A Short History of the Great War | Page 4

war the blame for
which could be laid at others' doors.
The German Kaiser played but a secondary part in these transactions. It
is true that the German constitution placed in his hands the command of
the German Army and Navy and the control of foreign policy; but no
paper or parchment could give him the intellect to direct the course of
human affairs. He had indeed dismissed Bismarck in 1890, but
dropping the pilot did not qualify him to guide the ship of state, and he
was himself in 1906 compelled to submit to the guidance of his
ministers. The shallow waters of his mind spread over too vast a sphere
of activity to attain any depth, and he had the foibles of Frederick the
Great without his courage or his capacity. His barbaric love of pomp
betrayed the poverty of his spirit and exhibited a monarchy reduced
from power to a pageant. He was not without his generous impulses or
exalted sentiments, and there was no section of the British public, from
Mr. Ramsay Macdonald to Mr. Rudyard Kipling and the "Daily Mail,"
to which one or other of his guises had not commended itself; it pleased
him to pose as the guardian of the peace of Europe, the champion of
civilization against the Boxers, and of society against red revolution.
But vanity lay at the root of all these manifestations, and he took
himself not less seriously as an arbiter of letters, art, and religion than
as a divinely appointed ruler of the State. The many parts he played
were signs of versatile emotion rather than of power; and his
significance in history is that he was the crest of a wave, its superficial
froth and foam without its massive strength. A little man in a great
position, he was powerless to ride the whirlwind or direct the storm,
and he figured largely in the public eye because he vented through an
imperial megaphone the fleeting catchwords of the vulgar mind.
After Agadir he had often been called a coward behind his back, and it
was whispered that his throne would be in danger if that surrender were
repeated. He had merited these reproaches because no one had done
more than he to inflate the arrogance of his people, and his eldest son
took the lead in exasperating public opinion behind the scenes. The

militarists, with considerable backing from financial and commercial
groups, were bent on war, and war appeals to the men in the streets of
all but the weakest countries. The mass of the people had not made up
their mind for a war that was not defensive; but modern governments
have ample means for tuning public opinion, and with a people so
accustomed as the Germans to accept the truth from above, their rulers
would have little difficulty, when once they had agreed upon war, in
representing it as one of defence. It is, however, impossible to say when,
if ever, the rulers of Germany agreed to attack; and to the last the
Imperial Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, struggled to delay if not to
avert the breach. But he gradually lost his grip on the Kaiser. The
decisive factor in the Emperor's mind may have been the rout in
1912-13 of the Turks, on whom Germany had staked her credit in
return for control of the Berlin-Baghdad route; for the free Balkan
confederation, which loomed on the horizon, would bar for ever
German expansion towards the East. The Balkan States themselves
provided the German opportunity; the Treaty of Bukarest in 1913
entrenched discord in their hearts and reopened a path for German
ambition and intrigue. Austria, not without the usual instigation,
proposed to Italy a joint attack upon Serbia; the offer was not accepted,
but by the winter of 1913-14 the Kaiser had gone over to the party
which had resolved upon war and was seeking an occasion to palliate
the cause.
The immeasurable distance between the cause and the occasion was
shown by the fact that Belgium was the first to suffer in an
Austro-Serbian dispute; and the universal character of the issue was
foreshadowed by the breach of its neutrality. Germany would not have
planned for two years past an offensive through that inoffensive,
unconcerned, and distant country, had the cause of the war been a
murder at Serajevo. The cause was a comprehensive determination on
the German part to settle international issues by the sword, and it
involved the destinies of civilization. The blow was aimed directly or
indirectly at the whole world, and Germany's only prospect of success
lay in the chance that most of the world would fail to perceive its
implications or delay too long its effective intervention. It was the
defect of her self-idolatry and concentration that she could not