Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [219]
Belgium began to mobilize too. King Albert suspected that Germany was about to demand permission to march across his borders en route to Paris. Such permission could not be given without a sacrifice of Belgian sovereignty. That almost certainly meant the destruction of his country and his culture. Several great powers, including Great Britain and France, had declared Belgium “an independent and perpetually neutral state” as long ago as 1839, in the Treaty of London. But after seventy-five years of changing interests, the signatories could not necessarily be relied on, if General Falkenhayn decided to invade.
In a midnight meeting with Sir Edward Goschen, the British ambassador in Berlin, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg tried to send peaceable signals to London. He said that Germany regarded, or professed to regard, its military policy toward France as purely defensive. It could not allow that grudge-bearing nation to compromise the Kaiser’s efforts to come to a settlement with Russia. As long as Belgium “did not take sides” in the matter, “her integrity would be respected.” And if Britain, too, “remained neutral … in the event of a victorious war,” Germany would guarantee never to change the boundaries of France.
When Goschen, remembering the Agadir crisis of 1911, asked if that extended to France’s overseas possessions, Bethmann-Hollweg’s tone changed. He would give no such assurance. What was more, he “could not tell to what operations Germany might be forced by the action of France.”
The combined vagueness and truculence of these remarks, counterpointing the Kaiser’s ambiguous diplomacy, appalled the British Foreign Office. Sir Edward Grey noted that a promise to respect territory was not a promise to respect sovereignty. The boundaries of Alsace-Lorraine had not altered since 1870, yet the flag that flew over Zabern was German. Bethmann’s admission that Germany might be “forced” to negate its own guarantees amounted, in British eyes, to a check as blank as the one Wilhelm II had handed the Austrian ambassador at the beginning of July.
The last forty-eight hours of July accelerated with a momentum that Bethmann-Hollweg likened to that of a landslide. All the key figures in the crisis became terrified, with the exception of Falkenhayn and his nominal superior, General Helmuth J. L. von Moltke, the German chief of staff. Their Prussian blood pulsed to the potential of mobilizing the world’s mightiest army, and deploying it east and west. The enormous dynamo was there, oiled and superbly tuned, the end product of decades of tinkering and testing. In the manner of a mechanism developed for one overriding purpose, it wanted to whir into action. Falkenhayn dreaded that the Kaiser or Bethmann-Hollweg might yet effect a negotiated settlement with Nicholas II. He raged against “those peace people at the palace” holding up German mobilization while hordes of Slavs were standing to arms. Moltke warned the Chancellor that France and Russia together would bring about “the mutual destruction of the civilized states of Europe.” Since the adjective mutual implied only a pair of states, it was clear that Germans and Austrians felt menaced on all sides by barbarians.
“Germany does not want to be the cause of this egregious war,” he wrote, “but … it would violate the deepest bonds of national loyalty—one of the noblest features of the German psyche … if it did not come to its ally’s aid just when this ally’s destiny is hanging in the balance.”
Forces for good and forces for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a thousand-fold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over the whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid, the mainspring coils and spreads at a rate constantly quickening, the whole world movement is of constantly accelerating velocity.
Theodore Roosevelt’s address to the University of Berlin had not gone down well in 1910, and was probably forgotten now, even by those