A Short History of the Great War | Page 5

develop

an international mind or fathom the mentality of other peoples. She
could not conceive how England would act on a "scrap of paper," and
never dreamt of American participation. But she saw that Russia and
France would inevitably and immediately be involved in war by the
attempt at armed dictation in the Balkans, and that the issue would
decide the fate of Europe. The war would therefore be European and
could only be won by the defeat of France and Russia. Serbia would be
merely the scene of local and unimportant operations, and, Russia
being the slower to move, the bulk of the German forces were
concentrated on the Rhine for the purpose of overwhelming France.
The condition of French politics was one of the temptations which led
the Prussian militarists to embark upon the hazard. France had had her
troubles with militarism, and its excesses over the Dreyfus case had
produced a reaction from which both the army command and its
political ally the Church had suffered. A wave of national secularism
carried a law against ecclesiastical associations which drove religious
orders from France, and international Socialism found vent in a pacifist
agitation against the terms of military service. A rapid succession of
unstable ministries, which the group system in French parliamentary
politics encouraged, militated against sound and continuous
administration; and in April 1914 a series of revelations in the Senate
had thrown an unpleasant light upon the efficiency of the army
organization. On military grounds alone there was much to be said for
the German calculation that in six weeks the French armies could be
crushed and Paris reached. But the Germans paid the French the
compliment of believing that this success could not be achieved before
Russia made her weight felt, unless the Germans broke the
international guarantees on which the French relied, and sought in
Belgium an easier and less protected line of advance than through the
Vosges.
For that crime public opinion was not prepared either in France or
England, but it had for two years at least been the settled policy of the
German military staff, and it had even been foretold in England a year
before that the German attack would proceed by way of Liège and
Namur. There had also been military "conversations" between Belgian

and British officers with regard to possible British assistance in the
event of Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality. But the Belgian
Ministry was naturally reluctant to proceed far on that assumption,
which might have been treated as an insult by an honest or dishonest
German Government; and it was impossible for England to press its
assistance upon a neutralized State which could not even discuss it
without casting a slur upon the honour of its most powerful neighbour.
Nor was England bound by treaty to defend the neutrality of Belgium.
She had been so bound by a treaty concluded during the
Franco-Prussian War; but that treaty expired in the following year, and
the treaty of 1839, which regulated the international situation of
Belgium, merely bound the five great signatory Powers not to violate
Belgian neutrality without obliging them individually or collectively to
resist its violation. It was not in fact regarded in 1839 as conceivable
that any of the Great Powers would ever violate so solemn a pledge,
and there was some complacent satisfaction that by thus neutralizing a
land which had for centuries been the cockpit of Europe, the Powers
had laid the foundations of permanent peace. But the bond of
international morality was loosened during the next half-century, and in
the eighties even English newspapers argued in favour of a German
right-of-way through Belgium for the purposes of war with France. It
does not appear that the treaty was ever regarded as a serious obstacle
by the German military staff; for neither treaties nor morality belong to
the curricula of military science which had concluded that encirclement
was the only way to defeat a modern army, and that through Belgium
alone could the French defence be encircled. The Chancellor admitted
that technically Germany was wrong, and promised full reparation after
the war. But he was never forgiven the admission, even by German
jurists, who argued that treaties were only binding rebus sic stantibus,
while the conditions in which they were signed remained substantially
the same; and Germans had long cast covetous eyes on the Congo State,
the possession of which, they contended, was inconsistent with
Belgium's legal immunity from attack in Europe.
The opposition of Bethmann-Hollweg and the German foreign office
was accordingly brushed aside, and the army made all preparations for
an invasion of France through Belgium. The diplomatists would have

made a stouter resistance had they anticipated the attitude England was
to adopt. But the German ambassador in London, Prince Lichnowsky,
failed to convince his