Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [179]
As a reaction to that victory, the Kaiser and his court of almost exclusively Prussian generals and landowners had forced upon the parliament the greatest troop buildup in German history. The army was now increased to well over three-quarters of a million men, with seventy-two-thousand called up this month alone. Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Chancellor, argued that a record force was needed to prepare for the coming battle of “Slavdom against Germandom.” The Reichstag had reluctantly granted his wish, but was looking for an issue that would transform it at last into a parliament of public opinion, rather than a tame enacter of the imperial will.
SERBIA YIELDED TO THE Austrian ultimatum. Its surly capitulation served only to accelerate Russia’s long-term program of rearmament and (what made the German Chancellor ever more apprehensive) raiload building, with most lines pointing west. Aross Europe, from Königsberg to Bordeaux and from Naples to Edinburgh and Christiania, fears of a multinational war sharpened into certainty. Georges Clemenceau, France’s former prime minister and its most eloquent Cassandra, had been railing since the spring against the pangermaniste monstrosity in Leipzig, and all it stood for. The German army bill, he wrote, made it “inevitable” that France must fight for her survival again—and soon. She was, after all, the ally of Russia. His warnings used so many words of common meaning on both sides of the Atlantic that they did not need translation. Germany was plotting a “fureur d’hégémonie dont l’explosion ébranlera tout le continent européen quelque jour.” Its ultimate aim was nothing less than “une politique d’extermination.”
EARLY IN NOVEMBER there was a scuffle between two army recruits on a rifle range outside Zabern, in the Reichsland.
In living French memory, Zabern had been Saverne, and the Reichsland known as Alsace-Lorraine. But the Ninety-ninth Prussian Infantry had been garrisoned in the town for twenty-five years. Restaurants served more beer than wine, and the Kaiser’s portrait hung in the offices of the civil authority.
The fight on the range was broken up by Günter von Forstner, a twenty-year-old lieutenant. With members of his entire squad listening, he lectured the youths on the importance of proper behavior in a region where there was a racial difference between the conquerors and the conquered. It was especially important not to tangle with any “Wackes” downtown.
Wacke, an almost untranslatable word connoting peasant or thickheaded inferiority, had as much force locally as nigger in the United States. Forstner went on to say that German soldiers had, nevertheless, the right to draw arms against this subspecies if shoved or insulted. “Should you kill one of them, so be it,” the lieutenant went on. “Behave right, and you’ll get ten marks from me, no one will blame you.”
A sergeant standing at his elbow increased the offered bounty. “And me, I’ll give you three marks more.”
They were indulging in what passed among Prussians as humor. But the citizens of Zabern were not amused when reports of Forstner’s words were published in two town newspapers. With repetition, the lieutenant’s language got stronger: “For every one of those dirty Wackes you cut down, I’ll pay you ten marks.” The story spread to Paris and Berlin.
On 7 November, a public demonstration broke out in front of Forstner’s house on the main street in Zabern. Stones were thrown. Amid catcalls of “Dirty Prussian!” two toughs broke down the front door before being dispersed by police. Thereafter, Forstner was escorted everywhere by a security detail so preposterously armed that the