by Mark Rowe
Politics
There is no standing still in the world’s history. All is growth and development.
Germany and the Next War, by General Friedrich von Bernhardi (1911)
Goonie Churchill’s letters - simple and silly as some of them were - did show Britain’s thinking, a few days into war. A fear lingered, and not only by the seaside, that Germans would attack Britain, because the Germans were so warlike; and had they not made such a fuss about their navy? Britain thought first and most of war by her navy, to protect the oceans that brought food and kept trade going; even the army, if it sailed to France or anywhere, would need the navy for a safe crossing.
Many spoke like Goonie of the Germans with hatred. At best some, as in 1939, sought to excuse the German people as oppressed or fooled, while the ruler Kaiser Wilhelm was a despot, or insane. If anyone regretted war, and felt pity for all, few said so, at least in public. An exception was the Rev T F Jerwood during a short sermon for the Territorials leaving Market Harborough on Thursday August 6. He asked everyone to pray for the wounded of all sides, and to pray for loved ones left behind, throughout Europe, and for ‘our Father, yes the father of all, even the kaiser, poor misguided man’. While it took some nerve to feel charity for the kaiser, the most Jerwood could do was suggest the German emperor was badly advised - always the polite excuse when kings did wrong - or not right in the head. As a band led the town’s reserve soldiers along the high street on the main Leicester road to Oadby - in the opposite direction to Germany, as each county’s units gathered somewhere central - it was not the time to admit that the kaiser, and his countrymen, had as much right to their point of view as Britain. Only the artist George Rose made a leap of imagination, on Sunday September 6, during special prayers at church at home in Ongar: “I wondering at the time whether the German congregations were doing the same thing as we were.” Even Rose was only querying war, not his country’s right to take part in it. Rose conformed outwardly and probably only aired his doubts to his family, or his diary - or hid his feelings even more deeply. Rose’s brother Frank joined the army on August 25; Rose’s diary pages for the next few days were torn out.
In public, where politics happened, people had to decide where they stood. Who were they fighting for, and against? Why? What did they want, and how hard would they fight for it? The answers soon changed. If anyone remembered Servia, they forgot it; Germany, not Austria, was the enemy. Belgium was the cause, or small nations in general. That could include Servia, although as the country was so hard to reach and help, it was best left unsaid.
Why should Britain, with the world’s biggest navy and empire, bother about small countries? Duty, and honour, said every public figure from Asquith down. Such words - so suspiciously widely agreed by the newspapers, and by Unionist and Liberal politicians - were abstract. You did something out of duty not because it suited you, but because if you did not, you would lose face or feel shame. The navy officer James Somerville in his diary for August 3 noted that his ship would have the ‘honour’ of leading the fleet into action:
It is a great compliment to our admiral and the ship but there is no doubt we shall suffer severely because as the fleets converge on one another the leading ships come into action first and have to stand the brunt of the attack; also after a short time the rest of our line will be shrouded in smoke and spray and we shall be the only clear target for the enemy to fire at so though we have the honour we shall also have the casualties.
In other words, honour could be bad for you. Britain seemed anxious to convince itself that it was going to war for moral reasons. That might be because Britain had doubts - could the Liberal Government have done more, sooner, to localise the war to Austria and Servia? - or simply because everyone wanted to feel they were in the right, doing something as wrong as war. As Rose’s uncomfortable insight suggested, didn’t the Germans, as civilised as the British, feel that God was with them? Would only victory prove who, if anyone, was right?
Another clergyman speaking to departing Territorials, Canon Ernest Morris in Ashbourne, told the men in the town hall that they could go with a ‘clear conscience’: ‘... in as much as the quarrel had not been our seeking, but we had been forced into this war by the actions of others’. The churchman - like the appropriate hymn Onward Christian Soldiers that they then sang - was telling the soldiers they had permission to do what was otherwise unlawful and unchristian: to try to kill other men. Morris, the father of an officer, and himself a reservist, used another moral term. Lord Dartmouth, presiding at a meeting in mid-August at Stafford, used the term too, and like Morris said the crisis had been ‘forced upon them’: “If ever any country went into a war with clean hands it was the British country today.” His audience - including his wife, five other lords, and five members of parliament - applauded. The British wanted to believe they were blameless, although it begged the question of how long hands could stay clean, literally and metaphorically; if they ever were. If Britain had not chosen war (though strictly speaking, on that Tuesday, August 4, it had), and had been forced into it, shouldn’t the political leaders of so great a country as Britain have done rather better? Or, though it might hurt the national sense of worth, had the continental countries gone ahead with whatever they felt was in their interests, taking no notice of Britain? Because Britain was not as great in Europe as it thought it was? And was the fact that Britain deluded itself, with talk of duty and honour, part of the problem - that neighbours saw through it, and distrusted it?
II
At a distance, you might be short of news, but distance and that very shortage of news could make politics look clearer. Frank Balfour wrote to Irene Lawley on August 28: “One spends much time explaining the war, its causes and possible results to all and sundry - I’ve borrowed an Arabic map of Europe from the local school.” Nearly all the sheikhs took a newspaper - unlike Balfour, who had cancelled his, as he had expected to be in Europe on leave by then. “One of the things that strikes them most is the sinking of the Ulster business (I suppose it has - but I’m rather in the dark.)”
Certainly the war was British politics’ most pressing business of all. Public opinion would not allow anything else as a distraction. Suffragette organisers made the best of it and promised to stop their campaign, before they lost all sympathy. The Unionist and Nationalist sides in Ireland, and their English followers, each promised to support the war. Saying so in parliament was one thing; what they thought in private was another. Rallying against some outside threat did not solve Ireland’s differences. At best, the Liberal Government would - as Lord St Aldwyn gossiped in a letter to his son Mickey on Friday August 21 - put the ‘Irish and the Welsh Bills’ into statute but not make them happen for ‘possibly two years so that the next Parliament would be able to alter or repeal it’. (The ‘Welsh Bill’ by the way was for the disestablishment of the church in Wales, also controversial, though not enough to make anyone do gun-running.) Two years would take it to 1916, and another general election. Either the Liberals would win then, and could start again, or they would lose and the Unionists could have the problem. St Aldwyn quibbled: “But the Irish Bill cannot be settled by mere delay; they will have I think to give up the six counties [of Ulster] or something like it as a result and then it will be a pretty good row if they do not.”
As a former Unionist minister, St Aldwyn was still thinking as a party-politician. So was Lord Milner, who had tried, without much success, earlier in 1914 to set up committees across England against Home Rule. In a dictated letter Milner told an old friend, Philip Lyttelton Gell, on September 3 that he had no sympathy with the ‘present speaking campaign’, whereby Unionist, Liberal and even Labour politicians argued on the same platforms for the war and more recruits. Milner claimed he would like to forgive and forget at a time of national crisis. However Milner used recent history as a reason for not wanting to work with the Government and thus aid the Liberals:
At th
e time when speaking about the duty of National Service was still of some use because there was time to carry out a scheme of national defence the people who are now so eloquent were all engaged in crabbing and belittling and ridiculing the men who were prepared to face unpopularity in order to speak the truth. I should be prepared to forget all this if the government would even now have the courage to face the situation and adopt a measure of compulsion which is the only possible basis of an adequate military organisation and a great people in the modern world. As long as they themselves shrink from their plain duty in that respect it is detestable hypocrisy for them to appeal to the sense of national duty in others. I wonder how many more lessons we must have before they take the bull by the horns.
Milner preferred to be silent on the most important subject of the time, and leave the political ground to rivals, rather than stand with Liberals who talked of ‘duty’ but had, he felt, done the opposite of duty on Ireland and national defence. Milner, with reason, could claim he was serving his country; he was writing from 47 Duke Street in St James’s - another politician with a central London address - while he let the local Yeomanry use his Kent property, Sturry House. Milner meanwhile was still the party-politician. He claimed that the Liberals could stay in office forever, for all he cared: “...in fact I should like to see them there if only they would do the right thing. It is easy for them. It would be almost impossible for the opposition if it came into power.” Without saying so, Milner was admitting that the Unionists did not have the numbers in parliament to run the country; only the Liberals did. Hence the Liberals were running the war by themselves, and not inviting Unionists to become ministers; because they could. Likewise Milner thought only of the Unionists taking power, not sharing power if the Liberals fell. (Ironically, Milner did become a senior wartime minister under the next, Liberal prime minister, Lloyd George. Before then, much would happen.)
All Milner’s letter was honest party politics, and Milner gave his very honesty as the reason for keeping such views to himself. He told Gell: “I should not like to say these things in public because at a time like this all public recriminations must be avoided but between you and me there is no room for humbug.” By his public silence, however, Milner appeared to accept national humbug.
Chapter 13
Business as usual?
The wag of the regiment, a cockney, who had just been reading in the newspapers that the motto at home was ‘business as usual’, brought out an old biscuit tin which he had put the notice on and turned it towards the Germans as a hint that the men were ready again.
A story of Wiltshire Regiment men in France, from the Bristol Times and Mirror, September 4, 1914
I
“Our children talk much of the war,” George Thorp, the Hull architect, wrote in his diary on August 17,
and Muriel’s ideas as to its strictly just and ethical settlement were very much to the point. ‘Why,’ she indignantly asked, ‘do they send all these poor men to be killed, that have nothing to do with it? Why don’t King George and the Emperor fight it out between them?’ Then she paused: ‘Well, perhaps that wouldn’t be quite fair, because our King is such a little man!’
‘My dear,’ I said to her, ‘your idea would settle all bloodshed for if those who made this dreadful strife had in this and other disputes to fight it out themselves there would be precious little war.’
We have no way of knowing how many felt the same as the childlike Muriel Thorp; then or since. By contrast, there are no end of examples of civilians and soldiers taking to heart the sound idea that you ought to aim to win by marching into the enemy’s capital. A month or two of war would show how unrealistic such ambitions were. In the meantime, ‘À Berlin’ was scrawled on the railway wagons taking the French conscripts to the front. J L Dent, a lieutenant in the 2nd battalion, South Staffordshire Regiment, felt low when the villagers who shouted in French ‘À Berlin!’ as his company marched into Belgium on Sunday August 23, murmured ‘A Londres’ as the men passed again in retreat, the next evening. Harold Cook in Clapham in south London posted a plain postcard around noon on Monday August 10, to tell a friend in Lincolnshire the good news. “I have been accepted today for the RAMC (Regulars) and received my first day’s pay,” he wrote. “I attend at Whitehall tomorrow for instructions. I will write to you from Berlin!!! Kindest regards.” By 1915, Cook, in the medical corps in France, was complaining by letter to his friend of the monotony. In the meantime, whether in all seriousness or with some bravado, ‘Berlin’ was (with exclamation marks) a shorthand way of saying that you were throwing yourself into the fight. Most people settled into the war between the extremes of the girl-pacifist Muriel Thorp, and the likes of Dent of the British Expeditionary Force, who bumped into an army between them and Berlin.
Everyone had to ask, depending on their occupation, and wealth, how war affected them, if at all. Few stood with the socialists, at the best of times; even fewer stood with them against war. Men as different as the later secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain Harry Pollitt (outside a barracks in Manchester) and Labour minister Herbert Morrison (on a Sunday morning on Hampstead Heath) each had meetings broken up by angry patriots. Judging by later memoirs, it seemed that you were nobody in the labour movement unless you were roughed up in August 1914 for telling the workers, in effect, that they were stupid, unless they agreed international war was not their business.
Ironically, some wealthy people took much the same view as the socialists, though the comparison would have insulted them. A common cry in August 1914 was ‘business as usual’. Politicians, for example, had little to do, apart from the ministers who were crushingly busy with the army and navy, or with related matters, such as the railways and press censorship. Asquith adjourned parliament for two weeks on August 10, and MPs went on holiday; Richard Holt went to his family’s usual retreat in Scotland. On his return on August 25, he admitted to his diary that MPs had ‘nothing much doing’ except emergency bills; and most of those in his opinion were not needed; but ‘there is a passion for doing something’.
Donating money - and being seen to donate - was popular, because you could look generous, and newspapers took care to list who gave what. By the end of August the new Prince of Wales’ Fund had £2m. A rare sceptic at this time, the writer Arnold Bennett, noted in the Sheffield Daily Independent on September 1 that some thought the sum marvellous. Compared with how much money people had to spare, and considering that the volunteers were leaving home to fight for the donors, Bennett called the amount ‘miserable’. He dismissed the fund as ‘machinery for enabling the income tax-paying classes to display their patriotism’. Another critic, Sheffield alderman George Senior, suggested a war tax, because while in his opinion aristocrats had ‘nobly done their duty’ by offering money and help, the upper middle class only did what they were made to do: “They are forced to pay rates and income tax; beyond that they do very little.”
This question of how much people ought to give to society towards things for the good of all - roads, an army and navy - dated as far back as Caesar, to the dawn of civilisation, and such things as taxation. War only made the question more urgent.
At least donors had given something - or had said they would. In his August 21 letter to his son, Lord St Aldwyn wrote a postscript: “ ... you and I have to give something to the county war fund - would you think £50 too much? I promised £100 but I have paid nothing yet ...”. St Aldwyn was thinking of only paying half at first: “I might pay £50 for myself and £25 for you if you like when I find out where to pay it to.”
Lord St Aldwyn would hardly miss £100; such a sum was a year or two’s income for a worker. Charity, then, was hardly a fair way of drawing from people. Both the Liberal movement and Unionist aristocrats, however, believed strongly in the proverb of one volunteer being worth ten (or however many) pressed men. As they saw it, free people gave gladly, and would prevail over those told to do someth
ing by a kaiser. This cross-party feeling was under threat in the last few years before 1914, from socialists, and from Liberals such as Lloyd George who used the state to take money from some (in national insurance for example) and gave it to others (such as the old-age pension). The state would demand more in a war, from more people, than in peace; and would ask for more still, as the war went on and seemed ever harder to win. Whole towns would boom or bust, without seeing a German; some ports had more work, some less, because in a war against Germany, the enemy assumed by the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) before 1914, North Sea ports could not run as normal, or at all. However, the state would not help those worse off as a result. A sub-committee of the CID, ‘supplies in time of war’, with Richard Holt among the members, said in 1911 that any ‘inequities’ (such as men out of work and starving families) could be left to ‘economic laws’ to put right, as soon as the emergency passed. During the emergency - presumably the days or weeks of change from peace to war - the state had enough to do, without looking for people to help. From the beginning, then, war made for coarser public affairs. If soldiers and sailors were dying, what did your suffering matter? And if you could not help the troops, why not help yourself?
When trade, jobs and food looked uncertain, and charity between classes was not nimble enough, or at all enough, to meet needs, society’s principle of individual responsibility looked like something less moral: every man for himself. All this clashed with those public ideals of duty, and honour - which on the battlefield led to another abstraction: sacrifice.
II
Businesses could hardly carry on ‘business as usual’, if what had been their markets, or source of materials, were now enemy territory. Even in Sudan, Frank Balfour soon noticed that almost half the country’s peacetime exports were gum, ‘mostly taken by Germany’. As crippling, though more subtle, was the shaken confidence of businessmen; irrational, maybe, yet all the harder to put right. In mid-August the Hull architect George Thorp visited relations: “Auntie not well,” he wrote. “Uncle pessimistic”: