Historical backgrounds of the great war; the war: its origins and warnings

Preface

This book originated in a series of lectures arranged for the Sheffield University War Lectures Committee, and for various Relief Committees, Adult Schools, Ethical Societies, and similar organizations in the Sheffield area. Since they were given, however, they have grown so considerably that I have thought it better to call them in their present form essays rather than lectures, for fear lest any reader should imagine that I actually administered such masses to my various audiences in lecture form. Nevertheless, an occasional colloquialism or repetition in the text which I may have not removed may serve to indicate the original form of the four essays which constitute the book.

In writing these pages I have aimed rather at provoking thought than at imparting exact information ; and if a critical reader undertakes to check my statements he will doubtless find the book afford him much valuable exercise. Nevertheless, I hope that my effort will have achieved its object, which is to rouse sufficient interest to make readers of it think, and inquire for themselves about the war and its effects. Thought based upon historical fact is the best cure for our national vice of muddling through.

The differences in point of view which exist among the combatants, though less tangible to deal with than the historic facts which have led to the war, are nevertheless too important to be ignored ; and in endeavouring to sketch them I have drawn as far as I have been able on my personal experiences in travel in the lands of all the combatants except the Balkan States and Japan.

Since these essays were written the Board of Education has issued its Circular 869 on the Teaching of Modern European History, and I was comforted, on reading it, to find that I had already anticipated in detail its suggestions in the historical framework of my book. I therefore venture to hope that the essays I have written will prove useful to such of my fellow-teachers of history as adopt the Board's suggestion " to arrange for special lectures or courses of reading suitable even for the younger pupils, dealing with the causes and progress of the present war." The Board itself admits that " there is not available so good a supply of suitable books — either books suitable as textbooks for pupils or books of reference for use of the masters and to be included in the school library — for the latter as there is for the earlier period," i.e. from 1871 onwards. I hope accordingly that my essays may help to fill the void. That they follow the lines of the Circular the following extract from the Circular will, I think, make clear

PREFACE 7

to those who read the various essays. " It will be possible to point out how the remote past still lives in the present : as, for instance, in the existence of a debatable territory between France and Germany which is ultimately due to the division of the Empire of Charles the Great ; the reasons why the Low Countries have so often been the seat of war between the greater Powers, and the continuity of English policy with regard to the independence of this district of Europe from the time of Edward I ; the reasons for the late organization of Italy and Germany as National States ; the fall of Poland ; the rise of Russia ; and the historical position of the Austrian Monarchy, especially in connection with the Mohammedan conquests and the gradual recovery of territory from the Turks." It may be too much to say, in the words of the Circular, " matters such as these naturally arise in the course of any well-directed study of English history," but I certainly claim that they form the backbone of my essays — and particularly of the first, on Germany, and the fourth, on England and Sea Power.

F. J. A.

Sheffield,

November 1914,

Contents

PAGE

FIRST ESSAY

Germany: Its Growth, Character, and Culture . 27

Introduction

Never has England experienced so sudden and so tremendous a change as that which came over her in the summer of 191 4. The schools broke up and families went off to the seaside in the fine weather at the end of July. By the August Bank Holiday the State had hold of the railways, all excursions were cancelled, a food panic and a money paniG with a Bank rate of 10 per cent, had swept over the land, flustering though not really shaking our nerves, and in short everybody was brought up suddenly by the fact that the State— the Government whom in happier days we had delighted to abuse— was possessed of powers over us and our belongings about which we had quite forgotten, if indeed we had ever known.

Our party politics vanished in a night ; the Opposition became His Majesty's Opposition indeed ; organizations both masculine and feminine which had adopted violence for the advancement of their respective causes found themselves suddenly changed, as if by some magic agency, into armed defenders of their common country and resourceful ministrants to those who were suffering or about to suffer ; ^ and soldiering leaped at once from being an amiable weakness of one's neighbour in the Territorials to becoming the supreme test of one's manhood.

Meanwhile a whole series of experiments which a month earlier would have caused interminable talk were established by the machinery which some people had already looked upon as no longer capable of effective action— namely Parliament— in a few minutes each. Not only did the State take over the railways— so that one could travel on the North Western with a Great Central ticket— but it started a scheme of Shipping Insurance ; it re-established a Press Censorship which had lapsed more than a couple of centuries before ; it told people that for the time being they need not pay their debts if they were of certain kinds ; it turned postal orders into currency ; it issued Treasury notes in shoals ; and —incredible though it may seem— it actually fixed the prices of foodstuffs : thus incidentally revealing the smart business man who waits for a rise in price as a public enemy and a pest, if not an actual traitor — even the Sheffield cutlers and gun -makers reflected for a moment on the real significance of their work and wondered as to its destination. And yet, in spite of the magnitude of these measures, in spite of their drastic and far-reaching effect, their enactment raised hardly a murmur and certainly no opposition. There were no cries that the State was going beyond its proper bounds ; there were no complaints of Socialism rearing its head in our midst (indeed, the President of the Anti-Socialist League was among the first, I believe, to urge the State to do more than it proposed to do for those who were dependent on our soldiers). No : we looked on Parliament less as the guardian of our liberties than as the rapid registrar of expert decrees ; we took these breathless revolutions in our accustomed experience as a matter of course ; and in so doing we realized, many of us for the first time, the true nature of the State's powers and therefore also of the liberty we had hitherto enjoyed— namely, that it was, as it were, merely what is left over : the residuum of independence which the State could afford with safety to leave with us under the existing circumstances. It was suddenly borne in upon us that the individual has no rights as against the State, since apart from the State's protection he would have nothing of his own — not even his liberty.

But we were all too excited or anxious to reflect and philosophize in this way. Only at a later date shall we have the leisure and inclination to return in memory to those close -packed days and try to extract from them the lessons they contain — unless we are too inflated with self -righteousness after the war to learn anything at all from it. Those days were indeed full of matter for thought — a veritable quarry for the student of social and political questions ; and I hope that ultimately we shall be able to make use of all the experience we have been gaining so rapidly since August 1914, before the memory of these critical weeks has slipped — like the golden sand with which our children were playing at the time — through our fingers.

Now what was it that had caused all this disturbance and spoilt our holidays? Of course, it was the war. The war had swept our interests rudely aside, it had pulled the whole of our public life into a fresh perspective ; it had made us hesitate about our favourite amusements — even football trembled just as it was about to re -ascend its throne — it had drawn our young men into the Army and threatened a dislocation in our industries which dwarfed the effect of the biggest strikes of recent years ; it had also —per contra — brought suddenly to an end all industrial disputes. And yet, although we accepted all this without a murmur, how many of us knew what it was all about?

We pride ourselves on being a self-governing people ; yet the whole course of our Government has been deflected, our most -discussed measures shelved, the whole of the machinery by which we imagine that we direct our own affairs arrested and turned to unaccustomed uses— simply because an Austrian archduke had been killed in a Balkan town. Now, troubles of one sort or another in the Balkans are by no means new. Indeed, we had grown quite accustomed to them— so accustomed, in fact, that many of us doubtless were in the habit of saying when we saw in our morning's paper that fighting was renewed in that unhappy peninsula : " They're at it again, I see," and then of turning to discover where our favourite football team was in the League or what was the price of our favourite investment.

_ On this last occasion, however, the matter seemed different : it seemed more obstinate, less inclined to resolve itself ; and then suddenly, gaining momentum with tremendous rapidity, it crashed upon us as the awful avalanche of a European war : the great war that had been hanging over us for decades, the war that some of us had almost ceased to believe in, since it had been so often threatened, yet so often averted, and above all since it was so terrible to think about.

Fortunately, thanks to the Boer War and its bitter lessons, our fighting forces, though small, were well prepared ; but if as regards military readiness we were not, within our limits, found wanting, nevertheless on the intellectual side our unpreparedness was appalling. As one talked to people about the war, or caught fragments of what they were saying to each other, one found that practically nobody had an adequate idea of what it was all about. After the first shock of astonishment had passed, the general feeling seemed to be one of resentment that so little a State as Servia could set all Europe by the ears. Later, it is true, the question of Belgian neutrality arose like a rock in the ocean to which we could cling ; but even with this basis of reason for the war— as far as we English were concerned— there still seemed to be a lurking idea in men's minds that there must be some larger explanation of the war as a whole than had hitherto become apparent to them. The rock of Belgian neutrality, upon which our peace had been shipwrecked was, in short, felt to be but the projecting summit of a vast mass, the sides of which sloped down to depths unknown to the man in the street. For the first time, perhaps, in his experience he realized that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in his philosophy and he was seized with a sudden desire to know. The domestic questions about which he had been so excited but a few short weeks before had suddenly been eclipsed by foreign questions about which he knew nothing and, as a rule, cared less ; and suddenly he realized that the relative importance of these two sets of questions had been reversed, that he was not master in his own house because he knew too little of the forces at work outside his house to gauge, still less to direct, them. As a self-governing Englishman, if not as 'a good European," it behoved him then to get to know as soon as might be what he could about this alien question which was so rudely upsetting his island menage. And so he began to demand enlightenment— and enlightenment at express speed and with a minimum of the thinking which hurts him so and which he regards, with Hamlet, as a malady. Unfortunately, however, the information he was seeking was not easily peptonized or eyen done up in pilulae, for it was nothing less than the history of Europe for several centuries past, and any attempt to bolt that dish is nearly certain to lead to a mental indigestion which will lower, not increase, his fighting strength.

His immediate needs can be supplied only in part ; but let us hope that now he has realized the necessity for an adequate teaching of history he will see to it that this most vital of all subjects is taught henceforth in such a way as to make it a real source of strength and guidance to the democracy in their task of ruling both themselves and the Empire. The " right little, tight little island/' Alfred -and-the -cakes conception of the subject, so favoured by the comfortably padded arm-chair historians who rule our University Local Examinations, will have to go and a more vital, more universal, treatment of the subject must take its place. In France, I believe, they begin with general history in simple sweeping outline and gradually focus on their own. In England we begin by isolating our own history so completely that it becomes almost meaningless, and then make matters worse by never going beyond the limits of our national history textbooks. The ratio as between home and foreign affairs must be redetermined. History per se and apart from our own island story must be taught in future, and the subject made dynamic by the acknowledgment of those great forces of race and economy and religion which mould the destinies of men just as rainfall and latitude determine the vegetation of any given area of the earth's surface. Like the Army, history is neglected and ignored in time of peace, and then suddenly rediscovered and abused for being inadequate in time of war. iWere it not for the experts in both fields, who work unrecognized for years, the nation would have to pay a heavy price indeed for its neglect of these connected factors in national life.

But teaching alone, however excellent, will never give the Englishman that sense of other presences which land frontiers and their corollary — conscription — gives to every foreigner. The silver streak to which we owe so much is accountable also, of course, for our insularity : not only is Great Britain an island, but every Briton who lives in it is an island as well— self-contained and difficult to approach ; and

INTRODUCTION I9

in this double insularity lurks the danger we are now facing— the danger of a faulty and imperfect realization of the temper and spirit of foreign peoples, of their ideals and aims, of a lack of interest in foreign affairs and foreign movements generally— the danger of the sea change, in short. And, to my mind, there is but one effective escape from that danger! and that is, foreign travel sensibly undertaken. A friend and I went from Sheffield through London and Dover to Belgium. We visited Ostend, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Liege, Dinant, and Namur ; we crossed the border and reached Aachen, or Aix-la- Chapelle— the run into Germany cost us sixpence each— and the whole tour of a week's duration cost us less than five pounds each, right back to Sheffield again. With this record before him and these figures —and we did it quite comfortably ; I understand that we spent more than ten shillings each in tipslet no comfortably placed clerk or artizan say that a foreign tour is beyond his reach ; while as to the language, an Englishman gets along somehow under all conditions ; and a traveller never can know the language of every land he happens to be in— sooner or later he is bound to be reduced toj speechlessness. We may, then, hope for great results from improved teaching and increased travel (every teacher should be made to travel as part of his training) j but for the moment our ignorance is a serious handicap, how serious appears with clearness only when we remember the effect of our hesitation after Germany had declared war on France and Russia.

For some days before that declaration there had been a strong movement all over England in favour of neutrality. That movement collapsed suddenly, it is true, as soon as the Germans crossed the Belgian frontier ; but the existence of the spirit which animated that movement was the chief factor in Germany's decision. Germany declared war because our neutrality was virtually assured — to German eyes. How great therefore was German surprise and anger at the sudden reversal of our national attitude I Can we wonder that the Germans thought it was deliberate on our part, that, like some of the German troops who throw up their hands and so lure our men to their death, we had feigned neutrality just to induce the Germans to declare war and then turned treacherously upon them and joined our Navy to the gigantic forces of France and Russia? We did nothing of the kind — our hesitation was genuine, not feigned, as the Germans, anxious to blame us for their misjudgment, believe ; it was the hesitation of ignorance, not of design. Yet its effects were the same ; and it is at least arguable that our national hesitation, born as it was of our national ignorance of the matters at issue and of our own past foreign policy, was the real cause of the war. If it be; suggested that, since the war was bound to come sooner or later, the sooner the better and the greater the forces opposed to Germany the greater the chance of ultimate peace, I am bound to say that such a line of argument is Machiavellian and of a sort we should expect from Germany rather than from ourselves. If good comes out of the evil results of our ignorance; we can claim no credit for it. Drift is always dangerous and undignified, and especially so when it is due to ignorance. Quite a modest amount of knowledge of German history and ideas would have: convinced Englishmen of all that lay behind the Kaiser's words and deeds. Nobody who knew anything of the Napoleonic struggle of the previous century could have doubted England's part in the war which burst so suddenly over Europe practically, on the centenary of Napoleon's defeat at the hands of Wellington — and Bliicher ; while the connection between England and Belgium is so ancient and of such a nature that our intervention can be described, as all students of history will acknowledge, only in the words of Mr. Bonar Law — words endorsed by, Mr. Balfour — at the great Guildhall meeting in August 1914, when he said that in the matter of Belgium England's honour and England's interest went together. These were the most honest words on the intervention of England in the land -fighting that I have yet heard from a public ma,n: ; they convey the teaching of history, and we need not be ashamed to confess that our interest as much (as our honour is involved in our action. As I heard Professor Vinogradoff say lately, " Infatuation and insincerity are bound to bring retribution."

My next reason for believing that an increase in our knowledge would be an element of strength in our great national effort is this : a short war may be fought and won in a burst of sheer enthusiasm ; but for a long war other qualities are required. The determination that will persevere to the end of a long and dragging war, with its. cruel and inevitable losses, is the determination which arises out of the conviction that nothing but stern necessity and the consequences of failure determine our action ; you beat your enemy by studying him and understanding him, as any boxer will tell you. " It's dogged that does it " in a long war ; and doggedness, if it is not founded on mere stupidity, must be founded on a clear vision of the end in view. There seems to me something prophetic in the popularity of " It's a long way to Tipperary " among our men ; and I imagine that the last marches are likely to be made in silence. Do we realize yet the significance of the single fact, for instance, that the women of South Germany have forced reluctant officials to accept their golden ornaments? " Gold is always wanted in war-time," they say ; and they would feel ashamed to flaunt it in time of national extremity for mere ostentation.

Of all the lines in our patriotic minstrelsy the one we shall need most in the long run will not be " Britons never shall be slaves," but a line from another nautical song, " Hearts of Oak," and that line is, " Steady, boys, steady ! " and, to me at any, rate, the steadiness, the ballast we need to keep us on an even keel amidst the gales and billows of this tempest of war, is as much history as we can intelligently take on board. Hence my reasons for the mainly historical line I shall take in this series of essays. The thrills we get from the detailed fighting, the heroism of our soldiers and sailors, are, after all, only the last moves in the long game of chess that has been played for years previous between the various Chancelleries of Europe. Just as artillery and rifle fire itself only prepares the way for the bayonet charge, so do diplomatic notes and telegrams in their turn prepare the way for the artillery. All focuses on the bayonet ; but behind the soldier is the diplomatist.

Another reason for spreading knowledge in time of war — especially historical knowledge — is its hardening effect, its killing out of the sentimentality in which we usually soak ourselves. We are so unused to the horrors of war that they make us sick ; we try to escape the very thought of them. But nausea has to be overcome, for it is akin to panic. The young surgeon cannot afford to have his nerve shaken by the blood and the reek when he is in the middle of his first operation ; and so must it be with us who are an unblooded generation. The English foxhunter wipes the bleeding stump of the fox's tail across the face of the boy or girl he has taken to hounds for the first time ; and thus they are "blooded." Now some such blooding seems to be a national necessity for us, and history provides it, as, for instance, in the details of Agincourt. Nelson was always seasick for the first few days of a voyage ;

but he had overcome his weakness by the day of battle. As with Nelson, so with his fellow-countrymen. Given time, they recover ; but there is always an anxious period of readjustment which a people with a better mental preparation for war escapes. We find it harder than they to face the harsh necessities for war : to think, for instance, of a bayonet being used for killing men during the daytime and for toasting a steak cut from a horse killed in action after the fight is over ! We shrink from the dilemma produced by the use of non-combatants as a shield for the enemy's advance, even though the women so used call on the Allied troops to shoot ; we do not rise at once to the height of the old Scotch couplet : —

He who fights and runs away Lives to fight another day,

when the fate of cruisers is in the balance ; and the Admiralty has had to remind its captains of the principle contained in Stevenson's pirate song, '* Time for us to go," even when a consort is sinking. We are apt to think seriousness and a sense of responsibility, especially in the young, a sign of priggishness, and are unable to realize that Nelson's midshipmen at the age of thirteen or so could not only bring a prize across the Atlantic and beat off Spanish attacks on her, but could also write home in this strain on the death of Nelson : " But, Britons, still be joyful. Cease to weep. Do not give way to unmanly pleasures. I do not mean to say, Care not for his death, but regret it in a manly manner."' We like our boys to be boyish and believe — quite rightly — in slow development ; but we are also apt to forget that development may be so slow as to be inappreciable ; and we have too many adults among us who are merely old boys and not men at all in any real sense — people who make the mockvirtue of mock-modesty an excuse for shirking responsibility ; people whose chief aim is to be lost in the crowd and exactly like everybody else ; people who solace themselves with the dangerous half-truth that they will learn to command merely by learning to obey. We are, in short, apt to be soft in the first stages of war, and it is largely by envisaging the facts which history reveals that we grow hardened to its horrors ; and can at last accept the great words of Cromwell when he said : " Being denied just things, we thought it our duty to get that by the sword which was not to be got otherwise — and this hath ever been the spirit of Englishmen."

Let us now try to imagine ourselves at the point when victory has been achieved, peace signed, and normal life resumed. With a sigh of relief the Englishman will relapse into his earlier rut ; he will forget all about the war as speedily as ever, he can ; he will shut out from his mind and memory the picture of a ravaged continent ; the details and actualities he was forced to face during the war will soon become faint and blurred ; he will forget the geography the war has taught him ; he will gratefully look on life once more from his cosy little island standpoint, and thank Heaven it is no longer necessary to pretend to understand the French or the Russians, Bernhardi, Nietzsche, or Treitschke. He can sweep all such harsh names, all such nebulous ideas from his mind at the same time that he finally abandons the attempt to pronounce the names of Polish fortresses ; and he can once more revel with a good conscience in the blessings of peace, which mean to him a resumption of the daily service along the well-worn tram-lines of his accustomed life with nothing in particular to think about. Happy in his escape from the unaccustomed regions into which the war has led him, he soon sinks — if he is true to his own past — into the dangerous state in which earlier realities have ceased to be real, earlier dangers have become merely the bogies of the alarmist or else of the professional man with an axe to grind, earlier precautions simply the wasteful extravagance of a more barbarous and brutal age.

Intent once more on his business — the true end of man — he will tend only too quickly to forget all that the war has taught him ; and if such be the case even with the generation which lived through the actual period of the fighting,, how much more will it be true of the next and succeeding generations ! How, then, are we to protect posterity, from this gradual descent into unreality, which is the greatest peril of our insular position — a peril from which continental peoples are preserved by the continual presence of armed forces across their frontiers? Surely, by a real study of our past wars and the effects of them. Even the far-distant story of Ethelred the Unready, of the decay of the Navy, of the massacre of the Danes in 1002 — an Anglo-Saxon alternative to our present-day spy-removing— the subsequent conquest of England by the Danes, have a direct message to us to-day. Ignorant contempt, again, for the Normans was largely responsible for the Conquest of 1066 ; and so we could go on. Each conquest, each shock, produces a more or less transitory change in England, by breaking into the charmed circle in which she lives and reminding her of the existence of the foreigner. We remember for a moment that national existence may be a struggle even for us ; and then we forget. But unless we learn to remember, unless we open our minds to the invasion of facts and ideas from our own past and from abroad, we may even yet have, once again, some day, unwillingly to open our land to the invader in arms.