The German Question, Part Seventy-Two

"Kaiser Wilhelm & World War I" Part Two/B "The Germans At War"

"An Early Peace Becomes Virtually Impossible"

Just weeks after the war began, the Allies* announced they had signed a pact in London in which each agreed NOT to sign any separate peace agreements. Within a week, this brought a "war goals plan" from the Germans in response, a plan that was never made official, but once made public, it became "reality," official or not. With early German military successes in both western Europe and eastern Europe, the German leadership displayed both over confidence and stupidity...ah, I mean poor judgment. The "plan" announced Germany's intention to annex Luxembourg to Germany,** to annex  parts of Belgium to Germany, to station German troops and naval forces in both Belgium and the Netherlands (thus putting both nations under German influence and replacing any ideas of "neutrality"), to extract large reparation payments from France to pay for the costs of the war, to make France more economically dependent on Germany by forbidding French trade with Britain and by possibly even taking certain French industrial territory, to require France to dismantle fortifications near or along the German border, to take the Russian part of Poland and make it into a German dominated state, to expand Germany's colonies in Africa by taking French and Belgian colonies.

If this didn't scare the absolute hell out of the Allies, it certainly left them little or no wiggle room, except to fight on. The Allies certainly didn't need much of a propaganda machine with the above "goals," as the "plan" spoke for itself. In fairness, many German leaders opposed this whole thing, and again, it was never made official, but the damage was done. Further, by the Allies announcing that they would stick together, with no separate peace agreements possible (in theory), they also share a part of the blame for the mentality that overtook the war, as a fight to the death (again, in theory). (A Word History is below the notes)

* France, Britain & Russia. Italy and the United States did not enter the war on the Allied side until later.

** So here is Luxembourg in the "German Question" again. Remember, it had been a German state, but had gained independence, although keeping its association with Germany as a member of the German Customs Union ("Zollverein," in German). There's no question much of the population was German, although with French influences, naturally more heavily near the French border, but without much info on public sentiment, I don't really know how Luxemburgers felt overall. The problem France, especially, had with this, was not over whether most Luxemburgers were Germans or not, but rather how annexation of Luxembourg would have augmented Germany's power; something France already feared, and it would have lengthened the German border with northern France.

WORD HISTORY:
Helmet/Helm-"Helm" goes back to the Indo European root "kel/khel," which meant "cover." This then gave Old Germanic "(k)helmaz," meaning "a sturdy cover for the head, protective head cover." This gave Anglo-Saxon "helm," with the same meaning. Meanwhile, Frankish, a Germanic language or dialect related to English, passed along "helm" to Old French, a Latin-based language, but with a fair number of Germanic words (especially still in those days) bequeathed to it, mainly from its namesake, "Frankish." It was spelled "helme" in Old French, but then became "helmet," a bit later, with the ending making it smaller (called a diminutive); so "small protective head covering," was the more literal meaning. This form was borrowed into English in the latter part of the 1400s, and overtook the native "helm" form of the word. Very common in its various forms in the Germanic languages: Standard German, Low German, West Frisian and Dutch all have "helm" (technically German uses a capital "H," as all nouns are capitalized), East Frisian has "hälm," Danish and Norwegian have "hjelm," Swedish has "hjälm," Icelandic has "hjálmur."