Otto von Bismarck predicted around 1905 there would be a major war soon “over some fool thing in the Balkans.” As you can see in this take from the BBC (language warning), there were a lot of hands stirring that shit, not just two.
Hey Vince, what do they call gourmet pepper in France?
Pepper Royale.
Weird! Some years back I read exactly the opposite. An adult who grew up the child of a spice merchant wrote that peppercorns were the exception to the general rule of buying spices fresh, that whole peppercorns stayed good a ridiculously long time. But I can’t find that article now: all Google searches lead to reviews of The Spice Merchant’s Daughter, and I don’t know if that was the author in question.
What is this, Dune?
Since the thread is active:
No shit Sherlock? THAT’S what Mangetout was doing??? I’m glad I’ve got a genius like @DrDeth to interpret that for me.
Most of his posts are like that. I finally pulled the plug on him yesterday.
He remains the only poster on my ignore list.
The board really is better that way.
And now DrDerp has found his dream thread, the one about nitpicks in IMHO. And promptly he questions the expertise of our resident linguistic expert, @Johanna, in a field he obviously knows nothing about.
Now, that’s funny. Aren’t there about a dozen linguists among the regular posters? How many has he been dismissive of in that thread thus far? My money’s on all twelve. I haven’t checked the thread yet, so I’ll trust y’all.
What the hey, I’m feeling chartiable. Yo, DrDeth! Do yourself a favor and start a story board so you can keep your narratives in some semblance of order and (snort) logic.
In the interests of clarifying things. I assume that his contention derives from Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, a book he intermittently and inexplicably also calls Sleepwalker. This is a revisionist text, although not—I would argue—in an especially pejorative sense. With the caveats that:
- I did study German history at university (as part of a double major in anthropology), but I never finished the capstone course so I’m maybe 1% more qualified than a layman to comment, and
- I would call The Proud Tower and The Guns of August two of the more influential books I’ve read so I’m one of the Tuchman Sheeple, I suppose.
The Sleepwalkers attempts to make the strong argument that ascribing “blame” to the origins of the Great War is a fool’s errand, as well as in my opinion the weak argument (again, non-pejorative, I just mean it’s not what I would call the central thesis) that, in particular, blaming “Germany” as a singular entity elides both the role of other states and the fissures internal to the German Empire, particularly between the kaiser and his senior military leadership.
Notably, Clark does not claim that France and Russia declared war on Germany. He is quite clear that Germany declared war on Russia, and quite clear that Germany’s consequent military planning necessitated preemptive war with France. Nor does Clark claim that France or Russia were responsible for a “lie […] fed to Tuchman, by falsifying records.”
In Clark’s words, “the Russian general mobilization was one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis” and that, as the first of the general mobilizations, “there would later be some discomfort among French and Russian politicians about this sequence of events.” Clark alleges (p.510) that:
The French Yellow Book played even more adventurously with the documentary record, by inserting a fictional communiqué from Paléologue dated 31 July stating that the Russian order had been issued ‘as a result of the general mobilization of Austria’ and of the ‘measures for mobilization taken secretly, but continuously, by Germany for the past six days . . .’ In reality, the Germans had remained, in military terms, an island of relative calm throughout the crisis.
That’s it. Clark does not allege that France intended war with Germany—indeed he acknowledges that France was eager to avoid provocation and does not argue that France withdrawing its military from the border was anything other than an attempt at conciliation. “French diplomats later advanced the timetable of Austrian mobilization” is only a gotcha if you view the Russian strategy over the summer of 1914 as offensive, which nobody does.
Not even Clark. Clark doesn’t make very much of this “falsification”—he doesn’t mention it elsewhere and treats it as an aside—because even if the communiqué was a complete fabrication, it’s not functionally inaccurate.
One: the Russians believed the Austrians were mobilizing against them, which Clark understands and does not dismiss (p. 513):
One last thought on the Russian decision to mobilize: when Sazonov saw the Tsar on the afternoon of 30 July, he found him preoccupied with the threat posed to Russia by Austrian mobilization. ‘They [the Germans] don’t want to acknowledge that Austria mobilized before we did. Now they demand that our mobilization be stopped, without mentioning that of the Austrians. [. . .] At present, if I accepted Germany’s demands, we would be disarmed against Austria.’
In his view, this is because the Russians overestimated Austro-Hungarian military prowess; Russian intelligence believed that the Austrian war plan called for mobilizing up to seven corps to invade Serbia. On being told that they were currently mobilizing eight or nine, the Russians took this as a sign that a shift was underway to the Austrian war plan targeting Russia instead of Serbia alone.
Clark contends that this was actually the result of Vienna’s changing assessment of Serbian strength (and the course of the war would bear this out), but he does not ascribe this to motivated thinking on the Tsar’s part. He understands that the Russians had gained sufficient familiarity with Austro-Hungarian planning and designs that they took the mobilization to be an existential threat.
(Nor were they incorrect in doing so; Austria-Hungary’s military had been agitating for a war with Russia for some time and renewed those calls in the spring of 1914 even in advance of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, whose influence served to check that desire)
Two, Russian thinking was guided by Foreign Minister Sazanov’s belief that, as Clark puts it, “Austria’s intransigence was in fact Germany’s policy” (indeed he openly accused Count Pourtalès, the German ambassador in Saint Petersburg, of this).
But Austrian intransigence was Germany’s policy. Here Clark is, in my view, let down by the gulf between the argument he wants to make and the facts on the ground. He wants to make the argument that Austrian policy was distinct, and that the idea that the Germans “made commitments that surpassed Austrian intentions, and thereby pressured them into war” is “problematic” (p. 415).
But he is compelled to acknowledge that the Germans were, in fact, pressuring Vienna, and had been agitating for them to declare war for most of July (whilst, in parallel, assuring Russia that Austria-Hungary’s failure to invade Serbia was proof that they had no intention of doing so and Russia did not need to be concerned).
Clark emphasizes the timeline of Russian mobilization because he acknowledges that, for political reasons, the Germans felt it was crucial for the Russians to be seen as the aggressors, “in the light of pacifist demonstrations in some of the German cities. […] Of particular concern was the leadership of the Social Democrats,” but (p. 526-527):
On 30 July, the chancellor was able to reassure his colleagues that they need not fear, in the event of war, subversion from within by the organized working class.
Of course, at the exact same time, the chancellor was elsewhere quite clear-headed about Russia’s intent. The Sleepwalkers does not, for whatever reason, mention this. We must turn instead to David Fromkin’s Europe’s Last Summer; as Fromkin puts it (p. 232), on that day:
Bethmann understood that Russia’s move was no cause for alarm. He told the Prussian State Ministers that “although the Russian mobilization had been declared, her mobilization measures cannot be compared with those of the West European states [. . .] Moreover Russia does not intend to wage war, but has only been forced to take these measures because of Austria.”
Three, Clark calls Germany “an island of relative calm,” but to the extent that this is true, it’s only an artifact of Kaiser Wilhelm’s erratic beliefs over whether or not he desired a peaceful resolution to the crisis and is at odds with the book’s own subsequent description. Germany had been making preparations for war; Clark notes that most of these were kept secret, and suggests that German military leaders felt that they were capable of handling the Austro-Hungarian crisis without more extensive mobilization.
In his view (this is not, as such, a radical proposal) Germany principally erred in believing that a limited, fast war was possible well after Austria-Hungary’s glacial preparation (and the open perfidy the two countries shared in concealing their plans) ensured that invading Serbia would be plainly seen as the land grab that it was and not the response to the archduke’s assassination they wanted to claim it was.
But, suppose their intent was “relatively” pure in supporting an Austrian war of conquest as opposed to a continental war—a supposition undermined by their clandestine maneuvering or, e.g., jamming French diplomatic transmissions while the French President Poincaré and Prime Minister (also Foreign Minister) Viviani were at sea.
The Sleepwalkers is quiet on Berlin’s preparations for an Austro-Serbian war even before the Serbian response to Austria’s ultimatum had been given, because he is blithely dismissive of the ultimatum generally, lamenting (p. 449-450):
Firmness in this context meant an intransigent opposition to any Austrian measure against Serbia. At no point do the sources suggest that Poincaré or his Russian interlocutors gave any thought whatsoever to what measures Austria-Hungary might legitimately be entitled to take in the aftermath of the assassinations.
This is silly revisionism, in that Clark himself must surely be one of the only people who actually wondered what “legitimate measures” were ever desired by Vienna or Berlin, or believes that those states were ever interested in anything other than re-establishing the influence lost in the Second Balkan War.
He is also terse, if almost laudatory, on the outbreak of the wider conflict itself (p. 527):
During a meeting at which War Minister Falkenhayn was present, Wilhelm gave a spirited exposé of the current situation, in which the entire responsibility for the impending conflict was laid at Russia’s door. ‘His demeanour and language,’ Falkenhayn noted in his diary, ‘were worthy of a German Emperor, worthy of a Prussian king’ – these were striking words from a soldier at the forefront of those hawks who had excoriated the monarch for his love of peace and his fear of war. When the Russian government refused to rescind its mobilization order, Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914.
Emphasis mine, because Clark does not see fit to note, for instance, that Germany “declared war on Russia” twice: having sent their ambassador two options—one claiming Saint Petersburg had not replied, and one claiming that their reply was unsatisfactory—the ambassador inexplicably delivered both to the Russian foreign minister.
That said:
It’s hard to get around that, and Clark doesn’t even try. There is no way to softpedal the German decision to respond to putative Russian “aggression” by invading Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. He instead calls out how Wilhelm’s sudden desire to avoid Luxembourg caused an argument with Moltke that left the Chief of the German General Staff “almost hysterical” because the Kaiser did not understand that their war plan required those movements.
Clark does describe giving the Belgians an ultimatum allowing Germany’s army free passage to invade France as “a disastrous mistake”; he is also obligated to acknowledge that this ultimatum was drawn up on July 26th—before Russia’s general mobilization and, indeed, before Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
Because, of course, by that point Moltke was already committed to a broader war. And because, of course, Germany’s aims were ultimately maximalist. As Fromkin puts it (p. 96-97):
Culturally, in every way the most and best educated population in Europe—that of Germany—was telling itself that it was being suffocated by a European civilization that was pressing in on it from all sides. It was not evident then nor is it now why the Germans felt that way, but it is clear that they did.
The Sleepwalkers doesn’t really concern itself with that. It is, IMO, overly sympathetic to the German position—accepting the notion that they were brought into the conflict by Austrian and Russian machinations with a degree of credulousness that one might say bordered on naiveté.
What it does not do, though, is dispute that the ultimate decision to go to war was German, or propose that it was principally the result of French or Russian aggression, because that isn’t a tenable position and Christopher Clark is not an idiot. I have to assume the only way to have come to the conclusion that the book is some striking refutation of the conventional narrative or that it “proves” German victimhood is to have not read it in the first place.
Thanks for going through all that.
So bottom line: there was no allegation made in the book of a secret French declaration of war that somehow the Germans found out about, and in defense had to invade Belgium, Luxembourg and France. 
There’s a faint chance that DD skimmed a review of the book that misstated its claims. Or that he read part of it, seizing on a minor point to invent a fictional account of the war’s beginnings that he could use to troll people.
I incline towards the latter view.
He tried to sell me the linguistic equivalent of flat Earth. Denial of Proto-Indo-European, which is literally the best established thing in the whole field.
That’s like predicting that if it rains the ground will get wet.
Well apparently no one saw it clearly enough to take steps to stop it.
Of course national leaders are far more sophisticated now and would quickly act to avert an oncoming catastrophe anyone can see. (Looks at the progress made to achieve the Paris Agreement) Or not.
On the contrary, they wanted it.
Which thread? I’d like to read your posts.
And this is clearly the distinction between Clark and DrDerp. Thank you for the summary of Clark’s work.
“Real-world examples of ‘Ummm, acktually, It’s X, not Y’ nitpicks, and discussion about them” in IMHO.
I hardly know anything about linguistics, I just know a few different languages, but I thought as much. I bet DrDerp doesn’t even know a second language, let alone ancient or proto-languages, but of course he has to chime in with basically saying “it’s just a theory”. Like young-earthers use to say about evolution.
Well worth the investment of time. I got to see DrD get his ass handed to him, AND I learned something about linguistics, a subject in which I have no expertise but which I enjoy exploring.