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.