• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1311 0

of the founding of the First International and the twenty-fifth of the Second. Faith in its purpose and its goal were high. In May a Franco-German Committee of Socialist deputies, including Jaurès and Hugo Haase, met at Basle to discuss measures for rapprochement between their countries. Their intention was good but its limit was talk. In England Keir Hardie in the midst of a speech to a conference of the ILP in April turned suddenly to face rows of children from Socialist Sunday Schools, seated behind the platform. Speaking directly to them, he pictured the loveliness of the world of nature and of the world of man as it could become. He spoke of how unnecessary were war and poverty and how he had tried to pass on to them a better world and how, although he and his associates had failed, they, the children, could yet succeed. “If these were my last words I would say them to you: Live for that better day.”

At the end of June, news that Serbian patriots had assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, in an obscure town in the annexed territory of Bosnia, provided a sensation of the kind to which Europe was accustomed. It passed without causing undue public alarm. Then suddenly, a month later, on July 24, with terrible impact, came the announcement that Austria had delivered an ultimatum to Serbia of such “brutality,” in the words of Vorwärts, the German Socialist paper, that “it can be interpreted only as a deliberate attempt to provoke war.” Full-scale crisis opened beneath Europe’s feet. Would it be another like Agadir and the Balkan War, hot with challenge and maneuver but finally fended off? People waited in desperate hope. “We relied on Jaurès,” wrote Stefan Zweig long afterwards, to organize the Socialists to stop the war.

Socialist leaders consulted. To wait to make a demonstration at Vienna a month hence might be too late. A readiness, a sense of gathering belligerence, could be felt in the atmosphere. The Bureau of Brussels summoned an emergency meeting of leading members for July 29. Jaurès, Hugo Haase, Rosa Luxemburg, Adler, Vandervelde, Keir Hardie and representatives of the Italian, Swiss, Danish, Dutch, Czech and Hungarian parties and of the several Russian factions, about twenty in all, assembled with a “sense of hopelessness and frustration.” What could they do? How could they make the will of the working class felt? What indeed was that will? No one asked that question for none doubted that it was for peace, but one answer had already been given two days earlier in Brussels at a congress of trade unions attended by Léon Jouhaux, head of the CGT, and Carl Legien, the German trade-union chief. Jouhaux tried anxiously to find out what the German unions would do. The French, said Jouhaux, would call a strike if the Germans would, but Legien remained silent. In any case no plans had been prepared.

All week the Socialist press of every country roared against militarism, urged the working class of all nations to “stand together,” to “combine and conquer” the militarists, to engage in “ceaseless agitation” as planned by the International. La Bataille Syndicaliste, organ of the French unions, stated: “Workers must answer the declaration of war by a revolutionary general strike.” Workers poured out to mass meetings, listened to exhortations, marched and shouted, but of desire to strike there was no sign as there had been no plan.

On a rainy day in Brussels the Socialist leaders met in a small hall of the Maison du Peuple, the proud new building of the Belgian labour movement with its theatre, offices, committee rooms, café and shops of the cooperatives. As they met they learned that Austria had declared war on Serbia but that other nations were not yet engaged. The hope that somehow the workers would rise—the “somehow” to which they had clung for so long—was all that remained. Each delegate hoped his neighbor would bring news of some great spontaneous outbreak in his country expressing the workers’ No! Adler’s speech brought no hope of a rising in Austria. Haase, too restless to sit still,