Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy - Couverture rigide

Preston, Diana

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0786244763 ISBN 13 : 9780786244768

Editeur : Thorndike Pr, 2002

A propos du livre

Extrait :

CHAPTER ONE

A Scrap of Paper

At the outset of the First World War, German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg handed the Allies the moral high ground and an unassailable propaganda advantage. At 3 p.m. on 3 August 1914, the day Germany declared war on France and two days after she declared war on Russia, he rose to address a packed and expectant Reichstag. He informed his fellow countrymen that German troops, advancing on France, had occupied Luxembourg and were "already in Belgium." Then, in a moment of candor he would almost immediately regret, he added: "Our invasion of Belgium is contrary to international law but the wrong-I speak openly-that we are committing we will make good as soon as our military goal has been reached."

The next day the British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Edward Goschen, called on Bethmann Hollweg to present the British ultimatum: Quit Belgium or face Britain's entry into the war. Germany had until midnight to decide. Goschen found the chancellor "excited" and "very agitated"; he complained that Britain was committing an "unthinkable" act, "like striking a man from behind while he was fighting for his life against two assailants." Britain, the chancellor said, would be responsible for all the dreadful events that must follow, and it was all "just for a word-'neutrality,' a word which in war time had so often been disregarded"-all just "for a scrap of paper that Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation." This "scrap of paper" was the Treaty of London, signed by the European powers, including Prussia, in 1839 and guaranteeing Belgian neutrality. Goschen replied that if it was strategically a matter of life or death for Germany to advance through Belgium, it was equally a matter of life or death for Britain to keep her solemn compact.

It was still some hours before midnight and the expiry of the ultimatum when Goschen left to find newspaper billboards in the streets already proclaiming Britain's entry into the war. According to one of the diplomats within, a mob "of quite well-dressed individuals, including a number of women," gathered to stone the British embassy, smashing many of the windows. The crowd, stirred by the accusations of propagandists and the press, "seemed mad with rage and was howling 'Death to the English pedlar nation!' " that was guilty of Rassen-verrat!-race treason-against Germany, which, unlike Britain's allies, France and Russia, shared her origins. As the British diplomats prepared to depart, the embassy's three German servants, who had been paid off with a month's wages, "took off their liveries, spat and trampled on them and refused to help carry the trunks down to the taxi cabs."

In his unfortunate comments, Bethmann Hollweg had raised two issues that would be hotly debated throughout the Great War, issues of respect for international law and the balance between expediency and the rights of neutrals. In so doing he had placed Germany at such a disadvantage in the battle for the minds of neutral countries that she would never fully recover. Goschen duly reported to the foreign office in London what Bethmann Hollweg later claimed to have been a privileged and personal conversation, including the disparaging reference to the "scrap of paper." Goschen perhaps disingenuously said he had little idea of how the phrase would resonate. For his part, Bethmann Hollweg later commented: "My blood boiled at his hypocritical harping on Belgian neutrality, which was not the thing that had driven England into the war." Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy would soon become a familiar German charge against both Britain and America.

Many argued at the time, and many have argued since, that world war was not the inevitable consequence of the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of the empire's subsequent declaration of war on Serbia. David Lloyd George, then British chancellor of the Exchequer, later suggested that there was a general slide to a war that no nation really wanted. Others have argued that military mobilization, once begun, achieved a momentum of its own, even that summer holidays and consequent unfortunate delays in communication played a part in provoking war that summer of 1914 when tensions between the powers seemed, if anything, to have eased. A British battleship squadron was paying a courtesy visit to the Kiel Week regatta-a celebration of the imperial navy. The German officers were entertaining their guests with great bonhomie when news of the Sarajevo assassination reached both parties courtesy of the kaiser. He had learned of it himself while competing in one of the races aboard his yacht, the Meteor.

Other contemporaries and historians believed that war could not have been long delayed. There was tension between Austria and Serbia over borders; Russia, Germany, and Austria were at loggerheads over Slav rights; France was aching for revenge for her defeat by Prussia in the war of 1870-71 and to regain her lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine; Germany was feeling hemmed in and deprived of the colonies and international status to which she felt her commercial and military strength entitled her. Her conservative leaders saw expansion abroad as a useful damper on liberal and socialist reforming aspirations at home. In seeking such expansion Germany was bound eventually to challenge Britain, either directly, by taking a portion of the Flanders coast (which was one of her later declared war aims), or indirectly, by challenging Britain's command of the seas and preeminence in maritime trade.

By 1914, the naval rivalry between Britain and Germany was well established. Since the turn of the century their dramatically increasing expenditure had accelerated technical development and exacerbated international tensions. Strong, charismatic personalities dominated the Admiralties of both nations. The sixty-five-year-old secretary of state for the imperial German navy, Alfred von Tirpitz, had been born plain Alfred Tirpitz, son of a lawyer and a physician's daughter. He joined the navy not out of enthusiasm but because he was "very mediocre" at school. Hearing that a friend was to join, he decided that "it might mean a certain relief for [his] parents" if he too "were to take up the idea." During his early years at sea he came into close contact with the British navy and admired its methods. While a gunnery officer in 1877, he reported enthusiastically on a visit to the Whitehead Torpedo Company in Fiume and was immediately put in charge of torpedo development for the German navy. He tried to render the wildly unstable torpedoes more reliable. "I worked on them," he later recalled, like "a tinker with my own hands."

Tirpitz's success was rewarded by appointment as chief of staff of the Baltic Squadron in 1890. A few months later he attended a dinner at Kiel Castle with the army chief of staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, along with several admirals and generals. Their host, the kaiser, was seeking advice on the future of the navy. Tirpitz kept silent throughout a long, desultory, and inconclusive discussion but eventually, at a sign from his senior officer, gave a spirited exposition of his vision of a stronger navy, one equipped with battleships rather than the cruisers currently deployed. His views coincided exactly with the kaiser's aspirations.

As a result, Tirpitz was soon in Berlin as chief of staff to the navy high command, where, at the kaiser's personal behest, he was to devise a strategy for a German high seas fleet. His forthright views, bluntly expressed, brought him into conflict with much of the naval establishment. In particular he irked the secretary of state for the navy, Admiral Friedrich Hollmann, whom Tirpitz wrote off as a "high-minded man who was never quite clear as to the direction to be followed!"

For a time Tirpitz seemed likely to lose out in this power struggle, but in January 1896 his memorandum calling for a German fleet of seventeen battleships reached the kaiser. It was excellent timing. The kaiser was bitterly regretting his impotence to influence events in South Africa following the Jameson raid precisely because of his lack of a high seas fleet. Hollmann did not last long thereafter. On 6 June 1897 Tirpitz replaced him as secretary of state for the navy, the post he still held in August 1914. Just nine days after his appointment he presented a 2,500- word top-secret memorandum claiming that "for Germany at the moment the most dangerous naval enemy is England. . . . the strategy against England demands battleships in as great a number as possible." He went on to argue for nineteen such vessels. By March 1898 a naval bill had passed through the Reichstag but only after Tirpitz had secured the support of former chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the armaments magnate Gustav Krupp, and Albert Ballin, president of the Hamburg- Amerika Line, whose ships were becoming a force on the transatlantic route. A second naval bill followed in 1900, at the height of the Anglo- Boer War. The kaiser awarded Tirpitz his ennobling "von," and Britain began to worry that Germany might rival her naval supremacy.

Prime among those doing the worrying was Admiral "Jackie" Fisher. In the spring of 1902 his successful three-year tour of duty in command of Britain's Mediterranean Fleet was coming to an end, and his future looked uncertain. He felt he had been "tabooed" by the Admiralty for his radical ideas and that, at sixty-one, he had no further chance of advancement. This did not prevent him from arguing to everyone who would listen that "the Germans are our natural enemies everywhere. We ought to unite with France and Russia."

John Arbuthnot Fisher in some ways resembled Tirpitz. Both men combined passionate beliefs with a facility for winning converts to them. Fisher was born in January 1841 in Sri Lanka; his father was an ex-army officer and failed coffee planter, his mother the daughter of a failed wine merchant. He was brought up from the age of six in London by his maternal grandfather and never lost the sense of being abandoned by his parents. He later claimed, not entirely accurately, that when he joined the navy he was "penniless, friendless and forlorn." He was more correct in describing the arcane entrance tests of the time: "I wrote out the Lord's Prayer and the doctor made me jump over a chair naked and I was given a glass of sherry."

Once in, he made swift progress. He became a great advocate of torpedoes. Upon his promotion to captain at age thirty-three, he became commander of the newly established torpedo school at Portsmouth. After that his rise was even faster, interrupted only by periodic bouts of dysentery and malaria. The latter left him with a sallow, yellow complexion that his enemies, imbued with the racist sentiments of their day, maliciously attributed to Malay or Singhalese blood-a charge which wounded Fisher and which he took pains to refute in his memoirs.

To his credit, Fisher was at least as good at making friends as enemies. He was a man of great charisma, intelligence, frankness, and humor. He was also a superb dancer. The czar's sister, Grand Duchess Olga, wrote to him: "I believe, dear Admiral, that I would walk to England to have another waltz with you." He made other eminent conquests, including Queen Victoria, and through her won the ear of the Prince of Wales. Fisher lectured him ebulliently and forcefully about the right way to run a navy. His plan was simple: less bureaucracy, less ship painting, and far fewer time-wasting drills; far more training, far better gunnery, heavier armaments. a broader officer-recruitment base, and a new emphasis on torpedoes and defenses against them. Once, when he was in full flow, the Prince of Wales asked plaintively, "Would you kindly leave off shaking your fist in my face?"

Fisher's language was exaggerated and colorful. He signed letters "Yours till hell freezes" and "Yours till charcoal sprouts." He was often tactless and execrated his enemies in the vilest terms. The existence of politicians had "deepened his faith in Providence. How else could one explain Britain's continued existence as a nation?" His temperament was mercurial, his laughter infectious, but his anger quiveringly awesome. He wrote as he spoke-impetuously-and never revised his words. His large, bold scrawl was peppered with exclamation marks, double and triple underlinings, and frequent admonitions to the reader to burn his letters after a quick scan to protect his confidences. Fortunately for the historian, few followed his advice. If Fisher's good characteristics, his decisiveness and ability to command, grew more pronounced with age and increased power, then so did his bad ones, particularly his lack of patience and restraint. In May 1899 he was appointed a member of the British delegation to the first Hague Peace Conference, called by the czar to try to limit arms, to define a code to mitigate the horrors of war, and to develop a system of arbitration that would solve international disputes and thus render war obsolete.

Fisher charmed his fellow delegates and "danced down everyone else in the ballroom." His influence on the conference was mostly exercised through informal conversations. At every opportunity he derided the objective of humanizing war as naive: "The humanizing of war? You might as well talk about humanizing Hell! The essence of war is violence! Moderation in war is imbecility! . . . I am not for war, I am for peace. That is why I am for a supreme Navy. The supremacy of the British Navy is the best security for the peace of the world. . . . If you rub it in both at home and abroad that you are ready for instant war . . . and intend to be first in and hit your enemy in the belly and kick him when he is down and boil your prisoners in oil (if you take any) . . . and torture his women and children, then people will keep clear of you." An enemy's realization of the horrors of war, coupled with conviction about Britain's readiness to fight, was the best deterrent. It was his duty, Fisher said, to see that his country, and in particular her navy, was prepared.

Fisher was equally impatient with the delegates' debate about the theoretical rights of "neutral shipping" carrying supplies to the enemy: "Suppose that war breaks out, and I am expecting to fight a new Trafalgar on the morrow. Some neutral colliers try to steam past us into the enemy's waters. If the enemy gets their coal into his bunkers, it may make all the difference in the coming fight. You tell me I must not seize these colliers. I tell you that nothing that you, or any power on earth, can say will stop me from sending them to the bottom, if I can in no other way keep their coal out of the enemy's hands; for tomorrow I am to fight the battle which will save or wreck the Empire. If I win it, I shall be far too big a man to be affected about protests about the neutral colliers; if I lose it, I shall go down with my ship into the deep and then protests will affect me still less."

Fisher's next posting, and the one which in 1902 he had believed would be his last, was to command the Mediterranean Fleet. But then, much to his surprise, he was offered the post of second sea lord at the Admiralty. He so excelled that he was soon made commander in chief, Portsmouth. Fisher now argued...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

On May 7, 1915, toward the end of her 101st eastbound crossing, from New York to Liverpool, England, R.M.S. Lusitania — pride of the Cunard Line and one of the greatest ocean liners afloat — became the target of a terrifying new weapon and a casualty of a terrible new kind of war. Sunk off the southern coast of Ireland by a torpedo fired from the German submarine U-20, she exploded and sank in eighteen minutes, taking with her some twelve hundred people, more than half of the passengers and crew. Cold-blooded, deliberate, and unprecedented in the annals of war, the sinking of the Lusitania shocked the world. It also jolted the United States out of its neutrality — 128 Americans were among the dead — and hastened the nation's entry into World War I.

In her account of this enormous and controversial tragedy, Diana Preston recalls both a pivotal moment in history and a remarkable human drama. The story of the Lusitania is a window on the maritime world of the early twentieth century: the heyday of the luxury liner, the first days of the modern submarine, and the climax of the decades-long German-British rivalry for supremacy of the Atlantic. It is a criticalchapter in the progress of World War I and in the political biographies of Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, Kaiser Wilhelm II, andFirst Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. Above all, it is the story of the passengers and crew on that fateful voyage — a story of terror and cowardice, of self-sacrifice and heroism, of death and miraculous survival.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Thorndike Pr
• Date d'édition: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0786244763
• ISBN 13: 9780786244768
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 848