military pact four years later. It was the beginning
of the process that split Europe into two opposing
camps. Britain tried to assume the mantle of hon-
est broker but too many imperial interests of its
own, which brought it into conflict with Russia,
stood in the way.
Germany added to its problems by being
blinded by a vision of Weltpolitik, worldwide
power; a latecomer in the colonial carve-up,
Germany was now demanding its place in the sun.
Unless a world power, the inheritor of the British
Empire, its chauvinist leaders thought, Germany’s
eventual decline was certain. German foreign
policy swung from apprehension at the growing
menace of the French–Russian alliance with a
nightmare vision of a Russian army of millions
marching into East Prussia while the French
massed in the West, to bold strokes making its
weight felt when it came to sharing out the
remaining dishes of the imperialist dinner.
The two sides of this policy were forcing
France and Britain to make concessions in West
and East Africa while building up Tirpitz’s bat-
tleship fleet and drawing up the Schlieffen Plan
to cope with a two-front war. France would be
invaded first riding roughshod over Belgian neu-
trality and then Russia. Its foreign policy turned
Britain from the path of seeking an alliance at the
turn of the century to forming military defensive
arrangements and imperial settlements with
France and Russia in 1904 and 1907. Meantime
Germany became more and more reliant on a
weakening ally, the Habsburg Monarchy beset by
the problems of keeping a multinational state
going. The year 1912 was fateful for Germany at
home and abroad. Its bullying tactics had gained
it just small prizes in Morocco and Africa while
causing great friction. Bismarckian diplomacy was
turned on its head. In the Balkan cauldron,
Germany even feared that Russia and Austria
might reach an amicable accommodation and
then Germany would lose its reliable ally. Italy
had long ceased to be completely loyal. Chan-
cellor Bethmann Hollweg, imperial Germany’s
last peacetime chancellor, tried hard to evade the
dark clouds gathering, but he had to deal not
only with growing conflicts in the Balkans, but
also with the powerful army chiefs at home who
had the kaiser’s ear and were urging a preventive
war before Russia grew too strong.
Bethmann Hollweg could still count on
Tirpitz and his ever-unready navy to aid him in
urging a delay in bringing about conflict. The
desirability of launching a preventive war against
France and Russia was discussed by the kaiser and
his principal military advisers, meeting in a so-
called war council, in December 1912. The kaiser
had had one of his periodical belligerent brain-
storms, this time brought about by a warning
received from Britain that it would not leave
France in the lurch if Germany attacked it.
Nothing aroused the kaiser to greater fury than
to be scorned by Britain. But the secret meeting
of 8 December 1912 did no more than postpone
war. A consensus among all those present was
achieved in the end; Admiral Tirpitz had opposed
the army, which urged that war should be
unleashed quickly; after debate all agreed to wait
but not much beyond 1914. They were also
agreed that Germany would lose all chance of
defeating Russia and France on land if the war
was longer delayed. Speedier Russian troop move-
ments to the German frontier along railway lines
financed by the French would make the Schlieffen
Plan inoperable because Russia would be able to
overwhelm Germany’s weak screen of defence in
the east before the German army in the west
could gain its victory over France.
The most sinister aspect of the meeting of
December 1912 was the cynical way in which the
kaiser’s military planned to fool the German
people and the world about the true cause of the
war. It was to be disguised as a defensive war
against Russia in support of the Habsburg
Empire. In the coming months, they agreed, the
German people should be prepared for war.
Still, a war postponed is a war avoided.
Bethmann Hollweg was not yet convinced or
finally committed. Wilhelm II could and, in July
1914, actually did change his mind. As the
German chief of staff rightly observed, what he
feared was not ‘the French and the Russians as
much as the Kaiser’.
Nevertheless, in 1913 the needs of the army
did become first priority; a bill passed by the
Reichstag increased the hitherto fairly static
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HEREDITARY FOES AND UNCERTAIN ALLIES 21
