The Evidence in the Case / A Discussion of the Moral Responsibility for the War of 1914, as Disclosed by the Diplomatic Records of England, Germany, Russia

by James M. Beck

I quite appreciate the distinction between the immediate causes of a war and the anterior or underlying causes. The fundamental cause of the Franco-German War of 1870 was not the incident at Ems nor even the question of the Spanish succession. These were but the precipitating pretexts or, as a lawyer would express it, the “proximate causes.” The underlying cause was unquestionably the rivalry between Prussia and France for political supremacy in Europe.

Behind the Austrian ultimatum to Servia were also great questions of State policy, not easily determinable upon any tangible ethical principle, and which involved the hegemony of Europe. Germany’s domination of Europe had been established when by the rattling of its saber it compelled Russia in 1908 to permit Austria to disturb the then existing status in the Balkans by the forcible annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and behind the Austrian-Servian question of 1914, arising out of the murder of the Crown Prince of Austria at Serajevo, was the determination of Germany and Austria to reassert that dominant position by compelling Russia to submit to a further humiliation of a Slav State.

The present problem is to inquire how far Germany and her ally selected a just pretext to test this question of mastery.

The pretext was the work of diplomatists. It was not the case of a nation rising upon some great cause which appealed to popular imagination. The acts of the statesmen in that last fateful week of July, 1914, were not the mere echo of the popular will.

The issues were framed by the statesmen and diplomats of Europe and whatever efforts were made to preserve the peace and whatever obstructive tactics were interposed were not the acts of any of the nations now in arms but those of a small coterie of men who, in the secrecy of their respective cabinets, made their moves and countermoves upon the chessboard of nations.

The future of Europe in that last week of July was in the hands of a small group of men, numbering not over fifty, and what they did was never known to their respective nations in any detail until after the fell Rubicon had been crossed and a world war had been precipitated.

If all of these men had sincerely desired to work for peace, there would not have been any war.

So swiftly did events move that the masses of the people had time neither to think nor to act. The suddenness of the crisis marks it as a species of “mid-summer madness,” a very “witches’ sabbath” of diplomatic demagoguery.

In a peaceful summer, when the nations now struggling to exterminate each other were fraternizing in the holiday centers of Europe, an issue was suddenly precipitated, made the subject of communications between the various chancelleries, and almost in the twinkling of an eye Europe found itself wrapped in a universal flame. The appalling toll of death suggests the inquiry of Hamlet: “Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with ’em?” and if the diplomatic “loggats” of 1914 were ineffectively played, some one must accept the responsibility for such failure.

This sense of responsibility against the dread Day of Accounting has resulted in a disposition beyond past experience to justify the quarrel by placing before the world the diplomatic record.