Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [146]
Rennes was the climax. After Rennes neither the fight for Justice nor the struggle of the Right against the Republic was over, but the Affair was. While it lasted, France exhibited, as in the Revolution, political man at his most combative. It was a time of excess. Men plunged in up to the hilt of their capacities and beliefs. They held nothing back. On the eve of the new century the Affair revealed what energies and ferocity were at hand to greet it.
* The document recovered from the wastebasket of the German military attaché which was the original evidence of treason. It was a list of the information supplied.
* The last Bourbon Pretender, grandson of Charles X, who styled himself Henri V and died in 1883.
* He had been promoted.
5
The Steady Drummer
THE HAGUE : 1899 AND 1907
5
The Steady Drummer
JOY, HOPE, SUSPICION—above all, astonishment—were the world’s prevailing emotions when it learned on August 29, 1898, that the young Czar of Russia, Nicholas II, had issued a call to the nations to join in a conference for the limitation of armaments. All the capitals were taken by surprise by what Le Temps called “this flash of lightning out of the North.” That the call should come from the mighty and ever expanding power whom the other nations feared and who was still regarded, despite its two hundred years of European veneer, as semi-barbaric, was cause for dazed wonderment liberally laced with distrust. The pressure of Russian expansion had been felt from Alaska to India, from Turkey to Poland. “The Czar with an olive branch,” it was said in Vienna, “that’s something new in history.” But his invitation touched a chord aching to respond.
Fear of the swelling armaments industry was widespread. Krupp, the colossus of Essen, was the largest single business in Europe. Skoda, Schneider-Creusot, Vickers-Maxim, the distended combines of many mergers, with harsh names that grated on the ear, had interests in every camp, sold their products to customers on every continent and to both sides of every quarrel, profited from every dispute. Each year one or another of them produced a new weapon more efficient in deadliness, which, when adopted by the armed forces of one power, immediately required a matching effort by its rival. Each year the cost mounted and the huge piles of weapons grew until it seemed they must burst in final, lethal explosion.
The Czar’s manifesto called for a stop to this process. Addressed to all the governments represented at St. Petersburg, it stated that although the longing for peace had been especially pronounced in the last twenty years, “the intellectual and physical strength of nations, labour and capital alike, have been unproductively consumed in building terrible engines of destruction.” Today these were the last word in science, tomorrow they were obsolete and had to be replaced. The system of “armaments à l’outrance is transforming the armed peace into a crushing burden that weighs on all nations and if prolonged will lead inevitably to the very cataclysm which it is desired to avert.” To arrest this exorbitant competition was now incumbent upon all.
The summons from such a source surpassed the wildest dreams of the friends of peace. It “will sound like beautiful music over the whole earth,” said a Viennese paper. Phrases like “a new epoch in civilization,” “dawn of a new era,” “omen for the new century,” appeared in the press of every country. In Belgium the summons was called a “veritable deliverance,” an act of “colossal importance” whose author would go down in history as “Nicholas the Pacific.” In New York it seemed a possible beginning “of the most momentous and beneficent movement in modern history—indeed in all history.” Rome lauded “one of the great documents that honors its century,” and Berlin greeted “the new Evangelist on the banks of the Neva” whose goal was noble and beautiful in theory however unrealizable in practice. Humanitarian but utopian was the consensus in