to bluff their counterparts into peace. Efficiently, each Chief of Staff activated his mobilizing apparatus. Inevitably, the mobilizations accelerated each other.
Now the subordination of Chiefs of Staff to heads of state was only nominal. Now the Chiefs drew their true prerogative from an unofficial but tremendous power. Overnight this power had become visible. It was surging through the streets all over the continent.
The new power did not wait for proclamations from governments. It needed no galvanizing by propaganda, no goading from the press (which was by no means uniformly militant in the principal countries). The new power had already divided the world into Allies-until-Victory and Enemies-unto-Death. This new power had gathered thousands along the shores of the Danube where they sang, fervently, 'The Watch on the Rhine' against France. The new power burned German flags in Paris while cafe orchestras along the Champs Elysees played 'God Save the King.' The new power raised a sea of fists against the Russian Embassy in Vienna, against the German Embassy in Paris, and its stones shattered eleven windows of the British Embassy in Berlin. Even restaurants felt the fingers of the new power. 'Menu cards here in Vienna,' Karl Kraus wrote to his beloved Sidonie, 'now have their English and French translations crossed out. Things are getting more and more idiotic.. '
But Kraus himself knew better. It wasn't mere idiocy that was governing things now. It was something far more formidable. Sarajevo had only been a flash point of its strength.
Our politicians [Kraus said in Die Fackel of July 1914] are unconsciously right in their suspicion that 'behind this schoolboy… who killed the Archduke and his wife stand others who cannot be apprehended and who are responsible for the weapon used.' No less a force than progress stands behind this deed-progress and education unmoored from God…
A key sentence on the century's key moment as nations were turning themselves into regiments. Kraus did not amplify here on the God from whom progress had severed mankind so fatally. He had done that earlier elsewhere, in his poem 'The Dying Man.' There God meant the Presence in the pristine garden that was both 'source and destination.' But now men had paved over His soil and their souls. Concrete had strangled the 'source.' They had lost their sense of origin and of final purpose. Therefore they must claw from the barrenness a new 'destination'-an angrier destiny. Under the oppressiveness of a loss, the new power had been forged.
It had forged the life of Gavrilo Princip, modernity's foremost assassin, who had triggered the crisis. The family of 'this schoolboy' had lived for centuries in an approximation, however imperfect, of Kraus's garden. As a zadruga, that is, as a tight-knit, farm-based Bosnian clan, the Princips had raised their own corn, milled their own flour, baked their own loaves, and worshipped a God close enough to their roof to be their very own protector.
Progress had broken all that apart. Princip's father could no longer create bread from his earth. He could no longer live his livelihood. He must earn it with the estranged, endless trudgings of a postman. His son Gavrilo, more educated than his father, more sensitive, more starved for the wholeness that is holiness and thus more resentful of the ruins all about him, had to seek another garden. He sought something that would satisfy his disorientation and his anger; something which, as his readings of Nietzsche suggested, would restore the valor of the vital principle that his race had lost. He found it in the Black Hand. It conjured 'the earth that nourishes… the sun that warms.' It was part of the new power. It offered him the cohesion, the communal fortitude and faith of the shattered zadruga.
Progress had shattered numberless zadrugas by hundreds of other ethnic names, from the hamlet of Predappio in Italy's Romagna where a blacksmith named Mussolini had a son named Benito, to the village of Didi- Lilo in Russia's Transcaucasia where a cobbler named Dzhugashvili sired a boy later called Stalin. The Stalins, Mussolinis, Hitlers, Princips were the monsters of progress. Progress had abused and bruised them, but they could turn the sting outward and avenge the injury. There were many millions like them with less fury in their bafflement, less steel in their deprivation: the lumpen-proletariat on whose backs Europe rode toward the marvels of the new century. Their anonymous pain fermented the new power.
A year before Sarajevo, Vienna's Arbeiter Zeitung published a survey documenting that it was always the most rapidly industrializing areas which produced among the poor the highest rate of alcoholism, of syphillis and tuberculosis, of emotional pathology, and by far the highest rate of suicide. Their sickbeds and their graves marked the trail of 'progress unmoored from God.' But now Princip's deed was inspiriting its live and able-bodied victims. With two shots he had set in motion a firestorm that was to burn meaning into the numbest slums.
Instead of beating their heads against the prison of their class, instead of deadening themselves with toil or liquor, the masses now had something to kill for. Before Sarajevo, hundreds of thousands had been on strike in Russia. Not long afterwards the factories hummed again all day. At night, toilers massed before the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg with torches and holy ensigns, acclaiming the Tsar as their defender. 'Wonderful times…' said a British diplomat who saw the spectacle. 'Russia seems to have been completely transformed.'
In Vienna the transformation was just as wonderful. On May Day 1914, workers had marched on the Ringstrasse with the chant 'Frieden, Brot, and Freiheit!' ('Peace, Bread, and Freedom!'). On August 1, many of the same crowd marched again with 'Alle Serben mussen sterben!' ('All Serbs must die!'). 'The patriotic enthusiasm of the masses in AustriaHungary seemed especially surprising,' Trotsky wrote in his autobiography. 'I strode along the main street of the familiar Vienna and watched the most amazing crowd fill the fashionable Ring, a crowd in which hopes had been awakened… What was it that drew them to the square in front of the War Ministry?… Would it have been possible at any other time for porters, laundresses, shoemakers, apprentices to feel themselves masters of the Ring?… In their demonstrations for the glory of Habsburg arms, I detected something familiar to me from the October days of 1905 [when Trotsky had led a shortlived insurrection]. No wonder that in history war has so often been the mother of revolution.'
In Paris workers had sung the 'Internationale' on May Day before returning to their tenements. Now their throats rang with the 'Marseillaise' while the Kaiser's effigy went up in flames. Everywhere life leaped from lonely gray grind to grand national adventure. Hurrah!
But the poor weren't the only ones grateful for the zest provided by the crisis. The middle classes, too, felt exhausted and baffled. Progress had fed them well. Yet the more meat on their table, the less tang was there to each morsel, the more intolerable the superior cut of somebody else's steak. No doubt they were dining well. Were they still eating together? They consumed as they produced: aggressively against each other. When worshipping, they knelt on velvet in churches unmoored from a common God. Their mansions brimmed, but they did not feel sheltered. They promenaded in spats and top hats-where from? To what end?
Germany's most popular almanac for 1913 featured a poem by the writer Alfred Walter Heymel. It was called 'Eine Sehnsucht aus der Zeit' ('A Longing in Our Times').
Hurrah!
The cry came, as the British poet Rupert Brooke phrased it, from 'a world grown old and cold and weary.' It came from 'this foul peace which drags on and on. ' as General Conrad wrote to his mistress Gina von Reininghaus. For worker or burgher or poet or Chief of Staff, Mars was the God of Liberation. 'A crisis had entered Western culture,' a high Habsburg official would write later, 'and many of its representative citizens had been oversaturated into desperation. Like men longing for a thunderstorm to relieve them of the summer's sultriness, so the generation of 1914 believed in the relief that war might bring.' Their longing for thunder was the new power.
The thunderstorm with its mortal flash-this image shivers ubiquitously through the whole period. In the summer of 1914, Europe's musical sensation was still Stravinsky's Rite of Spring premiered a year earlier in Paris, where Nijinsky's 'lightning leaps' celebrated the theme of the ballet, namely the enchantments of death.
In painting, a dominant mode was Futurism, which anticipated the lightning-like strokes of stroboscopic photography; the Futurist manifesto exalted war because it would blast away the stultification of present concepts
