Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 223

Would Our Attacks on Russia be So Shrill if We Knew More about This War?

I would like to begin this posting by praising the considerable courage, resolve and dedication of the team from the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe) whose bulletins from the Ukraine war are so very useful to anyone seeking impartial and careful reports.

 

Here’s a recent example;

 

http://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm/122468

 

You can obtain these reports free of charge by going to the OSCE website and subscribing.

 

Follow these instructions

 

'In order to receive our newest press releases and other material, you need to go to our Home page http://www.osce.org/.  If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, you will find this:

 

 

Enter your email, click on sign up, and you will be taken to a page where you should set your preferences.  In order to receive all information about Ukraine, be sure to check the “Ukraine” box, and of course any other countries you are interested in. That is the only way to receive news from us the moment we post them on the website.

 

If you wish to check recent news about Ukraine, there are two places to look on our website:

-        The first is the page called “Ukraine, a developing story”, which you can access either by clicking on it on the Carrousel, or directly at this link: http://www.osce.org/ukrainemonitoring

-        The second is the Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine” page: http://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm

 

In addition to these two pages, whenever there are breaking news or stories we feel deserve attention, we put them up on the Home page Carrousel (the moving slides on top) or on the red and blue ticker lines at the very top.'

 

 

Fair-minded readers here will I hope recognize that I am severely critical of the behaviour of pro-Russian and Ukrainian forces in this area, and I do not in any way seek to conceal that the OSCE (and the UN) have reported disgraceful actions by the separatists, including kidnapping and torture. My Russian sympathies do not make me blind to the barbarities of ‘my’ side. On the contrary, I am especially disgusted and dispirited by them.

 

This is a very nasty little war, the nastiest since Yugoslavia. I counselled against the steps which led to it, and wish it was not taking place. It is leading rapidly to the ‘New Cold War’ which others have long wanted, though it may not be that Cold when it comes to it.

 

I believe, and have argued here till every particle of the relevant facts and logic was ground into tiny mites of dust, that the aggressors in this matter (and so the instigators of the horrors) were the EU and their American backers. I still believe this is very much the case, and deplore their willingness to take such a large, conscious risk, against many clear warnings,  in such a contentious area.

 

Anyway, my point here is that, if the coverage of the war in the Western media were a little fuller, the self-righteous anti-Russian tone might be a little less shrill.

 

How often have we heard of various out-of–favour governments being condemned for ‘killing their own people’, a charge mysteriously never laid against such favourites of the ‘West’ as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan (of whom more soon, as he grasps for his country’s Presidency) who is just as much of a menace to freedom as Vladimir Putin, but gets away with it. Prominent among such governments until recently was that of Syria, which now turns out to have been our bulwark against the Sunni fanatics of Islamic state. And which has also complied very thoroughly with the agreed destruction of its chemical weapons, a development barely reported.

 

In fact, ‘Islamic State’ (formerly ISIS), can reasonably be said to have been created by the decision of the ‘West’ to join in the destabilization of the Assad government, so gravely weakening that state and allowing this poisonous flower to flourish.

 

Now, read the OSCE report to which  have linked above. It reports, dispassionately and carefully, the shelling of a block of flats and of a hospital in Donyetsk. Yup, that’s right -  a hospital.

 

These are actions for which Israel is (quite rightly)  condemned in Gaza. Many hundreds have already died in this war. And who, do you think, fired the shells? It seems to me that there is no other possible culprit except the forces ( I will not say 'Army', because there are many less disciplined units) of Ukraine. And these victims are citizens of Ukraine. therefore surely this is a case of that thing we are always righteously condemning. A government 'killing its own people'. 

 

In case any of you have not followed the link, here is an excerpt from it  (SMM means ‘Special Monitoring Mission). It comes from Donyetsk, a large, densely-populated city in separatist-held territory,  now under artillery attack and other forms of attack from Ukraine :

 

‘Based on information received from local sources, the SMM proceeded to a city-centre residential area two kilometres (ten furlongs, or one and a quarter miles)  north of their initial location, where they observed two high-rise buildings that had evidently sustained serious damage, which the SMM assessed as being consistent with shelling.

 

In one of the buildings, a 15-storey residential block, there was a large 50cm-diameter hole in outer walls on both the fifth and thirteenth floors. All windows on both floors were shattered. Rescue and emergency personnel were present. They reported no casualties.

 

At a 17-storey high-rise building 200 metres (220 yards)away, the SMM observed a 50cm-diameter (1 foot 8 inches) hole in the outer wall of the seventh floor and two 50cm-diameter holes in the outer walls of the fifteenth floor. All windows were shattered on the ground floor, and there were multiple traces of shrapnel in the aluminium façade of the wall.

 

Both buildings are less than 500 metres (550 yards) from the occupied SBU building. The area has been shelled three times previously in the past three weeks.

 

Two hundred metres from the high rise buildings, the SMM observed that all the windows on the second floor of a public hospital had been destroyed. On entering the hospital, the SMM observed that the entire second floor had been destroyed, with internal walls, furniture and medical equipment destroyed, with only rubble remaining. (The SMM has photographs of all material damage observed).

 

The SMM saw many evidently traumatised and crying civilians and medical staff. Ten patients, in their pyjamas, were outside the building. A doctor told the SMM that two civilians, who had been standing outside the building at the time of the attack, had been hit by shrapnel, one of whom, he said, had died. The SMM later went to the morgue, where they saw a body, with upper chest injuries consistent with information supplied by the doctor. According to a staff member at the morgue, the deceased man had been 38 years’ old.’

Fools and Knaves?

This posting takes up an argument I have been having with Mr Charles Stephenson on the comment thread of ‘1914 Revisited – Part Two’.

(the exchange is reproduced below).

 

But first, what is a ‘viable’ position?  Mr Stephenson seems to think that it is one validated by fashion. I think it is one validated by facts, reason and experience. If a man had been counted wise and successful all his life, and then suddenly deserted left his home and family, and took to criminal violence, debauchery and drunkenness, would he still be wise or good, or a ‘serious intellect’? Or would we think that perhaps we had misjudged him before?

 

Mr Stephenson responds to my point -  that two major political figures, John Burns and John Morley, resigned from the Cabinet that the two of the Left’s greatest figures opposed the war and that a demonstration against war filled Trafalgar Square to overflowing on Sunday 2nd August 1914 (which I offered as evidence that Asquith did not ‘take a united country into war’ as Mr Stephenson had maintained, and there was ‘significant opposition’, as Mr Stephenson had said there wasn’t) -  by saying:

 

‘ Many of them were against war on principle; the Labour leader was a pacifist. It wasn’t just this war it would have been any war. In any event, just two of Asquith’s cabinet resigned; the leader of the Labour Party (37 MPs I believe and so roughly equivalent to today’s pre-coalition Lib-Dems) also resigned when the majority of his parliamentary party supported it;’;

 

I think this still represents significant opposition, especially in a country where the ‘establishment’ was in favour of war, and when the warning of approaching war was so very brief. Had the anti-war forces in politics, the newspapers and the country  (the Manchester Guardian was fiercely opposed to war) had more time to mobilize before war was a fait accompli, I think we would have seen far greater opposition. But, like all bad decisions, this one was rushed.

 

Mr Stephenson continues (do I hear a sniff of scorn here?)  :

‘ and there was (according to The Times) a ‘socialist demonstration in Trafalgar Square.’

 

Well, yes, ‘The Times’ was ferociously in favour of war. Other reports, detailed by Douglas Newton, gave the demonstration far greater prominence and treated it more seriously. The organisers had perhaps a couple of days to assemble their forces. I would like to see anyone, even Mr Stephenson,  fill Trafalgar Square at such notice even in these days of easy mass communications and much larger population.

 

 

Mr Stephenson concludes : ‘You say that ‘the arguments made for it were and remain demonstrably thin.’ This wasn’t apparent to the likes of . . . I won’t bother itemising a list of those who disagreed at the time, many of whom were considered serious intellects both then and now. Yet you argue that they were, all of them, merely fools or knaves. I submit that this this is not a viable position.’

 

I am not interested in what was ‘apparent’. I am interested in what was the case, the very thing which serious intellects are supposed to be able to distinguish. The task of all philosophy is to penetrate the disguises in which history advances itself. Much of the point of 'King Lear' is to show what happens to those who mistake their friends for their enemies, and appearance for reality.

 

So: the naval threat didn’t exist (or rather it came from the USA, not from Germany) . Britain had no treaty obligation to France or Russia. The 1839 Treaty of London did not commit us to go to war for Belgiumm, and the Cabinet knew it. The threat to the French coast from the German navy was imaginary, and in any case irrelevant. We had no material interest in entering the war. The impression, given by Grey and shared by most enthusiasts for war, that Britain would not be involved in a land war but would fight purely as an naval power, was utterly false.   Modern war was already known, by observation,  to be static, costly and bloody in the extreme.  The idea that this was a war for freedom and democracy was exploded by the fact that our principal ally was Tsarist Russia, a fact not mentioned by Grey in his speech to the Commons urging war. At least Churchill acknowledged that there were moral problems in an alliance with Stalin.

 

‘Fools and knaves’ is Mr Stephenson's formulation, pressed on me in a Paxmanesque 'Yes or no! Answer the question!' fashion'. I might have myself chosen more nuanced words, such as ‘unwise’ , ill-infornmed, 'vainglorious' or ‘unscrupulous’. But if pressed, I cannot really disagree with his assessment of the men who ruined the British Empire forever in an evening.

 

Here I will digress a moment to respond to ‘EricD’ who wrote ; ‘ What alternative did Britain have in August 1914? Suppose Britain and the Empire had abstained from Armageddon. The German armies would have torn France apart and marched victorious through Paris. Without France holding on the West, the Kaiser's legions would have turned on Russia and brought the Tsarist Empire to its knees. An intolerable German hegemony would have arisen in Europe, and the militarist autocracy of Imperial Germany would hardly have been liberalized by vast military triumph. Britain and the Empire would have been left isolated between rising American power on one side and a predatory German Empire on the other. What alternative could the Cabinet of 1914, knowing what it did at the time, have pursued that would have led to a better future for the Empire? I'm not so sure. If you haven't already done so Mr. Hitchens, I would highly recommend the book "Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914" by Max Hastings’

 

Yes, I have read Sir Max’s book ( and my article in the ‘American Spectator’ to which I linked here  on this blog two weeks ago http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/07/an-article-about-the-first-world-war-for-the-american-spectator.html is in part a review of it).

 

 

But ‘EricD’ is not, I fear, thinking about what he writes. Why should Britain have cared if in 1914

‘German armies would have torn France apart and marched victorious through Paris.’ ?

 

France was not, and never has been, our traditional ally,  let alone our friend. if France had fought and resisted Germany in 1940 as bitterly and determiendly as she fought against Britain in the Vichy years (Mers-el-Kebir, Dakar, Syria) , the Blitzkrieg might have failed.  . We hadn’t cared when something similar happened in 1870. In 1815, we and the Prussians had both joined hands to defeat France and occupy Paris. I believe there were victory parades, and ho does he think Britain owns the rather grand embassy we still occupy in Paris? 

 

Why would German hegemony have been ‘intolerable’ exactly, if we had stayed outside it? We have it now, and we are trapped in it. Is that better? Germany in 1914 was a law-governed state with a larger manhood suffrage than Britain’s, and a huge and powerful opposition in the form of the Social Democrats. By comparison with tsarist Russia, our ally in 1914, it was a model of modern liberal governance. Even the most cursory reading of my three-part essay on the war over the past week will show a) that Germany’s interests lay in the east, not the West, that it only attacked France because France was allied with its real target, Russia and b) that Germany’s elite was interested in a ‘liberal imperialism’ rather similar to today’s EU. I don’t see how the nations and peoples of eastern and central Europe would have been particularly worse off under such hegemony as they were in the War and what followed. Rather the contrary. As Tooze demonstrates, America's military and financial power was largely created by our participation in the Great War. Without it, her challenge would ahve been at least delayed, perhaps cancelled. Russia, as always. was a tougher old goose than most people thought. It is unlikely Germany would ahve been able to relax in the east for many long years. 

 

By staying out in 1914, Britain would have remained rich and independent enough to avoid absorption into any such hegemony, and there is no reason to believe that Germany would have cared, priovdied we had left her to get on with her eastwards (liberal) Empire-building.  I am quite sure of this. No doubt Britain would have declined from its position in 1914 anyway, but our involvement in the war was not decline, it was cataclysm, descent into debt and subservience in a matter of two years, accompanied by moral pollution and the loss of our best young men.

 

What alternative could the Cabinet have pursued? The alternative that Woodrow Wilson pursued, of staying out of a conflict in which we had no interest, using our wealth to influence the outcome in our interests, employing our natural defences of the sea and our costly and long-cherished weapon, the Royal Navy to deter anyone from dragging us in.

 

Here are my exchanges up till now with Mr Stephenson:

 

Mr S:

‘Mr Hitchens, The reason why Britain went to war against Germany in 1914 is, at bottom, straightforward; the government of the time considered that it was in British interests to do so. It may be that the Liberal cabinet was composed of knaves and fools, but there was little or no opposition in the House of Commons, the press, or indeed the country as a whole so far as can be judged. Indeed, the leader of the Conservative Party stated in parliament on 3 August: ‘on behalf of the party of which I am leader in this House, that in whatever steps [the government] think it necessary to take for the honour and security of this country they can rely upon the unhesitating support of the Opposition.’ Even British labour leaders, who had maintained an anti-war stance up until the point the government declared war on Germany (4 August), fell in with the decision. These included most, though not all, of the 40 Labour MPs in Parliament at the time. Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party were in support and only the Independent Labour Party remained opposed. You appear to be of the opinion, if I have understood you correctly, that all these people, many of whom were by no means lightweight in any sense of the term, were wrong. Wrong moreover not just in hindsight, but wrong at the time. As a very distinguished historian once put it: ‘It’s unfair to criticise a man because you know something he didn’t know.’ I think then that you are being unfair.’

 

Me:

 

Mr Stephenson writes : 'Mr Hitchens, You mention three people who opposed Britain’s declaration of war in August 1914; John Burns, Ramsay MacDonald, and Keir Hardie. No doubt there are several more names that could be added. But, and it is a very big but, these voices were very few and, dare I say it, not those of people particularly well regarded or influential at the time. The Liberal Government under Asquith took a more or less united country into the conflict. Certainly the Conservative opposition, who might well qualify as ‘proper’ conservatives, were at one with them. That this happened was essentially down to one thing and one thing only: it was judged at the time to be in Britain’s essential interests to do so. Were all these people fools and/or knaves?' Don't know about well-regarded or influential . John Burns, like John Morley, who also opposed war, was a member of Asquith's Cabinet, so he must have been a *bit* well-regarded. Morley himself was one of the most distinguished Liberals of his age. Ramsay Mac was Parliamentary leader of the Labour Party and would later become Prime Minister. Keir Hardie is generally counted to have been a great man even by his opponents. If accounts of the Trafalgar Square demonstration are true (and they come from several separate sources) , that hardly makes it a united country. But then, remember the way things went over the Iraq war, which had almost universal political and media support, or at least compliance. Fools? In my view yes. The default position of any wise and civilized person, faced with a choice of war or not (and this was a war of choice) is to be against unless overwhelming reasons dictate war. As I rather thought I'd shown in this series of posts, the excuses and pretexts for war advanced at the time and since don't stand up to examination now, and , more crucially, didn't stand up to it then. Though some of them may have been knaves too. That's another discussion. As to the Tories being 'proper conservatives' in 1914, were they? I don't see why. They never were at any other time.

 

 

 

Mr S:

 

Mr Hitchens, You mention three people who opposed Britain’s declaration of war in August 1914; John Burns, Ramsay MacDonald, and Keir Hardie. No doubt there are several more names that could be added. But, and it is a very big but, these voices were very few and, dare I say it, not those of people particularly well regarded or influential at the time. The Liberal Government under Asquith took a more or less united country into the conflict. Certainly the Conservative opposition, who might well qualify as ‘proper’ conservatives, were at one with them. That this happened was essentially down to one thing and one thing only: it was judged at the time to be in Britain’s essential interests to do so. Were all these people fools and/or knaves?

 

 

Me:

 

Mr Stephenson, with the air of a High Priest Bearing the Urn of Certainty Down the Steps of Truth, says : ‘Mr Hitchens, So all of those who supported British entry into the war in 1914, apart perhaps from some who were knaves, were fools! An interesting, if totally ahistorical, position. Good luck with it.’ I don’t see that I need much luck. Since I have shown that responsible persons opposed the war at the time, and that they had good reason to do so, and that the arguments made for it were and remain demonstrably thin, and since it is beyond doubt that it was a colossal and irreparable national disaster, what need of luck? Any observation of modern public life would tend to confirm a high quotient of fools. As for knaves, I’m not prepared to have that discussion right now as I’m too busy, though there is one rather prominent candidate for the title, alas. Mr Stephenson appeared in an earlier posting not to realise that John Burns was a Cabinet Minister in 1914, or even to know who John Morley was, or to reckon that the Labour Party of the time was an important political force, or to grasp how large the anti-war protest in London was on the Sunday before war broke out, or to know anything of the substantial opposition to war among Liberal newspapers, as he said ‘these voices were very few and, dare I say it, not those of people particularly well regarded or influential at the time. The Liberal Government under Asquith took a more or less united country into the conflict.’ United country? Trafalgar Square full of protestors, and, for goodness sake, at one stage five of Asquith’s Cabinet resigned rather than support war, though some of them later withdrew their resignations. This simply isn’t the case, and I don’t think anyone who had read my postings properly would have said it. As for ‘ if the Tories weren’t 'proper conservatives' in 1914, and ‘never were at any other time’ either, then is it the case that the UK has never had a conservative (as opposed to Conservative) government? Ever?’ , I should think that was about right. Pre-1914 was by its nature a conservative thing in itself, but its competing political factions neither understood the nature of this nor valued it (as they showed by risking it). The trouble with people such as Mr Stephenson is that they think any idea that is generally accepted is naturally right, and are disturbed if anyone suggests that such ideas need to be proved or demonstrated.  

 

Mr S:

 

‘Mr Hitchens, So all of those who supported British entry into the war in 1914, apart perhaps from some who were knaves, were fools! An interesting, if totally ahistorical, position. Good luck with it. Slightly off topic: if the Tories weren’t 'proper conservatives' in 1914, and ‘never were at any other time’ either, then is it the case that the UK has never had a conservative (as opposed to Conservative) government? Ever?

 

 

Mr S:

 

‘Mr Hitchens, You argue that you ‘have shown that responsible persons opposed the war at the time, and that they had good reason to do so.’ I don’t doubt that there were ‘responsible persons’ that opposed British entry into the war, or that ‘they had good reason to do so.’ The trouble is there weren’t that many of them and they weren’t influential enough to have any effect. Many of them were against war on principle; the Labour leader was a pacifist. It wasn’t just this war it would have been any war. In any event, just two of Asquith’s cabinet resigned; the leader of the Labour Party (37 MPs I believe and so roughly equivalent to today’s pre-coalition Lib-Dems) also resigned when the majority of his parliamentary party supported it; and there was (according to The Times) a ‘socialist demonstration in Trafalgar Square.’ You say that ‘the arguments made for it were and remain demonstrably thin.’ This wasn’t apparent to the likes of . . . I won’t bother itemising a list of those who disagreed at the time, many of whom were considered serious intellects both then and now. Yet you argue that they were, all of them, merely fools or knaves. I submit that this this is not a viable position.

1914 Revisited, Part 3 - the Price of Vainglory is Paid in Power as Well as Gold

The Price of War is Paid in the Currency of Power

 

After the folly comes the cost.  We know about the lives, ended or ruined ( and any who know anything about the period knows how devastating that loss was, not least because our army, alone in Europe, was initially made up of volunteers, by their nature the best we had).

 

Most of what follows is taken from Adam Tooze’s ‘The Deluge’ undoubtedly the history book of the year. It is far more important and revelatory than Christopher Clark’s weirdly popular pro-German volume ‘The Sleepwalkers’, which diminishes the blame most historians have rightly attached to Germany since Fritz Fischer’s devastating work 60 years ago.

 

If Germany hadn’t wanted war with Russia, there would have been no war in 1914. France might have been disappointed, but France wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to create a war where none was needed. And the pro-war faction in Britain were willing to seize what they madly thought was an opportunity, but also would never have engineered a war out of nothing. The poor old Russians were simply manoeuvred into a gigantic elephant trap, out of which they are still trying to heave themselves a century afterwards.

 

I was amused on Wednesday to see that a German historian has doubts about Christopher Clark’s  book. Gerd Krumreich, Professor of Modern history at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge,  has been attacking Professor Clark’s book, saying in the French magazine ‘L’Express’ ‘Clark likes Germans too much…He lets them off the hook and tells them their ancestors are less to blame than the Russians, Serbs and French. And the general public loves to rediscover a past which is now no longer to be deemed corrupted.’

 

It’s all still alive, you see. The ghosts of Bethmann Hollweg, the Kaiser, Ludendorff, Friedrich Naumann and the rest of them still walk.  But only those who understand the game that was played in 1914 can see clearly that it is still being played now, in the twice-devastated bloodlands of Ukraine.

 

Adam Tooze’s main theme is the triumph of the USA, not just over Britain( which it indebted, out-gunned and replaced) but over the whole pre-1914 order. This wasn’t just a US victory, but a transformation. What the USA (especially Woodrow Wilson) wanted was a tamed world in which old-fashioned great power rivalries would no longer mess everything up and get in the way of its dominance.

 

By idiotically going to war (for no discernible purpose) in 1914, Britain gave Washington the opportunity to achieve this. The process, interrupted by the great depression and the 1939 war, was completed in 1941-48 by Placentia Bay, Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, NATO and the first moves towards European Union. Tooze doesn’t say this, or probably even think it, but my own conclusion from what he writes is that, without the 1914 war, the USA would have had to contrive a war against Britain to get what it gained from our suicidal policy.  

 

It seems to me that such a war would have been very hard to contrive. Even Britain’s political class, who emerge in history repeatedly as being none too bright, might have seen the risks of a war with the United States.

 

The book itself is so rewarding in so many ways that I can only advise readers to get hold of it and read it themselves. I shall concentrate here on those aspects of it which emphasize the stupidity of our entry into war in 1914, and the still greater stupidity of our refusal to get out of it before it was too late.

 

The first thing is the economic devastation which it caused. Tooze understands that the figures must never be neglected. All the combatants, he recounts on p.36, began the war with strong credit balances, specially by today’s rackety standards.

 

But not for long. By 1916 things were very different. Tooze gives a fascinating explanation of how the war was financed by Britain, France and Russia, and how this gradually turned into an enormous unpayable debt owned by Britain to the USA (the battle of the Somme was actually financed by American loans) . This debts was so huge that it remains unpaid to this day, perhaps the biggest single sign of our national fall from power and importance, one of the largest national defaults in world history, yet widely unknown in Britain (where many people mistakenly think it was paid off, because the 1939-45 debt has been) and not referred to in polite society.

 

See here : http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/08/britains-vast-unpaid-debt-to-the-usa.html

 

 

and meanwhile the USA was taking advantage of its neutrality to ensure that it was equipped for the global power that we were ceding with every shipment of gold and securities across the Atlantic. As Tooze says (p.37) ‘The most powerful states in Europe became dependent on foreign creditors’ .In 1916, the year of Jutland (which everyone recall), Woodrow Wilson authorized a huge expansion plan for the US Navy (which nobody recalls), saying to his aide Colonel House ‘let us build a navy bigger than [Britain’s] and do what we please’(p.35). In the same summer France’s credit nearly collapsed under the strain of Verdun.

 

In October 1916 (p.51), a huge Sterling crisis was caused by Wilson’s unwillingness to authorize a new and enormous loan to the allies. Wilson was trying to stop the war – and he was not taking sides. In fact, the idea that the USA intervened on the side of the Allies has always been wrong. The USA joined the war to fight for itself, not to get Britain’s or France’s chestnuts out of the fire – hence its insistence on its troops being under its own control.

 

He nearly succeeded. German belligerence and stupidity, the decision to launch unrestricted submarine warfare, literally torpedoed Wilson’s peace plan.

 

The whole chapter ‘Peace without Victory’ is a tremendous tour de force, and a great revelation to any who still think that the USA rode to aid of its cousins out of benevolence or sentimentality. Wilson wanted to overtake Britain, pacify Europe and inaugurate a new world order. He also, by this time,  wanted to safeguard his country’s huge investment in the allied war effort, which would go down the plughole if Germany won(it was destined to go down the plughole anyway, but he wasn’t to know that).

 

But the fond and foolish idea that ‘America came in late’ to a quarrel in which it ought to have been a participant from the start, is sentimental drivel. The USA, like any rationally-governed nation, entered the war only when it had to, for hard-headed calculated reasons of its own advantage.

 

Brest-Litovsk brings Mitteleuropa into being – the roots of today’s Ukraine war

 

As I keep pointing out, the real war in Europe was always between Germany and Russia. everything else was secondary. And in 1917, entirely thanks to Ludendorff’s employment of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and their willingness to act as German agents against their native land (which was by then a liberal republic, not a Tsarist autocracy)  Germany had beaten Russia.

 

So came the 1917-1918 talks at Brest-Litovsk ( I have been to the ruined fortress where this gigantic event happened, and it is still scarred and riven by the terrific bombardment it withstood in 1941 during an eight-day siege by Hitler’s forces).

 

Germany, by December 1917, was by no means a simple autocracy. Liberal nationalists, indeed liberal imperialists of the Naumann type,  were still very influential, had in fact reasserted their power,  and everyone was scared of mutiny among the working class and the armed forces after the Russian revolution. The country was slowly starving under our blockade. Yet it appeared to be winning the war.

 

Germany didn’t want an old-fashioned empire of obviously conquered, subject peoples. Tact was to be applied. On p.113, Tooze writes ( referring to our old friend Naumann) about a ‘proposed ‘zone of German hegemony in central Europe, based on some kind of federative imperialism’.

 

‘Hegemony’ is a great word for avoiding the central ‘Who,Whom’ question, isn’t it? (you can always find out the answer to that by checking the treaties, the banknotes and the borders, after all).  And I do love ‘federative imperialism’. The phrase seems to me to describe a certain large supranational body now swallowing most of Western, eastern and central Europe.

 

But here is the bit I most treasure (again on p,113) ‘Once Tsarist power collapsed in 1917and America entered the war, it was obvious to the more intelligent strategic thinkers in Germany that there was no better means to dynamite the Tsarist Empire than for Berlin to espouse the demand for self-determination’. A mild version of this had already been tried in Poland in 1916, when Berlin and Vienna had tried to harness Polish nationalism by setting up a puppet ‘Kingdom of Poland’ in 1916. The invading Germans, entering Russian-ruled parts of Poland,  had portrayed themselves as liberators.

 

The Bolsheviks, still in their utopian phase, rashly agreed to this ‘self-determination’, an error they and their rougher successors spent many years putting right by violent reconquest of land, much of which (especially Ukraine)  had been ‘self-determined’ into German, er, hegemony.

 

Tooze (pp114-115)says the German liberal imperialists were not just being cynical. ‘They believed that history refuted the choice , supposed by simplistic advocates of nationalism, between slavery and full, unfettered sovereignty. For most, full sovereignty was always a chimera. Even neutrality was an option only under exceptional circumstances’…

 

 

‘..for most, the real choice was one between hegemons. The Baltic states, if broken away from Russia, would inevitably fall into the orbit of another great power, if not Germany or Russia, then Britain. What the more far-sighted strategists in Imperial Germany were advancing was a vision of negotiated sovereignty in which economic and military independence wa  s pooled by smaller states with larger states’.

 

Once again, does this sound familiar?

So will the increasingly violent struggles which followed over the status of Ukraine, with its vital strategic position, and its grain and coal (By the way, the adventures and travels of Ludendorff during this period would make a novel).

 

And they call this ‘The Special Relationship’

 

I’ll end (reluctantly, for there are so many other enthralling parts of this book, including its exploration of allied intervention in Bolshevik Russia, Versailes, Keynes, the momentous cession of British power at the Washington naval conference, as huge as any of Mikhail Gorbachev’s retreats from Superpower status,   the beginnings of modern China) with the devastating material on America’s real attitude towards Britain.

 

On pp 268-9 you will find Woodrow Wilson, on his way to Europe, saying atht America ‘will build the biggest navy in the world, matching theirs [Britain’s]and exceeding it…and if they would not limit it, there would come another and more terrible and bloody war and England would be wiped off the face of the map’.

 

Then , by the end of March 1919 ‘ relations between the naval officers of the two sides had degenerated to such an extent that the admirals threatened war and had to be restrained from assaulting each other’ .

 

On page 192 you will find a description of Washington’s first known direct interference in the internal affairs of the United Kingdom. On page 395 you will find

US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes raging and shouting at Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Auckland Geddes, that America had saved Britain’s bacon and we had better be grateful from now on.

 

In a voice rising to a scream, Mr Hughes declared: ‘You would not be here to speak for Britain – you would not be speaking anywhere, England would not be able to speak at all!

 

'It is the Kaiser who would be heard, if America – seeking nothing for herself but to save England – had not plunged into the war and won it!’

 

And on page 240, you will find words from Woodrow Wilson that should be engraved over the door of the British Ambassador’s study in Washington DC. These words were not privately spoken, as were the other quotations and events above, but for public consumption. They are the words of a master gently shoving away an over-affectionate and excessively servile dog, with the toe of his polished shoe:

 

‘You must not speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the people of the US. Nor must too much importance in this connection be attached to the fact that English is our common language …no, there are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and of interests’.

 

And, of course, where such ideals and interests clash, we know whose will prevail.

 

Was the disappearance of our wealth, power and pre-eminence fore-ordained and unavoidable? I do not think so. For certain, it needn’t have been so quick. And if Burns and Morley, rather than Grey and Asquith, had prevailed in Cabinet in August 1914, I believe we would live in a better world by far than the one we live in now. 

Mystic Hitchens Was Wrong - Official

What follows is an extended response to a timely and justified criticism from Mr Wylie in the ‘Boris Johnson’ thread.

 

Mr Wylie asked :

 

‘Recently Mr Hitchens commented on the courage of one of his readers for his willingness to rethink his stance on addiction. Can I ask Mr Hitchens when he will have the courage to admit that he was wrong on his predicted split of the Coalition Government, by the Spring of 2014, through some sort of manufactured row between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and that Vince Cable would take over from Nick Clegg as leader of the Liberal Democrats, following Nick Clegg’s appointment as a European Commissioner. These were views that Mr Hitchens expressed in his blog on 25th November 2011, 4th March 2012, 15th July 2012, and then on 17th May 2013, bafflingly under the headline ‘MYSTIC HITCHENS IS RIGHT AGAIN’, even though the events he had forecast had not actually happened yet. Come on Mr Hitchens, show your courage and admit that you got this one wrong.

 

I replied ( as soon as I saw his comment in the queue): ‘Mr Wylie asks :' Can I ask Mr Hitchens when he will have the courage to admit that he was wrong on his predicted split of the Coalition Government, by the Spring of 2014, through some sort of manufactured row between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and that Vince Cable would take over from Nick Clegg as leader of the Liberal Democrats, following Nick Clegg’s appointment as a European Commissioner. ' Mr Wylie is quite right , and he has pricked my conscience. I have been meaning to address this for some time, and will do so (with full admission of error) in a proper post soon. But yes, I was wrong.'

 

 

 

I repeat, my prediction was wrong.

 

I won’t offer any defence, as such, simply say that in my view the Coalition Parties would have been more sensible if they had done what I predicted. I am sure such an arrangement was considered. Could it be that it didn’t happen because a planned putsch against Nick Clegg failed? The whole affair certainly had the look of a botched coup to me.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2640629/Et-tu-Vince-Cables-best-friend-revealed-putsch-topple-Clegg-Lord-Oakeshott-paid-opinion-poll-said-lead-party-disaster.html

 

 

What they have done instead is an elaborate distancing act, in which Mr Cameron and his colleagues attempt to give the impression that they have woken from a long liberal sleep and become conservatives ‘initiatives’ about welfare. Immigration, crime, the EU etc) , and the Liberal Democrats are increasingly publicly critical of those areas of coalition policy with which they disagree.

 

My only puzzle is why Mr Clegg wants to stay in Coalition to the bitter end, and why his MPs are ready to let him do so. Maybe they just decided that nothing could save them.

 

The Tories, as was plain from the appalling spin they successfully foisted on their media toadies after the Euro-elections, genuinely believe their own propaganda, that they can win outright, that Labour were the main losers in May (statistically this is blatantly untrue) and have pinned almost everything on the so-called (buy them) ‘Kill Mill’ strategy.

 

This aims to mock and diminish Ed Miliband to such an extent that he becomes as much of a liability as Gordon Brown was (after a similarly disreputable  campaign of personal vilification) in the last election. It had not occurred to me when I made my prediction that British politics had now sunk to such a puerile level. I apologize for failing to realise the depths to which the Tory machine would sink, and the willingness of the media circus to go along with this.

 

Mind you, I should have realised that. After all, if there’s no earthly reason to vote Tory, the only thing you can do is to smear the other side.

A fine book on the First World War is republished

I am delighted to see that a book I have praised here, Covenant with Death, by John Harris, is to be republished. It is a spare, moving fictional account of the fate of a small group of volunteers from a Yorkshire steel town who answered the patriotic call to duty in 1914, and went over the top in the Battle of the Somme.

 

This was what I said about it

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/covenant-with-death.html

Here are some details of the new edition.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Covenant-Death-John-Harris/dp/0751557129/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407419945&sr=8-1&keywords=covenant+with+death

The title is from Isaiah, the 28th Chapter, and the 15th verse : 'Because ye have said, we have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves.'

But God replies (18th verse) : 'And your covenant with death shall be disannnulled , and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it'.

 

 

 

 

 

Boris Johnson's move shows he doesn't really believe the Tories can win in 2015.

So much for the incessant stratagems of Lynton Crosby, the Australian wonder-worker of the polls who sometimes seems to be personally directing the whole government. So much for the allegedly New Iron Lady (alternatively The British Angela Merkel) Mrs Theresa May, flailing wildly to conceal the fact that she can and will do nothing about mass immigration or crime.

 

So much for the ‘Kill Mill’ plan to destroy Ed Miliband by incessant personal abuse.  So much for the supposed vote-winning powers of the new Tory Youth Movement  (‘Ambition Above All’ is their watchword, and ‘What do you mean, conservative?’ their question) , fanning out to marginal constituencies by the busload to replace decrepit and/or mutinous actual Tory members in the fight for votes.

 

 

Mr Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson  (‘Boris’ is his stage name, his family call him ‘Al’) has plainly concluded that the Tories cannot and will not win the general election in May, or even do well in it. 

 

He will of course not say so. But how could he?

 

This is why he has advertised himself as a candidate in the fast-approaching general election, in an announcement only one step short of actually standing in the middle of London with a sandwich board round his neck saying ‘Safe Seat Wanted’ .

 

If he thought the Tories would win in May, he would not risk the slight whiff of gamesmanship  which must hang around a person who once pledged not to hold two political offices at once, and now says that this is exactly what he now desires and plans to do (his term as President of the People’s Republic of London will not end until 2016).

 

After all, what would be the hurry to get into Parliament and burden himslf with the school and parking problems of some suburb, if David Cameron was likely to sweep back into Downing Street with the first Tory majority since 1997 (always a raving fantasy) , or even if Mr Cameron was likely to hold on to the premiership thanks to being largest single party in a re-hung Parliament (a possibility which the opinion polls have been unambiguously ruling out now for some years, with iron consistency)? 

There wouldn’t be any hurry. He could keep his promise and stay as Mayor. Mr Johnson can get into Parliament pretty much when he wants to, given a few months’ notice.

 

The remaining Tories all swoon and grovel at the approach of 'Boris', laughing helplessly if he says so much as ‘Good Evening’, reduced to pitiful hysterics if he actually attempts a joke, their hero, their only star, the Great, the Stupendous, the Officially Funny….Boris!

 

No sitting member is safe from his approach. If 'Boris' wants a seat, then he can pretty much have it from these fans. And this will remain so until the day when Mr Johnson is actually tested in office, if he ever is, and turns out to be just like David Cameron, only more so.

 

The same thing happened to Mr cameron, too, of course. the poor old loyalists thought he was a secret Superconservative, dressed up as a sort of Clark Kent. He turned out not even to be Clark Kent, but to be David Cameron.

 

But there wouldn’t be any hurry for Mr Johnson to become an MP  in a Tory party restored to office. On the contrary. Mr Johnson, we may safely say, does not yearn to be a backbencher, or a junior minister, the best he could hope for if Mr Cameron were still in Downing Street in June 2015.

 

The House of Commons did not love him the last time he was there, nor he it.  He has higher things on his mind, and those things will only be available to those who are already MPs after the May general election.  

1914 Revisited Part 1:How the Lights Went Out All Over Europe - But Did they Need to Go Out Here?

So now we come to that distinguished thing, the one hundredth anniversary of the War that Ended Peace, the Great War, the Apocalypse, the End of Christendom,  the War that Ended the British Empire or, if you prefer , the Great War for Civilization.

 

I linked, the other day, to an essay in the American Spectator, ‘the Foul Tornado’, in which I gave my general opinion of this disaster. You can read it here

 

http://spectator.org/articles/59563/foul-tornado

 

What I write here today has another purpose, to share with my readers as much as possible the lessons from two excellent and original books on the war and its consequences,  which I have been reading during the past month.

 

The first is : The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War 1914, by Douglas Newton, formerly Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Sydney, published by Verso.

 

 

 

The second is : The Deluge: the Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, by Adam Tooze, Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies at Yale, published by Allen Lane

 

Professor Tooze’s is the bigger and more momentous book, but Professor Newton’s is the more passionate and the more iconoclastic. If he is right, much of the standard account of the outbreak of war being touted about the place this week is seriously wrong.

 

 

 

I find Professor Newton’s account of events (which is undoubtedly contentious and has already been attacked by one reviewer) extremely persuasive, in the light of what I know about the conduct of British politics in modern times.

 

But while I was reading both books ( and Adam Tooze’s is inconveniently heavy to haul about in a backpack, but I did anyway, so as never to be far from it) I felt I was breathing the pure, clear mountain air of real, refreshing history. Not justifying, not rehashing, not regurgitating, but boldly telling what the writer feels very strongly is an important truth, a truth which has reached out of the archives and put its thumb in his eye.

 

Let ’s begin (I gave a pint of blood at lunchtime, and have an appointment this evening, so I already feel this posting can’t be finished off today and is going to have to be in at least two parts) with ‘The Darkest Days’.

 

It’s plainly polemical history. Its epigraph, from a 1920 work unknown to me by Vernon Lee , called ‘Satan the Waster’  declares ‘If men are to do and die, for mercy’s sake let them question why as thoroughly as possible; else some other men are sure to be required to do and die as a consequence of this blindness and haste’

 

 

‘If people had questioned why, not only this war but nearly, perhaps every other modern war  would have been spared us’.

 

And so say I, especially about the blindness and haste.

 

So I read this work very sympathetically, and I make no doubt about that. He makes it plain he has no wish to exculpate Germany. This is wise. Germany’s responsibility for pushing Austria into a confrontation with Russia, pushing Russia into war, and so bringing about a war Berlin thought it could win, seems to me to be beyond doubt. See this excellent essay by Nigel Jones, rebutting the fashionable over-praise for Christopher Clark’s ‘Sleepwalkers’, recommended by everyone, which seeks to spread the blame all over the place. Hmph.

 

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/books/2012/09/lets-not-be-beastly-to-the-germans/

 

So let’s get that out of the way. It was Germany’s fault.

The question is, why did Britain join in?

 

Let us first of all dispose of the ‘Naval Arms Race’ argument, under which Germany threatened British naval superiority, so we had to destroy them.  You have to look this up to find it out, but the naval race between Britain and Germany was over by 1912, officially declared at an end by German Chancellor Theobald Bethmann Hollweg. This was at least partly because Germany had decisively lost, having been brutally outbuilt and outspent by us.  It was also because Germany needed to build up its armies for the coming two-front war it was planning with France and Russia – but mainly with Russia, then as now Germany’s real target.  By 1914 Berlin possessed a mere 17 dreadnoughts compared with Britain’s 29. The real threat to British naval predominance (which turned out to be real and is now colossally evident) was already beginning to develop in a quite different place –the USA. This subject will come up in detail, when I get on to Adam Tooze’s book.

 

Next, there’s Belgium. Now, in 1914, the only relevant Treaty in force was the 1839 Treaty of London, by which a number of powers guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium, Britain among them.

 

You may read it here if your French is up to it.

 

http://mjp.univ-perp.fr/constit/be1839.htm

 

I’d be interested to know if anyone can tell me which bit of it, exactly,  commits Britain to go to the aid of Belgium if invaded. It’s said, in weaselly tones, that it does so ‘by implication’. What it says is that the guarantors (including Britain) have to respect Belgian neutrality. And that Belgium has to maintain it. That’s it. (As I’ve pointed out here before, Palmerston got out of a much clearer obligation to intervene in Schleswig Holstein in 1864 on the grounds that it wasn’t in our interests to do what we’d said we’d do)   But I can’t see why. I could equally well say this it doesn’t by implication.  Treaties don’t imply. They state. Especially do they state when military obligations are under discussion.  

 

(And boy, were military obligations under discussion, but not openly but in secret cabals, behind the backs of Parliament and even most of the Cabinet. Barbara Tuchman writes at some length in ‘The Guns of August’ about the years of secret conversations between Sir Henry Wilson and Ferdinand Foch about joint Anglo-French military arrangements, down to train timetables, rations and billets. These detailed chats, I should stress, were quite unknown to the Cabinet or Parliament. And, as Professor Newton stresses, Parliament and the country believed in August 1914 that Britain’s role in the coming war would be largely naval. The idea that a vast conscript army would end up in France, or even that Britain’s small Army would leave these shores at all, simply didn’t occur to them. Nor was any such thing mentioned by Edward Grey in his supposedly masterly speech to the Commons on the eve of war (this also didn’t mention that we had willy-nilly become the allies of the Russian autocracy, famous for anti-Semitism and repression, a fact that to this day a lot of people seem rather vague about).  

 

 

 

 

And here, on the Belgian issue,  Professor Newton is especially telling. First he points out that the last major threat to Belgian neutrality had been just after the outbreak of the July 1870 Franco-Prussian War. On pp 57-9 he details the fact that Gladstone’s then government did not then rely on the 1839 Treaty. They concluded it was too vague to be of any use.  So Britain, on 9th and 11th August 1870, signed identical treaties with Prussia and France (neither side had by then entered Belgium)  . They were ‘scrupulously even-handed’ Both Prussia and France were told that Britain would go to war with them if they violated Belgian neutrality. They promised to co-operate with the other (innocent) power ‘toward the limited objective of defending Belgium’, so as to ensure that the British engagement was not widened. The treaties automatically expired twelve months after peace was signed and were quite dead by 1914.

 

Under Article I of both treaties, Britain firmly declared that she was not obliged to take part in the general Franco-Prussian war. This smartly (and prophetically) prevented either side from dragging Britain into the war on its own side by manoeuvring its enemy into invading Belgium.

 

By July 1914, the old, vague, useless 1839 Treaty was all that remained. It was no more obligatory or specific than it had been in 1870. The cabinet specifically discussed these points at its meeting on 29th July 1914

 

Newton records (p.59) ‘The teach-in on 1839 and 1870 had highlighted a crucial fact: Britain was not * obliged * to make war on a power violating Belgium’s neutrality. Therefore, the Radicals [the cabinet faction opposing war] argued, there should be no decision in advance to fight on behalf of Belgium. The cabinet resolved that ‘the matter, if it arises, will be rather one of policy than of legal obligation’ (Asquith, writing to the King, July 1914, quoted in Spender ‘Life of Asquith’, Volume II page 81).

 

But that’s nothing like all.

 

On pp 141-142, Newton analyses a conversation between Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary) and Prince Lichnowsky ( German Ambassador to London and a walking olive branch who was a fervent Anglophile and hated the idea of war) at 3.30 p.m. on 3rd August. Lichnowsky asked what would happen if Germany undertook to respect Belgian neutrality in exchange for British neutrality(this forms part of several and various frantic attempts by Lichnowsky, not all of them approved by Berlin, to try to keep Britain out of the war, which tend to be passed over with dismissive scorn by historians writing with hindsight, and were later dismissed with exaggerated scorn by British pro-war politicians and their press allies . But was that because they were absurd, or because Britain a) was committed to war already and b) wished to give an impression of greater unity with France than actually existed, for morale and policy purposes? I have to say they give me the impression that Germany would have done almost anything to keep Britain out of the war, which of course is only interesting to people like me who think that we should have stayed out anyway. Those who think that the war was a noble struggle for civilisation, democracy, freedom etc must view with scorn the mundane and unpoetic manoeuvrings of Prince Lichnowsky.

 

Those who prefer living men - fathers, brothers and husbands - to rat-mauled corpses and nameless graves in craters and ruins, and those who prefer happy prosperous, unwrecked towns to war memorials, however stately, may feel differently.

 

What if Lichnowsky meant what he said? What if the Kaiser really didn’t want us to join in and would have paid heavily to achieve this?  France wanted war with Germany, and Germany wanted a war with Russia that also meant a war with France (which Germany did not especially want, but must have before she could attack her real, Eastern objective with full force). And poor, duped old Austria-Hungary had been dragged in to start the necessary fight, and plant the blame on Russia. Well, let them have it if they wanted it. But what was our need to join in?  Somebody please tell me, what we hoped to gain (we gained, in fact, nothing, and lost almost everything, but what, please, did we * hope * to gain?)

 

 

Anyway, read pages 141 and 142, and see what you think.

 

 

Newton concludes:

 

‘A German decision to respect Belgian neutrality would win Germany neither credit nor advantage. Britain would probably still rush to the assistance of France and Russia if it came to war. The Entente was sacred. Britain would not begin to negotiate over Belgium’.

 

And

 

‘The exchange of conversation in Grey’s study, even as reported in Grey’s [own] summary,  showed quite clearly that Britain’s decision to enter the war was * not * dependent on a German violation of Belgian neutrality. The German offer to respect the Treaty of 1839 had not moved Grey at all – because it was linked to * British* (my emphasis) neutrality . He was, quite openly, beholden to Paris and St Petersburg’.

 

Anyway, read pages 141 and 142, and see what you think.

 

On p.179 Newton records Grey’s insistence to the Cabinet on Sunday 2nd August that ‘it was * vital * to him that he should today assure [French Ambassador Paul] Cambon that if the German fleet attacked [the] French coast we w[oul]d prevent it and use all our naval power and he must say this in Parliament tomorrow’. (Monday 4th August).

 

He … demanded a decision on naval assistance before he saw Cambon at 2.30.

 

Asquith meanwhile was hinting at a Coalition – revealing that the Tories had written to him pledging support for a warlike policy, not even mentioning Belgium as an issue) if the radicals would not go along.  This was increasingly the fear of the radical faction in the cabinet which opposed war, that if they quite - as four of them at one stage did, secretly, they would simply open the way for a pro-war coalition. Once again, the elite consensus (utterly wrong, as usual) was ready to steamroller principles, and wise caution. 

 

Newton describes Grey’s highly emotional appeal, Grey’s pleas that France had been ‘relying on us’ and had ‘left their northern coast undefended’  the revelation that Cambon had been weeping as he begged for our support. Then Grey threatened to resign if he did not get authorisation to make the pledge.

 

He got the authorisation. Grey was told he could tell Cambon that the British Fleet would give 'all the protection in its power' if France faced a German naval attack.

 

Newton writes :’From this point – before anything was known of the German threat to Belgium –it was certain that the British government would intervene in any war in which France was embroiled with Germany’.

 

‘Downing Street had decided on the first trigger for war.’

 

I shall leave it at that for now, and return on Wednesday with further arguments and information.  

 

1914 revisited part 2 - It Wasn't About Us

1.Britain was never as important as we think we were

 

 

We are so vain in this country.  One of the biggest problems in discussing either of the two great European wars of the last century is the ‘War Picture Library’ view that both these wars were mainly fought between Britain and Germany, and that Britain was, throughout,  a major force.

 

 

Both wars certainly had Germany at their heart (as all European diplomacy has done since 1870, and as it most definitely does now) . But Britain?

 

Britain pushed her way into both of them, though it was not her quarrel in either case. In fact, the German view of Britain’s entry into the 1914 war was at first baffled dismay, because it endlessly complicated the conflict without giving Britain any obvious advantage, and then fury, because Germany believed that our intervention had sabotaged Germany’s best chance of getting what she wanted (she ended up getting that only in 1990 and the years afterwards, when Russian power collapsed in eastern Europe and the Caucasus).

 

I think Germany would have done almost anything to keep us out, in the way of guarantees of Belgian neutrality and even of French national integrity. As I have tried to explain,  Germany did not fight France for territorial gain. If Bismarck had wanted any more of France than Alsace and Lorraine, he could and would have taken it in 1870. Germany attacked France in 1914 *because France was the ally of Russia*. And not just any old ally, but a close military and political ally, bound to Russia by treaty and also by huge loans, which Russia spent on modernising its army and railways in preparation for war with Germany. France’s leaders were actually *in* Russia cementing that alliance days before war broke out.

 

This was a wholly unprincipled alliance. France preened itself on being a liberal republic, but Russia was a corrupt and crude autocracy, Judophobic and repressive. The alliance was made purely because France refused to accept the (in my view) just verdict of 1870, when Napoleon III had stupidly provoked a war which he had then swiftly and decisively lost.

 

France has of course *now* accepted its subordinate status, enshrined in the EU, where it is allowed to pose as a major world power  (nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, the Francophonie and the Security Council) while in fact being a well-paid vassal of Germany. But in those days it wouldn’t. Understandable, but was that status really worth the twin ordeals of Verdun and Vichy, or worth Britain’s dead at the Somme and Passchendaele? As a longstanding Francophile,  I doubt it. 

 

France’s war plans for 1914 were all plans for frontal mass attacks on Germany (more disastrous and wasteful of human life than Verdun or the Somme, as it turned out), using the tactics, and wearing the uniforms, of 50 years before.  They were, as it turned out, annihilated by German guns in a ghastly, unforgiveable slaughter by general.

 

But (as Barbara Tuchman, again,  recounts in detail) none of these attacks was allowed to begin until Germany entered Belgium, for fear that France’s (actual) aggressive purpose would be clear, and Britain could then not be persuaded to join the war on her side, as the saviour of neutral Belgium. Tuchman records how French troops were even pulled back some miles from the border as war approached (morally an act of madness in military terms) , so as to avoid any accidental incursions which might have placed the blame for starting the war on France rather than Germany.

 

So we have in 1914 two aggressors (Germany and France) both anxious to push the blame on to someone else. Germany was using Austria-Hungary to provoke Russia into mobilisation and war.  France was waiting  (and hoping) for Germany to make the first aggressive move into Belgium, to trigger her own long-planned revenge attack and to drag Britain in on her side.

 

Both got what they wanted.

 

But Germany’s attack on France (and consequently on Belgium) was not a war of conquest, as some readers seem to think. *Germany’s colonial interest was where it had always been, in the east*. It was intended to be a swift blow, knocking out France by October, and so allowing the real war (the one Germany wanted in 1914 as it wanted it in 1941), the war on Russia. In the absence of a French alliance with Russia, there would have been no Schlieffen Plan, no battles of Marne, Somme Ypres, Passchendaele or Verdun.

 

Nor can I see exactly how Britain would have suffered. Despite the invasion fantasies of  Erskine Childers, Saki and William le Queux, there is no reason to believe that Germany ever contemplated an invasion of Britain in 1914 (and scant evidence that she did so seriously in 1940 either) . Seaborne invasions are dangerous and unpredictable at the best of times, and even when you really need to do them they are very hard to stomach. But if what you really want is Warsaw, Bucharest, Kiev, Vilnius and Baku, why attack Dover?

 

2. Antwerp was a Pistol Pointed at the Heart of England

 

 

Maybe so, if anyone wanted to point such a pistol. But who did? Germany didn’t *want* Belgium. As Tuchman again makes clear, Germany longed to find a way of persuading Belgium to agree to let her armies through without a fight. Germany’s ambassador to Brussels made such an offer before the invasion rolled. There is no reason to believe ti was not sincere. Germany made no move against the Netherlands in 1914.   And in four years of occupation of Belgium,  Germany never used Antwerp to threaten Britain.

 

Anyway, Britain had lived for centuries with France as an enemy (and an enemy who wasn’t at all bad at naval warfare, or lacking naval strength)  in possession of Dunkirk, Brest and Cherbourg.

 

Once again. In 1914 9 as in 1939) Germany’s principal, overriding interest was in the East. It was only concerned with France because of France’s alliance with Russia. It was only concerned with Belgium because Belgium blocked the way to a speedy attack on France. It wasn’t concerned with Britain at all. Britain didn’t enter into Germany’s calculation, unless Britain chose to ally with France.

 

Oh, and by the way, why was France so unable to defend her own Channel coast in 1914? What powerful naval foe did she face in the Mediterranean, which forced her to concentrate her entire Fleet there, with no ships to spare for La Manche? Austria-Hungary? Hardly. Vienna's fleet barely left its Adriatic harbour during the entire war. Italy stayed neutral and was eventually bribed into war on the French side.  

3. The problem of hindsight and the ‘balance of power’

 

As with my opposition to the deliberate bombing of German civilians in 1942-5, I am told here that I am excusing hindsight, and can’t understand how people felt at the time. Actually, many people in 1942 opposed Arthur Harris’s ( and Churchill's)  bombing, some on grounds of its military uselessness (Henry Tizard) others on the grounds of its moral wrongness (Bishop George Bell, Richard Stokes MC MP) .

 

Before turning to that, I’ll also deal with the ‘Balance of Power’ argument. Just as by August 1939 power in Europe was rather well-balanced between Hitler and Stalin, it was pretty well-balanced in 1914 too, between Russia and Germany.  In 1914, we were the one power capable of unbalancing it, by plumping (as we did) for the Russian side.  

 

Had we stayed out, and France been defeated,  I rather think that the Germans (and even more so the Austrians) would have had a hard time of it once they turned East in earnest.  Russia’s army would not have been the decayed and mutinous thing it was by 1917. It would still have been the army that repeatedly thrashed the Austrians throughout the early years of the war, and held off the Germans (aftr initial defeats) for the same period. Fighting on its own soil, even against a Germany fighting on one front,  it would still have been a formidable adversary. As for a German-dominated Europe, that is what we have now, except that we are now a debtor rather than  creditor nation, a rump rather than an empire, far more at the mercy of such an arrangement than we would have been as a wealthy and well-defended neutral.

 

Now, as for hindsight. As Ross Towes has rightly pointed out, nobody had any excuse for not knowing what sort of war it was going to be . Mr Towes wrote  in a comment on an earlier posting : ‘The point is, while obviously they can't have known, they should have been able to guess. The experience of the Franco-Prussian War (enormous casualties from breech-loading rifles, cavalry of limited value, artillery devastating), the Boer War (vulnerability of large formations, difficulty communicating with resultant dispersed formations, increasing use of telegraphy to micro-manage from London) and the Russo-Japanese War (massive casualties, dominance of machine guns and artillery, extensive use of trenches and wire obstacles) should have registered with any serious statesman. Britain was, after all, a combatant in one of these conflicts and had respected observers at the other two. The observer in the Russo-Japanese War was particularly horrified by what he witnessed. They simply weren't paying attention.’

 

I’d add to that the experience (also witnessed and much discussed by military experts) of the American Civil War should have been in their minds. It also provided a terrible warning of the sort of carnage, deadlock, bankruptcy, civilian misery and devastation that modern war, conducted between ‘civilized’ foes could lead to.

 

But there were people present at the decision who knew what was at stake. John Burns, one of those Cabinet members who resigned rather than support a war he believed disastrous and needless (and into which he thought Grey was trying to manoeuvre the Cabinet) , said on August 2nd : ‘Honour, duty, humanity all unite in my protest against this wanton war. ‘

 

Two years later, pointing out to a critic that he had resigned on principle before the invasion of Belgium was even an issue, he shot back that he had ‘tried to save Britain from the loss of a half a million of men, a national debt of thousands of millions, to be followed by a stalemate, a revolution and the disruption of empire’, which was pretty prophetic in 1916.

 

And Ramsay MacDonald, the then leader of the Labour Party in the Commons,dared to speak against the war in a House of Commons beguiled and emotionally worked up by Sir Edward Grey’s rhetoric (in which, as MacDonald mentioned) he managed to omit the fact that we were going to war at the side of the Russian autocracy).

 

He said ‘So far as we are concerned, whatever may happen, whatever may be said about us, whatever attacks may be made upon us, we will take the action that we will take – of saying that this country ought to have remained neutral, because in the deepest part of our hearts we believe that that was right, and that that alone was consistent with the honour of the country, and the traditions of the party that are now in office (the Liberals)’.

 

There was no vote. The debate, which decided the future of the British Empire, lasted a mere two hours. The House of Lords did not even debate the war.

 

Diouglas Newton's account of Sir Edward Grey's behaviour in this debate (especially his none-too-candid revelations of the nature and extent of pre-existing Anglo-French commitments, largely unknown to the cabinet and Parliament) is well worth reading in full, especially the passage on pp 216-219. 

 

The previous Sunday, an anti-war demonstration had filled Trafalgar Square, overflowing into Whitehall, towards the Admiralty Arch, up the Strand and down Pall Mall.

 

Keir Hardie, predicting ‘the greatest calamity Europe has ever seen’, was the opening speaker. He denounced any alliance with ‘the foul government of anti-democratic Russia’ and said ‘Our shores are not being attacked. Your liberties are not being menaced. Why, then, should we fight?’ . This was foresight, not ihindsight.

 

The paradox  was that it was largely to be found among the socialist, statist Left, whose cause would hugely benefit from the two wars that followed – while the war’s keenest supporters were to be found among conservatives, whose cause would be ruined forever by the conflict they cheered.  

How the Lights Went Out All Over Europe - But Did they Need to Go Out Here?

So now we come to that distinguished thing, the one hundredth anniversary of the War that Ended Peace, the Great War, the Apocalypse, the End of Christendom,  the War that Ended the British Empire or, if you prefer , the Great War for Civilization.

 

I linked, the other day, to an essay in the American Spectator, ‘the Foul Tornado’, in which I gave my general opinion of this disaster. You can read it here

 

http://spectator.org/articles/59563/foul-tornado

 

What I write here today has another purpose, to share with my readers as much as possible the lessons from two excellent and original books on the war and its consequences,  which I have been reading during the past month.

 

The first is : The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War 1914, by Douglas Newton, formerly Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Sydney, published by Verso.

 

 

 

The second is : The Deluge: the Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, by Adam Tooze, Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies at Yale, published by Allen Lane

 

Professor Tooze’s is the bigger and more momentous book, but Professor Newton’s is the more passionate and the more iconoclastic. If he is right, much of the standard account of the outbreak of war being touted about the place this week is seriously wrong.

 

 

 

I find Professor Newton’s account of events (which is undoubtedly contentious and has already been attacked by one reviewer) extremely persuasive, in the light of what I know about the conduct of British politics in modern times.

 

But while I was reading both books ( and Adam Tooze’s is inconveniently heavy to haul about in a backpack, but I did anyway, so as never to be far from it) I felt I was breathing the pure, clear mountain air of real, refreshing history. Not justifying, not rehashing, not regurgitating, but boldly telling what the writer feels very strongly is an important truth, a truth which has reached out of the archives and put its thumb in his eye.

 

Let ’s begin (I gave a pint of blood at lunchtime, and have an appointment this evening, so I already feel this posting can’t be finished off today and is going to have to be in at least two parts) with ‘The Darkest Days’.

 

It’s plainly polemical history. Its epigraph, from a 1920 work unknown to me by Vernon Lee , called ‘Satan the Waster’  declares ‘If men are to do and die, for mercy’s sake let them question why as thoroughly as possible; else some other men are sure to be required to do and die as a consequence of this blindness and haste’

 

 

‘If people had questioned why, not only this war but nearly, perhaps every other modern war  would have been spared us’.

 

And so say I, especially about the blindness and haste.

 

So I read this work very sympathetically, and I make no doubt about that. He makes it plain he has no wish to exculpate Germany. This is wise. Germany’s responsibility for pushing Austria into a confrontation with Russia, pushing Russia into war, and so bringing about a war Berlin thought it could win, seems to me to be beyond doubt. See this excellent essay by Nigel Jones, rebutting the fashionable over-praise for Christopher Clark’s ‘Sleepwalkers’, recommended by everyone, which seeks to spread the blame all over the place. Hmph.

 

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/books/2012/09/lets-not-be-beastly-to-the-germans/

 

So let’s get that out of the way. It was Germany’s fault.

The question is, why did Britain join in?

 

Let us first of all dispose of the ‘Naval Arms Race’ argument, under which Germany threatened British naval superiority, so we had to destroy them.  You have to look this up to find it out, but the naval race between Britain and Germany was over by 1912, officially declared at an end by German Chancellor Theobald Bethmann Hollweg. This was at least partly because Germany had decisively lost, having been brutally outbuilt and outspent by us.  It was also because Germany needed to build up its armies for the coming two-front war it was planning with France and Russia – but mainly with Russia, then as now Germany’s real target.  By 1914 Berlin possessed a mere 17 dreadnoughts compared with Britain’s 29. The real threat to British naval predominance (which turned out to be real and is now colossally evident) was already beginning to develop in a quite different place –the USA. This subject will come up in detail, when I get on to Adam Tooze’s book.

 

Next, there’s Belgium. Now, in 1914, the only relevant Treaty in force was the 1839 Treaty of London, by which a number of powers guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium, Britain among them.

 

You may read it here if your French is up to it.

 

http://mjp.univ-perp.fr/constit/be1839.htm

 

I’d be interested to know if anyone can tell me which bit of it, exactly,  commits Britain to go to the aid of Belgium if invaded. It’s said, in weaselly tones, that it does so ‘by implication’. What it says is that the guarantors (including Britain) have to respect Belgian neutrality. And that Belgium has to maintain it. That’s it. (As I’ve pointed out here before, Palmerston got out of a much clearer obligation to intervene in Schleswig Holstein in 1864 on the grounds that it wasn’t in our interests to do what we’d said we’d do)   But I can’t see why. I could equally well say this it doesn’t by implication.  Treaties don’t imply. They state. Especially do they state when military obligations are under discussion.  

 

(And boy, were military obligations under discussion, but not openly but in secret cabals, behind the backs of Parliament and even most of the Cabinet. Barbara Tuchman writes at some length in ‘The Guns of August’ about the years of secret conversations between Sir Henry Wilson and Ferdinand Foch about joint Anglo-French military arrangements, down to train timetables, rations and billets. These detailed chats, I should stress, were quite unknown to the Cabinet or Parliament. And, as Professor Newton stresses, Parliament and the country believed in August 1914 that Britain’s role in the coming war would be largely naval. The idea that a vast conscript army would end up in France, or even that Britain’s small Army would leave these shores at all, simply didn’t occur to them. Nor was any such thing mentioned by Edward Grey in his supposedly masterly speech to the Commons on the eve of war (this also didn’t mention that we had willy-nilly become the allies of the Russian autocracy, famous for anti-Semitism and repression, a fact that to this day a lot of people seem rather vague about).  

 

 

 

 

And here, on the Belgian issue,  Professor Newton is especially telling. First he points out that the last major threat to Belgian neutrality had been just after the outbreak of the July 1870 Franco-Prussian War. On pp 57-9 he details the fact that Gladstone’s then government did not then rely on the 1839 Treaty. They concluded it was too vague to be of any use.  So Britain, on 9th and 11th August 1870, signed identical treaties with Prussia and France (neither side had by then entered Belgium)  . They were ‘scrupulously even-handed’ Both Prussia and France were told that Britain would go to war with them if they violated Belgian neutrality. They promised to co-operate with the other (innocent) power ‘toward the limited objective of defending Belgium’, so as to ensure that the British engagement was not widened. The treaties automatically expired twelve months after peace was signed and were quite dead by 1914.

 

Under Article I of both treaties, Britain firmly declared that she was not obliged to take part in the general Franco-Prussian war. This smartly (and prophetically) prevented either side from dragging Britain into the war on its own side by manoeuvring its enemy into invading Belgium.

 

By July 1914, the old, vague, useless 1839 Treaty was all that remained. It was no more obligatory or specific than it had been in 1870. The cabinet specifically discussed these points at its meeting on 29th July 1914

 

Newton records (p.59) ‘The teach-in on 1839 and 1870 had highlighted a crucial fact: Britain was not * obliged * to make war on a power violating Belgium’s neutrality. Therefore, the Radicals [the cabinet faction opposing war] argued, there should be no decision in advance to fight on behalf of Belgium. The cabinet resolved that ‘the matter, if it arises, will be rather one of policy than of legal obligation’ (Asquith, writing to the King, July 1914, quoted in Spender ‘Life of Asquith’, Volume II page 81).

 

But that’s nothing like all.

 

On pp 141-142, Newton analyses a conversation between Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary) and Prince Lichnowsky ( German Ambassador to London and a walking olive branch who was a fervent Anglophile and hated the idea of war) at 3.30 p.m. on 3rd August. Lichnowsky asked what would happen if Germany undertook to respect Belgian neutrality in exchange for British neutrality(this forms part of several and various frantic attempts by Lichnowsky, not all of them approved by Berlin, to try to keep Britain out of the war, which tend to be passed over with dismissive scorn by historians writing with hindsight, and were later dismissed with exaggerated scorn by British pro-war politicians and their press allies . But was that because they were absurd, or because Britain a) was committed to war already and b) wished to give an impression of greater unity with France than actually existed, for morale and policy purposes? I have to say they give me the impression that Germany would have done almost anything to keep Britain out of the war, which of course is only interesting to people like me who think that we should have stayed out anyway. Those who think that the war was a noble struggle for civilisation, democracy, freedom etc must view with scorn the mundane and unpoetic manoeuvrings of Prince Lichnowsky.

 

Those who prefer living men - fathers, brothers and husbands - to rat-mauled corpses and nameless graves in craters and ruins, and those who prefer happy prosperous, unwrecked towns to war memorials, however stately, may feel differently.

 

What if Lichnowsky meant what he said? What if the Kaiser really didn’t want us to join in and would have paid heavily to achieve this?  France wanted war with Germany, and Germany wanted a war with Russia that also meant a war with France (which Germany did not especially want, but must have before she could attack her real, Eastern objective with full force). And poor, duped old Austria-Hungary had been dragged in to start the necessary fight, and plant the blame on Russia. Well, let them have it if they wanted it. But what was our need to join in?  Somebody please tell me, what we hoped to gain (we gained, in fact, nothing, and lost almost everything, but what, please, did we * hope * to gain?)

 

 

Anyway, read pages 141 and 142, and see what you think.

 

 

Newton concludes:

 

‘A German decision to respect Belgian neutrality would win Germany neither credit nor advantage. Britain would probably still rush to the assistance of France and Russia if it came to war. The Entente was sacred. Britain would not begin to negotiate over Belgium’.

 

And

 

‘The exchange of conversation in Grey’s study, even as reported in Grey’s [own] summary,  showed quite clearly that Britain’s decision to enter the war was * not * dependent on a German violation of Belgian neutrality. The German offer to respect the Treaty of 1839 had not moved Grey at all – because it was linked to * British* (my emphasis) neutrality . He was, quite openly, beholden to Paris and St Petersburg’.

 

Anyway, read pages 141 and 142, and see what you think.

 

On p.179 Newton records Grey’s insistence to the Cabinet on Sunday 2nd August that ‘it was * vital * to him that he should today assure [French Ambassador Paul] Cambon that if the German fleet attacked [the] French coast we w[oul]d prevent it and use all our naval power and he must say this in Parliament tomorrow’. (Monday 4th August).

 

He … demanded a decision on naval assistance before he saw Cambon at 2.30.

 

Asquith meanwhile was hinting at a Coalition – revealing that the Tories had written to him pledging support for a warlike policy, not even mentioning Belgium as an issue) if the radicals would not go along.  This was increasingly the fear of the radical faction in the cabinet which opposed war, that if they quite - as four of them at one stage did, secretly, they would simply open the way for a pro-war coalition. Once again, the elite consensus (utterly wrong, as usual) was ready to steamroller principles, and wise caution. 

 

Newton describes Grey’s highly emotional appeal, Grey’s pleas that France had been ‘relying on us’ and had ‘left their northern coast undefended’  the revelation that Cambon had been weeping as he begged for our support. Then Grey threatened to resign if he did not get authorisation to make the pledge.

 

He got the authorisation. Grey was told he could tell Cambon that the British Fleet would give 'all the protection in its power' if France faced a German naval attack.

 

Newton writes :’From this point – before anything was known of the German threat to Belgium –it was certain that the British government would intervene in any war in which France was embroiled with Germany’.

 

‘Downing Street had decided on the first trigger for war.’

 

I shall leave it at that for now, and return on Wednesday with further arguments and information.  

 

Some Thoughts on Abortion

Some of you may be interested by this interview I have given to a journalist in New Zealand, on the subject of abortion and the law:

 

 

http://www.getfrank.co.nz/editorial/media/peter-hitchens-abortion-interview