MacMillan's book The War That Ended Peace tells us that French crowds were supportive of the British king's visit in 1903.
Early in 1903 diplomats more than toyed with agreement(s). Agreements had to do with settlements. And settlements had as much to do with money and economy flow as they did with maps. There was initial agreement between Landsdowne and Cambon anyway: British, French, and Spanish banks could make a joint loan to Morocco.
As a gesture of goodwill King Edward could visit Paris. Possibility: an entente with Britain, signalling // a new attitude, new beginning. The British had been guarding their isolation. And to even think of chaining monies into more of the scramble to carve up territory for imperialist profit, well, it had advantages and risks.
From there it was black out curtains and sea crossings.
Expatriates all over the place were already battlescarred. "The public" was beginning to really have opinion(s) and getting downright outspoken. In Britain there'd been public outcry about risking relations with the United States in the tangle of Venezuela owing money to German and British interests; and refusing to pay up. The U.S. used the somewhat mysterious in application Monroe Doctrine to cry--VIOLATION. Germany suggested, Let's mount a joint-naval expedition. The British public expressed vehemence in public outcry about working with Germany. Though, just then the fears each of the powers had of the other powers was more myth and mystique than "intelligence" shared with "public".
"'Sometimes a metaphor is the truest thing there is,' Tante Marie said;" in the story Shadow on the Mountain.
Pasts and presents collided in a wild effusion of emotion in art and loss. Expression changed form, form changed expression.
The poet Kipling's newspaper poem of just before Christmas, 1902, cited in MacMillan's text (pp. 162-163), asks, "Was there no other fleet to find/that you strike bands with these?" With such a question he is scathingly questioning authority: royal and fellow, and recording history. And, the poem criticizes without criticizing. Tsk, tsk, "In sight of peace" jeopardy "--from the Narrow Seas/O'er half the world to run--" worries then of unprotected, further enmity "With a cheated crew, to league anew/With the Goth and the shameless Hun!"
The layers of this rag verse are also about not correcting mistakes and unsound foundations in decision-making and so the trajectory of situation--embattling. And a Judeo-Christian sensibility about sins piling and sinking the honor and glory of an all, like a nation. A cheated crew; so what kind of decisions might get made? The bloody past of all of Europe was testament to such dis-graceful broken from established policy cheats/violences.
The German ambassador in London had never seen such hostility in Britain towards another nation. Personalities and experiences of the world wrestled in diplomacy just beneath the top layer of nationface.
In a round of buildup diplomatic history seemed to evaporate like people on underground trains in Baltimore. And whom shall control Egypt?
Afterall, in modern and somewhat in postmodern times, there is an international community that sees
Failed or failing states as "a problem", "weak", ripe for the picking and depositing into an imperial purse.
Delcasse's representative in Morocco "reported gloomily that the British would use every means from persuasion to bribery in Morocco and when those failed the wives of British diplomats knew what they had to do to further Britain's interests" (MacMillan, 165). Such talk is still bringing gasps from the polite. Some amount of courtly palace drama was also making its way through the minds of the people. Maybe it's the distance between happening and story that allows for citizens to be separate from the castles of news. The distance allows for obscurity and the twists/turns of intrigue and corruption.
Not all advantages and risks are foreseeable, but "realists" could fathom the dangers of actual past(s). Notions like entente, active partnerships, friendship, neutrality were bubbling with new beginning ambitions, acceptance questions, authority, perceptions, and policy.
At the very least, the smoke swirled with whiskey smells, effort, one must make effort, say, preventing other nations from doing so. And just what Sir, are you proposing? Conversations can be epicized too.
Come World War II the people and policies were differently understood. For Europeans there were long histories of self and other navigating issues like same space, runaway egos, rampant discord as money changed situation on broad scale, and a palpable sense of not being "a new nation".
While some policy was re-fortified by warring it out and what truce could be made had been made post WWI, there was more boldness to some groups' designs and devices. Hard lessons had been learned about lip-service and hypocrisy, playing at global truth versus creating barriers between real truth (like national defense) and presentations of nation to other. The ambitions to protect came more fully into form and "national unity" took on more meaning. Whereas the early Communists generated a certain formula of national unity for their feifdoms, the USA had consistently dug deep to find why a unity, some kind of unity is necessary.
Yeah, I heard. Ballistic missiles in Red Sea, and very recent: Russian missiles in Poland's area.
In the 1970's in New York people had to hack out new measures of safety alongside freedom of the press. Whether reflexive with the broader literary world, or, editors and boards taking cues from each other was part of carefully inching from war censorship into peacetime. There'd been realism relayed through fiction. And there'd been dogs and wolves guarding against fiction or any untruth telling from "getting in" to print matter, press-related.
The first "new journalism" was a fiesty challenge according to the writers who dabbled and tooled such literary works. Spicing up detail, deepening context, authoring verifiable fact was evolutionary. And a craft. Newspapers held the line, guarded the fort--it had to be truth. Verify, verify, verify.
Returned MacMillan but found Philpott's War of Attrition at a local bookshop. Both writers' voices on the topic are crirically important.
Gen Xers were always scrambling to understand. In some ways the type of warring that grew out of the Cold War required not a draft, but a working of people already on track with skill-building and experience to align with what was a supreme command with a commander-in-chief working with every conceivable type of character and group.
