The causes of World War I originated many years before the first shot was fired, yet it might have been averted with goodwill and diplomacy on all sides The United States was not officially drawn into the conflict until 1917, but its entry was a decisive factor in the events leading up the signing of the Peace Treaty at Versailles in 1919.

 

The negotiations that led to the transfer of the Danish West Indies just a week before the US declared war on Germany also completed a process begun centuries beforehand. Britain and Denmark had resisted German attempts to establish colonies on St. Thomas and Peter Island as early as the late 1600s. On a personal note, the war tore my own family apart.

Denmark’s loss of short wars with Prussia (the largest of a patchwork of German states) and Austria (the other major Central European power) in 1864 strained its finances. It was having to subsidise the declining D.W.I. economy, but the islands traded almost exclusively with the US. This and their strategic location led the US government to agree to buy St. Thomas and St. John for $7.5 million in 1865. The colony’s electorate voted overwhelming in favour of the transfer, but the US Senate voted against the acquisition of any further non-contiguous territory after purchasing Alaska, with jibes against “annexing hurricanes and earthquakes” after the recent damage St. Thomas had suffered.

Aging king

In Prussia the elected Landtag (legislature) sought a liberal democracy like Great Britain’s. However, the aged King Wilhelm, backed by the army, wanted a powerful unified Germany dominated by Prussia. This led the king to appoint Prince Otto von Bismarck (the country’s strong man) as his minister-president. Bismarck considered Prussia’s frontiers (fixed in 1815, after the Napoleonic Wars) unsuitable for its “healthy” expansion. He allied with Austria to seize the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark, then in 1866 turned on Austria so Prussia could annex them both and assert its supremacy over all the German states. Forty thousand Austrians and 10,000 Prussians were killed, wounded, or imprisoned after the decisive battle of the latter war.

Prussia humiliated France in 1871, after a slightly longer war, by seizing Alsace-Lorraine in a peace treaty signed in the French Palace of Versailles. While there, Bismarck also had King Wilhelm declared Kaiser (emperor) of a unified Germany. Then in 1877-8, Russia waged a successful war against Turkey, but the other European powers later reversed some of the territory it claimed as a result. Seeing other European powers carving out African colonies, Germany launched expeditions as well, frightening both the British and French governments. Bismarck (himself a reluctant coloniser) called a conference of all the major European countries in Berlin in 1884 to agree on a joint policy on the African continent (leading to the “Scramble for Africa.”)

Personal ties

In 1866, my 6-year-old grandfather, Gustav Adolph Hermann Moll (“GAH” for short) was living in Berlin with his widowed mother and three older brothers. Friedrich Herman Leopold Raphael (“FHLR”), their eldest sibling, had joined the Indo-European Telegraph Company in England in 1865 as a telegraphist. Oskar Paul Leopold Moll (POL) also joined the Victorian communications revolution in 1867 and later married an English woman in a fashionable church near London. He was naturalised British in 1879.

The Indo-European Telegraph Company chose POL to act as the Shah of Persia’s personal telegraph operator while he stayed in Buckingham Palace in 1873. He could thus conduct his state business just as if he were in his own palace in Tehran, something impossible not many years before. POL had to remain within the “calling” sound of a telegraph instrument set up in an apartment next to the Shah’s bedroom. When the Shah stayed with The Lord Mayor of London in Mansion House, FHLR performed a similar duty. By 1881, GAH was also working in London, as a telegraph clerk. He married my grandmother, born in Hertfordshire, in 1883.

The new Kaiser

Prussia’s liberally minded Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, married to Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter “Vicky,” succeeded his father as Kaiser in 1886. He had endeared himself to the Landtag by supporting mass education, a free press and the advancement of women. However, these objectives were opposed by the army and Bismarck, to whom democracy was an anathema. However, Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm was dead from a chronic throat disease within months. His successor, his eldest son Wilhelm, was the complete opposite of his father. He was arrogant, self-centred, impetuous and insensitive, ever aware of the deformed left arm with which he had been born. He treated his widowed mother harshly and forced her to retire to the Prussian countryside after his accession.

Even Bismark despaired of Kaiser Wilhelm’s undiplomatic, war-like attitude and resigned from his post in 1890. Kaiser Wilhelm then went on to alienate both Russia and France. Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm’s early death was a tragedy for Germany and the world. He would have led the development of liberal democracy in Europe. Instead, his son stoked the nationalistic fires that led to WWI.

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