Von Tirpitz's task was not only to build the fleet but to agitate German public opinion uninterruptedly in favor of its constant expansion. To him and the Navy League, which he controlled, and to his Press Bureau and its swarm of journalistic and literary parasites, were due the remarkable Anglophobe campaigns which resulted in the desired periodical additions to the Fleet. A politician of consummate talent, von Tirpitz held successive Reichstags in the palm of his hand. No Imperial Chancellor, though nominally his chief, was ever able to override the imperious will of von Tirpitz the Eternal. Repeatedly in the years preceding the war England held out the hand of a naval entente. The War Party and von Tirpitz said "No!" And Armageddon became as inevitable as the setting sun.
I have enumerated only the outstanding figures of the German War Party. They could be supplemented at will--there are the men like Professor von Schmoller, of the University of Berlin, who foresees the day when "a nation of two hundred million Germans oversea would rise in Southern Brazil"; or Professor Adolf Lasson, also of Berlin, who proclaimed the doctrine that Germans' "cultural paramountcy over all other nations" entitles them to hegemony over the earth; or Professor Adolf Wagner, the Berlin economist, who excoriates compulsory arbitration as the refuge of the politically impotent and a dogma beneath the dignity of the Germany of the Hohenzollerns; or the whole dynasty of politician-professors like Delbrück, Zorn, Liszt, Edward and Kuno Meyer, Eucken, Haeckel, Harnack, or minor theorists like Münsterberg, who year in and year out preached the doctrine of Teutonic superiority, Teutonic invincibility and Teutonic "world destiny." These intellectual auxiliaries of the War Party in their day have sent tens of thousands of young men out of German universities with politically polluted minds. Their class-rooms have been the real breeding ground and recruiting camps of the German War Party.
And then, of course, in addition to the admirals who wanted war, and the professors who glorified war, and the editors, pamphleteers, Navy and Army League leaders and paid agitators who wrote and talked war, there was the German Army, represented by its corps of fifty thousand or sixty thousand officers, which was the living, ineradicable incarnation of war and with every breath it drew sighed impatiently for its coming. I suppose armies in all countries more or less constitute "war parties." But never in our time has an army tingled and spoiled for battle as sleeplessly as the legions of the Kaiser. It was written in the stars that it was only a question of time when they would realize their aspiration to prove that the German war machine of the day was not only the peer, but incomparably the superior, of the Juggernauts with the aid of which Frederick the Great and Moltke remapped Europe.
But the Grand Mogul of the German War Party, its pet, darling and patron saint, was Crown Prince William, the Kaiser's ebullient heir who contributed so conspicuously to Germany's loss of Paris in September, 1914. For ten years he was the apple of the army's eye. William II's oratorical peace palaverings long ago convinced his military paladins that their hopes could no longer with safety be pinned on the monarch who would do nothing but rattle his saber. "A place in the sun" could never be achieved by such tactics, they argued, so they transferred their affections and their expectations to the "young man" who cheered in the Reichstag when his father's Government was accused of cowardice in Morocco. They placed their destinies in the keeping of the Imperial hotspur who wrote in his book, Germany in Arms, that "visionary dreams of everlasting peace throughout the world are un-German." Their real allegiance was sworn henceforth to the swashbuckling young buffoon, who, taking leave of the Death's Head Hussars after two years' colonelcy, admonished them to "think of him whose most ardent desire it has always been to be allowed to share at your side the supreme moment of a soldier's happiness--when the King calls to arms and the bugle sounds the charge!" It was an open secret that when the Crown Prince was exiled to the command of a cavalry regiment in dreamy Danzig, far away from the frenzied plaudits of the multitude in Berlin, the Kaiser's action was inspired by the disquieting realisation that his heir was acquiring a popularity, both in and out of the army, which boded ill for the security of the monarch's own status with his subjects.
These, then, are the men, and these their principal methods, which provided the scenario for the impending clash. As with every great "production," preliminary plans were well and truly laid. Rehearsals, in the form of stupendous maneuvers on "a strictly warlike basis," had brought the chief actors, scene shifters and other accessories to first-night pitch. The stage managers' work was done. They had now only to take their appointed places in the flies and wings and let the tragedy proceed. The rest could be left to the puppets on both sides of the footlights. A month of slow music, and then the grand finale.
CHAPTER V
SLOW MUSIC
July in Berlin of the red summer of 1914 began as placidly as a feast day in Utopia. The electric shock of Serajevo soon spent its force. Germans seemed to be vastly more concerned over the effect of the Archduke's assassination on the health of the old Austrian Emperor than over resultant international complications. It was Sir Edward Goschen, British Ambassador in Berlin, previously accredited to the Vienna court, who recalled to me Francis Joseph's once-expressed determination to outlive his heir. The doddering octogenarian had realized his grim ambition.
The German Emperor returned to Berlin from Kiel on Monday, the 30th of June. Ties of deep affection united him to his aged Austrian ally. It was universally assumed that the Kaiser, with characteristic impetuosity, would rush to Vienna to comfort Francis Joseph and attend the Archduke's funeral. So, as events developed, he ardently desired to do; but intimations speedily arrived from the Hofburg that "Kaiser Franz" had chosen to carry his newest cross unmolested by the flummery and circumstance of State obsequies, and William II remained in Berlin for honorary funeral services in his own cathedral in memory of the august departed. Some day a historian, who will have great things to tell, may relate the real reason for the baffling of the Kaiser's desire to play the rôle of chief mourner at spectacular death-rites in the other German capital. He had telegraphed the orphans of the murdered Archduke and Duchess that his "heart was bleeding for them." Men who have an X-ray knowledge of Imperial William's psychology were unkind enough to suggest that he longed to parade himself before the mourning populace of the Austrian metropolis as Lohengrin in the hour of its woe, an Emperor on whom it were safer to lean than on the decrepit figurehead now bowed in impotent grief, with a beardless grand-nephew of an heir apparent as the sole hope of the trembling future.
Until the late Archduke Francis Ferdinand began to assert himself, William II's influence at Vienna had been profound. Francis Joseph liked and trusted him. Austria was frequently governed from Potsdam. With the great bar to his ascendency removed from the scene, the German Emperor may well have thought the hour at length arrived for the virile Hohenzollerns to save the crumbling Hapsburgs from themselves, and invertebrate Austria-Hungary from the Hapsburgs. But Vienna decided it was better the Kaiser should stay at home. His political physicians, on the evening of July 1, suddenly discovered that His Majesty was suffering from that famous German malady known as "diplomatic illness," whereupon the court M.D. dutifully announced, through the obliging official news-agency, that "owing to a slight attack of lumbago" the Kaiser would not attend the funeral of the murdered Archduke, "as had been arranged." Forty-eight hours later other "face-saving" procedure was carried out--the Viennese court proclaimed that by the express wish of the Emperor Francis Joseph, no foreign guests of any nationality were expected to attend the Royal obsequies.