Free A Higher Form of Killing by Diana Preston Page B

east he demanded the Baltic states and perhaps the Don Basin, the Caucasus, and the Crimea for Germany. His prime justification was to secure “Germany’s supply of raw materials.” Noteworthily, none of these various submissions spelled out what would be the strategy toward Britain, merely implying it should be humble toward Germany and as a result of other changes commercially and militarily less powerful.
    Von Bethmann Hollweg and the others were to be disappointed in their dreams of a speedy victory. The German armies in the west were held and in places pushed back at the battles of Mons, the Marne, and the first battle of Ypres. Thereafter the front lines quickly began to stabilize even if at Ypres the British were left in an exposed salient. By New Year’s Day 1915, a line of trenches 450 miles long stretched from Switzerland to the North Sea, across which 110 Allied divisions—as yet only ten of them British—faced 100 German ones. Over three hundred thousand Frenchmen and nearly a quarter of a million Germans were already dead. Britain had lost some thirty thousand men, nearly one fifth of its small regular army. The war of movement on the western front was over. Stalemate had begun. In the east too stalemate was approaching. The Austro-Hungarian army had lost over a million and a quarter men and the Russians one and a half million.
    Across the Atlantic the world’s other emerging great power had watched Europe’s disintegration into war with both alarm and a degree of detachment and disbelief. The North Dakota Daily Herald said of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, “One archduke more or less makes little difference.” The Philadelphia Public Ledger quipped in addressing Austro-Hungary: “If the Serbs defeat you it will ‘Servia right’!” The Dallas News joined many in Europe in thinking the war would soon be over, suggesting it would be “long before the cotton season is.” A more serious commentator considered that the great safeguard “against the armies and navies Europe has gathered for war is that Europe is not rich enough to use them and is too human and humane to want to use them.” However, Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium turned sympathy toward the Allies. “As if by a lightning flash,” wrote a columnist, “the issue was made plain; the issue of the sacredness of law; the rule of the soldier or the rule of the citizen; the rule of fear or of law.”
    Such emphasis on the rule of law chimed well with the views of fifty-seven-year-old Woodrow Wilson, then in the second year of his first term. He had been a student of law and history, and subsequently a professor at Princeton and then president of the university. His secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, defeated three times for the presidency, had been essential to Wilson securing the Democratic presidential nomination. Like Wilson a lawyer, but also a lifelong fundamentalist Christian and teetotaler and more radical than Wilson, he championed labor rights against big business.
    A strong supporter of the Hague Treaties and of arbitration, Bryan saw the United States as a “republic . . . becoming the supreme moral factor in disputes.” One of his first acts as secretary of state in 1913 was to persuade most of the major powers (including Great Britain and France but not Germany) to agree to treaties committing themselves, to some extent at least, to the use of cooling-off periods and of arbitration to settle international disputes. At the signing ceremony he presented the diplomats with paperweights cast in the symbolic form of ploughshares from old swords from Washington Naval Yard. He supplemented his income by frequent performances on the lecture circuit. His audiences’ response convinced him they shared his love of peace, but many American commentators doubted whether Bryan’s intellect and political acumen matched his eloquence and undoubted sincerity—a view shared by diplomats with whom he came into contact.