A Higher Form of Killing Read Online Free
Author: Diana Preston
initiative.
Germany, only united since 1871 following its victory over France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War in which it had seized from its defeated enemy the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, had none of Russia’s economic worries but great political and imperial ambitions. The thirty-nine-year-old mercurial, sometimes vacillating, sometimes impulsively unreasoning Kaiser Wilhelm II, among whose titles was that of “Supreme War Lord,” was stunned that Nicholas had “put a brilliant weapon into the hands of our democrats and opposition. Imagine a monarch dissolving his regiments and handing over his towns to anarchists and democracy.” He compared the invitation to the conference to a Spartan proposal during the Peloponnesian War that Athens agree not to rebuild its city walls and asked, “what will Krupp pay his workers with?” (Friedrich Alfred Krupp’s company was then Europe’s biggest business and at the forefront of artillery development.) Inclined as often to see issues between nations as personal ones between their rulers, Wilhelm alleged Nicholas was trying to steal the limelight from his own planned visit to Jerusalem. As a confidant of the kaiser put it, “he [Wilhelm] simply cannot stand someone else coming to the front of the stage.”
However, with vibrant peace unions in many countries and with no desire to appear enemies of peace, all invited nations felt compelled to accept the czar’s invitation even if many privately sympathized with the kaiser when he said, “I’ll go along with the conference comedy but I’ll keep my dagger at my side during the waltz.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Humanising War”
One hundred and eight delegates from twenty-six countries assembled in May 1899 in a red brick Dutch royal chateau—“the House in the Woods”—just outside The Hague, which as the capital of the Netherlands, a neutral country, the nations had chosen as the venue. Thus began the city’s association with the laws of war, just as the conference in Geneva began that city’s association with the Red Cross. The head of the American delegation, Andrew White, was not alone in thinking that no similar group had ever met “in a spirit of more hopeless scepticism as to any good result.”
The agenda had two main components—how to avoid war by the use of arbitration and the limitation of armaments, and how war should be conducted if it did break out. Each delegation had strict guidance from its government on how best to protect its interests. The British, for example, were told prohibiting or restricting innovations in weaponry would “favour the interests of savage nations and be against those of the more highly civilised.”
Members of the press, soon to be considerably annoyed by being excluded from the formal sessions of the conference, and what would now be called “lobbyists” of all sorts thronged The Hague. The head of the German delegation, Count Munster, complained to his foreign minister, “The conference has brought here the political riffraff of the entire world, journalists of the worst type, baptised Jews like Bloch and female peace fanatics.” In Munster’s mind journalists “of the worst type” would have included W. T. Stead who was in The Hague to chronicle the conference and to campaign for his views. Ivan Bloch was a Russian railway magnate who believed that any future wars would be “suicide” and who was author of a newly published peace-promoting treatise in six volumes. Said to have influenced the czar, it prophesied the stalemate of trench warfare leading to a prolonged conflict whose intolerable human and economic costs would exhaust the belligerents or plunge them into social revolution. On the eve of the conference an international women’s movement had organized demonstrations for peace in many of the countries involved and some of its members were in The Hague. Among the foremost female peace campaigners was the Czech Bertha von Suttner who considered peace
Germany, only united since 1871 following its victory over France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War in which it had seized from its defeated enemy the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, had none of Russia’s economic worries but great political and imperial ambitions. The thirty-nine-year-old mercurial, sometimes vacillating, sometimes impulsively unreasoning Kaiser Wilhelm II, among whose titles was that of “Supreme War Lord,” was stunned that Nicholas had “put a brilliant weapon into the hands of our democrats and opposition. Imagine a monarch dissolving his regiments and handing over his towns to anarchists and democracy.” He compared the invitation to the conference to a Spartan proposal during the Peloponnesian War that Athens agree not to rebuild its city walls and asked, “what will Krupp pay his workers with?” (Friedrich Alfred Krupp’s company was then Europe’s biggest business and at the forefront of artillery development.) Inclined as often to see issues between nations as personal ones between their rulers, Wilhelm alleged Nicholas was trying to steal the limelight from his own planned visit to Jerusalem. As a confidant of the kaiser put it, “he [Wilhelm] simply cannot stand someone else coming to the front of the stage.”
However, with vibrant peace unions in many countries and with no desire to appear enemies of peace, all invited nations felt compelled to accept the czar’s invitation even if many privately sympathized with the kaiser when he said, “I’ll go along with the conference comedy but I’ll keep my dagger at my side during the waltz.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Humanising War”
One hundred and eight delegates from twenty-six countries assembled in May 1899 in a red brick Dutch royal chateau—“the House in the Woods”—just outside The Hague, which as the capital of the Netherlands, a neutral country, the nations had chosen as the venue. Thus began the city’s association with the laws of war, just as the conference in Geneva began that city’s association with the Red Cross. The head of the American delegation, Andrew White, was not alone in thinking that no similar group had ever met “in a spirit of more hopeless scepticism as to any good result.”
The agenda had two main components—how to avoid war by the use of arbitration and the limitation of armaments, and how war should be conducted if it did break out. Each delegation had strict guidance from its government on how best to protect its interests. The British, for example, were told prohibiting or restricting innovations in weaponry would “favour the interests of savage nations and be against those of the more highly civilised.”
Members of the press, soon to be considerably annoyed by being excluded from the formal sessions of the conference, and what would now be called “lobbyists” of all sorts thronged The Hague. The head of the German delegation, Count Munster, complained to his foreign minister, “The conference has brought here the political riffraff of the entire world, journalists of the worst type, baptised Jews like Bloch and female peace fanatics.” In Munster’s mind journalists “of the worst type” would have included W. T. Stead who was in The Hague to chronicle the conference and to campaign for his views. Ivan Bloch was a Russian railway magnate who believed that any future wars would be “suicide” and who was author of a newly published peace-promoting treatise in six volumes. Said to have influenced the czar, it prophesied the stalemate of trench warfare leading to a prolonged conflict whose intolerable human and economic costs would exhaust the belligerents or plunge them into social revolution. On the eve of the conference an international women’s movement had organized demonstrations for peace in many of the countries involved and some of its members were in The Hague. Among the foremost female peace campaigners was the Czech Bertha von Suttner who considered peace
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