I

attacked Germany by the same right by which Prussia and Austria attacked Denmark in 1864. That Great Britain had other grounds for declaring war is not disputed. They are indicated in the correspondence published by the British government, and they were frankly stated-and put first-by Sir Edward Grey in his speech in the House of Commons, August 3. If among its various grounds for declaring war, the British government finally selected that which was formally the best and which would appeal most strongly to public sentiment in Great Britain and in other countries, it is not chargeable with insincerity or with hypocrisy. Any other course would have been unintelligent. As far as the appeal to public sentiment is concerned, Austria and Germany acted in the same way; the former in the stress it laid upon the crime of Serajevo, the latter in charging the Russian emperor with "perfidy" because his armies were mobilizing while the German emperor was conducting direct personal negotiations with him.3

On the face of the record again, the powers of the Triple Entente, and preeminently Great Britain, exhibited an apparently sincere desire to maintain the peace of Europe. In the brief time available, between Austria's ultimatum to Servia, July 23, and Germany's ultimatum to Russia, July 31, these powers, and also Italy, seem to have made every possible effort to avert war. The Austrian and German governments assert, indeed, that these efforts were insincere. They claim that in reality Russia was the prime aggressor. They asserted from the outset that Russia had no right to intervene, even through its diplomacy, to protect Servia. If the division of spheres of influence in the Balkan peninsula, as it existed at the close of the nineteenth century, had persisted, this assertion would be plausible. In fact, however, as we have seen, this arrangement had long been abandoned, and primarily because of German encroachments upon the Russian sphere of influence. By attacking

1

1 Cf. British Blue Book, especially nos. 89, 101, III.

3 This was the casus belli emphasized in all the German days of August.

2 Ibid., pp. 89-96.

newspapers in the early

* For Austrian recognition of its abandonment, at least since the Balkan War, cf. British Blue Book, nos. 91, 118.

Servia, Austria menaced the existing balance of power in the Balkans; and it was on this ground, not on the ground of a duty to protect a Slav state, that Russia intervened.' Austria indeed declared that it had no intention of disturbing the balance of power, and it offered to promise not to annex Servian territory; but it was unable to satisfy Russia that Servian independence was not threatened.3 It was precisely on this last point that negotiations were in progress when Germany declared war.

The German government asserts that Belgium had ceased to be neutral and was virtually in alliance with France and Great Britain. If this assertion could be proved, the strongest prejudice which Germany's conduct of the war has aroused in neutral countries would tend to disappear. In America, at least, few people care whether the treaties of 1839 were or were not in force and binding upon Prussia. Even if Belgium was no longer a neutralized country, it was apparently a neutral country, and it has been ravaged with fire and steel because so the German armies could reach France most quickly. What, however, has Germany been able to prove? Only that British military attachés had concerted with Belgian military authorities plans of joint action against a German invasion. If, as is insisted, no consultations were held with German military attachés to provide for the defence of Belgian neutrality against a French or British invasion, what does that prove? Only that the Belgians knew well or guessed rightly on which side their neutrality was menaced.

The German assertion, made in the ultimatum to Belgium, that France was planning to send troops through Belgium into Germany, and the more recent assertion that Great Britain intended to send troops into Belgium without waiting until German troops crossed the Belgian frontier, can have no influence. upon neutral opinion. Neither in law nor in morals, public or

'Russian Orange Paper, no. 77.

'German White Paper, Memorandum and annex 10.

Russian Orange Paper, nos. 41, 60, 67.

'The Case of Belgium, in the light of official reports found in the archives of the Belgian government. With an introduction by Dr. Bernhard Dernburg (n. d.).

private, is a wrong excused by alleging, or even by proving, that a similar wrong was contemplated by an adversary. Moreover, neither of these assertions has been proved. Of such an intention on the part of the French government no evidence has been submitted; and the only evidence adduced to prove such an intention on the part of the British government is the opinion expressed by a British military attaché. It is, however, a matter of common knowledge that military attachés are never empowered to commit their governments to any line of action, and that their opinions, if not purely personal, reflect at most the desires of their military chiefs, not the intentions of the political heads of government.

In asserting that they were really attacked or threatened with attack, Austria and Germany are today in the position in which Bismarck's adversaries habitually found themselves; they can not prove their assertions. If in the future, on the basis of evidence which we do not possess, the historian shall be able to show that in 1914 the Triple Entente brought about a European war in order to crush Germany and dismember Austria, he will still be forced to say that the conspiring governments played the diplomatic game according to Bismarckian traditions; and if he fails to attribute to Grey or to Sazonoff as high a degree of adroitness as Bismarck displayed, it will be because the ineptitude of their adversaries made their task easier than his.

V

The inferiority of Austrian and German diplomacy in 1914 to that of Bismarck in the German unity wars might plausibly be explained by the personal difference between a statesman of genius and the average diplomatist. This, however, hardly accounts for the inferiority of Austro-German diplomacy to that of the Triple Entente. It is the chief It is the chief purpose of this paper to suggest an explanation.

In the histories, biographies and memoirs of the Bismarckian period we read of conflicts between the Prussian premier and German chancellor on the one hand, and the military leaders,

'The Case of Belgium, p. 12.

notably the chief of the General Staff, on the other. These are usually regarded as collisions of strong personalities, ascribable largely to competing personal ambitions. They mean more than this. They represent the natural and apparently necessary antithesis of the political and the military mind; and they typify. the perpetual and universal struggle between diplomacy and military strategy.

We have seen what Bismarck thought of policies of power and of prestige. To the soldier, however, the state is power; and the fear which its power inspires in other states, which is one form of prestige, is essential to its welfare, if not to its existence. Prestige, however, which is at best only the image or reflection of the substantial, and may be mere semblance or illusion, is protean in its aspects. It is often the reflection of success. It is often the illusion of dignity or of honor. Το General Bernhardi (who in this respect, as in others, typifies the military mind) honor and dignity, as well as success in war and the fear which such success inspires, are all indistinguishably blended in the notion of prestige. He writes:

War seems imperative when, although the material basis of power is not threatened, the moral influence of the state . . . seems to be prejudiced. . . . Apparently trifling causes may under certain circumstances constitute a fully justifiable casus belli, if the honor of the state, and consequently its moral prestige, are endangered. An antagonist must never be allowed to believe that there is any lack of determination to assert this prestige, even if the sword must be drawn to do so.1

Very weighty and very thorny questions are begged in the vague phrase, "under certain circumstances." The sentiments which long maintained the duel in England and in America, and still maintain it in continental Europe, are far stronger in the military class than among civilians. Today, as in the sixteenth century, the soldier is "jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel." To slight discourtesies, even to lack of deference, the European officer, and particularly the German officer, exhibits an extreme sensitiveness. This reappears, pushed to the point

1 1 Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War, translation, pp. 49, 50.

of caricature, in the German corps student. Closely related to this sensitiveness is the disastrous notion that " trifling causes may so endanger the prestige of the state as to justify war. Bismarck was a Junker; he had swung the Schläger at Göttingen; he was a Prussian military officer; but Bismarck the statesman wrote: "International conflicts, which can be settled only by wars between peoples, I have never regarded from the point of view of the student duel and its code of honor." "

I

Another difference between the military and the political mind, less fundamental, perhaps, but not less important, reveals itself when there is question of anticipating a war because it is deemed inevitable and the moment seems favorable. On this point Bismarck and Moltke were, on at least two occasions, of different opinions. In 1867, during the dispute over Luxemburg, Moltke said to a fellow member of the North German Parliament, Count Bethusy-Huc:

I cannot but wish that the occasion given for a war with France were taken advantage of. Unhappily I regard this war as absolutely unavoidable within the next five years, and within this period the now indisputable superiority of our organization and weapons will be equaled by France. . . . The sooner, therefore, we come to blows the better.

Bethusy laid Moltke's views before Bismarck. The latter "recognized the justice of Moltke's remarks," but declared that he could not assume responsibility for the course of action proposed. "The personal conviction of a ruler or statesman, however well founded, that war would eventually break out, could not justify its promotion. Unforeseen events might alter the situation and avert what seemed inevitable." 2

In 1875, again, when Germany was disquieted by the rapid reëstablishment of French power and by the apparently general

1

1 Memoirs, p. 605; translation, vol. ii, p. 294.

2 Essays, Speeches and Memoirs of Count Helmuth von Moltke, translation (1893), vol. ii, pp. 204, 205. Bismarck alludes to this episode in his Memoirs, pp. 441, 442, translation, vol. ii, p. 103. There is other contemporary evidence that in 1867 he was not convinced that war with France was either inevitable or desirable. In 1870 his view had changed. He had decided that war with France was necessary for the completion of German unity and was therefore to be promoted. Cf. article, January 16, 1893, in Hofmann, vol. ii, pp. 196, 197.