The possibilities for peace in 1914

I saw that the BBC website has an interesting piece of informed speculation on what might have happened in the summer of 1914 had events turned out differently. It can be seen at How close did the world come to peace in 1914?

This is not a full blown exercise in "Counter-factualism", but rather something which does show how disaster came about through chance - or mischance - and accident - or misadventure. I was struck by the point about the men of the Austro-Hungarian army going off that summer on home leave to help get in the harvest. It  is a reminder of how armies and societies conducted themselves in such practical matters until very recently indeed.

Buying books for the Oxford Union

I am a long standing member of the Library committee at the Oxford Union - almost fifteen years in two sessions - and I was asked recently to prepare a list of suggested books for the History list which we were to recommend for purchase to the membership this week.

My aim was to fill gaps in the collection. This was partly based on my recent teaching work this term, on what I felt would complete or continue series we already have and with the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War some relevant books about that. I also aimed for what would appeal to both students and to the the more general readers among the membership.  For these latter reasons I thought I would share it  with readers and recommend the books to them in case they are interestedin the topics covered. Apart from replacement copy of the text of a medieval chronicle the books I suggested - and which were accepted - are:   

J.F. Webb and D.H.Farmer (eds) The Age of Bede  Penguin Classics  
A valuable set of saints' lives in translation - including those of St Cuthbert and St Wilfrid
 

Michelle P. Brown  The Lindisfarne Gospels and the Early Medieval World  British Museum Publications   
This places the Gospels in their historic context of seventh and eighth century Britain.

Sarah Foot  Athelstan: The First King of England  Yale UP 
We collect the biographies in this established series, and this is an important book for historians working on the period; the other year I heard a wonderful lecture from the author, who is Regius Professor at of Ecclesiastical History at Christ Church, on the life of the King.

Edmund King King Stephen  Yale UP  
In the same series , and again an important work for understanding the Anarchy and twelfth century England.

David Abulafia The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms: The struggle for dominion 1200-1500 Routledge  
A useful text book by a leading historian of the region and the period

Malcolm Vale The Origins of the Hundred Years War: The Angevin Legacy 1250-1340  OUP
It turned out I had missed this book which was already on the Union catalogue - I think I probably recommended it years ago. An excellent interpretive account . 

Christopher Fletcher Richard II: manhood, youth and politics 1377-1399  OUP

A potentially interesting reinterpretation of the reign in the light of the clash between the King and an older political elite, and questioning the depiction of him as effeminate.

Giles Tremlett Catherine of Aragon: Henry's Spanish Queen  Faber and Faber
The most recent biography of the Queen, by a British journalist based in Madrid.

Derek Beales  Joseph II:  Against the World 1780-1790  CUP  

We already have volume I of this major biography covering his life up to the death of his mother the Empress Maria Theresa in 1780.

Piers Paul Read The Dreyfus Affair   Bloomsbury 
I was given this as a birthday present the other year - a comprehensive account of one of the most divisive and significant events if the history of France since 1870.

          
Muriel E Chamberlain Pax Britannica? Britain's Foreign Policy 1789-1914  Pearson reprint
This ties in with some of the teaching I have been doing this term, and links foreign policy to domestic political and social dvelopments. 

R.J.W.Evans and H. Pogge van Strandmann (eds) The Coming of the First World War   OUP

A well established classic account by distingushed experts of the events leading up to 1914 

H. Afflerbach and D. Stevenson (eds) An Improbable War?: The Outbreak of World War I and European Political culture before 1914  Berghalen NY
Highly recommended by a student the book questions many received ideas about the war's causes, especially the notion of "inevitability."      

Greg King and Sue Woolmans The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the murder that changed the World  Macmillan  

A new biography of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, and of the fate of their family after the murders in 1914.Well illustrated and with new material from the Hohenburg family

I had hoped to include a secondhand copy of J.R.Strayer's The Reign of Philip the Fair, published by Princeton UP in 1980, but the affordable copy I found online had disappeared before I could submit the list to the Libraraian-in- charge. I shall have to keep looking out for this as it is the standard work in English on this very important figure and reign.

In addition I had been asked last week to look at Alec Ryrie Being Protestant in Reformation Britain  OUP and to advise on its possible purchase, it having been recommended by a member. This looks a very valuable contribution to our understanding of the mindset of the era. Prof Ryrie draws on English and Scottish sources for the period 1540-1640, and I can see this becoming a counterpart to Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars. We agreed to buy this as well, so all in all a good number of additions to the Library were proposed by the Committee.



 

Who was responsible for the Great War?

A friend sent me the link to a piece on the BBC website where they had asked the opinions of ten historians as to whom they thought responsible for the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. Their answers can be read here.

It is perhaps easier to say who I do not agree with than those I do. Much as I respect his achievement in his massive three part biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II - I hope to post about the first volume covering in vast detail the period 1859 to 1888 in the near future - I do not agree with Professor Rohl's interpretation of the Kaiser. I find Christopher Clark's interpretation much more credible and convincing. Nor do I incline to others in the same vein, or to Sir Max Hastings' confident anti-Germanism.

I am much more inclined to the views of Professors Evans, Hirschfeld and McMeekin, though I would perhaps not agree wholeheartedly with them.

I would certainly want to avoid too much of the "We are all guilty"attitude exemplified by the late, great, Peter Simple's Professor Heinz Kiosk in this matter, but a collective failure by political leaders and, in their own way, the military, to understand what was at risk, or how the world had changed in the preceding decades seems to me a central point. Governmental machines had taken on a life of their own which made the slide to war, once it began, almost unstoppable.

The debate should not be so much "Who caused the War " - that has been argued with little positive result but much harm since July 1914, but more who caused what to happen as and when it did during the crisis. On that approach responsibility for specific acts  becomes more certain and more precise in its attribution, but the end result depends on the next reaction and  move in the diplomatic game.

Was the Great War an accident, or was it an accident waiting to happen, or was it some sort of conspiracy? I doubt the last explanation, as may already be clear. If it was a chance accident or an ever more likely one to happen it is a terrible warning. It may also be somewhat futile to be still trying to pin the blame on one or another country. Governments reacted as they might have been expected to do - perhaps as, by the light of the times, they should have, but perhaps also not - and the tragedy may be that no-one in the right position had the ability to see the way things were heading. In that situation that failure to restrain policy or offer mediation led to terrifying disaster.

However if it comes to responsibility we should not look to the Foreign Offices and General Staffs of Europe. Given the delicate balance of advantages and alliances maybe, just maybe we need to recall what set the engine of destruction in motion. Not a grand conspiracy, not a failure of diplomacy, nor a failure of a civilisation. No, we come back to a vile little oik engaging in gesture politics with a loaded gun when a freak of chance gave him the opportunity. Never mind the captains and the kings - locked within a complex system and unable to break out of it - put the blame on Gavrilo Princip.

Gavrilo Princip

Image:BBC

The word of an Officer and Gentleman

In several of the newspapers yesterday and today there are articles derived from Richard van Emden's new book Meeting the Enemy about Anglo-German military contact during the Great War about one of the most remarkable stories Emden uncovered in his research, that of Capt Robert Campbell, and how, on the basis of him giving his word, he was allowed compassionate leave to visit his mother. The story can be read in Revealed: Extraordinary story of British WWI captain released by Kaiser from German prison camp so he could see his dying mother in Kent - on condition that he returned to his cell... and he DID

That chivalric tradition was certainly still strong during the terrioble events of the First World War, and one that has, I think, survived at least in the British Army, though I fear the world is less chivalrous today. It is also an interesting story in itself, with its 'human interest' and a vignette of life at the time. 

The Great European Civil War

Perusing the newspapers earlier I saw that the Daily Mail was not only critical of the Bishop of London for his comments about the "baby-boomer" generation - he being a member should not criticise it etc being the argument - but also for saying that the Great War was a European civil war and that church leaders should reflect seriously on how their predecessors on all sides had endorsed men going off to fight. The Bishop's comments were apparently all the worse for being in line with an EU approach that the war had been such a civil conflict and in line with the Government apparently wanting not to blame the Germans when it came to commemorating the outbreak of hostilities next year.

Well now, the European civil war argument is not new - it was certainly used by F. Scott Fitzgerald in writing about the '20s, and strikes me as an excellent way to understand the dreadful disaster that was the 1914-18 war. You do not have to be an obsessive devotee of the modern EU to think that. One can be very Eurosceptic indeed about the structures of the Union without wanting to ignore the fact that the UK is inextricably bound up with what happens on the continental mainland of Europe - that is, after all, why we were drawn in in 1914.

As to blaming the Germans - well what actually started the war was not the Deutches Reich, but an act of terrorism against the established order in Sarajevo. That set off a tragic and disastrous series of political chain reactions that drew in most of Europe, due to mutual suspicion and the failure on all sides to look at the wider scene. It would be less than historically accurate to think that the war started when Germany invaded Belgium - that is of the "Fog in Channel, Continent cut off" school of thought.

 

 

 

 

Commemorating the Great War

I saw in yesterday's Sunday Times a report about discussions in Whitehall about events overthe coming years to commemorate the Great War. The planning committee were reported as anxious to avoid opening old wounds and to play down any note of triumphalism. That seems right to me. Given that the centenary is approaching and given the number of lives lost and blighted by the War it is, of course, appropriate to recall those terrible losses. I do rather worry that some may try to appropriate such solemn anniversaries to a modern agenda regarding Europe.

What worries me more is that commemoration here will begin with the British entry into the War on August 4th. That was not the beginningof the conflict, nor even the Austrian shelling of Belgrade on July 28th. The crisis began with the Sarajevo assassinations on June 28th. Now whatever the blindness of politicians, the influence and impact of the military industrial complex, and the draft plans of military men it should be remembered that the whole crisis was triggered off by an attack on the traditional order by the forces of violence and revolution in the person of Princip. War may well have been a real danger in 1914, but it was not inevitable. Even after the deaths of the Archduke and his wife it might have been possible to prevent or contain the conflict. The tragedy of 1914 is that it was not - and that fact is what really needs commemorating next year.

 

Remembrance

Here are a few thoughts, not necessarily all connected, about Remembrance and reflections on war in the last century.

I am not a pacifist, not by nature, not by conviction, not as a historian, not as someone who knows something of human nature - but I increasingly find it difficult to see the case for war and destruction, and certainly not the waste of human life, usually at its most hopeful stage in early adulthood, for causes that are politically and morally wrong or stupid. I had, and have, no doubts about the appropriateness of the Falklands campaign, or the First Iraq war, but subsequent campaigns have, I am inclined to think, been unwise, fooling or plain wrong.

When it comes to the Great War I think I agree with this post from the American Mad Monarchist , though I might be more optimistic than he is that some of the tensions of 1914 would have been resolved bilaterally and peacefully. Basically he says what I have thought for years. The events of the summer of 1914 were a disaster with few parallels in history, and not, by any means, inevitable.

In the wake of the war many sought, and continue to seek, to blame the pre-war establishments, the monarchies and social hierarchies for what happened. My own feeling is that the old order appeared to be in control, but were the facade behind which other forces manipulated events. When defeat came the old symbolic institutions could be jettisoned, but the modern state ploughed on regardless. The two generation s before 1914 had seen a transformation of state institutions that was concealed from both the monarchs and their subjects. In their different ways they paid the price, but the forces that shaped events usually emerged unscathed. Thus monarchs on both sides could lament that Queen Victoria was not around to solve the quarrels of her grandchildren, not realising that they were themselves prisoners of a system that reduced them to cyphers much of the time. So the problem was not and is not the old order, but its initial subversion from within by popular and institutional forces, forces which have in a huge variety of forms been strengthened by the century of total war. Restoring government to its proper place in the human scale, but also the Divine scale, of things is part of the way of correcting that development.

Fr Jerome Bertam in his sermon yesterday morning at the Oxford Oratory spoke of the 1914-19 war medal that described it as the "Great War for Civilisation", and said that rather we should see the end of European civilisation in 1914, and that it was followed by the Peace to End Peace. All this he ascribed to the sin of Pride, pointing out that it affects all systems of government, monarchies and republics alike, display this, the sin of Satan.

This is true. The post-1918 experience makes it very clear that the liberal vision that without monarchs there would be less conflict was fatally flawed, and indeed a very dangerous delusion indeed. Nor is post-1945 liberal democracy, let alone popularist, collectivist, radical or revolutionary democracies more peaceable and less bellicose - but being the voice of the people, or rather the Voice of The People - i.e.what they can be conned into believing - are less constrained by human reason and piety.

The Mad Monarchist follows his post with one about the one temporal ruler amongst the combatants of 1914-18 who tried to stop the war - the Emperor Charles I of Austria, to whom I have, as regular readers will be aware, a devotion.

This was already the month of prayer for the dead before it became the season of Remembrance. I prayed for two, not especially close relatives who died in the Second World War, for friends of my parents and for all the war dead. That is something we can do for them. For ourselves and our contemporaries, and for our successors we should take care not to waste human lives as carelessly as the twentieth century became so used to doing - and that requires thought for the individual, thought for the nation, and thought about ourselves and our fallen nature.

Fr Blake from Brighton has some not dissimilar reflections here, which I would also commend to your thoughts.