Tragic and Disastrous

Far too rarely, the Old Right is permitted a platform. Allan Massie writes:

The First World War was tragic and disastrous, its consequences appalling: the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the collapse of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, a weakened France and a weakened Britain, Italy ripe for the Fascist takeover; Germany demoralised, resentful, and eventually succumbing to Hitler bent on revenging the defeat in 1918. When the culture minister Maria Miller says it “ensured that Europe could continue to be a set of countries which were strong”, one despairs. Where did she get that idea?

In 1914 almost everybody got it wrong. That includes the United Kingdom, of which more later. The murder in Sarajevo of the heir to the Habsburg Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, served as the trigger. The assassin was a young Serbian nationalist. Austria-Hungary sought revenge; in Vienna they believed that a little war against Serbia would strengthen the Empire. Russia played the big Slav brother; a successful war would bolster the Tsardom.

Germany was alarmed and backed Austria-Hungary; its general staff was eager for war with Russia. They calculated that Russia’s economic and military development meant that in a few years Russia would be stronger than Germany. So war now was better than war later. France had a treaty of alliance with Russia and also wanted revenge for the defeat in 1870 and the recovery of the “lost provinces”, Alsace and Lorraine, annexed by Germany then. The German war plan in the west provided for a sweep through Belgium, whose neutrality was guaranteed by treaty. Though the Foreign Office was not sure that the Treaty obliged us to intervene, the prospect of Belgium’s ports being in German hands was alarming.

Of all the powers engaged, Britain was the least responsible for the war. Yet we might have prevented it. We had an understanding with France – the Entente Cordiale – but no firm commitment. If we had made it clear to Germany that we would stand by France, wiser counsels might have prevailed in Berlin. If, alternatively, we had told the French that we would not intervene, their government might have hesitated.

In the end everyone found good reasons for going to war. This is understandable. What is less understandable – or at least less forgivable, at this distance – is why the war continued after a sort of stalemate had been reached in 1915-16. The only answer must be that war has its own momentum; we can see this in Syria today. Only victory can justify war’s horrors.

So when, in 1916, the Marquess of Lansdowne, a former Conservative foreign secretary, presented a memorandum to the Cabinet arguing for peace negotiations, he met with no response. A year later, November 1917, he wrote in the same terms to The Times, which refused to print his letter. It was then published in The Daily Telegraph, and Lansdowne found himself accused of disloyalty to the Allied Cause and was ostracised by the Conservative Party.

The great battles in the autumn of 1918, which broke the German army and led to the Armistice in November, seemed at the time to justify the rejection of Lansdowne’s recommendation that a peace conference should have been called to end the war. Yet he was surely right. Without the German myth of “the stab in the back”, without the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, without the great inflation and the economic troubles that afflicted the Weimar Republic, there would have been no Hitler, no Nazi regime, no Second World War.

As for the other consequences of that terrible war, we know what happened to Russia, and, even now, we can see in the turmoil of the Middle East, the long-term consequences of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, Germany’s ally in 1914-18.