"The Catastrophe of Victory"
Whatever happens to resolve this mess in the short term, it's still a mess.


Troubled skies over the Capitol. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite via the Washington Post.


Regular visitors among the billion-eyed audience know of my persistent fascination with the series of events leading to the outbreak of the First World War. I'm further intrigued, in a speculative fiction/alternative universe way, about how if that conflict could've been mitigated or postponed from its historical track that the world we wake up into every morning would be quite different. At least, the roster of problems would not seem as familiar.

That all aside, I am reading a book now that I wish I'd gotten hold of prior to writing Richmond In Ragtime: Socialists, Suffragists, Sex and Murder. Upon suggestion from Amie, the other day, I went by Chop Suey books which is closing its near-VCU store and consolidating at Carytown, so specials were avaialble. I purchased there for a whopping 10 samolas five books, all dealing with the near and dear topic.

The one I got that I'm devouring just now is Frederic Morton's Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914. In this just about note perfect work, Morton uses his novelist's sense of rhythm, pacing and character and writes not a fiction but a suspenseful factual account of the steady tread toward disaster. It's horrifying to watch events unfold, because the reader knows what's coming, and you're unable to reach in and change a particle of the situation.

Anyway, RIR sort of tries to achieve this on a much smaller scale--I have cameos by Eugene Debs, Anna Shaw and President Taft where Morton got Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Hitler, Freud, Viktor Adler and poor Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who is the most sympathetic person in the book. And Vienna, as herself.

One what-if that, as a reader, I found myself rooting for was the death of the elderly Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, who became desperately ill with pneumonia in the early spring of 1914. Had he died, Franz Ferdinand would've come into power with sweeping reforms -- though court intrigue may have stymied him at the top level, and Gavrilo Prinzip was already in motion to leap from the shadows and kill him.

Enter our old pal German Chief of the Armed Forces Helmuth von Moltke, "Moltke the Younger," who among his other duties was in charge of the care and feeding of the German's war preparations. The "Schlieffen Plan" that had been handed down as the road map for taking out France in a quick campaign of motion and envelopment, wasn't even a good idea on paper. But it was treated as holy writ by the arrogant nervous nelly Moltke.

I'll let Morton take it from here:

"[German Kaiser Wilhelm] called Moltke "der traurige Julius" (sad Julius). High-echelon wags in Berlin claimed that he was not sad, just hurting with bruises form his falls from the saddle. As a source of many a grin, the horsemanship of the Chief of Staff contributed to the lighter side of official life in Berlin. One of his celebrated tumbles had been in front of the equestrian statue of his uncle, the Helmuth von Moltke, the great Field Marshal von Moltke, victor over Napoleon III in the war of 1870.

The comparison afflicted the lesser von Moltke all this life. So did the conflict between his duty, which must be remorseless, and his intelligence, which was considerable. "The next war," he told the Kaiser a few years earlier, "will be a national war. It will not be settled by one decisive battle but will be a long wearisome struggle with an enemy who will not be overcome until his whole national force is broken...a war which will utterly exhaust our own people even if we are victorious." Yet, here he sat, in May 1914, discussing the next war. It was von Moltke's job to map out the catastrophe of victory."

What a phrase! And I find it appropriate in looking at this present undertaking by Congress to correct the national economic crisis. Whatever bill they pass, it won't work, or not for long, and we'll be back again at the well soon enough but perhaps in even a worse predicament.

We have, as the sad Julius observed, a long wearisome struggle ahead of us.

A German prisoner helps British wounded make their way to a dressing station near Bernafay Wood following fighting on Bazentin Ridge, 19 July 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. Via Wikipedia.

We Interrupt This Regularly Scheduled Blogpost
To Prevent World War I.

Again.

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month some 89 winters ago; distant from us across a scorched earth of memory and events; known because of black and white photographs and some herky-jerky moving images and yellowing newspapers -- back then, the most horrendous enterprise ever undertaken by humanity concluded. World War One came to an exhausted finale.

The war settled little and returned in a new and improved guise 21 years later.

Some 10 million people died during 1914-1918, though this was but the warm-up for the Big One, which swallowed around 65 million. If we throw in that science now guesstimates that the Great Influenza of 1918 may have had its incubation in the trenches of northern France--and that that pandemic may have killed between 20 million to 100 million from August 1918 to March 1919--we can pile those incomprehensible figures on top of everything else. So we're talking ballpark about 172 million people dying as a direct result, or through disease, from both conflicts.

This is a bit like dropping a rock down a well and never hearing a splash. We cannot now contemplate such horrendous, unspeakable amounts of death.

I've spent far too much time and effort contemplating a separate reality where World War I as it is known to us didn't occur. If you go here, and scroll down, you can see. If we undertake a study of the causes of that cataclysm, they were hydra-headed. Gavrilo Prinzip lit a fuse when he bumbled into assassinating the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. You can go to Strange Interludes Part the Second to read more.

I asserted then that our history would be better off if the Wilhelmine Germans and the so-called Central Powers had triumphed in the fall and winter of 1914. But I've reassessed. Consider how during the first four months of the war, on the Western front alone, the combined casualties of Britain, Belgium and France were 570,000. Germany suffered about 200,000.

That's too many. Too many wives to have lost husbands, too many children to be deprived of fathers, too many first blushes of young love extinguished. These numbers are an affront and insult to life itself. Yes, Heraclitus the Cynic observed that struggle is the father of all things; but bettter that be accomplished through challenging poses of the Kama Sutra than across the churned up moonscape of Flanders.

And so I take a step into mist-shrouded fantasy. I ask for your indulgence, and to consider this: how at almost each turn, the assassination by Serbian state-allowed terrorists of Austria-Hungary's heir apparent could've been prevented. Even to the last. If Gavrilo Prinzip had just eaten his lunch at another deli, the Archduke's discombobulated motorcade would've ridden off into the Sarajevan dust. The random quality of this single occurrence just causes one to shake the head in disbelief. It's almost like Prinzip was being guided on a wire.

World War I--as it occurred in our history--was avoidable, or it could've been mitigated into a Balkan region conflict such as were flickering and disturbing the peace as they'd been since 1912.

Boundaries on the Balkans after the First and the Second Balkan War, 1912-1913.

Consider how Austrian chief of the general staff and primary war planner, Baron Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf wavered on July 29, 1914, about going to war with Russia. He thought he could settle the score with Serbia first. He figured he'd have two weeks before Russian intervention.

Further, Hotzendorf's German equivalent, Helmuth von Moltke believed on the morning of July 30 that Russian mobilization didn't mean Germany needed to mobilize in support of Austria-Hungary. By the afternoon, Moltke's mind was changed--maybe because he'd learned that Hotzendorf's preoccupation with Serbia would leave Germany's ass in the wind. Moltke was counting on supporting Austro-Hungarian movement in Galicia. But the two generals, supposed allies, didn't really talk much prior to the war. When it all came down, these two be-medaled boobs were swept up and tossed aside.

Matters were further muddied by official German diplomatic messages urging Austro-Hungarian restraint regarding Russia, while Moltke urged otherwise, confusing the easy-to-confuse Hotzendorf who said flat out he didn't want to be blamed for igniting a general European war.


One August 1, 1914, Europe teetered on the edge of international war. As historian Harry F. Young summarized in his recounting of that fateful day: "Austria had opened fire on Serbia; Russia had begun to mobilize the troops; Berlin’s ultimatum to St. Petersburg would expire at noon; France was prepared to support her tsarist ally; and so far England’s efforts to mediate had failed.”

Kaiser Wilhelm signed the order to commence German war preparations. A short while later, Wilhelm was given a dispatch from a German diplomat in London that indicated the British foreign minister Sir Edward Grey had promised, "England would remain neutral and would guarantee France's neutrality" if Germany didn't attack France. Wilhelm convened a meeting of his top brass and popped champagne to celebrate.

The specter of a two-front war was dissipated. Germany could go on the offensive in the East and remain on the defensive in the West. Von Moltke, summoned to the meeting by a harried messenger, was flabbergasted. He and the "All Highest" argued as the general insisted the Schlieffen Plan had a schedule to keep. The single-front mobilization plan was, he said, out of date. The trains couldn't be called back. If they were, the troops sent east would arrive in a higgedly-piggeldly pile of bodies and equipment, far too unorganized to present effective force. The Schlieffen Plan was to Moltke holy writ -- for the most part because he didn't have an alternative he believed would work. The concept of a quick knock out of France in one campaign was his motivating idea. Nothing else mattered.

The Kaiser bellowed at Moltke, "Your uncle would've given me a different answer!" This was a sharp cut; he was referring to "Moltke the Great" who, with Bismarck, unified Germany into an empire.

The younger Moltke must've known that plans to send the armies to the East were worked on through 1913, and with typical German efficiency could've been yanked out of their files and put into play. German railroad officers received as rigorous training as soldiers. A staff officer who'd worked on these plans would later prove, on paper at least, that with almost the flip of a switch, the Germans could've transferred up to four armies to the east within days. But the German Railway Office wasn't consulted: just two neurotics getting red-faced in Berlin, both of whom, were they in civilian life, would've been more suitable for running a grocery store.

Moltke quite simply didn't want to deviate from the schedule. He seems just to have wanted to get it over with. War was inevitable; let it come. This meant violating the neutrality of Belgium, and tripping the wire to get Britain involved.

But the Kaiser didn't want to hear a refutation of good news. If conflict with France could be prevented, Germany needed to make the effort. A messenger was sent flying to the forward units edging toward Luxembourg: stop in your tracks. Don't transgress the border.

As happened, though, the whole thing was an an apparent confusion by the Anglophillic and fluent English speaker Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky, the German envoy in London -- "The Misunderstanding of August 1." Lichnowsky loved England's ways, but his homeland, too, and a telephone conversation with the obtuse British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, left him with the impression that a ruinous conflagaration engulfing both of his favorite nations could be avoided. He'd cabled the Kaiser: Wait, hold up--we can turn this thing around. There's been debates about this so-called misunderstanding ever since.

Prince Lichnowsky seems to have misinterpreted Grey's circituitous phrases--what the foreign secretary had actually said was that he could guarantee Germany against attack by France if Germany would promise to attack neither France nor Russia.

There was no way, of course, that Britain could assure French docility. The incident, however, points out Moltke's over-reliance on a plan that really wasn't much better than a table-top exercise that rolled over neutral Belgium and guaranteed British mobilization, and didn't solve the Problem of How To Take Paris. In fact, within a few months of the extent of the horrendous miscalculation becoming quite visible in both the exhausted soldiery and massive body counts, Moltke would remark that the choice to invade France--which hadn't fired so much as a popgun at Germany after Sarajevo--was a terrible mistake.

It is doubtful France would've remained idle if Germany had turned the brunt of its power against Russia. The nation could now revenge the humiliation of Sedan and 1870. Or, would some how a diplomatic angle get worked; that of making a Alsace-Lorriane an autonomous division of Germany? Better diplomacy than mad policy -- except nationalism in Europe was in the air like a dog whistle, calling the nations forward, lerching them into collision like zombies driving in a demolition derby.

Consider the Titanic, built by this same Anglo-Teutonic Civilization, one that believed in such a thing as a ship that couldn't sink. Her Captain Edward J. Smith was at the helm of a vessel that in size and scope surpassed his experience. She had the latest technological innovations, but not enough lifeboats due to concern both about concern and appearances. No boat drills were held. After the iceberg was struck, no general announcement was given, word spread like gossip, although steerage passengers, engineers and those luckless post office clerks knew the ship was in dire trouble.

And later, when the "Spanish Influenza" began claiming thousands of lives at a rate not known since the bubonic pandemic of the 14th century, the civil and religious authorities of 1917-1919 at first thought that such a thing was impossible in their advanced technological age. These were the people who considered the 1914-1918 cataclysm "The War To End All Wars."

Von Moltke was hung up on his pre-conceived plans and wouldn't deviate from them. But they were faulty, and relied on a knock out one-two punch by armies too large to actually encircle and destroy, much less move at inhuman speeds to undertake such endeavors. He had to learn that himself, in time, and by then, it was too late for him and Europe.

So my solution? I send this out to any who would be able to conceive of such.

On May 9, 1911, 10 men meet in Belgrade to form a secret organization Ujedinjenje ili Smrt (Union or Death), which becomes known as The Black Hand. This is the most radical branch of another secret organization brought together on Oct. 8, 1908, Norodna Odbrama, "National Defense."

A number of members were Serb army officers. Their stated goal was to realize a Greater Serbia by any means necessary, which meant political assassinations. This meant the destabilization of Austria-Hungary. None of them on May 9 understand what their shenanigans will end up causing.

By 1914 the group blossoms into some 2500 members organized in grassroot cells of 3-to-5 members. Cell members didn't know much about what was going on outside their sub-groups.

The Black Hand obscures the boundary between it and National Defense, and supplants the older group. The cells were directed by two levels of committees, the top being a 10-member committee chaired by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, known also as Apis, The Bee. His personal courage was undisputed, but his zealotry and ruthlessness knew no bounds. Even the Serbian prime minister feared Dimitrijevic--for he could just as well lead a coup against the present Serb government if it stood in the way of his plans.

My solution: through bio-electro-chemical means, zap the 10-member "Black Hand" May 9, 1911 gathering with a shot of "Road to Damascus." Maybe it's triggered by something in their drinks, food, even an airborne agency. The 10 are afflicted by physiological seizures. Their brains spark and pop as synaptic firings alter. They scream, laugh, weep. They transform into Scrooge on Christmas Day.

A few go starkers. Drooling, naked crazy. A couple may kill themselves on the spot in a fit of ecstatic realization. The Bee could be one of these, or, he understands now he must work for a diplomatic solution. That'll end up getting him killed by the haters he's helped stir up (in fact, Dimitrijevic got shot in 1917 for treason).

This mind-altering experience of a few key players won't stop war, but delay the conception, and perhaps prevent the grinding death machine of the Western Front trenches and the horror of Galipoli. Likewise not to occur as in our history, would be the nonsensical drawing of Mesoptamian maps by the British and French. Their meddling-- and the world's ravenous need for petroleum-- is one of the reasons our reality today is threatened by constant conflict from that region.

No World War I, no World War II, no Holocaust, no Soviet pogroms, no Rape of Nanking, no "Great Depression," no radical Islam as it is understood today, a different development of nations both in Mesopotamia and Africa -- and no Hogan's Heroes.

This changed reality still leaves Britain and Germany in a naval arms race, a truncated Russia with German satellites--through economic support or otherwise--in the Ukraine, along the Baltic and with the Kingdom of Poland, providing buffers between the German Empire and nationalist Russians. There is a revanchist France, perhaps in the altered worldline, more like Franco's Spain. Another spate of conflict is inevitable. Anybody who has ever played the elementary strategy game of Risk, and squabbled over Europe, can tell you that.

Perhaps Russia moves to reclaim Belarus, a chafing German client state, and at the same time, France launches across the border again to get its licks in, sometime around 1920-ish. The U.S.--a different one than what we know because there wasn't a World War I for it to stretch its superpower eagle's wings--would sit and read of the distant events at the family breakfast table.

Germany and Britain come to blows over colonies and control of Mesopotamian oil interests. Maybe a version of Jutland occurs, but under different circumstances, and another result. And, because there's no repression of Jews, all those European scientists and intellectuals and artists stay home. Abstract Expressionism isn't exported to New York. The laurels of European culture is wrested from Paris, where it was sliding anyway, to Berlin.

In this altered world, perhaps it is the Germans who split the atom, and the Germans who perfect rocketry, among other technolgical innovations. A "Cold War" might exist between whatever Germany evolves into and the whatever Russia becomes, but it's anybody's guess whether in this altered world if the nuclear standoff would've led to a Space Race like the one that caused John F. Kennedy to make the bold statement of sending a man to the moon and returning him to Earth. The Maltese Cross banner might've gotten shoved into the lunar dust, not Old Glory. "Das ist ein kleiner Schritt für einen Mann, ein riesiger Sprung für Menschheit."

The inhabitants of such a world wouldn't be any less venal or more gracious than the world we are condemned to inhabit. Those residents just have a different set of problems to complain about, and keep them up nights on blogs that few if anybody ever reads.

The sad part is, that even if this "zap the Black Hand" option could be played, I wouldn't enjoy any of the benefits. Not in this "worldline" where I dwell. Some other Harry Kollatz Jr., sitting in his version of a cluttered Colonial Ave. Richmond, Va., office, would be pondering another batch of "what-ifs." Or, at least, that's one theory.

Whatever the case, get working on this problem of World War I, you future historic circumstance-altering humanity-loving scientists, on this 11th day of the 11th month. Make the past an alternate future for somebody today!

A rare World War I aerial photo, taken at a height of 150 meters by a French photographer, shows French troops on the Somme Front launching an attack on the Germans. (Photo credit: U.S. National Archives) Via History Place.

Strange Interludes Part the Second

"While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down."
- From "The City in the Sea," Edgar Allan Poe


"There is so much that goes unanswered, even though the facts of the case are
so well known: how the failing Hapsburgs, impelled by their own unlucky taste for adventure, had seized Bosnia and Herzigovina from the Turks and aggravated the racial imbalance of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire; how the southern Slavs within the Empire felt themselves oppressed and increasingly demanded freedom: how the ambitious little hill kingdom of Serbia saw a chance to establish a South-Slavic hegemony over the Balkans; and how
Czarist Russia, itself near ruin, plotted with its client Serbia to turn the Austro-Hungarian
southern flank. But there is so much more that needs to be taken into account: how Franz Ferdinand, the aged emperor Franz Joseph's nephew, became his heir by default (Crown Prince Rudolph had committed suicide at Mayerling; Uncle Maximilian, Napoleon III's
pawn had been executed in Mexico; Franz Ferdinand's father, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, had
died--most improbably--from drinking the waters of the Jordan): how the new heir--stiff, autocratic, and unapproachable, but implausibly wed in ironic middle class marriage to the
not-quie-acceptable Sophie Chotek--sensed the danger to the Empire and proposed a policy
that would have given his future Slav subjects most of what they demanded: how the Serbian
nationalists were driven to panic, and how the secret society of jingoes known as "The Black
Hand" plotted Franz Ferdinand's death: how seven boys were recruited to do the deed, and
how one of them, Gavrilo Princip, on the morning of June 28, 1914, shot Franz Ferdinand and
Sophie dead."

-- "Sarajevo -- The End of Innocence," Edmund Stillman,Horizons Magazine, Summer 1964





Thesis:

The Ridiculous Regent and the Munificent Minister.

Kaiser WIlhelm II and British Liberal Member of Parliament from Dundee, Winston Churchill, on Sept. 15, 1909, a few years before the end of the world they both knew.

The Kaiser's propensity to drama is, well, self-evident here. At this moment in time, Wilhelm's brash and unfortunate public statements about the German Empire's might and its rightful place in the sun, was scaring the bejeebus out of England's public and damaging his own tenuous credibility.

At this time in England, popular books and plays speculated on the possibilities of a fictional German invasion. Churchill couldn't conceive of an English conflict with their Teuton brethren. Churchill instead advocated for a reduction of naval spending in order to cool the heating arms race between the nations jockeying for empire.

This image distills the future. The Kaiser looks and is
archaic. Churchill's political education is well underway.

Anti-Thesis: Natural-Born Conspirators:
Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, Balkan intrigue proceeds apace.
Shown here, like Tony Soprano with his lieutenants, on the far right, is Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, code named "Apis" or "The Bee." You
didn't want to get stung by this one.

Dimitrijevic was a member of the vehement Serbian nationalist movement. No coward, the Bee carried in his body three bullets fired into him during the "successful" 1903 slaughter of the autocratic and unloved Serbian King Alexander and Queen Draga. And that's about where the train of reason careened off the rails.

Dimitrijevic in 1911 co-founded The Black Hand terrorist organization that advocated the achievement of Serbian statehood by any means necessary, including assassination. He had the means and resources to conduct covert operations as a respected and courageous leader, he was also chief of Serbian military intelligence.

In the spring of 1914, Dimitrijevic learned of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's visit to Sarajevo and put the wheels in motion to "whack" the unsophisticated and not completely anti-Serb successor to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Some of Apis' colleagues expressed alarm at such an egregious attack. But in a series of pathetic and unfortunate events the main actors stood by as though frozen or they either could not, or cared not to believe what was happening around them. The great disaster occurred, it could be said, because of a failure in procrastination. At any given time the whole process could've been interrupted. The plans moved forward with a strange and implacable sleepwalker momentum to a catastrophic conclusion.

Synthesis:

The Last Man: Gavrilo Princip was a young, frail, and idealistic Bosnian who wanted to make a mark in the world for his people. Rejected from regular military service and even other terrorist activity, he fell into the influence of the Black Hand, and became, by simple dint of circumstance, the catalyst that blew over the trembling diplomatic and social house of cards that Europe had built for itself during the prior few decades. He was one of seven trained killers who were in Sarajevo a month in advance of Franz Ferdinand's arrival.

Ferdinand chose to visit Sarajevo to review troops, attend the opening of a museum, and give his beloved Sophie an anniversary trip. His father, the Emperor Franz Joseph, didn't regard Sophie as a royal, though she was a countess though not from the proper side of the aristocracy. He disapproved of their courtship, tried to prevent the marriage, but finally relented, though he didn't attend their wedding. The union was permitted with the catch that any children wouldn't be in the line of royal succession, and Sophie couldn't ride next to Ferdinand, or sit with him in the royal box. That was in Vienna. In the provinces, they could be together like husband and wife.

The would-be assassins hung out until the appointed day, then spread themselves along the Ferdinand's parade route. They bungled almost every part of the plan. A bomb thrown too late blew up the car behind the Archduke's, injuring spectators, and also--quite important to the story-- the man responsible for directing the route of the motorcade. The bomb thrower tried at first to take expired cyanide--it just made him sick--then drown himself in a nearby river, but due to a drought, it was only a few inches deep. He was seized by the mob.

The other terrorists, perhaps thinking their job was done, scattered. Princip blended into the crowd, chatted with a friend, and sat down to eat a sandwich at a café.

The visting monarch nonetheless kept to schedule and arrived at the Sarajeven mayor's offices where Ferdinand expressed his outrage. The spluttering mayor nonetheless kept to his regular welcoming speech. Ferdinand wanted to visit his wounded attaché but the uninformed driver kept to his pre-scheduled course. The chaffeur, realizing his error, jammed the gears of the Archduke's car while putting it into reverse -- in front of the café where Princip sat munching his sandwich. The littlest terrorist saw that Ferdinand and Sophie were quite alive. He pulled out his pistol and fired. Sophie was struck in the abdomen. Ferdinand, bleeding from his mouth, urged her to stay alive for the children. When an aide asked him where he was hurt, he said, "It's nothing. It's nothing."

Princip tried ineffective poison, and almost shot himself, before he, too, was tackled.

Neither the Emperor Franz Joseph nor Kaiser Wilhelm could be bothered to attend Ferdinand and Sophie's funeral.

Four years and an estimated more than 10 million military dead later, 20 million wounded and missing, the otherwise wrecked world was made safe for the cobbled together country of Yugoslavia. We all know how well that worked out.

Princip, who died of tuberculosis in prison six months before World War I ended in 1918, got a plaque in Sarajevo, to commemorate his patriotic duty. It was removed after the Bosnian War of 1992-1995. A less chauvunistic marker is on the site today.

And the hits just keep on coming.