Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) Read online

  This book may not convince all my readers of the validity of my claims, but if it at least prompts them to ask for the evidence when confronted with yet another fulminatory condemnation of the British war effort of 1914–18, then I shall have achieved my aim.

  J. G. H. Corrigan

  EASTRY, KENT, 2002

  NOTES

  1 Bulletin of the Western Front Association, no. 56, February 2000.

  2 There were official censuses in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in 1911, and in England, Wales and Scotland in 1921. The Irish Free State and Northern Ireland held separate censuses in 1926. In all cases the census reports included the number of occupied dwellings, a dwelling being a self contained collection of rooms that were occupied by an individual or group, either a house or a flat. In arriving at the number of households in 1914, I have assumed that the rate of change was constant between 1911 and 1921 for Great Britain, and between 1911 and 1926 for Ireland. This cannot, of course, be entirely accurate, but is probably as near to the correct figure as it is possible to get. Statistics are contained in: Census of England and Wales 1911, General Report with Appendices, HMSO, London, 1917; Census of England and Wales 1921, General Tables, HMSO, London, 1925; Report of the Twelfth Decennial Census of Scotland, Vol. II, HMSO, London, 1913; Report of the Thirteenth Decennial Census of Scotland, HMSO, Edinburgh, 1923; Census of Ireland 1911, Preliminary Report with Abstract of the Enumerators’ Summaries, HMSO, Dublin, 1911; Preliminary Report on the Census of Northern Ireland 1926, HMSO, Belfast, 1926; Saorstát Éireann Census of Population 1926, Vol. IV, Housing, Dept of Industry and Commerce, Dublin, 1926.

  3 The question is examined in detail in Alex Danchev, Alchemist of War, The Life of Basil Liddell Hart, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1998.

  4 Professor Brian Bond in Look to your Front, Studies in the First World War, Spellmount Publishers, Staplehurst, 1999.

  5 For an assessment of British anti-war writing see Professor Brian Bond, ‘British Anti-War Writers and Their Critics’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter H. Liddle (eds.), Facing Armageddon, Leo Cooper, London, 1996.

  1

  AN UNNECESSARY WAR

  In deciding whether any war is necessary or not, one must first define one’s terms. In this context I take ‘necessary’ to mean ‘in the British interest’. For the war of 1914–18 we need not ask, ‘Was it in the British interest for there to be a war at all?’ for clearly it was not. Britain had no territorial ambitions in Europe, nor did she have designs on any of Germany’s colonies, albeit that some did become British mandates after the war. Germany was becoming a trading and economic rival to Britain, as was the United States, but at no time did any responsible person in Britain suggest that this rivalry should be settled by war. The question that must be asked and answered is: given that war happened, was it in the British interest to participate?

  Germany was a relatively recent arrival on the world stage. In 1864 Prussia, with Austria as a reluctant ally, had detached Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, and this in turn provided the excuse for war with Austria in 1866. In a seven-week campaign Prussia destroyed Austrian hegemony over the German states and annexed Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, Hesse-Nassau and Frankfurt-am-Main. In 1867 the North German Federation under Prussian leadership was formed, while the South German Federation, for the time being, went its own way. By luring the France of Napoleon III into war in 1870, Prussia annexed one-third of the French province of Lorraine and all of Alsace, and assumed leadership of the south German states as well. In 1871, while the siege of Paris was still going on, the King of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor1 in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

  While pre-war France and Britain were parliamentary democracies, with power resting with elected politicians returned on a narrower franchise than today but widely representative nonetheless, the new German Empire was not. It was a federal institution, consisting of four monarchies, six duchies, six principalities and three free cities. Of the monarchies, Prussia was the largest (the others were Bavaria, Württemberg and Saxony), with its capital Berlin also the capital of the empire. There was a relatively toothless federal council, the Bundesrat, including representatives of all the component states but with Prussia having the largest bloc. The imperial constitution had as its senior functionary the Imperial Chancellor, an unelected official who was usually also Prime Minister of Prussia and was appointed and dismissed by the Emperor. The Chancellor presided over the Reichstag, the imperial parliament, but he was not answerable to it nor could he be a member of it. The Chancellor did have to obtain the approval of the Reichstag for the imperial budget and for some imperial legislation, and if he could not do so then he had to dissolve parliament and seek support at the polls. As the most influential group in the Reichstag was that representing Prussia, which had a much narrower franchise than the other German states, the Chancellor could nearly always count on acquiescence from that body. This was changing: in the 1912 general election the Social Democrats gained almost one-third of the seats in the Reichstag, but even if parliament did rebel, which it very rarely did, certain powers were in any case the prerogative of the Crown. These included foreign policy, defence, the declaration of war2 and the making of peace; functions of state that the Emperor directed through the Chancellor. The heads of imperial ministries were not elected, but were officials appointed by the Emperor on the advice of the Chancellor. The Prussian army and the Imperial Navy (there were no German states’ navies) at all times, and the armies of the other German states in time of war, came directly under the Emperor. Imperial authority over the armed forces was exercised through the Military and Naval Cabinets for personnel matters, and through the General and Naval Staffs for operations. The Prussian Minister for War and the Secretary of State for the Imperial Navy (both appointed officials) represented all the armed forces in the Reichstag, but were responsible only for recruitment, equipment and the vote for the army and navy budgets. Lest budgetary control give the Reichstag a veto over military adventures, the military budget was passed for seven years at a time up to 1893, and for five years at a time thereafter. All this gave Prussia an overwhelming influence in the policies of the German Empire. Prussia’s ministers were appointed, rather than nominated by the Diet, and her restricted franchise ensured that that influence was conservative and often militaristic. The other German states were not undemocratic: some had a far-reaching franchise, ministers were appointed by elected parliaments, and many of their governments were what we would now describe as liberal. They accepted Prussian dominance, however, partly from fear of red revolution and partly owing to cultivation of the bourgeoisie by successive imperial chancellors.

  Germany, for so long a mosaic of statelets, was now an empire and her population became increasingly nationalistic. It has been suggested that had Otto von Bismarck, the ‘Iron Chancellor’ who had masterminded German unification, remained in power the First World War might never have happened. He would surely have ensured that Germany did not find herself in a position where she was isolated, surrounded by potential enemies and without allies of any consequence. As it was, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who succeeded his father in 1888 at the age of twenty-nine, dismissed Bismarck in 1890. Bismarck was born in the year of Waterloo, 1815, and so was seventy-five when dispensed with by the young Kaiser. Inevitably he was past his prime, and he died in 1898. His absence from the helm is therefore irrelevant, but does serve to reinforce the fact that the men who were chancellors in the pre-war period were either themselves in favour of an expansionist policy, or lacked the influence over Wilhelm II that Bismarck was able to exercise over his grandfather, the first Emperor.

  Since the French Revolution democracy had developed in Western Europe, but the German Empire had eschewed it. While there was a measure of democracy within the German states – a considerable measure in some – all major decisions pertaining to foreign policy and war were made by the Emperor and the armed forces, who were accountable to nobody. We do not have a psychological profile of Kaiser Wi
lhelm II, but we do know that he was born with a withered arm, had an uncomfortable relationship with his English mother, a daughter of Queen Victoria, and idolised his father despite having been bullied unmercifully by him.3 Wilhelm’s father, Frederick III, eighth King of Prussia and second Emperor of Germany, had a reign of only ninety days in 1888 before dying of cancer of the throat. He had been unsuccessfully treated by English doctors called in by Wilhelm’s mother, and Wilhelm seems to have blamed her, and by extension the British, for the death of his adored father. Perhaps if Frederick had lived (and he was only fifty-seven when he died) European history might have taken a different course. Unlike his son, Frederick abhorred war and disliked autocracy. He too would have dismissed Bismarck – as crown prince he had objected to the chancellor’s anti-constitutional policies – but thereafter he would have followed a programme of alliance rather than alienation.

  Despite being a newcomer to the European stage, the German Empire was economically a very powerful performer on it. The German states had never been interested in overseas possessions – they had enough worries at home – but Wilhelm, egged on by the military-industrial complex, wanted what he considered to be Germany’s rightful place in the sun. The Germans were not good colonisers. Their treatment of their African subjects was appalling, even by the standards of the time. The German states had never been naval powers – they had virtually no access to the world’s oceans and did not depend upon external trade – but Wilhelm wanted a blue-water navy, both as an antidote to the British Royal Navy and as an imperial symbol. The armies were the direct descendants of those of the old German states, whereas the navy owed its loyalty to the empire and the Kaiser alone. By the outbreak of war it was the second most powerful navy in the world.

  Germany’s wish to be, and to be recognised as, a great power successively alienated those nations that might otherwise have been expected to be well-disposed towards her. The alliance with Austria-Hungary from 1879, coupled with the abrogation of treaties with Russia, antagonised the Tsar and his government. As Germany’s economy grew she found it necessary to have a merchant marine, which provided another excuse for developing a navy to protect it. This, and the Kaiser’s bombastic statement in Damascus in 1898 that he saw himself as the protector of all Muslims, irritated both the British and the Russians, who ruled over large Muslim populations. The Kaiser’s support for the Boers in the South African War helped to shift British public opinion regarding German ambitions from tolerance to suspicion, if not downright hostility. It was hardly surprising that Germany and France saw each other as rivals, as since 1871 France had always hoped to regain the lost territories of Alsace and Lorraine. In December 1905 there was a workers’ revolt in Moscow, put down with considerable bloodshed by the tsarist government. Fearing similar unrest at home, the Kaiser wrote to the Imperial Chancellor, Bülow, telling him: ‘Shoot down, behead and eliminate the socialists first, if need be by a bloodbath, then war abroad. But not before, and not à tempo.’ Hardly the wise words of a peace-loving constitutionalist. In 1911, when British support for France during the Moroccan crisis resolved colonial rivalries in North Africa in favour of France, the German public, and the Kaiser, saw this as a humiliation of Germany; many Germans became increasingly convinced that in war lay the determination of Germany’s world position. In 1912, in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, the German ambassador in London, Lichnowsky, sent a written report to the Emperor warning that Britain ‘could under no circumstances tolerate France being crushed’. In a marginal note the Emperor scribbled, ‘She will have to.’

  All the evidence – and there is much – points to Imperial Germany preparing for a European war of aggression against France and Russia; and, while there were hopes that Britain might remain neutral, against her too if need be. The Kaiser held mixed views about the British. On the one hand he liked the country, enjoyed his visits there and had adored his grandmother, Queen Victoria. On the other hand he thought that the British were forever putting him down, and saw slights where none were intended. For all his bombast, and his revelling in the idea of war and military glory, when faced with the reality of war the Kaiser recoiled, lost his nerve and tried very hard and at the last moment to avoid it. It was far too late. The Kaiser himself may not have wanted a European war, but he surrounded himself with, or allowed himself to be surrounded by, people who did. He did nothing to discourage them until the moment for restraint had long passed.

  After the war the Versailles Treaty made very plain that Germany was entirely responsible for the war. Article 231 said:

  The Allied and Associated Governments affirm, and Germany accepts, the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.4

  But then the Versailles Treaty was written by the victors. It went further:

  The Allied and Associated5 Powers publicly arraign Wilhelm II of Hohenzollern, former German Emperor, for a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctities of treaties. A special tribunal will be constituted to try the accused … it will be composed of five judges, one appointed by each of the following Powers: namely, the United States of America, Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan.6

  ‘Hang the Kaiser’ was a popular slogan in the British general election of 1918, and both the British and French governments made strenuous but unsuccessful efforts to persuade the government of the Netherlands, where Wilhelm had sought refuge after abdicating in 1918, to hand him over for trial. It is difficult to see under what law he could have been tried. Even as late as 1999 it was being argued before the British House of Lords that a head of state could not be put on trial for actions carried out in that capacity – ‘acts of state’ were not subject to domestic law. Unlike the situation after the Second World War, there was no body of international law hastily cobbled together to allow the indictment of the political and military leaders of a defeated nation.

  It is not the purpose of this book to examine the causes of the war in detail, nor to apportion guilt for it. That task has been well undertaken by Fritz Fischer, A. J. P. Taylor and James Joll, amongst others. Fischer, the German, is adamant that Germany’s foreign policy aims were annexationist and that she went to war to achieve them.7 What is undeniable, however, is that Germany, by offering unconditional support to Austria-Hungary in her dispute with Serbia, precipitated the series of events that led to war. Long before that, at least as early as 1906, Germany had in place a plan for an aggressive war based on the premise that Germany would have to fight Russia and France simultaneously, with Britain as a possible ally of France. It need not have been so, but the young Kaiser had abandoned Bismarck’s policy of always having a treaty of non-intervention with Russia, and had alienated Britain and France. There was a view in Germany, held by many of the intelligentsia, that Britain was an ‘ageing state’ and that the future of the world lay with the younger, vigorous, emerging powers: Germany and the United States.

  Ever since unification Germany had plans for war on the continent of Europe. Every country has contingency plans and there is nothing wrong with that, indeed it would be surprising if they did not. The difference, perhaps, is that Germany, or at least many politicians and virtually all the military leaders, believed that a war was inevitable and necessary. The Emperor at the very least condoned those views. Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the German general staff for the victory of 1870–71 and designer of the modern staff system, thought that if war on two fronts came, the German army should first defend against France; then deal with Russia; then turn and counter-attack the French. Moltke’s ambitions were limited: he planned to cripple Russia and France, not destroy them by total victory. Moltke retired in 1888. His successor, Waldersee, was more aggressive. He wanted to launch a preventive war against Russia, until reined in by Bismarck, but he did not alter the basic war plan – to at
tack in the east first. The architect of the plan implemented by Germany in 1914 was Field Marshal Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, who had been Waldersee’s quartermaster general before succeeding him as chief. Von Schlieffen was the archetypal German staff officer. Born in 1833, he was commissioned into the Prussian Guard Cavalry. He attended the Prussian staff college and was a staff officer during the war against Austria in 1866 and against France in 1870–71. From 1876 to 1883 he commanded a regiment of uhlans, but for the rest of his service he was a staff officer pure and simple. He joined the Great General Staff in 1883, being successively head of various departments before becoming the Chief of the General Staff in 1891, a position he held until 1906. He was a brilliant if somewhat humourless man, and even today aspiring officers in western armies are reminded of his favourite aphorism: ‘No plan survives the first five minutes of encounter with the enemy.’ He devoted himself solely to his profession, and was known to give his subordinates theoretical tactical problems on Christmas Eve and require the solutions on his desk by Boxing Day. Were this to have happened in the British army, the officers would have concluded that the old boy was mad, thrown the papers in the bin and gone to the races.