Chapter XVI

Fifteen years since the outbreak, and eleven years since the cessation of European hostilities have passed away; but the question is not yet fully settled of responsibility for the war. Fortunately the question need not here be asked; for it would lead us too far into the maze of treaties and of safeguarding diplomacy by which the European nations strove to make innocuous that national sentiment they themselves had so outwardly fostered. Our concern here is not with moral responsibility, but with tendency and result. The tendency in Europe, for a century of European history, had been to prepare for war and to strive to maintain outwardly the peace by diplomacy. There came a time when the machine of war, carefully prepared and oiled, went forward simply of itself. The brakes of diplomacy refused to work any longer. That moment came in August, 1914.

The ultimate decision for war no doubt came from the fact that Russia, having mobilised her armies, in response to Austria’s insulting ultimatum to Serbia, refused to withdraw the mobilisation order and to allow Kaiser Wilhelm to make his eleventh-hour appearance in the rôle of peacemaker. But to say that thereby Russia was solely responsible for the war, is to utter the most pernicious nonsense. One might as well say that America--who began and furthered the negotiations in the person of President Wilson--was solely responsible for the peace, as embodied in the Treaty of Versailles. From the moment when the Czar and his advisers decided not to tolerate any further Austro-German interference with the Slav nationalities of the Balkans--interference which had already completely alienated Bulgaria and had transformed Rumania from a friendly people to a sullenly hostile one--from that moment the issue was already as good as settled. The Russian people awoke as by magic from the stupor of their long nightmare, and walked forth in the sunlight of a clear racial policy. Henceforward there were to be no more mad attempts to penetrate into distant Asia, while ignoring the plaint of the neighbour lying wounded at their own doors. The dream of uniting the oppressed western Slavs of Europe into one great free confederation under the headship of orthodox Moscow--a dream which had been Russia’s up to Peter the Great’s day, and which had revived under Nicholas I and Alexander II--needed but the touch of the Russian ultimatum to Austria to start afresh from the soil. The “third Rome” was to be no more a lost ideal but an accomplished fact. In the fervour of a mystical re-conversion to an ideal which had somehow been lost sight of, all party differences, all scars and injuries were forgotten, and immense throngs again kneeled before the Czar. Only the tram operatives of St. Petersburg and Moscow, indifferent to any feeling but that of class, persisted for a time in a crippling strike, at the same time the ultimatum went forward to Austria and her ally, Germany. A small defection, but one pregnant with ominous possibilities for the future.

Having mobilised his forces on the frontier, ready to move forward in case Austria persisted in enforcing the terms of her outrageous military and political demands upon helpless Serbia, the Czar refused to countermand the order, despite Kaiser Wilhelm’s belated and hysteric attempts to extricate himself from a position in which he had already placed himself. Had Russia done so, what would have been the result? The infuriated armies of Russia, withdrawn from the frontier, and doubly tricked by their rulers, from accomplishment of an aim that seemed to them perfectly just, might have perhaps marched upon Moscow and deposed the Romanovs. No doubt this consideration was also present in the minds of the Czar and of his chief advisers. It was necessary at least to make an armed demonstration of goodwill to the Slav peoples in general, in order to save their faces. Moreover, there was France to be considered; France, which had solely stood by Russia during the dark years since 1905, and which was burning with the hope of revenge on Germany. So the time-limit of midnight August 1st expired, and the world blundered into war.

The fact that Russia, despite her immense awakening of enthusiasm for the cause of her fellow-Slavs, and despite her determination to fight on to the bitter end--a determination which she proved over and over again--was, after all, badly led and shamefully equipped, was no handicap at the outset. Had the East Prussian campaign which was halted at Tannenberg, not been fought, the allies could not have stood firm, and stemmed the German onset at the Marne. This campaign, in the end disastrous to the Russians, was nevertheless of equal moral effect on the ultimate result as was America’s intervention three years later. In the one case as in the other, it was not skill, but the mere weight of numbers that finally decided the issue. The French troops, badly beaten in their first attempt to seize upon Alsace-Lorraine, and supported only by a meagre skeleton force of British, fell back steadily upon Paris, until suddenly the pressure upon their crumbling front relaxed and the desperate stand upon the Marne was transformed into an advance to the Aisne. And this policy had been dictated to the German general staff by the trail of smoking farmsteads and ravaged towns that the Russians were making in the Hohenzollern province of East Prussia. The well-directed thrust of the German armies to get between the desperate French troops and Paris itself, and to cut off one from the other, failed because two army corps had to be detached to aid Hindenburg to trap the advancing Russians at Tannenberg. Thus the true agent of the so-called “miracle of the Marne” was neither France nor England, but Russia--that Russia whom her allies abandoned and repudiated three years later in the time of her bitterest humiliation.

Despite the appalling loss of eighty thousand effectives at Tannenberg, the great masses of the Russian people undoubtedly felt that they could go on waging war indefinitely. Austria on the Carpathian-Polish frontier proved as easy for them to invade as East Prussia was impossible. All that they needed to accomplish the ultimate result was a steady supply of munitions and supplies from the better-equipped allies. But this feeling was not shared by the more intelligent heads of affairs in the allied countries. One of the most far-seeing, the English war secretary, Kitchener, had spoken of three years as being the probable duration of the contest. It would take that time, he thought, to stem the German advance through Belgium into France and to train and equip armies sufficiently strong to coöperate with the Russians elsewhere, and thus to force Germany to abandon the struggle. By a miracle which was even greater in its total effect, though less popularly acclaimed, than the “miracle of the Marne,” England barely managed to save the Channel Ports through her stand at Ypres, and thus effectively blockaded Germany--though this miracle was accomplished at the price of all her fighting effectives. The war became, after the first winter, a war of attrition with only one outstanding question: how long would it take the Allies, backed as they were by the immense wave of enthusiasm that was sweeping England and her colonies, to raise the enormous forces required to throw back Germany in the West, and to bring relief in the East to Russia, who was now equally blockaded--her only effective port being Archangel. For by this time Germany had persuaded Turkey to enter the war on her side.

The question was not long in being answered. In the spring of 1915 England committed herself to an attack upon the Gallipoli peninsula. Had that attack been pressed home, and Constantinople fallen, the war would certainly have ended then and there. For Germany could not then have halted the immense supply of munitions and equipment that England, confident of her financial resources and Still mistress of the seas, was now cleverly procuring for herself and her allies through the factories of outwardly neutral America. But as regards Russia, Germany was already doing her work pretty thoroughly. Though the supplies were pouring into Archangel, they were for the most part never allowed to leave the wharves, or mysteriously disappeared _en route_ to the Russian armies. For by now a small group of sycophantic courtiers and corrupt administrators of the Czar’s own inner circle, taking their tone from Berlin, and possibly also from the imperious and self-willed Czarina, were asking themselves the question, “What should happen, if, after all, we won? Would we not have put into the hands of the people the very weapon whereby to destroy our power?”

Thus through outward delay and inner treachery, the Allies themselves threw away their chief opportunity of forcing a decision upon Germany. The Gallipoli advance, thanks to divided counsels in England and in France, was never pressed home in time. The Russian armies, which despite their terrible shortage in munitions, had fought their way into Galicia in the spring of 1915 and delivered their last effective threat to Vienna, crumbled away helplessly before the new policy Germany had conceived of standing like a wall in the West, and sweeping down all opposition in the East. From the foothills of the Carpathians and the Hungarian plains to the Pripet marshes that lay two hundred miles behind Warsaw, the Russian armies retreated, fighting with sticks instead of rifles, and having back of them not sufficient reserves of ammunition even to feed their batteries for a day. The outcome was that the Grand Duke Nicholas, an able hard-bitten soldier, was deposed from command of the Russian armies, and the Czar, now more than ever swayed by the evil influences of his consort and Rasputin, took command. Russia’s doom was sealed.

At the same time, England, misled by the French into thinking that the German effectives were wasting away more rapidly than those of the Allies in the West, withdrew from Gallipoli and launched a disastrous attack at Loos, which was completely abortive, and served only to sweep away a great portion of the new armies which Kitchener had summoned into being. Henceforward, stalemate was practically certain, and by this stalemate Germany in the end stood ready to profit. For she could now move towards the East whenever and wherever she pleased. Bulgaria was brought into the war on Germany’s side to counterbalance Italy’s defection to the cause of the Allies, in 1915; and from Antwerp to the Persian Gulf, Kaiser Wilhelm now ruled supreme. Russia had utterly collapsed in the East, and the iron wall of troops still stood firmly planted on French soil. That was the prospect that uplifted all German hearts to face, in 1916, another year of war.

2

So the first act of the great drama ended with Germany everywhere triumphant in the East and the Allies unable to force a decision anywhere on their own chosen ground of the West. But this result had only hardened the Western allies to persist. Their very lives were now at stake, and they still held the German lines immobilised, and the German coasts in the grip of the blockade. Economically, Germany could persist no more than Napoleon had persisted, in bearing the strain. She still had two military weapons whereby she might be able to bring her last two opponents, France and England, to the ground. These were her own power of making munitions, a power which had been tested and proven successful in pulverising the Russians in the spring of 1915; and in addition, the submarine which might eventually starve out England. Both weapons were launched on the world in full strength in 1916.

The million of shells which the German armies showered on Verdun in the first twelve hours’ bombardment of that fortress, and the million tons of shipping which England began losing every month, proved, however, equally ineffective to bring the war to its close. The first led directly to open discontent behind the lines in Germany itself; the latter led indirectly to America’s entry into the war. For despite the wave of horror that had swept over her at the loss of the _Lusitania_, America now learned with amazement that the Germans had no intention whatever of abandoning the submarine, with its constant threat to neutral traffic. The outcome was to bring America into the struggle as a fresh factor of incalculable strength against an already disillusioned Germany.

Yet this decision was not taken immediately. Apart from two strongly vocal minorities, one of which insistently upheld the cause of the Allies, while the other just as clearly pointed out the tremendous triumphs of the German military machine, the great bulk of the American people were still indifferent. They had, and they desired, no quarrel with the people of Germany. On this basis, the sentimental basis of “having kept America out of the war,” President Wilson was re-elected in November 1916. He knew, and had given indications that he knew, that the business of American neutrality was played out. But this knowledge was not shared by the great majority of his people, who fondly hoped to continue to profit at the expense of both sides in the struggle, by maintaining a prosperous neutrality.

With incredible folly, the military leaders of Germany, blind to the harvest of suffering they were creating in the homes and hearts of their own people, played completely into the American President’s hands. They issued a proclamation pointing out the devastation that the German arms had already caused (a devastation real enough when we consider that a million Russians had been slaughtered, another million were prisoners in German hands, and that great tracts of land had been left desert in Northern France, Poland, and the Balkans) and demanding that this destruction should now cease. Let the Allies come to the council table, and they would learn Germany’s demands. In the swollen phrases of this threatening note, the American President found his opportunity. He issued an appeal to the Allies to state their war aims. The reply was unexpectedly moderate, but official Germany gave no indication that she would accept it. Instead, while Wilson spoke openly of a peace without victory, based on the cessation of interference by one nation in another’s affairs, government by the consent of the governed, freedom of the seas, and limitation of armaments, Germany unsheathed her last weapon. On January 31st, 1917, she proclaimed a blockade of England, France, and Italy, closed the ports of Europe to neutral shipping, and declared that her submarines would sink henceforward all ships that endeavoured to trade with the belligerents at war with Germany. The answer was prompt and immediate. The American government severed diplomatic relations with Germany.

Thus America came into the war in defence of the same principle of freedom of the seas about which she had once before fought England in 1812. The leaders of Germany, had they possessed any intimate knowledge of American history, or the American character, might have foreseen this result. For the American nation as a whole lives and flourishes by, and wages its greatest struggles over, the application of certain very simple shibboleths and slogans. It was so in 1776, in 1812, in 1861, and it was again to prove so in 1917. Unlike the Russians, who can always change their outward principles completely, without losing any of their inner characteristics, the Americans have no special inner characteristics (as they have no aristocracy) but make up for this lack by their whole-hearted obedience to certain primary ideas and taboos which are to them sacred. The threat which Germany delivered to the cherished right of America to trade freely with all the nations of the earth, and thereby to end the whole edifice of American prosperity, proved sufficient to unite all sections of the American people; and never did President Wilson speak more surely on behalf of the entire nation than when, paraphrasing Luther, he declared that America “could do no other” than fight.

Thus it happened that America, immense in untouched power and resource, united to defeat Germany at the same moment when Russia, bleeding and defeated, with an internal revolution on her hands, reeled out of the struggle. For the first time--if we except the opening up of Japan in which each had taken previously a hand--the two nations whose effort was to dominate the future, met on a common ground. Like an electric flash, or the torches that the Greek runners had carried in their races long gone by, an impulse flashed from one to the other. That impulse may have differed in origin, but not in aim. What Russia by her concentration of power into a vacillating but central ruling class, could not do, America, by her diffusion of power into a self-reliant bourgeoisie, accomplished. Russia had crippled the European nationalist military machine; America overwhelmed the economic. And not only the liberated Slavs of Eastern Europe, but also the Mediterranean powers, owe their existence to-day to the action of two nations, neither of which stood to profit thereby: America and Russia.

3

The impulse that had pushed the two great frontier nations forward to their momentary encounter on the blood-soaked and devastated soil of Europe, was unquestionably the same in essence, though differing profoundly in origin and in ultimate result. In the case of Russia, the unconscious weight of public opinion, holding steadily to its ancient dream of a great Pan-Slav Empire, had literally pushed from behind the vacillating and enfeebled Czar. In the case of America, an aloof, cautious, and essentially undemocratic President had found at last a democratic formula to which popular opinion, holding firm to its old dream of liberty for all peoples, could respond. The situation of 1688, of 1776-89, of 1860-65 was thus repeated, on a larger scale, and with the world itself for background; and the repercussion of both events in their respective countries led to the same profound and far-reaching changes.

In America, the principles which President Wilson had enunciated in his celebrated Fourteen Points--principles which the Allies promptly accepted as a basis for negotiation with a Germany, now ready to acknowledge its defeat, and which they conveniently forgot immediately afterwards--came into open and direct conflict with the outstanding notion which had guided America in its foreign relations since the days of Washington; that there was to be above all, aloofness from Europe, no entanglement in European affairs. The result was that the American President, who had been unquestionably empowered by his people to wage war, found himself unable to make peace. The moment he stepped upon European soil, President Wilson ceased to represent the American people and became only representative of himself. Thus the declaration of the Armistice led not to peace and sheathing of the sword, but to the last act of the world struggle, an act in which America was obliged to play the part of striving to rehabilitate Europe economically, while standing aloof politically.

At the other end of the scale, it is necessary to note that since the spring of 1917, Russia had been in revolution, a revolution which took an extreme form in the Bolshevik seizure of power in November of that year. Lacking a Czar, abandoned by its Allies, utterly disillusioned about the war, leaderless, and incapable of continuing the struggle, the country now presented an opportunity to any clever opportunist who could, under the guise of promising to the peasants bread, peace and land, effectively usurp the central power of the Czar. Lenin alone saw this opportunity and was ready to seize it and bend it to its purposes. A new alliance equally deadly to avowed Czarists and liberal intellectuals was forged between factory-worker and mujik; and from the achievement of this alliance we date present-day Russia. The situation had found the sole man, ruthless, undemocratic, efficient, who could guide it. In America, Wilson had skilfully manœuvred his people into a position where further retreat into neutrality was, as he thought, impossible. He had created his own opportunity, instead of waiting for it to come to him; and having created it, he immediately supposed that he could personally master it, and that it would follow him blindly. He did not count on the revulsion of horror that would follow upon America’s awakening to the fact that the country was enmeshed in European diplomacy, the determination on the part of his people to remain an independent frontier. Thus the American and the Russian crises followed very different courses.

There is much in the career of Woodrow Wilson that recalls the tragic life-story of the Egyptian Pharaoh, Amenophis IV, known to later ages as Akhnaton. Like the Egyptian king who strove to transform the religion of his people from a tribal polytheism into a pure and universal form of monotheism, Wilson strove to formulate finally the American creed as it affected the world. But the American creed is too loosely held, too vague a sentiment, to be formulated. A Californian, though he may belong to the same racial stock, cannot have the same outlook as a New Englander; a New Orleans Creole cannot share the attitude to life of a Scandinavian settler in Northern Michigan. America owes its continuance solely to the fact that all these diverse racial and geographical stocks assume that their pooled effort will make America sufficient to itself, and that “government of the people by the people for the people” will still persist in bestowing the fruits of middle-class prosperity. But it is obvious that this simple creed--or superstition--cannot be maintained if once any attempt is made to apply it to the more complex European situation. Once America backs any side in the European struggle, then that side has to become outwardly, if not inwardly, American; that is to say, it has to abandon all the traditional differences that distinguish it from its European neighbours. Wilson strove to reconcile the psychology of America with the remoter psychology of Europe, in the same way as Amenophis strove to identify all forms of Egyptian worship with his own personal and individual creed. In striving thus to simplify the situation, he merely complicated it. And the result was, as in the case of the Egyptian Pharaoh whom he resembled, a personal tragedy of immense magnitude, which left the American President an outlaw and heretic in his own country, and pursued him to his death with rancour and misunderstanding.

Russia in repudiating the war and the Romanovs had to repudiate Europe, and this despite the Bolsheviks themselves, whose dream was probably a Marxian version of Peter the Great’s Empire. It became again a peasant country facing the East. America, by its repudiation of Wilson, was driven also to repudiate Europe, and this despite the most intelligent classes of Americans who were aware that the one hope of the maintenance of European peace lay in the establishment of an European concert of nations. America became again a land of opportunist industrialism, facing westward. Thus the two nations, having like two planets revolved in opposing orbits up to the moment these orbits coincided, resumed again their former course, but not without the hope of some further encounter in the future. The optimistic idealism of President Wilson, ready to accept the most outrageous provisions of the Versailles Treaty for the sake of preserving his conception of a League of Nations bound to respect the fundamental principles of democracy, was finally rejected not by Europe, but by America. The fatalistic materialism of Lenin, ready to swallow complete defeat at Brest-Litovsk for the sake of creating a proletarian world-empire, broke equally before the lack of European support and the obstinacy of the Russian peasantry. With Wilson’s final retirement and Lenin’s new economic policy the issue of the great drama was largely settled as regards the two chief protagonists of Russia and America. But the third, Europe, caught in the cleft of the dilemma, unable to decide for either democratic capitalism or demagogic dictatorship, has as yet found no clear issue out of the impasse.

This position, which is the world position of to-day, was enforced on Europe by the successive abandonment of the European situation on the part of both Russia and America. In the case of Russia, the abandonment was perhaps more absolute, because it was more deeply psychological. The Russian asked Europe for a new fetich, a new sacred talisman, to replace the old fetich of the Orthodox Czar which was utterly worn out, and impotent to protect him longer against misfortune. Such a belief in the power of a fetich, a cult-object, is Oriental, and indeed the Russian is fundamentally Oriental. The fetich of success had been imported formerly from abroad, by Peter the Great, by Catherine, by Alexander II, by Witte. Now it was no longer forthcoming. Even the guns and the gold that the Allies had promised and provided, were turning against the Russians themselves. A new talisman would have to be found within. Lenin was the sole man who could provide it. A workman’s cap, a few words from Marx, education and electric light for all, would be sufficient. Russia could scramble out of her impasse, secure in the conviction that she henceforth could control her destiny alone, while undermining the nations of Europe with their own revolutionary ethic.

But America, too, abandoned Europe for causes that, however economic they may appear on the surface, have a firmly-grounded psychological foundation. Unlike Russia, all the talismans, wealth, power, prosperity, were in her hands. But she was uneasy because she could not discover a verbal formula that would cover equally her own political union and the diversity of disunited European nations. This belief in a formula--which expresses itself in Egyptian hieroglyph, in Aristotelian syllogism, in algebraic equation--is Occidental, and America is fundamentally Occidental. Even the arguments of the most enlightened European statesmen, prepared to back up President Wilson in his demand for a League of Nations, turned against America itself. A League of Nations--what did that mean but a confederation of sovereign and independent states such as had threatened to disrupt the economic alliance between North and Middle West during the fateful years of 1854-65? What else did it mean, but that the Americans themselves, in so far as they were still sentimentally attached to Europe, could still feel themselves to be Europeans? The whole process of “Americanization” was threatened by such a programme. Common standards of Puritan conduct, of business dealing, of economic prosperity were threatened by such a step. Wilson’s words, however close they seemed to Lincoln’s, would effectively destroy all that the armies invoked by Lincoln had fought for. They would destroy Americanism, and make Europeans equal in every respect, to Americans. Let them be anathema! America hastened to scramble out of her impasse, fearful that the European nations were plotting against her, and determined henceforth to undermine them by means of the “peaceful penetration” of mass-production.

Nations have their phobias and complexes no less than individuals. In the case of America and Russia, a complex and a phobia were to take the place of the natural growth of tradition, and to strive to overcome the world.