Miracle at Belleau Wood: The Birth of the Modern U.S. Marine Corps (2 of 3 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Miracle at Belleau Wood: The Birth of the Modern U.S. Marine Corps by Alan Axelrod. Copyright 2007 Alan Axelrod
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INTRODUCTION (CONT'D)

There had been a time when soldiers did not hug the earth in mud-dun uniforms but paraded in bright cloth and gleaming brass, a time when statesmen were full of big plans and rational words. Of those statesmen, Germany's famed Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was the most important. In 1871, he forged from a collection of petty states a unified Germany in the wake of Prussia's quick victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War. This new Germany would be fueled on coal from the Alsace-Lorraine, the territory France had given up as a condition of its ignominious surrender. Bismarck understood that Germany's territorial acquisition would create a lasting enmity with France, and so he played all Europe like a chessboard, acting to isolate France from any potential allies by binding Russia and Austria-Hungary to the strong, new Germany. France and Russia played their own games, however, and by the end of the nineteenth century, formed an alliance against Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Up to the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain managed to remain outside the entangling web of European alliances and enmities, maintaining a policy of what its statesmen termed "splendid isolation." But early in the new century the British made agreements with France and Russia, so that before the first decade of the twentieth century was over, what started as ill will between Germany and France metastasized into the division of all the major European powers. Germany and the Hapsburg empire of Austria-Hungary were on one side, and France, Russia, and Britain on the other--with Italy more or less oscillating between.

Although armed to the teeth and divided against itself, Europe remained deceptively peaceful as the new century's single-digit years gave way to double digits--peaceful everywhere except in a part of the continent few western Europeans gave much thought to. The Balkan Peninsula was chronically wracked by violence, as its tiny nations and would-be nations sought freedom from Hapsburg domination even as they craved ethnic identification with Russia, which eagerly offered itself as the defender of all who proclaimed themselves Slavs. Even as he put together the alliances and counteralliances he hoped would ensure German domination of a stable Europe, Bismarck had predicted the very detonation that threatened to shatter all he was then building. "If a general war begins," he remarked, "it will be because of some damn fool thing in the Balkans."

That "thing" was the assassination on June 28, 1914, of the heir apparent to the Hapsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, the Grand Duchess Sophie, when they visited Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Balkan realm unhappily languishing as a province of Austria-Hungary.

The assassin, a tubercular student named Gavrilo Princip, had been armed, coached, and prompted to act by the Black Hand, a Serbian secret society dedicated to the overthrow of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now, the Black Hand was by no means an agency of the Serbian government, and had men of goodwill in the Hapsburg government chosen to look upon the assassination as the crime of a desperate youth, the tragedy might not have reached beyond June 28. But Count Leopold von Berchtold, Austria-Hungary's foreign minister, was not a man of goodwill. By accusing Serbia of having killed the heir apparent, Berchtold saw an opportunity to crush Bosnian nationalism and the pan-Slavic movement. Far from wanting to avert war, Berchtold was motivated to provoke one--short and sharp, just a little war to bloody Serbia's nose and thereby deliver to the other nations and would-be nations of the Balkans a lesson they would not forget.

But no flame, no matter how small, can burn harmlessly in a room packed with explosives. In the Europe Bismarck had created, there could be no such thing as a short, sharp, local war. Nations great and small were bound by treaties and covenants public and secret. Start a war with one country, and others would detonate in turn until the whole of Europe exploded. Even as he called for the mobilization of the Austro-Hungarian army, Berchtold dispatched a message to the German government, asking if Austria-Hungary could count on its support. On July 5, Kaiser Wilhelm II invited the Hapsburg ambassador to lunch in Berlin. Germany, he pledged, would stand behind Austria-Hungary, even if this meant war with Russia--which, the Kaiser knew, was bound to defend Serbia. Those privy to the exchange thought it was merely an impulsive promise. In any case, the Kaiser could afford to be expansive.
Like everyone else, he was confident that Serbia would comply with whatever Austria-Hungary demanded, and the matter would end there.

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