the extent of its domains, was the empire of Germany, which covered
considerably less than 1,500,000 square miles, but rested upon a home
population of nearly 70,000,000, more docile, more industrious, and
more highly organised than any other human society. The empire of
Germany had been more easily and more rapidly acquired than any of the
others, yet since its foundation it had known many troubles, because
the hard and domineering spirit in which it was ruled did not know how
to win the affections of its subjects. A parvenu among the great
states--having only attained the dignity of nationhood in the
mid-nineteenth century--Germany has shown none of that 'genius for
equality' which is the secret of good manners and of friendship among
nations as among individuals. Her conversation, at home and abroad, had
the vulgar self-assertiveness of the parvenu, and turned always and
wholly upon her own greatness. And her conduct has been the echo of her
conversation. She has persuaded herself that she has a monopoly of
power, of wisdom, and of knowledge, and deserves to rule the earth. Of
the magnitude and far-reaching nature of her imperialist ambitions, we
have said something in a previous chapter. She had as yet failed to
realise any of these vaulting schemes, but she had not for that reason
abandoned any of them, and she kept her clever and insidious
preparations on foot in every region of the world upon which her
acquisitive eyes had rested. But the exasperation of her steady failure
to achieve the place in the world which she had marked out as her due
had driven her rulers more and more definitely to contemplate, and
prepared her people to uphold, a direct challenge to all her rivals.
The object of this challenge was to win for Germany her due share in
the non-European world, her 'place in the sun.' Her view of what that
share must be was such that it could not be attained without the
overthrow of all her European rivals, and this would bring with it the
lordship of the world. It must be all or nothing. Though not quite
realising this alternative, the mind of Germany was not afraid of it.
She was in the mood to make a bold attempt, if need be, to grasp even
the sceptre of world-supremacy. The world could not believe that any
sane people could entertain such megalomaniac visions; not even the
events of the decade 1904-14 were enough to bring conviction; it needed
the tragedy and desolation of the war to prove at once their reality
and their folly. For they were folly even if they could be momentarily
realised. They sprang from the traditions of Prussia, which seemed to
demonstrate that all things were possible to him who dared all, and
scrupled nothing, and calculated his chances and his means with
precision. By force and fraud the greatness of Prussia had been built;
by force and fraud Prussia-Germany had become the leading state of
Europe, feared by all her rivals and safe from all attack. Force and
fraud appeared to be the determining factors in human affairs; even the
philosophers of Germany devoted their powers to justifying and
glorifying them. By force and fraud, aided by science, Germany should
become the leader of the world, and perhaps its mistress. Never has the
doctrine of power been proclaimed with more unflinching directness as
the sole and sufficient motive for state action. There was practically
no pretence that Germany desired to improve the condition of the lands
she wished to possess, or that they were misgoverned, or that the
existing German territories were threatened: what pretence there was,
was invented after war began. The sole and sufficient reason put
forward by the advocates of the policy which Germany was pursuing was
that she wanted more power and larger dominions; and what she wanted
she proposed to take.
On the surface it seemed mere madness for the least and latest of the
great empires to challenge all the rest, just as it had once seemed
madness for Frederick the Great, with his little state, to stand up
against all but one of the great European powers. But Germany had
calculated her chances, and knew that there were many things in her
favour. She knew that in the last resort the strength of the
world-states rested upon their European foundations, and here the
inequality was much less. In a European struggle she could draw great
advantage from her central geographical position, which she had
improved to the highest extent by the construction of a great system of
strategic railways. She could trust to her superbly organised military
system, more perfect than that of any other state, just because no
other state has ever regarded war as the final aim and the highest form
of state action. She commanded unequalled resources in all the
mechanical apparatus of war; she had spared no pains to build up her
armament works, which had, indeed, supplied a great part of the world;
she had developed all the scientific industries in such a way that
their factories could be rapidly and easily turned to war purposes; and
having given all her thoughts to the coming struggle as no other nation
had done, she knew, better than any other, how largely it would turn
upon these things. She counted securely upon winning an immense
advantage from the fact that she would herself fix the date of war, and
enter upon it with a sudden spring, fully prepared, against rivals who,
clinging to the hope of peace, would be unready for the onset. She
hoped to sow jealousies among her rivals; she trusted to catch them at
a time when they were engrossed in their domestic concerns, and in this
respect fate seemed to play into her hands, since at the moment which
she had predetermined, Britain, France, and Russia were all distracted
by domestic controversies. She trusted also to her reading of the minds
and temper of her opponents; and here she went wildly astray, as must
always be the fate of the nation or the man who is blinded by
self-complacency and by contempt for others.
But, above all, she put her trust in a vast political combination which
she had laboriously prepared during the years preceding the great
conflict: the combination which we have learned to call Mittel-Europa.
None of us realised to how great an extent this plan had been put in
operation before the war began. Briefly it depended on the possibility
of obtaining an intimate union with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a
control over the Turkish Empire, and a sufficient influence or control
among the little Balkan states to ensure through communication. If the
scheme could be carried out in full, it would involve the creation of a
practically continuous empire stretching from the North Sea to the
Persian Gulf, and embracing a total population of over 150,000,000.
This would be a dominion worth acquiring for its own sake, since it
would put Germany on a level with her rivals. But it would have the
further advantage that it would hold a central position in relation to
the other world-powers, corresponding to Germany's central position in
relation to the other nation-states of Europe. Russia could be struck
at along the whole length of her western and south-western frontier;
the British Empire could be threatened in Egypt, the centre of its
ocean lines of communication, and also from the Persian Gulf in the
direction of India; the French Empire could be struck at the heart, in
its European centre; and all without seriously laying open the
attacking powers to the invasion of sea-power.
It was a bold and masterful scheme, and it was steadily pursued during
the years before the war. Austro-Hungary was easily influenced. The
ascendancy of her ruling races--nay, the very existence of her
composite anti-national empire--was threatened by the nationalist
movements among her subject-peoples, who, cruelly oppressed at home,
were more and more beginning to turn towards their free brothers over
the border, in Serbia and Rumania; and behind these loomed Russia, the
traditional protector of the Slav peoples and of the Orthodox faith.
Austro-Hungary, therefore, leant upon the support of Germany, and her
dominant races would be very willing to join in a war which should
remove the Russian menace and give them a chance of subjugating the
Serbs. This latter aim suited the programme of Germany as well as it
suited that of Austria, since the railways to Constantinople and
Salonika ran through Serbia. Serbia, therefore, was doomed; she stood
right in the path of the Juggernaut car.
The acquisition of influence in Turkey was also comparatively easy.
Constantinople is a city where lavish corruption can work wonders.
Moreover Turkey was, in the last years of the nineteenth century, in
bad odour with Europe; and Germany was able to earn in 1897 the lasting
gratitude of the infamous Sultan Abdul Hamid by standing between him
and the other European powers, who were trying to interfere with his
indulgence in the pastime of massacring the Armenians. Turkey had had
many protectors among the European powers. She had never before had one
so complaisant about the murder of Christians. From that date Germany
was all-powerful in Turkey. The Turkish army was reorganised under her
direction, and practically passed under her control. Most of the
Turkish railways were acquired and managed by German companies. And
presently the great scheme of the Bagdad railway began to be carried
through. The Young Turk revolution in 1908 and the fall of Abdul Hamid
gave, indeed, a shock to the German ascendancy; but only for a moment.
The Young Turks were as amenable to corruption as their predecessors;
and under the guidance of Enver Bey Turkey relapsed into German
suzerainty. Thus the most important parts of the great scheme were in a
fair way of success by 1910. One of the merits of this scheme was that
as the Sultan of Turkey was the head of the Mahomedan religion, the
German protectorate over Turkey gave a useful mode of appealing to the
religious sentiments of Mahomedans everywhere. Twice over, in 1898 and
in 1904, the Kaiser had declared that he was the protector of all
Mahomedans throughout the world. Most of the Mahomedans were subjects
either of Britain, France, or Russia--the three rival empires that were
to be overthrown. As General Bernhardi put it, Germany in her struggle
for Weltmacht must supplement her material weapons with spiritual
weapons.
To obtain a similar ascendancy over the Balkan states was more
difficult; for the Turk was the secular enemy of all of them, and
Austria was the foe of two of the four, and to bring these little
states into partnership with their natural enemies seemed an all but
impossible task. Yet a good deal could be, and was, done. In two of the
four chief Balkan states German princes occupied the thrones, a
Hohenzollern in Rumania, a Coburger in Bulgaria; in a third, the
heir-apparent to the Greek throne was honoured with the hand of the
Kaiser's own sister. Western peoples had imagined that the day had gone
by when the policy of states could be deflected by such facts;
especially as the Balkan states all had democratic parliamentary
constitutions. But the Germans knew better than the West. They knew
that kings could still play a great part in countries where the bulk of
the electorate were illiterate, and where most of the class of
professional politicians were always open to bribes. Their calculations
were justified. King Carol of Rumania actually signed a treaty of
alliance with Germany without consulting his ministers or parliament.
King Ferdinand of Bulgaria was able to draw his subjects into an
alliance with the Turks, who had massacred their fathers in 1876,
against the Russians, who had saved them from destruction. King
Constantine of Greece was able to humiliate and disgrace the country
over which he ruled, in order to serve the purposes of his
brother-in-law. These sovereigns may have been the unconscious
implements of a policy which they did not understand. But they earned
their wages.
There were, indeed, two moments when the great scheme came near being
wrecked. One was when Italy, the sleeping partner of the Triple
Alliance, who was not made a sharer in these grandiose and vile
projects, attacked and conquered the Turkish province of Tripoli in
1911, and strained to breaking-point the loyalty of the Turks to
Germany. The other was when, under the guidance of the two great
statesmen of the Balkans, Venizelos of Greece and Pashitch of Serbia,
the Balkan League was formed, and the power of Turkey in Europe broken.
If the League had held together, the great German project would have
been ruined, or at any rate gravely imperilled. But Germany and Austria
contrived to throw an apple of discord among the Balkan allies at the
Conference of London in 1912, and then stimulated Bulgaria to attack
Serbia and Greece. The League was broken up irreparably; its members
had been brought into a sound condition of mutual hatred; and Bulgaria,
isolated among distrustful neighbours, was ready to become the tool of
Germany in order that by her aid she might achieve (fond hope!) the
hegemony of the Balkans. This brilliant stroke was effected in
1913--the year before the Great War. All that remained was to ruin
Serbia. For that purpose Austria had long been straining at the leash.
She had been on the point of making an attack in 1909, in 1912, in
1913. In 1914 the leash was slipped. If the rival empires chose to look
on while Serbia was destroyed, well and good: in that case the
Berlin-Bagdad project could be systematically developed and
consolidated, and the attack on the rival empires could come later. If
not, still it was well; for all was ready for the great challenge.
We have dwelt at some length upon this gigantic project, because it has
formed during all these years the heart and centre of the German
designs, and even to-day it is the dearest of German hopes. Not until
she is utterly defeated will she abandon it; because its abandonment
must involve the abandonment of every hope of a renewed attempt at
world-supremacy, after an interval for reorganisation and recovery. Not
until the German control over Austria and Turkey, more complete to-day,
after two and a half years of war, than it has ever been before, has
been destroyed by the splitting up of Austria among the nationalities
to which her territory belongs, and by the final overthrow of the
Turkish Empire, will the German dream of world-dominion be shattered.
But while this fundamentally important project was being worked out,
other events, almost equally momentous in their bearing upon the coming
conflict, were taking place elsewhere. It was the obvious policy of
Germany to keep her rivals on bad terms with one another. The tradition
of Bismarck bade her isolate each victim before it was destroyed. But
the insolence and the megalomania of modern Germany made this
difficult. German writers were busily and openly explaining the fate
marked out for all the other powers. France was to be so crushed that
she would 'never again be able to stand in our path.' The bloated and
unconsolidated empire of Britain was to be shattered. The Russian
barbarians were to be thrust back into Asia. And what the pamphleteers
and journalists wrote was expressed with almost equal clearness in the
tone of German diplomacy. In face of all this, the clumsy attempts of
the German government to isolate their rivals met with small success,
even though these rivals had many grounds of controversy among
themselves. France knew what she had to fear; and the interpolation of
a few clumsy bids for her favour amid the torrent of insults against
her which filled the German press, were of no avail; especially as she
had to look on at the unceasing petty persecution practised in the lost
provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. Russia had been alienated by the first
evidences of German designs in the Balkans, and driven into a close
alliance with France. Britain, hitherto obstinately friendly to
Germany, began to be perturbed by the growing German programmes of
naval construction from 1900 onwards, by the absolute refusal of
Germany to consider any proposal for mutual disarmament or retardation
of construction, and above all by the repeated assertions of the head
of the German state that Germany aspired to naval supremacy, that her
future was on the sea, that the trident must be in her hands. Should
the trident fall into any but British hands, the existence of the
British Empire, and the very livelihood of the British homeland, would
rest at the mercy of him who wielded it. So, quite inevitably, the
three threatened empires drew together and reconciled their differences
in the Franco-British agreement of 1904 and the Russo-British agreement
of 1907.
These agreements dealt wholly with extra-European questions, and
therefore deserve some analysis. In the Franco-British agreement the
main feature was that while France withdrew her opposition to the
British position in Egypt, Britain on her side recognised the paramount
political interest of France in Morocco. It was the agreement about
Morocco which counted for most; because it was the beginning of a
controversy which lasted for seven years, which was twice used by
Germany as a means for testing, and endeavouring to break, the
friendship of her rivals, and which twice brought Europe to the verge
of war.
Morocco is a part of that single region of mountainous North Africa of
which France already controlled the remainder, Tunis and Algeria.
Peoples of the same type inhabited the whole region, but while in Tunis
and Algeria they were being brought under the influence of law and
order, in Morocco they remained in anarchy. Only a conventional line
divided Morocco from Algeria, and the anarchy among the tribesmen on
one side of the line inevitably had an unhappy effect upon the people
on the other side of the line. More than once France had been
compelled, for the sake of Algeria, to intervene in Morocco. It is
impossible to exaggerate the anarchy which existed in the interior of
this rich and wasted country. It was, indeed, the most lawless region
remaining in the world: when Mr. Bernard Shaw wished to find a scene
for a play in which the hero should be a brigand chief leading a band
of rascals and outlaws from all countries, Morocco presented the only
possible scene remaining in the world. And this anarchy was the more
unfortunate, not only because the country was naturally rich and ought
to have been prosperous, but also because it lay in close proximity to
great civilised states, and on one of the main routes of commerce at
the entrance to the Mediterranean. In its ports a considerable traffic
was carried on by European traders, but this traffic was, owing to the
anarchic condition of the country, nothing like as great as it ought to
have been. In 1905, 39 per cent. of it was controlled by French
traders, 32 per cent. by British traders, 12 per cent. by German
traders, and 5 per cent. by Spanish traders. Manifestly this was a
region where law and order ought to be established, in the interests of
civilisation. The powers most directly concerned were in the first
place France, with her neighbouring territory and her preponderant
trade; in the second place Britain, whose strategic interests as well
as her trading interests were involved; in the third place Spain, which
directly faced the Morocco coast; while Germany had only trading
interests involved, and so long as these were safeguarded, had no
ground of complaint. If any single power was to intervene, manifestly
the first claim was upon France.
In 1900 France had directed the attention of Europe to the disorderly
condition of Morocco, and had proposed to intervene to restore order,
on the understanding that she should not annex the country, or
interfere with the trading rights of other nations. Some states agreed;
Germany made no reply, but made no objection. But owing to the
opposition of Britain, who was then on bad terms with France and feared
to see an unfriendly power controlling the entrance to the
Mediterranean, no action was taken; and in the next years the chaos in
Morocco grew worse. By the agreement of 1904 Britain withdrew her
objection to French intervention, and recognised the prior political
rights of France in Morocco, on the condition that the existing
government of Morocco should be maintained, that none of its territory
should be annexed, and that 'the open door' should be preserved for the
trade of all nations. But, of course, it was possible, and even
probable, that the existing Moroccan government could not be made
efficient. In that case, what should happen? The possibility had to be
contemplated by reasonable statesmen, and provided against. But to do
so in a public treaty would have been to condemn beforehand the
existing system. Therefore a hypothetical arrangement was made for this
possible future event in a secret treaty, to which Spain was made a
party; whereby it was provided that if the arrangement should break
down, and France should have to establish a definite protectorate, the
vital part of the north coast should pass under the control of Spain.
To the public part of these arrangements, which alone were of immediate
importance, no objection was made by any of the other powers, and the
German Chancellor told the Reichstag that German interests were not
affected. France accordingly drew up a scheme of reforms in the
government of Morocco, which the Sultan was invited to accept. But
before he had accepted them the German Kaiser suddenly came to Tangier
in his yacht, had an interview with the Sultan in which he urged him to
reject the French demands, and made a public speech in which he
declared himself the protector of the Mahomedans, asserted that no
European power had special rights in Morocco, and announced his
determination to support the 'independence and integrity' of
Morocco--which in existing circumstances meant the maintenance of
anarchy. What was the reason for this sudden and insolent
intervention--made without any previous communication with France? The
main reason was that France's ally, Russia, had just been severely
defeated by Japan, and would not be able to take part in a European
war. Therefore, it appeared, France might be bullied; Britain might not
be willing to risk war on such an issue; the Entente of 1904 might be
destroyed; the extension of French influence might be prevented; and
the preservation of a state of anarchy in Morocco would leave open the
chance of a seizure of that country by Germany at a later date, thus
enabling her to dominate the entrance to the Mediterranean, and to
threaten Algeria. But this pretty scheme did not succeed. The Entente
held firm. Britain gave steady support to France, as indeed she was
bound in honour to do; and in the end a conference of the powers was
held at Algeciras (Spain). At this conference the predominating right
of France to political influence in Morocco was formally recognised;
and it was agreed that the government of the Sultan should be
maintained, and that all countries should have equal trading rights in
Morocco. This was, of course, the very basis of the Franco-British
agreement. On every point at which she tried to score a success over
France, Germany was defeated by the votes of the other powers, even her
own ally, Italy, deserting her.
But the German intervention had had its effect. The Sultan had refused
the French scheme of reform. The elements of disorder in Morocco were
encouraged to believe that they had the protection of Germany, and the
activity of German agents strengthened this belief. The anarchy grew
steadily worse. In 1907 Sir Harry Maclean was captured by a brigand
chief, and the British government had to pay 20,000 pounds ransom for
his release. In the same year a number of European workmen engaged on
harbour works at Casablanca were murdered by tribesmen; and the French
had to send a force which had a year's fighting before it reduced the
district to order. In 1911 the Sultan was besieged in his capital
(where there were a number of European residents) by insurgent
tribesmen, and had to invite the French to send an army to his relief.