Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [220]
Now, four years later, the great accident was occurring, and Wilhelm was powerless to prevent it. There was a deterministic logic to Europe’s breakdown, as if that ancient seditionist, Fate, had engineered the whole thing. What empire in 1914, with the exception of the Ottoman, was more worn out than that of Austria-Hungary? Now that the heir to the Dual Monarchy had fallen, who could doubt that many more kings and emperors—maybe all of them east of Spain—would fall too, as generals and politicians became the new autocrats, and socialists and anarchists and separatists fought for postwar spoils? Even George V of England had to be afraid, with his own Irish subjects resorting to terrorism, and a general strike looming at home. France—“the French Socialist Republic” as Wilhelm contemptuously called it—had no king to kill. But it was as divided between its militaristic right and enragés of the left as it had been on the eve of the Revolution. Italy, nominally one of the Central Powers counterbalancing the Triple Entente, was so demoralized after its recent “Red Week” labor violence (fomented by a young socialist, Benito Mussolini) that it was likely to declare neutrality out of sheer lack of will. Russia, less centripetal than Austria or France, was more prerevolutionary than either. And the Balkans were the Balkans: forever divided between race and race, religion and religion. What Gavrilo Princip had so reflexively started would not stop.
Owen Wister had been vacationing at Triberg, in the heart of the Black Forest, when the news came from Sarajevo. He stood with other people reading the dispatch on the hotel bulletin board. Nobody spoke. The mountain air was hot and still, charged with pine fumes. An old Bavarian had said, “That is the match which will set all Europe in flames.”
Now Wister was in Brussels, awaiting the conflagration. A Belgian doctor told him that Germans shared two characteristics impelling them toward war: “the mania of grandeur, complemented by the mania of persecution.” It was the generalization of a frightened lowlander, certain that his country was about to be invaded, and would have been more accurate if the doctor had referred specifically to Prussians. The Zabern affair had dramatically demonstrated how great was the gulf, in Germany, between the Junker military elite and the bourgeois or working-class Volk empowering the Center Party, the National Liberals, the Progressives, and the Social Democrats—Europe’s largest socialist group. Although the parliament of these parties, the Reichstag, was still unable to override the will of the imperial government, it had profoundly shaken it with last December’s vote censuring Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. More recently, for the first time in history, the popular majority had refused to join in a traditional standing salute to Wilhelm II.
That insult had done much to aggravate the two manias the Belgian doctor spoke of. Even Bethmann-Hollweg, a mild and almost peaceable man by Prussian standards, was persuaded to believe, along with his ministers, that a war mobilizing the entire Reich would purify it of the toxins of socialism and communism.
He and Wilhelm hesitated, prevaricated, and panicked throughout the morning of Friday, 31 July, firing off diplomatic telegrams and summoning ambassadors. But at the same time Moltke and Falkenhayn, who cajoled the Kaiser to proclaim a state of “imminent war