Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  There was a self-limiting quirk in the imperial desire of the original east coast American settlers. Their ‘manifest destiny’ was to spread out across continental North America, regardless of who currently lived on or claimed that land, but only until they reached the Pacific. At that point, once their empire stretched from sea to shining sea, there was to be no more talk of expansion. Their efforts were then focused on quality, not quantity. The aim was to become the biblical ‘shining city on a hill’. They wanted to build the best nation that humanity could achieve, not the largest. This made the United States something of an anomaly at the start of the twentieth century.

  Outside of the US, at the beginning of the twentieth century, this was still a world of empires and emperors.

  The Ottoman Empire stretched across what is now Albania, Macedonia and Turkey, and reached down through Iraq, Syria and Palestine into Africa. Above it lay the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This covered a huge number of what are now modern states, from the Czech Republic in the north down to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the south, and from parts of Italy in the west to parts of Romania and Ukraine in the east. Geographically this was the second-largest European power, beaten only by the vast Russian Empire of Nicholas II to the east. To the north-west lay the German Empire of Wilhelm II and beyond that lay the territory of the elderly Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India. In Imperial China, Empress Dowager Cixi presided over an empire that had held power, in some form, for over two thousand years. The Emperor of Japan, Emperor Meiji, was still alleged to be divine, and had a status not dissimilar to that of ancient Egyptian pharaohs.

  Colonialism was a more recent development in the history of empire. The exact definitions of colonialism and imperialism are fiercely debated in academia, but here we’re referring to the practice of extending empire into areas of the world that were not geographically adjacent. It first appeared in the fifteenth century, when it became possible to ship well-armed European soldiers far across the world. Spanish and Portuguese rulers laid claim to large parts of South America and Africa. India, which was itself a product of Mughal imperialism, fell under the control of the British during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the nineteenth, so many European countries were helping themselves to chunks of Africa that it was considered unusual not to. Colonialism also allowed republics, such as France, to indulge in land grabs that would otherwise be described as imperialistic.

  This was how the world had organised itself throughout history. There was scant evidence that other systems were available. As Philip II of Macedon was reputed to have said to his son Alexander the Great in 336 BC, ‘My son, ask for thyself another kingdom, for the one which I leave is too small for thee.’ Alexander may not have conquered all the known world, but he certainly gave it a good shot. He claimed territory that didn’t belong to him through strategy, determination and the possession of a superior army. This was considered admirable and impressive, both in his time and afterwards. He was not viewed, over those long millennia, as a thief, murderer or psychopath, and neither were the emperors who built the Roman, Persian or Egyptian empires. From long before Alexander, emperors were a logical part of human society. It is maybe not surprising that, in an age of unprecedented global migration, Norton’s use of the title would have some residual symbolic power in the nineteenth century.

  And then, that system ended.

  The concept of emperors, so firmly carved into the entirety of world history, collapsed over a few short years. The First World War began on 28 July 1914. By the time the war ended, on 11 November 1918, emperors were discredited beyond redemption. They were the way things always had been, but in a blink they were gone.

  Nicholas II of Russia and all of his family were shot dead in a cellar in Yekaterinburg in 1918, after the Bolsheviks seized power. Imperial dynastic China ended with the fall of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Chinese republic in 1912, following years of internal strife. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy collapsed at the end of the war in 1918 and the Ottoman Empire was dissolved in 1922. Wilhelm II of Germany avoided being extradited by the Allies for a probable hanging, but he was forced to abdicate and lived the rest of his life in exile. Of all the dynastic Western emperors and empresses who ruled the major world empires at the start of the twentieth century, only the British king remained on his throne when the shooting stopped, and even then the British Empire was wound down and dismantled over the following decades. A similar fate befell the Empire of Japan, which emerged from the First World War intact, but only lasted until the end of the Second.

  What caused this sudden change? Before we can begin to disentangle the messy aftermath of the war to end all wars, we’re going to take a step back and consider why emperors were so universal, and what changes brought about their downfall. To do this we’ll need to go a little further back than you might expect from a book about the twentieth century. But bear with me, for the question of why such a long-lasting system of human organisation should end so abruptly has surprising parallels to the work of the scientists and artists we have already discussed.

  Imagine that human societies can be represented by a linear, progressive scale, with those societies increasing in complexity as population grows.

  At one end of the scale are small roving bands of hunter-gatherers, which may only number a few dozen. These groupings have no hierarchies or leadership structures other than those that emerge from the normal politics of family life. Property and decision-making are shared, and formal structures are unnecessary.

  When the size of the group swells from dozens to hundreds, these bands become tribes. But although decision-making remains egalitarian, there starts to emerge a ‘big man’ in the tribe who, although not possessing any formal status, tends to be actively involved in conflict resolution and planning. His (or on occasions, her) role is the result of personal aptitude and character. It is a case of the best person for the task stepping up when needed. That person would not receive any special rewards for their actions. They would dress the same as everybody else, perform the same amount of work and live in similar huts or dwellings.

  There is considerably more scope for discord when tribes of hundreds grow into chiefdoms which number thousands of people. This was no longer a situation where individuals knew most of the people they saw daily. As the anthropologist Jared Diamond has noted, ‘With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.’

  In groups of this size there was increased specialisation in work and less equality in wealth. There was now need for a ‘chief’, a formal role distinct from the rest of the group. The chief would dress differently, live in a more luxurious manner and, on a symbolic level, represent the chiefdom itself. They would make decisions on behalf of the group, and they would frequently be privy to information, such as the ambitions of a nearby tribe, that the rest of the group did not share. The chief ruled with the consent of their group and could usually be replaced at any point, in a similar way to a seventeenth-century pirate captain or a modern-day leader of a gang of bikers.

  As populations increased, forms of currency and trade emerged, and the chief’s power of decision-making allowed them to become rich. Once power became associated with wealth and privilege, many were willing to take the burden of responsibility from their chief’s shoulders. If a leader was to survive, it was necessary to generate popular support for their rule. Cultural and religious structures were a great help here, as were hereditary principles and heavily armed bodyguards. But what really mattered was the principle of protection. The people would support a leader who protected their interests from both internal and external threats. To do this, the chief (who would by now be going by a more grandiose title, such as lord, king or sultan) needed to offer law.

  This was the bargain between the ruler and the ruled, which the French called noblesse oblige. It
was the understanding that with privilege came responsibility. Should a lord provide stability, safety and just and equal law, then the people would pledge him their loyalty in return. This loyalty created legitimacy, which allowed rulers to pursue the wealth, power and prestige they craved. What kings really liked were wars that allowed them to subdue other kings. When kings had other kings under their protection, it allowed them to use an even more impressive title, such as emperor, kaiser or tsar.

  Empires were not always popular, especially expensive and unjust ones, but they had some benefits. The single lord ruling over a large territory made all the usual local quarrels and power struggles irrelevant, and the result could be periods of stability and growth. As the revolutionary group the People’s Front of Judea ask in the Monty Python movie Life of Brian, ‘What have the Romans ever done for us? … Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order?’

  The big problem with empires was that people were not regarded as individuals. They were instead defined by their role in the great imperial hierarchy. They were expected to ‘know their place.’ If you happened to find yourself in the role of a serf or a peasant rather than a lord or a master, there really was very little you could do about it. This became increasingly problematic following the rise of Enlightenment thought in the late seventeenth century, and the growing acceptance of both rationality and the rights of man.

  The flaw in the system became apparent when rulers failed in their duty to provide law, stability and justice. When that occurred in a small chiefdom it took a particularly formidable bodyguard to keep that chief on the throne. Or indeed, to keep that chief’s head on top of his body. Yet when that ruler was an emperor with whole armies at his disposal, replacing him was considerably more difficult. A system that worked well for smaller groups became fundamentally flawed at larger scales.

  After kingdoms reached the scale where people were no longer able to remove their leader, the incentive to rule justly became less pressing. Rulers became attracted to doctrines such as the divine right of kings. This claimed that a king was not subject to the will of the people, because their right to rule came directly from God. When people believed in the divine right of kings, all notions of egalitarian leadership were over. Leaders were intrinsically superior to their people, at least in their own eyes and in the eyes of those who benefited financially from their power. It is noticeable that leading theologians had very little to say about the divine right of pig-farmers.

  This system continued into the twentieth century. It may have been tempered by the growth of representative parliaments, but it was emperors who led the world towards the First World War.

  The nineteenth century had been relatively peaceful, at least in Europe. The wars that did occur after the defeat of Napoleon, such as the Franco-Prussian War, the wars of Italian independence or the Crimean War, were brief. Most were over in a matter of months, if not weeks. The only major prolonged conflict was in North America, and that was an internal civil war rather than an expansionist imperial one. When the British Foreign Office announced in August 1914 that Britain was at war with Germany, and huge crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace to cheer the king in response, there was little reason to think this war would be any different. Although some politicians nursed private fears about a prolonged war, the words of a single British soldier, Joe Armstrong of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, summed up the thoughts of many enlisting Europeans: ‘Well, I thought the same as everybody else. Everybody said “It’ll be over by Christmas and you’ve got to get out soon, otherwise you won’t see anything.” ’

  The jubilant scenes at enlisting stations showed enormous popular enthusiasm for the fight. In Britain, the formation of ‘pals battalions’, where friends from factories, football teams or other organisations could sign up together and be placed in the same unit, added to the sense that the war would be a bit of an adventure. The schoolboy-like names of these pals brigades, such as the Liverpool Pals, the Grimsby Chums, the Football Battalion or Bristol’s Own, make the tragedy of their fate even more acute. The tone of recruitment posters (‘Surely you will fight for your King and country? Come along boys, before it’s too late’) seems horribly disconnected from the horrors that were to come, as does the practice by British women of handing white feathers to men not in uniform to mark them as cowards. Britain had traditionally relied on professional soldiers to fight its wars, so Parliament’s plea in August 1914 for a volunteer army of 100,000 men was unparalleled. By the end of September over 750,000 men had enlisted. Those soldiers had no concept of tanks, or aerial warfare or chemical weapons. They did not imagine that war could involve the entire globe. The events to come were unprecedented.

  This enthusiasm might now seem bizarre in light of the weakness of the justification for the war. The British were going to war to defend Belgium, which was threatened by Germany’s invasion of France and Russia, which was triggered by Russia declaring war on Austria, who were invading Serbia following the shooting of an Austrian by a Serbian in Bosnia. It was a complicated mess, and historians have spent the century since arguing about why it happened. Some have pointed the finger at German imperial expansionism, most notably the German historian Fritz Fischer, yet imperial expansionism was an area in which most of the other combatants were not entirely innocent. The Cambridge historian Christopher Clark argues that the protagonists of this conflict were sleepwalking into the abyss, ‘blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world’. There is no single villain we can blame for what happened. As Clark notes, ‘The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol … Viewed in this light, the outbreak of war was a tragedy, not a crime.’

  The initial shooting that led to the conflict was itself a farce. The assassin in question was a Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. He had given up in his attempt to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria following a failed grenade attack by Princip’s colleague, and gone to a café. It is often said that he got himself a sandwich, which would surely have been the most significant sandwich in history, but it seems more likely that he was standing outside the café without any lunch. By sheer coincidence the Archduke’s driver made a wrong turn into the same street and stalled the car in front of him. This gave a surprised Princip the opportunity to shoot Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Over 37 million people died in the fallout from that assassination.

  Europe plunged the world into a second global conflict a generation later. The Second World War produced art and literature that were resolute, determined and positive, from songs like ‘We’ll Meet Again’ to movies like The Dam Busters or Saving Private Ryan. They highlight a clear, unarguable sense of purpose, based around the central understanding that fascism had to be stopped whatever the cost. The First World War, in contrast, produced novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque or the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, all of which examined the war from a point of shocked, uncomprehending horror. The soldiers of the First World War had no comparisons in history to turn to for an explanation of what they had experienced. Remarque fought on the opposing side to Sassoon and Owen, but the questions that these soldiers wrestled with were the same. The experience of the war seems universal, regardless of which side of the trenches a soldier was on and regardless of whether it was recounted by an upper-class poet like Sassoon or a working-class war poet like Ivor Gurney. Much of the most important work did not appear until decades after the conflict, as people were still trying to make sense of their experience of war long after it ended.

  This difference in tone is highlighted by two classic war movies, which both tell a broadly similar story of captured officers attempting to escape from a prisoner of war camp. The names of these two films are enough to express their diffe
ring character. John Sturges’s 1967 film about Second World War Allied prisoners is called The Great Escape. Jean Renoir’s 1937 story of French First World War prisoners is called La Grande Illusion.

  With the exception of airmen such as the Red Baron, who won eighty dogfights up in the clouds far removed from life in the mud and trenches, the First World War did not generate popular, romanticised stories. It is instead remembered with static visual symbols – poppies, muddy fields, silhouetted soldiers, trenches, graves – rather than narrative. The closest it came were the spontaneous, unofficial Christmas truces that saw men from both sides leave the trenches, fraternise and play football together. What marked this incident as memorable was that it was not war itself, it was the opposite of war. This ceasefire has become the popular folk memory of the Great War, for who could romanticise the events of Gallipoli, Passchendaele or the Somme? The pointlessness of the conflict can be seen in the stoical humour of the soldiers, who would march to the trenches singing, to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here …’

  Remarque, Sassoon and other writer-soldiers, and writer-nurses like Vera Brittain, did not don their uniforms to profit themselves. They did so because their king, kaiser or emperor told them to. Most were patriotic and loyal, and enlisted on the back of a wave of enormous popular support for the conflict. As the war dragged on past Christmas 1914 the belief that what they were doing was worthwhile began to falter. By 1917, it was gone. Although early war poems did deal with the expected notions of honour and glory, such as Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ (‘If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England’), those poet-soldiers abandoned that approach when the reality of the war became apparent. Assuming that, unlike Brooke who died in 1915 on his way to Gallipoli, they lived long enough.