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.