The last time I absorbed such a huge amount of information in such a short time was around ten years ago when, on a visit to London’s theatreland, I watched The Reduced Shakespeare Company act out the complete works of William Shakespeare in 97 minutes.
Peter Stubbs, a regular and popular visitor to Stumperlowe Probus Club, took even less time (approximately 50 minutes) to explain to us not only the rather complicated build-up to the First World War but what was virtually a history of Europe.
Fortunately for his audience of 46 members and guests, Peter – a retired Sheffield solicitor who lives in Bakewell – has an easy speaking style and the knack of turning all these nuggets of information into an engaging and entertaining presentation, with the benefit of numerous illustrations. Peter, who has had a lifelong interest in history, was making his eighth visit to our club since October 2017. “I wish you had been my history teacher when I was at school,” was one comment from the audience when Peter took questions at the end of his talk.
He set the scene by reminding us that, 100 years before Germany invaded Belgium at the start of the First World War, there was no such thing as a German state. The country as we know it consisted of more than two dozen kingdoms (with Prussia on its own being a major European power), dukedoms and principalities. Prussia’s military aspirations were summed up by Count Mirabeau, the French statesman, when he famously said: “Prussia is not so much a state with an army but an army with a state,”
The Battle of Leipzig in 1813 saw the coalition armies of Austria, Prussia, Sweden and Russia decisively beat the army of French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte which also included Polish and Italian troops as well as Germans from the Confederation of the Rhine. The battle involved 560,000 soldiers and resulted in 133,000 casualties. It was the largest battle of the Napoleonic Wars and the largest in Europe prior to WWI. Decisively defeated, Napoleon was forced to abdicate and went into exile in Elba in 1814.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the North German Confederation led by the Kingdom of Prussia. In the final days of the war, with German victory all but assured, the German states proclaimed their union as the German Empire under the Prussian king Wilhelm I and Chancellor Bismarck. With then exception of Austria and German Switzerland, the vast majority of German speakers were under a nation state for the first time.
The war had a lasting impact on Europe. By hastening German unification, it changed the balance of power on the Continent, with the new German state supplanting France as the dominant power. By 1914, Germany had few friends but huge industrial muscle and the largest population in Europe. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austrian-Hungarian throne, was assassinated on a visit to Sarajevo, sparking the First World War, the German Kaiser confirmed that “Austria could depend on Germany’s full support.”
The assassination set off a chain of events that led to war in August 1914, when Germany declared war on Russia, leading to the bloodiest conflict in history. When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, a Russian ally, Russia began mobilising for war. Germany, as Austria-Hungary’s ally, demanded that Russia stop preparing for war, and when Russia refused Germany declared war.
The conflict dragged on for more than four years. When the fighting ended, the French General Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Allied Commander on the Western Front in 1918, considered the terms of the Treaty of Versailles too lenient on Germany, declaring ominously: “This is not peace – it is an armistice for 20 years.”
History, of course, proved him right.