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Part VII
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36 Men and Machines
The Biedermeier era - Steam engines, steamships, locomotives, the telegraph
- Spinning machines and mechanical looms - Coal and iron - Luddites - Socialist
ideas - Marx and his theory of class war -Liberalism - The revolutions of 1830
and 1848
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Barricade on the rue Soufflot, by Horace Vernet
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Metternich and the pious rulers of Russia, Austria, France and Spain
were indeed able to bring about a return to life as it had been before
the French Revolution - at least in its outward forms. Once again there
was all the splendour and ceremony of courts, where the nobility
paraded, their breasts covered in medals and decorations, and wielded
much influence. Citizens were ex -cluded from politics, which suited
many of them very well. They occupied themselves with their families,
with books and, above all, with music. For, in the last hundred years,
music, heard mostly as an accompaniment to dancing, songs and hymns in
earlier times, had become the art which, of all the arts, spoke most to
people. However, this period of tranquillity and leisure, known to
Austr-ians as the Biedermeier era - that of the administrative or
professional middle-class citizen - was only the visible side of things.
There was one Enlightenment idea that Metternich could not suppress -
not that he ever thought of doing so. This was the idea Galileo had had
of a rational, mathematical approach to the study of nature, which had
appealed so much to people at the time of the
Enlightenment. And it so happened that this hidden aspect of the
Enlightenment led to a far greater revolution and dealt a far more
deadly blow to the old forms and institutions than the Parisian Jacobins
ever did with their guillotine.
Mastering the mathematics of nature enabled people not only to
understand the forces of nature, but to use them. And they were now
harnessed and put to work for mankind.
The history of all the inventions that followed is not as simple as you
might think. In most cases they began with an idea. This idea led to
experiments and trials, after which it was often abandoned, only to be
picked up again later, perhaps by somebody else. It was only when a
person came along who had the determination and persistence to carry the
idea through to its conclusion, and make it generally useful, that that
person became known as the 'inventor'. This was the case with all the
machines which changed our lives -with steam-driven machinery, the
steamship, the steam engine and the telegraph - and they all became
important in Metternich's time.
The steam engine came first. A learned Frenchman called Papin had
already been carrying out experiments around 1700. But it wasn't until
1769 that a Scottish engineer named James Watt was able to patent a
proper steam engine. At first the engine was mainly used to pump water
out of mines, but people soon saw the possibility of using it to drive
carriages or ships. Experiments with steamships went on in England in
1802, and in 1803 an American engineer called Robert Fulton launched a
steamboat on the Seine. Commenting on the event, Napoleon wrote: 'This
project is capable of changing the face of the world.' Four years later,
in 1807, the first steamship made its way up the Hudson River from New
York to Albany, its huge paddle-wheel churning, with much puffing,
clanking and belching of smoke.
At about the same time attempts were also being made in England to
propel vehicles using steam. But it took until 1803 for a usable engine
to be invented, one which ran on cast-iron railway lines. In 1814 George
Stephenson built the first effective steam locomotive and named it
Blucher after the great Prussian general, and in 1825 the first railway
line was opened between the towns of Stockton and Darlington. Within
thirty years there were railway lines all over Britain, America,
throughout almost all of Europe, and even in India. These lines went
over mountains, through tunnels and over great rivers, and carried
people at least ten times as quickly as the fastest stagecoach.
It was much the same with the invention of the electric telegraph, the
only means of rapid communication before the telephone. First thought of
in 1753, there were many attempts from the 1770s onwards, but only in
1837 did an American artist called Samuel Morse succeed in sending a
short telegraph to his friends. Once again, hardly more than ten years
had passed before use of the telegraph was widespread.
However, other machines changed the world even more profoundly. These
were the machines which made use of the forces of nature instead of
manpower. Take spinning and weaving, for example - work that had always
been done by artisans. When the demand for cloth increased (around the
time of Louis XIV), factories already existed, but the work was done by
hand. It took a while for people to realise that their new knowledge of
nature could be applied to the production of cloth. The dates are much
the same as those of the other great inventions. People were
experimenting with various sorts of spinning machines from 1740 onwards.
The mechanical loom was introduced at about the same time. And again, it
was in England that these machines were first made and used. Machines
and factories needed coal and iron, so countries which had their own
coal and iron were at a great advantage.
All of these developments produced a tremendous upheaval in people's
lives. Everything was turned upside-down and hardly anything stayed
where it had been. Think for a moment how secure and orderly everything
had been in the guilds of the medieval cities! Those guilds had lasted
right up until the time of the French Revolution and longer. True, it
was no longer as easy for a journeyman to become a master as it had been
in the Middle Ages, but it was still possible and the hope was there.
Now, all of a sudden, everything changed. Some people owned machines. It
didn't take
much training to learn how to operate them - just a couple of hours and
then they ran themselves. This meant that anyone who owned a mechanical
loom could, with the help of one or two assistants - perhaps his wife
and children - do more work than a hundred trained weavers. So whatever
became of all the weavers in a town into which a mechanical loom was
introduced? The answer is that they woke up one day to discover that
they weren't needed any more. Everything it had taken them years to
learn, first as apprentices and then as journeymen, was useless.
Machines were faster, better and very much cheaper. Machines don't sleep
and they don't eat. Nor do they need holidays. Thanks to the new
machines, the money that had allowed a hundred weavers to live safely
and comfortably could now be saved by the factory owner, or spent on
himself. Of course, he still needed workers to manage the machines. But
only unskilled workers, and not many of them. But the worst thing was
this: the city's hundred weavers were now out of work and would starve,
because one machine was doing their work for them. And naturally, rather
than see his family starve a person will do anything. Even work for a
pittance as long as it means he has a job to keep body and soul
together. So the factory owner, with his machines, could summon the
hundred starving weavers and say: 'I need five people to run my factory
and look after my machines. What will you charge for that?' One of them
might say: 'I want so much, if I am to live as comfortably as I did
before.' The next would say: 'I just need enough for a loaf of bread and
a kilo of potatoes a day.' And the third, seeing his last chance of
survival about to disappear, would say: 'I'll see if I can manage on
half a loaf.' Four others then said: 'So will we!' 'Right!' said the
factory owner. 'I'll take you five. How many hours can you work in a
day? "Ten hours,' said the first. 'Twelve,' said the second, seeing the
job slipping from his grasp. 'I can do sixteen,' cried the third, for
his life depended on it. 'Fine,' said the factory owner, 'I'll take you.
But who'll look after my machine while you're asleep? My machine doesn't
sleep!" I'll get my little brother to do it - he's eight years old,'
replied the luckless weaver. 'And what shall I give him?' 'A few pennies
will do, to buy him a bit of bread and butter.' And even then the
factory owner might reply: 'He can have the bread, but we'll see about
the butter.' And this was how business was done. The remaining
ninety-five weavers were left to starve, or find another factory owner
prepared to take them on.
Now you mustn't think that all factory owners were as vile as the one I
have just described. But the worst of them, who paid the least and sold
at the lowest prices, could be the most successful. Then others, against
their conscience and their natural instincts, often found themselves
treating their workers in the same way.
People began to despair. Why bother to learn a skill and take pains to
make beautiful things by hand? Machines could do the same job a hundred
times more quickly, often more neatly and at a hundredth of the price.
And so weavers, blacksmiths, spinners and cabinet-makers sank ever more
deeply into misery and destitution, running from factory to factory in
the hope of earning a few pennies. Many of them raged against the
machines that had robbed them of their happiness. They broke into
factories and wrecked the looms, but it made no difference. In England
in 1812 the death penalty was introduced for anyone found guilty of
destroying a machine. And then newer and better machines followed that
could do the work, not of a hundred, but of five hundred workers, and
the general misery increased.
Some people felt that things could not go on like this. It was simply
not right that a person, just because he happened to own or had perhaps
inherited, a machine, should be able to treat everyone else more harshly
than many noblemen used to treat their peasants. It seemed to them that
factories and machines and suchlike, which gave their owners such
monstrous power over other people's lives, shouldn't belong to
individuals, but to the community as a whole. This idea is called
socialism. People had many ideas about how to organise work in a
socialist way, so as to put an end to the misery of starving workers,
and came to the conclusion that, instead of receiving a wage set by the
individual factory owner, workers should have a share of the overall
profits.
Among the many socialists in France and Britain in the 1830s there was
one who became particularly famous. He was a scholar from Trier in
Germany, and his name was Karl Marx. The ideas he had were rather
different. In his view it was pointless wondering how things might be if
only the machines belonged to the workers. If they wanted the machines,
the workers would have to fight for them, for the factory owners would
never give up their factories voluntarily. And it was equally pointless
for groups of workers to go round destroying mechanical looms now that
they had been invented. What they should do was stick together. If each
of those hundred weavers had not gone out looking for work for himself,
and instead they had all got together and said with one voice, 'We won't
work for more than ten hours in the factory, and we each want two loaves
of bread and two kilos of potatoes', the factory owner would have had to
give in. True, that in itself might not have been enough, since the
factory owner no longer needed skilled weavers for his mechanical looms,
and could take his pick from men so destitute that they would accept the
lowest wages. But this, said Marx, was precisely why unity was so vital.
For in the end the factory owner would be unable to find anyone who
would do the job for less. So the workers must support each other. And
not just those from one district, or even one country. All the workers
of the world must unite! Then they would not only have the power to say
how much they should be paid, but they would end up by taking over the
factories and the machines themselves, and so create a world that was no
longer divided into haves and have-nots.
For, as Marx went on to explain, the truth of the matter was that
weavers, shoemakers and blacksmiths didn't really exist any more. A
worker who did nothing but pull a lever on a machine two thousand times
a day hardly needed to know what the machine produced. His only interest
was in his weekly pay packet and in earning enough to prevent him from
starving like his unhappy fellows who had no work. Nor did the owner
need to learn the trade which gave him a living, for the work was all
done by machines. Which meant, in fact, said Marx, that there were no
longer any real occupations. There were just two sorts - or classes - of
people: those who owned and those who didn't. Or as he chose to call
them, capitalists and proletarians. These classes were in a
constant state of war with one another, for owners always want to
produce as much as possible for the smallest amount of money, and
therefore pay the workers - the proletarians - as little as they can get
away with, whereas workers seek to force the capitalists -the owners of
the machines - to part with as much of the profit as they can be made
to. This battle between the two classes of people, so Marx thought,
could only end in one way. The many dispossessed would one day seize the
property of the owning minority, not in order to own it themselves, but
to get rid of ownership altogether. Then classes would cease to exist.
This was the goal of Karl Marx, one that he thought was near and quite
simple to achieve.
However, when Marx published his great appeal to the workers (The
Communist Manifesto, as he called it) in 1848, the situation was
very different from what he had expected. And things have gone on being
different, right up until today. In those days few factory owners had
any real power. Most of it was still in the hands of those
much-decorated noblemen whose authority Metternich had helped to
restore. And it was these noblemen who were the real adversaries of rich
citizens and factory owners. They wanted a secure, orderly and regulated
state in which each had his appointed place, as people had always had in
the past. This meant that, in Austria for example, peasants were still
tied to inherited estates, and were hardly less bound to the landowners
than the serfs of the Middle Ages. Artisans were still governed by many
strict and ancient regulations dating back to the time of the guilds -
as, to some extent, were the new factories. However, citizens who had
become wealthy as a result of the new machines and factories were no
longer willing to take orders, either from the nobility or from the
state. They wanted to act as they saw fit, and were convinced that this
would be best for everyone. All that was needed was for able people to
be given a free rein, unimpeded by conventions, rules or regulations,
and in time the whole world would be a better place. The world looks
after itself as long as it isn't interfered with, or so they thought.
Accordingly, in 1830, the citizens of France rose up and threw out Louis
XVIII's successors.
In 1848 there was a new revolution in Paris, which spread to many other
countries, in which citizens tried to obtain all the power of the state
so that nobody could any longer tell them what they might or might not
do with their factories and their machines. In Vienna, Metternich found
himself dismissed and the emperor Ferdinand was forced to abdicate. The
old regime was definitively over. Men wore black trousers like
drainpipes that were almost as ugly as the ones we wear today, and stiff
white collars with complicated knotted neckties. Factories were allowed
to spring up everywhere and railways transported goods in ever
increasing quantities from one country to another.
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37 Across the Seas
China before 1800 - The Opium war - The Taiping Rebellion -China's
submission - Japan in 1850 - Revolution in support of the Mikado - Japan's
modernisation with foreign assistance - America after 1776 - The slave states -
The North - Abraham Lincoln - The Civil War
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The Peacemakers (1868) by George P.A. Healy.
Aboard the River Queen on March 28, 1865, General William T. Sherman,
General Ulysses S. Grant, President Abraham Lincoln, and Admiral David
Dixon Porter discuss military plans for the final months of the Civil
War.
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Thanks to railways and steamships the world became much smaller. To
set off across the seas for India or China was no longer a perilous
adventure into the unknown, and America was almost next door. And so
from 1800 onwards it is even less possible to see the history of the
world as only that of Europe. We must take a look beyond our frontiers
at Europe's new neighbours, and in particular at China, Japan and
America. Before 1800, China was still in many ways the same country it
had been at the time of the rulers of the Han family at around the time
of the birth of Christ, and at the time of China's great poets, eight
hundred years later. It was a mighty, orderly, proud, densely populated
and largely peaceful land, inhabited by hardworking peasants and
citizens, great scholars, poets and thinkers. The unrest, the religious
wars and the endless disturbances which troubled Europe during those
years would have seemed alien, barbaric and inconceivable to the
Chinese. True, they were now ruled by foreign emperors who made men wear
their hair in a plait, as a sign of their submission. But since their
invasion, this family of rulers from inner Asia, the Manchus, had
adopted Chinese ways and had learnt and absorbed the guiding principles
of Confucius. So the empire flourished.
On occasion, learned Jesuits came to China to preach Christianity. They
were usually received with courtesy, for the emperor of China wanted
them to teach him about Western sciences, and about astronomy in
particular. European merchants took home porcelain from China. People
everywhere tried to match its exquisite fineness and delicacy. But it
took centuries of experimenting before they could do so. In how many
ways the Chinese empire, with its many, many millions of cultivated
citizens, was superior to Europe you can see from a letter sent by the
emperor of China to the king of England in 1793. The English had asked
for permission to send an ambassador to the Chinese court, and to engage
in trade with China. The emperor Ch'ien-Lung, a famous scholar and an
able ruler, sent this reply:
You, О king, live far away across many seas. Yet, driven by the
humble desire to share in the blessings of our culture, you have sent a
delegation, which respectfully submitted your letter. You assure us that
it is your veneration for our celestial ruling family that fills you
with the desire to adopt our culture, and yet the difference between our
customs and moral laws and your own is so profound that, were your envoy
even capable of absorbing the basic principles of our culture, our
customs and traditions could never grow in your soil. Were he the most
diligent student, his efforts would still be vain.
Ruling over the vast world, I have but one end in view, and it is this:
to govern to perfection and to fulfil the duties of the state. Rare and
costly objects are of no interest to me. I have no use for your
country's goods. Our Celestial Kingdom possesses all things in abundance
and wants for nothing within its frontiers. Hence there is no need to
bring in the wares of foreign barbarians to exchange for our own
products. But since tea, silk and porcelain, products of the Celestial
Kingdom, are absolute necessities for the peoples of Europe and for you
yourself, the limited trade hitherto permitted in my
province of Canton will continue. Mindful of the distant loneliness of
your island, separated from the world by desert wastes of sea, I pardon
your understandable ignorance of the customs of the Celestial Kingdom.
Tremble at my orders and obey.
So that was what the emperor of China had to say to the king of the
little island of Britain. But he had underestimated the barbarity of the
inhabitants of that distant island, a barbarity which they demonstrated
several decades later when they arrived in their steamships. They were
no longer prepared to put up with the limited trade allowed them in the
province of Canton, and they had found a ware that the Chinese people
liked all too well: a poison -and a deadly one at that. When opium is
burnt and the smoke is inhaled, for a short time it gives you sweet
dreams. But it makes you dreadfully ill. Anyone who takes up smoking
opium can never give it up. It is a little like drinking brandy, but far
more dangerous. And it was this that the British wanted to sell to the
Chinese in vast quantities. The Chinese authorities saw how dangerous it
would be for their people, and in 1839 they took vigorous action to
stamp out the trade.
So the British returned in their steamships, this time armed with
cannons. They steamed up the Chinese rivers and fired on peaceful towns,
reducing beautiful palaces to dust and ashes. Shocked and bewildered,
the Chinese were powerless to stop them and had to give in to the
demands of the big-nosed foreign devils: they had to pay a huge sum of
money and open their ports to foreign trade. Soon afterwards, a
rebellion broke out in China, known as the Taiping - or great peace -
Rebellion, begun by a man who proclaimed himself Heavenly King of the
Heavenly Kingdom of the Great Peace. At first the Europeans supported
him, but when the port of Shanghai was threatened, they fought alongside
the imperial troops to protect their trade and the rebels were defeated.
The Europeans were determined to expand their trading activities, and
set up embassies in China's capital, Peking. But the imperial government
would not allow it. And so, in 1860, British
and French troops together forced their way northwards, bombarding towns
and humiliating their governors. When they reached Peking, the emperor
had fled. In revenge for Chinese resistance, the British sacked, looted
and burned the beautiful and ancient imperial Summer Palace, together
with all its magnificent works of art dating back to the earliest days
of the empire. Wrecked, and in a state of utter confusion, the vast and
peaceful thousand-year-old empire was forced to bow to the demands of
Europe's merchants. This was China's reward for teaching Europeans the
art of making paper, the use of the compass, and -regrettably - how to
make gunpowder.
During these years the island empire of Japan might easily have suffered
the same fate. Japan at this time was much like Europe in the Middle
Ages. Actual power was in the hands of noblemen and knights, in
particular those of the distinguished family which looked after the
emperor - not unlike the way the ancestors of Charles the Great had
looked after the Merovingian kings. Painting pictures, building houses
and writing poetry were all things the Japanese had learnt hundreds of
years before from the Chinese, and they also knew how to make many
beautiful things themselves. But Japan was not an orderly, vast and
largely peaceful country like China. For years powerful noblemen from
the various districts and islands had fought each other in chivalrous
feuds. In 1850 the poorer ones among them joined together to seize power
from the great rulers of the kingdom. Would you like to know how they
did it? They enlisted the help of the emperor, a powerless puppet who
was forced to spend several hours each day just sitting on the throne.
Those impoverished noblemen rose up against the great landowners in the
emperor's name, claiming that they would give him back the power Japan's
emperors were said to have had, way back in the mists of antiquity.
All this was happening at about the time when European envoys first
returned to Japan, a land forbidden to foreigners for more than two
hundred years. To these white-skinned ambassadors, life in Japanese
cities - with their millions of inhabitants, the houses made of paper
and bamboo, the ornamental gardens and pretty ladies with their hair
piled high upon their heads, the bright temple-banners, the rigid
formality, and the solemn and lordly manner of the sword-bearing knights
- was all delightfully comical. In their filthy outdoor boots they
trampled over the priceless mats of the palace floor where the Japanese
only trod barefoot. They saw no reason to respect any of the ancient
customs of a people they thought of as savages, when exchanging
greetings with them or drinking tea. So they were soon detested. When a
party of American travellers failed to stand aside politely, as was the
custom, when an important prince happened to pass by in his sedan chair,
together with his entourage, the enraged attendants fell on the
Americans and a woman was killed. Of course, straight away British
gunships bombarded the town, and the Japanese feared they were about to
suffer the same fate as the Chinese. Fortunately, the rebellion had
meanwhile been successful. The emperor - known in Europe as the Mikado -
now really did have unlimited power. Backed by clever advisers who were
never seen in public, he decided to use it to protect the country
against arrogant foreigners for all time. The ancient culture must be
preserved. All they needed was to learn Europe's latest inventions. And
so, all at once, the doors were thrown open to foreigners.
The emperor commissioned German officers to create a modern army, and
Englishmen to build a modern fleet. He sent Japanese to Europe to study
Western medicine and to find out about all the other branches of Western
knowledge which had made Europe so powerful. Following the example of
the Germans he established compulsory education, so that his people
would be trained to fight. The Europeans were delighted. What sensible
little people the Japanese had turned out to be, opening up their
country in this way. They made haste to sell them everything they wanted
and showed them everything they asked to see. Within a few decades the
Japanese had learnt all that Europe could teach them about machines for
war and for peace. And once they had done so, they complimented the
Europeans politely, as they once more stood at their gates: 'Now we know
what you know. Now our steamships will go out in search of trade and
conquest, and our cannons will fire on peaceful cities if anyone in them
dares harm a Japanese citizen.' The Europeans couldn't get over it, nor
have they, even today. For the Japanese turned out to be the best
students in all the history of the world.
While Japan was beginning to liberate itself, very important things were
also happening across the seas in America. As you remember, the English
trading posts which had grown into coastal cities on America's eastern
seaboard had declared their independence from England in 1776 in order
to found a confederation of free states. British and Spanish settlers
had meanwhile pressed on towards the west, fighting Indian tribes as
they went. You must have read books about cowboys and Indians, so you'll
know what it was like. How farmers built log cabins and cleared the
dense forest and how they fought. How cowboys looked after enormous
herds of cattle and how the Wild West was settled by adventurers and
gold diggers. New states sprang up everywhere on land taken from the
tribes, although, as you can imagine, not much of that land had been
cultivated. But the states were all very different from each other.
Those in southern, tropical regions lived off great plantations where
cotton or sugar cane was cultivated on a gigantic scale. The settlers
owned vast tracts of land and the work was done by negro slaves bought
in Africa. They were very badly treated.
Further north it was different. It is less hot and the climate is more
like our own. So there you found farms and towns, not unlike those the
British emigrants had left behind them, only on a much larger scale.
They didn't need slaves because it was easier and cheaper to do the work
themselves. And so the townsfolk of the northern states, who were mostly
pious Christians, thought it shameful that the Confederation, founded in
accordance with the principles of human rights, should keep slaves as
people had in pagan antiquity. The southern states explained that they
needed negro slaves because without them they would be ruined. No white
man, they said, could endure working in such heat and, in any case,
negroes weren't born to be free . . . and so on and so forth. In 1820 a
compromise was reached. The states which lay to the south of an agreed
line would keep slaves, those to the north would not.
In the long run, however, the shame of an economy based on slave labour
was intolerable. And yet it seemed that little could be done. The
southern states, with their huge plantations, were far stronger and
richer than the northern farm lands and were determined not to give in
at any cost. But they met their match in President Abraham Lincoln. He
was a man with no ordinary destiny. He grew up as a simple farm boy in
the backwoods, fought in 1832 in a war against an Indian chief called
Black Hawk, and became the postmaster of a small town. There in his
spare time he studied law, before becoming a lawyer and a member of
parliament. As such he fought against slavery and made himself
thoroughly hated by the plantation owners of the southern states.
Despite this, he was elected president in 1861. The southern states
immediately declared themselves independent of the United States, and
founded their own Confederation of slave states.
Seventy-five thousand volunteers made themselves available to Lincoln
straight away. Despite this, the outlook was very bad for the
northerners. Britain, which had abolished and condemned slave labour in
its own colonies for several decades, was nevertheless supporting the
slave states. There was a frightful and bloody civil war. Yet, in the
end, the northerners' bravery and tenacity prevailed, and in 1865
Lincoln was able to enter the capital of the southern states to the
cheers of liberated slaves. Eleven days later, while at the theatre, he
was murdered by a southerner. But his work was done. The reunited, free,
United States of America soon became the richest and most powerful
country in the world. And it even seems to manage without slaves.
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38 Two New States in Europe
Europe after 1848 - The Emperor Franz Josef and Austria - The German
Confederation - France under Napoleon III - Russia -Spain's decline - The
liberation of the peoples of the Balkans - The tight for Constantinople - The
kingdom of Sardinia - Cavour -Garibaldi - Bismarck - The reform of the army in
defiance of the constitution - The Battle of Koniggratz - Sedan - The founding
of the German empire - The Paris Commune - Bismarck's social reforms Dismissal
of the Iron Chancellor
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This is what the map of central Europe looked like before Italy
and Germany hail become states. At the same lime as all these little
pieces of hind were uniting to create those two powerful stales, the
Turkish empire was breaking up into an ever- increasing number of
independent countries.
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I have known many people who were children at a time before either
Germany or Italy existed. It seems incredible, doesn't it? That these
great and powerful nations, which play such an important role, aren't
old at all. After the revolutions of 1848 - when new railway lines were
being built all over Europe and telegraph cables were being laid, when
the towns which had turned into factory towns were expanding and many
peasants were being drawn into them, and when men had taken to wearing
top hats and funny pince-nez spectacles with dangling black cords - the
Europe we know was still no more than a patchwork of tiny duchies,
kingdoms, principalities and republics, linked to one another by
complicated ties of allegiance or enmity.
In this Europe (if we ignore Britain, which was at this time more
concerned with its colonies in America, India and Australia than with
the neighbouring continent), there were three important powers. In the
centre of Europe stood the empire of Austria. There the emperor Franz
Josef had been ruling from the Imperial Palace in Vienna since 1848. I
saw him once myself, when I was a little boy. He was by then an old man,
and was crossing the park at the Palace of Schonbrunn. I also have a
very clear memory of his state funeral. He really was what an emperor
was meant to be. He ruled over all sorts of different peoples and
countries. He was emperor of Austria, but he was also king of Hungary
and count-elevated-to-the-rank-of-prince of the Tirol and had lots of
other ancient titles, such as king of Jerusalem and protector of the
Sacred Tomb - a title that went back to the Crusades. Many provinces of
Italy came under his authority, while others were ruled by members of
his family. Then there were the Croats, the Serbs, the Czechs, the
Slovenes, the Slovaks, the Poles and innumerable other peoples, For this
reason, the words on old Austrian banknotes (for example, 'ten crowns')
also appeared in all these other languages. The emperor of Austria even
had some power, at least in name, in the German principalities. But the
situation there was rather complicated. When Napoleon shattered the last
remnants of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1806, the
German empire had ceased to exist. The many German-speaking lands -
which included Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Frankfurt, Brunswick
and so on and so forth - then formed an association, known as the German
Confederation, to which Austria also belonged. All in all it was a
remarkably confusing picture, this German Confederation. Each speck ot
land had its own prince, its own money, its own stamps and its own
official uniform. It was bad enough when it took several days to get
from Berlin to Munich by mail-coach. But now that the same journey took
less than a day by train, it had become almost unendurable.
The patchwork presented by the lands of Germany, Austria and Italy was
quite unlike anything around them on the map.
To the west was France. Shortly after the revolution of 1848, it had
once again become an empire. One of Napoleon's descendants had been able
to reawaken memories of the glory of the past and although far from
great himself, he was first elected president of the republic and soon
afterwards, emperor of Fiance under the name of Napoleon III. Despite
all its wars and revolutions, France
was now an exceptionally rich and powerful country, with great
industrial cities.
To the east was Russia. The tsar was not loved in that mighty land. You
must bear in mind that by this time many Russians had studied at
universities in France and Germany and their outlook was quite modern
and up to date. But the Russian empire and its officials was still
living in the Middle Ages. Just think: it was only in 1861 that serfdom
was formally abolished and then, for the first time, twenty-three
million Russian peasants were promised an existence worthy of human
dignity. Making promises is one thing, but keeping them is another. In
Russia, generally speaking, government was by the lash - or the knout,
as it was called. The penalty for speaking freely, for expressing even
the mildest opinion, was exile to Siberia at the very least.
Consequently, students and members of the middle classes who had
received a modern education detested the tsar so much that he lived in
constant fear of assassination. This was, in fact, the fate of most
tsars, however hard they tried to guard against it.
Beside the immensity of Russia and the battle-hardened might of France
it seemed impossible for any other country to make itself heard in
Europe. With the loss of its Latin American colonies, beginning in 1810,
Spain had become weak and powerless. Turkey, no longer in control of its
European possessions, was now referred to in the newspapers as the 'sick
man of Europe'. Its various Christian subject peoples had been fighting
for their liberty with the enthusiastic support of the rest of Europe.
The Greeks were first, followed by the Bulgarians, the Romanians and the
Albanians, while Russia, France and Austria fought over the rest of
Turkey's European possessions and Constantinople. This was just as well
for Turkey, for none of those three countries was willing to surrender
such a rich prize to any of the others. So Constantinople stayed
Turkish.
Meanwhile France and Austria were still fighting over the Italian
dominions, as they had been for hundreds of years. But times had
changed. Italians had also been brought closer to one another by their
railways and, like the inhabitants of German towns, they too had come to
realise that they weren't simply Florentines, Genoese, Venetians or
Neapolitans. They were all Italians, and they wished to decide their own
fate. At that time there was only one small state in northern Italy that
was free and independent. It lay at the foot of the mountains over which
Hannibal had once come and was called Piedmont, which means exactly
that: foot of the mountains. Now Piedmont and the island of Sardinia
together formed a small but strong kingdom under one ruler, King Victor
Emmanuel. And he had an exceptionally able and wily minister called
Camillo Cavour, who knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted what all
Italians had been yearning for, and what so many of them had shed their
blood for in bold but often ill-conceived and perilous adventures, both
during and after the 1848 revolution: a unified Italian kingdom. Cavour
himself was no warrior. He had no faith in the secret conspiracies and
risky surprise attacks favoured by a brave dreamer called Garibaldi and
his young fellow fighters in their efforts to win their country's
freedom. Cavour was looking for a different and more effective way, and
he found one.
He managed to persuade the ambitious emperor of the French, Napoleon
III, that he should join in the struggle for Italian freedom and unity.
He encouraged him to think that if he did so he had everything to gain
and nothing to lose. For by involving himself in the struggle for
freedom of a country that didn't belong to him, he could only harm
Austria, through its possessions in Italy -a prospect which did not
altogether displease him. At the same time, being the champion of
liberty would make him the hero of a great European nation, and this too
was a tempting thought. Thanks, then, to Cavour's cunning diplomacy and
to the bold expeditions of the impetuous Garibaldi, and at the cost of a
very great number of lives, the Italians achieved their goal. In the two
wars they fought against Austria, in 1859 and 1866, the Austrian armies
often had the upper hand, but as a result of interventions by Napoleon
III and the tsar, the emperor Franz Josef was finally forced to give up
his Italian territories. Elsewhere everyone had cast their votes, and
the results showed that the whole population wanted to belong to Italy.
So the various dukes abdicated. By 1866 Italy was unified. Only one
state was lacking, and this was the capital, Rome. But Rome belonged to
the pope, and Napoleon III refused to hand the city over to the Italians
for fear of falling out with him. He defended the city with French
troops and repelled a number of attacks by Garibaldi's volunteers.
In 1866, Austria's stubborn determination might yet have ended in
victory if Cavour hadn't cleverly arranged an enemy for Austria with
similar intentions. This was Prussia, in the north, whose prime minister
at the time was Bismarck.
Bismarck was a noble landowner from north Germany. He was a man of
exceptional intelligence with a will of iron. He never lost sight of his
goal and wasn't in the least bit shy of telling even King William I of
Prussia exactly what he thought. From the outset Bismarck wanted just
one thing: to make Prussia mighty and use its strength to make one great
German empire out of the jumbled patchwork of the German Confederation.
For this, he was convinced it was vital to have a strong and powerful
army. Indeed, it was he who famously said that the great questions of
history are decided not by speeches but by blood and iron. I don't know
whether that's always true, but in his case history proved him right.
The Prussian representatives were unwilling to grant him the great sum
he needed for this army out of the people's taxes so, in 1862, he
persuaded the king to rule against the constitution and the will of
parliament. The king feared he would suffer the same fate as King
Charles I of England when he failed to keep his word, and Louis XVI of
France. He was travelling with Bismarck in a railway carriage and turned
to him and said: 'I can see exactly where all this is leading. Down to
Opera House Square where they'll chop off your head beneath my windows,
and then it will be my turn.' Bismarck merely said: 'And then?' 'Well,
then we shall be dead,' replied the king. 'True,' said Bismarck, 'then
we'll be dead, but what better death could we have?' And so it came
about that, against the will of the people, a great army was equipped
with a large number of guns and cannons and was soon proving its worth
against Denmark.

The Battle of Königgrätz by Georg Bleibtreu
With these exceedingly well-armed and well-trained forces Bismarck
attacked Austria in 1866, while the Italians were attacking from the
south. His aim was to force the emperor out of the German Confederation,
leaving Prussia as its most powerful member. Prussia could then lead
Germany. At Koniggratz, in Bohemia, he defeated the Austrians decisively
in a bloody battle. The emperor Franz Josef had to give in and Austria
left the Confederation. Bismarck didn't press his victory too far and
made no further demands. This incensed the generals and officers of the
Prussian army but Bismarck wouldn't budge. He had no wish to make a
lasting enemy of Austria. But, without telling anyone, he made secret
pacts with all the other German states, ensuring their support in any
war Prussia chose to undertake.
Meanwhile, in France, the growth of Prussian military power was making
Napoleon III increasingly uneasy. He had just lost an utterly
unnecessary war in Mexico in 1867 and was fearful of this well-armed
neighbour across the Rhine. In any case, the French had never felt
comfortable with any growth in German military might. King William of
Prussia was staying at a hot-spring resort at Ems when Napoleon Ill's
ambassador interrupted his cure with the most extraordinary demand. On
behalf of himself and his descendants, the king was to renounce in
writing claims that he had never even made. Without the king's agreement
Bismarck then seized the opportunity to force Napoleon III to declare
war. Against the expectations of the French, all the German states
joined in, and it was soon clear that the German troops were better
equipped and better led than the French.
At a place called Sedan, the Germans captured a large part of the French
army, which happened to include Napoleon III. They hurried on towards
Paris where they laid siege to the well-defended city for months. The
defeat of France meant that the French troops in charge of the pope's
protection had to leave Rome, and this allowed the king of Italy to make
his entry. It was all very complicated. Meanwhile, during the siege,
Bismarck persuaded the various German kings and princes to propose to
the king of Prussia, who was staying at Versailles, that he accept the
title of German emperor. You won't believe what happened next. King
William insisted on being called emperor of Germany and not German
emperor, and the whole thing nearly fell through. Finally, however, in
the great gallery of mirrors at Versailles, the creation of the German
empire was solemnly proclaimed. But the newly appointed emperor, William
I, was incensed at not having the title he had wanted. In full view of
everyone, shockingly and intentionally, he strode past Bismarck,
refusing to shake the hand of the empire's founder. Despite this
Bismarck continued to serve him, and served him well.
In Paris, during the months of the siege, a dreadful and bloody workers'
revolt had broken out which was later suppressed with even greater
bloodshed. More people died in it than in the whole of the French
Revolution. For a while afterwards France was powerless, and the French
were forced to make peace. They had to hand over a large part of their
country to Germany (Alsace and Lorraine) together with a large sum of
money. Because he had ruled so badly, the French dismissed Napoleon III
and founded a republic. They had had enough of emperors and kings and
they wouldn't ever have any again.
Bismarck was now chancellor, or prime minister, of the unified German
empire and he governed with great authority. He was a fierce opponent of
the sort of socialist action recommended by Karl Marx, but he knew about
the appalling conditions of the workers. He believed the only way to
stop the spread of Marx's teachings was to allay the worst hardships of
the workers, so that they no longer wanted to turn the whole state
upside-down. So he created organisations to give support to workers who
were sick or had had accidents, who would otherwise have died from lack
of assistance, and did his best to ensure that the worst poverty was
reduced. Even so, all workers in those days still had to work a
twelve-hour day - including Sundays.
Prince Bismarck, with his bushy eyebrows and his stern and resolute
expression, was soon one of the best-known men in Europe. Even his
enemies agreed that he was a great statesman. When the peoples of Europe
wanted to set about dividing up the world, which was now so much
smaller, they met together in Berlin in 1878, and Bismarck led the
discussions. But when a new German
emperor came along, the two were constantly at odds. After many
disagreements with his chancellor, William II could stand it no longer
and dismissed him. Bismarck, now an old man, retired to his ancestral
estate. There he lived for several more years, sending messages to the
new leaders of the German government to warn them of the blunders they
were making.
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39 Dividing Up the World
Industry - Markets and sources of raw materials — Britain and France - The
Russo-Japanese War - Italy and Germany - The race to mobilize - Austria
and the East - The outbreak of the First World War - New weapons -
Revolution in Russia - The American intervention - The terms of peace -
Scientific advance - End
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Bolshevik, by
Kustodiev
Boris
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And now we are coming to the time when my parents were young. They
were able to tell me exactly what things were like. How more and more
homes came to have first gas and then electric lighting, and then a
telephone, while in the towns electric tramways appeared, soon to be
followed by cars. How vast suburbs spread to house the workers, and
factories with powerful machines kept thousands busy doing work which
used to be done by perhaps hundreds of thousands of artisans.
But whatever happened to all those textiles, shoes, tins of food and
pots and pans that were turned out every day in wagonloads by these
great factories? A certain amount, of course, could be sold at home.
People who had jobs could soon afford many more clothes and shoes than
artisans used to own. And everything was infinitely cheaper, even if it
didn't last as long, so people had to keep buying replacements. But of
course they didn't earn enough to buy all the things the monstrous new
machines produced. And if all those wagonloads of cloth and leather just
sat around unsold, it was pointless for the factory to keep on producing
more. It had to close down. But if it did, the workers lost their jobs
and were no longer able to buy anything, and even less was sold. This
sort of situation is called an economic crisis. And to make sure it
didn't happen, every country needed to sell as much as it possibly could
of what its many factories produced. If it was unsuccessful at home it
had to try to sell its goods abroad. Not only in Europe, where there
were factories just about everywhere, but in countries where there
weren't any - countries where there were people who didn't yet have
clothes or shoes.
In Africa, for example. And so, all of a sudden, the industrialised
countries found themselves falling over each other in a race to get to
remote and wild places. The wilder they were, the better. They needed
them not only so they could sell their goods, but also because those
places often had things that their own countries didn't have, such as
cotton for making cloth and oil for petrol. But there again, the more of
these so-called 'raw materials' they brought from the colonies to
Europe, the more the factories were able to produce, and the more eager
was their search for places where there were still people who would buy
their vast output. People who were unable to find work in their own
countries could now emigrate to these foreign places. In short, it
became vitally important for the countries of Europe to own colonies. No
one bothered to ask the native inhabitants what they thought about it.
And, as you can imagine, they were often very badly treated if any of
them tried shooting at the invading troops with their bows and arrows.
Of course, the British did best in this division of the world. After
all, they had had possessions in India, Australia and North America for
several centuries, and colonies in Africa, where their influence in
Egypt was particularly strong. The French had also started early, and by
now owned a large part of Indo-China and several parts of Africa, among
them the Sahara desert - more impressive, perhaps, on account of its
size than for any other reason. The Russians had no colonies overseas,
but their own empire was vast and they didn't yet have many factories.
They wanted to extend their grasp across Asia as far as the sea, and
trade from there. But their way was barred by those good students of the
Europeans, the Japanese, who said: 'Stop!' In a dreadful war that broke
out between Russia and Japan in 1905, the tsar's mighty empire was
defeated, and forced to give up some of its territory by liny, new
Japan. And now the Japanese also began building more and more new
factories for themselves, and they too needed foreign lands, not only to
sell their goods, but because there wasn't enough room for them all in
their tiny island kingdom.
Naturally enough, last in line for the share-out were the new states:
Italy and Germany. While they had been fragmented they had been in no
position to conquer lands overseas. Now they wanted to make up for
centuries of lost opportunities. After much fighting, Italy obtained
some narrow strips of land in Africa. Germany was stronger and had more
factories, so its needs were greater. And in time, Bismarck succeeded in
acquiring several larger stretches of land for Germany, mainly in
Africa, together with some islands in the Pacific.
But because of the way the whole thing works you can never have enough
land. More colonies means more factories, more factories means more
goods and more goods means that even more colonies are needed. The
demand isn't driven by ambition or the lust for power, but by a genuine
need. But now the world had been shared out. To create new colonies - or
merely to prevent the old ones being snatched from them by stronger
neighbours - it was necessary to fight, or at least to threaten to do
so. So each state raised powerful armies and navies and kept on saying:
'Attack me if you dare!' The countries that had been powerful for
centuries felt they had a right to be so. But when the new German empire
and its excellent factories entered the game, built a great navy and
tried to win more and more influence in Asia and Africa, the others took
it very badly. And because everyone knew that sooner or later there was
bound to be a fearful conflict, they all went on expanding their armies
and building bigger and bigger battleships.
When war finally did break out, however, it wasn't where it had been
expected all those years. Nor was it on account of some dispute in
Africa or Asia. It was caused by another country, the only
great slate in Europe to have no colonies at all: Austria. That ancient
empire, with its mosaic of peoples, wasn't interested in conquering
far-off lands on the other side of the world. But it did need people to
buy the goods made in its factories. So, just as it had done since the
wars with Turkey, Austria kept on trying to acquire new lands towards
the east, lands only recently liberated from Turkish rule where there
weren't yet any factories. But these small populations of newly
liberated eastern peoples, such as the Serbs, were frightened of the
great empire and didn't want it to reach out any further. When, in the
spring of 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne was visiting one of
these newly conquered regions called Bosnia, he was murdered by a Serb
in the capital, Sarajevo.
Austria's generals and politicians thought at the time that a war with
Serbia was inevitable. The dreadful murder had to be avenged, and Serbia
humbled. Frightened by Austria's advance, Russia was drawn in, whereupon
Germany, as Austria's ally, also became involved. And once Germany was
in the war, all the ancient enmities were unleashed. The Germans wanted
to begin by destroying France, their most dangerous enemy, so they
marched straight across neutral Belgium to attack Paris. Britain,
fearing that a German victory would make Germany all-powerful, now
joined in as well. Soon the whole world was at war with Germany and
Austria, and the two countries found themselves surrounded by the armies
of the entente (meaning their allied enemies - those who had an
understanding with one another). Germany and Austria, in the middle,
were known as the 'central powers'.
The gigantic Russian armies pressed forward, but were brought to a
standstill after a few months. The world has never seen a war like it.
Millions and millions of people marched against each other. Even
Africans and Indians had to fight. The German armies were stopped when
they reached the River Marne, not far from Paris. From this moment on,
real battles, in the old sense, would only very rarely be fought.
Instead, giant armies dug themselves in, and made their camps in
endlessly long trenches facing one another. Then, for days on end, they
fired thousands of guns at each other, bursting out in assaults through
barricades of barbed wire and blown-up trenches, across a scorched and
devastated wasteland strewn with corpses. In 1915, Italy also declared
war on Austria, despite having originally been its ally. Now people
fought in the snow and ice of the mountains of the Tirol and the famous
exploits of Hannibal's warriors during their crossing of the Alps seemed
like child's play compared with the courage and endurance shown by these
simple soldiers.
People fought each other in the skies in aeroplanes; they dropped bombs
on peaceful towns, sank innocent ships, and fought on the sea and under
the sea, just as Leonardo da Vinci had foreseen. People invented
horrible weapons that murdered and mutilated thousands each day, the
most terrible of which were gases that poisoned the air. Anyone who
breathed them died in terrible agony. These gases were either released
and carried to the enemy soldiers on the wind, or fired in the form of
grenades which released their poison when they exploded. People built
armoured cars and tanks which moved slowly and inexorably over ditches
and walls, demolishing and crushing everything in their path.
The people of Germany and Austria were destitute. For a long time there
was hardly anything to eat, no clothes, no coal and no light. Women had
to queue for hours in the cold to buy the smallest piece of bread or a
half-rotten potato. But just once there was a glimmer of hope. In Russia
a revolution had broken out in 1917. The tsar had abdicated, but the
bourgeois government which followed wanted to continue with the war.
However, the people were against it. So there was a second great
uprising in which the factory workers, under the guidance of their
leader, Lenin, seized power. They shared out the farmland among the
peasants, confiscated the property of the rich and the nobility, and
tried to rule the empire according to the principles of Karl Marx. Then
the outside world intervened, and in the fearful battles that followed
millions more people died. Lenin's successors continued to rule Russia
for many years.
The Germans were able to recall some of their troops from the eastern
front, but this didn't help them much because new, fresh soldiers now
attacked them from the west. The Americans had decided to step in.
Nevertheless, the Germans and Austrians held out for more than a year
against overwhelming odds. By putting all their efforts into a last
desperate attempt in the west, they very nearly won. In the end,
however, they were exhausted. And when, in 1918, America's President
Wilson announced that he wanted a just peace in which each nation would
determine its own fate, many of their troops gave up. So Germany and
Austria were forced to agree to a ceasefire. Those who had survived
returned home to their starving families.
The next thing that happened was that revolution broke out in these
exhausted countries. The emperors of Germany and Austria abdicated and
the various peoples of the Austrian empire -the Czechs and the Slovaks,
the Hungarians, the Poles and the Southern Slavs - declared themselves
independent and founded individual states. Then, having understood from
President Wilson that there was to be a peace treaty, and that
negotiations were to be held in the ancient royal palaces of Versailles,
St Germain and the Trianon, Austria, Hungary and Germany sent envoys to
Paris, only to discover that they were excluded from these negotiations.
Germany was held chiefly responsible for the war and was to be punished.
Not only did the Germans have to surrender all the colonies and lands
which they had taken from France in 1870, and pay vast sums of money to
the victors each year, but they even had to sign a formal declaration
saying that Germany alone was to blame for the war. The Austrians and
the Hungarians fared little better. So this was how President Wilson
kept his promises. (What you have just read is what I believed to be
true when I wrote this account, but read my explanation in the final
chapter of this book.)
Eleven million people died in that war and entire regions were
devastated in a way that had never been seen before. The suffering was
beyond imagination.
Mankind had come a long way in its mastery of nature. With a telephone
you can now sit in your room at home and talk about everything or
nothing with someone on the other side of the world
in Australia. You can tune in on the radio to a concert in London or a
programme on raising geese broadcast from Portugal.
People build gigantic buildings, far higher than the pyramids or St
Peter's church in Rome. They make great aeroplanes, each one capable of
killing more people than the whole of Philip II of Spain's Invincible
Armada. Ways have been found to combat the most fearsome diseases. There
have been amazing discoveries. People have found formulas for all sorts
of things that happen in nature which are so mysterious and so
remarkable that few people understand them. But the formulas are
correct: the stars move in exactly the way they predict. Every day we
know a little more about nature, and about human nature too. But the
horror of poverty remains. There are many millions of people on our
earth who cannot find work and every year millions die of starvation. We
all hope for a better future - it must be better!
Imagine time as a river, and that we are flying high above it in an
aeroplane. Far below you can just make out the mountain caves of the
mammoth-hunters, and the steppes where the first cereals grew. Those
distant dots are the pyramids and the Tower of Babel. In these lowlands
the Jews once tended their flocks. This is the sea the Phoenicians
sailed across. What looks like a white star shining over there, with the
sea on either side, is in fact the Acropolis, the symbol of Greek art.
And there, on the other side of the world, are the great, dark forests
where the Indian penitents withdrew to meditate and the Buddha
experienced Enlightenment. Now we can see the Great Wall of China and,
over there, the smouldering ruins of Carthage. In those gigantic stone
funnels the Romans watched Christians being torn to pieces by wild
beasts. The dark clouds on the horizon are the storm clouds of the
Migrations, and it was in those forests, beside the river, that the
first monks converted and educated the Germanic tribes. Leaving the
deserts over there behind them, the Arabs set out to conquer the world,
and this is where Charlemagne ruled. On this hill the fortress still
stands where the struggle between the pope and the emperor, over which
of them was to dominate the world, was finally decided. We can see
castles from the Age of Chivalry and, nearer still, cities with
beautiful cathedrals - over there is Florence, and there the new St
Peter's, the cause of Luther's quarrel with the Church. The city of
Mexico is on fire, the Invincible Armada is being wrecked off England's
coasts. That dense pall of smoke comes from burning villages and the
bonfires on which people were burnt during the Thirty Years War. The
magnificent chateau set in a great park is Louis XIV's Palace of
Versailles. Here are the Turks encamped outside Vienna, and nearer still
the simple castles of Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa. In the
distance the cries of 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity' reach us from
the streets of Paris, and we can already see Moscow burning over there,
and the wintry land in which the soldiers of the Last Conqueror's Grand
Armee perished. Getting nearer, we can see smoke rising from factory
chimneys and hear the whistle of railway trains. The Peking Summer
Palace lies in ruins, and warships are leaving Japanese ports under the
flag of the rising sun. Here, the guns of the World War are still
thundering. Poison gas is drifting across the land. And over there,
through the open dome of an observatory, a giant telescope directs the
gaze of an astronomer towards unimaginably distant galaxies. But below
us and in front of us there is nothing but mist, mist that is dense and
impenetrable. All we know is that the river flows onwards. On and on it
goes, towards an unknown sea.
But now let us quickly drop down in our plane towards the river. From
close up, we can see it is a real river, with rippling waves like the
sea. A strong wind is blowing and there are little crests of foam on the
waves. Look carefully at the millions of shimmering white bubbles rising
and then vanishing with each wave. Over and over again, new bubbles come
to the surface and then vanish in time with the waves. For a brief
instant they are lifted on the wave's crest and then they sink down and
are seen no more. We are like that. Each one of us no more than a tiny
glimmering thing, a sparkling droplet on the waves of time which flow
past beneath us into an unknown, misty future. We leap up, look around
us and, before we know it, we vanish again. We can hardly be seen in the
great river of time. New drops keep rising to the surface. And what we
call our fate is no more than our struggle in that great multitude of
droplets in the rise and fall of one wave. But we must make use of that
moment. It is worth the effort.
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End
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40 The Small Part of the History of the World Which I Have Lived Through
Myself:
Looking Back
The growth of the world's population - The defeat of the central-European
powers during the First World War - The incitement of the masses - The
disappearance of tolerance from political life in Germany, Italy, Japan and
Soviet Russia - Economic crisis and the outbreak of the Second World War -
Propaganda and reality - The murder of the Jews - The atomic bomb - The
blessings of science -The collapse of the Communist system - International aid
efforts as a reason for hope
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The first nuclear explosion, named "Trinity", was detonated July
16, 1945
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It is one thing to learn about history from books, and quite another
to experience it oneself. That is what I wanted to remind you of just
now when I likened a glimpse into the past of mankind to the view seen
from an aeroplane flying at a great height. All we can make out are a
few details on the banks of the river of time. But when seen from close
up, with the waves coming towards us one by one, the river looks quite
different. Some things are much clearer, while others are barely
visible. And that's how I found it. In the last chapter I told you about
the terrible World War of 1914-18. Although I lived through it, I was
only nine years old when it ended. So when I wrote about it I still had
to rely on books.
In my final chapter I would like to tell you a little about what I
actually did experience. The more I think about it, the stranger it
seems. The world is now so utterly different from what it was in
1918, and yet so many of the changes that occurred happened so
imperceptibly that we now take them completely for granted.
When I was a boy there were no televisions, no computers, no space
flights and no atomic energy. But it's easy to forget the most important
change, and that is that there are so many more people in the world than
there were then. Towards the end of the 1914-18 war there were more than
2,000,000,000 people on our planet. Since then the figure has more than
doubled. Of course, numbers as big as that don't mean much to us because
we can't actually picture them to ourselves. But if we bear in mind that
a line drawn round the earth at the level of the equator would measure
roughly 40,000,000 metres, and that when people form queues in front of
a ticket office there are roughly 2 of them to a metre, it means that
80,000,000 people waiting patiently in a queue would reach all the way
round the world. The queue when I was a boy would have gone round 22
times, and today, with our 4,500,000,000 fellow inhabitants, the queue
would reach more than 50 times round the earth!
Then you must also realise that, throughout the time that the population
was multiplying at such a tremendous rate, the globe we all inhabit was
imperceptibly growing smaller and smaller. Of course, I don't mean
literally shrinking, but technology - and, in particular, that of flying
- kept on reducing the distance between the various parts of the globe.
This was also something I experienced myself. Whenever I find myself at
an airport and hear a succession of announcements for flights to Delhi,
New York, Hong Kong or Sydney, and see the swarms of people preparing to
depart, I can't help thinking of my youth. In those days people would
point at someone and say: 'He's been to America', or 'She's been to
India!'
Today there are hardly any places in the world that can't be reached in
a matter of hours. Even if we don't go to far-off countries ourselves,
they seem closer to us than they were in my youth. Whenever a major
event happens anywhere in the world we read about it in the newspapers
the next day, we hear about it on the radio and see it on the television
news. The inhabitants of ancient
Mexico knew nothing about the destruction of Jerusalem, and it is
unlikely that anyone in China ever heard of the effects of the Thirty
Years War. But by the First World War things had changed. The very fact
that it was known as a 'World War' was because so many nations had been
drawn into the fighting.
Naturally, that doesn't mean that all the news which now reaches us from
all over the world is true. One of the things I also learned was not to
believe everything I read in the newspapers. I'll give you an example.
Because I had lived through the First World War myself, I thought I
could believe everything I had heard about it at the time. That is why
the last chapter, 'Dividing up the world', is not quite as impartial as
I had intended. The role played by America's President Wilson was not at
all what I had imagined. I described a situation in which Wilson made
promises to the Germans and Austrians which he failed to keep. I firmly
believed that what I remembered had to be right - after all, it was part
of my own experience - and when 1 wrote about it later I just wrote down
what everyone believed. But I should have checked my facts, as all
historians must be especially careful to do. To cut a long story short,
President Wilson did indeed make a peace offer early in 1918, but
because Germany and Austria and their allies were still hoping to win
the war, they ignored it. Only when the war had dragged on for ten more
months, and they had been defeated with very heavy losses, were they
prepared to accept the President's proposal. But by then it was too
late.
Quite how serious and regrettable this error of mine was rapidly became
apparent. For, although I did not foresee it, the fact that all those
who had been defeated were convinced that their suffering was the result
of a gross deception was very easily exploited and transformed by
ambitious and fanatical agitators into a raging thirst for vengeance. I
am reluctant to name them, but everyone will know that the one I have
most in mind is Adolf Hitler. Hitler had been a soldier in the First
World War, and he too remained convinced that, had it not been for the
supposed deception, the German army would never have been defeated. But
he didn't just blame Wilson. In his eyes, the enemy's propaganda had
been crucial in persuading the Germans and Austrians at home to abandon
the soldiers at the front to their fate. Hitler was therefore determined
to trump the enemy in the art of propaganda. He was a brilliant popular
orator and drew huge crowds. He knew there was no better way to incite a
mob to action than to give them a scapegoat, someone they could blame
for their suffering, and he found one in the Jews.
The fate of this ancient people has been touched on several times in
this book. I described their voluntary segregation, and the loss of
their homeland with the destruction of Jerusalem, and their persecution
during the Middle Ages. But even though I come from a Jewish family
myself, it never entered my head that such horrors might be repeated in
my own lifetime.
Here I must confess to another error that slipped into this history -
but one for which I might perhaps be excused. In chapter 33 it says that
a 'truly new age' began in which people started to turn their minds away
from the brutality of earlier times, because the ideas and ideals of the
so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century had by then become so
widespread that people took them to be self-evident. At the time that I
wrote that it seemed to me inconceivable that anyone might ever again
stoop to persecuting people of a different religion, use torture to
extract confessions, or question the rights of man. But what seemed
unthinkable to me happened all the same. Such a painful step backwards
seems almost beyond our understanding, and yet it may be no harder for
young people to understand than it is for adults. They need only open
their eyes at school. Schoolchildren are often intolerant. Look how
easily they make fun of their teacher if they see him wearing something
unfashionable that the class finds amusing, and once respect is lost all
hell breaks loose. And if a fellow student is different in some minor
way - in the colour of their skin or hair, or the way they speak or eat
- they too can become victims of hateful teasing and tormenting which
they just have to put up with. Of course, not all young people are
equally cruel or heartless. But no one wants to be a spoil-sport, so in
one way or another most of them join in the fun, until they hardly
recognise themselves.
Unfortunately grown-ups don't behave any better. Especially when they
have nothing else to do or are having a hard time - or, sometimes, when
they just think they are having a hard time. They band together with
other real or supposed companions in misfortune and take to the streets,
marching in step and parroting mindless slogans, filled with their own
importance. I myself saw Hitler's brown-shirt supporters beating up
Jewish students at Vienna University, and when I was writing this book,
Hitler had already seized power in Germany. It seemed only a matter of
time before the Austrian government would also fall, so I was lucky to
be invited to England just in time, before Hitler's troops marched into
Austria in March 1938. After that, as in Germany, anyone who greeted
someone with a simple 'Good morning' and not a 'Heil Hitler!' was taking
a very grave risk.
In this type of situation it soon becomes all too clear that in the eyes
of the supporters of this sort of movement, there is only one sin,
disloyalty to the Fuhrer, or leader, and only one virtue, absolute
obedience. To bring victory closer every order had to be obeyed, even if
it ran counter to the laws of humanity. Of course, similar things have
happened at earlier times in history, and I have described many of them
in this book - for example, when I wrote about Muhammad's first
disciples. The Jesuits, too, were said to place obedience above all
else. I also touched briefly on the victory of the Communists in Russia
under Lenin, and there, too, there were convinced Communists who would
not tolerate any opponents. Their ruthlessness in the pursuit of their
goals knew no bounds, and millions died as a result.
In the years that followed the First World War, tolerance also vanished
in Germany, Italy and Japan. The politicians of those countries told
their fellow countrymen that they had been cheated when the world was
shared out, and that they too had the right to rule over other peoples.
The Italians were reminded of their ancient Roman ancestry, the Japanese
of their warriors, and the Germans of the old Germanic tribes, of
Charlemagne and Frederick the Great. People, they were told, were not of
equal value. Just as some breeds of dog were better at hunting than
others, they themselves belonged to the best race, the one designed for
ruling.
I know a wise old Buddhist monk who, in a speech to his fellow
countrymen, once said he'd love to know why someone who boasts that he
is the cleverest, the strongest, the bravest or the most gifted man on
earth is thought ridiculous and embarrassing, whereas if, instead of
'I', he says, 'we are the most intelligent, the strongest, the bravest
and the most gifted people on earth', his fellow countrymen applaud
enthusiastically and call him a patriot. For there is nothing patriotic
about it. One can be attached to one's own country without needing to
insist that the rest of the world's inhabitants are worthless. But as
more and more people were taken in by this sort of nonsense, the menace
to peace grew greater.
Then, when a serious economic crisis in Germany condemned vast numbers
of people to unemployment, war seemed the simplest way out. The
unemployed would become soldiers or work in the armaments factories, and
in this way the hateful treaties of Versailles and St Germain would be
wiped off the face of the earth. Not only that, but the Western
democratic countries - France, Britain and the United States - had
become so softened by years of peace, or so it was thought, that they
were hardly likely to defend themselves. Gertainly no one there wanted a
war, and every effort was made to avoid giving Hitler an excuse to bring
calamity down on the world. But, sadly, a pretext can always be found
and, if need be, 'incidents' can be arranged. So on the first day of
September in 1939, the German army marched into Poland. By that time I
was already in England and witnessed for myself the profound sadness -
but also the determination - of those who had to march off to war again.
This time there were no cheerful battle songs, and no dreams of glory.
They were just doing their duty, for the madness had to be stopped.
My task was to listen to German broadcasts and translate them into
English so as to know what German listeners were being told, and what
they were not being told. This meant that from 1939 to 1945 I was in the
curious position of living through all six years of that terrible war on
both sides, as it were, if in very different ways. At home in England I
saw determination, but also hardship, anxiety for the men at the front,
the effects of air raids and fear at the turns the war was taking. From
German radio broadcasts all I heard were cries of triumph and
outpourings of abuse. Hitler believed in the power of propaganda, a
faith which seemed justified when the successes of the first two years
of the war exceeded even his wildest expectations. Poland, Denmark and
Norway, Holland and Belgium, France, large parts of Russia and the
Balkans were overrun, and only Britain, that little island on the edge
of Europe, still held out. And even that resistance could surely not
last long, for, to the sound of trumpet fanfares, the German radio
ceaselessly proclaimed how many ships carrying supplies and armaments
intended for the British had been sunk by their U-boats.
But when, without any declaration of war, in December 1941, the Japanese
attacked the American fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor and virtually
destroyed it, and Hitler took it upon himself to declare war on the
United States, and when, in the autumn of 1942, the German troops were
beaten back in North Africa and defeated by the Russians in January 1943
outside Stalingrad, and when the German air force - the Luftwaffe -
proved powerless to prevent the Allies' devastating bombardments of
German towns, it became clear that it takes more than fine words and
fanfares to win a war. When Winston Churchill became prime minister in
England, at a time when the outlook was grim, he said: T can promise
nothing but blood, sweat and tears.' And it was precisely because he had
said that that we also believed him when he held out a glimmer of hope.
How many German listeners paid any attention to the justifications and
promises that 1 heard, day in, day out on the German radio, is anyone's
guess.
What I do know is that neither the German listeners nor we ourselves
were aware at the time of the most horrifying of all the crimes
committed by the Germans during the war. In connection with this 1
shall, if you don't mind, take you back to page 280 where it says
(speaking of the Spanish conquistadores of Mexico): 'there and in other
parts of America they set about exterminating the ancient, cultivated
Indian peoples in the most horrendous way. This chapter in the history
of mankind is so appalling and so shameful to us Europeans', I wrote
'that I would rather not say anything more about it. . .'
I am even more reluctant to talk about the monstrous crime that was
committed in our own century - after all, this book is intended for
young readers who should not have to read about such things. But
children grow up too, and they too must learn from history how easy it
is for human beings to be transformed into inhuman beings through
incitement and intolerance. And so it came about that, in the last years
of the Second World War, the Jewish inhabitants of every country in
Europe under German occupation - millions of men, women and children -
were driven from their home countries. Most were put on trains and sent
eastwards, where they were murdered.
As I said before, the German radio said nothing about any of this to its
listeners, and like many others I couldn't at first bring myself to
believe it when the war ended and the unthinkable became known (in
1945). But sadly there is abundant proof of this monstrous crime, and
although many years have already passed since it was committed, it is of
the utmost importance that it should not be forgotten or hushed up.
With the mingling of peoples on our tiny planet, it becomes more and
more necessary for us to respect and tolerate each other, not least
because technological advances are bringing us closer and closer
together.
The impact of technology was also demonstrated in the Second World War,
when the almost inexhaustible reserves of the American arms industry,
which benefited both Britain and Russia, made the outcome inevitable.
Despite the desperate resistance put up by the German soldiers, the
British and Americans were able to land on the French coast of Normandy
in the summer of 1944 and drive the Germans back. At the same time the
Russians were pursuing a by now unresisting German army and, in April,
they finally reached Berlin, where Hitler took his own life. There was
no talk of
a peace treaty this time. The victors remained in Germany as occupying
forces, and for decades a heavily guarded frontier ran right through
Germany separating the sphere of influence of Communist Russia from that
of the Western democracies.
However, with the defeat of Germany the World War was still not over,
for the Japanese, who had meanwhile conquered large parts of Asia, were
far from defeated. And because no end was in sight, the Americans
brought out an entirely new weapon: the atomic bomb.
It so happened that, shortly before war broke out, I had met a young
physicist who told me about an article published by the great Danish
scientist, Niels Bohr. Its subject was the theoretical possibility of
constructing a 'uranium bomb' whose destructive power would far exceed
that of any known explosive. At the time we were both united in hoping
that such a weapon might only be dropped on some desert island, to show
friend and foe alike that all other ideas of weaponry and warfare had
had their day. Although many of the scientists who were working
frantically throughout the war to realise this weapon certainly felt as
we did, our hope was in vain. In August 1945, the Japanese towns of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki became the first victims of an unimaginable
catastrophe, and Japan was finally defeated.
It was clear to all of us that with this invention an entirely new
chapter in the history of the world had begun, for the discovery of
atomic energy might be likened to the discovery of" fire. Fire, too, can
warm, and it can destroy, but its destructive power is nothing next to
that of today's even greater atomic weapons. One can only hope that this
development has made it impossible for such weapons to be used ever
again against human beings. It must be clear to everyone that if they
were to be used, neither side would be likely to survive and vast areas
of the globe would be turned into uninhabitable deserts. Of course, the
world has changed enormously since the last war. The inhabitants of
whole continents that belonged to the British empire have since then
become largely independent — although, unfortunately not yet any more
peaceable for it. Yet despite the brutal conflicts and worrying crises
that have broken out since 1945 in various parts of the globe, we have
been spared a third world war because we all know only too well that it
could mean the end of the history of the world. It isn't a great
comfort, but it's better than none at all.
Not surprisingly, this entirely new situation in human history led many
to condemn out of hand all the achievements of a science that had
brought us to the edge of the abyss. And yet those people should not
forget that, without science and technology, it would not have been
possible for the countries concerned to make good, at least in part, the
damage and destruction caused by the World War, so that life could
return to normal much earlier than anyone had dared to hope.
Finally, I should like to make one more small correction to my book, to
make good an omission that lies close to my heart. My chapter 'Men and
machines' is not exactly incorrect, but it is a little one-sided. While
it is indeed true that the switch from artisans and craftsmen to
factories and machines entailed a great deal of suffering, I should
nevertheless have mentioned that without the new techniques of mass
production it would have been quite impossible to feed, clothe and house
the steadily increasing population. The very fact that more and more
children were being born, and fewer and fewer of them were dying soon
after, was largely due to the scientific advance of medicine which
insisted on such things as piped running water and proper sewerage.
True, the growing industrialisation of Europe, America and of Japan has
meant the loss of much that is beautiful, but we must not forget how
many blessings - and I mean blessings - it has brought us.
I well remember what people meant in my youth when they talked about
'the poor'. It was not only the destitute, the beggars and the homeless
who looked different from the middle-class inhabitants of large towns,
but factory workers too-both men and women could be recognised at a
distance by their dress. The women usually wore shawls on their heads
against the cold, and no factory worker would ever have dreamed of
wearing a white shirt, for it would have instantly shown the dirt. And
when I think about it, I remember people used to talk about 'the smell
of the poor', because the majority of a town's inhabitants lived in
poorly ventilated tenements with, at most, a single tap at the foot of
the stairs. A middle-class household (and not just the wealthy ones)
usually included a cook, a parlour-maid and often a nursery-maid to take
care of the children as well. Such women often had a better life than
they would have had if they had stayed at home, but it can't have been
very pleasant, for example, to have had only one day a week when you
were allowed out, and to be generally looked upon as a servant. It was
during my childhood that people were just beginning to think about such
things, and after the First World War, servants became officially known
as 'home helps'. Even so, when I visited Berlin as a student, houses
often had a sign at the entrance which read 'Entrance for Gentlemen and
Ladies only'. Even in those days this made me feel uncomfortable.
Servants and tradesmen had to use the back stairs and weren't allowed to
use the lift, even if they had a heavy load to carry.
Thankfully, all that is over now, like a bad dream. To be sure, life is
still hard for many people, and there are wretched and joyless
neighbourhoods in the towns of Europe and America. But most people who
work in factories and even most of the unemployed live better today than
many medieval knights must have done in their castles. They eat better,
and above all they are healthier and as a rule live longer, which was
not the case only a short while ago. Since time began people have
dreamed of a 'Golden Age', and now that something close to one is true
for so many, no one is willing to admit it.
But the same could not be said of those countries in Eastern Europe
which were forced by Russia's armies to adopt the Communist system. It
was especially hard for the inhabitants of East Germany, who, as the
years went by, saw how much better the lives of their Western neighbours
were, until the day came when they were no longer prepared to make the
heavy sacrifices that the Communist system of economics demanded. And
so, in 1989, quite unexpectedly, the unthinkable happened. The East
Germans succeeded in forcing open their border and both parts of Germany
were once more united. The mood took hold of Soviet Russia, where the
political system collapsed, as it did in all the remaining countries of
Eastern Europe.
I ended my account of the First World War with the words: 'We all hope
for a better future, it must be better.' Has such a future come? For
many of the people who live on our earth, it is still remote. Among the
constantly growing populations of Asia, Africa and South America the
same misery reigns that, until not so long ago, was accepted as normal
in our countries as well. We have no easy remedies, not least because
there too, as ever, intolerance and misery go hand in hand. And yet
improvements in sending information have made the consciences of richer
nations a little more attentive. Whenever an earthquake, a flood or a
drought in a far-off place leaves many victims, thousands of people in
wealthier countries put their money and their efforts into providing
relief. And that, too, used not to happen. Which proves that we still
have the right to go on hoping for a better future.
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In 1969, humans first set foot on the Moon
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