by Andrew Marr
So although the Kaiser’s Germany was in no way an earlier version of the evil force of Hitler’s, the calculation about a continent under German control, and Britain’s future if that happened, was the same in 1914 as it would be in 1939. Could Grey have found a compromise? He tried very hard. He has been criticized for not making it clear enough early enough to Berlin that invading Belgium would lead to a British declaration of war. But the extraordinary gamble of the German military plan utterly depended on cutting through Belgium, and assumed as well that victory over the French would have been secured before Britain could intervene properly. Whatever Grey said, the Germans had to spring their plan to have a good chance of victory; and it nearly worked.
So the preparations clicked into place in Britain as elsewhere. Armed guards suddenly appeared at railway junctions and ports. Artillery batteries arrived at key sites on the south coast and the mouth of the Thames. The fleet, its lights doused, slipped down the Channel to take up its battle stations in the North Sea. Britain’s ambassador in Berlin quietly hurried home. The cabinet was unsure until the last moment about sending troops to France, hoping that this could be Winston Churchill’s naval war. In the City there was something close to panic. The Germans had called in their overseas loans and stocked up their gold reserves: Asquith complained that Britain’s financiers were ‘the greatest ninnies . . . all in a state of funk, like old women chattering over teacups in a cathedral town’. Both the Tories and the Irish nationalists in the Commons assured Asquith they would support war to defend Belgium and France. All this happened so fast, in just a few days, that individuals felt overwhelmed. Grey said later that not even someone like himself, foreign secretary, could make pledges about war or peace on behalf of a great democracy. One of his strongest feelings was that ‘he himself had no power to decide policy and was only the mouthpiece of England’.61
And on the streets, the crowds were indeed for war. An anti-war counter demonstration in Trafalgar Square on Sunday 2 August was a damp squib. Asquith was disgusted as he heard the King being cheered late at night the next day, a ‘distant roaring’ half a mile away from where he sat in Downing Street. He wrote to his lover Venetia Stanley: ‘War or anything that seems likely to lead to war is always popular with the London mob. You remember Sir R. Walpole’s remark: “Now they are ringing their bells; in a few weeks they’ll be wringing their hands.” ’ Britain had not fought a war on the continent of Europe since the Battle of Waterloo was won in 1815. She had, by continental standards, a tiny army. Politicians with a sense of history, and those who had studied the growth and power of armies and weapons, had some sense of what war, not against Boer farmers or Afghan tribesmen, but against well-prepared modern forces, might mean. On the street, where the cause of France was popular and the German menace had been luridly discussed in the press for years, it seemed much simpler. Britain was the world’s greatest power and it was time to teach the Hun a lesson. And Churchill? He was with the crowds in spirit, as he often was. Margot Asquith recorded with distaste that on the day when war finally broke out, 4 August, as she was passing the foot of the staircase in 10 Downing Street, ‘I saw Winston Churchill with a happy face striding towards the double doors of the cabinet room.’ Once he was inside, her husband reported the same: ‘Winston, who has got on all his war paint, is longing for a sea fight.’ What fun was going to be had.
Part Two
THE MEANING OF HELL
1914–1918
The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;
‘We’re sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!’
I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, sweet Home’,
And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.
Siegfried Sassoon, ‘ “Blighters” ’, 1916
There are aerial photographs of the great First World War battlefields, taken by the earliest military planes. So we can see what the village of Fleury outside Verdun looked like in 1914 as the fighting started. Neat farm buildings are clearly visible, and roads and strips of fields, drains and hedges running in all directions, land-loving patterns that go back to medieval times. Exactly the same place in 1916 is like a photographic negative, or a dead coral, with empty tooth-stumps instead of houses, and the surrounding landscape scarred. Many of the features have gone. By 1918 there is nothing recognizable of Fleury at all. The artillery, the mortars, the wire and the trenches have left by now a blank, with only a rough, pitted texture. You could be looking at a close-up of an elephant’s skin. If it wasn’t labelled you would have no idea this had been a landscape. This rubbing-out of meaning is also a metaphor. On the day it ended, arguments began about what the war meant, including whether it was a victory or a catastrophe, and whether it needed to be fought at all. They have carried on ever since – far more so than for the war against Hitler. The arguments drew in pacifists and prime ministers, historians of the left and right. They were fought out in plays and novels, television comedy programmes and documentaries, and they continue still.
The arguments about the war’s meaning cannot end. The Kaiser’s Germany was indeed a militaristic, expansionist and out-of-control polity, determined on war at a scale that would have forced Britain to resist, or to accept fast decline. The Germany of 1914 was not the Nazi Germany of 1939. It had a functioning parliament, with opposition parties, and its anti-Semitism was mainly confined to words. But it was a leader-directed state, determined to expand, prepared for an aggressive war and militarized in a way that no other country in Europe could quite comprehend. A world in which the Kaiser’s Germany had won, dominating the Netherlands, France, Scandinavia and central Europe, with the continent’s ports barred to Britain, would have made a very different twentieth century. The British Empire would have swiftly died, rather than living on into the middle of the century. Adolf Hitler would, perhaps, have remained a mediocre water-colourist and bar-room bore. It is impossible to guess what would have happened to Russia. Perhaps Czarism would have been reformed into bourgeois democracy and Lenin left to brood in Swiss exile. The domination of America would have been, perhaps, less dramatic.
Still, it is not hard to see why Britain’s leaders mostly thought they had to fight. Once that is conceded, the military historians argue persuasively that although awful blood sacrifices were made, and awful mistakes, the generals cannot be blamed as easily as they once were. This was a new kind of fighting, which nobody was properly prepared for, including the Germans. The trench system could not have been broken by some other, unexplained, but somehow cleverer strategy. But even conceding all this does not subdue the persistent anger and incredulity about the slaughter. It is the front-line tales, the squalor and suicidal bravery, the culling of the youngest and best that has stuck in people’s minds, while the smoothly persuasive explanations of the historians slip past us. Study the many accounts of the first day of the Somme from a military perspective. Realize just what Haig’s dilemma was, how scanty his intelligence, hoessing his need to relieve the French, being hammered to pieces at Verdun. Dispose of some of the myths about men being made to advance slowly out of mere military stupidity. After all that, one is still left with the trembling lieutenants putting their whistles to their lips and leading their men straight to almost certain death.
It is true that of all the British troops involved in the Somme offensive, three-quarters emerged unharmed – that includes, of course, many well behind the front line. But how powerful is that, compared with knowing about Captain D. L. Martin of the 9th Devons, a former maths teacher, who carefully worked out from drawings and models that he and his men would certainly be killed by enfilading machine-gun fire on 1 July and explained this to senior officers, but who nevertheless led the attack as ordered? He was right – he and 160 men of the Devons were
almost instantly killed, and buried in a mass grave over which was written: ‘The Devonshires held this trench. The Devonshires hold it still.’ There are thousands of ‘Captain Martin’ stories. This book does not include a detailed account of the battles of the war, month by month and yard by yard. There are thousands of others that do. It will include an account of the main turning-points. But the real problem is reaching back through the arguments about its meaning to try to find the people who fought and endured it. In many ways they have been lost in the mud too. Our attitudes today, to class, to ethnic and religious differences, to suffering and death, to patriotism, make the gap virtually unbridgeable. The patriotic-Edwardian landscape has gone, just as medieval Fleury from the air has gone.
Though the war did not change everything about Britain’s story, it changed a lot. During it, we discovered big government, high taxes, working women, and the common use of the word ‘fuck’. After the war, women could no longer be denied the vote and the old Liberal Party was broken. After the war, what used to be called ‘high politics’ – the doings of cabinet ministers and the parliamentary debates – simply mattered less. Grey third-raters trudged through the footnotes of politics while around them a new world would open up, of protest and experiment, hedonism and cynicism. Before the war began, the Ulster revolt had threatened civil war; after it, the Irish Republic broke free. Post-1918, people might still be patriotic but they could not be gaily patriotic in the old way.
A struggle to comprehend the war’s meaning began immediately, and has never gone away. During the 1920s many people clearly saw it as a victory from God. The dead were present, on freshly carved memorials, and in the minds of their widows, children and friends. To call theirs a meaningless sacrifice would have been disrespectful, cruel, blasphemous. The man to blame was the Kaiser; it was a shame he was skulking in Holland and couldn’t be hanged. For years there were raucous alcoholic celebrations on Armistice Day, even Armistice Balls at the fashionable hotels. Then, slowly, a more mournful tone emerged, and the influence of scarred writers became stronger. Wilfred Owen began his long posthumous march from obscurity – nobody had heard of him in the years immediately after the war – to becoming one of twentieth-century Britain’s best known poets. In the radicalized thirties, hostility to the ‘Colonel Blimp’ military chiefs who had led the war, and disillusion about a land unfit for heroes, caused many Britons to rethink the Great War. When it became clear that the war to end wars hadn’t been that, and Britain was fighting her second German war, the first one was remembered mainly as a prequel. Though there was no Somme, at least for the British, during 1939–45, the parallels between the two wars are stronger than is sometimes understood.
But it was after 1945 that the Great War’s meaning was most strongly argued over. The creation of the welfare state, and then the great consumer economy, perhaps gave people a sense of superiority over the earlier part of the century. That first war had been far bloodier, fought against a less clearly demonic enemy, and had certainly not produced a fairer, happier Britain. Second time around, the enemy was utterly evil, the war unavoidably one of national survival and the victory belonged to everyone. Post-war leaders such as Attlee, Macmillan and Eden, who had fought in the Great War, had a strong sense of class guilt about the sacrifice of so many troops, and were animated by a ‘never again’ mentality. On the left, the threat of nuclear war and later the anti-Vietnam War movement made the theme of military incompetence and upper-class callousness popular. The Allied leadership of the more recent war was still beyond reproach, but the conduct of the earlier one became an irresistible target. Thus from the early 1960s, with Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War and the fast-growing popularity of anti-war poets such as Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg, the notion of the Great War as the Senseless Slaughter grew. This chimed well with the anti-establishment mood of public schoolboys who had grown sick of pious lectures in the war memorial-decorated chapel. The voices of the class-regimented Edwardians fell silent; the statues could not speak.
It wasn’t only the left. Critical conservative historians such as Basil Liddell Hart were now followed by cage-rattling Tory polemicists. Alan Clark’s 1961 book The Donkeys was hugely successful with the public, however much disdained by academics. The historians’ attack on the generals had plenty of raw material to work with since between the wars leading politicians, notably Lloyd George and Churchill, had vigorously pursued their old quarrels with Earl Haig and French in print; but the impact of so much death on so many working-class families helped give the argument a new bite. Television jumped in too, as television does. How could the poets’ passionate disgust fail to trump the stale regimental memoirs? Was it not the case that all you needed to remember was that shaking white face of the eighteen-year-old as a subaltern’s whistle blows? Were not the Germans just like us, ready to play football and sing carols on Christmas Day, as much the innocent victims of politics as any Tommy? In the empathy culture of today this can seem the end of the argument.
Eventually, counter-attacking in waves, came the Great War revisionists, historians like Gary Sheffield, Gordon Corrigan and Dan Todman, who asked afresh what choices Britain really had in 1914, and whether the generals had really been as stupid and heartless as was being claimed. Instead of standing firmly in today’s world and pointing the finger at yesterday, they tried to see the choices and beliefs, illusory or not, as they were understood at the time. ‘They should have used tanks.’ ‘Making soldiers walk with packs towards machine guns was simple murder.’ In 1915–17 it was never so easy or clear. In pointing out to a new generation the huge difficulties facing the British commanders, and reminding us that the story of the war includes the British army’s ‘forgotten’ breakthrough victories of 1918 as well as the bloody slogging of earlier years, the revisionists have done a great service to truth. They have also sometimes gone too far in trying to minimize the horror, and been unfair on the politicians, or ‘frocks’ as the soldiers dismissively called them. Lloyd George may have been a scheming, untrustworthy and self-justifying goat, but in rallying, sustaining and holding together a young semi-democracy through terrible times, he was touched by greatness too.
The Nearness of Hell
This was the first war to touch almost everyone in Britain since the brutal civil wars of the seventeenth century; it had vastly more impact on the homes of the British than the wars against Napoleon or the imperial wars. You could hear it. If you were walking in the Home Counties, or opened a window even in a London suburb when the wind was in the right direction, the air was stirred by the rumble of barrages from guns in France. When the British mines that began the Battle of the Somme exploded, they could be clearly heard in central London. A journalist, Michael MacDonagh, recalled sitting in the sunshine on Wimbledon golf course in March 1918 (when the last German offensive was starting) and feeling ‘a curious atmospheric sensation – a kind of pulsation in regular beats. There was not the faintest breeze . . . Yet there were persistent tremors or throbs.’62 The front line was very close, a short train ride from the Normandy coast. Soldiers sent home dirty linen and letters weekly, and households in Glasgow or Hull sent back home-baked cakes, photographs and newly knitted socks along with freshly ironed smalls. At home, across most of Britain, bivouacs for soldiers occupied parks and squares. School playgrounds and football fields were taken over for drill and bayonet practice. Khaki was everywhere on the streets – though in the early days, when there was a lack of dye, you would have seen plenty of soldiers in blue, because the postmen’s cloth had been taken. You would see the recruiting posters and the grim-faced women waiting with white feathers to pounce on men in civilian clothes – enough of a problem for the government to issue armbands and badges to men whose work was essential at home. As the war went on you would see women doing work, in banks, factories or even in the fields, that had once been done by men. Other absences would strike you. So many of the horses had disappeared. As the war went on, a pervasive dinginess s
pread. Lights went out. By 1916 even Bonfire Night had been banned.
You would feel the war too, most obviously in your stomach. Right at the start there were shortages and rocketing prices, as panicky people stocked up on sugar, flour and tins. But this passed, and for a while few people saw much of a change. Yet Britain imported a third of her food. Atlantic shipping was now urgently needed for war materials and once the German U-boat attacks began in earnest, there was real hunger. In the Second World War, universal rationing was introduced early and basic principles of fairness were set, leading to many poorer families actually enjoying a better diet. In the Great War, rationing arrived late, in 1918, and there was great unfairness beforehand. The journals and letters of people living in the country show a ravenous obsession with collecting mushrooms, trapping rabbits and killing wild birds. Game birds – partridge and grouse – were noisily abundant because the sport of shooting them had stopped. But still there are some accounts of rural children dying of hunger. Everywhere allotments were dug, from public-school playing fields to city parks, and there was also a government-sponsored scheme of ‘voluntary rationing’ during which the minister of food, Lord Devonport, exhorted the country in May 1917: ‘We must all eat less food and, especially, we must all eat less bread . . . The enemy is trying to take away our daily bread. He is sinking our wheat ships. If he succeeds in starving us, our soldiers will have died in vain. In the interests of the country I call upon you all to deny yourselves, and so loyally to bridge over the anxious days between now and the harvest.’ At one point there was two months’ supply of wheat and only four days’ supply of sugar left. The familiar white bread disappeared; food riots broke out in parts of London and Liverpool, with much suspicion of shopkeepers for hoarding and appallingly long queues. The crisis passed and a more serious form of rationing followed, using local councils and private companies to police it. Meanwhile in schools, shivering children had to make do with vile slops for their meals and, at home, odder and odder forms of bread were picked apart with trepidation.