THE CRUEL KNOCK

On the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns of the Great War fell silent. In their place the bells of armistice rang out in towns and villages all across Western Europe. On that day, in the English town of Shrewsbury, Tom and Susan Owen received a knock on their door. A message had arrived that they had hoped for two years never to hear, certainly not this near to the end of the war. The telegram brought cruel news that just one week earlier, as the long-awaited peace was being negotiated, their son Wilfred had been killed in action. He had died of machine gun fire on the banks of a muddy canal in France.

Owen was one of England's most promising young poets. When war broke out, his verse reflected a romantic view of battle that was common among the young men of 1914.

O meet it is and passing sweet
To live in peace with others,
But sweeter still and far more meet
To die in war for brothers.

So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together
Over an open stretch of herb and heather
Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned
With fury against them; earth set sudden cups
In thousands for their blood; and the green slope
Chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space.

We were lying off Victoria. I had gone down to my cabin thinking to write some letters. I drew aside the door curtain and stepped inside and to my amazement I saw Wilfred sitting in my chair. I felt shock run through me with appalling force and with it I could feel the blood draining away from my face. I did not rush towards him but walked jerkily into the cabin--all my limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not sit down but looking at him I spoke quietly: "Wilfred, how did you get here?"

He did not rise and I saw that he was involuntarily immobile, but his eyes which had never left mine were alive with the familiar look of trying to make me understand; when I spoke his whole face broke into his sweetest and most endearing dark smile. I felt not fear--I had none when I first drew my door curtain and saw him there--only exquisite mental pleasure at thus beholding him. He was in uniform and I remember thinking how out of place the khaki looked amongst the cabin furnishings. With this thought I must have turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty . . .

I wondered if I had been dreaming but looking down I saw that I was still standing. Suddenly I felt terribly tired and moving to my bunk I lay down; instantly I went into a deep oblivious sleep. When I woke up I knew with absolute certainty that Wilfred was dead.

-- Harold Owen

Their stories will be told in The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century, an eight-hour NEH-supported documentary airing November 10-13 on public television.

For some, loss was added to loss. The commander of France's 8th Army, General Castelnau, lost three sons. Each time he saw a sad military face entering his office or home, he asked the simple question: "Which one?"

The German commander General Erich Ludendorff lost two stepsons, both pilots. He personally had to identify the remains of the second, shot down in April 1918. "The war," he said, "has spared me nothing."

Vera Brittain was a volunteer nurse in a London hospital. She had already lost her fiance Roland in late 1915, and harbored hopes that at least her younger brother Edward would be spared. When she read of heavy fighting in June 1918 on the Italian front where her brother was serving, she had a premonition that he was gone too.

I had just announced to my father, as we sat over tea in the dining-room, that I really must do up Edward's papers and take them to the post office before it closed for the weekend, when there came the sudden loud clattering at the front-door knocker that always meant a telegram.

For a moment, I thought that my legs would not carry me, but they behaved quite normally as I got up and went to the door. I knew what was in the telegram--I had known for a week--but because the persistent hopefulness of the human heart refuses to allow intuitive certainty to persuade the reason of that which it knows, I opened and read it in a tearing anguish of suspense.

"Regret to inform you Captain E. H. Brittain M.C. killed in action Italy June 15th."

-- Vera Brittain

While we were playing tennis in the afternoon Clouder, our servant, came in to say I was wanted. The moment I took up the telephone I said to myself, "Raymond is killed." With receiver in hand, I asked what it was, and if the news was bad. Our secretary, Davies, answered, "Terrible, terrible news."

--Margot Asquith

The Great War was a great tragedy. The dimension of human suffering alone confirms this. But there is more tragedy to this sad story, for the sacrifices did not deliver a resolution. Like Owen's family, the world soon realized that it was not safe with the news that war had ended, for in the war were sown the seeds of an even greater conflict.

*

Among the numerous figures who played a role, large and small, none is more fascinating than Wilhelm II of Germany. No one was more easily caricatured during and after. While it would be inaccurate to point an accusing finger at him as the villain who caused the war, Wilhelm found himself at the epicenter of the continent's stresses and strains.

The new century had barely begun when one of the great monarchical reigns came to a natural end. "The last moments were like a great three-decker ship sinking," said one friend who was present at Queen Victoria's death at eighty-one. Around her bedside on January 22, 1901, were three men. Two were her sons, the Prince of Wales and Prince Arthur. The other was a grandson who had rushed across the Channel to be with her. "How I love my Grandmother, I cannot describe for you," he once told an acquaintance, "She is the sum total of all that is noble, good, and intelligent." The grandson was Wilhelm II, the ruler of Germany.

In Victoria's day, royal bloodlines reached far beyond national borders. The Queen's blood flowed through the veins of kings, queens, princes and princesses throughout Europe. Victoria was a royal icon, a symbol of an important age, for in her time Britain became a pervasive and influential global presence, the largest empire the world had ever seen, ruling one quarter of the world's population and land. Behind Britain came other competing European powers, each with imperial ambitions. Germany arrived late to the colonial table, but by 1884, to the shock of the British, Germany had acquired territory in Africa and the Pacific that amounted to five times the size of Germany itself. However meager in terms of resources and raw materials, the possessions were another sign of Germany's rising preeminence. Another was the German navy.

Wilhelm II had long had a fascination with the sea. "It sprang," he wrote, "of no small extent from my English blood." As a child, his first and most pleasant childhood memories had been those of playing at his grandmother's seaside resort on the Isle of Wight. "There awoke in me the wish to build ships of my own like these someday, and when I was grown up to possess as fine a navy as the English."

The man who would lead Germany into World War One was born to the first daughter of Queen Victoria on January 27, 1859. It was a difficult birth. The breech delivery required the use of forceps. In the procedure the arm was wrenched out of its socket, causing severe muscle and nerve damage that shriveled the limb, making it essentially useless. As a result, the left side of his body was underdeveloped, affecting even his ability to hold up his head. A special metal brace was created to stretch his neck muscles.

How well I recollect how nervous, weak and sad I felt on Willie's christening day and how it went to my heart to see him half covered up to hide his arm which dangled without use or power by his side. I cannot tell you what I suffered when I saw him in that machine. To see one's child treated like one deformed--it is very hard.

-- Victoria

Despite his English mother's worries, she was determined that Willy overcome his handicap. She took responsibility for his general education, hoping to instill in him "our British feeling of independence, together with our broad English common sense--so rare on this side of the water." She proved a hard taskmaster. He learned to speak German and English simultaneously and with equal ease. Physical accomplishments, however, came slowly. "My greatest troubles," Wilhelm wrote in his memoirs, "were with riding. The thought that I, as Heir to the Throne, should not be able to ride, was to her intolerable."

When the prince was eight-and-a-half years old, a lackey still had to lead his pony by the rein, because his balance was so bad that his unsteadiness caused intolerable anxiety to himself and others. So long as this lasted, he could not learn to ride: it had to be overcome, no matter what the cost. Therefore the tutor, using a moral authority over his pupil that by now had become absolute, set the weeping prince on his horse, without stirrups, and compelled him to go through the various paces. He fell off continually: every time, despite his prayers and tears, he was lifted up and set upon its back again. After weeks of torture, the difficult task was accomplished: he had got his balance.

-- George Hinzpeter

*

Only when Wilhelm grew to manhood did he find happiness--in the Prussian Army. "I really found my family, my friends, my interests--everything of which I had up to that time had to do without." Under the army's influence Wilhelm hardened and distanced himself from his parents, especially his mother, whom he began calling "the English Princess." By now Queen Victoria found him insufferable. "As for Willy, that very foolish, undutiful and, I must add, unfeeling boy, I have no patience with him and I wish he could get a good skelping as the Scotch say." The English queen was not alone in her judgment. Even his own father agreed. "Considering the unripeness and inexperience of my eldest son," he wrote to the German chancellor, "together with his leaning toward vanity and presumption, and his overweening estimate of himself, I must frankly express my opinion that it is dangerous as yet to bring him into touch with foreign affairs."

Wilhelm showed little interest in diplomacy, but he was fascinated with ceremony and military trappings. He loved taking part in war games with his army, and the sport of hunting was a preoccupation he took to extremes. On one hunt in 1896 he fired off some 1,600 rounds of ammunition. His entourage was often the butt of unusual and sometimes cruel jokes. New members boarding his yacht were "baptized" in champagne poured over their heads, followed by the painful order to carry a block of ice barehanded around the deck. One elderly Prussian general was made to imitate a dog by jumping over a stick.

Wilhelm's office was called "general headquarters." The lowest of his servants were issued uniforms and ranks. His own wardrobe contained some two hundred uniforms. He prized collecting the uniforms--and titles--of other nations. He was especially proud of being made an honorary Admiral of the British Navy by Queen Victoria. "Fancy wearing the same uniform as St. Vincent and Nelson!" he exclaimed. "It is enough to make one giddy."

Wilhelm's posturing served more than to satisfy personal whim and vanity. He was perceived as the personal embodiment of the empire, created only seventeen years before he had become kaiser. Both nation and ruler were young, dynamic, restless, belligerent, and insecure. The Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck described him best: "The Emperor is like a balloon. If one did not hold him fast on a string, he would go no one knows whither."

The German empire was largely a creation of the political genius of Bismarck. Not since Napoleon had Europe seen such a dominant and effective leader. In 1847 he had entered politics and found it to his liking and quickly rose up the ranks. Upon becoming Minister-President of Prussia, he made a famous pronouncement: "The great questions of the day will not be decided by speeches and the resolutions of majorities . . . but by iron and blood." He quickly went about showing what he meant by using war to unify the German states. There were victorious wars against Denmark and Austria. These victories threatened France, and another war ensued in 1870. Napoleon III and his army, which was thought to be the finest fighting machine in Europe, surrendered in humiliation. The Franco-Prussian war brought the German states together, and Bismarck took full advantage of the opportunity this afforded, arguing for the creation of a new German empire with the Prussian king, Wilhelm I (Wilhelm II's grandfather), as emperor. The states agreed and made their proclamation on French soil in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. This, combined with a heavy war indemnity and the loss of the rich iron-mining and manufacturing territory of Alsace and Lorraine, was a grievous insult to the people of France.

Having established Germany's prominence on the battlefield, Bismarck turned his attention to keeping peace through diplomacy. While he served as imperial chancellor, there were no wars among Europe's major powers--Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Great Britain. The secret to peace, he believed, was to never forget the importance of being a majority of three on "the European chessboard." All politics reduce themselves to this formula: "try to be a trois in a world governed by five powers."

Bismarck's main concern was the possibility of a link between a hostile France and Russia. He created alliances for protection. The first military alliance was Austria-Hungary, which provided a buffer against Russia. Bismarck then wooed Russia. His masterstroke was what became known as the "Reinsurance Treaty"--a secret agreement with Russia against Austria. Only a mastermind could have devised such a series of secretive and manipulative treaties. And only a mastermind could maintain them. When Wilhelm II became the German Emperor in 1888 at age twenty-nine, he quickly began upsetting Bismarck's delicate balance of power.

Wilhelm insisted on building a formidable German navy. Why, he argued, should Britain alone dominate the seas? The British were building a new class of battleship, the powerful Dreadnoughts. Germany, the kaiser declared, should have them too. The German fleet was ordered to double in size. Wilhelm's motives had more to do with gaining respect and a mutual alliance than military advantage. "We ought to form an Anglo-German alliance," the kaiser had written as part of a speech (which his advisers removed) on leaving England after his grandmother's funeral: "You keep the seas while we would be responsible for the land. With such an alliance not a mouse could stir in Europe without our permission."

The image which danced before Wilhelm's eyes as the most wonderful prospect for the future was to see himself at the head of a great, a very great, German fleet starting out on a peaceful visit to England. At the heights of Portsmouth the English sovereign at the head of his high seas fleet would await the German Kaiser. The two fleets would file past one another; each of the sovereigns standing on the bridge of their respective flag ships wearing the naval uniform and decorations of the other. Then following the obligatory embraces and kisses, a gala dinner with splendid speeches would be held at Cowes.

-- Bernhard Furst von Bulow, Memoirs

Half-British himself, Wilhelm's ambivalence about his mother's nation was never resolved. He simply could not understand why the expansion of German naval strength poisoned Anglo-German relations. His affection for things English was a matter of record, but his attitude to the English disclosed a fundamental volatility of mood and mind. He was capable of deep sensitivity one moment, and at the next, the most outrageous remarks. Images of bloodshed were only just under the surface of his mind. During a strike in 1900, Wilhelm telegraphed the commanding general: "I expect that when the troops move in at least five hundred people should be gunned down."

Such intemperate behavior would be the stuff of caricature, and not tragedy, but for the fact that Wilhelm was the autocratic head of state that gave him a set of roles far beyond those of any other contemporary European monarch. He was Supreme War Lord, and the leader of the strongest army in the world. He exercised personal authority over every major appointment in the state. This was the source of his very personal politics and the court intrigue which swirled around him. Under these circumstances, it is not at all surprising that a Viennese joke had it that "The Kaiser insists on being the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral." What made him a particularly dangerous character on the world stage was his contradictory and combustible mixture of old and new world views. He saw himself as the embodiment of a vigorous new nation, yet he clung to ideas, as his Uncle Bertie, the Prince of Wales, put it, "more suited to the Middle Ages."

By this time Bismarck had long ago gone into retirement, taking along with him to the countryside thousands of bottles of fine German wine. He could only watch in horror as his life's work was dismantled, bit by bit. Britain, which had long espoused a foreign policy of "splendid isolation," began seeing advantages to forming alliances with France. From his country estate, Bismarck had few kind things to say about Wilhelm and his bellicosity. On any occasion where he found a German coin in his hand, he was said to turn the Kaiser's likeness away from his eyes, "so I will not have to see that false face."

When a British message to the Kaiser in December 1912 made it clear that Britain would not tolerate a repeat of the Franco- Prussian war with its humiliation of France, the Kaiser was livid with rage. He took this diplomatic question as a matter of personal honor. Who had the right to tell him what was or was not tolerable? He called together his chief military (though not his political) advisers. The Kaiser initially pushed for an immediate declaration of war. But military and naval planners urged caution. They needed more time. The Kiel Canal linking the Baltic and the North Sea, which would allow the passage of the wide Dreadnoughts, would be finished in eighteen months' time. Other preparations were under way to strengthen the army. Caution prevailed. Eighteen months from December 1912 was the summer of 1914.

The Kaiser both represented and deepened the profound instabilities within European life in the years before the Great War. He didn't bring about the war single-handedly; but his larger than life personality reflected everything that could--and did--go wrong with the European world order. In the end, the Kaiser's naval expansion was a disaster. It gained Germany not England's respect, but its suspicion. That reaction only made the Kaiser--and Germany--even more encircled and insecure.

*

"Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans," Bismarck predicted, would ignite a major war. For years, the Balkans had been a hostile ethnic and cultural maze straddling the three worlds of Europe, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. Austria controlled much of this area--what until recently was known as Yugoslavia. Dozens of Slav nationalist groups were clamoring for independence. As Bismarck had foreseen thirty years earlier, it was an explosive mix.

Knowing the Balkan problems he would soon inherit as Emperor, the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand had hinted of sharing power with the Slavs. Hoping to demonstrate his friendship, Ferdinand decided to pay a visit to the provincial capital of Sarajevo. The day was poorly chosen: it was the anniversary of the end of Serbia's military independence. Dressed in a field marshal's uniform, his six-car motorcade entered the city on June 28, 1914. Waiting for him were seven assassins recruited by a Serbian secret society, "The Black Hand."

The first would-be assassin did nothing. The second conspirator tossed a bomb at the archduke's car. The chauffeur saw it coming and sped away. The bomb exploded in the road, wrecking the following car and wounding three aides and several spectators. The nineteen-year-old bomb thrower swallowed a cyanide pill and jumped into the nearby river to drown. Neither attempt at suicide worked, although he nearly died at the hands of the mob that hauled him out of the river. Ferdinand, although incensed by the attack, insisted on maintaining the day's agenda and spoke at the town hall. This took him by other assassins, who made no move. After the speech, he decided to alter the prearranged itinerary and visit the hospital where the injured from the earlier bomb attempt had been taken. His driver then made a wrong turn that took them face to face with the seventh and final assassin. He turned out to be also the most determined.

His name was Gavrilo Princip and he was nineteen years old. A Bosnian, he had twice tried to enlist in the Serbian army. Both times he was rejected as being too small and too puny. Now, with pistol in hand, he took aim at the Archduke's car and fired two shots at point blank range.

Inside the car, the Archduke opened his mouth to speak, and blood spilled over his tunic. He turned to his wife, begged her not to die, and collapsed. He had been shot in the neck, she in the lower stomach. Within minutes, both were dead.

The Austrian Emperor Franz Josef wrote to the kaiser, seeking his support:

The bloody deed was not the work of a single individual but a well organized plot whose threads extend to Belgrade . . . No one can doubt that its policy of uniting all Southern Slavs under the Serbian flag encourages such crimes and the continuation of this situation is a chronic peril for my house and my territories. Serbia must be eliminated as a political factor in the Balkans.

With Germany's support, Austria delivered an ultimatum to Serbia which declared that the assassination had been planned and supported by Serbia and that Serbia had forty-eight hours in which to open its borders to Austrian officers to conduct an investigation. Serbia swallowed its national pride and accepted most of the conditions, but the Austrians ignored the concessions, declared war, and began shelling Belgrade. "This means a European war," the shocked Russian foreign minister announced to the Austrian ambassador. "You are setting Europe alight!"

Serbia looked to Russia and its tsar for protection. A cousin to both the kaiser and Britain's King George, Nicholas too was driven by old world traditions.

By July 30, Nicholas was being told that there was no longer an option--Russia had to mobilize. "Think of what awful responsibility you are advising me to take!" he snapped at his staff. "Think of the thousands and thousands of men who will be sent to their deaths!" After an hour of resisting, he signed the order.

Once Germany and Austria had decided for war, there was no way to avoid escalation. German war plans were based on knocking out the French army before Russian mobilization was complete. This meant invading France from the north, through Belgium. Invading Belgium was bound to bring Britain in, as signatory of the treaty ensuring Belgian independence.

One day after the tsar ordered a total mobilization, Germany mobilized.

Everyone claimed that they had been pushed into a "defensive war." The truth was otherwise. The war had been made, and the moment of its outbreak had been chosen. Germany may have pulled the trigger, but it did so as part of a political community which collectively let the peace of Europe slip through its fingers. Why did they do it? Wilhelm II, Nicholas II, Franz Josef of Austria, Raymond Poincare, president of France, H. H. Asquith, prime minister of Britain, were ultimately responsible for the decision to go to war in 1914. Over and over again, we are presented with the image of those at the centers of power detonating a charge they thought they had carefully measured, and then finding out its explosive potential dwarfed even their most terrifying dreams.

Blaine Baggett is executive producer of The Great War; Jay M. Winter, chief historian; and Joseph Angier, producer.

The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century will be broadcast November 10-13. The film is a co-production of KCET/Los Angeles and the BBC in association with the Imperial War Museum.

The project has received major financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funders are the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Public Broadcasting Service, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.