Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (34 page)

Home Rule, then, might have been enacted, but the political risks involved were great, and might well have been realised. The only terms upon which the measure might have been passed involved temporary, and possibly permanent, partition - with constitutional results broadly similar to those which exist today. Had Ulster Unionists been eased into a Home Rule Ireland, then it is just conceivable that a stable, pluralist democracy might have swiftly emerged. But it would have been a high-risk strategy, with every possibility that a short-term political triumph for Liberal statesmanship might have been bought at the price of a delayed apocalypse. Northern Ireland under the Union has been likened to Bosnia; but Ireland under Home Rule might well have proved to be not so much Britain’s settled, democratic partner as her Yugoslavia.
¹²⁰

Niall Ferguson

There was no immediate cause for dreading catastrophe.

SIR EDWARD GREY,
Fly Fishing
¹

 

 

 

In Erskine Childers’s highly successful novel
The Riddle of the Sands
(1903), Carruthers and Davies stumble across evidence of a German plan whereby ‘multitudes of sea-going lighters, carrying full loads of soldiers ... should issue simultaneously in seven ordered fleets from seven shallow outlets and, under the escort of the Imperial navy, traverse the North Sea and throw themselves bodily upon English shores’.
²
This nightmare vision was far from unique in the years before 1914. Just such a German invasion was luridly portrayed three years later by the author William Le Queux in his best-selling
Invasion of 1910
, first serialised in Lord Northcliffe’s Germanophobic
Daily Mail
. Earlier in his career as a ‘scaremonger’, Le Queux had been more preoccupied with the danger of Russian and French invasions. But (like Baden-Powell, the hero of Mafeking and founder of the Boy Scouts) he had acquired bogus ‘plans’ for a German invasion from a gang of forgers based in Belgium, and it was these which provided the inspiration for such titillating flights of fancy as ‘The Battle of Royston’ and ‘The Siege of London’.
³
The final imaginative leap was taken by Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) in
When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns
(1913), which depicts the aftermath of a lightning German victory.
⁴
Saki’s hero, Murrey Yeovil - ‘bred and reared as a unit of a ruling race’ - returns from darkest Asia to find a vanquished Britain ’incorporated within the Hohenzollern Empire ... as a Reichsland, a sort of Alsace Lorraine washed by the North Sea instead of the Rhine‘, with Berlin-style cafés in the ’Regentstrasse’ and on-the-spot fines for walking on the grass in Hyde Park. Though Yeovil yearns to resist the Teutonic occupation, he finds himself deserted by his Tory contemporaries, who have fled (along with George V) to Delhi, leaving behind a despicable crew of collaborators, including Yeovil’s own amoral wife Cecily, her bohemian friends, various petty bureaucrats and the ‘ubiquitous’ Jews.
⁵

Was war between Britain and Germany inevitable in 1914? Certainly, few events in modern history have been subjected to more deterministic interpretations than the outbreak of the First World War. It was not only British popular novelists who saw it coming. In Germany too, there was a widespread assumption that war was unavoidable. The Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg told his secretary at a critical moment in the July Crisis that he felt ‘a force of fate stronger than the power of humans, hanging over Europe and our people’.
⁶
A few days later, once the war had actually begun, Bethmann Hollweg sketched what has since become one of the classic determinist explanations of the war: ‘The imperialism, nationalism and economic materialism, which during the last generation determined the outlines of every nation’s policy, set goals which could only be pursued at the cost of a general conflagration.’
⁷
A still greater fatalist was the Chief of the German General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, who had been conscious of ‘the Gorgon head of war grinning’ at him as early as 1905.
⁸
‘War’, he declared shortly after his resignation in September 1914, ‘demonstrates how the epochs of civilisation follow one another in a progressive manner, how each nation has to fulfil its preordained role in the development of the world.‘
⁹
Moltke’s determinism was a mixture of fin-de-siècle mysticism and the ‘Social Darwinism’ popularised by writers like his former colleague Bernhardi
¹⁰
and also detectable in the later remarks of his Austrian opposite number Conrad.
¹¹
But a similar conclusion could be based on very different ideological premises. As Wolfgang Mommsen has shown, ‘the topos of inevitable war’ was as much a feature of the pre-war Left as the Right in Germany. Even if Marxist intellectuals like Hilferding and Kautsky - to say nothing of Lenin and Bukharin - failed to predict the war (until, of course, it had broken out), the Social Democrat leader August Bebel was by no means alone in anticipating, in December 1905, ‘the twilight of the gods of the bourgeois world’.
¹²

British politicians also sometimes used such apocalyptic language to explain the war - though it is not without significance that they tended to do so more in their memoirs than in their pre-war utterances. ‘The nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war,’ wrote Lloyd George in a famous passage in his
War Memoirs
. Nor was this the only metaphor he employed to convey the vast, impersonal forces at work. The war was a ‘cataclysm’, a ‘typhoon’ beyond the control of the statesmen. As Big Ben struck ‘the most fateful hour’ on 4 August, it ‘echoed in our ears like the hammer of destiny.... I felt like a man standing on a planet that had been suddenly wrenched from its orbit ... and was spinning wildly into the unknown.’
¹³
Winston Churchill used the same astronomical image in his
World Crisis
:

A ‘dangerous disease’ was at work, ’the destiny of mighty races of men’ at stake. ‘There was a strange temper in the air.... National passions ... burned beneath the surface of every land.’
¹⁴
Like Churchill, the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey recalled the same ‘miserable and unwholesome atmosphere’. Like Lloyd George, he too had the sensation of being ‘swept into the cataract of war’.

The function of all these images of natural catastrophe is obvious enough. At a time when the Great War had come to be seen as the greatest calamity of modern times, they served to illustrate vividly the politicians’ claim that it had been beyond their power to prevent it. Grey stated quite explicitly in his memoirs that the war had been ‘inevitable’.
¹⁵
In fact, he had expressed this view as early as May 1915, when he admitted that ‘one of his strongest feelings’ during the July Crisis had been ‘that he himself had no power to decide policy’.
¹⁶
‘I used to torture myself,’ he admitted in April 1918, ‘by questioning whether by foresight or wisdom I could have prevented the war, but I have come to think no human individual could have prevented it.’
¹⁷

A few historians continue to favour the imagery of profound natural forces, propelling the great powers into the abyss.
¹⁸
Hobsbawm has likened the July Crisis to a ‘thunderstorm’; Barnett has compared the British government to ‘a man in a barrel going over Niagara Falls’.
¹⁹
Yet elsewhere - even in their memoirs - most of those concerned admitted that there had been at least some room for calculation, debate and decision before the British decision to go to war in August 1914. Two more precise reasons tended to be cited for British intervention: firstly, the belief that Britain had a moral and contractual obligation to defend the neutrality of Belgium. As Asquith put it, in the familiar language of the public school: ‘It is impossible for people of our blood and history to stand by ... while a big bully sets to work to thrash and trample to the ground a victim who has given him no provocation.’
²⁰
Lloyd George agreed: ‘Had Germany respected the integrity of Belgium ... there would have been plenty of time for passions to exhaust their force.’
²¹
The argument that British intervention in the war was made inevitable by the violation of Belgian neutrality has been repeated by historians ever since. Forty years ago, A. J. P. Taylor wrote that ‘the British fought for the independence of sovereign states’.
²²
Most recently, Michael Brock has argued that this was the crucial factor which persuaded a majority of the Asquith Cabinet to back intervention.
²³

However, of more importance - certainly to Grey and to Churchill - was a second argument that Britain ‘could not, for our own safety and independence, allow France to be crushed as the result of aggressive action by Germany’.
²⁴
According to Churchill, a ‘continental tyrant’ was aiming at ‘the dominion of the world’.
²⁵
In his memoirs, Grey made both points.‘ Our coming into the war at once and united’, he recalled, ‘was due to the invasion of Belgium.’
²⁶
‘ My own instinctive feeling [however] was that ... we ought to go to the help of France.‘
²⁷
If Britain had stood aside, ‘Germany ... would then [have been] supreme over all the Continent of Europe and Asia Minor, for the Turk would be with a victorious Germany’
²⁸
‘To stand aside would mean the domination of Germany; the subordination of France and Russia; the isolation of Britain; the hatred of her by both those who had feared and those who had wished for her intervention; and ultimately that Germany would wield the whole power of the Continent.’
²⁹
According to K. M. Wilson, this self-interested argument was in fact more important than the fate of Belgium, emphasised by the government mainly to salve the consciences of wavering Cabinet ministers and to keep the Opposition out of office. More than anything else, the war was fought because it was in Britain’s interests to defend France and Russia and prevent ‘the consolidation of Europe under one potentially hostile regime’.
³⁰
David French takes a similar view;
³¹
as do most recent syntheses,
³²
as well as Paul Kennedy’s suggestively titled
Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism
.
³³

The idea that Germany posed a threat to Britain itself can hardly be dismissed as an
ex post facto
rationalisation. Between around 1900 and 1914, as the examples cited above show, the view was widely held that the German Reich intended to make some kind of military challenge to British power. Of course, books like Saki’s are usually ridiculed by British historians as xenophobic ‘scaremongering’, mere propaganda in the radical right’s campaign for conscription. (Indeed, they were ridiculed at the time by, among others, P. G. Wodehouse, who wrote a wonderful pastiche entitled
The Swoop
, or
How Clarence Saved England
, in which the country is simultaneously overrun not only by the Germans but by the Russians, the Swiss, the Chinese, Monaco, Morocco and ‘the Mad Mullah’.) Yet it should not be forgotten that the idea of a German threat to Britain was taken quite seriously - even if depicted in less colourful forms - by senior officials at the British Foreign Office, including the Foreign Secretary himself.
³⁴
Of the FO’s contributions to the Germanophobe genre, perhaps the best known is the Senior Clerk Sir Eyre Crowe’s memorandum of November 1907, which warned that Germany’s desire to play ‘on the world’s stage a much larger and more dominant part than she finds allotted to herself under the present distribution of material power’ might lead her to diminish the power of any rivals, to enhance her ‘own [power] by extending her dominion, to hinder the cooperation of other states, and ultimately to break up and supplant the British Empire’.
³⁵
Fundamental to Crowe’s analysis was a historical parallel with the challenge which post-Revolutionary France had posed to Britain. As another FO Germanophobe, Sir Arthur Nicolson, put it in a letter to Grey in early 1909: ‘The ultimate aims of Germany surely are, without doubt, to obtain the preponderance on the continent of Europe, and when she is strong enough, [to] enter on a contest with us for maritime supremacy.’ The Foreign Office view was clear: Germany had a two-stage plan for world power: first, ‘the hegemony of Europe’; then there would simply be ‘no limits to the ambitions which might be indulged by Germany’.
³⁶
Nor was this line of argument peculiar to the diplomats. When making the case for a continental expeditionary force, the General Staff employed the same analogy: ‘It is a mistake’, ran its 1909 memorandum to the Committee of Imperial Defence, ‘to suppose that command of the sea must necessarily influence the immediate issue of a great land struggle. The battle of Trafalgar did not prevent Napoleon from winning the battles of Austerlitz and Jena and crushing Prussia and Austria.’
³⁷
The argument was repeated two years later: domination of the continent ‘would place at the disposal of the Power or Powers concerned a preponderance of naval and military force which would menace the importance of the United Kingdom and the integrity of the British Empire’. Even navalists like Viscount Esher sometimes took the same line. ‘German prestige’, Esher wrote in 1907, ’is more formidable to us than Napoleon at his
apogée.
Germany is going to contest with us the hegemony of the sea.... Therefore “L‘Ennemi, c’est l‘Allemagne”.’
³⁸
Without the navy, said Churchill, Europe would pass ‘after one sudden convulsion ... into the iron grip of the Teuton and of all that the Teutonic system meant’. Lloyd George remembered the same argument: ‘Our fleet was as much the sole guarantor of our independence ... as in the days of Napoleon.’
³⁹
The Chief of the General Staff, Robertson, was thus only guilty of slight exaggeration when he wrote in December 1916 that ‘Germany’s ambition to establish an empire stretching across Europe and the North Sea and Baltic to the Black Sea and the Aegean and perhaps even to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean [had] been known for the last twenty years or more.’
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