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consisted of contingents from the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, Japan, and Germany under a German commander. When the kaiser addressed his own troops leaving for China he departed from his prepared text: “My men, you are about to meet a crafty, well-armed foe! Meet him and beat him! Give him no quarter! Take no prisoners! Kill him when he falls into your hands! Even as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made such a name for themselves as still resounds in terror through legend and fable, so may the name of Germany resound through Chinese history . . . that never again will a Chinese dare to so much as look askance at a German.” As a consequence, his future opponents would frequently dub German troops “Huns.”
    When the international army eventually relieved the Beijing legations and captured the city, the majority of the foreigners indulged in an orgy of looting. But that was not the worst. A British officer described how “Every Chinaman . . . was treated as a Boxer by the Russian and French troops and the slaughter of men women and children . . . was revolting.” The French commander, General Henri Frey, when challenged about “the frequent occurrence of disgraceful outrages upon women” by his men, responded dismissively: “It is impossible to restrain the gallantry of the French soldier.”
    In February 1904, without any declaration of war Japan attacked Russia in a dispute over their competing ambitions in Korea and Chinese Manchuria. In the fighting that followed, the Japanese navy, with its modern guns, torpedoes, and mines, first destroyed the Russian Far East Fleet and then at Tsushima—the greatest sea battle since Trafalgar in 1805—the Russian Baltic Fleet, which had sailed halfway around the world to its doom. Early in its voyage to the Far East, the Baltic Fleet had at the Dogger Bank in the North Sea fired on British trawlers, sinking one of them and killing two fishermen under the fanciful impression that the Japanese were confronting them. The incident produced a major crisis with Britain, only resolved when the two countries put the dispute to arbitration in The Hague. On land, in fighting that saw the first extensive use of barbed wire to defend positions, the Japanese defeated the Russians and captured Port Arthur in Manchuria—Russia’s prized and recently occupied only eastern warm-water port. Captured Russian soldiers suffered greatly at Japanese hands.
    In July 1905 U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt offered to mediate between the Russians and the Japanese, both of whom were nearly exhausted militarily and economically. At a meeting under his chairmanship at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, they agreed to a peace treaty. Soon afterward the United States also played a leading role in persuading the kaiser to agree to a peace conference to resolve a crisis between Germany and France over Morocco. In 1906 Roosevelt, the advocate of speaking softly but carrying a big stick, was awarded the fifth Nobel Peace Prize.
    Although his inventions had produced major advances in weapons technology, Alfred Nobel had been an advocate of arbitration and deeply interested in the peace movement. (The peace activist Bertha von Suttner had briefly been his secretary.) On his death in 1896 he left most of his fortune to establish five prizes to be awarded irrespective of nationality or sex for eminence in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace promotion. The first peace prize in 1901 had gone to Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, rehabilitating his reputation. *
    Politics were also changing in Europe. Shaken by its poor military performance in the Boer War and feeling threatened by the pace of German armament, Britain in 1904 concluded an informal alliance or “entente” with the French. King Edward VII had prepared the ground for the alliance by a royal visit to Paris. As Prince of Wales he had always been a lover of all things French, in