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Showing posts with label World War I. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World War I. Show all posts
By which I obviously mean the First World War since neither before or since has our perception of a war been so influenced by literary output, particularly of outstanding poetry. Since most British poets and writers seem to have served on the Western Front, the literature has contributed to the country's obsession with that part of the war, important but not the only one. Even the lavish centenary celebrations last year have not changed that attitude much.
Furthermore, because of the high calibre of the literary output we do think of the First World War as being unparalleled in horror. I have no desire to go into a discussion about the technological developments that had made the war different from many others though the truth is that it was not till the Second World War that more people had died because of enemy action than because of diseases. As Paul Delany points out in his biography of Rupert Brooke, Fatal Glamour,
in the Gallipoli campaign, bloody as it was, two-thirds of he two hundred thousand Allied casualties were caused by disease rather than enemy action.One of those was Rupert Brooke who died of septicemia, caused by a mosquito bite and exacerbated by general weakness and low immunity.
It always seemed to me rather touching that the wonderful memorial to the Camel Corps on the Embankment, commemorates all the dead, whether in battle, of wounds or disease.
Fatal Glamour is an interesting biography and deals with Brooke as he was, warts or feet of clay and all, much of which was hidden for many years by the people who published his poetry, letters and a few biographies. The image of the golden boy (and he really was extraordinarily good looking), the poet (he certainly was talented as several of the best poems show), the warrior (that is more dubious but not for lack of trying) being struck down as he went to war for his country and for Western civilization had to prevail.
There is no question, there were many faults in Brooke and his personality had many problems and episodes of instability. Would he have overcome them, had he survived the war or would he have descended into manic depression, which is one possible explanation for his break-down in 1912 and his behaviour afterwards? None can tell. No more can we tell whether his talent would have developed into something truly magnificent or whether he would have become another second-rate poet like the other Georgian poets? Would his literary talent have stayed with the war like Sassoon's did or moved forward like Graves's did? We can but speculate and, sensibly, Paul Delaney does very little of it. There is so little to go on.
He does make a very interesting point about the role of Brooke and the other poets and writers, people who came from a class that had not, traditionally, sent its sons to war and who, therefore, reacted with greater horror to what they faced.
Rupert's death would have counted for much less if he had been a conscript. As a volunteer, it mattered little that he had died of illness just before his fellow officers were mowed down by the Turks. He had chosen to face death for his country; his country had not chosen for him. And he had volunteered as a poet, who in his war sonnets had expressed the volunteer's creed of self-sacrifice. Nor did all war poetry need to be of that kind: the poets of disillusion - Sassoon, Graves, Owen - had been volunteers, too.Numbers of volunteers went down as the news from the Western front and Gallipoli came in and by 1916 those who maintained that the war could not be fought or won without conscription were politically victorious. The idea that had been proclaimed as un-British for decades became acceptable and by 1939 taken for granted.
The 1914 - 15 generation of volunteers had a unique moral authority, sandwiched between the professionals of the British Expeditionary Force and the conscripts of 1916 - 18. No other belligerent country had met its wartime needs for soldiers in the British way; not coincidentally, none of those countries produced a comparable generation of poets. Whatever the excesses of Rupert's war poems, he still had his place in that lyrical flowering, without precedent before or since.
As last year's overwhelming and not always accurate memorials to the outbreak of the First World War slide away into memory, we can start discussing the subject a little more seriously and look at the conflict as well as its aftermath, the Versailles order, from other points of view. In January after watching Testament of Youth, I wrote a dissatisfied posting. I had hoped that the centenary would bring out more than just more stuff about the Western front, the mud, the barbed wire, the sensitive young men hardened by the horrors, etc etc. The film, as I said, was very much in that group and not a particularly good example of it, either. As it happens, the film did not garner particularly good reviews and disappeared from the cinema screens surprisingly quickly. Had everyone had enough of the whole subject by the beginning of this year? Or was the film simply not appealing enough?
There were, of course, a number of serious historical works published as well and, maybe, I should do a blog about some of them but the one that came out recently is of superlative interest to anyone who really wants to know about the causes of the war, its development and its aftermath.
The book is called Towards the Flame and subtitled Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia and is by the eminent historian, Professor Dominic Lieven (yes, he is of that family though not, I believe, a direct descendant of the Russian Ambassador of the early nineteenth century).
Professor Lieven chastises his colleagues, historians in the English-speaking world for concentrating too much on the Western European aspect of the war. In his Introduction he says:
This underlines a basic point about the First World War: contrary to the near-universal assumption in the English-speaking world, the war was first and foremost an eastern European conflict. Its immediate origins lat in the murder of the Austrian heir at Sarajevo in southeastern Europe. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, led to a confrontation between Austria and Russia, eastern Europe's two great empires. France and Britain were drawn into what started as a conflict in eastern Europe above all because of fears for their own security: the victory of the Austro-German alliance over Russia would tilt the European balance of power decisively towards Berlin and Vienna.The question before 1914 was who would be the dominant power in Central and Eastern Europe: Germany and Russia, with Austria-Hungary (as it was by then) naturally inclining to support Germany.
Germany, says Professor Lieven, did not really have to win in the West: a draw would have been sufficient as long as Russia was defeated, something that was confidently predicted by 1916. In the end, Russia's defeat did not help Germany as the war in the West ended with the Allies' victory, thanks to the American entry into the war and those Eastern gains had to be surrendered.
I must admit this all seems fairly obvious to me but, perhaps, not to a number of better known historians. (Much better known.)
The Versailles order, set up in the wake of the victory in the West could be put together only because the situation in the East was rather peculiar. A war that started as a bitter to-the-death contest between Russia and Germany ended with both countries defeated and destroyed. It was, therefore, possible to dismember the Austro-Hungarian Empire and set up a number of small states that could not defend themselves against a strong and aggressive Germany or Russia (or, perhaps, both as it happened in 1939 in Poland and the Baltic states). The assumption that this state of affairs could go on indefinitely was rather strange. Sooner or later and probably sooner rather than later Germany and/or Russia would become strong again and there would be another catastrophe for Europe. So it turned out. The Versailles order that had excluded both Germany and Russia was inherently unstable.
There was much more to the suffragist movement than the WSPU, which was small, less and less influential in the years before the First World War and, many said even at the time, counter-productive in its actions and attitudes.
Martin Pugh, the well-known historian of popular politics and women's politics (sometimes these overlap and sometimes they are opposites) says this in the first chapter of his Women and the Women's Movement in Britain 1914 - 1959:
The important role traditionally claimed by the Pankhursts has not, so far, recovered from the careful analysis of their organization by Andrew Rosen. Their suffering and sacrifice made an indelible impression that can never be forgotten; but history is an unsentimental business, and it has clearly exploded many of the more extravagant claims made by the suffragettes.Martin Pugh has been accused before of an anti-Pankhurst bias and even inaccuracy but there is a good deal of evidence for what he says here. Lady Knightley, a prominent member of the Primrose League and a Conservative suffragist, certainly thought their methods are counter-productive though she admired Mrs Pankhurst personally.
Pankhurst claims that they had won public opinion to their side scarcely seem consistent with the antagonism towards them amongst working-class women which Jill Liddington has discussed in her valuable study of Lancashire. Nor does it square with the growing hostility of the crowds and the defeat of the Pankhurst-backed candidate at the Bow and Bromley election in 1912.
Always a small organization, the WSPU split repeatedly until it became a mere rump of personal followers of the Pankhurst family. Nor, ultimately, did militant tactics succeed in shaking the resolve of the government on women's suffrage; rather they alienated, if only temporarily, much of the support built up amongst politicians for enfranchising women.
History may be unsentimental but media, the art world and popular mythology all have a great dash of sentiment in their activity and the glorious Pankhursts together with their followers seem to figure prominently in all of them.
In the same way, it is a mistake to suppose that women, whether active or not, were all pacifists during and immediately after the First World War, no matter what we might glean from books by and about Vera Brittain. The National Portrait Gallery has a small but fascinating exhibition of women during the Great War, with nary a mention of either Miss Brittain or her friend Winifred Holtby. There are photographs and life stories of some of the many other women who became nurses, organizers and many other things during that conflict. The stories are fascinating and the conclusion is very sad: though women won many rights while their work was desperately needed, much of that was lost in the immediate period after the war.
Nevertheless, in 1918 a good many men and some women were enfranchised for the first time and there was, naturally enough, a good deal of worry and discussion how these groups would vote. The results were interesting in 1918 and subsequent elections. It seems that very few of the anti-suffrage MPs suffered because of their stance, most of those who stood being re-elected.
Here are some interesting points Martin Pugh makes about the 1918 election, which was somewhat unusual politically but interesting in what it showed in voting patterns.
The inclusion of the wives of workingmen - the bulk of the 8.4 million women - largely satisfied the non-Conservative politicians that there would be no additional advantage for the propertied classes. But the new electorate of women displayed an obvious bias towards age. Only the youngest of the women had been born in the late 1880s and thus reached an impressionable political age in the Edwardian period when Liberal-Labour reformism was at its height. The great majority of women voters are likely to have formed political loyalties in a period when the choice was between Conservative and Liberal, though we must allow for the realignment of some of the most politically active women as a result of the suffrage controversies prior to the war.He then turns to some of the details of the voting patterns.
Although most women electors had not voted even in a local government election before, the low turnout of 58.9 per cent in 1918 should almost certainly not be attributed to female abstention since the 12.9 million males included 3.9 million naval and military voters of whom it was reported that two thirds failed to take the chance of voting by post or by proxy.
Modern studies confirm that young voters are consistently the least likely to participate, and it thus seems very likely that abstention in 1918 was due to male behaviour rather than to the more mature female electorate. This is corroborated by many contemporary accounts which refer to the women as undemonstrative but determined in turning out to vote.
Dr John Turner has approached the 1918 election by using the evidence provided by the electoral register of 1915 and the number of men included in the 1918 register to estimate the total number of new male electors. He then examined the performance of the Labour Party's candidates and found that there was an inverse relationship between the size of the Labour poll and the proportion of new voters. In fact the greater the proportion of new male voters the less well Labour did and the greater proportion of women voters the less well Labour did.Accounts of the newly enfranchised women voters' behaviour at meetings confirm this view and there is a great deal of interesting material available on the differences between the servicemen and those who had stayed at home in their various attitudes towards the peace negotiations. It would have been interesting to know how many of the more bloodthirsty women had 'done their bit' during the war itself.
Yet a statistical relationship is one thing: explaining it is another. This can be done at two levels. From a long-term perspective the emergence of an organised Labour Party can be seen to have been linked to the relatively prosperous, unionised and politically aware working-class communities who were already enfranchised to a great extent. Consequently the incorporation of the whole of the male working class weakened Labour's position in the short run. Similarly, women as a group were as yet relatively uninvolved in the social and institutional networks that fostered support for Labour, and their enfranchisement was unlikely, without further changes, to prove advantageous.
More immediately women appear to have reacted to the 1918 campaign in a rather striking way, as contemporaries observed. It is easy to be misled by the prominence of a small group of women activists i n the anti-war cause. To those politicians who had hoped or feared that women would want to vote for international peace and conciliation the Coupon Election came as a shock. Anti-war candidates such as Ramsay MacDonald experienced heavy defeats in their constituencies, in his case at West Leicester where the women voters were reported to be 'bloodthirsty, cursing their hate', and as posing a physical threat to pacifist politicians.
Emmeline Pethwick-Lawrence first became aware of this in 1917 when helping a peace-by-negotiation candidate at Aberdeen; the women there 'were even more embittered than the men', she wrote. Subsequently as a Labour candidate herself in Manchester in 1918 she commented:
I realised at once that my supporters were not the women - this election was their chance of 'doing their bit' and the were all for 'going over the top' to avenge their husbands and their sons. My supporters were the soldiers themselves.
Yesterday's event at the National Liberal Club was very successful: well attended, two fascinating presentations and a largely excellent discussion though there were a couple of contributors who asked the speakers to confirm something that the latter had already said. The event was recorded and as soon as it goes on line this blog will link to it.
The account of Asquith's 1915 - 1916 coalition and its eventual failure raised many interesting questions, one of which, in my mind, concerned the Churchill coalition of 1940.
In 1915, as both speakers, Dr Ian Packer and Dr Nigel Keohane, made clear, Asquith was in charge of the coalition negotiations, despite the fact that his position was weakened by continuing problems both domestically and with the conduct of the war. He created a Cabinet in which the Conservatives took a secondary position and continued to be the Prime Minister. (A couple of questions about his personal problems to do with Venetia Stanley breaking off the relationship in 1915 and his son Raymond being killed in 1916 elicited the replies that Asquith was not the man to give in to emotions publicly, regardless of his private reaction.)
By the end of 1916, however, the coalition was finished and Asquith's resignation together with most of his Cabinet (not Arthur Henderson, the Leader of the Labour Party) was a miscalculation: Bonar Law might not have been able to form the new government but David Lloyd George could and did. It lasted to the end of the war and was re-elected in 1918. It collapsed when Conservative MPs famously announced that they did not want to be part of a coalition in 1922. That was, effectively, the end of the Liberal Party as a powerful body in British politics.
The causes for the collapse of Asquith's coalition were many but the most important was that the failures continued. The Battle of the Somme did not produce the outcome that had been hoped for though being able to fight it said something about the government's ability to organize and arm a large army, the Battle of Jutland was, in many ways, a disaster, the landing at Gallipoli even more so and by the end of 1916 it was becoming clear that Russia was not likely to be a useful ally for much longer.
Food stocks were running low and conscription (which was pushed by Lloyd George) caused a great deal of discontent.
When we look at the coalition of 1940 we can see a good many of the same problems. Militarily, things were going badly even though it had been expected that Churchill becoming Prime Minister would help the war effort and produce some victories. At the same time, there was discontent over conscription, over the home front not being organized well, there were continuous strikes and continuing propaganda produced by the Communist Party, under orders from the Comintern to oppose the war and praise the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Unlike the British Union of Fascists, the CPGB was not banned and its propagandists were not interned as the government did not want to upset the unions. (Interestingly enough, the French Communist Party was proscribed as soon as war had been declared on Germany.)
While the latter disappeared on June 22, 1941 (to be replaced by demands for a Second Front Now) other difficulties remained to which one can add the fact that from about 1942 on Churchill spent a great deal of time out of the country and the very important fact that he categorically refused to discuss post-war aims, being even less interested in that subject than Lloyd George had been. Caught between Attlee who was working on post-war aims domestically and Stalin who had his eyes fixed on the post-war international structure from a very early stage, Churchill and the Conservative Party were to pay heavily in 1945.
There were criticism of the way the war was run and a number of votes of no confidence taken in the Commons there was never any serious consideration of Churchill's coalition being replaced before the end (near enough) of the war.
The most obvious reason is the absence of a credible alternative to Churchill once Halifax had been shipped off to the US although he, too, would have faced problems unless the Labour Party changed its 1940 attitude. For that very reason, as Dr Keohane pointed out yesterday, Bonar Law, whose political position was a good deal weaker than Asquith's, survived the débâcle of 1916 while his opponent did not: there was no Lloyd George in the Conservative Party and though the old boy was still around in 1940 he alone considered his claims to leadership seriously.
Added to that the fact that Churchill, unlike Asquith, was a great orator and an inspirational though, oddly enough, not a particularly popular leader and one can see why his position remained secure despite misjudgements, bad news, various mistakes and illnesses.
Perhaps, the fact that in 1940 Churchill was not as secure as Asquith in 1915 contributed to the success of his coalition: he had to share fairly with the Labour Party, whose senior members were given important positions, beginning with Attlee, who became Deputy Prime Minister and was in charge of the home front. The Labour Party and the unions used the war years to consolidate their control over large parts of the country and its economy, something that was vital in the post-war creation of their own brand of the welfare state.
As we approach the end of another coalition (well, maybe) there are bound to be various discussions on the subject. It is worth mentioning that Dr Packer started his presentation with a half-joking comment that the 1915 coalition indicated that coalitions may not be good news to the Liberal Party and, perhaps, its successor.
Melanie McDonagh writes about the film of Testament of Youth, about to go on general release in today's Evening Standard and she, too, is an expert, knowing all those words. Despite Vera Brittain, the horror of the war was in the trenches, she tells us and she has a point though, actually, the medical stations behind the lines were full of horror as well. As were the ships that were sunk and the towns that were bombed (oh yes they were in the First World War). Her argument that we should concentrate on the men who were fighting and not just on the women who also served is not unreasonable though that would present as partial a picture as the one she is complaining about.
As it happens, I went to see the new film yesterday at the National Film Theatre and even sat through the less than enthralling discussion afterwards. Baroness Williams really ought to make up her mind about her early life: either she remembers her "beloved aunt Winifred [Holtby]" extremely well though she was five when that talented lady died at the age of 37 in 1935 or she was "only a child" in 1947 (as a matter of fact, she was 17). The other participants, one of the producers, the director and Alicia Vikander were mostly involved in mutual admiration and that is as it should be at film previews.
Ms McDonagh mentions that the film has already had great critical acclaim with the Standard's David Sexton describing it as a "tearful experience" though he was talking about the whole idea of the "lost generation". Think how tearful he would be if he looked at the losses in other countries, such as France, Germany and Russia in numbers and ratio.
I must admit, however that I agree with Ms McDonagh when she is being a self-described "party pooper" (having already been criticized severely on Twitter for not toeing the party line on the film).
Shirley Williams, Vera Brittain’s daughter, loved it, having feared initially that it would sanitise her mother, who “absolutely wasn’t a straightforward romantic heroine”. And indeed Alicia Vikander does convey Vera Brittain’s rather humourless intensity — even if she is, inevitably, luminously beautiful to Vera’s own pale prettiness. Actually, if I might party-poop a bit, what I balked at in the film was its relentless visual appeal — even the front had a period drama look to it — and the sentiments of the time have been given a contemporary spin to appeal to our own sensibility.It is, indeed, a "beautiful" film with a great deal of time spent on sweeping camera work, especially on glorious scenery. In fact, despite a chorus of approbation and self-approbation about the film not being Hollywood schmaltz (one gathered from something the producer said that the big studios were not interested in the idea) one has to admit that it is rather slushy.
The first act, the director told us, was deliberately slow and gracious with long sweeps of the camera: we had to see the beauty of that last summer before the world collapsed. That I have no objections to but I would have preferred a little more characterization as well.
The young people at the centre are highly intelligent (or so we must assume from them all going to Oxford). Do they never talk about anything at all of any kind of intellectual content? Do the two who intend to be writers, Vera and Ronald, never discuss their favourite authors? Not in this film, they don't.
Vera Brittain does not have to fight particularly hard to get to Oxford - her father gives in rather easily; she does not spend any time wondering or agonizing about her own abilities or ideas - we take all that on trust as she stares intensely into the camera; the four young men who would all be killed in the war, Vera's brother Edward, her fiance Roland and two others are not particularly well defined - we never really learn much about them.
What do they think of the war really? According to her diaries, Vera Brittain was initially greatly in favour and was anxious that her brother should enlist. In the film she talks her father, who is reluctant to let him go, round simply to do young Edward a favour.
The school Edward and his friends attended, Uppingham, was rather hearty (there is some indication of it, what with rugby, a cadet corps and a heavily patriotic pep talk from the headmaster) and the artist, C. R. W. Nevinson who also attended it, though earlier than our young men, described it as a place of "appalling jingoism" where anyone who did not share the prevalent view was "kicked, hounded, caned, flogged, hair-brushed, morning, noon and night". Presumably, this had not changed by the time young Edward Brittain and his friends had become pupils. Where did they fit in and how did that affect their thinking later, as the war progressed, if at all?
The second act is Oxford, the hospital in England, Vera's stint in France, the four young men killed one by one, right to Armistice with Vera being unable to join in the general celebration.
I well recall the 1979 series in which Cheryl Campbell, as the heroine, goes to Somerville and is overwhelmed by the joy of friendship with other girls of her calibre and is almost intoxicated by the pleasure of being able to argue and discuss various new ideas. For that Vera Brittain the decision to abandon all this and become a nurse, "to do something" is a real wrench and sacrifice. For the intense and gloriously beautiful Alicia Vikander it is hardly so: she has no friends, spends no time on discussion, reads rather reluctantly and moons over Roland as well as her brother.
The scenes in the various hospitals, in England and France, seem to be quite bloody enough and the odd shot of the battlefield or of the trenches that recalls films, photographs and paintings adds to the horror of it all. But we continue to know nothing about the way either the young men or Vera Brittain develop beyond the fact (known to all readers of poetry, of Journey's End, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Goodbye to All That and All Quiet on the Western Front) that sensitive young men become hardened or so horror-struck that they are not really capable of human emotion. Or perhaps they are when the girl they are in love with hugs them.
There is no mention that Edward Brittain, according to the Wikipedia entry on his sister, received the Military Cross, which was not awarded simply for sensitivity. In fact, as this note under a photograph in the Imperial War Museum tells us, "he participated in the first day of the Battle of the Somme, during which he was wounded and awarded the MC". But there are other aspects to the story of Edward that have been and still are carefully hidden as this review of a recent biography of Vera Brittain tells us. The film tells us nothing of it. What we get, instead, is numerous close-ups of Ms Vikander, who is beautiful, intense and brilliantly tragic.
Act three ought to be the post-war period but it is so truncated as to be more of an epilogue, which is a pity as the problems of people returning from the front and facing the world they left behind, in itself changed beyond recognition, is also fascinating. Both the book and the series did it justice; the film has scenes of Vera Brittain having a near-break-down and being rescued by Winifred Holtby, of one meeting and a lengthy scene of her returning to the lake where they had all bathed, undressing, swimming and swearing not to forget the young men.
In a sense that is true: thanks to her four young men, too young, perhaps, to have become personalities of made any impact on the world, have been remembered and for that we must be grateful. With them the whole of that generation is remembered in all the pity and glory that is their due though, perhaps, we should also remember those who fought elsewhere, not on the Western Front and those, the majority, who came back.
Will this film really bring that whole story alive to generations born long after? I am not sure. It is beautiful and it is full of tears but it does not really go beyond that.
Will it make Vera Brittain into an icon, which is what the director thinks she ought to be to young women? No, most definitely not. But why should it? Why should Vera Brittain be an icon? Young women now have to fight other battles and make other decisions.
I had hoped that with all the remembrance there will be more attention devoted to other parts of that catastrophic war but it seems that my hopes were in vain. I had also hoped for more thought and less emotion. That, too, seems to be unlikely.
There have been several coalition governments in modern British politics (the term is inappropriate for the period prior to the formation of well defined parties) and one is coming to an end. The Liberal Democrat History Group together with the Conservative History Group will be looking at another such coalition that was formed 100 years ago.
In May 1915, following political and military setbacks, Liberal prime minister H H Asquith brought senior figures from the opposition parties into his government. The meeting will look in detail at the background to the formation of the coalition and go on to consider its performance in government before its dramatic fall in December 1916.With some irony it will be held in the Lloyd George Room in the National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, SW1A 2HE at 7 pm on Monday, January 26.
Speakers: Dr Ian Packer, Acting Head of the School of History and Heritage at Lincoln University, author of a number of books on Edwardian and Liberal politics, who will look at the coalition from the Liberal side and Dr Nigel Keohane who now works at the Social Market Foundation and is the author of the book The Conservative Party and the First World War, to consider the coalition from a Conservative perspective.
The Chair will be taken by the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, (Raymond Asquith) the great-grandson of H H Asquith and currently the newest member of the Liberal Democrat team in the House of Lords.
Entry is free but please bear in mind that the Liberal Democrat History Group will be holding its AGM at 6.30, which is for members only.
It is possible that the remembrance season we entered two days ago will last the four or five years until it will be time to commemorate the tragic peace that followed the unusually tragic war but it is much more likely that there will be a complete exhaustion of commemoration all round and even politicians and media hacks will stop reminding us about the need to remember those who died for us and to draw the necessary lessons.
It seems very unlikely that people will remember the dead of the various wars of the last century on a day to day basis but equally unlikely that they will forget them completely. We are, after all, reminded of them every year at the moving and solemn Remembrance Day events. Is that not enough? In recent years, because of Britain's involvement in two major wars in Iraq (at an end for several years) and Afghanistan (coming to an end) there has been a revival of interest and emotion connected with that solemn moment of the Eleventh Hour on the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, which has become a time when we recall all the other wars as well and their various heroes and victims. It is my great fear that the multiplication of remembrance and the outright gorging on sentimentality of the last few days will take away attention from Remembrance Day. People may well feel quite bloated with remembrance by the time we get to the right day.
And so, on to August 4, 1914, generally seen as the beginning of the First World War, the horror unleashed on Europe and the world that, in its turn, precipitated further horrors. On that day Britain declared war on Germany. While there is evidence that politicians and diplomats felt that they had failed in solving the crisis, the public in both countries was enthusiastic about the war but, as is natural, lost that enthusiasm in years to come.
In Britain, when Asquith addressed a packed House of Commons, he said:No reply came and the Foreign Office released the following statement:
“We have made a request to the German Government that we shall have a satisfactory assurance as to the Belgium neutrality before midnight tonight. The German reply to our request was unsatisfactory.”
Asquith explained that he had received a telegram from the German Ambassador in London who, in turn, had received one from the German Foreign Secretary. Officials in Berlin wanted the point pressed home that German forces went through Belgium to avoid the French doing so in an attack on Germany. Berlin had “absolutely unimpeachable information” that the French planned to attack the German Army via Belgium.
Asquith stated that the government could not “regard this in any sense a satisfactory communication.”
He continued:
“We have, in reply to it (the telegram), repeated the request we made last week to the German Government that they should give us the same assurance with regard to Belgium neutrality as was given to us and to Belgium by France last week. We have asked that a reply to that request and a satisfactory answer to the telegram of this morning, should be given before midnight.”
Owing to the summary rejection by the German Government of the request made by His Majesty’s Government for assurances that the neutrality of Belgium would be respected, His Majesty’s Ambassador in Berlin has received his passport, and His Majesty’s Government has declared to the German Government that a state of war exists between Great Britain and Germany as from 11pm on August 4th.The nightmare began and has lasted to this day. Two days ago, on August 4, 2014, a great deal of commemoration went on.
We cannot argue with the importance of the date or the fact that the centenary should, in some way, be remembered. But one cannot help thinking that it was all overdone to an almost nauseating extent. Military parades, restrained speeches, the laying of wreaths (will they all be laid again in November?), beautiful services in various cathedrals are all solemn and, up to a point, moving. Photographs and newsreels of the period are enormously interesting and a number of exhibitions around the country have been fascinating.
But did we really need the call for darkness and the lighting of candles? Sir Edward Grey's famous comment about the lamps going out in Europe was not a literal description of what happened. Did we really need all the commentary, the endless sentimentality, the glorification of Britain's decision to go to war? Let me make it quite clear: I am not, in this posting, discussing either that or the various military campaigns, merely the surfeit of remembrance. We must remember! We must learn our lessons! But what must we remember? That war is hellish? Who doesn't know that? Given the fact that most of what was repeated in those endless comments was the old old myths about the war and the trenches, as if there had been no naval war, no air war, no fighting elsewhere in Europe and the world, nothing much seems to have been learnt about the actual events outside the pages of such magazines as History Today.
Those lessons we must learn? What are they exactly? That war is a bad thing? Well, who knew? That war is sometimes unavoidable? I am shocked, I tell you, shocked. The slightest suggestion that perhaps British generals were not quite as stupid as the mythology would have it, that many people came back from the war and got on with their lives, that British casualties were not as high as other countries', that, perhaps, signing those treaties with France and Russia was not such a good idea when we look at what they led to, that maybe it was not simply Germany's fault though they were hardly victims and of other not very controversial matters was greeted with hysterical outbursts about visiting battle fields (I have not done that but have visited at least one military cemetery and it was very moving) and the need to remember. Not to understand, not to keep a stiff upper lip but to remember.
It is one of the curious developments of the last few years that as Britain becomes less and less of a military power for psychological as well as practical reason, so there is a greater proliferation of memorials and remembrance festivities, till they have become a season, whose end is not in sight.
I should like to quote relevant comments from two writers, both, as it happens conservative. Dorothy L. Sayers's novel The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club which starts on Remembrance Day (and raises an interesting question about the wearing of the poppy) has a number of characters who had gone through the war and had been affected by it in a greater and lesser degree. Lord Peter Wimsey who, as readers of Sayers's books know, had suffered from shell-shock but had more or less overcome it meets at the beginning of the novel George Fentiman who seems to have been gassed and shell-shocked. He is in a bad state and seems unable to recover from his experiences. (There is a sort of a happy solution at the end of the novel but it does not ring true. Sayers's own marriage to a man who had never really recovered from the war was not happy.)
Listening to George Fentiman's complaints, Wimsey diagnoses the problem:
Cheer up. All this remembrance-day business gets on your nerves, don't it? It's my belief most of us would only be too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn't run it for all it's worth. However, it don't do to say so.That was written in 1928.
My other quotation is from John Dickson Carr, a writer who was more than a conservative, positively a Tory, and it refers to the period immediately after the Second World War. Carr was in Britain at the end of the war and was not particularly happy by the regime imposed on the country by the Labour government (a good many people were unhappy about it, feeling justifiably that war-time rationing and regulations should not intensify once the war was over).
In November 1945 he went back to the States and together with Frederick Dannay (one half of Ellery Queen) scoured the second-hand bookshops for the detective fiction of his youth. He emerged with what must have been a remarkable haul, including a complete set of novels by Carolyn Wells, an extremely popular writer in her day but almost forgotten now. Carr wanted to bring the books back to Britain but found it an incredible chore, it being necessary. apparently, to obtain a licence for the process from a government that rather sniffily discouraged, according to what Carr quoted in a letter to Dannay, the importation of fiction. (Who but a socialist government would think of that?)
As Douglas G. Greene quotes in his superlative biography of Carr and as Curtis J. Evans re-quotes in his essay on Carolyn Wells in the recent collection Mysteries Unlocked, Carr wrote to Dannay in May 1946 that the British government has finally (after six months) agreed to grant that licence though he also received "a stern letter saying it is not customary to allow importation of fiction". Carr goes on:
The regulations in this country go more and more damnable. One more war for liberty and we shall all be slaves.Something to mull over in this remembrance season.
100 years ago today, on June 28, 1914 the shots that ushered in the disaster of the twentieth century were fired in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip at the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. I need not go through all the subsequent events that eventually led to the First World War which, in turn, led to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and of Europe in general, pushed Britain and the British Empire closer to the bankruptcy and dissolution of the second half of the century and unleashed the two most evil ideologies of history: Nazism and Communism.
Just out of interest here is a link to The British Newspaper Archive that shows the coverage the Archduke's assassination received in British papers.
The second act of the century's tragedy is also commemorated today. 95 years ago, on June 28, 1919 the Versailles Treaty was signed and many of the century's tragedies was unleashed then. Certainly, in the Middle East we are still dealing with the outcome and no solution seems to be in sight.
Tory Historian has been ignoring THAT anniversary though THAT date (of THOSE shots) is coming. However, the time has come, TH thinks to read something around the subject and this new book about the Habsburgs by Paula Sutter Fichtner, who has written a great deal on the subject before, seems to be the right way to start.
The book starts with some discussion of Usage, that is of names, both geographic and personal, a matter of huge contention when one writes about the Habsburg empire, which she prefers to spell with a small e, because there are debates as to whether it had any or some imperial characteristics. (You see? We have a fierce contention before we even start.)
When it comes to place names the subject is fraught with difficulties, with borders and political structures changing all the time and many places having at least two or three legitimate (by some standards) names. Explanations are all very well but one really needs is maps. Lots of maps and, preferably, detailed ones.
By leafing through the volume, Tory Historian, a lover of maps, found three maps of Central Europe a. k. a. Habsburg lands in 1250, 1570 and c. 1815. They are not very detailed but they are maps and they give a reasonable idea of what the region looked like at three crucial periods. Eventually, TH found where the maps are listed; well, not listed exactly but their source indicated: right at the end, after the list of illustrations (numerically but not by page numbers) and before an indication of the source for several excellent family trees, also necessary if you want to follow the vagaries of the dynasty.
Not too bad for modern publishing. Could be better but at least there are some maps.
It might be admitted, incidentally, that British statesmen are peculiarly prone to this illusion. They are so accustomed, in domestic controversies, to invoke the principle of fair dealing and to rely upon settlement by compromise, that they do not understand that such conceptions are not always present in the minds of foreign negotiators.Needless to say, Grey was a Wykehamist himself but mutatis mutandis, that attitude still pervades our corridors of severely diminished power.
It was difficult, for instance for those who worked under Sir Edward Grey to convince him that the envoy of some Balkan country did not possess the same sort of traditions, intuitions and principles as he had inherited himself: he was inclined to regard them, if not perhaps as Old Wykehamists, then at least as Old Marlburians. If subsequent developments led him to revise this opinion, he would feel that that a gros dexeption had been practised upon him and would regard the foreign statesman who ahd failed to live up to Old Marlburian standards as a man of irredeemable iniquity.
Tory Historian was not going to comment on the row between Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, Tristram Hunt, his Shadow and the egregious Blackadder series but an article in yesterday's Evening Standard by Anthony Beevor seemed too good to ignore.
Mr Beevor, who is known as an historian of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, tells both Mr Gove and Mr Hunt that they are wrong (and sometimes right) about the reasons for Britain getting involved in the First World War and whether it was a good idea or not. On balance, he thinks, it was a good idea and Britain was right to do so but the object was not to protect freedom and democracy (a doubtful concept even at the time) but to prevent German hegemony of Europe.
Then he moves on to the problem of people writing about the way the war or, to be quite precise, the war on the Western Front was conducted. It is at this point that the Blackadder problem raises its ugly head. The discussions on what is, after all, a comedy show about the reason for the war are rather simplistic and the image of how it was conducted is based on a series of myths first promulgated by middle-class writers and poets who had not, as a class, taken part in a war before and thus had no idea just how horrible it really was, then by historians like Alan Clark who has never been able to show where he got that quote about lions being led by donkeys and, finally, by various showbiz personalities. In the meantime, real historians have been doing a good deal of work on the subject but that did not always get through to popular consciousness, let alone the educational establishment.
In the course of the article Mr Beevor also discusses the question of anti-militarism, its growth in reaction to the preceding "patriotism at all costs" ideas and, also, its anachronism.
Much of the anti-militarism is a perfectly natural reaction against the earlier, collective versions of history depicting the story of country, army and regiment. In the past 20 years especially there has been a far greater emphasis on the individual. But at the same time there has also been a certain element of sentimentalisation, generalising tragedy from individual cases. The demands for a sweeping pardon for deserters overlooks the fact that a few were hardened criminals, not just sufferers from shellshock.Why the teaching profession in its majority has taken so strongly in recent decades against anything to do with the armed forces and service rendered to the country is a large subject and Mr Beevor barely touches on it. He is right to point out, however, that this attitude must not extend to distortion of facts as it too often does.
I was appalled when I heard from a historian who is a First World War battlefield tour guide that he had heard a teacher tell her school group that officers stayed in their trenches and forced the men forward. As a recent article in the New Statesman acknowledged, young officers died at twice the rate of ordinary soldiers. Such deliberate distortions tend to underline the way that intellectual honesty is the first casualty of moral outrage.In this connection TH calls attention to a fascinating review by Charles Moore of a recent book by Anthony Seldon and David Walsh, Public Schools and the Great War, which gives figures of casualties and the rate at which young officers, most of whom were from public schools, were killed.
Public schoolboys died at getting on for twice the average for all those who served — a rate of more than 18 per cent. One reason for this is that most were commissioned officers, and therefore led their men into battle, making themselves conspicuous. Another is that they were, generally, five inches taller than their working-class contemporaries in 1914, so they were easier for the Germans to hit.Facts and figures are always interesting in such emotionally charged discussions but are rarely produced. It is sad to think that teachers do not bother to do so either.
Mr Beevor does mention at the end of his article something that is of great importance:
School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of “going over the top” on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man’s-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.TH is already rather bored with the endless, mostly inadequate and politically charged articles, essays, speeches and general bilge that will pervade this centenary year. It would be good to to assume that at least one good thing will come out of it all: a realization that the war consisted of a good deal more than just the trenches on the Western front. So far, there seems little hope of that assumption being realized.
As we approach a year that will be full of contentious and paralyzingly dull books, articles, celebrations, analyses and other suchlike events of the First World War (indeed, the process has started already) I feel it appropriate that I have just finished reading Marina Soroka's extraordinarily detailed account of the last Russian Imperial Ambassador's career in London.
Count Benckendorff was an interesting person and I shall be writing more about him but first some paragraphs about the beginning of the war that was not supposed to happen. This is what Dr Soroka writes (pp. 258 - 259)
No one as yet had blamed the war on "the old diplomacy". In fact, no one had ever blamed diplomats for wars, for it was common knowledge in Europe that governments led nations into wars for various reasons, some honourable and some not, but diplomats patched up the quarrels which governments started and armies fought. Diplomats were the most civilized and pacific representatives of their nations.And another myth was born. I may add that the heavy-handed irony of the last sentence is most uncharacteristic of Dr Soroka.
In the summer of 1914 they had not done anything different from what they had always done in crises, and their responsibility for what happened was no greater than for the Crimean war or the Franco-Prussian war or the Italo-Turkish war. During the Anglo-Boer war there was a moment, in 1900, when Germany, Russia and France seemed to be on the verge of intervening to make Britain sign peace, But, as a French government official wrote: strategic interests, humanitarian considerations and public opinion sympathetic to the Boers failed to outweigh the three powers' political interests, prudence and expediency. Much as their public opinion sympathized with the Boers, the governments backed away from a confrontation, resigning themselves to the fact that "England will swallow the two poor nations without being disturbed or distracted". [Abel Combareieu] A major conflict was avoided.
In July 1914 the inability to think beyond the status and strategy considerations deprived the European cabinets of real alternatives and diplomacy was pushed aside while the military advised the heads of governments. When the unforeseen duration and the scope of the war became clear the nations fell on their governments, which sought the most plausible scapegoats and deftly passed the blame on to the diplomats. By 1918 the "old diplomacy", roundly condemned for its undemocratic, secretive and inefficient character, had been demoted to the rank of a handmaiden to the pure-minded monarchs, prime ministers and presidents of the powers whose inherently pacific intentions had been so poorly served by their elitist and hawkish foreign offices.
For various reasons to do with ongoing research I have been reading some of the essays in the volume edited by T. G. Otte, The Makers of British Foreign Policy. The first chapter, an introductory overview of the period "from Malplaquet to Maastricht" (a proper acknowledgement of the importance of both those treaties) and written by Professor Otte has this to say among many other interesting matters (p. 12):
The changing political structure of Britain after the extension of the franchise in 1867, moreover, affected the framing and executing of foreign policy. The rising middle class's stringency began to outweigh the aristocracy's traditional appreciation of Europe's significance for British interests, though between Canning and Grey only three Foreign Secretaries sat in the House of Commons. Victorian finance pursued strictly economic ends. Between the Crimean War and the Boer War, Britain's national debt fell steadily. With the reduction in government expenditure, the size and preparedness of Britain's army declined.This raises several interesting points not least that European entanglement was not new to Britain in the twentieth century but it was something that was seen by a growing section of the extended electorate as not being wholly desirable.
The relative insignificance of Britain's armed forces compared with the mass armies of France and Prussia-Germany, and the inapplicability of naval pressure against the dominant Continental powers further restricted Britain's ability to interfere in Europe. The prevailing economizing consensus, indeed, created a mindset that would ultimately contribute to Neville Chamberlain's problems in the late 1930s. The desire of mid-Victorian public opinion for abstention sapped the ability of governments to lead with confidence.
Disraeli (later Lord Beaconsfield) was prepared to challenge that opinion and, if needs be to manipulate it both in his readiness to threaten Russia with a naval squadron and to run rings round it in diplomacy (and that, despite the fact that the Russian Foreign Ministry managed to intercept and decipher most diplomatic telegrams that came anywhere near them or their agents).
It was Gladstone whose policy was beset by ambiguity that has dogged all liberal interventionists ever since, particularly if they wanted to control expenditure. On the one hand, he saw it as Britain's duty to develop an active European policy, on the other hand he wished to eschew Continental entanglements that were liable to cost the country dear and bring no immediately obvious benefits.
A couple of pages later Professor Otte writes:
The underlying problem for British diplomacy at the close of the nineteenth century was that British governments saw European affairs in light of Britain's imperial interests. Continental governments, by contrast, viewed colonial problems in terms of the general great power constellation in Europe.The Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 was fraught with even more difficulties and misunderstandings (not to mention bad faith on both sides) and was fraying badly by the summer of 1914.
As a result, British diplomacy tended to regard agreements on issues arising from the geostrategic periphery as a means to reduce European frictions, which, in turn, could impinge on Britain's overseas interests. The European powers judged the value of any agreement with Britain by its utility in forcing Britain in taking part in Continental affairs. Thus, Anglo-German alliance talks in 1898 and 1900 - 01 came to nothing and the Anglo-French entente after 1904 was plagued by different interpretations as to the nature and extend of the understanding.
For many of the same reasons I have also been reading a somewhat less satisfactory book by Marina Soroka, Britain, Russia and the Road to the First World War, which does, however, have an interesting comment about the ideas behind diplomacy in that period.
In the 1900s European governments tried to implement their foreign policies without losing sight of two guiding principles. One stated that the "man in the street never cares two damns about foreign politics until he finds himself landed in the wary". The other cautioned that if a government went against the "national feeling" too often or too openly, it might undermined the popular confidence in its foreign policy. How universal these axioms were is obvious from the fact that the first one was expressed by a Foreign Office bureaucrat in parliamentary Britain and the second by the Russian autocrat Alexander III.The two opinions are related though Marina Soroka does not exactly explain how. In general, her book proposes certain theses and then floods the pages with detailed facts and quotations from official and unofficial correspondence, hoping that the theses will find support somewhere in that flood.
While British governments of the late nineteenth century found it difficult to conduct a foreign policy with the electorate more interested in balanced budgets than doubtful European glory, it it also true that by the time of the early twentieth century many diplomats and officials in various foreign ministries found themselves driven to a more aggressive foreign policy than they would have preferred by popular opinion, expressed by the newspapers all too often and by politicians who felt they had to react to that opinion.
Tory Historian happens to be what is vulgarly described as a sucker for newsreels of the past. What a joy it is, therefore, to find two videos on the History Today blog, one of people celebrating in the streets in 1918 on hearing that the war is finally over and the other is a longish piece of various dignitaries arriving for the Versailles Conference. There is even a sequence of the documents being signed. One wonders where the Pathé News cameraman is standing as the pictures always seem to be above and behind everybody else.
The Battle of Jutland, the largest naval battle of World War I was fought on May 31 - June 1, 1916 in the North Sea, near Jutland. Rather than commenting on it or asking Tory Historian to do so, I shall put up a brief discussion between two Conservative activists and amateur historians, who are very knowledgeable on the subject.
David Herdson describes himself as a Conservative activist, political commentator ( a weekly column with politicalbetting.com, running on Saturday mornings at the moment), with a keen interest in history. This is his brief comment on the battle:
My own view is that Jellicoe got just about all the big calls he made right (his decision on how and whether to form line of battle was spot on and he had 2 mins to call it), that his strategic understanding was correct (keep the fleet in being; deny the Germans access to the ocean), but that the fleet and Admiralty didn't perform as well as they should have done under the circumstances. Much has been made of Jellicoe's decision to break off the action in dusk but that was surely right with the technology in WWI. More should be made of how long it took to make contact in the first place.
Anyone else wants to join the discussion?
The last surviving British veteran of the trenches has died at the age of 111. Harry Patch, whose death was announced today, fought at Passchendaele where more than 70,000 British soldiers were killed. The total number of casualties was: on the British/French/Commonwealth side 508,800 dead, wounded, missing, or captured and on the German side 348,300 dead, wounded, missing, or captured.
Tory Historian sincerely hopes that Mr Patch will not be insulted in death by the sort of silly, patronizing comments various people and politicians made after the death of Henry Allingham.
The last remaining British veteran is Claude Choules, 108, who lives in in Australia. He was a seaman and is a veteran of both World Wars.
Tory Historian agrees that the passing of Henry Allingham, the oldest man in the world and the oldest British veteran of the Great War, at the age of 113 is, indeed, a solemn occasion; a time for us all to meditate on that war, its horrors and, perhaps even more, the horrors that followed it. The short twentieth century was not a happy one for most of the world.
On the other hand, Tory Historian is a little puzzled by comments seen on various outlets about what a lovely fella Mr Allingham was or how marvellous he was or others of that ilk, made by people who patently have no idea and have never heard of Mr Allingham until his death.
Clearly, he was an admirable man, whose life was very private and who deserves better than patronizing comments such as the one made by Prime Minister Brown:
I had the privilege of meeting Henry many times. He was a tremendous character, one of the last representatives of a generation of tremendous characters.Mr Allingham's MP, who clearly had not the slightest idea about the man (somehow it is hard to imagine Mr Allingham frequenting his MP's office but anything is possible) also burbled in an equally condescending fashion:
He lived in Eastbourne for much of his life and was a much-loved local figure.Tory Historian finds all this very distasteful.
He always had a roguish sense of humour and we're all going to miss him hugely.
He always had a joke and loved all the attention.
Tory Historian cannot let this day pass without mentioning the one event of modern history that can be described as catastrophic in every way: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, backed by six co-conspirators.
That shot fired in Sarajevo has been rather dramatically described as the one that ushered in the “real” twentieth century. Certainly its outcome – the two groupings of allies going to war not only plunged Europe and, through the various empires and America’s eventual participation, the world into a horrific war but created the darkest and most savage decades of European history for many centuries.
By 1918 Germany had lost her empire and was a defeated and humiliated country; Russia was in ruins and the Ottoman Empire in pieces. Europe went on living out the consequences for the rest of the century, the Middle East is still doing it.
By an interesting coincidence, June 28 is also the day in 1919 when the next step in the twentieth century tragedy was taken – the Versailles Treaty was signed, leaving Germany with a feeling of bitterness and France with continued dissatisfaction.
Tory Historian walked down the Aldwych today from Bush House towards the Strand and Trafalgar Square (eat you heart out Burlington Bertie) and managed to miss the St George's Day celebrations, which was no great tragedy as Tory Historian dislikes state sponsored jollification.
The route went past the memorial to Eagle Hut, carefully photographed, that is in the wall of Bush House, just next to India House. It is a moving plaque that reminds us of an alliance and friendship sealed at a time of hardship.
This note tells us that Eagle Huts for American servicemen overseas were initiated by a General Order (#26-II-1) by U.S. Commander-in-Chief General John Pershing.
Published on 28 August 1917 it affirmed that the Y.M.C.A. would "provide for the amusement and recreation of the troops by means of its usual programme of social, physical, educational and religious services".The plaque goes further. Its text reads:
Perhaps the most famous of the servicemen's centres was the so-called Eagle Hut opened in London on 3 September 1917. Operated by the Y.M.C.A. the centre, staffed by some 800 voluntary personnel, offered overnight accommodation and food for American servicemen passing through London.
The centre additionally helped with arrangements for London sightseeing tours and entertainment. Turnover was heavy: in February 1919 alone 134,566 meals were served. The Eagle Hut remained open beyond the armistice, finally closing its doors on 25 August 1919.
This tablet marks the site of EAGLE HUT where services to the men of American and Allied Forces testified to the friendship of the English speaking peoples.Characteristically, the plaque is not very noticeable and few people know about it.
Tory Historian is going off the beaten track today to spend the day in preparation for a talk this evening on the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Properly speaking, it should have been delivered last year, for the anniversary but not nearly enough people were interested.
For some reason, the anniversary of the Entente Cordiale of 1904 seemed of greater import. Yet the two are inextricably linked - both agreements negotiated in secret against popular opinion (especially the Anglo-Russian one) by a Foreign Office that was turning away from traditional ideas of international politics.
Both were supposed to put an end to centuries of rivalry and enmity but together they resulted in Britain becoming involved in the First World War. In fact, one could argue that these agreements made that war all but inevitable. Or did they? Tory Historian is looking forward to some trenchant opinions from readers of this blog.
