World War One: A Short History Read Free Page B

Austria-Hungary. Now there was a direct clash, over Russia’s most vital interest.
    This coincided with heightened tension of a more general sort. The arms race had been speeding up after 1911: a new dimension in the air, a ‘super-Dreadnought’, more soldiersbeing conscripted, more strategic railways being built. Turkey was on Europe’s frontier, and if there were diplomatic crises, armies – Austrian, German, Russian – were affected. Before 1914, there was a great boom in trade, and governments had money to spend. A modest German increase in army spending (to train more men) in 1911 provoked a French response (again, more men in the peacetime army) in 1912, which provoked in turn another German (and Austrian) increase. In 1913 came the decisive one: a ‘great programme’ that was intended to turn Russia into a ‘super-power’. That programme would have given Russia more guns than Germany and, at last, would have allowed the Russian army to feed and clothe and transport more than the hitherto very limited proportion of men reaching the conscription age. Shortage of money had meant that the Russian army, though based on a population three times greater than Germany’s, was no larger than Germany’s, had considerably fewer guns and had considerably fewer strategic railways. That was about to change, and dramatically so. By 1914, Sir Arthur Nicolson, who had been the British ambassador in St Petersburg, was hugging himself with glee that the two countries were in alliance.
    In Berlin, there was panic. It was easy in those days to find out what potential enemies were doing. Troops would have to go by train, and the length of platforms gave the game away as regards enemy war plans; there were no restrictions on travel, or photography, and an Austro-Hungarian intelligence officer even moved around south-western Russia with a passport in which his profession was entered as ‘General Staff officer’. If a platform were suspiciously long, in some out-of-the-way place normally catering for farmers’ wives carrying chickens, then it meant that, at some point, infantry or cavalry would be unloaded there. Then again, all countries by now had a parliament, and its proceedings were a matter of public record, to be read even in the daily press. Berlin and Vienna could thereforevery easily know, by the spring of 1914, that the Russians were flexing their new economic muscle in military matters. The German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, had seen for himself the growing strength of Russia, as the Gold Standard now supported its currency and as railways linked supply and demand at all levels. Technical journals showed the extraordinary advance of Russia – here, a lorry winning a European prize for a long journey to Riga, there a theoretical physicist (Cholkovsky) writing the equations that would eventually carry Sputnik (the first man-made space satellite) beyond Earth’s gravity. St Petersburg still is the European capital of the might-have-been. Bethmann Hollweg was easily intelligent enough to know that Germany should just have adapted to this. He was asked by his son whether long-maturing elms should be planted on his Brandenburg estate, Hohenfinow. The Chancellor said: no, only the Russians would profit. In that, he was right: thirty years later, they did indeed arrive in Brandenburg, and stayed for another fifty. But Bethmann Hollweg himself was a fatalist, and he gave in to other men who did not have his scepticism. The military were now banging on the table: Germany could win a war now, but if she waited a further two or three years, Russia would be too strong.
    The increase in the Russian army’s size and weight was bad enough. What caused panic was the growth of her railways. Russia after 1908 joined in the process of self-propelling industrialization that had already occurred most spectacularly in the USA and Germany. She had of course enormous resources, but they had been poorly exploited because