After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  You could say that all these developments would have occurred anyway, war or no war. The war hastened and enabled them. To that extent even without entering contentious debates about cause and effect you could say that the war was a Before and After event like no other in history. The vanquished were the British Liberal party, though it was slow to realize this; the imperial idea of government; Islam as a cohesive international political force – the only Muslim power had been eliminated, and another would not appear until Pakistan tested its hydrogen bomb; the aristocratic militaristic Prussian empire of Bismarck. The beneficiaries were newspaper proprietors; speculative capitalists; communist revolutionaries, especially Lenin; Irish revolutionaries, especially Sinn Fein; feminists and, ultimately, fascists. None of these consequences formed part of the war aims of Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, France or Britain as their politicians and military top brass prepared for war in the hot summer of 1914.

  It is all the more remarkable when you consider that the territories known since 1870 as Germany had almost no history of conflict with Britain: some of the troops defeated by Marlborough at Blenheim were Bavarian, Britain was at war with Prussia between 1807 and 1812, but there had been no serious conflict, ever, between the British and the Germans. They had supplied Britain with their monarchs for two centuries; with their greatest shared composer, Handel; with their religion since the sixteenth century; and since the early nineteenth with most of their philosophical ideas. For all the Kaiser’s talk, when in his anti-British manias, and for all the rivalries between the two navies, there was no European clash of interest between Germany and Britain as there was between Britain and France. Prussia had formed itself, together with the old princedoms and duchies and the kingdom of Bavaria, into a mighty nation, and this was uncomfortable for the older mighty nation on their western border, France. But their disputed territories – Alsace-Lorraine – and their mutual distrust, and indeed hatred, were of no political threat to Britain – either to her trade abroad, or her way of life at home. The diplomatic commitments entered into when the Entente Cordiale was hatched were what shifted the balance of power in Europe and led to the length of the war and the extent of its slaughter. Had Britain remained neutral, the obviously sensible option, there would probably have been a repeat performance of 1870, and the Germans might have reached Paris long before Christmas. Lenin might well have ended his days as a disgruntled pamphleteer in Zurich cafés, while in their Viennese equivalents Adolf Hitler, after a brave army career, would have eked out his no less disgruntled living as a water-colourist. Well over 10 million lives would have been saved.

  Bismarck had said that the plum trees and pigs of Serbia were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier,6 but it was the fate of Serbia, this belligerent little place, still baring its teeth at its equally belligerent Croat, Bosnian and Albanian neighbours in the twenty-first century, which led to the ruin of all the great European powers in 1914. The war began in the Balkans. Since 1912, Serbia had been fighting Turkey for more territory, and feeling aggrieved because Austria-Hungary would not allow it an Adriatic port. Bulgaria and Greece, also anxious to rid Europe of Turkish sovereignty, were allied with Serbia, and behind Serbia stood their fellow Orthodox Christians, the mighty empire of Russia, seen as a threat both by Austria-Hungary and by Germany.

  There can be no doubt that Germany was in the grip at this period of an ultra-reactionary aristocratic–military clique, intent upon using some international crisis as an excuse for war. When the eminent Texan Colonel Edward M. House was sent by President Wilson to Europe to urge its governments to sign a peace pact, he found in control of German policy ‘a military oligarchy’, determined upon war, and ready if necessary to depose the Kaiser in favour of his son if he opposed their machinations.7 What they did not know was what Britain would do if, for example, Germany invaded Belgium, to ‘show who was their master’.

  Then, at this very volatile juncture in European politics, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, paying a visit with his wife Sophie to Sarajevo, in Bosnia-Hercegovina, was assassinated by a Serbian terrorist called Gavrilo Princip. A group of seven young Serbians had crossed the border into Bosnia specifically to kill the heir apparent. They called themselves Young Bosnia and wanted to detach Bosnia from Austria-Hungary. The first attempt to kill the archduke and his wife – a student called Nedeljko Cabrinovic hurled a bomb at their car – was unsuccessful. It rolled off the back of the car and injured some bystanders. After visiting the town hall, Franz Ferdinand decided to visit the injured in hospital. Their driver took a wrong turning at the junction of Appel Quay and Franzjosefstrasse. Gavrilo Princip was loitering on the corner. Amazed to see the archduke passing by, he stepped forward and shot both Franz Ferdinand and his wife at point-blank range. Sophie died instantly, Franz Ferdinand within half an hour.

  The man Princip shot was, at the court of his eighty-four-year-old uncle the Emperor Franz Joseph, a restraining moderate diplomatic influence. It was decided in Vienna that Serbia must be taught a lesson. The chief of general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorff, believed, as a social Darwinian, that war was a natural human condition, that the struggle for existence was the ‘basic principle behind all the events on this earth’. Politics, he said, ‘consists precisely of applying war as method’.8

  By attacking Serbia, Austria risked antagonizing Russia, but Germany had offered her unstinting support, her famous ‘blank cheque’. They delayed for about a month, largely so that the mainly peasant Austrian army could gather the harvest.9

  By 28 July the Tsar of Russia had responded to the Balkan crisis by mobilizing four military regions, and two days later he ordered a general mobilization. In Vienna, enormous and enthusiastic crowds filled the streets. They imagined there would be a quick victory over a small, exhausted and vulnerable nation, Serbia. As it happened, while the crisis brewed, the French president Raymond Poincaré and his prime minister René Viviani had been making a state visit to Russia. He had affirmed his support for Russian policy in the Balkans, but this had been generally interpreted as a willingness if necessary to fight on Russia’s side should the war extend beyond its localized Serbian confines.

  The diplomatic exchanges between the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and the German ambassador Lichnowsky were civilized, leisurely, but grave. Grey urged Germany to restrain Austria. He tried to organize a peace conference in London, but by the time he had proposed a date, Austria had already gone to war with Serbia. The Germans meanwhile were sabre-rattling. They demanded French reassurance that France would not intervene on the side of Russia, and they were asked to decide within eighteen hours of the afternoon of 1 August. The Germans also demanded that as a token of neutrality the French should hand over the fortresses of Toul and Verdun – with all their dreadful memories of 1870 – to Germany for the duration of the war.

  The British Foreign Office now realized the seriousness of having entered into the Entente with France. If he could have remained neutral, Sir Edward Grey would have done. He saw nothing but ruin – financial, commercial, political – facing Britain if she got involved. The cabinet was about two-thirds in favour of remaining neutral. The City of London was broadly anti-war. Of all the major European governments, the British cabinet alone was taken by surprise at the sudden emergence of the crisis. This was no longer a war game discussed by military experts such as Sir Henry Wilson. Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August, and on France on 3 August. The British ultimatum to Germany was that they must respect Belgian neutrality. John Morley, the old Gladstonian Liberal, and John Burns the working-class bibliophile resigned from the cabinet. On 4 August Asquith told Parliament that Germany had invaded Belgium. What had been a cause of British rejoicing in 1815 was, in the summer of 1914, a casus belli.

  Germany had not set out to conquer Belgium. Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg (1856–1921), their civilized old chancellor, recognized immediately that a violation of international law had been
perpetrated. But France had declared war from the West, Russia from the East. ‘We shall undo the wrong we are doing as soon as our military objective has been achieved,’ he promised. ‘Someone who is threatened, as we are, and fights for his all can think only of how to cut his way through.’10

  Bethmann Hollweg’s predecessor as chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, saw the Kaiser during those days, bleary with sleeplessness and yet excited. In the chancellor’s eyes he saw an ‘incredibly helpless and sad expression. “How on earth do you think this happened?” he asked. Bethmann raised his long arms to heaven and said in a dull voice, “Heaven knows”.’11

  The German plans were based on war-games devised as long ago as 1905 by their chief of General Staff, General Schlieffen. They involved the invasion of Belgium, passing by Brussels on the right wing, then turning swiftly southwest and west to Paris. The invaders would then move eastward, and drive the French army towards Switzerland, or towards the rest of the German army posted in Lorraine. This plan was drawn up on the understanding that Britain would stay out of the war. It came unstuck when it found itself outflanked by an improvised French army supported by the BEF. The Germans crucially lost the initiative, and the chance of taking Paris, by early September 1914.

  On the other hand, they did defeat the French in Lorraine, even if they failed to encircle the whole of the French army. So in the first month of the war neither French nor German plans went right. The German armies went into full retreat across the Marne.12

  The French army, under the command of General Joseph Joffre, was a superbly well-organized fighting force, motivated at this stage of hostilities by a greater passion than could possibly have inspired either the Germans or the British: that passion was for France itself, on whose soil the dreadful war was being fought. Left wing and right wing, royalist and freethinker, Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard Frenchmen were, during that late summer, united in a violent desire to prevent a repetition of the disasters of 1870. It was probably this collective spiritual resistance, as much as any tactical decision from one day to the next on the field of battle, which gave the French army such power against the invaders. The French death toll in the first five months of the war – 300,000 dead and 600,000 wounded, captured or missing – exceeded the total number of British war dead in the whole of the Second World War.13

  In the First Battle of Ypres, which began on 30 October 1914, the British put into line almost their entire regular army. ‘The B.E.F. fought the Germans to a standstill and itself out of existence.’14 The generals, mostly old men who remembered old wars, were in a hurry to finish the fighting before the winter set in. They did not at first appreciate that with the conveniences of modern warfare, there was no need to discontinue the fighting when bad weather came. The twentieth-century soldier could be fed on tinned food. Winter quarters were unnecessary. To avoid further slaughter on the battlefield, both sides dug themselves in to trenches which now stretched from the Channel port of Nieuport through Artois and Picardy and Champagne to the Swiss border.

  Much to the displeasure of the War Office in London, peace momentarily was observed on parts of the Western Front on Christmas Day 1914. German soldiers walked across the British wire into no man’s land. British soldiers walked out to join them. The dead were buried. Plum puddings were given. Carols were sung. Football was played. This happened ‘almost everywhere in British No Man’s Land’,15 though not in the French. Bruce Bairnsfather, author of one of the most popular of wartime volumes, Bullets and Billets, recorded that: ‘It all felt most curious: here were these sausage-eating wretches, who had elected to start this infernal European fracas, and in so doing had brought us all into the same muddy pickle as themselves … There was not an atom of hate on either side that day; and yet, on our side not for a moment was the will to war and the will to beat them relaxed.’16 The next day, they resumed their mutual slaughter.

  One of the hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen who died – in his case, in a charge at Neuville St Vaast on 15 June 1915 – was the 23-year-old sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. In the avant-garde periodical Blast, his English friend T. E. Hulme published what is in effect his last testament, his artistic and philosophical manifesto. In the previous November he had written from the trenches:

  I HAVE BEEN FIGHTING FOR TWO MONTHS and I can now gauge the intensity of Life.

  HUMAN MASSES teem and move, are destroyed and crop up again.

  HORSES are worn out in three weeks, die by the roadside.

  You might have expected a young artist in the prime of life to see war as a supreme evil, but in common with huge numbers of Europeans, perhaps the majority, Gaudier-Brzeska was pleased to contemplate the destruction which war brought. It was not merely the opportunities for patriotism and glory which excited him. It was the mass slaughter itself. It would be convenient to lay all the blame for the First World War on incompetent politicians and generals. They played their part. But there is a palpable sense, in the poetry, music, sculpture and painting of the period, that many people actually welcomed the era of mechanized destruction. The sculptor’s friend Percy Wyndham Lewis transcribed Gaudier-Brzeska’s last letter in capitals to give it the quality of a motto inscribed on memorial stone.

  IT WOULD BE FOLLY TO SEEK ARTISTIC EMOTIONS AMID THESE LITTLE WORKS OF OURS. THIS PALTRY MECHANISM, WHICH SERVES AS A PURGE TO OVERNUMEROUS HUMANITY.

  THIS WAR IS A GREAT REMEDY.

  IN THE INDIVIDUAL IT KILLS ARROGANCE, SELF-ESTEEM, PRIDE. IT TAKES AWAY FROM THE MASSES NUMBERS UPON NUMBERS OF UNIMPORTANT UNITS, WHOSE ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES BECOME NOXIOUS AS THE RECENT TRADE CRISES HAVE SHOWN US.

  MY VIEWS ON SCULPTURE REMAIN ABSOLUTELY THE SAME.

  IT IS THE VORTEX OF WILL, OF DECISION, THAT BEGINS.

  I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES, I SHALL PRESENT MY EMOTIONS BY THE ARRANGEMENT OF MY SURFACES, THE PLANES AND LINES BY WHICH THEY ARE DEFINED.

  Philistines fail to see that artists, even in their posturings, hold up mirrors to what is going on in societies, they take soundings of a society’s cohesion, moral wellbeing, strength or lack of it. That is why totalitarian regimes persecute poets and composers with just as much rigour as they devote to silencing overtly political opposition. Stalin and Hitler both had violently strong views about art and music. One method of dealing with the troublesome messages by which poets or painters instinctually telegraph to the rest of society what has become of the human spirit was to send them to prison. Another way was the highly effective British system of education for its governing class, more or less successfully eliminating artistic or literary sensibility by the values of public school boorishness.

  When Thomas Hardy’s seventieth birthday approached in 1910, Asquith’s private secretary telephoned Buckingham Palace to suggest that a telegram to ‘old Hardy’ would be appreciated. Mr Hardy of Alnwick, who made King George V’s fishing rods, was astonished to receive royal congratulations on achieving an age he had not attained, on a day which in his life was an anniversary of nothing. At the opening of the Tate Gallery extension, the king stood before a French Impressionist picture and called out to the Queen: ‘Here’s something to make you laugh, May.’ At a canvas of Cézanne’s he shook his stick.17

  The art critics in London were scarcely less Philistine than their king. In November 1910, when Roger Fry and Desmond MacCarthy organized an exhibition at the Grafton Galleries called Manet and the Post Impressionists, London had its first taste not only of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin but also of younger artists such as Matisse, Signac, Derain, Vlaminck and Picasso. The Times decided that it was ‘the rejection of all that civilisation has done, good or bad’. H. M. Bateman did cartoons mocking it, and hundreds of visitors recorded indignant complaints in a special book provided by the gallery for the purpose.18

  There were very few English painters who really wanted to engage with the developments of painting in Europe, and this was symptomatic of something much greater than painting technique. Britain, partly by virtue
of its geographical separation from the Continent, was slow to absorb the effects on the European soul of mechanization, secularization, politicization. Things had changed and would never be the same again. British historians, even now, tend to attribute the extraordinary changes to the war alone. Before 1914, they see an idyllic Britain of Flora Thompson peasantry, of factory workers with waistcoats and watch chains, of Wind in the Willows and Gertrude Jekyll: afterwards, jazz, short skirts, an independent Ireland and socialism – symptoms of a lost innocence, and an irreversible change. But the truth is otherwise. We have already seen that prewar Britain was far from tranquil. From the politicians’ point of view the war was a way of postponing, or not directly facing, the most urgent domestic questions of the day, such as the demand for female suffrage and the near civil war in Ireland. But you only have to look at the movements in painting and sculpture to see that the world had already changed – as Yeats would say, changed utterly – before any shots were fired.