How Shall we Mark the Centenary of The Great War?

A strange argument has broken out in Whitehall about how we should mark the centenary of the First World War next year. An advisory committee of authors, historians and soldiers is split . Should we commemorate Germany’s defeat as a triumph for good? Should we emphasise the futility and loss? Apparently Sir Hew Strachan, the eminent military historian, wants a frank celebration of victory. The novelist Sebastian Faulks says it should be modest, inclusive and reverential of others’.

 

First, I’m not sure this is or should be a political decision or a government matter. Let those who take part in solemn commemoration find their own thoughts, rather than be told what to think.

 

I’d like, most of all,  a series of memorial services in the nation’s churches, using only the language, liturgy and music that would have been familiar to those who died and were bereaved (thus making sure that expressions such as ‘inclusive’ didn’t feature). Almost all of them were serious Christian believers, and we owe them a serious Christian ceremony even if we cannot live up to their levels of faith and devotion.

 

Part of me would like to see an immense, sombre, dawn-to-dusk  march-past through the centre of London, representing the time it would have taken for the British dead to pass through the capital.

 

And I would urge a national effort  to get by heart Edward Thomas’s ‘Easter 1915’ (the one that opens with the words  ‘The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood’), which I have long thought was the best of all the war poems, because of the way it gently takes you by the hand and then suddenly, fiercely makes you weep, when you understand what the words ‘now far from home’ actually mean. It dates from the moment the people of Britain began to understand the unique, terrible scale of the losses they were undergoing.

 

I also think it’s time for a new discussion about Lord Lansdowne’s ignored letter, calling for a negotiated peace which – if heeded – might have prevented the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Hitler. Perhaps someone could write a counterfactual thriller on the subject.

 

As someone who never watched a single episode of ‘Blackadder’, and wouldn’t have done if you’d paid me, and as a person who instinctively loathes everything connected with Joan Littlewood, I ought to be on Professor Strachan’s side.   But I’m not. It grieves me to admit that this rather crude agitprop drama is broadly right, that the war was a terrible mistake, fought by generals and politicians who had no idea what they were doing for most of the time, and involving the stupid and wasteful deaths of legions of fine men.

 

But somehow I’d like to separate it from dreary unthinking pacifism. It isn’t always wrong to fight. It is sometimes vital to carry on fighting even when all seems lost. What we need to examine is the competence and abilities, and the thinking, of our political leaders who (as this week’s African adventures illustrate) never cease to be childishly keen on rushing into war, unable to learn how hard it is to get out of wars once you are in them.

 

Something also needs to be said about journalists, equally willing to rush other people into combat, and to rejoice in reporting it when it happens. The horrible mess we now have in Syria is at least partly the fault of reporters who have oversimplified and romanticised events there.

 

I am currently plodding through the foothills of Christopher Clark’s majestic new book on the outbreak of the war ‘The Sleepwalkers’ , but I don’t think it is going to persuade me that Germany didn’t start the war (I’m told by Nigel Jones of the Spectator

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

 

…that everyone who wanted to know, has known for years (thanks to hard evidence uncovered by Kurt Eisner and Fritz Fischer) that the German Kaiser wanted war and set out to get it, thinking he could win as quickly as Bismarck had done in 1870.  And I have to say the ( historically well-known) mysterious destruction of some important German and Austro-Hungarian archives does make you wonder what it was they sought to hide).

 

I still think the real problem was the rivalry between Germany and France, which could only end in the victory of one or the other, and which, as far as I can see, was bound to end in the triumph of Germany sooner or later. And so it has, and nobody now complains.

 

I’m amused by the fact that modern liberal opinion ferociously and rather righteously supports the current European Union settlement, which is in all but name the defeat of France by Germany, formalised into a mysterious headless ‘Union’ which never mentions its chief purpose, the institutionalisation of German dominance of Europe, whiel France is allowed to pretend to be a great power.

 

Germany has learned many things since 1914, but one of the most important of all the things it has learned is tact. Otto von Bismarck had both tact and skill and was able to cement and increase German power without endangering his country, but when Wilhelm II got rid of him, things moved rapidly towards war. German politicians and diplomats couldn’t see the point of Bismarck’s bizarre and sometimes contradictory treaty entanglements with Russia and France which prevented a slide into war.

 

I suspect they also thought that Russia, rapidly modernising in the pre-1914 age, might one day become a much more effective ally of France, and that they had better got on with their war if they were not to risk a combat on two fronts. And it may also have been that they saw the chance (taken at Brest-Litovsk in 1917) to seize the Ukrainian wheatfields, the Baltic states and the Crimea, which Hitler would later covet and invade. I don’t know. But it seems to make sense.

 

As in 1939, I cannot for the life of me see why Britain needed to get involved in this, or what good our intervention actually did, to us or to those we claimed to be saving or helping. Clark’s book suggests that the supposed German threat to British naval supremacy was never that serious, which seems to me to have a ring of truth (Why did Germany want supremacy over the oceans anyway? Her interests were eastward and landlocked. The USA were our rivals in that struggle, and the ones who defeated us, too, while we were looking the other way and considering them as our allies). And, once that is taken out of the equation, I really cannot see why it mattered to us that the military verdict of 1870 should be reversed. France alone could not withstand Germany alone. Wouldn’t a clear settlement of this fact have been far more civilised in 1914 than it was in 1940?

 

France, despite sentimentalism about the Entente Cordiale, had many times been our chief enemy and was our natural rival in the Middle East (fighting between Britain and Vichy France in that region was among the bitterest combat of the Second World War.  Anglo-French rivalry in Syria and Palestine was a diplomatic nightmare between the wars , and during the last years of the Palestine mandate,  see ‘A Line in the Sand’) . I believe the British chiefs of staff were worried about war with France as recently as the early 1920s, and my former home town, Portsmouth, is amusingly ringed with gigantic, vastly expensive Victorian fortifications built against a French invasion threat of the 1850s. What was our interest in preventing a resolution of the Berlin-Paris quarrel?

 

Germany’s main interests were continental, and lay to the East. In 1914, Poland and Czechoslovakia, not to mention the Baltic states,  didn’t even exist, and Britain didn’t much care whether they did or not. Nor was Britain especially concerned about the Balkans. If Germany did push east, that would weaken Russia, which we did in those days regard as a threat in the Mediterranean and in India. Had we been able to see into the future, we would all have been keen on maintaining the dear old Austro-Hungarian empire, so much nicer than what came after it.

 

And, as usual, we had no continental-style land army of any size. Lord Roberts, Rudyard Kipling and (through his enjoyable book imagining a German invasion of Britain ‘When William Came’) ‘Saki’ (H.H.Munro) all campaigned for such an army. But they didn’t get anywhere. I used to think they had a point, but I don’t any more.  It was too expensive, conflicted with our traditions,  would have weakened the navy ( and so exposed the empire to danger) and  compelled us to lock it into some sort of formal continental alliance.

 

Our supposed guarantee to Belgium was not as clear-cut as you might think, nor did our fulfilment of it do much good to Belgium, which would have been a lot better off if it had let the Germans pass through on their way to Paris (almost nobody even knows that Sweden let German troops cross its territory after the occupation of Norway) . It seems to me, too, that France would have been a lot better off if it had been permanently and swiftly defeated in 1914.  It would have been spared Verdun, Vichy and the murder of its Jews. Germany would have been spared the blockade, Versailles, Hitler, the Holocaust,  the bombing , partition. Russia would have been spared the Bolsheviks, the civil war, Stalin, Barbarossa and all that followed. The Middle East might have remained slothful and untroubled, under a slowly decaying Ottoman rule. And who can say that would not have been a better outcome than the one we have?

 

 

 

The Netherlands, Italy, Scandinavia, Greece and above all (from my point of view) Britain would have been spared many losses and tragedies. The peoples living in Eastern Europe would have passed under different rulers, perhaps, but would probably have survived the century much more happily and more prosperous . The horrible forces released by Bolshevism and by Wilsonian national self-determination would have stayed buried at the bottom of Pandora’s Box.  Whatever it was, it was a mistake.  Whatever we do, we should not pretend otherwise.