Free A Higher Form of Killing by Diana Preston

at odds with his parents, and alternately looking for love or bullying to gain attention—as a sad, somewhat comic, deluded figure. However, his ambitions and his views of Britain reflected those of most of his cabinet and much of his nation as is evident from von Bethmann Hollweg’s comments to Goschen about a “kindred nation” and shouts of “race treason” by the mob attacking the British embassy. Von Tirpitz too had been something of an Anglophile, speaking fluent English and reading English books like the kaiser, sending his daughters to Cheltenham Ladies’ College and admiring the British navy wholeheartedly. But he too had come to feel slighted and patronized, complaining that “the English believed that they could treat us like Portugal.” Nevertheless, when von Bethmann Hollweg told the German cabinet on August 3 that with the German invasion of Belgium Britain’s entry into the war was inevitable, von Tirpitz cried out, “All is then lost.” James Gerard, U.S. ambassador to Berlin, described how: “The army and all Germany believed . . . that Great Britain would remain neutral, and that Germany would consequently become, if not the actual owner, at least dictator of the world.”
    The kaiser would have happily included the United States in a Teutonic alliance between Germany and Britain. In January 1914, he told Colonel Edward Mandell House, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s main confidant and frequent envoy to Europe, that the Russians as Slavs and the French as Latins would never be suitable allies for the English. Only an English, American, and German alliance based on their common Anglo-Saxon racial heritage would withstand the challenges of the new century. As Gerard later remarked as the war progressed, Germany and its people would be even more ready to include the United States with Britain in their charges of hypocrisy.
    The war had popular support in each of the belligerent countries. In France an officer described how as his troop train left a Paris station at six A.M. he saw a huge crowd and “quite spontaneously, like a smouldering fire suddenly erupted into roaring flames, an immense clamour arose as the Marsellaise burst from a thousand throats. All the men were standing at the train’s windows waving their kepis . . . The women were throwing kisses and heaped flowers on our convoy.” In Saint Petersburg the French ambassador saw an enormous crowd in front of the Winter Palace “with flags, banners, icons and portraits of the Tsar. The Emperor appeared on the balcony. The entire crowd at once knelt and sang the Russian national anthem. To those thousands of men on their knees . . . the Tsar was really the autocrat appointed of God, the military, political and religious leader of his people, the absolute master of their bodies and souls.”
    In Munich, an Austrian eking out a living as a painter—Adolf Hitler—witnessed a vast crowd gathered in the Odeonsplatz acclaim the proclamation of mobilization. He was “not ashamed to acknowledge that I was carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment . . . and . . . sank down upon my knees and thanked heaven out of the fullness of my heart for the favour of having been permitted to live in such times.” Almost immediately he petitioned for permission to join a Bavarian regiment even though he was an Austrian subject. It was speedily given.
    Religious leaders backed their countries. In Berlin, the kaiser’s pastor led a vast congregation in its prayers for victory while at the Oranienstrasse synagogue the rabbi prayed for a German triumph. A German newspaper proclaimed this is “a holy war: Germany cannot and is not allowed to lose . . . if she loses so, too, does the world lose its light, its home of justice.” On the opposing side, the bishop of London insisted, “The Church can best help the nation first of all by making it realise that it is engaged in a holy war.”
    On a much more personal level, a British girl,