A deeper-seated cause was the racial hatred of Slav and Teuton. For rulers do not make war these days; they try to keep their thrones secure on the crest of public opinion. They appear to rule and to give, and are ruled and yield. Whoever had travelled in Russia of late years had been conscious of a rising ground-swell in the great mass of Russian feeling. Your simple moujik had an idea that his Czar had yielded to the Austrians and the Germans. In short, the German had tweaked the nose of the Slav race with the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Czar had borne the insult because his people were willing.
Slow to think, and not thinking overmuch, the Russian peasant began to see red whenever he thought of a German. As a whole public thinks, eventually its rulers must think. The upper class of Russia was inclined to fan the flames of the people’s passions. If the people were venting their emotions against the Teuton they would not be developing further revolutions against the old order of things. The military class was prompt to make use of the national tendency to strengthen military resources. By action and reaction across the frontiers the strain was increasing. Germany saw Russia with double her own population and was sensitive to the dangers behind Russia’s ambitions. Russia stood for everything abhorrent to German order and racial feeling.
And what of France? There is little to say of her when we assign responsibility. Here was a nation with its population practically stationary; a nation with a closed-in culture; a democracy with its racial and national integrity assured by its own peculiar genius. Visions of conquest had passed from the French mind. Her “place in the sun” was her own sun of France. Her trade was that due to skill in handicraft rather than to any tactics of aggression. At every Hague conference France was for all measures that would assure peace; Germany against every one that might interfere with her military ambition; England against any that might limit her action in defending the seas.
The desire for “revenge” for ’70 had died out in the younger generation of Frenchmen. Her stationary population, which chauvinists resented, had solved the problem of expansion. From father to son, she could be content with her thrift, her industry, and her arts, and with the joy of living. For, more than any other European nation, she had that gift: the joy of living. Her armies and her alliances were truly for defence. She could not fight Germany and Austria alone. She must have help. If Russia went to war she, too, must go to war. She acted up to her belief when she held back her armies five miles from the frontier till the German struck; when she gave Germany a start in mobilisation—a start which, with England’s delay, came near being fatal for her. That price she paid for peace; that advantage Germany gained by striking first. It is a hard moral for the pacificists, but one which ought to give the French conscience a cleaner taste in after years.
The Kaiser, too, insisted that he was for peace. So he was, according to German logic. He realised his military power as the outside world could not realise it. Had Italy joined her forces to her allies, he might have crushed France and then turned on Russia, as his staff had planned. For striking he could reduce France to a second-rate power, take her colonies, fatten German coffers with an enormous indemnity, and gain Belgium and the Channel ports as the next step in national ambition before crushing England and securing the mastery of the seas. But he held off the blow for many years; that is the logic of his partisanship for peace. The fact that France proved stronger than he thought hardly interfered with his belief in his own moderation, in view of his confidence in his arms before the test came. He was for peace because he did not knock the other man down as soon as he might.
No other race in all Europe liked the Germans; not even the Huns, or the Czechs, or the Croats, and least of all the Italians. The Belgians, too, shared the universal enmity. It was Germany that Belgium feared. Her forts looked toward Germany; she looked toward England and France for protection. In this she was unneutral; but not in the thing that counted—thorough military preparation.
Thus were the Germanic empires isolated in sentiment before the war began. This strengthened their realisation that their one true ally was their power in arms, unaffected by any sentiment except that of beating their enemies. Europe, straining under the taxation of preparation, long held back by fear of the cataclysm, yet drawn by curiosity as to the nature of its capacity, sent her millions of soldiers to that test in practice of the struggle of modern arms which had been the haunting subject of her speculation.