by Andrew Marr
As the full bloody cost of the war began to become apparent to everyone, the UDC found itself more popular, and the government started to consider it more dangerous. During the wave of strikes it attracted 3,000 people to a meeting in Merthyr, south Wales, in September 1916; more big gatherings took place the following month in Glasgow and Bradford. By the spring of 1917 the Russian Revolution had enthused the left of the Labour Party and the UDC campaigners felt they were making headway in what until then had been a pro-war party. The government cracked down. At the end of the war, the MPs who had supported the UDC would be swept from the Commons in the ‘khaki election’ of 1918, but the movement, by welding radical Liberals and Labour people together, helped snap the old Liberal Party and led to the post-war rise of Labour.
This was the tense political situation into which Sassoon had walked. He knew little of politics, but he was determined to be a martyr. The army was equally determined that he would not be. His well-connected friends divided between those who cheered his stand and those who were appalled by it. There then began a fascinating struggle for his conscience. Fellow officers wrote from France begging him to say he had been sick, had a nervous breakdown, and would withdraw his attack on the war. Fellow poet Robert Graves travelled up to see him to persuade him to attend a medical board. Though alike in some ways, they had differing ideas about bravery. Graves told Sassoon he was losing the respect of his brother officers, still fighting in France. Sassoon told Graves that by not speaking out he was the coward. In the end, Sassoon capitulated and allowed himself to be sent to a hospital for mentally damaged officers, Craiglockhart, on the southern outskirts of Edinburgh. There he came under the care of a podgy, balding, stammering but brilliant man, Dr William Rivers of the Royal Army Medical Corps. An early specialist in psychology and neurology who had travelled the world and studied in pre-war Germany, Rivers was influenced by Freud, though he did not agree with his theories on sex. He became closely involved in the Sassoon case, seeing him sometimes three times a day as he steadily tried to persuade him to return to the war.
Famously, Sassoon was interrupted while cleaning his golf clubs by a nervous younger man from the Manchester Regiment who had suffered a nervous breakdown after being shelled on the Somme. This man, Wilfred Owen, had bundles of handwritten poems and would be much influenced by Sassoon before returning abroad and being killed in the final days of the war. Sassoon eventually decided he had to return too. He had not recanted his views in the place he called ‘Dottyville’, nor ever did. He simply felt his place was with the fighting men, not with the uncomprehending civilians, particularly when he heard in November 1917 that his battalion was having a terrible time. His return to France was circuitous, via service in Ireland and the Middle East. On 10 July 1918 he finally got his wish and was reunited with his comrades on the front line. The following day, attacking a German machine-gun post, he incautiously stood up to get a better view and was promptly shot by his own side. Luckily for poetry and for posterity, he survived this second wound.
During the war, unlike the French, the British army would not mutiny. Unlike Russia, there would be no revolution. In Britain there were just 7,000 people who registered as conscientious objectors but who agreed to do other work, such as in ambulance units. Another 3,000 were sent to labour camps and 1,500 ‘absolutists’ who refused any compulsion were treated particularly harshly. These are tiny numbers. But Sassoon’s indecision was shared by many. He was torn between intellectual contempt for the war and for its leaders on the one hand, and his feelings of exhilaration and comradeship on the other. He had no great loathing for Germans, except when a friend was killed. He was engagingly open about how proud he was of his medal, the MC he threw into the Mersey. However vile and dangerous the fighting was, it gave him at times a stronger sense of being alive than anything at home. In all this he stands for countless others who were neither enthusiasts for the war nor found they could evade it. He could express this tragic tension as few others could. Nor was he alone in hoping for a negotiated peace. At just the same time as Sassoon was rejoining his regiment, at the end of November 1917, a Unionist statesman published a letter in the Daily Telegraph calling for just that. Lord Lansdowne had been a last-ditcher against Lloyd George in pre-war politics, was a close ally of Balfour’s and had not been asked to join Lloyd George’s government. His letter, proposing a compromise peace, spawned much outrage in the national papers and a torrent of abusive mail, never mind anger in the cabinet. But it was supported privately by many individuals, including the Archbishop of Canterbury. The war drew a kind of snarling bulldog mask across the face that the British people presented to the outside world. Behind that mask, however, many thousands were having second thoughts.
Shadows from the Hall of Mirrors
For Germany, the end had come suddenly. Faced with a final death-or-glory mission against Britain, the High Seas Fleet had started to mutiny. Red flags were raised, officers shot and trains commandeered. A revolutionary situation spread through the coastal cities. Workers’ and sailors’ councils were formed, much as in Russia, and for a short time there was a communist Republic of Oldenburg with a stoker as president. Communist crowds were marching through Berlin. German officers in uniform were chased by angry civilians. Ludendorff resigned. The Kaiser, pressed by President Wilson, eventually agreed to abdicate and a German republic was declared. Wilhelm fled to the neutral Netherlands where he was consoled with ‘good hot English tea’, shortbread and scones. Despite demands for him to be handed over to be tried, the Dutch gave him sanctuary and he settled down in a small castle at Doorn, chopping wood, playing the country gentleman and later observing the rise of Hitler with mixed feelings. Wilhelm’s army had hoped for a ceasefire on the field, followed by cautious negotiations about the future. However, when the German delegation had made its way tortuously by car through the front line, waving white towels, and finally reached the Allied commander-in-chief Marshal Foch in his train carriage in the forest of Compiègne, they were confronted with instant demands for disarmament and withdrawal. Faced with revolution and after fruitless protests, they signed. This was only the first part of Germany’s march of humiliation.
Unlike in 1945, in 1918 Germany was not occupied or disarmed. Indeed, she still had troops in France and had decisively won her war in the East. She thought she was getting a negotiation when in fact she was getting an ultimatum. This was perhaps just deserts for a country which had imposed such a brutal settlement on Russia a year earlier. Yet the leaders who gathered in Paris, led by President Woodrow Wilson, who had arrived by ship from the United States, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Italy’s Vittorio Orlando, were not nearly as powerful as they seemed. The war had shaken the world, and their reach was short. The Russian Bolshevik revolution was something they did not understand and with which they could not negotiate. In other places, including Budapest and Munich, there were further communist uprisings, and the delegates in their frock coats and top hats were all too aware that hunger and anger could yet upend all Europe.
The Treaty of Versailles has not been fondly remembered. Above all, it is blamed for the huge reparations heaped on defeated Germany, and thus for the rise of Hitler and the next German war. It managed to humiliate Germany while not sufficiently tying her down to avoid the next confrontation. Its guiding principle of self-determination for all peoples, proclaimed by the American president, raised hopes that would be quickly dashed. For self-determination, if it means anything, means an end to imperialism, and this was a war won by empires, the British one most obviously. Americans might have disliked and resented the British imperial system, and the old gang of European leaders, but they could do very little about it. Among those who left Paris in 1919 with a deep sense of grievance were the would-be empires of the future, notably Japan and Italy. The United States Senate, understanding at least some of this, refused to ratify the treaty. So America never joined the League of Nations, Wilson’s great project. In France, public opinion thought that the
treaty was too kind: Clemenceau, their great war leader, was voted out of office the following year. Barely had the ink dried before there was fighting again, in Poland, Ireland and Turkey. Meant to put a full stop to the old ways of war, Versailles proved only a comma.
For Britain, after the jubilation of the Armistice, not much of this was clear. Whatever trouble would be faced at home by Wilson and Clemenceau, Lloyd George was riding high. In December 1918 he had won a crushing general election victory. Liberals who had supported his coalition and Unionists agreed not to stand against each other, thus prolonging the wartime alliance. With many women now voting, and a fresh register, twice as many people took part as at the last election, in 1910, and the result was a massive personal triumph for Lloyd George, ‘the man who won the war’. Unionist and pro-Lloyd George candidates won 473 seats and the Asquith Liberals were reduced to a pitiful twenty-nine – Asquith himself being among those who lost his seat. Labour lost its pacifists, but won an extra twenty seats, now becoming the second largest party. Although women were now eligible to stand, not a single female MP was returned to Westminster – the only woman elected had been the aristocratic Sinn Feiner Countess Markiewicz, who, like the other Sinn Feiners who had swept southern Ireland, took her place in Dublin’s self-proclaimed Dàil. Lloyd George would live to regret both his dependence on the Unionists, who again dominated the new government, and his wilder promises during the campaign, when he pledged a land fit for heroes. But this fickle, brilliant, corrupt and charismatic man was for the time being at the very peak of his popularity and power.
The war had changed him from a radical to a pillar of the establishment. He was more moderate than many in wanting a fair settlement with Germany and retained his old interest in welfare. But now on the world stage, he was an imperial leader. Britain had been more admiring of her allies, France and America, than she had ever been before. But people felt this had been a victory for the British Empire; there were no US troops stationed in Britain and the Americans had, after all, arrived late. When there was precious little good news from Flanders or Gallipoli, there had been cheer from sideshows such as T. E. Lawrence’s involvement with the Arab revolt against the Turks and the defeat of German forces in East Africa. In the war’s darkest days, Lloyd George had created an Imperial War Cabinet. The sacrifice and success was that of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa. The Commonwealth was closer and meant far more, after the heroics of the Canadians and Australians, and the Indians too. People such as Jan Smuts, the South African who had led commandos against the British in the Boer War but who went on to be a member of the War Cabinet, a British field marshal and a founder of both the League of Nations and the UN, were public heroes. The same went for the former trade unionist (and, like Smuts, deeply racially prejudiced) Australian prime minister Billy Hughes – cheered and lauded on the streets of London as no Australian leader would be now. And indeed the Australians lost more soldiers than the Americans. Now the war was over, the position of the Empire seemed if anything stronger. Ireland was clearly a problem that could not be long delayed. There were ominous rumbles in India. But this seemed a time to expand, not contract.
The worst British decisions affected the Middle East. The story of the Empire in the early twentieth century itself is too large and tangled to be dealt with properly here. But the tale of Britain’s bumbling incompetence and double dealing with the Muslim world has left too much of a legacy to be ignored. It is a narrative of greed for land, greed for oil and ignorance about Islam, combined with some heroic and ludicrous military moments; it has done its bit to create the wound of modern Iraq and some of the extremist and authoritarian regimes of the region. To start with, Britain’s involvement had been mainly with Egypt, effectively run as a subsidiary of the British Empire because of the importance of the Suez Canal to Egypt and the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Since Churchill had switched the British navy from coal to oil before the war, the oilfields there, and the refinery at Abadan, built in 1913, had been a vital national interest – and a source of huge wealth to the shareholders of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. But the decision of the Ottoman Empire to side with Germany in 1914 opened up other possibilities. Early in the war, to protect the Persian oil, a British-Indian force invaded that part of the Ottoman Empire we now call southern Iraq, seizing the sleepy mud-built town of Basra which until then had been forgotten by the modern world. A major expedition north through Mesopotamia was first successful and then disastrous when an over-stretched and cut-off British force was obliged to surrender to the Turks after a siege at Kut el-Amara, south of Baghdad. In 1917 a larger British army did capture Baghdad.
More dramatically, another British army, after early reverses, spent 1917 pushing back the Turks and their German advisers through Palestine and Syria. General Allenby, a ferociously bad-tempered, heavy-set and brilliant commander, descended from Oliver Cromwell, had assembled a force in Egypt which included soldiers from almost every part of the British Empire, plus three battalions of Jewish volunteers, many from America. Using 12,000 British, Australian and Indian horsemen, backed up with planes, armoured cars, torpedo boats and much cunning, he outmanoeuvred and outfought the Turks, entering first Gaza and then, after a skirmish involving the Welsh Guards at the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem itself. Allenby took the city as the leader of the first Christian army to get there for 700 years: he arrived on foot and unarmed. He then pushed north into Syria, where he overwhelmingly defeated the Turkish army in one of the last and most decisive battles of the war: it happened at Megiddo, or Armageddon as it is better known. With Allenby was another Englishman touched by myth. T. E. Lawrence, or ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, the scholar, writer, archaeologist and self-promoting genius, had helped lead the Arab revolt from what is now Saudi Arabia, something he himself called ‘a sideshow within a sideshow’. Lawrence persuaded Allenby – probably in spite of his penchant for swaggering around in Arab robes – that a campaign of Bedouin guerrillas on camels led by the ancient Hashemite family and directed by himself could hugely help the conventional war. The price, however, was the promise to Emir Feisal that a great new Arab kingdom would be created across much of what is now Syria, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Iraq. When Lawrence and Feisal rode into Damascus, along with Allenby’s cavalry, this is what they thought would happen.
They could not have been more wrong. For one thing, in his famous Declaration of 1917, the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour had just promised to support a Jewish homeland. Sent to Lord Rothschild after a cabinet meeting, the very short letter declares British ‘sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations’. It goes on to proclaim that Britain viewed ‘with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ and would try to help that happen, ‘it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. Quite what this meant has been debated ever since. It seemed to promise the Zionists their own state; yet it also suggested that this could come about without harming the rights of Arab Muslims living there. But however mealy-mouthed, it would certainly mean no independent Arab state could include Palestine; Allenby was worried enough by the Declaration that he tried to hide news of it. Worse was to come, however, for Feisal and the Arab revolt. As soon as the Ottoman Empire had collapsed, Britain and France began to fight over the scraps. Britain had always eyed Mesopotamia. Once it was out of fear that the Russian bear, or the Kaiser, who had proclaimed himself the protector of all Muslims, would move south against British India. Now those threats had gone, but the British had realized that the black, tarry stuff oozing from the grit and sand of Basra, Mosul and Baghdad was almost certainly oil. They wanted it and, after a complex deal to share some of the benefits with the French, the Middle East was duly carved up. Palestine and what is now Iraq went to Britain’s sphere of influence, joining her domination of Egypt and Persia. France got Syria and the Lebanon. So much for the self-determination of people
s.
So, at the Paris peace conference, Prince Feisal, with Lawrence in attendance, was humiliated – almost as much as another hopeless petitioner, Ho Chi Minh, then working as a kitchen assistant in the French capital but already dreaming of independence for Vietnam. The Arab humiliation would be partly reversed two years later in Egypt at a conference chaired by Churchill, when Feisal would be declared the first King of Iraq and his brother Abdullah would become Emir of Transjordan – two fake monarchies to serve British interests. This in turn would weaken the Hashemite dynasty: Arab power would start to move across to another rebellious family, that of Ibn Saud, whose Wahhabi form of Islam has had such an influence on the modern world. By then the last Caliphate in the Muslim world, that of the Ottomans which had sided with Germany and declared jihad against her enemies, had disappeared. Britain had encouraged Arabs to believe that the Caliphate should be based not in Turkey but where the rulers of Medina and Mecca could be found. After the war, the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and its dismemberment would also mean the end of the Caliphate of Constantinople; this caused a major movement of protest and outrage in India (including of course today’s Pakistan) with its then 70 million Muslims. These are complicated matters but it is worth totting up the tally so far. We have made-up countries with imported puppet rulers; Arab nationalism first encouraged and then mocked; extremist forms of Islam left to flourish; and the old Caliphate abolished, leading to a debate about what should replace it throughout the Muslim world. The consequences of the First World War amount to more than paper poppies once a year; they are all around us still.