A Short History of the Great War | Page 2

advantage to the oppressor, but the guilt has yet to be
apportioned, and instigation may have come from secret sources within
the Hapsburg empire; for the Archduke was hated by dominant cliques
on account of his alleged pro-Slav sympathies and his suspected
intention of admitting his future Slav subjects to a share in political
power.
For some weeks after the murder it bade fair to pass without a
European crisis, for the public was unaware of what happened at a
secret conclave held at Potsdam on 5 July. It was there decided that
Germany should support to the uttermost whatever claims Austria
might think fit to make on Serbia for redress, and she was encouraged
to put them so high as either to ensure the domination of the Balkans by
the Central Empires through Serbian submission, or to provoke a war
by which alone the German militarists thought that German aims could
be achieved. That was the purport of the demands presented to Serbia
on 23 July: acceptance would have reduced her to a dependence less
formal but little less real than that of Bosnia, while the delay in
presenting the demands was used to complete the preparations for war
which rejection would provoke. It was not, however, against Serbia that
the German moves were planned. She could be left to Austria, while
Germany dealt with the Powers which would certainly be involved by
the attack on Serbian independence.
The great Power immediately concerned was Russia, which had long
aspired to an outlet into European waters not blocked by winter ice or
controlled by Baltic States. For that and for the less interested reasons
of religion and racial sympathy she had fought scores of campaigns
against the Turks which culminated in the liberation of most of the
Balkans in 1878; and she could not stand idle while the fruits of her
age-long efforts were gathered by the Central Empires and she herself
was cut off from the Mediterranean by an obstacle more fatal than
Turkish dominion in the form of a Teutonic corridor from Berlin to
Baghdad. Serbia, too, Orthodox in religion and Slav in race, was more

closely bound to Russia than was any other Balkan State; and an attack
on Serbia was a deadly affront to the Russian Empire. It was not
intended as anything else. Russia was slowly recovering from her
defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 and from the revolutionary
outbreaks which had followed; and there was little doubt that sooner or
later she would seek compensation for the rebuffs she had suffered
from the mailed fist during her impotence. Conscience made Germany
sensitive to the Slav peril, and her militarist philosophy taught her that
the best defence was to get her blow in first. Her diplomacy in July was
directed towards combining this advantage with the appearance, needed
to bemuse her people and the world at large, of acting in self-defence.
But Russia was the object of Germany's diplomatic activity rather than
of her military preparations. It was thought that Russia could not
mobilize in less than six weeks or strike effectively in less than two or
three months, and that that interval would suffice for the crushing of
France, who was bound by treaty to intervene if Russia were attacked.
The German mobilization was therefore directed first against France,
defence against Russia being left to second-line German troops and to
an Austrian offensive. The defeat of France was not, however, regarded
by Germans as a mere incident in a war against Russia; for it was a
cardinal point in the programme of the militarists, whose mind was
indiscreetly revealed by Bernhardi, that France must be so completely
crushed that she could never again cross Germany's path. To
Frenchmen the war appeared to be mainly a continuation of the national
duel which had been waged since the sixteenth century. To Great
Britain it appeared, on the other hand, as the forcible culmination of a
new rivalry for colonial empire and the dominion of the seas. But these
were in truth but local aspects of a comprehensive German ambition
expressed in the antithesis Weltmacht oder Niedergang. Bismarck had
made the German Empire and raised it to the first place as a European
Power. Europe, it was discovered, was a small portion of the globe; and
Bismarck's successful methods were now to be used on a wider scale to
raise Germany to a similar predominance in the world. The Serbian plot
was merely the lever to set the whole machinery working, and German
activities all the world over from Belgrade and Petrograd to
Constantinople, Ulster, and Mexico were parts in a comprehensive

piece.
But while the German sword was pointed everywhere, its hilt was in
Berlin. Prussia supplied the mind which conceived the policy and
controlled its execution;