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is unsurprising that the wing-collared statesmen of Europe found it difficult to adjust their thinking and conduct to the new age into which they were so abruptly thrust, to the acceleration of communication which transformed human affairs, and to an increase of military destructive power which few understood. Horse-and-carriage diplomacy, like governance by crowned heads selected by accident of birth, proved wholly inadequate to address a crisis of the electric age. Winston Churchill wrote in1930: ‘Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent or vital has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.’
    Between 1815 and 1870 Russia, Prussia, Austria and France carried about equal weight on the world stage, behind Britain. Thereafter the new Germany powered ahead, becoming recognised as by far the most successful continental nation, world leader in almost every industrial sphere from pharmaceuticals to automobile technology, and a social pioneer in promoting health insurance and old-age pensions. Some British jingos allowed the vastness of their empire to delude them about the primacy of their own little country, but economists coolly measured its eclipse by America and Germany as both manufacturer and trader, with France ranking fourth. All the major nations acknowledged as a proper ambition the maximisation of their own greatness and territorial possessions. Only Britain and France favoured maintenance of the status quo abroad, because their own imperial ambitions were sated.
    Others chafed. In May 1912 Lt. Col. Alick Russell, the British military attaché in Berlin, expressed concern about the febrile mood he identified. There was, he thought, ‘an uncomfortable feeling in German hearts that the army of the Fatherland is gaining a reputation for being unwilling to fight, an intense irritation at what is considered French arrogance and the apparently inevitable hostility of ourselves’. Put together, he suggested, ‘we obtain a sum of national sentiment, which might on occasion turn the scale, when the issue of peace or war was hanging in the balance’. Russell’s concern about German volatility, sometimes trending towards hysteria, was reflected in all his dispatches, and increased during the two years that followed.
    Contrary to the belief of their neighbours, however, many German people had no enthusiasm for war. The country was approaching a constitutional crisis. The Social Democratic Party which dominated the Reichstag – the German socialist movement was the largest in the world – was deeply hostile to militarism. Early in 1914, the British naval attaché reported with some surprise that Reichstag navy debates were sparsely attended; only between twenty and fifty members turned up, who gossiped incessantly during speeches. The industrial working class was profoundly alienated from a government composed of conservative ministers appointed for their personal acceptability to the Kaiser.
    But Germany, if no longer an absolutist state on the Russian model, remained more of a militarised autocracy than a democracy. Its most powerful institution was the army, and its crowned head loved to surroundhimself with soldiers. On 18 October 1913, Kaiser Wilhelm II decreed large-scale celebrations for the centenary of the victory at Leipzig, the ‘Battle of the Nations’ against Bonaparte. Following royal example, German department stores surrendered generous floorspace to commemorative dioramas. The marketplace was lavishly endowed with militaristically-tinted products. A harmonica named ‘ Wandervogel ’, in honour of an Austro-German youth hiking movement of that name, was sold in a military postal service box. A best-selling harp was inscribed with the words: ‘ Durch Kampf zum Sieg ’ – ‘Through Battle to Victory’. Gertrud Schädla, a twenty-seven-year-old teacher living in a small town near Bremen, described in her May 1914