To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  British society was openly fragmented in 1914. The activities of the suffragettes, the succession of major strikes between 1911 and 1914 (40 million working days were lost in 1912), the opposition of the Ulster Unionists to Irish home rule, were all challenges not only to the Liberal government but to liberalism. Extra-parliamentary agitation had become a major means of political expression. Even more worrying were the efforts on the right to undermine parliamentary sovereignty: in 1909–10 the Conservatives used the House of Lords to block a Commons-approved budget, and in 1914 they condoned Ulster loyalism to the point of backing the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force and supporting the so-called ‘Curragh mutiny’, the refusal of the officers of the 3rd cavalry brigade to enforce Irish home rule in Ulster.

  Yet, despite these manifestations of class and regional division, the emotion generated by the war in Britain did not contain that element of relief at newfound unanimity across the classes which so characterized the fusion of left and right in France and Germany. The nation was united when it voted for war credits, and yet it did not give that moment of unity a title—the English language coined no equivalent to the union sacrée or the Burgfrieden. The acceptance of the war without the agonizing to be found across the Channel is perhaps the best negative indicator of how little either liberalism or parliamentary sovereignty was genuinely under threat—despite all the overt divisions—in 1914. An elected Liberal government had genuinely and conscientiously grappled with the issues that confronted it, and had then decided that war was the only possible step: both the Conservative and Labour parties supported that decision.

  To the underlying faith in parliament and the constitution must be added another element—in itself a product of the first—in explaining the weakness of anti-war sentiment in Britain. Intellectual socialism lacked the strength that it had acquired in France and Germany. Indications of this were already evident in 1911, during the second Moroccan crisis, when Lloyd George managed to settle the railway strike by an appeal to the national interest. On 2 August 1914 the British section of the International staged a major demonstration against the war, and in particular against a war on behalf of tsarist Russia. Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour party’s chairman, distinguished between the behaviour of the German government and his sympathy for the German people. That the war was a product of the arms race and of covert diplomacy was a theme expressed by him and, on 5 August, by a majority of the national executive of the party. But the themes in all this were not the revolutionary ones of international working-class solidarity or of an absolute opposition to war in itself. Indeed, although MacDonald resigned the party chairmanship when it became clear that the party as a whole was more enthusiastic about the war than he was, his views were not very different from those of his successor, Arthur Henderson, and both were agreed that the war should be fought until Germany was defeated. MacDonald’s resignation led to his rapprochement with the more Marxist and pacifist Independent Labour Party. The Labour party itself was dominated by the trades unions: it followed that its concerns were revisionist and economic, its priorities domestic, and its general sentiment patriotic. The Trades Union Congress had withdrawn from the Second International after 1896, and resisted Legien’s suggestions that it become involved in the work of the International Secretariat.67 Working-class culture, at least in London, was determined less by socialism and more by recreation, by football, by the music hall. Middle-class intellectuals had little influence, and the Labour party itself was shown, during the pre-war strikes, to be lacking in a clear, alternative political programme. On 29 August the party executive decided to support the army’s recruiting campaign.68

  Part of the explanation for the weakness of Internationalism within the Labour party was that pacifism was not its exclusive prerogative, but was shared with elements of the Liberal party. The Gladstonian and nonconformist heritage of nineteenth-century Liberalism, plus the addition of social reforming elements in the 1890s, meant that Grey’s major worry in the domestic accounting for his foreign policy was over the reactions of radicals within his own party. Their principal journal, the Manchester Guardian, was particularly vociferous: ‘Englishmen’, it fulminated on 30 July 1914, ‘are not the guardians of Servian well-being, or even of the peace of Europe. Their first duty is to England and to the peace of England.’ On that same day the parliamentary Liberal party resolved that ‘on no account will this country be dragged into the conflict’.69 But the strength of their case resided in their emphasis on Serbia and on their rejection of such constructions as the balance of power. When France was threatened, so was the security of Britain. Moreover, the demands of self-preservation and of anti-war instincts were no longer incompatible, but were rationalized by the claim that Britain fought to defend Belgian neutrality and to uphold international law. Not fighting in 1914 could, therefore, be interpreted as as great an affront to Liberal ideals as fighting. Thus, no immediately effective opposition to the declaration of war emerged from this quarter either. The two ministers who resigned from Asquith’s cabinet retired from politics. Charles Trevelyan, a backbench MP, abandoned junior office to oppose the war, and organized a group of about thirty Liberal MPs committed to securing peace as soon as possible. On 17 November Trevelyan’s initiative resulted in the creation—with the support of the Independent Labour Party—of the Union of Democratic Control: the four major objectives of the union embraced a more open conduct of diplomacy, greater parliamentary accountability, national self-determination, and measures for disarmament. Implicit within it was an acceptance of the current war.

  The argument that the outbreak of the First World War somehow constituted a failure on the part of socialism is a point of view that only a minority of socialists in 1914 would have accepted. ‘War’, the British socialist historian R. H. Tawney, wrote on 28 November 1914, ‘is not the reversal of the habits and ideals we cultivate in peace. It is their concentration by a whole nation with all the resources on an end as to which a whole nation can agree.’70 The emphasis of Jaurèsian Internationalism was on the better management of foreign policy, on the use of arbitration in the event of a crisis, rather than on outright pacifism. In extremis war could be justified. And most socialists in Europe, presented with the imminence of war, and enamoured of doctrinal debate and intellectual clarity as ends in themselves, found little difficulty in producing a cogent case for involving themselves in the events which overtook them. The willingness to defend carried with it the expectation that the nation itself could become a better society, and that the war might be the means to achieve that. The union sacrée and the Burgfrieden could be interpreted as expressions of socialist fraternity; the war—it was widely believed—would be an agent for domestic social reform. But, on the plane of Internationalism, this was also the last war, the war to end wars, the vehicle for establishing a lasting international order. Through the war, French socialists argued, republicanism would be introduced to the Central Powers; through the war, Kurt Renner of the Austrian social democrats contended, imperialism and monopoly capitalism, which were embodied in Britain, would be overcome. The First World War was therefore not the sort of war against which socialism had aligned itself: it was a war for justice and liberty, not of imperial aggrandizement.

  THE IMAGININGS OF INTELLECTUALS

  Furthermore, some socialists at least shared the view, common elsewhere across the political spectrum, that war between nations was inevitable. Nothing in Marx suggested that this was not true; a similar determination led the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce to respond to war as part of the historical process. Many of the leading statesmen in 1914, as the previous chapter has shown, were led to comparable conclusions by their acceptance of social Darwinism. Thus, Bülow considered that: ‘In the struggle between nationalities, one nation is the hammer and the other the anvil; one is the victor and the other vanquished . . . it is a law of life and development in history that where two national civilizations meet they fight for ascendancy.’71

  The differ
ence between the Marxists’ approach and Bülow’s was one of outcomes: socialist determinism posited a better and war-less world as an ultimate conclusion. Present in Bülow’s picture was a double pessimism: first, that one of two nations would be forced into irretrievable decline by the outcome of war; and second, that war was part of a recurrent and eternal process.

  Such negativity was not a necessary response to Darwinism.72 True, Darwin had used an emotive and Hobbesian vocabulary to describe evolution. He had observed that tribes with superior martial qualities prevailed. But he would not conclude that society was becoming more military as time passed. Instead, he saw war as an evolutionary phase: culture and education, liberalism and industrialization would in due course moderate the genetic inheritance of struggle and violence. This positivist strain was explored by Darwin’s contemporaries and successors, notably Herbert Spencer and T. H. Huxley. By 1914 many biologists were using their discipline to predict the evolution of a war-less world.

  The impact of this optimistic version of social Darwinism was muted. First, the pacifist movement, under the influence of Norman Angell’s The great illusion (1910), was in the thrall more of economics than of biology: states would not fight because war did not pay. Even reformist socialists, for all the continuing conviction of those on the left that the crisis of capitalism could only be resolved through war, found Angell’s arguments persuasive. The problem was that these very themes—the triumph of capitalism and of economic self-interest—fed fears which were deemed to have biological implications. Prosperity was not merely softening people, rendering them decadent and ultimately unfit; it was also—through social reform—keeping alive the weak who in harsher times would have died. Therefore a world in which military competition was replaced by economic rivalry was likely to be racially degenerate.

  Thus, the popular and fashionable impact of biology before the outbreak of the First World War was less in social Darwinism per se and more in the field of eugenics. Some students of heredity contended that humanity could only advance by improving its genetic endowment, and that future generations should therefore be fathered not by the weak, propped up by the nascent welfare state, but by the strong. The latter would be forged in war, itself a parent to innovation as well as to the advancement of the great civilizing empires. Those who opposed this line of thought did so because they disagreed not with its basic assumptions, but with its belief that the effects of war were eugenic. The unfit were exempted from military service: consequently war eliminated the strong while protecting the weak. Pessimism was inherent in both camps. Those who saw war as eugenically favourable had to accept war as a biological necessity; those who concluded that war was dysgenic reckoned that war would be biologically disastrous.

  Any solutions to this dilemma were long term and fanciful rather than immediate. The American philosopher William James called in 1910 for ‘the moral equivalent of war’. He wanted to hone military ideals, but in a more constructive and pacific environment than combat. Graham Wallas of the London School of Economics was influenced by James and worried about the ‘baulked disposition’ of young men endowed with warlike qualities but unable to find alternative outlets for them. His solution, a change in the quality of life interspersed with challenges, was vague. His conclusion was pessimistic. Fear of ‘the blind forces to which we used so willingly to surrender ourselves’ had replaced the liberals’ faith in progress. ‘An internecine European war’, Wallas wrote in The great society, which appeared in the spring of 1914, ‘is the one enormous disaster which over-hangs our time.’73

  Therefore the debates surrounding Darwinism by 1914, for all the positivism of many of their proponents, were couched in apocalyptic terms. In this they reflected what was perhaps a general trend: the subordination of science to art, the triumph of Romanticism over the Enlightenment. From physics to psychology, science was being moulded less by the dictates of its own empirical reasoning amd more by a total conception in which art, and the emotional experience which it conveyed, as well as history were central to the overall vision.74

  Pre–1914 art—using the word in its broadest sense— abounds with images of the apocalypse, of the world’s end and of Christ’s second coming. For the religious, like Vasily Kandinsky, the message of the Resurrection was ultimately optimistic, devastation and despair were the path to renewal and regeneration. Kandinsky’s less abstract imagery used mounted figures, knightly riders with military overtones. But many artists portrayed the apocalypse in terms that were not exclusively associated with the inevitability of destructive war. Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, published in 1913, employs the metaphor of plague, not war. The series of paintings executed by Ludwig Meidner in 1912 and 1913, with their bombed cities, storm-laden skies, and piles of corpses, undeniably gave forceful and visual expression to the anticipated terrors of modern war; in conception, however, they were as much a response to the frenzied pace of industrialization and urbanization (and particularly, in this case, of Berlin).75 Where the references to war are more direct, as in Franz von Stuck’s allegorical painting of war completed in 1894 or Arnold Böcklin’s rendering of the four horsemen of the apocalypse painted two years later, they may be as much a reflection of the fin de siècle as anticipations of imminent European conflict.

  Stuck’s picture portrays war as a handsome young man, his head crowned with the laurels of victory, while corpses are piled at his feet. But with the new century these associations of beauty and heroism gave way to decadence and decay: the painters Walter Sickert and Egon Schiele may have explored murder, prostitution, and disease rather than war, but the apocalyptic undertow is still present. War became part of the vocabulary of fatalism.76 Oswald Spengler started writing his book Decline of the West in 1911; Andrei Belyi’s novel Petersburg, published in 1914, used the somewhat hackneyed metaphor of a time-bomb to illustrate the condition of Europe; Gustav Holst spent the summer of 1914 composing the Planets, beginning with Mars. Such prefigurings were not uncommon.

  The apocalyptic view of war was not primarily concerned with the causes of war in the same way as either Marxism or social Darwinism. Many artists, for all their anticipations of war, were still surprised by its outbreak. Much of the intellectual and artistic attention to war before 1914 was devoted to war as a phenomenon in itself, with battle not as a means but as an end. For a generation younger than that directly influenced by social Darwinism,77 war was a test of the individual rather than of the nation. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who appealed to the student, to the radical, and to the romantic. ‘You say it is the good cause that hallows war?’, he had written in Thus spake Zarathustra; ‘I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause.’ Nietzsche’s metaphors, the superman, the will to power, were replete with martial images. Marking what would have been the philosopher’s seventieth birthday on 15 October 1914 in the Strassburger Post, Theodor Kappstein celebrated his summons to ‘a life-endangering honesty, towards a contempt for death . .. to a sacrifice on the altar of the whole, towards heroism and quiet, joyful greatness’.78 For the Kaiserreich Nietzsche’s influence was subversive. Only after the war broke out was he appropriated as a patriotic icon, a process in which the radical right and enemy propaganda colluded. After all, Nietzsche himself was a self-confessed European, scathing about the nationalist preoccupations of Bismarckian Germany. Intellectuals influenced by him did not reflect the national limitations of politicians: in 1910 Rupert Brooke, to be seen in 1914 as representing something essentially English in British letters, found his inspiration abroad, writing: ‘Nietzsche is our Bible, Van Gogh our idol.’79 What Brooke and his contemporaries expected to find in war was, therefore, more immediate and more personal than the serving of patriotism. Indeed, if they had viewed the war primarily as one fought for national objectives they might have found it far harder to accept. Another British poet, Charles Sorley, recognized the irony in his fighting for England, which embodied ‘that deliberate hypocrisy, that terrible middle-class sloth of outlook’, agai
nst Germany, which was doing ‘what every brave man ought to do and making experiments in morality’.80

  Brooke has been castigated as the embodiment of British public-school idealism, gulled into enthusiasm for the war by false ideals and vain hopes. This misses the point. Brooke was scared. The war was therefore a test of his courage, a personal challenge to which he had to respond or think less of himself: ‘Now God be thanked,’ he wrote, ‘who has matched us with this hour.’ By embracing the war in spite of his fears the individual became a hero. He also gained the means to live life more intensely: soldiers, a Hungarian, Aladar Schöpflin, said in late August 1914, ‘are going into the totality of life,81 and Walter Bloem, a novelist and German reserve officer, felt that war service had made his novels ‘my own living present.82

  The notion that modern society was too safe, that boredom and enervation were the consequences, was propagated by popular British writers like John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard. In France Charles Péguy and Ernest Psichari, both killed in the opening weeks of the war, had written successful books venerating the glory of war and the asceticism of military service. In Germany A. W. Heymel penned a poem in 1911 that longed for war as an end to the ‘opulence of peace’, and in the winter of 1912–13 Johannes R. Becker portrayed his generation as rotting, seated at their desks, as they waited for the trumpet call to a ‘great world war.83