Young people's history of the World War

Front matter

YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO - DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO

Foreword

For a year or two following the Armistice of November, 191 8, and especially after the signing of the Peace Treaty in the early summer of 1919, the peoples of the victorious allied countries showed a decided disinclination to hear or read about the great war. They had been so thoroughly surfeited with tales of heroism, so numbed by the daily casualty lists, so bombarded by patriotic propaganda, that they wished only to forget the whole horrible business.

Of late, however, there has been a renascence of interest. A new generation is growing up, composed of young folks who were not old enough in 1 914- 1 7 to know what it was all about. It is with these people in mind that this volume has been written. It is not well that the valorous deeds of this terrible period should be forgotten. If mankind is to advance, we must learn to avoid in the future the mistakes of the past. The time must never come again when a nation shall regard the pledge of its sacred honor as a " scrap of paper." A nation must know that, like an individual, it is bound by moral law, even though there exist no international court or international police power to enforce it.

vii viii FOREWORD

The lesson of the World War is a tremendous one. Summed up in a single sentence it is, "It must never happen again." The morale of the men in the trenches, on the allied side, at least, was kept up through the weary years of struggle by the persistent propaganda that this was to be the last war, — the war to end war. We are playing falsely with the nine million dead, — the flower of the young manhood of a dozen nations — if we fail to keep before the minds of their young brothers the glorious story of their sacrifice and the awful needlessness of it all.

If war is to be blotted off the face of the earth, each must do his "bit." This small contribution is offered to swell the mighty and ever growing volume of demands that nations, like individuals, deal with each other openly, honorably, and without greed. When that day shall have come, the navies and armies of the world will have gone the way of the rapier, which every gentleman of the sixteenth century was obliged to carry, or the six-shooter, which took the place of courts and juries in the days of '49.

While this volume is written for the understanding of young people, it is the hope of the author that many older readers may find in his pages something to repay their time.

Louis P. Benezet.

Evansville, Indiana, December 22, 1921.

Table Of Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Junkers and Their Leader i

II. The Middle-Europe Scheme 20

CHAPTER I The Junkers and Their Leader

Civilization cracking apart. — How the Kaiser, as King of Prussia, ruled all Germany. — The military system of the Prussian Junkers. — Bismarck and his Junker-built empire. — The arrogance of the military group. — Foreign dealings. — The young Kaiser asserts his independence. — The sea Junkers and their program.

No one who was old enough to read the newspapers in the summer of 19 14 will forget the astonishment with which the American people learned of the outbreak of the World War.

There was a sense of bewilderment, a feeling that it simply could not be true, as we heard that the men of the five greatest nations in Europe, together with those of three smaller countries, were flying at each other's throats to wound, maim, and kill.

For an even hundred years the United States had kept out of European quarrels. Our little war with Spain in 1898 had dealt entirely with Cuban troubles.

Very few people on this side of the Atlantic knew much about the history of Europe or the reasons why one country was afraid of being attacked by another. We had read, of course, of the big standing armies of Russia, Austria, Germany, and France, but this did not mean much to us. We knew about the wars that had taken place between Russia and Japan, and between Turkey and Italy, but we had thought of Russia and Turkey as not being highly civilized. We had the idea that most of the nations of western Europe, like Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Holland, and Belgium were too well educated and too civilized ever to go to war with each other.

Suddenly, we read that Austria had attacked the little country of Serbia. As far as we could see, there was no excuse for this. Then Russia warned Austria to keep hands off and to let little Serbia alone. Next, Germany sent word to Russia that she must stop threatening Austria with her armies ; that if Russia kept on, Germany would make war on her. Then we read that Germany had actually attacked, not Russia, as one would expect, but France, who, as far as we could see, was an innocent bystander. At the same time, we heard, with astonishment, that the German army, in order to attack the French from the north, was marching through the country of the Belgians, who seemed bystanders still more innocent. The following day, news came that England, which, next to our own country, was the most peaceful nation in the world, had declared war on Germany. Declaration of war followed declaration of war so rapidly that we could not keep track of them. Why all this took place and why it was that these countries were fighting, it is important that we know.

The German empire from 1871 to 1918 was governed in a curious way. Although parts of western and southern Germany were filled with large industrial cities, the great majority of whose inhabitants were occupied in trade and manufacture, the German people really had little or no voice in the government. To be sure, they elected representatives to one law-making house of the German Congress, which they called the Reichstag, but no law could be passed if thirteen members of the other house, called the Bundesrat, voted against it. Now seventeen members of the Bundesrat were picked out by the King of Prussia, who was also the German Emperor (Kaiser), so that really no matter what the members elected by the people might say or do in the Reichstag, the real master of the German empire was the Kaiser. He ruled with almost as much power as the Tzar of Russia. To be sure, the German people were so much better educated than the Russians that the Kaiser had thought it wise to allow them to make certain laws that kept them contented ; but when it came to questions of the army or of war and preparation for war, he was an absolute monarch.

In England, France, and Italy, the man who sees to it that laws are obeyed, and who is the real ruler of the country, is the Prime Minister. He holds his place only as long as the majority of the people's representatives in Congress support him. When they vote against him, he must resign.

In Germany, on the other hand, the Chancellor of the empire, who held a place like that of the Prime Ministers in the other countries, was not accountable to the Reichstag at all. He did not have to be satisfactory to the people or to their representatives. So long as he was pleasing to the Kaiser he still ruled the German nation. Appointed by the Kaiser, and acting as Prime Minister of Prussia as well as German Chancellor, he was able to do this because so large a part of Prussia, which was the largest state in the empire (nearly two-thirds of the inhabitants of Germany lived in Prussia) was under the control of the descendants of the old warrior chiefs that ruled these lands during the middle ages.

In the Prussian elections people voted in three different classes according to the amount of property that they owned. The vote of any two classes outweighed the vote of the third. There was one district in Prussia where one very rich man owned one third of all the property. He was the only voter in the first class. Fifty -two other men owned another third of the property. They voted in the second class. The rest of the ten thousand people living in this district made up the third class. If twenty-seven of the fifty-two men in the second class voted for the same candidate that the one man in the first class voted for, these twenty-eight could elect him, even though all the other thousands voted together for someone else. In this way the rich and powerful, who were mostly descendants of the old fighting chiefs of the middle ages, ruled the great country of Prussia, and through Prussia controlled the German empire. These rich landowners and their relatives are known by the name Junkers (yoon'kers). It will be interesting to learn something about them and their country of Prussia.

In its origin, the name Prussia is not a German name at all. The first Prussians were not a Germanic tribe. They spoke a language more like the Russian or the Polish. The district known as Prussia two hundred years ago was located on the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea. A number of German fighting men, a secret order, called the Teutonic Knights, had settled there, conquered the Slavs, Lithuanians, and Prussians, and ruled the country at the point of the sword. They had encouraged other Germans to move into this district until there came to be a large colony of them around the city of Konigsberg (ku'niks barg) . Then a daughter of one of the dukes of this now Germanized county of Prussia had married a German Count of Brandenburg whose family name was Hohenzollern. The Duke of Prussia had no other children, so his grandson became, in course of time, both Duke of Prussia and Count of Brandenburg. Brandenburg was the county in which was situated the little city of Berlin. Between Brandenburg and this German part of Prussia was the county of West Prussia, inhabited by Poles and other Slavic tribes.

Finally, one vain Count of Brandenburg changed his title to that of King of Prussia. His father and grandfather had been ambitious men who had added greatly to their lands by waging war on their neighbors. These neighbors did not wish to be annexed to Brandenburg, but had been compelled to join it by the bigger armies of the Brandenburg counts.

At last there came a king of Prussia who was one of the most wonderful fighters that the world has ever produced. He is known in history as Frederick the Great. He was a cold-blooded, unscrupulous, forceful ruler (very much like other kings of his time, however). He lived during the early days of our first President, George Washington, but it would be hard to find two men whose ideas were more different. Frederick, true to the Junker blood in his family, started his reign by marching down and seizing from the Austrian Empress the rich county of Silesia. He had no more right to do this than you would have to knock down the first man that you might meet on the street and take his watch and money away from him.

There were three long, bitter wars over this seizure, but in the end Frederick was the winner and kept the stolen land.

You will remember that West Prussia, a part of the country of the Poles, kept Frederick from going from Berlin to his county of East Prussia, around Konigsberg, except by water. Toward the end of his reign he and his old enemy, the Austrian Empress, together with an unscrupulous empress who then ruled over Russia, agreed to cut great slices off the kingdom of the Poles. The Poles were unable to resist. They could not fight three powerful nations at once, and another act of brutal robbery helped to enlarge the kingdom of Prussia.

Forty years later, Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, tried to undo the wrong that the three sovereigns had done to Poland by rebuilding that state. He forced Prussia and Austria to give back a good part of the land that they had stolen. But after the kings of Europe had combined against him and forced him to leave France, the three countries once more divided Poland, giving Russia a larger slice than she had had before. To make up to the Prussians for losing part of the plunder, the kings forcibly cut off half the little kingdom of Saxony and joined it to Prussia. They then compelled certain counties in the west of Germany along the River Rhine to join Prussia also.

After the French, under Napoleon, had beaten the Prussian army in 1806, the French Emperor, in order to keep the Prussian king from having his revenge, gave orders that not more than thirty thousand men should be in the Prussian army at any one time. The Prussians, however, slyly worked up a scheme to deceive Napoleon and train a big army to fight him. They called thirty thousand young men into the army, trained them hard for a few months, and then sent them to their homes, taking in their places another thirty thousand who went through the same hard drill. A few months later, and still another group were brought into training. In this way they were able to drill as soldiers all the able-bodied men in their kingdom. So when Napoleon was beaten by the snow and ice in his big winter campaign against Russia, the Prussians, to his astonishment, brought out a welldrilled, formidable army which helped not a little in overthrowing him.

This was the beginning of the military system of the Prussians, a system which turned whole nations into armies, and made of Europe one vast armed camp.

In 1 848 the people in many parts of Europe rose up and drove several kings from their thrones. France became a republic. The Emperor of Austria had to give up his throne to his nephew. The Germans actually called a Congress to vote a constitution which should give the people the right to rule themselves. It seemed as though the end of the rule of the Junkers had come in all countries of Europe except Russia and Turkey.

However, the German revolution proved to be a fizzle. The revolutionists could not agree, quarreled among themselves, and thus let the kings remain in power. The new Emperor of Austria started out with fine promises, but before many years he was ruling in the same arrogant way that his uncle had.

In the meantime, an unusual man had come to the front in Prussia. This was Count (afterward Prince) Bismarck, a true Junker, with all the Junker's disdain for the common people and their desire for free speech and free government. Bismarck's one ambition was to make Prussia the leading military power of Europe.

He did this through the agency of three wars. The first took place in 1864. It was an attack on poor little Denmark by the combined armies of Prussia and Austria. As a result, two counties inhabited partly by Germans and partly by Danes were taken away from Denmark. These were Schleswig (shlas'vig) and Holstein (hol'shtm) . Next Bismarck picked a quarrel with Austria, and, in spite of the fact that some of the south German states and the north German state of Hanover joined Austria, Bismarck, by getting Italy to ally itself with him, defeated the Austrians in a short war, crushing their armies in a six weeks' campaign. Schleswig, Holstein, and Hanover were then forcibly annexed to Prussia.

Bismarck next turned his attention to France, which was the strongest military power in Europe at that time. He waited until he was sure that the Prussian armies would be victorious and until he knew that he would have the help of the south Gerio HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR

man states, and then picked a quarrel with France in a most unscrupulous fashion by altering a certain telegram sent him by the King of Prussia. He made it appear to the German people that their king had been insulted by the French Ambassador, while he gave out the news to Paris that the Prussian king had practically pushed the French Ambassador out-of-doors. The war which resulted lasted less than a year. It proved that the French army had been in no shape to fight. Some of its generals were dishonest and badly trained, and its men poorly supplied with guns and munitions.

The states of south Germany now joined with Prussia to form a new German empire with the King of Prussia as its Kaiser. Bismarck, as Chancellor, was the real ruler of the nation. He had been intensely unpopular for some time when he was forcing Prussia to drill her army and to get ready for his wars. He had paid no attention to laws or to the votes of the representatives of the people, but had contemptuously ignored them, relying on the strong support given him by military men and other Junkers.

After 1 87 1, when France was beaten, the majority of the German people lined up with the Junkers in their program. The successes of the Prussian army had turned the whole nation into militarists. The Junkers got control of the schools and of the newspapers. They taught the children that Germany was surrounded by jealous neighbors who

II might one day attack her if she did not maintain a big army. The newspapers kept up the same kind of talk. But the people failed to see that the other nations were unfriendly only because they feared

Bismarck Dictating Terms of Peace to Thiers and Ferry the Junkers and what Germany's great army might do.

At the conclusion of the war the Junkers had forced France to pay Germany one billion dollars and to give up two of her richest counties, Alsace and Lorraine. Prussia had picked the quarrel, Prussia had led the attack on France, Prussia had robbed her prostrate foe when she was unable to resist any longer. The morals of the whole affair were the same as if Bismarck had met President Thiers of France walking peaceably down the street and had beaten him over the head with a club and picked his pockets. The German people, by allowing themselves to believe that this sort of thing was right, stored up for themselves a dreadful day of reckoning.

Meanwhile Bismarck became the most popular man in the empire ; they hailed him as a hero and a demigod. The whole German nation, with few exceptions, gloried in the might of their armies. The spirit of militarism grew stronger all through the land. The Junker officer, in the army, even though he might be comparatively poor, was considered in rank far above the wealthy merchant or manufacturer, the professor in the university or the eminent writer or artist.

The officers in the German army, who were nearly all Junkers, could treat the privates with great arrogance to which the men dared not object. An officer could kick his men or cuff them about if he wished. When these Junkers walked through the streets of the cities, they expected every one to get out of their way. American women in Berlin, not knowing this custom, were sometimes crowded off the sidewalks into the gutters by these young officers.

In 1 91 3 an incident happened in Zabern (tsa'bern), a town in Alsace, which showed how the military group was above the law of the land. A young officer named Von Foerstner (firstner) ordered his soldiers to charge a crowd of men and boys who had been jeering at them. They did so, but caught only one man, a lame old shoemaker. They brought him before the officer, who drew his sword and cut the old man across the head. A storm of anger arose from many parts of the country where the people were beginning to grow restless. It was demanded in the Reichstag that Von Foerstner be punished. Instead of this the Kaiser moved him to another town and gave him a medal.

The spirit that might makes right ,\ has always been characteristic of the Junkers. In 191 1, a German general, named Von Bernhardi, wrote a book entitled "Germany and the Next War," in which he tells, in the most cold-blooded manner imaginable, just why and how Germany must attack and destroy all her weaker neighbor nations. Considerations of treaties, pledged word, or the rules of Christianity do not affect him in the least.

After her great defeat in 1870, France began to think less of leadership in war, and more of building up her colonies and her trade with Africa and the Indies. She planted settlements and trading stations in many parts of Africa and in southeastern Asia. This pleased Bismarck and the Germans, who felt that as long as the French were kept busy with little wars in Africa and Asia they would have no time to think of getting even with Germany over the taking of Alsace and Lorraine.

France marched an army into Tunis in northern Africa, and told the people there that they would have to let Frenchmen help them run the government. This made Italy angry, for she had been planning to do this very thing. As a result of this feeling of Italy toward the French, Bismarck was able to persuade the Italians to join a league with Germany and Austria. Italy agreed to come to the help of the other two countries if they were attacked by France and Russia together. Years afterward it was proved that Bismarck himself had urged the French to seize Tunis, hoping that this act would make trouble, and possibly war, between them and the Italians.

In 1888 the old Kaiser of Germany died, followed, ninety-nine days later, by his son, who had developed cancer of the throat from too much smoking, it was said. His grandson, the young Kaiser, was a man of peculiar and arrogant nature. In a good many ways he was astonishingly well educated. He spoke several languages, he knew a great deal about history (that is, the history of kings and wars) , he could paint fairly good pictures, compose music, write books, preach sermons, and talk intelligently on a great number of subjects.

Unfortunately, an important part of his training had been entirely left out : he had never been made to obey ; he had never been taught to consider the rights or the feelings of other people; he could not bear to be. crossed in anything; he wanted nobody around him except those who would tell him how wise he was and how glorious was his empire, what a wonderful army he had, etc.

The old Kaiser, his grandfather, had not been a brilliant man. However, he had wit enough to know that Bismarck was far shrewder and wiser than he, and was content to let him run the empire so long as the empire prospered. The young Wilhelm, however, after two years of quarreling with Bismarck, dismissed him with no more ceremony than if he had been discharging a servant whom he had caught stealing. There were murmurs of regret and indignation from all over Germany when the man who had built up the army and the world power of the empire stepped down and out, but the group of flatterers around the young Kaiser took care that little of this talk reached his ears.

The old Chancellor took it calmly. "Some day that young fool will play his hand, play it at the

Cartoon by Sir John Tenniel

Dropping the Pilot"

t6 HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR

wrong time, and ruin himself and his country," said he.

The men who followed Bismarck as chancellor were more or less of the "rubber stamp" kind, who took orders from their master and, in turn, told the representatives of the people in the Reichstag what they might or might not do.

Meanwhile, Germany prospered. Her population increased by thirty millions in forty years. In 1870 most of her people had been farmers. By 1910 she did not raise more than two-thirds of what her people ate, so many of her men had become factory- workers. Her great gun-factories made rifles and cannon for Russia, for Turkey, for Italy, for most of the small nations of the world. Her goods were sold all over the globe. A great fleet of ships, built in Germany, was carrying more and more of the world's produce as the years went by.

With the growth of factories and trade, a new kind of Junker came forward, a Junker of the sea. The land Junkers could not be satisfied until their army had ridden roughshod over every nation of Europe. In the same way the leaders of Germany's new navy would be satisfied only when, protected by the strongest fleet in the world, they should force England and France to give up some of their richest colonies and should capture for Germany the trade of the world.

The leader of this Junker sea-plan was the young Kaiser himself. "Our future lies on the water," he said, not long after his grandfather's death.

He had a canal cut across the neck of the Danish peninsula, through Schleswig-Holstein, so that his warships could sail from the North Sea into the Baltic without ever leaving German waters.

Germany had started too late in the race for colonies. It was not until 1884 that she began to acquire land in Africa and to annex islands in the sea. The Kaiser resented the fact that France and Great Britain had already seized the choice parts of the world before Germany began to build up her colonial empire. In 191 1, by sending a warship to Morocco and threatening war, he forced France to give up to him a great stretch of land in Central Africa which he added to his so-called Cameroon colony. France was gradually getting more and more of Morocco under her control, and this had greatly angered the Kaiser and the Junkers. They growled and threatened, until, rather than go to war about it, the French bought them off.

The Kaiser's chief helper in his sea-plans was Admiral von Tirpitz. Together they planned to rule the seas, by building a navy that should be stronger even than England's. How they envied England ! envied her her rich colonies of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand; envied her the forts at Malta, Gibraltar, Aden, and Hongkong; envied her, above all, the right to rule India and Egypt; envied her the ownership of the Suez Canal. As Germany's navy grew, it surpassed Russia's, Italy's, France's, and that of the United i8 HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR

States. It was nearly as large as England's. The German sea Junkers boasted that one day they would sail out and crush the British fleet. Their officers were always talking about ' ' der Tag ' ' (the day) when this would happen.

In 1895, the Germans, backed by Russia and other European powers, had used the threat of their fleet to force Japan out of certain rights in China, and then two years later had compelled China to give these identical rights to Germany. This story will be told in full in a later chapter. It is enough for us now to note the rough manner in which the two eastern nations were handled. In the language of the Kaiser, "the mailed fist" of the German empire had been shaken in their faces.

1. Why was the outbreak of the World War such a surprise to Americans ?

2. How could the Kaiser prevent laws from being passed?

3. What was the chief difference between the Chancellor of Germany and a Prime Minister in any other country ?

4. How did the Prussian election system keep the power in the hands of the Junkers ?

5. How did Prussia grow to be a powerful nation?

6. How did the Prussian military system force Europe to train all its young men for war ?

7. Compare the revolution of 1848 in France with that of Germany in the same year.

8. How did Bismarck become successful?

9. What changed the feelings of the German people toward Bismarck ?

10. What was shown by the Zabern affair?

11. How did Bismarck induce Italy to join the "Triple Alliance" with Germany and Austria?

12. What was the chief fault with the young Kaiser's training?

13. Why was the German navy so greatly increased?

CHAPTER II The Middle-Europe Scheme

Germany's late start in the race for colonies. — The trade of Turkey.

— The Kaiser and the Sultan. — The Berlin to Bagdad railway.

— Designs on Egypt, India, and the Caspian oil fields. — Serbia, Bulgaria, and Roumania. — The peoples within the Austrian empire. — One hundred and fifty million subjects. — Centers of discontent. — The harbor of the Sheik of Koweit. — The four little nations against Turkey. — German and Austrian interference brings on the Second Balkan War. — A settlement most displeasing to Berlin and Vienna. — Junker plans for war. — The murder of the Austrian heir. — Two birds with one stone.

Bismarck had scorned the idea of colonies. In fact, he had rather rejoiced to see France annexing so much land in Africa, thinking that it would cause her a great deal of worry and trouble. The Germans had been so busy building up their new empire and their factory system that they paid little attention to Africa and the islands of the Pacific until the best places for colonies had all been annexed by Great Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, and Portugal. Waking up at last, Germany had frantically seized the few remaining parts of Africa, and had planted her flag upon a few islands in the Pacific. These colonies did not prove profitable, however. The country, in most cases, was so poor and the natives had so little to trade, that it cost Germany more to run her colonial governments than the colonies paid into the treasury.