World War One: A Short History Read Online Free PDF Page A

Russian mobilization, and when it was refused, war was declared on 1 August. The German war plan meant an immediate attack on France, and the trains began to roll. An ultimatum was served in Paris, to the effect that the French should surrender three fortresses at the outset, as a guarantee. When this was refused, war followed there, too, on 3 August.
    There was a final twist. The German army could not really attack France directly, because the fortifications on the short Franco-German border were far too strong. It could only invade France through the plains of Belgium, and Belgium was a neutral country, her neutrality guaranteed by the Great Powers, including Great Britain and Germany. What were theBritish to do if Germany invaded Belgium? In terms of treaty obligations, the position was clear enough: war. Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty mobilized the Royal Navy at once. The situation of 1914, of war in the West emerging from some crisis in the East, had been foreseen, and study of the length of railway platforms in the Rhineland had even shown that there would be a German invasion of Belgium. But war between Germany and England was in many quarters unthinkable – Germany, the model country, with the largest Social Democrat party, the best local government, the best education in Europe. Why go to war with her, at the side of Tsarist Russia? But, as happened with redoubled force in 1939, reason was hardly counting. Germany had built an entirely unnecessary fleet, directed straight at British ports, and had gone on to aggressive behaviour against Russia, against France. Members of the British cabinet had quite a good idea of what it was all about, the central question of British foreign policy since 1850: Germany or Russia? What would have happened if, at the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the then British foreign secretary had appeared, indicating that he had no objection to a German-dominated Europe, provided that British interests, worldwide, were guaranteed? The trouble was that, by then, no one trusted the Germans, and the brightest figure in British politics, David Lloyd George, said that a Germany controlling the resources of Russia would be unbeatable. Without a German invasion of Belgium, the British navy would in any event have been engaged in defending the Atlantic coast of France. The invasion of Belgium gave a cast-iron excuse for intervention, which silenced many (though not all) of the doubters. On 4 August a British ultimatum demanding the evacuation of Belgium was issued: it remained without answer, and the European war became a world war.
    NOTES
    1. Heinz von Lichem, Krieg in den Alpen 1915–1918 (Augsburg, 1993), vol. 3, p. 179ff.
    2. The French had money to spare partly because, almost alone in Europe at the time, their population hardly rose between 1870 and 1914, and might-have-been parents saved with ferocity.
    3. It was of course true that imperialism enriched the imperialists and their professorial hangers-on, but the costs of it were prodigious, and Weber himself learned as much. After his inaugural lecture, he became a national hero, and attracted the attentions of a very clever woman, who led him into a world of which he had had no knowledge. He was, for much of the time, a nervous wreck, and seems thereby to have learned that professor-doctors do not really have a monopoly of wisdom. He grew up. In 1914, almost all of the thousand-plus great names in German cultural life signed a ‘petition of the Intellectuals’ that argued on Weber-inaugural lines. Weber became a medical assistant on the western front. See Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: Die Leidenschaft des Denkens (Munich, 2005), pp. 215–33 and p. 548ff.
    4. Hitler even took the idea of having a party uniform of special shirts from Mussolini, who had chosen black. He hit upon brown ones, by accident, when a job lot of jungle uniforms turned up on the market. They had been intended for the German army in East Africa and were stored