by Simon Winder
British planners had spent generations planning a war with France, just as Germany had in substantial part become united out of fear of France. It took only a superficial interest in history to notice that at regular intervals France appeared to go crazy and attack everyone. The British continued to pour resources into a navy specifically aimed at France. As had been the case in previous wars, Britain’s natural allies were Prussia and Austria (ideally both of them if they were not at each other’s throats). In the nineteenth century this relationship remained a complex and almost unthinking tangle of assumptions. These were fed by the great Allied moments of the past – the British and Austrians crushing the French at Blenheim in 1704, the British and Prussians crushing the French at Waterloo in 1815. The establishment of a new European order after Waterloo was mainly the work of British and Austrian negotiators – and indeed an interesting and little-examined issue is why, by the outbreak of the First World War, Britain and Austria seemed to be living in such different and unrelated worlds after such a long partnership. As already discussed, the British were both instrumental in building Prussian power in Western Europe and benevolent neutrals in the German wars of unification. There was also a shared monarchical, ideological disgust with France – with its fake kings and emperors, turbulence, revolutions and implied continual affronts to the legitimist (and closely intermarried) British and German royal families.
The speed of the alienation was breathtaking. Neither side had a convincing strategy for fighting the other. Britain’s main naval stations at Plymouth and Portsmouth had developed over centuries to fight France, and the new North Sea bases needed to fight Germany were always provisional, half-hearted and vulnerable. Even Britain’s continuing commitment to defend Belgian neutrality had always been meant to be a tripwire against some future French eruption – a tediously traditional strategy for over two centuries, left over in part from when Belgium had been ruled by Austria. Nobody had really thought through the mad implausibility that Belgium might be invaded from the east, as now happened. Within moments of war existing between Britain and Germany both sides became utterly invested in the destruction of the other. The British public was appalled by the German ‘rape’ of Belgium and was fed a diet of bizarre stories of Belgian nuns being tied to the clappers of church bells and squelched to death when these were rung. The German army was undoubtedly brutal in Belgium, but only to a degree the British should have found familiar from their own behaviour in, say, China or South Africa. The German public (and leadership) felt that they had gone to war confident of British neutrality and that they were now being stabbed in the back by repulsive and hypocritical ‘shopkeepers’, using the excuse of Belgium’s neutrality to try to destroy their patent successors as Europe’s leaders. This confidence was reckless and almost infantile – a feeling that if you could only wish hard enough Britain would not stand by France and German war plans might work; therefore it was necessary to assume Britain would stay neutral. But Britain gave out chaotic, dithery signals and its tiny army did not seem relevant to even a year-long war.
This is a fiendishly difficult issue, but Britain’s global preponderance was undoubtedly an element in creating the pressure-cooker atmosphere that resulted in 1914. Some over-perceptive Russian officers in the latter stages of the Napoleonic Wars had suggested that Russia should stop fighting, as every fresh Russian victory over Napoleon simply opened up the world even further to the British. This had also been the case with the Seven Years War, when Prussia had done the really hard fighting while Britain wildly snatched up chunks of the rest of the planet. Victorian Britain had therefore managed, despite the loss of the United States, to become an imperial power like no other. However, Britain’s range of ‘holdings’ was always vulnerable to some fresh predator. The whole nineteenth century was spent in a maze of complex negotiations and threats in order to keep it all together. In 1900, as Britain took over the rest of South Africa, it was an interesting question how the British empire (and therefore much of the world) would evolve and whether or not this process would involve British decline. Many British leaders were appalled by the South African War – how isolated it had made them from scornful world opinion, how expensive and violent it was, given what was supposed to be weak opposition, how many people had been killed. Would the future involve endless fighting of this kind? These anxieties led to the colonial agreements with Russia and France – a wish to settle the futures of Africa and Asia without further bloodshed, but which turned out to draw together the three allies in ways which resulted in far worse bloodshed in Europe.
The Germans were bitterly resentful of this British preponderance and became ever more deeply prey to a sense that they were being shut out of the world. Something of the same effect can be seen today in, for example, the nature of French anti-Americanism, in which so many of the discontents of French culture are mysteriously the fault of the United States. In Germany’s case this began to take on pathological proportions. This has tended to be portrayed as the result of the Kaiser’s feeling of inferiority and dislike over his mother’s British family and their (admittedly) patronizing attitude. Wilhelm II was an important element and a more genial, tubby and self-indulgent figure on the throne could have led Germany in a different direction, but he was also reflecting a mass of seething, wonky German nationalist opinion.
Without fighting anybody, Germany was dominating Europe before 1914 – its factories were creating goods sold all over the world. A marvellous sense of this can be found in the old Free Port area of Hamburg. As part of the negotiation for Hamburg joining the German empire, Hamburg’s rulers insisted on maintaining a separate Free Port which would allow the city to continue its preeminent role as mainland Europe’s great entrepôt: a tax-free island where goods could be warehoused and released into the market as price and demand dictated. The enormous zone built to achieve this – cut off from the mainland by its own canals, bridges and police force (yet again a united Germany manages to wind up with enclaves, exceptions and oddities) – could not be more painfully atmospheric of the Germany that could have been. Stinking of low-tide mudflats, the great warehouses (some of which are still used, particularly for Persian carpets) are a warren of narrow corridors and steel anti-fire doors. I have a vulnerable sort of interest in commodities and so was a pig-in-clover at the warehouse museum, with its displays of sacks of coffee, crates of tea, sheets of raw rubber. There is even a diagram, from a later date, showing the loading of a German merchant ship as it headed to the Far East (mechanical equipment, fencing, processed goods) and the loading for the return trip (bauxite, copra, ball rubber). Weights and measures, pulleys, ladders, cranes, stevedores’ hooks, dollies, hessian – these should have been the basis for Germany’s future rather than troop trains and siege artillery. Much of the history of the world could be described through ship manifests and warehousing. The old Hamburg free port is a sort of concentrated essence of what most people value and Germany by 1900 lay at its heart. It slurped in immense quantities of tropical goods, squirting them into an infinite range of specialized factories and then selling them back across the world – and doing all this through an infinity of middlemen and normal mercantile behaviour, with only a tiny element contributed by the German colonial empire itself.
Unfortunately tangled up with this was a feeling of intense competitiveness with Britain. Germany was winning that competition – its industries were overtaking Britain’s, but in a rapidly expanding global market this need hardly be viewed as a problem. But a mutually reinforcing ideology grew in some circles in Britain and Germany that their futures were becoming incompatible. This was expressed most famously in the ‘naval race’, with Germany building huge new battleships of a kind which could only be seen as taking on Britain militarily. The British poured about a quarter of all government revenues into making sure that they won this race, which they did. But it stoked a powerful, mutually reinforcing paranoia. If anyone had carried out opinion polls in 1890 the idea of an Anglo-German war wou
ld in both countries have seemed ludicrous – by 1910 it would have appeared very plausible.
The outbreak of war pushed into hyper-drive this British sense of Germany as a sort of illegitimate horror. It required some rapid retooling by the royal family, who had been until very recently more than happy intimates with many Germans. Photographs of George V wearing a spiked helmet tended to disappear and the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha suddenly became the House of Windsor. When Kaiser Wilhelm heard this he proposed, in a rare moment of wit, that the German translation of Shakespeare’s play should be altered to The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg (after whom the odd yet addictive bright yellow and pink British cake is named), a clever and capable royal adventurer who had spent most of his career in the Royal Navy and was First Sea Lord in 1914, suddenly found himself having to retire and change his name to Mountbatten. Nobody could have been more British – he had become naturalized aged fourteen and was married to Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, but suddenly he was unacceptably German.
War may have broken out in 1914 through recklessness and mismanagement, but its justification at once became monolithic and adamant. The Germans, as it turned out, were intensely militaristic (despite having a smaller proportion of citizens under arms than the French), despotic (despite being strikingly less so than Russia) and materialistic (despite the Allies being far richer than the Central Powers). Germany’s previously admired philosophers became the prophets of zombie unthink; its widely drunk wines grossly inferior to those of France and swept from the table; its beautiful language the gargled jackboot voice of a parade-ground culture. It’s as inevitable a part of fighting as putting on uniforms, but it doesn’t make it any less depressing. This exhaustive intellectual and cultural boarding-up of all the windows and locking all the doors we have lived with ever since – attitudes which still make Germany a sort of dead zone. The course of Nazism confirmed these attitudes in every way: what could (if the result had not been so serious) be seen almost as a parody of British ideas from 1914 of German loathsomeness.
It was what turned out to be the unwinnable nature of the war that destroyed everything. The ‘Hamburg future’ was tragically deferred for Western Europe until the normal consumer world of early 1914 re-emerged for survivors after 1945 and after Hamburg itself had been razed to the ground. But even in the depths of the First World War, a relentlessly narrow and exclusively military struggle, at least on the Western and Italian fronts, nobody could imagine the specifically German evil that would ultimately be unleashed.
The Germans saw themselves in the Great War as sitting at the heart of European heritage, fighting against a bunch of vulgar materialists (the British), pants-down revanchists (the French) and drunken savages (the Russians). This was expressed by the Germans in Wagnerian and medievalist terms – the German soldier as a knight errant, as the cultured and thoughtful man obliged to arm himself for national defence. Until 1914 most British intellectuals would have denied being vulgar materialists, but would have been happy to agree with the descriptions of their new allies and have conceded Germany’s central place in European culture. In 1914 this was knocked on the head with an immediate campaign across British universities to expunge ‘German’ thinking and block out any sense at all of Germany as a major culture, except perhaps in the far-distant past. It became, for obvious reasons, suspect to have any interest in Germany at all. The British and later the Americans mocked the idea of German ‘Kultur’, contrasting these appeals to ancient epics and chivalry with the sort of baby-eating, nun-violating reality. This infuriated the Germans and drove them to produce a deranged poster (on view in the Ingolstadt museum) comparing the output of literate schoolchildren, graduating students and publication of new books in Germany and Britain and showing (with suitable decorative trimmings such as the wise owl of Minerva) how Germany was miles more literate, innovative and sensitive – which was probably true. But it is striking now, when the passions of 1914 are broadly spent, just how much damage was done by this process. Decisions taken by sweating military men and tense politicians for specific – and as it turned out grotesquely wrong – reasons spilt out into every aspect of life in a sort of total mobilization with which in some measure we still live.
Disaster
The horrible military surprises piled up hour by hour. Only the most complacent elements in various high commands thought that the war would be brief, but everyone had assumed a serious victory followed by a further campaigning season to finish everything off. It turned out that the technology, particularly artillery, had run out of control and could kill off astonishing numbers of troops. Everyone’s offensives, however frenzied, seized up in a disgusting hail of shell.
Every element in the war had failed within weeks to comply with the military leaders’ plans – even Austria-Hungary’s invasion of Serbia had gone completely wrong. It is at this point that the issue of Germany having a uniquely malign role in modern history becomes acute. After the French had won the Battle of the Marne, the Germans never developed a new plan that would have allowed them to prevail: even if the French could somehow be defeated there was now the promise of effectively infinite British and British empire resources backed potentially by American resources too. Everyone was stunned by the hundreds of thousands of casualties that had piled up. Germany’s rulers should have sued for peace at that point. They had a substantial chunk of French territory to bargain with, but the failure to do this doomed everybody. Public opinion made an end to the war impossible for all sides and the way that the Germans failed even to discuss something which became self-evident later on—that the odds were hopelessly against them—is trivial and frightening. Both German defensive excellence and revolting haemorrhages such as the Battle of Verdun killed people in a way that made a mockery of the old Prussian élan that all German commanders swore by. Like the Emperor Ferdinand II in the Thirty Years War, the German General Staff held a delusive hope that the following campaigning season would make a major difference, whereas it simply radicalized and decayed the war further.
It is impossible to say much more about the Great War without overbalancing this whole book yet again. It is striking that the whole thrust of German ‘world strategy’ before the war (which had been the reason Britain was now fighting alongside France) proved entirely futile. The German empire wound up having no value at all. One of the few guilty pleasures available to the British was the swift destruction of this empire. Britain’s Japanese allies took over the German concession in China and many Pacific islands; the cruelties and viciousness of the Germans all over Africa were replaced by a different layer of cruelties and viciousness. The only exception was a brilliant guerrilla campaign in German East Africa which had no wider meaning beyond misery and death for countless Africans.
One of the surprises proved to be the German surface navy, which had soaked up huge resources of steel, men and ingenuity but which effectively played no serious part in the war. The British blockaded Germany with ease, using their immense Grand Fleet to hold the two choke points of the English Channel and northern approaches to the North Sea; the Germans blockaded Britain in turn with U-boats. But however much damage the U-boats did they were a weapon of extreme weakness. The world’s oceans crawled with British ships but all roving German surface units had been wiped out by the end of 1914 and U-boats could not reach most of Britain’s global commerce. As it turned out, the British blockade was far more effective and Central Europe was starving by the third winter of the war, whereas the British just had to be frugal. The North Sea blockade was matched by an amazing line of boats across the bottom of the Adriatic between Italy and Corfu which penned in the Austro-Hungarian navy, essentially making it inoperative for the whole war: U-boats slipped through but the ships built at such huge and futile cost by the Habsburgs stayed impotent. This was of course a relatively minor aspect of the war, but it sums up the problem faced by the Central Powers: the point of their history had been a constant argumen
t for many centuries over who ruled which bit of a broadly landlocked part of the world. The Hungarians, as rulers of Fiume (now Rijeka), had spent a fortune on building their own dreadnought, the Saint Stephen, which was then sunk by an Italian torpedo-boat. The only fruit of all this was the commander of that navy, Admiral Horthy, after Hungary became reduced to a residual landlocked state after 1918, became its ruler for almost twenty-five years, with mixed results. Essentially the First World War did not earn that name because of Germany or Austria-Hungary, who could hardly move out of their small chunk of Central Europe, but because of the Allies, who ruled most of the world.
This parochialism doomed the Germans at repeated intervals. The Battle of Jutland in 1916 should have been a crushing British fleet victory, but what turned out for the British, after a century of having no serious opponents, to have been a mishandled mess proved to be irrelevant: the German ships’ retreat to port ended the challenge. It was in effect a British victory because the German surface fleet conceded it could never get out of the North Sea. The navy which had done so much to ruin international relations before 1914 and alienate Germany from Britain had only one further role. It sat sullenly in Wilhelmshaven and Kiel waiting to bring down through mutiny the imperial regime which had lavished so much money on it. In the end, some fifty of the ships, including monsters like the Crown Prince, after being interned by the British in the Orkney Islands were scuttled by their German commander in June 1919 – the last futile act of a German empire that had imagined itself a global sea-power despite centuries of experience that implied otherwise. Most hair-raising is the suggestion that with the resources frittered on its navy it could easily have used the metal to make an almost infinite amount of artillery (how many field weapons could be made out of a floating town of steel like the Crown Prince?) with which the Battle of the Marne might even have been won.