English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  Was this a fatal missed opportunity? It doesn’t look much like one. First of all, Lichnowsky had no authority to launch that kite. France and Germany had both already been asked to guarantee the neutrality of Belgium: France had agreed, Germany had not, and was no more likely to do so now that its troops were already moving up through Luxembourg. Newton and Clark make even more of a further thought floated by Grey to Lichnowsky that same Saturday: that Britain would be happy to stay neutral if France and Germany could stay facing each other under arms without attacking each other. For a few hours that evening, the Kaiser wobbled frantically, attracted by the idea of confining hostilities to the East, but Moltke and the rest of the High Command soon argued him off it. The preparations for war on two fronts had gone too far to be called off.

  In any case, whatever the inconsistencies and ambiguities of his policy, Grey was right when he said that he was in no position to guarantee Britain’s neutrality. Here the political facts that both the diplomatic and the military historians tend to underplay have to be taken into account. Asquith’s biographers, Roy Jenkins and Stephen Koss, both casually assert that Asquith ‘won’ three general elections. In our modern sense, he never won one. Campbell-Bannerman was the party leader at the Liberal landslide of 1906, and Asquith’s two elections of 1910 both produced badly hung Parliaments, with almost identical results: the Liberals and the Conservatives each had between 271 and 274 seats, and the Liberals continued in office only with the support of the eighty-odd Irish MPs and the forty Labour members. With his effortless Balliol superiority, Asquith carried on as if he had a majority of a hundred. But his only way of surviving was to keep the Irish on side by delivering the Home Rule Bill, against the deepest instincts of many of his own members. The Curragh Mutiny of March 1914 showed just how badly the country was split over the Irish issue, encouraging Lichnowsky and others to report back that the British army might even refuse to fight a Liberal war.

  Asquith’s government was incurably fragile. If Grey had openly declared Britain’s neutrality, the government would surely have fallen as soon as the Germans crossed the Belgian border, let alone the French one. A coalition dominated by the Conservatives, but led by Lloyd George, would have taken over. This isn’t a what-if. It is what happened just over two years later. So it is extremely difficult to see how British neutrality could actually have come about. Nor, even then, is it clear that Britain with its ‘contemptible’ army (to use the Kaiser’s unforgettable epithet) could have been a key influence in deterring the major land war that was breaking out at the other end of the Continent. These exercises in alternative history don’t really allow us to escape from the same old questions about underlying German intentions. For fifty years the scene has been dominated by the arguments of Fritz Fischer and his school: that ever since Bismarck the Germans had been dreaming of a Mitteleuropa under German military and economic supremacy, with boundaries enlarged to allow German settlers to occupy lands in the East. Poland, the Baltic States, the Ukraine, Romania and Belgium would all be vassal states, controlled by if not formally annexed to the Greater Germany. According to Fischer, these aims were held consistently throughout the First World War, and shared by the diverse actors – the erratic Kaiser, the fanatic Moltke and the supple Bethmann-Hollweg. Large parts of the programme were actually realized at and after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, as a result of the collapse of Imperial Russia and Germany’s support for Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

  The second, inseparable part of Fischer’s thesis is that most influential Germans believed that their country’s legitimate aims could be achieved only by war, because it was encircled by the early starters in the race for empire. There would, as Moltke put it, have to be a final reckoning between Teuton and Slav. Naturally, the politicians would have to decide the timing, and the diplomats would have to present it as a defensive or preventive war, but war there would have to be. Thus the Schlieffen Plan for the war and the September Programme for the peace belonged together.

  In the past few years, a reaction against Fischer has undoubtedly set in. Recent historians (Max Hastings’s Catastrophe is an impressive exception) tend to find the anti-German colouring exaggerated. Many of them revert to the old orthodoxy of the 1920s and 1930s that everyone was to blame, that in Lloyd George’s words, ‘the nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any apprehension or dismay . . . not one of them wanted war, certainly not on this scale.’ They have become re-revisionists.

  On the whole, the re-revisionists tend to walk round Fischer rather than try a direct assault on his monument. Clark says merely that ‘such arguments are not supported by the evidence.’ Newton pays tribute to Fischer, but asks ‘Why should Fischer’s searing indictment of corrupting imperialism, delusional militarism, and the recklessness and vainglory of right-wing elites be confined to Germany? . . . Such men stalked the gilded rooms of power across Europe.’ Really? Was there no difference at all in character, intention and humanity between Asquith, Grey and George V and the Kaiser and his circle?

  Ferguson at least offers a more interesting argument: that Germany’s megalomania developed only under the terrible pressures of the war. Fischer, he says, can produce no evidence that ‘these objectives existed before Britain’s entry into the war . . . All that Fischer can produce are the pre-war pipe dreams of a few Pan-Germans and businessmen, none of which had any official status, as well as the occasional bellicose utterances of the Kaiser, an individual whose influence over policy was neither consistent nor as great as he himself believed.’ Well perhaps, but isn’t it striking that the moment these pipe dreams were turned into official policy, only a month after war broke out, they captivated the German nation? By December, pretty much every professor in the country had signed up to the Manifesto of the 93 in support of Germany’s war aims, a document which Clemenceau denounced as ‘Germany’s greatest crime’. Is it really plausible that this general enthusiasm for a Greater Germany had no deep pre-war roots?

  The re-revisionists slide away from Fischer’s shadow rather too easily. As a result, their pictures of Germany’s internal politics, both before and during the war, can seem a little under-coloured. Newton is of course concentrating on Britain, but even so the Kaiser’s occasional appearances as a clumsy but sincere peacenik scarcely do justice to his unpredictable ferocity. In Clark’s superb panorama of European politics, the German background seems relatively faint, certainly by contrast to his vivid description of the Serbs and their obsessive crusade for a Greater Serbia. In the case of the Balkan Wars, Clark does not try to make out that the faults were evenly distributed, or that ‘nobody wanted war.’ The Serbs wanted a Greater Serbia and they were hot to fight for it. Clark demonstrates beyond any doubt that the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was no random outrage, but an operation carefully planned by the higher reaches of the Serbian security service, certainly including its chief, the notorious ‘Apis’, and no doubt with a nod from the elusive, unstoppable prime minister, Nikola Pašić. The assassination had two aims, and it achieved both: to remove a peace-loving heir to the throne who intended to conciliate the Serbs inside Austria-Hungary, and to foment a big war in which the Serbs could hope to gain or regain huge swathes of territory and incorporate into Serbia millions of Slavs who at present didn’t even think of themselves as Serbs. The cost was terrible: between 1914 and 1919, the Serbs lost more than 60 per cent of their regular troops, and more than a million people in Serbia died of war, typhus and Spanish flu. The reward was the lead role in the new state of Yugoslavia. The obsession with Greater Serbia continued to exercise its malign hold, culminating in the terrible wars of the 1990s – the fifth Balkan Wars by some reckoning.

  So there was certainly one venomously aggressive power at work in Central Europe. Might it not be reasonable to conclude that there were two and that the collision between them was what proved so fatal? What set off the wider chain of consequences was the harsh pressure that the Kaiser put on Franz Joseph to lose no ti
me in launching a major retaliation for the assassination of his nephew. If the Serbs don’t look much like sleepwalkers, neither do the Germans. Both of them appear wide awake and full of purpose.

  Douglas Newton concludes his brisk and highly readable narrative by declaring that ‘nations going to war are very like each other. Britain’s descent into war was marked, as elsewhere, by panic, manipulation, deception, recklessness, high-handedness, and low political calculation – and decisions made at a tearing pace.’ Certainly that is true if you look only at the machinery: the expiring ultimatums, the last-minute démarches which don’t come off because they aren’t meant to, the ambassadors receiving their passports, the carefully crafted statements in Parliament. But what ultimately matter are the underlying intentions and mindsets of those involved. Was there really an equivalence in belligerence? Do sleepwalkers weep as Grey and Asquith wept?

  CHURCHILL’S CALAMITY: DAY TRIP TO GALLIPOLI

  On the way up Scimitar Hill, my grandfather spotted Fred Cripps, Sir Stafford’s pleasure-loving brother, then a young officer, and said to him, ‘What are you ducking for, Fred? The men don’t like it and it doesn’t do any good.’ Fred lived to the ripest of old ages. My grandfather got to the top of the hill and, like most of his staff, was never seen again. Those few of his brother officers who survived say that he led his brigade the whole way up with a walking stick in his hand and a pipe in his mouth. He only stopped once, to light the pipe. Apart from the smoke of battle, an unseasonable fog had come down, and the Turkish guns had set the gorse aflame. In the circumstances, the pipe seemed a bit superfluous.

  The orders given to the Bucks, Berks and Dorset Yeomanry were, I think, much like those given further along the hill to Colonel Sir John Milbanke, VC, who told his Sherwood Rangers, ‘We are to take a redoubt. But I don’t know where it is and don’t think anyone else does either; but in any case we are to go ahead and attack any Turks we meet.’ He did not come back either.

  This was the last great battle fought on the Gallipoli peninsula and, in terms of numbers, the greatest of the whole campaign. When it was over, the Turks had been forced to bring up their last reserves, but the British had endured 5000 casualties and had not advanced at all. General Hamilton had already asked Kitchener for another 95,000 troops and been told in effect that the Gallipoli enterprise had had its chance. Alan Moorehead argues that the battle had been lost ten days earlier when General Stopford dallied so long after the first landings at Suvla Bay and so allowed Kemal (not yet Ataturk) to recapture the heights of Tekke Tepe and Chunuk Bair. Scimitar Hill was only a foothill. As so often before throughout that spring and summer, when surprise was lost, so was the battle. Again and again, the frustrated commanders muttered, ‘If only the navy had arrived on time . . . if only we had not been starved of ammunition . . . if only we had got there half an hour earlier . . .’

  Nobody described the dallying at Suvla more vividly than Churchill himself, the author of The World Crisis, that resonant, sulphurous apologia of a man who felt he had been unfairly blamed for the whole business and who, at political meetings ten years later, still had to endure shouts of, ‘What about the Dardanelles?’:

  We may pause to survey the scene on both sides of the front this sunny August afternoon. On the one hand, the placid, prudent, elderly (like many of the British generals, Stopford was over 60 and he was also in poor health) English gentleman with his 20,000 men spread around the beaches, the front lines sitting on the tops of shallow trenches, smoking and cooking, with here and there an occasional rifle shot, others bathing by hundreds in the bright blue bay where, disturbed hardly by a single shell, floated the great ships of war: on the other the skilful German stamping with impatience for the arrival of his divisions, expecting with every hour to see his scanty covering forces brushed aside, while the furious Kemal animated his fanatic soldiers and hurled them forward towards the battle.

  Sitting among the irises and the red and pink anemones by the cemetery at Hill Ten, I began to share Churchill’s impatience, with all the fury of a non-combatant gifted with hindsight. How could such a huge landing force have taken so long to capture this low, scrubby mound? It all looked so easy in the dream landscape of this vast bay with its shimmering salt lake (dried out in the merciless heat of the summer of 1915) and the wide horseshoe of pine-wooded hills behind, dotted with the white stone of the cemeteries on top of almost every one. I began to feel that almost anything could have happened in this eerie, empty place and that much of the futile slaughter might have been avoided, perhaps even that my grandfather (a large, untidy, kindly man I am told) might have gone on living his guileless life. If only old Stopford had not been such a dud, perhaps the Allies really could have reached Constantinople, taken Turkey out of the war, relieved the pressure on Russia’s southern flank and prevented the Bolshevik Revolution, just as Churchill said.

  The anniversary of the landings on 25 April [1990] is to be the final remembrance for the handful of remaining survivors, drawing Margaret Thatcher and Bob Hawke to these still untenanted shores (preserved from the rash of coastal concrete as a national memorial park). But each anniversary revives once again ‘the terrible ifs’, the alluring might-have-beens that Churchill so brilliantly deployed in the defence of his own seemingly shattered career.

  After all, was there not something lightweight, unsustained, frivolous even, about the way the Gallipoli campaign was waged, not least in the diaries and letters – bobbish, lyrical, facetious by turns – of Sir Ian Hamilton with his enchanting smile and his twinkling eyes? An insect bite had prevented poor Rupert Brooke from getting any further than Skyros, but his friends and his prose style were as ubiquitous as the insects. The natural beauty of the surroundings ennobled the stench of the trenches. ‘It was a cobweb morning,’ wrote Sergeant Hargrave of the 32nd Field Ambulance, recalling Stopford’s Day of Rest, ‘misty-thick, foretelling a steaming-hot day. Every sagebrush and wild thyme hassock festooned with spiders’ webs heavy with dew.’ Everyone who fought there or merely visited seems to have been moved to write like John Masefield, including John Masefield. Classical allusions came up with the rations; the windy plains of Troy were only a few miles across the straits on the Asian side. Some of the French troops stationed at Cape Helles at the toe of the peninsula excavated antiquities in their spare time, aided by the huge craters left by the shells of ‘Asiatic Annie’, the big Turkish gun across the water. Both Moorehead (1956) and Robert Rhodes James (1965) give marvellous descriptions of that strange heightened life, a mixture of terror, boredom, dysentery and exhilaration which has made the whole tragic adventure ring in the memory to this day.

  How peculiar it all was – peculiar, to start with, that we should be fighting the Turks at all, when, with only a fraction more diplomatic nous before the war, they might have been on our side (a fact which may explain the absence of rancour after the war and the mutual respect during it). And peculiar too for the Balliol subaltern sunning himself on these banks of asphodel to see only a few hundred yards away men in his own regiment under heavy fire in their trenches or clinging like seabirds to holes scrabbled in the cliff, often using corpses as sandbags or treading on their squashy faces. Peculiar too it must have been to return from the most vicious hand-to-hand fighting of the entire war, biting, bayoneting, clubbing one’s way a few yards forward only to be startled by pitiless enfilading fire and forced to scurry downhill again along the maze of gullies and on to the beach and splash into the sea to get away from the flies. Against the violent freshness of these contrasts, it is somehow all the more touching to read the same understated phrases in letters home as from any other British battlefield: ‘We got fearfully cut up last night’, ‘it was most awfully disappointing for us at Anzac’. No wonder the Gallipoli campaign has produced two of the finest short histories of any campaign in British military history: Moorehead the better on the submarine battles in the Sea of Marmara and on the bizarre intrigues at Constantinople, Rhodes James the more intense, sharp and gri
pping on the actual fighting (though marred by a bitchy insistence on belittling Moorehead’s research at every opportunity). Both manage superbly to balance the heroism against the horror, and to give just as full weight to the dash of the best commanders as to the lethargy of the worst.

  There could be no accusations of sloth or lotus-eating at the middle of the three battlefronts, Anzac Cove. There, only a couple of miles down from Suvla, the jagged, sandy cliffs rear almost straight out of the sea. There is scarcely room for the little graveyard at the edge of the beach. This place – one of the most legendary in the history of warfare – is hardly a cove at all, no more than the faintest of indentations in the roughest, least hospitable stretch of the coast. It is amazing that men could ever have fought their way to the top of the ridge, let alone held their trenches for months against the enemy above them. The ground is so cramped, so precipitous, so seamed with deceitful gullies and crevasses that any kind of coherent military advance seems inconceivable. Those cheerfully designated landmarks of the fiercest fighting – Plugge’s Plateau, Johnston’s Jolly – are mere pockets of scrub and scree, crammed to this day with the bones and equipment of those who died in them. Yet all the fire and dash at Anzac Cove achieved little more than the lethargy and indecision at Suvla Bay. For all the reckless daring displayed at both, the Allied line never reached more than a mile or so inland, the great ridge which forms the spine of the peninsula was never controlled, the Turkish batteries were never silenced, and the Dardanelles were never forced. And when I gazed down towards Suvla from the top of the ridge, where Kemal had his headquarters, the ultimate failure of the Allies no longer seemed so surprising. What looked like a fairly easy stroll from below looked hellish, verging on impossible from above. Suppose the Bucks, Berks and Dorset Yeomanry had managed to capture the high ridge and fought their way on up the peninsula, might they not still, I wondered, have been intercepted by German reinforcements from the Gulf of Saros, or been cut to pieces by Turkish guerrillas in the cruel winter of the Thracian uplands (thirty men froze to death in a single trench here in the last days before evacuation)? Constantinople still seemed a long way off, 200 miles and more, in fact.