and structures; as though defining lightning's lethal beauty, the manifesto proclaimed that 'movement and light must destroy the substance of objects.'
'The sense of approaching catastrophe,' wrote a Futurist who didn't know he was one, in his book Mein Kamp f, 'turned at last to longing: Let heaven finally give reign to the fate that could no longer be thwarted. And then the first mighty lightning flash struck the earth; the storm was unleashed, and with the thunder of heaven there mingled the roar of the World War batteries.'
'The war,' said German Chancellor von BethmannHollweg in his book on the subject, 'would be a thunderstorm to clear the air.'
'The palpable beginnings of the European crisis reach back a number of years,' wrote Count Ottokar Czernin who would succeed Count von Berchtold as Habsburg Foreign Minister, '… certain dynamics must take their course before a thunderstorm discharges its lightning and thunder.'
'I am convinced the storm is coming,' French President Raymond Poincare remarked to a friend in July of 1914. 'Where and when the storm will break I cannot say.'
'There is a crisis in the air,' Freud had written Lou AndreasSalome as 1913 turned to 1914, referring to Jung yet articulating much more than psychoanalytic weather. 'May it soon explode so that the air is cleared!'
The shots of Sarajevo sounded like an answer to many prayers in many nations. Afterwards some tried in vain to push back the bolt that came down from the blue-for example, in Paris on the sudden death of Jean Jaures, the French Socialist leader and Europe's most eloquent voice against war. On July 31, as he sat in the Cafe du Croissant, a nationalist zealot gunned him down. His comrades organized a pacifist parade around his body. They were swamped by a mob of conscripts. Brand-new lieutenants graduated from St. Cyr led the warriors, shouting, 'We'll go into battle with white plumes on our kepis and with white gloves on our hands!' Behind them young men roared by the happy thousands. The French General Staff planned for 87 percent of called-up reservists to appear at induction centers; 98.5 percent did. Hurrah!
In Austria, where Viktor Adler had groomed the worker to be a thinker and a doer, the proletariat accomplished not a single thoughtful act to halt disaster. Adler himself, though, did intervene in history without knowing it. During the antiRussian hysteria in Austria, Habsburg constables in Galicia arrested Lenin 'as a Tsarist spy' on August 8. In response to an appeal from Lenin's wife, Adler went to the headquarters of the political police in Vienna, cited their own sponsorship of this useful Bolshevik as an enemy of the Tsar and thus as a friend of Austria (Hurrah!), and obtained Lenin's release and safe passage first to Vienna, then to Switzerland. A few days later he helped usher Trotsky across the Swiss border. In other words, Adler put into place the preliminaries of the Russian Revolution three years later.
He also couldn't help collaborating in the genesis of its most important preliminary, namely that of the Great War. No matter that his ArbeiterZeitung had published many warnings against the threat of international slaughter. On August 5, the day before Austria issued its first declaration of war against a major power-Russia-this same Arbeiter Zeitung intoned, 'However the fates decide, we hope they will decide for the holy cause of the German people.' Hurrah! Two days earlier Adler's paper had reported that his German comrades, the Socialist deputies to the Reichstag in Berlin, had joined the other parties in voting the government the war credits it needed. This action marked, said the ArbeiterZeitung, '… the proudest and loftiest exaltation of the German spirit.' Hurrah!
Two men made dogged, last-ditch attempts against that inexorable hurrah. They were Nicky and Willy. That was how the two Emperors signed their respective cables, which started jittering, on the night of July 29, between the palace of Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg and the palace of Kaiser Wilhelm II in Potsdam. Nicky 'in the name of our old friendship' begged Willy to stop his Austrian ally from going too far. Willy, in turn, declaring himself to be Nicky's 'sincere and devoted friend and cousin,' said he was sure that Nicky as a fellow monarch wanted to see the murder of the Austrian Crown Prince duly punished. Nicky thanked Willy for 'the conciliatory and fraternal' message but in view of it voiced astonishment at the ominous tone of the note just delivered by Willy's ambassador to his, Nicky's, Foreign Minister. Willy answered that just because Nicky shared so cordially the wish for peace, he hoped Nicky would agree to remain 'in a spectator role' in the Vienna-Belgrade conflict, for only by localizing the matter and by not taking Russian military measures could Nicky avoid 'involving Europe in the most horrible war ever witnessed.' In reply, Nicky, 'grateful for the speed of your answer,' assured Willy that all Russian military measures were purely precautionary with no offensive intent and should therefore not interfere with Willy's 'much-valued role as mediator with Vienna.' Willy's response regretted that he could not mediate in Vienna while Russia persisted in mobilizing. To which Nicky answered that it was 'technically impossible' to stop Russian military preparations but that since, like Willy, he was very far from wishing war, he gave Willy his solemn words that 'my troops shall not commit any provocative action.' Whereupon Willy thanked Nicky for his telegram but said that 'only immediate, clear, unmistakable, and affirmative answer from your government can avoid endless misery.' And he begged Nicky to order his troops 'on no account to commit the slightest act of trespassing over our frontiers.'
This cable, ending the series, leaped from Berlin to St. Petersburg on August 1, at 10:30 P.M. Three and a half hours earlier, at 7 P.M., the Kaiser's ambassador had presented the German Government's declaration of war to the Russian Foreign Minister.
It was no longer important what Willy said to Nicky when. Quite aptly the two Emperors had reduced themselves to diminutives: two sashed little figurines raising toy scepters against the storm. The storm paid little attention. All over the continent young men filed into barracks in clockwork fulfillment of mobilization plans. Troop trains kept hurtling toward frontiers.
The martial hurrah of multitudes kept echoing on the square before Wilhelm's palace. Through his Lord Chamberlain the Kaiser thanked his subjects for this show of loyalty but asked them to disperse 'so that His Majesty can attend undisturbed to the challenges of leadership.' The hurrahs continued.
Less than twenty-four hours after Willy's final telegram to Nicky, Willy rose from his desk in the Star Room of his palace. It was a desk made from the wood of Lord Nelson's flagship Victory-a gift from Willy's grandmother Queen Victoria. On this desk he had just signed the order that let his soldiers flood across the borders of Luxembourg and then of Belgium. 'Gentlemen,' he said hoarsely to the military dignitaries assembled around him, 'you will live to regret this.'
Shortly afterward he sent a note to the British ambassador: Let King George of England be informed that he, Wilhelm, would never ever, as long as he lived, wear again the uniform of a British Field Marshal. Coming from the Kaiser, this signified ultimate bitterness. As usual, his statesmanship became a matter of epaulettes. From now on his role would be to gesticulate. Others commanded.
In these commanders the new power now began to manifest itself quite nakedly. They were the ones who controlled the final libretto, Libretto D, the libretto of Kraus's progress crescendoing toward a titanic fusillade. The spotlight, after shifting from the futility of Excellencies to the helplessness of Majesties, now came to rest on the supremacy of generals.
On July 31, German Chief of Staff von Moltke sent his Austrian counterpart a cable whose imperatives bluntly bypassed the Ministers of War in Vienna and in Berlin; a telegram which ignored both Emperors, theoretically the AllHighest decision-makers. 'Stand firm!' von Moltke cabled Conrad. 'Austria must fully mobilize at once!'
'How odd,' Foreign Minister von Berchtold said when Conrad showed him the message. It contradicted the tenor of two other cables, one from the German Chancellor to himself, the other from Wilhelm to Franz Joseph. 'Who rules in Berlin?'
He might just as well have asked: 'Who rules in Vienna?' By then his own cables were following almost verbatim General Conrad's proposals.
Who ruled in Russia? 'I shall smash my telephone,' the Russian Chief of Staff General Janushkevich told the Russian Foreign Minister. By which he meant that he would refuse to do again what he had done the day before, namely to rescind mobilization on telephoned orders from the Tsar. His pressure forced the Tsar to renew the order. 'Now you can smash your telephone,' said the Foreign Minister meekly.
Who ruled in France? Not Rene Viviani, though he was Prime Minister as well as Foreign Minister. His problem: He was a Socialist and peace-seeker. He had wept at the bier of the great pacifist Jean Jaures slain on July 31. He had given his arm to the widow walking behind the coffin on the way to the grave. Therefore it didn't matter that he was the Chief Executive of the Republic while Raymond Poincare as President was only the symbol of state. It did matter that Poincare had been born in Lorraine, the province lost by France to Germany in the War of 1870 and which must be won back again. It mattered that Poincare had a stake in the war to come. Hurrah!
Under Poincare's secret manipulation, the French Embassy in St. Petersburg stopped being an instrument of Foreign Minister Viviani and became a tool of General Joseph Joffre, Chief of the French General Staff. The French
