Guns of August

Peter Hitchens writes:

I’m pleased to see that the historian Niall Ferguson here is saying that Britain had no need to enter the First World War, and in fact that it was a terrible mistake for us to do so.

Good.  This seems to me to be the only worthwhile debate we can have about that conflict.

If it were true that it was some sort of struggle between freedom and tyranny, or civilisation and barbarism (which it wasn’t), then the excuses made for the generals and the politicians might have some validity.

If the stake truly had been that high, then all kinds of incompetent fumbling, and trial and error with thousands of men’s lives at stake, might just be excusable.

But as soon as it is reduced to a mere war of choice, into which this country for one fell through error, scheming, or simple panic, then the colossal butcher’s bill is plainly unjustified.

I’d add that there’s no real doubt that Germany began the war.

I really don’t know why anyone bothers to argue otherwise. The great German historian Fritz Fischer established this beyond all doubt in his unmatched work of 1961, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegzielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918.

This was published in English with the emollient and evasive title, Germany's Aims in the First World War. A more accurate, if slightly sensational translation, as the word ‘grab’ is slightly more violent and demotic than ‘Griff’, would be A Grab for World Power - The War Aims of Imperial Germany 1914-1918.

Perhaps Grasping for World Power would be more accurate, if less literal, as is often the case in translation. This article is also helpful in explaining the situation.

Barbara Tuchman’s marvellous Guns of August is also quite plain that Germany had been aching to march through Belgium into France for years, and had all but openly begged the Belgians to allow this to happen.

At the same time France, burning with the desire to revenge her (deserved) defeat in 1870, was virtually desperate to drag Britain in this futile conflict, and actually pulled its troops back from the German frontier in July 1914 to avoid any possibility of an incident allowing the Germans to portray France as the aggressor, in which case Britain would have stayed out.

Meanwhile British and French soldiers had been in secret talks for years, more or less committing Britain to march in the event of war, without the knowledge of the British government.

Quite why so many members of the Liberal government fell in so quickly with a war they initially opposed, I’ve often wondered.

It certainly wasn’t some kind of bankers’ conspiracy. The City of London, and most of the British economy, were aghast at the prospect of a European war.

I think we just have to put it down to stupidity, cowardice and human weakness, the things which explain so much of history.

Why wasn’t it, as my Grandfather’s old medal says, in words engraved on one whole side of the bronze disc he and many others were given when it was all over, ‘The Great War for Civilization’?

Well, it obviously didn’t work out that way. It probably put paid to Western Christian civilization, though it has taken about a century to die.

But even at the time, our side wasn’t that marvellous.

Experts on suffrage have pointed out that Imperial Germany, in 1914, had a broader suffrage than Britain. The mighty German Social Democratic Party, then still a united force, was growing constantly in power and strength.

Austria-Hungary, our other enemy, was a surprisingly liberal empire, almost multicultural in modern terms, and heartbreakingly civilized, in cultural and scientific terms, compared with the horrible things which would follow in the regions it governed.

As I’ve noted here before, Stefan Zweig’s World of Yesterday portrays a nation which, at the time, seemed stuffy and oppressive, but on which millions would look back fondly after it had vanished from the earth.

Belgium, well, I suggest those who are interested study Paul Belien’s A Throne in Brussels, for an unsentimental, and very Flemish, look at that artificial country and its very odd monarchy.

I don’t, by the way, endorse Dr Belien’s political position, or approve of his party, the Vlaams Belang.  But it’s a fascinating book.

We’ve discussed here before the supposed ‘commitment’ of Britain to rush to Belgium’s defence, which is a) nothing quite as clear as is claimed, and b) was the sort of commitment Britain had oiled out of in the past when it was foolish or inconvenient to fulfil it.

(This casts a flickering yellow light on the clinically mad guarantee to Poland of April 1939, in which we actually invented, quiet needlessly, a dangerous commitment to defend an unlovely country which we couldn’t in any case save, thus once again giving someone else the right to decide when, where and about what we entered a global war -  as if we actually desired to repeat the disaster of 1914 in detail.)

France had recently recovered from the Dreyfus affair, but remained a profoundly divided and often bigoted society, by no means friendly to Britain.

Russia, our other ally, was an autocracy, barely beginning to reform itself into a modern state, having abolished serfdom only a few decades before.

By the way, how France managed to survive the first months of the war, I still cannot fathom.

Its armies were so incompetently led, and so many men needlessly sacrificed in moronic frontal charges,  that it is a matter of amazement that Germany’s professional soldiers did not manage to roll them up in a matter of weeks.

By the way, the idea that plucky British soldiers saved the day is not borne out by the facts. The Old Contemptibles fought bravely, but made only a marginal difference to the speed of the German advance.

Quite possibly, the Belgians’ futile but courageous defence of Liege probably prevented a swift German triumph.

Tuchman’s book is terrific on this part of the war, and on the astonishment caused when Germany unveiled its enormous mobile siege guns, ominous and disturbing weapons unlike anything ever seen before in human history, foreshadowing all the mighty works of perverted science which have been such a feature of the modern world.  

Professor Ferguson says, in my view quite rightly, that we would have lost nothing significant by staying out of war in 1914, and might well have saved much that is valuable.

If this is true, and it is, then Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War! is more truthful and moral than an awful lot of respectable history.

And the triumvirate of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen, whose literary and poetic accounts of that war I tried so hard, for so many years, to resist, were right.