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By Root 1283 0

that year increased its forces by three Army corps, they opposed the enabling bill but did not venture so far as to oppose the tax which was to pay for it. When one of their number, Philipp Scheidemann, was elected First Vice-President of the Reichstag, his announcement that he would not join in the official call on the Kaiser touched off a new version of the knee-breeches debate. All the parties, not only the Socialists, took part. The vital question at issue was whether Scheidemann would make the call if the Second Vice-President were absent and whether Bebel had or had not agreed that the Socialists could join in the customary cheers for their Sovereign. In the upshot, Scheidemann’s principles caused his election to be cancelled, thus averting serious problems.

Within the body of Social-Democracy, Revision was keeping pace with the growing nationalism of the country. Socialism’s very success turned its sights away from the maximum program, toward the minimum and the possible. The red dawn of revolution receded. Believers repeated the Marxist formulas with untamed ardor, but conviction had passed to those who were still “illegals”—the Russians. At a meeting of the Leipzig left-wingers, a visiting Austrian Socialist referred to his hosts as revolutionaries. “We revolutionaries?” interrupted Franz Mehring. “Bah! Those are the revolutionaries,” he said, nodding at Trotsky, who was a guest.

For Jaurès the overriding task had become the need to forge and impose a policy for preventing war in terms compatible both with the defence of France and faith in Socialism. In his country too, nationalism, revanche, the belligerent spirit, was rising. The pressure of Germany was omnipresent, the shadow of Sedan lengthening. To logical extremists like Guesde, peace and the interests of the working class were not necessarily equivalent, but to Jaurès they were. He now believed that the only way consistent with Socialism to meet the threat of war was through a citizen army. When the whole nation was an army of reserves, with everyone having taken six months’ basic training, and with officers drawn from the ranks, the nation could not be drawn into belligerency in the interest of capitalist warmongers. In a war of defence against invasion only such an army of the whole nation, he argued, could hope to repel the terrible “submersion” that German use of reserves in the front line was preparing.

Jaurès’ campaign was not merely Socialist oratory. As in Les Preuves in the Dreyfus Affair, he set about demonstrating the practicability of his case, studying and working out, over a period of three years, the means of reorganizing the military establishment. He embodied the results in a bill submitted to the Chamber in November, 1910, and in a book of seven hundred pages, l’Armée Nouvelle, published in 1911. Preaching his cause tirelessly in the Chamber, in l’Humanité, the Socialist paper of which he was founder and director, in meetings and lectures, he was thunderously abused as a “traitor,” pro-German and “pacifist” by the cohorts of the Right, particularly by the vituperative Action Française.

The Balkans, where the interests of Russia and Austria clashed, was, as everyone knew, the hot-box of Europe. When in October, 1912, the Balkan League of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro, encouraged by Russia, declared war on Turkey, it seemed the awful moment had come. In Belgrade, Trotsky watched the 18th Serbian Infantry marching off to war in uniforms of the new khaki color. They wore bark sandals and a sprig of green in their caps, which gave them a look of “men doomed for sacrifice.” Nothing so brought home to him the meaning of war as those sprigs of green and bark sandals. “A sense of the tragedy of history took possession of me, a feeling of impotence before fate, of compassion for the human locust.”

To demonstrate the unity of the workers of the world against war, the Bureau in Brussels convened an emergency Congress to meet in Basle on the Swiss border between France and Germany on November 24 and 25. Five hundred and fifty-five delegates