Thus Roumania, like all other neutral states, was well within the sphere of attraction of the Central Empires long before the present conflict was unchained. And the clever tactics by which siege was laid to the sympathies of a nation which at bottom has hardly any traits in common with the besieger, would have entailed a complete revision and remodelling of the polity of Russia, France and Britain, had these Powers had any coherent programme or distant aims. But their motto was: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
True, none of those States ever designed a political revolution of the Old Continent, such as Napoleon had imagined or Germany is now striving to realize. But neither did they read aright nor even give serious thought to the symptoms of the great conspiracy which was being hatched by others for that purpose. Busied with their party squabbles and social reforms, they took it for granted that international tranquillity which was a condition of the stability of all internal affairs was assured. Such occasional misunderstandings as might crop up among the Powers could, they imagined, always be smoothed over by manifestations of goodwill and timely concessions. Fitfulness and hesitancy marked every attempt made by Germany’s rivals to push their trade or extend their political relations beyond their own borders.
This lack of enterprise was especially accentuated in their dealings with Turkey. No Powers had done so much to uphold Ottoman sway in Europe as France and Britain, and for a long while their exertions found their natural outcome in a degree of influence at the Sublime Porte which was unparalleled in Turkish history. But once Germany inaugurated her economico-political campaign in the Near East, the principle of neighbourliness was invoked in favour of allowing her to possess herself of a share of the good things going, whereupon Great Britain, and in a lesser degree France, curbed their natural impulse and left most of the field to the pushing new-comer. For years the writer of these lines pointed out the danger of this self-abnegation, but his insistent appeals for a more active line of conduct were met by the statement that Near Eastern affairs had long ceased to tempt the enterprise or affect the international policy of Great Britain. As though Great Britain were not a member of the European community or her geographical insularity implied political isolation; or as if her policy of equilibrium were capable of being achieved without the employment of adequate means! When I raised my voice against our participation in the Baghdad railway scheme and bared to the light the political designs underlying it, Cabinet Ministers assured the country that its scope was exclusively economic and cultural and had no connection with politics! This naïve belief and the laissez-faire attitude which it engendered enabled the Teutons to reduce Turkey to economic and political thraldom and to earmark Asia Minor, thenceforward hedged in with the Baghdad and Anatolian railways, as a future German colony.
The closeness and constancy of the relations between economics and politics which easily took root in German consciousness, had for another of its corollaries the dispatch of General Liman von Sanders and his band of officers to reorganize the Ottoman army. This measure struck some observers as the beginning of the end of European peace. It was thus that the Russian Premier, Kokofftseff, and his colleague, Sazonoff, construed it, and that was the interpretation which I also put upon it. But none of the other interested Governments expressed similar misgivings, nor, so far as one can judge, entertained any. Yet when war was finally declared, Germany’s plan of campaign allotted an important rôle to Turkey not in a possible emergency, but at a date to be determined by the completion of her military and naval equipment.
In this ingenious and comprehensive way, operating at a multitude of points, but never dissociating economics from politics, never abandoning the work of commercial expansion to the unaided resources of individuals, the Teutonic empires contrived to spread a huge net in whose meshes almost every civilized nation was to some extent entangled. And the subsequent political conduct of many of these was determined in advance by the plight to which they had been thus reduced. Russia was reasonably believed to be incapable of taking the field; Italy was accounted wholly unfitted to bear the weight of the financial burden which a conflict with Germany would lay upon her shoulders; Roumania, it was calculated, would decline to exchange material gains for political returns purchased at a heavy cost; Bulgaria could not afford to estrange Austria’s sympathies and need never fear that she might forfeit those of Russia; Sweden, saturated with German Kultur, was one of the foreposts of Teutonism in the north of Europe and might in time be induced to imitate Bulgaria and play for the hegemony of the Scandinavian States with the Kaiser’s help; Switzerland was virtually German in everything but political organization; Holland would believe in Prussianism and tremble; Belgium was economically a pawn in German hands and Antwerp a German port; and in the United States millions of hyphenated Germans would plead the Teuton cause and do the rough work of advancing it by means of their political organization and influence.
FOOTNOTES:
[55] See Le Temps, October 31, 1915.
[56] Mr. M. Civinini of the Corriere della Sera. See Corriere della Sera, October 11, 1915.
[57] In September 1914. See Morning Post, September 4, 1914.
[58] The Batak massacre of Bulgarians by order of Abdul Kerim Pasha had called forth Gladstone’s pamphlet: Bulgarian Atrocities, and aroused the horror of civilized men. But the Hungarian aristocracy sympathized with the mass murderer, and presented him with a golden hilted sabre. The list of subscribers for this mark of aversion to the Bulgarian people can still be viewed in the Museum at Budapest. The third name on that list—Princess Clementine—is followed immediately by that of her son Prince Ferdinand of Coburg, who gave one hundred florins as a token of his admiration for the exterminator of his future subjects! It need hardly be added that he was not yet Prince of Bulgaria.