babies were delivered
by Krupp doctors, children educated in Krupp schools.
They bought at Krupp stores, borrowed books from Krupp libraries,
married in the Krupp church and were buried in the Krupp cemetery.
Under Bismarck, Germany had come closer
than any other state to modern ideas of social welfare.
German workers enjoyed sickness, accident and maternity benefits,
canteens and changing rooms and a national pension scheme,
before these were even thought of in more liberal countries.
The steel mills operated a 12-hour ay and an 80-hour week.
Neither rest days nor holidays were guaranteed.
As in every industrial state, there was poverty and protest.
By 1912, the Socialist party was the strongest party
in the Reichstag, the parliament.
The Reichstag did not rule Germany.
The Kaiser ruled Germany through officials whom he appointed.
Sir Winston Churchill said, "No-one should judge Kaiser Wilhelm II
"without asking, 'What should I have done in his position?'"
Imagine yourself brought up to believe
that you were appointed by God to be the ruler of a mighty nation.
Imagine succeeding in your 20s to the prizes of Bismarck's three wars.
Imagine feeling the magnificent German race
bounding beneath you in ever-swelling numbers,
strength, wealth and ambition.
And imagine on every side the thunderous tributes of the crowds
and the skilled, unceasing flattery of the court.
With this background, subjected to these pressures,
trying to hide a left arm withered from birth, for 30 years,
Wilhelm II had vexed and perturbed the peace of Europe, but always short of war.
His first public utterance when he came to the throne
was addressed not to the people but to the army.
We belong to each other, I and the army.
We were born for each other and will indissolubly cleave to each other.
I promise ever to bear in mind that from the world above,
the eyes of my forefathers look down on me
and that I shall one day have to stand accountable to them
for the glory and honour of the army.
These were not empty words. The Kaiser was also the king of Prussia.
It was for the sake of Prussian strength that the other Germany,
the Germany of the merchants, industrialists,
musicians, philosophers had accepted her rule.
The Prussian influence permeated the whole nation.
It was a military influence,
well described by one of its advocates, General von Hindenburg...
The army trained and strengthened that mighty organising impulse,
found everywhere in the Fatherland.
The conviction that the subordination of the individual
to the good of the community was not only a necessity but a blessing
had gripped the mind of the German army and of the nation.
With Prussia as the core,
the German empire was the most powerful military organism in the world.
And at its head, posturing, gesturing,
stood the all-powerful Kaiser, challenging Europe.
Without Germany, and without the German Kaiser,
no great decisions must ever be taken.
If this should happen, the position of Germany in the world would vanish for ever
and I do not purpose that this should ever happen.
To employ suitable and, if necessary,
violent means ruthlessly is my duty, my fair privilege.
Germany's neighbours watched her clamorous progress with alarm.
The republic of France uneasily remembered
her overwhelming defeat at Germany's hands in 1870.
Then, the rich lands of Alsace and Lorraine had been torn from her.
This bitterly resented loss was passed on to new generations.
Think that the Motherland is your second mother,
that she weeps and suffers over the children torn from her bosom.
France had her iron, her coal, her industry,
but the French were above all tillers of the soil.
The produce of her fields and vineyards made France self-supporting.
The French cared for good food.
The specialities of each province acquired international fame.
While the ploughland and pastures of the provinces fed Paris,
Paris itself fertilised not only France, but Europe, too.
The curiosity and enthusiasm of Parisians matched a period
which seemed to produce new novelties every day.
Louis Bleriot was the first man to fly the Channel.
I began my flight steady and sure.
I have no apprehension, no sensations, nothing.
I am making at least 42mph, travelling at a height of 250 feet.
Below me is the sea. There is nothing to be seen,
neither France nor England. I am alone.
For ten minutes, I am lost and then I see the cliffs of Dover.
There were flying experiments of another kind, not so successful.
Cranks or pioneers, the French greeted them all expectantly.
A moving pavement was displayed at the exhibition of 1900.
Looking down from it, Paris was truly, "sovereign of cities, seemliest in sight."
The wide, bustling boulevards, the cafes,
the Louvre, storehouse of Europe's treasures,
the imprisoned sunshine of the Impressionists,
the acting of Sarah Bernhardt,
the Moulin Rouge and the legs of Mistinguett, dinner at Maxim's.
Picasso and Matisse were painting.
In her quiet laboratory, Madame Curie was discovering radium.
Paris was the Mecca of the West.
But Paris is not France.
The glamour of Paris did not reflect the deepest truths about the French.
It encouraged their optimism,
but it concealed unrest among the industrial classes,
who felt left out of a rising tide of prosperity.
It concealed the backwardness of French industry
in a world where this counted more and more
and a declining birthrate in a world which paraded its millions.
It concealed the canker at the heart of French politics,
memory of the defeat of 1870 and fear of the rising might of Germany.
Because of this, the army played a special part in the life of France.
Shattered in 1870, it had made a remarkable recovery.
It became a national army, based on universal conscription.
It schooled itself in colonial wars, but it was looking towards Germany.
In 1914, there was a socialist government.
Anti-militarism, pacifism and internationalism
were proclaimed with swelling voices.
The workers' organisations judge that wage earners
obliged to go to war have this alternative only,
to take up weapons and menace other wage earners,
or to take up battle against the common foe - capitalism.
Anti-militarist and anti-patriotic propaganda
must become evermore intense and audacious.
Discordant voices in France, strident voices in Germany.
For, as Germany pursued the destiny
preached by her thinkers, another neighbour took fright.
The Germans were not content with military might
and industrial supremacy. They still felt cheated.
They wanted a place in the sun, an empire.
Between 1884 and 1890, German sovereignty was proclaimed
over an area more than four times larger than Germany herself.
On the pretext of protecting these colonies
and her expanding trade, Germany built a battle fleet.
This was a threat that any British newspaper reader could understand.
The sea served Britain as a moat defensive to a house
against the envy of less happier lands.
Now envy was reaching across the sea.
Winston Churchill spoke for all Britain when he said...
Our naval power involves British existence.
If our naval supremacy were to be impaired,
the whole fortunes of our race and empire would perish
and be swept utterly away.
Britain awoke to the truths of the 20th century.
Reality jarred against the romantic image of merry England.
Yet the image lived on, reinforced by the royal family,
in its role of country squire.
Englishmen like to think of themselves in these terms.
They attached magical virtues to walking over fields.
They also found virtue in royal pageantry,
jubilees, coronations, state openings... funerals.
The funeral of King Edward VII in 1910
provided a last glimpse of royal Europe in all its panoply.
Nine kings followed Edward's coffin through the streets of London.
King George V, his successor, the Kaiser, his nephew,
the kings of Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Bulgaria, Norway and Greece.
The watching awe-struck crowds
were reminded that Britain was the centre of an empire on which the sun never set.
The most glittering jewel of all was India.
The Great Durbar at Delhi in 1911 seemed to confirm British rule.
Wearing their coronation robes,
with attendants carrying peacock fans, yak tails and golden maces,
their majesties took their thrones and faced thousands of their subjects.
King George V wrote in his diary...
The most beautiful and wonderful sight I ever saw.
I wore a new crown for India which cost L60,000.
The amphitheatre contained about 12,000 people and about 18,000 troops.
119 princes and maharajahs bowed and retracted
in a ceremony which lasted a full hour.
The Delhi Durbar affirmed the bond between the king-emperor
and more than 300 million Indian subjects.
Africans, too, were subject to the British Crown.
To Cecil Rhodes had come the dream of linking British possessions
with a railway from the Cape to Cairo.
The almost unbroken pink up the map of Africa
showed the dream well on the way to realisation.
And there were the white dominions, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
In these lands, men of British stock had driven down new routes,
creating British populations in far distant places,
half as numerous as the Britons who stayed at home.
In the British Isles, life for many was a struggle for daily bread.
The national wealth of the country in 1914
has been computed of L14,300 million.
But in Britain's industrial towns,
working-class families could not afford decent clothes or enough to eat.
In London in 1900, 30.7% of the population
were living below the poverty line.
In York, 28% existed on a diet less generous than that of the workhouse.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, wrote...
Our working populations, crushed into dingy and mean streets
with no assurance that they would not be deprived
of their daily bread by ill health or trade fluctuations,
were becoming sullen with discontent.
As in Germany and in France, the workers turned to socialism.
The Labour Party was born.
But 40 Labour MPs could not provide a remedy.
Only through the rapidly-growing trade union movement
could the workers assert their demands.
In 1911 and 1912, Britain was swept by a wave of strikes
more complete and embittered than any yet seen.
The trade union leader Ben Tillett said...
It was a great upsurge of elemental forces.
It seemed as if the dispossessed and disinherited classes
were all simultaneously moved to assert their claims upon society.
The ruling classes reacted with furious incomprehension.
In Liverpool, troops fired over the heads of the crowds.
A man told Sir Austin Chamberlain...
I think the situation is so serious that I went today to a wholesale armourer's.
to buy five revolvers. The shop man said,
"We had 100 yesterday, 50 when we opened this morning. We have not one left now."
This was England, facing a class struggle
such as she had not seen for over half a century,
and facing the dispossessed who had nothing to do with class - women.
The old fight for women's rights received a new impetus
from the militant suffragette movement.
Nothing was safe from their attacks.
Churches were burned, buildings destroyed, bombs were exploded,
the police and individuals assaulted, meetings broken up.
At Epsom on Derby Day,
a suffragette waited to throw herself under the king's horse.
She died of her injuries.
Workers and women.
There were others, too, whose discontents were coming to a head.
Southern Ireland was clamouring for home rule.
Her spokesman was Eamon De Valera.
The militarist power which has kept Ireland in its grasp for centuries
can never be persuaded to let go.
If liberty is not entire, it is not liberty.
The Irish struggle brought Britain to the very edge of civil war.
Poverty and envy, and riches and arrogance,
ambition and frustration, doubt and demand,
these were the tensions of every industrial state.
And to them were added the tensions between states themselves.
In Britain, alarm grew with the growth of the German fleet just across the water.
Public opinion was united, for once, on the need for battleships.
Each launching, whether in Barrow or in Bremen,
drove Britain and Germany further and further apart.
Even men as sympathetic towards Germany as Lord Haldane could say...
Peace was to be preserved, but preserved on what terms?
That the German was so strong by land and sea
that he could swagger down the high street of the world,
making his will prevail at every turn?
In 1908, Lloyd George met the German ambassador.
I explained to him that the real ground
for the growing antagonism towards Germany
was not jealousy of her rapidly expanding commerce, but fear of her growing navy.
But the Kaiser did not care.
I do not wish for a good understanding with England
at the expense of the extension of the German fleet.
So, Germany's naval dreams made Britain a potential enemy,
just as her military might had kept alive the hostility of France.
The two nations were drawn together by Germany's challenge.
The Entente Cordiale was forged.
By 1914, when King George V paid a state visit to Paris
and rode with President Poincare through cheering crowds,
the Entente was ten years old.
In both countries, men welcomed the end of centuries of rivalry.
It seemed a good omen for peace,
but the security offered by the Entente Cordiale was delusive,
for France had another ally on the other side of Europe - Russia.
Britain, in turn, made an agreement with her.
Thus Germany found herself faced
with what her statesmen had always most dreaded - encirclement.
Potential enemies in the west and in the east.
In the summer of 1914, it was not Britain nor France nor Russia
which held the real threat to the peace of Europe.
The real threat lay in Germany's alliance with Austria.
This was a shackle linking the swelling vigour of Germany
to the irresponsible policies of an old, decaying empire.
Bismarck foresaw the danger...
I shall not live to see the great war,
but you will see it and it will start in the east.
For centuries, Austria had been
the leading German state, Europe's shield against the east.
By 1914, her empire was an anachronism whose fatal ambitions died hard.
Head of this ancient realm was the 84-year-old Emperor Franz Josef.
He had reigned in Vienna since 1848, Europe's year of revolutions,
when the Austrian Empire had come near to collapse.
Franz Josef held it together by a mixture of compromise and repression,
but nothing could disguise its decrepitude. Lord Lansdowne wrote...
To human calculation, the Habsburg Empire
cannot survive the decease of the emperor Franz Josef.
The anachronism lingered on, upheld by this old man.
Its ceremonies, its displays, its brilliant uniforms,
the rigid protocol of the imperial court,
the high-sounding titles, the wit, the music, the culture of Vienna,
all belonged to a past which was ever more at odds with the present.
But this empire was, in the first place, a dual monarchy.
The Austrians shared power with the Hungarians
who kept their own parliament and laws.
Austrians and Hungarians together ruled over a mixture of peoples.
Italians, Poles, Czechs, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs.
Nearly half of Franz Josef's subjects were Slavs,
who hated their masters and yearned for liberation.
They looked for aid outside the Austrian Empire
to the free Slav countries, the rising kingdom of Serbia
and the Russian Empire, protector of Slavs everywhere.
Tribal memories and tribal fears agitated all these people
whose borders stretched to Europe's edge.
Russia would stand by the Slavs.
Against Russia, Austria would need strong help.
Germany had promised that help.
Whatever comes from the Vienna foreign office is a command from me.
Yet there were those in Germany who felt misgivings.
In 1914, the German ambassador in Vienna said...
I wonder whether it really pays to bind ourselves too tightly
to this phantasm of a state that is cracking in all directions.
But the Austro-German alliance was a fact, leading to inescapable conclusions.
In 1914, the Kaiser noted...
As a soldier, I have no doubt, on the basis of information reaching me,
that Russia is systematically preparing for war against us
and I frame my policy on that assumption.
Russia, also, was a troubled anachronism.
The Tsar of all the Russias ruled over countless millions of people.
More than 130 millions of them had been counted in the census of 1897.
How many were in the hinterlands of the Russian Empire none could say.
This was the largest state in the world, a sprawling giant.
Communications across it were primitive and difficult,
during the thaw, almost impossible.
- A British diplomat wrote... - No-one can have the slightest idea
what the country tracks in Russia are like in spring and winter.
It took me 16 days to traverse 80 miles,
Over these limitless distances,
the Romanov dynasty in the person of Nicholas II,
emperor and autocrat, ruled absolutely.
In 1895, answering a demand
for more representative government, the Tsar said...
Let all know that in devoting all my strength to the people's wellbeing,
I shall preserve the principle of autocracy
as firmly and as undeviatingly as did my father.
Russia suffered humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905.
The very foundations of tsarism were shaken.
The peasants, the vast, illiterate masses of Russian people,
living on a chancy borderline of famine and ruin, rose in revolution.
They found allies in the growing industrial proletariat.
But the 1905 revolution was bloodily crushed.
In 1906, the principle of autocracy was restated
by the Imperial Council more firmly than ever.
To the Emperor of all the Russias belongs supreme autocratic power.
Submission to his power, not from fear only, but as a matter of conscience,
is commanded by God himself.
With this imperious rejection of democracy,
the regime tightened the tensions,
exasperated the feelings and embittered the thoughts of the people.
There were riots and strikes.
A strike in the Lena gold fields was ruthlessly suppressed.
The Tsar and his court consume their time with simple pleasures,
heedless of the Russian people.
Interior tensions were coming to the boil
in this pious, passionate, intensely patriotic nation.
And as they did so, external tensions also grew.
The Balkans, where the Slav lands lay between the scowling frontiers
of three crumbling empires, were their point of impact.
In 1908, Austria, with outdated ambitions,
annexed the Slav territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the borders of Serbia.
Russia, still weak after defeat by Japan in 1905, let that pass.
Then in 1912, the small Balkan kingdoms joined together
to inflict a crushing defeat on the Turkish Empire,
but they quarrelled among themselves.
Out of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, Serbia emerged,
as the strongest Balkan state, an inspiration for all Slavs.
Austria watched her inconvenient progress with a jealous, calculating eye.
The British ambassador in Vienna reported in 1913...
Relations between Austria and Russia are growing worse day by day.
Serbia will set Europe by the ears and bring about universal war.
The French president, Poincare, came to a similar conclusion.
Whatever be the issue, which may arise in the future between Russia and Germany,
it will not pass by like the last. It will be war.
In Austria, the issue was clear.
The Austrian Chief of Staff, Conrad von Hotzendorf, said openly...
We must crush this viper Serbia.
By 1914, Europeans had learned to live with fear and fear is the midwife of war.
On Sunday, June 28th, Europe entered upon her final, fatal crisis.
The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne,
and his wife were visiting Sarajevo,
capital of the annexed province of Bosnia.
From Serbia, just across the border,
a group of Slav terrorists had also come to Sarajevo,
pledged to kill Franz Ferdinand.
As the Archduke and his wife departed,
one of these terrorists, a Slav schoolboy, Gavrilo Princip, fired two pistol shots.
They hit Franz Ferdinand and his wife. A quarter of an hour later, both were dead.
The peace of Europe died with them.
BELL TOLLS
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