A new series: History as we were taught it, and history as it was
History as we were taught it… and history as it was. (First article.)
I decided to start this series because the kind of “history” they teach in schools - and, alas, increasingly, in universities - is to a very large extent not even the fragile interpretation of scholars, but the detritus of ancient propaganda, kept alive by intellectual laziness, sentimentality and political self-interest. I am sick and tired of the trash I hear passing for history in common debate, of the unchallenged assumptions that are as false as a three-pound banknote, and most especially of the blackmailing sentimentality that often lies at their back. In my own space, at least - which is what this blog is - I would like to set up an alternative perspective. Here, for a start, let me deal with the mountain of misconceptions, learned at school and kept alive by all sorts of popular culture - including even genuine masterpieces such as David Olney’s song 1917 - about the First World War; for, in a sense - especially because the War led to a more central event for the evolution of our culture, the Russian Civil War - these misconceptions and ingrained lies have a direct effect on the management of politics in our day.
History as we have been taught it… causes and character of the First World War
The First World War was a disastrous blunder into which incompetent officers and bloodthirsty politicians wandered blindly, because they had not made any effort to disarm and had allowed the “armaments race” to become a kind of mechanical progression that inevitably led to the stored weapons being pointed and fired at each other. Disarmament, of course, would have reduced the danger of war. The war was kept going by corrupt journalist with false tales of enemy war crimes. There was no moral difference between the two sides, and the only people deserving pity (but not respect) were the unfortunate soldiers driven to their deaths like cattle by both sides.
History as it was.
If, as late as fifteen years earlier, anyone had predicted the form which the war would take, and which countries would join together - and join together in an iron alliance, from which nothing except complete defeat and civil war could remove a member - they would have been taken for lunatics. True, the highly unlikely alliance between France and Russia - France the bearer of the still controversial liberal and republican values; Russia the stronghold of absolute monarchy - was by then already a fact, but nobody would have taken it for anything but a contingent fact. It was not popular in France, and only hard-line enemies of Germany such as Jules Verne and Juliette Adam regarded it in a favourable light (Verne interrupted his career of writing science fiction to produce a pro-Russian potboiler, Michel Strogoff), nor very well-regarded in Russia, where the instinct had always been to be friendly with Prussia. Few people imagined that Russians would be ready to die for France, or Frenchmen for Russia; the alliance would only last as long as it was convenient for the two governments.
While the United States of America had nothing against Russia, they had been close to war with France, Britain, and Italy, within living memory. The general sense of friendship between America and France had been broken by the French invasion of Mexico in the 1860s, against which the Americans - busy until 1865 with their own civil war - had fought a proxy war by arming Benito Juarez. American hackles had been raised again by Ferdinand de Lesseps’ plan to dig the Panama Canal, another French intrusion into American territory, and there had been barely disguised glee in Washington DC when the French enterprise had dissolved into financial disaster and scandal, leaving the Americans to pick up the pieces.
American suspicion of France, however, was nothing compared with American dislike of Britain. Near-wars with the British were regular events in American politics; after the disaster of 1812-1814, there had been the Oregon Territory crisis of 1846-48, the Alabama crisis of 1862, the attempted Fenian invasion of Canada in (I think) 1867, and clashes over borders in Alaska and in Guyana (involving Venezuela, but with the USA as patron of the Caracas government) in the eighteen-nineties. If anyone had been asked in 1898 to predict where the next great war would happen, some Anglo-American flashpoint would have been near the top of the list.
America had actually nearly gone to war against Italy. Now follow this closely, because this is all actual historical fact, although you will not easily find it in American or British textbooks. In 1892, a mob lynched thirteen Italian criminals of Sicilian origin in New Orleans. Public opinion on both sides was furious - the Americans because of the feeling that Italy was exporting their dregs to them, the Italians over the lynching - and the Italian government was, by the height of misfortune, led by a Sicilian, Marquis di Rudini’. The American ambassador was forthwith expelled and the Italian navy set on a war footing. American newspapers announced war. At this point, the Americans started counting units, and realized an alarming fact. The US Navy had no more than four ships of the line in active service. The Italian navy had 73, including what was then the world’s largest battleship. And most of the major American cities lay on the sea. The Italians could bomb New York City, New Orleans, San Francisco - even Philadelphia and Washington DC - into flinders, without any effective defence. America scuttled for peace, offering a settlement of 125,000 gold lire to the dead men’s relatives - not a small sum, but very little to avoid a war. Italy calmed down; and America started building ships.
The protection of emigrants from violence and abuse was one of the major concerns of Italian foreign policy at the time, and it always placed her squarely against the Western powers. There was no great trouble for the small amount of Italian immigrants in Germany; but there were large Italian communities in the British Empire (Australia, Scotland, Canada), in the United States, and in France, none of which were treated well. France was the worst: the New Orleans massacre was repeated, with far less justification, in Aigues-Mortes (France), one of various episodes which had kept France and Italy at each other’s throats for decades. If Austria held the provinces of Trento, Trieste, Istria and Dalmatia, demanded by Italian nationalists, France had Savoy, Nice (Nizza) and Corsica, to which Italy had equally good claims, and the colony of Tunisia, snatched from under Italian noses in 1881 in spite of important Italian interests there. Italian reasons to detest France were stronger than for any other country. And in the Balkans - another major sphere of Italian interest - Italy was in competition not only with their supposed ally Austria, but also with the far larger and menacing presence of Russia, France’s ally. As late as 1906, nobody could see any reason why Italy would ever stand against Germany or Austria, let alone go to war against them.
(To add a footnote to this picture, in 1906 Italy forbade immigration to Brazil after a scandal involving Italian immigrants being treated like slaves. Brazil, too, was to become a member of the grand alliance against Germany.)
If Russia was at odds with Italy and Austria in the Balkans, that was little compared with her historic rivalry with Britain. Russia and Britain were each other’s bogeymen. Britain regarded Russian ambition as the major threat against its empire in three continents, and its policy was calculated primarily to restrain Russia. She had historically been the great protector of the Turkish Empire against Russian expansion, tolerating in its name the many and hideous Turkish massacres of Christians, going to war against Russia to protect Turkey in 1854 and again - nearly - 1878. Russian expansion in Central Asia was felt by the British to threaten their empire of India. Britain, in turn, had backed Japan against Russia in China, culminating in the Russian-Japanese war of 1905, in which the Russians had suffered the most shattering defeat in three centuries. And in spite of Britain’s support for such hardly liberal regimes as the Turkish Empire, Russia regarded Britain, much more than France, as the world headquarters of revolution and the engine of anti-monarchist, liberal, revolutionary feeling; astonishingly, Imperial Russia had been the constant friend of the democratic USA against Britain throughout the nineteenth century, to the extent of selling the USA their own American province of Alaska partly in order to make British North America (Canada) indefensible against the Americans.
Even the British/Russian rivalry, however, paled before the most historic, ineradicable, defining political opposition on the whole European continent: that between Britain and France. An alliance between London and Paris was inconceivable; even the passionately pro-French Kipling, in his great poem in praise of France, could only describe the relationship of the two countries as one of creative enmity, in which the struggles of the twin powers had spread European culture around the world. The last time English and French governments had been allies (except for the aberrant episode of the Crimean War) had been the Third Crusade, in 1190. Since then, there had hardly been a major European conflict or clash which did not have an element of France vs. England/Britain; if London intervened in favour of anyone, Paris felt bound to intervene against them, and vice versa. The Crimean War had been a personal adventure of Napoleon III, trying to build up a position in European politics, in which Britain had taken part because it suited her to trim Russia back. It had been followed by a period of genuine peace between the two rivals, symbolised by the free trade treaty of 1860; but the fall of Napoleon III had taken things right back to where they had been for six centuries. In the eighteen-nineties, a French politician (the future saviour of France, Clemenceau), could be ruined by the mere suggestion of English support, even when the documents supporting the suggestion were proved to be forgeries. As late as 1900, Britain and France nearly went to war over the French seizure of the town of Fashoda (Kodok), in Egyptian Sudan (present-day Sudan), where Britain exerted an informal but highly effective overlordship.
And while Britain scowled at France, she tended to smile at Germany. An informal understanding between Britain and the German bloc - made up, at the time, of Austria and Italy - existed through a naval agreement with Italy (the same which had allowed Italy to build up that tremendous naval potential that had humiliated the USA - which, in turn, hardly displeased Whitehall). German and British prejudice against France mirrored each other, and the ruling classes of Britain had a high regard for the order and efficiency of Prussian Germany, its Protestant past, and the family connections between the countries - the royal family of Britain was of German origin twice over, with several extra infusions of German princesses. The English squirearchy tended to feel at home in North Germany, as indeed did the Prussian gentry in rural England, while neither of them could stomach France, either its temperamental and chaotic capital, or its obstinate Catholic provinces. (This prejudice was not restricted to conservatives: the great historian Mommsen, as upright and courageous a liberal as ever lived, had nothing but contempt for the political chaos and incoherence of France.) The tension between Germany and Russia, which had led Russia to make the alliance with Paris, were hardly unwelcome in London either, and in fact one might suspect that the beginnings of the Franco-Russian alliance had as much to do with restraining London as with Berlin, if not more so. And through Britain and Italy, Germany also had an indirect but not ineffective line to Japan, the swiftly rising power of the East.
These were the international relationships as the new century dawned. And we must add that while all the future allies had more than enough reasons to be at each other’s throats, nobody except France had much reason to hate or fear Germany. Prussian Germany, it is true, had been built on a foundation of cruel violence, of self-satisfied and even moralistic brutality, which had horrified contemporaries such as the historians Burckhardt and Mommsen. But that was long ago, and it might perhaps be justified, in many people’s eyes, by the formation of the long-desired united German state - and a state, at that, of astonishing prosperity and order, unlike that other product of the liberal revolution, Italy. Germany swiftly rose, not by military means, but by an unprecedented kind of cooperation between government, investors, and its vast university sector, to the foremost position in Europe, surpassing Britain, France and Russia and approaching the industrial power of the United States. And after the failure of his last aggressive campaign - against the Catholic Church - Bismarck had started to take the position of a peacemaker, an honest broker among European powers, careful only to keep France as isolated and helpless as possible. Except for France, no country had been given reason to hate or fear Germany; fences had been mended even with the Vatican, to the point where the great Pope Leo XIII, in one of the most cynical acts in Vatican history, had made the Lutheran former persecutor a Papal knight.
This was how Europe and the world appeared in the last decade of the nineteenth century. And yet, between 1898 and 1917, all these rival powers, most of which had either gone to war with each other or been in danger of doing so within living memory, came to the conclusion, each of them separately and all of them together, that Germany’s war-making power had to be destroyed; and this resolution was so strong that through five years of bloodshed, defeat, and struggle without hope, in which the Allies were often humiliated not only by Germany but even by Turkey, not one of them even suggested the possibility of negotiations. At the end of the war, the Austrian politician Count Ottokar Czernin testified that the Empires had never once in five years received peace feelers from any Allied government - all peace initiatives, such as they were, had started from Germany and Austria. The Allies were resolute, from beginning to end, that no negotiated peace with Germany was worth making; and conversely, the repeated efforts at peace-making on the Austrian and German side shows that the Empires would have regarded a negotiated peace as advantageous to them - in fact, as a kind of victory. And between 1916 and 1917, as German victory seemed to be coming ever closer - Serbia, Russia and Rumania defeated and occupied, Italy in November 1917 reduced to the last extremity, France paralyzed by the largest troop mutiny in the history of the world - each of the three leading allies, in turn, dismissed their existing governments in favour of a new, one, each led by a foremost leader of the non-Marxist left - Lloyd George in Britain, Orlando in Italy, Clemenceau in France - with a mandate to carry on the war at all costs.
In other words, the approach of German victory stimulated nothing in her opponents except an obstinate desire to resist at all costs; as well as, in neutral America, the decision to intervene. The political leaderships of Britain, France, Italy, and America, as well as that of several smaller countries, seemed clear that anything was better than peace with Germany. (Indeed, the same might be said even of the failed republican government of Kerensky in Russia, who intended to go on fighting at all costs - and, as we will see, had the nation on its side.)
Incredibly, even the great mutiny of the French troops in 1917 implied no desire whatever for peace with Germany. The troops simply refused to be thrown away in wasteful attacks; but they would, and did, defend themselves and their country against enemy attacks. This was the common platform of all the 55 divisions that mutinied, and it was the reason why, through all the long months of crisis, the Germans never realized that anything was amiss. Any time they attacked, they met with fierce resistance.
The speed, the depth, and the dramatic intensity of this change, alone, would be enough to show that something more than chance or political calculation lay behind it. The passion to stop Germany at all costs was universal. In nineteen years, Germany had managed to make itself the enemy of the world.
At this point, my readers will be rubbing their eyes. This is a story they know - a German government starting with a divided and squabbling world and, within ten or fifteen years, uniting it all against itself, embarking on a war which they look like they can win till, as a satirist once said, enemies started growing by the roadside, and they were overwhelmed. They know it all; the disasters in France and Russia; the new British government, led by the former bugbear Churchill, with a mandate to prosecute the war at all costs; the forced and late entry of America; the cloud of lesser allies, including Brazil; the iron alliance between the most unlikely of allies, all resolute to do anything rather than accept German victory; the final victory, after which former allies fall out again. But this, surely, is the story of World War Two, not One? Have I got my facts wrong? Indeed I have not. Ask yourselves rather, did you think that Hitler came from nowhere? That was not the impression that contemporary observers, who had known Germany before Hitler and even before the Great War, had. The general feeling in 1939 is in the bitter French joke reported by C.S.Lewis: “Well, that was a good armistice!”
In terms of visible actions, the worst culprit for unleashing the slaughter was not Germany but her ally, Austria-Hungary. It was Austria, rather than Germany, that had a well-developed Secret Service whose actions, as they were progressively discovered, gave strength to the sense of an Austro-German plan to subjugate Europe. Austrian intelligence had penetrated many supposedly enemy countries, interfered in the Papal election of 1902, secretly purchased a controlling share in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro - when this was discovered, at the worst possible moment, in August 1914, it gave the final push to French enthusiasm for the war. And it was Austria who, in 1908, illegally annexated Bosnia-Herzegovina, which it had so far administered on behalf of the Turkish Empire, without informing its supposed ally Italy - a visibly hostile act. From 1908, the estrangement between Italy and her allies became serious. Finally, it was Austria who, in August 1914, made war inevitable, deliberately forcing Serbia into it. Austria, more than any other European power, wanted war, and in 1908 a secret memorandum from the Army chief Conrad explained why: “War must take place now or soon, because the enemy countries, Serbia, Russia and Italy, grow more powerful every day.” This memo called Italy, with which Austria had a treaty of alliance, an enemy power, and showed well enough the secret thoughts of the Austrian leadership. It also indicated a desire to expand territorially into the Balkans, which, while not insane in terms of the mentality of the time - Europe and the USA had just experienced a century of unparalleled territorial growth, and found it easy to imagine that territorial growth was the natural duty of any state - was pointless and damaging in terms of the Austro-Hungarian entity, which would have been saddled with territories that had nothing historically or culturally to share with it. It was, in fact, this territorial ambition that started the war, since Gavrilo Princip and his accomplices had intended to strike at the Austrian plans for Bosnia and the rest of the Balkans.
But if Austria went mad at this time, it was because it had fallen in love with Prussian ways and the Prussian mentality. The subtle and growing sense of unease that spread across Europe from the turn of the century onwards did not originate with any Austrian belligerance; Austria had neither the means nor the influence to scare the rest of Europe, much less to scare it together into one alliance.
It came from Germany. There never was in all the world a more benevolent, balanced and warmly affectionate mind and heart than G.K.Chesterton. Here is his account of a visit to a German university in 1909: Some time after all these events, I had to visit Frankfurt, where I took on rather casually the task of lecturing on English literature to a congress of German schoolmasters. We discussed Walter Scott's Marmion and other metrical romances; we sang English songs over German beer, and had a very pleasant time. But there was already stirring, even among those mild and amiable Germans, something that was not so pleasant; and though they expressed it quite politely, I suddenly found myself once more in the same difficulty about the national and the imperial notion. For, speaking to some of them at large about literature, as to a merely cosmopolitan world of culture, I touched on this preference of mine for what some consider a narrower national idea. I found that they also were puzzled; they assured me, with that gravity with which Germans alone can repeat what they regard as a platitude, that Imperialismus and Patriotismus were the same thing. When they discovered that I did not like Imperialismus, even for my own country, a very curious expression came into their eyes, and a still more curious notion seems to have come into their heads. They formed the extraordinary idea that I was an internationalist indifferent, or even hostile, to English interests. Perhaps they thought Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an alias of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Anyhow, they began to talk more openly, but still vaguely; and there grew gradually on my consciousness the conviction that these extraordinary people really thought that I might accept or approve, on some toshy ethnological or sociological ground or other, the extension of the Teutonic Race at the expense even of the impotence or absorption of my own land. It was a somewhat difficult situation; for they said nothing definite that I had any right to resent; it was merely that I felt in the atmosphere a pressure and a threat. It was Der Tag. After thinking a moment, I said, "Well, gentlemen, if it ever came to anything like that, I think I should have to refer you to the poem of Scott that we have been discussing." And I gravely repeated the answer of Marmion, when King James says that they may meet again in war as far south as Tamworth Castle.
Much honour'd were my humble home,
If in its halls King James should come;
But Nottingham has archers good,
And Yorkshire men are stern of mood;
Northumbrian prickers wild and rude. ...
And many a banner will be torn,
And many a knight to earth be borne,
And many a sheaf of arrows spent,
Ere Scotland's King shall cross the Trent.
I looked at them and they at me, and I think they understood; and there rose up like an enormous shadow over that drinking-hall the terror of things to be.
Chesterton, as usual, had seen right. This mood had been growing for years. It was something that all visitors to Germany, everyone who spoke with Germans, or who followed German cultural development with some care, could not miss. There were, of course, plenty of appeasers, plenty of people who did not want to admit what perversion was seizing a fellow European country, or who thought themselves too clever; but in the end facts were too much for anyone. Horrified accounts of German attitudes and German views were among the things that convinced Italy, America and Brazil to enter the war. Many of them are now available free on the Internet, so that there really is no excuse for the enduring ignorance on this matter. In Project Gutenberg, for instance, you may read Daniel Curtin’s The land of deepening shadow and Thomas F.A.Smith’s What Germany thinks, two cool, documented and rigorous descriptions of the German mind during the war. Even ninety years after the event, reading them is enough to make your hair stand on end, and to admit that not only ten, but fifty million dead were not too much to pay to preserve us from rule by such a power.
The proper comparison for the German mind before and during the war is modern Muslim terrorism. The adoration of hatred (during the war, Germany held regular “hatred days”); the firm belief that God has so ordained the world that “we” must fight wars in which “we” prevail, and that if “we” do not prevail, the fault is with conspiracies managed by evil, subtle inimical political powers; the very slogan “our enemies love life, we love death” - all these things are in common. And where the Muslims have God, the Germans had a brutal, oversimplified, yet professorial and abstract Social Darwinism. Stephen Jay Gould, an excellent amateur culture historian, has rediscovered yet another contemporary account of German minds, Vernon Kellogg’s Headquarters Nights. (It has now been reprinted and is available from Amazon.) Kellogg, an outstanding scientist and a leader of Darwinist thought in America, became involved in neutral relief in Belgium. This brought him into contact with German Headquarters, where he found that many of the generals and officers were former university professors, and, like him, promoters of the theory of evolution. Thus he got an exposure to their minds that scarred him and everyone who read his book. As Gould tells the story,
…he was posted at the headquarters of the German Great General staff, the only American on the premises. Night after night, he listened to dinner discussions and arguments, sometimes in the presence of the Kaiser himself, among Germany’s highest military officers. Headquarters Nights is Kellogg’s account of these exchanges. He arrived in Europe as a pacifist, but left committed to the destruction of German militarism by force.
Kellogg was appalled, above all, at the justification for war and German supremacy advanced by these officers, many of whom had been university professors before the war (FPB’s note; and went back to it afterwards, with the results to be expected. General Karl Haushofer was a Professor of Geopolitics at the University of Munich in the early twenties; his prize student was Rudolf Hess, and Hitler and Goering were also strongly affected by his theories.). They not only proposed an evolutionary rationale, but advocated a particularly crude form of natural selection, defined as inexorable, bloody battle:
Professor von Flussen is Neo-Darwinian, as are most German biologists and natural philosophers. The creed of the all macht (Gould’s note: “all-might”, or omnipotence) of a natural selection based on violent an competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals; all else is illusion and anathema…. This struggle not only must go on, for that is the natural law, but it should go on, so that this natural law may work out, in its cruel, inevitable way, the salvation of the human species… That human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage… should win in the struggle for existence, and this struggle should occur precisely [so] that the various types may be tested, and the best not only preserved, but put in position to impose its kind of social organization - its Kultur - on the others, or alternatively to destroy and replace them. This is the disheartening kind of argument that I faced at Headquarters… Add the additional assumption that the Germans are the chosen race, and that German social and political organization the chosen type of human community life, and you have a wall of logic and convinction that you can break your head against, but can never shatter - by headwork. You long for the muscles of Samson.
…horrible academic casuistry and… convinction that the individual is nothing, the State everything.
Notice, in particular, the insistence on the academic quality of what might be called the German heresy. This obscene perversion of morality and sense had been worked out largely in the most advanced and successful academic sector in Europe. And the rot had been going on for a long time before the war started - remember Chesterton’s German academics in 1909, who, upon finding out that Chesterton’s view of patriotism did not include imperialism, immediately concluded that he must be a racist who believed in the superiority and unity of Teutonic nations. They had no other perspective; they had used all their learning to wipe all other perspectives from their minds.
This attitude was already in embryo in Bismarck’s Prussia, if not indeed in Frederick II’s. Bismarck’s catastrophic success in uniting Germany by wholly dishonourable means (I do not have the space to describe what he did, but it is true that there is not one step in his political process that would not make an honest man blush for shame) riveted on all patriotic Germans the creed that might makes right and that the end justifies the means. Although the papers of Bismarck and his collaborators were kept secret until 1945, in the justified belief that they would disgrace Germany if published, enough was known from the mere public face of the facts - the brutal assault on defenceless Denmark; the partition of the Duchies, to whom independence had been promised, between Austria and Prussia; the faithless assault on Austria, with the result of excluding ten million Austrian Germans from the Reich; and finally, the cold-blooded placing of France in a situation where it literally had no choice but declare war on Prussia - all this meant that a German patriot had the pleasant choice between justifying immorality or condemning the formation of a national state formed wholly by political criminality. And of course, the successful criminals now ruled Germany, and had made the other 35 sovereigns of the German Empire their collaborators.
Moral complicity flowed down the political and social structures of the new Empire like oil, necessary to keep the structure working smoothly, and was further confirmed by the immense industrial success of the new State, which was, by 1900, the second industrial power in the world. There was, in the German mind, a diseased connect between the good, sound, and justified love of country - the thing that made ancient Greeks say “Nobody loves his country because it is great, but because it is his” - and the assertion of immorality, and what is more of the need and justice of immorality, in politics. In the end, the German madness may be defined as follows: a rigidly moralistic belief in immorality. And now I have to make a statement of my own view of human nature. My view is that morality is an innate part of human nature, and that a man or group of people cannot destroy it in themselves without performing something best described as self-rape. And it is also my view that this self-rape, once performed, is not finished with; it remains in the mind and soul as a bleeding wound, creating a constant wellspring of anger, love of cruelty, and desire to humiliate. Having performed this violence upon themselves, those who subject themselves to this self-rape need to make reparations to their permanently injured and maimed soul; and they do so by inflicting upon others wounds comparable to, or worse than, anything they are suffering at their own hand. Hence the crooked, horrible Prussian pleasure in oppression, the Prussian cultural brutality and - be it noted - preference for immorality, not just as being useful, but as being in some sense more moral than morality!
Once again I turn to Chesterton, for his memorable account of the founder of modern Prussia, Frederick II: Everything was young once, even Frederick the Great. It was an appropriate preface to the terrible epic of Prussia that it began with an unnatural tragedy of the loss of youth. That blind and narrow savage who was the boy's father had just sufficient difficulty in stamping out every trace of decency in him, to show that some such traces must have been there. If the younger and greater Frederick ever had a heart, it was a broken heart; broken by the same blow that broke his flute. When his only friend was executed before his eyes, there were two corpses to be borne away; and one to be borne on a high war-horse through victory after victory: but with a small bottle of poison in the pocket. (The terrible crime to which the great writer refers was the hanging of the young prince’s closest friend, in front of his eyes, by his father, who was as nearly insane as anyone can be without being actually committed. The crazy old king believed his son to be homosexual and this man to be his lover. He may have been right, too. And Frederick II certainly did carry a vial of poison with him during his wars, in case he was captured; not unlike his remote Nazi successors.) It is not irrelevant thus to pause upon the high and dark house of his childhood. For the peculiar quality which marks out Prussian arms and ambitions from all others of the kind consists in this wrinkled and premature antiquity. There is something comparatively boyish about the triumphs of all the other tyrants. There was something better than ambition in the beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. He was at least a lover; and his first campaign was like a love-story. All that was pagan in him worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman, and all that was Catholic in him understood the paradox of Our Lady of Victories. Henry VIII, a far less reputable person, was in his early days a good knight of the later and more florid school of chivalry; we might almost say that he was a fine old English gentleman so long as he was young. Even Nero was loved in his first days: and there must have been some cause to make that Christian maiden cast flowers on his dishonourable grave. But the spirit of the great Hohenzollern smelt from the first of the charnel. He came out to his first victory like one broken by defeats; his strength was stripped to the bone and fearful as a fleshless resurrection; for the worst of what could come had already befallen him. The very construction of his kingship was built upon the destruction of his manhood. He had known the final shame; his soul had surrendered to force. He could not redress that wrong; he could only repeat it and repay it. He could make the souls of his soldiers surrender to his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could make the souls of the nations surrender to his soldiers. He could only break men in as he had been broken; while he could break in, he could never break out. He could not slay in anger, nor even sin with simplicity. Thus he stands alone among the conquerors of their kind; his madness was not due to a mere misdirection of courage. Before the whisper of war had come to him the foundations of his audacity had been laid in fear.
Of the work he did in this world there need be no considerable debate. It was romantic, if it be romantic that the dragon should swallow St.George. He turned a small country into a great one: he made a new diplomacy by the fulness and far-flung daring of his lies: he took away from criminality all reproach of carelessness and incompleteness. He achieved an amiable combination of thrift and theft. He undoubtedly gave to stark plunder something of the solidity of property. He protected whatever he stole as simpler men protect whatever they have earned or inherited. He turned his hollow eyes with a sort of loathsome affection upon the territories which had most reluctantly become his: at the end of the Seven Years' War men knew as little how he was to be turned out of Silesia as they knew why he had ever been allowed in it. In Poland, like a devil in possession, he tore asunder the body he inhabited; but it was long before any man dreamed that such disjected limbs could live again. Nor were the effects of his break from Christian tradition confined to Christendom; Macaulay's world-wide generalisation is very true though very Macaulayese. But though, in a long view, he scattered the seeds of war all over the world, his own last days were passed in a long and comparatively prosperous peace; a peace which received and perhaps deserved a certain praise: a peace with which many European peoples were content. For though he did not understand justice, he could understand moderation. He was the most genuine and the most wicked of pacifists. He did not want any more wars. He had tortured and beggared all his neighbours; but he bore them no malice for it. An epitaph which applies just as well to the Chancellor of his successors, Bismarck; and a description of that same mental process of inner and outer rape which I tried to describe.
Crooked and cruel as he was, a militant immoralist disposed to deceive and compel his own king - for the King’s own good, obviously! - Bismarck had nevertheless a gift of common sense. Nobody could withdraw faster if he felt a battle was lost, or dismiss more coldly anyone who made proposals that were rash or did not contribute to the final greatness of Prussia. But his commonsense was his private property, whereas his belief in cruelty and immorality was the collective possession of all Prussia. From the 1890s on, deprived of the habits of mind and influence of Bismarck, Germany went slowly mad; but the roots of this madness, in truth, were deep into the Bismarckian “age of peace”. Prussian Germany had been built on war; the officers’ corps, thoroughly integrated into the landed aristocracy, was its leading social class; immoralism rested snug and untouched in the core of its riot of intellectual and economic activity. It was in the way to use brute force that Bismarck - especially the latter Bismarck, made wise by victories and defeats both - differed from his successors, but not on the basic conception: that at the heart of everything lies the iron fist. Bismarck’s successors felt that they could dispense with his caution, his careful evaluation of opposing forces, his devious way of setting one opponent against another - even to the extent of granting the sizeable mouthful of Tunisia to the arch-enemy, France, if by that means Italy could be further estranged from France and driven to a German alliance. They felt that Germany was powerful enough to look at nobody in the face.
Part of this madness was an increasing incapacity to understand the rest of the world. Germany, in effect, only spoke to itself. Not only among the dominant officers' corps, but even in the Foreign Ministry, one could often hear the view that "we" simply do not care what a lot of damned foreigners were thinking. But more to the point - and once again, Chesterton's experience in Frankfurt is symptomatic - even where Germans were brought up against foreigners, they simply were unable to understand them. Their academic and bookish view of the world simply did not take in the realities of French, British, American, Italian attitudes. As a result, before, during, and after the war, German diplomacy was a series of blunders and blind alleys; the worst and most fateful of which was when they went to negotiate for peace at Versailles under the firm and unbreakable convinction that they had not been defeated, only to find that the squabbling and already divided Allies were at one at least in this, that they HAD been. Germany was so detached from the real world as to be able to suffer a major defeat in war and not notice it.
Another effect of this moral separation from the European norm, this total lack of feeling for European feeling, was that Germany had already before the war built itself the reputation of a bully, a crook, and an immoralist. Too many Europeans and Americans had read German books and listened to German professors; too many of them were already prepared to regard Germany as an international bandit. In that situation, Germany could only escape the reputation of arch-warmonger and enemy of the world by behaving throughout in the most scrupulous way possible. Instead of which, it invaded Belgium for no good reason and in defiance of every treaty; and followed it up with a series of war crimes which, while exaggerated by rumour and dwarfed by her feats in World War Two, were nevertheless real and considerable enough that even German courts, after the war, were forced to hand down a certain amount of convictions.
What this meant was that Germany was condemned, in the court of world opinion, from the moment she invaded Belgium. From then on, the balance in the eyes of world opinion was such that, if Germany never committed a single other crime, she would still be regarded as the aggressor and the arch-criminal; and that even if the Allies committed any amount of crimes, they would be seen as justified by the need to resist German aggression. That Germany, on top of that, committed plenty of war crimes, that her ally Turkey committed even more, and that the Allies - with the obvious exception of Russia - fought really quite clean wars, only added to the moral default of the Central Empires. The Swedish doctor Axel Munthe was a Red Cross volunteer on the German front; like most Swedes, he had started with a presumption in favour of Germany, but what he saw made him conceive a violent hatred of Germany, and an equally burning admiration for the civilized and courageous Allies. (Alas, being a terrible writer, his memories of the war, called Red Cross and Iron Cross, are atrociously overcharged and purple; but what he describes is bad enough.)
Germany learned nothing. The war itself, if anything , deepened this collective pathology. Finding itself regarded as the bandit of the world, Germany only concluded that the enemy had been smarter at propaganda - a legend that has endured ever since. (In fact, Allied propaganda was fairly crude, as may be seen from the furious caricature of Siegfried Sassoon.) It is not some Western propagandist, but Count Czernin, the Austrian leader, who says that “Had Germany been victorious her militarism would have increased enormously. In the summer of 1917 I spoke to several generals of high standing on the Western front, who unanimously declared that after the war armaments must be maintained, but on a very much greater scale. They compared this war with the First Punic War. It would be continued and its continuation be prepared for; in short, the tactics of Versailles. The standard of violence must be planted, and would be the banner of the generals, the Pan-Germans, the Fatherland Party, etc. etc… Emperor, Government and Reichstag floundered helplessly in this torrent of violent purpose". The First Punic War, by the way, was the war in which Rome broke out of the Italian peninsula and lay the bases for its naval power and its conquest of the Mediterranean; the parallel implying that future German conquests would compare to pre-war Germany as the total of the eventual Roman Empire compared to the Italian peninsula. This seems to me a quite firm and final answer to the question, why did ten million men have to die to stop Germany?
Having said this, there still are a lot of myths to be cleared. Were the generals - in particular, the Entente ones - really as incompetent as they have been made out to be? Was the slaughter as crazed and careless? And was the final peace of Versailles really that vindictive, crushing abortion that so many accounts imply? As you can imagine, my view of these things is somewhat different from the Vulgate’s; but all these questions, interesting as they are, also come within another, more broad and encompassing, and more directly connected with our world and our life today. That is: how and why did these orthodoxies come to have the power they gained, even among people who had lived in the war itself and could remember why it was fought? I will deal with these matters in future posts; meanwhile, I would welcome comments and (polite) criticism.
I decided to start this series because the kind of “history” they teach in schools - and, alas, increasingly, in universities - is to a very large extent not even the fragile interpretation of scholars, but the detritus of ancient propaganda, kept alive by intellectual laziness, sentimentality and political self-interest. I am sick and tired of the trash I hear passing for history in common debate, of the unchallenged assumptions that are as false as a three-pound banknote, and most especially of the blackmailing sentimentality that often lies at their back. In my own space, at least - which is what this blog is - I would like to set up an alternative perspective. Here, for a start, let me deal with the mountain of misconceptions, learned at school and kept alive by all sorts of popular culture - including even genuine masterpieces such as David Olney’s song 1917 - about the First World War; for, in a sense - especially because the War led to a more central event for the evolution of our culture, the Russian Civil War - these misconceptions and ingrained lies have a direct effect on the management of politics in our day.
History as we have been taught it… causes and character of the First World War
The First World War was a disastrous blunder into which incompetent officers and bloodthirsty politicians wandered blindly, because they had not made any effort to disarm and had allowed the “armaments race” to become a kind of mechanical progression that inevitably led to the stored weapons being pointed and fired at each other. Disarmament, of course, would have reduced the danger of war. The war was kept going by corrupt journalist with false tales of enemy war crimes. There was no moral difference between the two sides, and the only people deserving pity (but not respect) were the unfortunate soldiers driven to their deaths like cattle by both sides.
History as it was.
If, as late as fifteen years earlier, anyone had predicted the form which the war would take, and which countries would join together - and join together in an iron alliance, from which nothing except complete defeat and civil war could remove a member - they would have been taken for lunatics. True, the highly unlikely alliance between France and Russia - France the bearer of the still controversial liberal and republican values; Russia the stronghold of absolute monarchy - was by then already a fact, but nobody would have taken it for anything but a contingent fact. It was not popular in France, and only hard-line enemies of Germany such as Jules Verne and Juliette Adam regarded it in a favourable light (Verne interrupted his career of writing science fiction to produce a pro-Russian potboiler, Michel Strogoff), nor very well-regarded in Russia, where the instinct had always been to be friendly with Prussia. Few people imagined that Russians would be ready to die for France, or Frenchmen for Russia; the alliance would only last as long as it was convenient for the two governments.
While the United States of America had nothing against Russia, they had been close to war with France, Britain, and Italy, within living memory. The general sense of friendship between America and France had been broken by the French invasion of Mexico in the 1860s, against which the Americans - busy until 1865 with their own civil war - had fought a proxy war by arming Benito Juarez. American hackles had been raised again by Ferdinand de Lesseps’ plan to dig the Panama Canal, another French intrusion into American territory, and there had been barely disguised glee in Washington DC when the French enterprise had dissolved into financial disaster and scandal, leaving the Americans to pick up the pieces.
American suspicion of France, however, was nothing compared with American dislike of Britain. Near-wars with the British were regular events in American politics; after the disaster of 1812-1814, there had been the Oregon Territory crisis of 1846-48, the Alabama crisis of 1862, the attempted Fenian invasion of Canada in (I think) 1867, and clashes over borders in Alaska and in Guyana (involving Venezuela, but with the USA as patron of the Caracas government) in the eighteen-nineties. If anyone had been asked in 1898 to predict where the next great war would happen, some Anglo-American flashpoint would have been near the top of the list.
America had actually nearly gone to war against Italy. Now follow this closely, because this is all actual historical fact, although you will not easily find it in American or British textbooks. In 1892, a mob lynched thirteen Italian criminals of Sicilian origin in New Orleans. Public opinion on both sides was furious - the Americans because of the feeling that Italy was exporting their dregs to them, the Italians over the lynching - and the Italian government was, by the height of misfortune, led by a Sicilian, Marquis di Rudini’. The American ambassador was forthwith expelled and the Italian navy set on a war footing. American newspapers announced war. At this point, the Americans started counting units, and realized an alarming fact. The US Navy had no more than four ships of the line in active service. The Italian navy had 73, including what was then the world’s largest battleship. And most of the major American cities lay on the sea. The Italians could bomb New York City, New Orleans, San Francisco - even Philadelphia and Washington DC - into flinders, without any effective defence. America scuttled for peace, offering a settlement of 125,000 gold lire to the dead men’s relatives - not a small sum, but very little to avoid a war. Italy calmed down; and America started building ships.
The protection of emigrants from violence and abuse was one of the major concerns of Italian foreign policy at the time, and it always placed her squarely against the Western powers. There was no great trouble for the small amount of Italian immigrants in Germany; but there were large Italian communities in the British Empire (Australia, Scotland, Canada), in the United States, and in France, none of which were treated well. France was the worst: the New Orleans massacre was repeated, with far less justification, in Aigues-Mortes (France), one of various episodes which had kept France and Italy at each other’s throats for decades. If Austria held the provinces of Trento, Trieste, Istria and Dalmatia, demanded by Italian nationalists, France had Savoy, Nice (Nizza) and Corsica, to which Italy had equally good claims, and the colony of Tunisia, snatched from under Italian noses in 1881 in spite of important Italian interests there. Italian reasons to detest France were stronger than for any other country. And in the Balkans - another major sphere of Italian interest - Italy was in competition not only with their supposed ally Austria, but also with the far larger and menacing presence of Russia, France’s ally. As late as 1906, nobody could see any reason why Italy would ever stand against Germany or Austria, let alone go to war against them.
(To add a footnote to this picture, in 1906 Italy forbade immigration to Brazil after a scandal involving Italian immigrants being treated like slaves. Brazil, too, was to become a member of the grand alliance against Germany.)
If Russia was at odds with Italy and Austria in the Balkans, that was little compared with her historic rivalry with Britain. Russia and Britain were each other’s bogeymen. Britain regarded Russian ambition as the major threat against its empire in three continents, and its policy was calculated primarily to restrain Russia. She had historically been the great protector of the Turkish Empire against Russian expansion, tolerating in its name the many and hideous Turkish massacres of Christians, going to war against Russia to protect Turkey in 1854 and again - nearly - 1878. Russian expansion in Central Asia was felt by the British to threaten their empire of India. Britain, in turn, had backed Japan against Russia in China, culminating in the Russian-Japanese war of 1905, in which the Russians had suffered the most shattering defeat in three centuries. And in spite of Britain’s support for such hardly liberal regimes as the Turkish Empire, Russia regarded Britain, much more than France, as the world headquarters of revolution and the engine of anti-monarchist, liberal, revolutionary feeling; astonishingly, Imperial Russia had been the constant friend of the democratic USA against Britain throughout the nineteenth century, to the extent of selling the USA their own American province of Alaska partly in order to make British North America (Canada) indefensible against the Americans.
Even the British/Russian rivalry, however, paled before the most historic, ineradicable, defining political opposition on the whole European continent: that between Britain and France. An alliance between London and Paris was inconceivable; even the passionately pro-French Kipling, in his great poem in praise of France, could only describe the relationship of the two countries as one of creative enmity, in which the struggles of the twin powers had spread European culture around the world. The last time English and French governments had been allies (except for the aberrant episode of the Crimean War) had been the Third Crusade, in 1190. Since then, there had hardly been a major European conflict or clash which did not have an element of France vs. England/Britain; if London intervened in favour of anyone, Paris felt bound to intervene against them, and vice versa. The Crimean War had been a personal adventure of Napoleon III, trying to build up a position in European politics, in which Britain had taken part because it suited her to trim Russia back. It had been followed by a period of genuine peace between the two rivals, symbolised by the free trade treaty of 1860; but the fall of Napoleon III had taken things right back to where they had been for six centuries. In the eighteen-nineties, a French politician (the future saviour of France, Clemenceau), could be ruined by the mere suggestion of English support, even when the documents supporting the suggestion were proved to be forgeries. As late as 1900, Britain and France nearly went to war over the French seizure of the town of Fashoda (Kodok), in Egyptian Sudan (present-day Sudan), where Britain exerted an informal but highly effective overlordship.
And while Britain scowled at France, she tended to smile at Germany. An informal understanding between Britain and the German bloc - made up, at the time, of Austria and Italy - existed through a naval agreement with Italy (the same which had allowed Italy to build up that tremendous naval potential that had humiliated the USA - which, in turn, hardly displeased Whitehall). German and British prejudice against France mirrored each other, and the ruling classes of Britain had a high regard for the order and efficiency of Prussian Germany, its Protestant past, and the family connections between the countries - the royal family of Britain was of German origin twice over, with several extra infusions of German princesses. The English squirearchy tended to feel at home in North Germany, as indeed did the Prussian gentry in rural England, while neither of them could stomach France, either its temperamental and chaotic capital, or its obstinate Catholic provinces. (This prejudice was not restricted to conservatives: the great historian Mommsen, as upright and courageous a liberal as ever lived, had nothing but contempt for the political chaos and incoherence of France.) The tension between Germany and Russia, which had led Russia to make the alliance with Paris, were hardly unwelcome in London either, and in fact one might suspect that the beginnings of the Franco-Russian alliance had as much to do with restraining London as with Berlin, if not more so. And through Britain and Italy, Germany also had an indirect but not ineffective line to Japan, the swiftly rising power of the East.
These were the international relationships as the new century dawned. And we must add that while all the future allies had more than enough reasons to be at each other’s throats, nobody except France had much reason to hate or fear Germany. Prussian Germany, it is true, had been built on a foundation of cruel violence, of self-satisfied and even moralistic brutality, which had horrified contemporaries such as the historians Burckhardt and Mommsen. But that was long ago, and it might perhaps be justified, in many people’s eyes, by the formation of the long-desired united German state - and a state, at that, of astonishing prosperity and order, unlike that other product of the liberal revolution, Italy. Germany swiftly rose, not by military means, but by an unprecedented kind of cooperation between government, investors, and its vast university sector, to the foremost position in Europe, surpassing Britain, France and Russia and approaching the industrial power of the United States. And after the failure of his last aggressive campaign - against the Catholic Church - Bismarck had started to take the position of a peacemaker, an honest broker among European powers, careful only to keep France as isolated and helpless as possible. Except for France, no country had been given reason to hate or fear Germany; fences had been mended even with the Vatican, to the point where the great Pope Leo XIII, in one of the most cynical acts in Vatican history, had made the Lutheran former persecutor a Papal knight.
This was how Europe and the world appeared in the last decade of the nineteenth century. And yet, between 1898 and 1917, all these rival powers, most of which had either gone to war with each other or been in danger of doing so within living memory, came to the conclusion, each of them separately and all of them together, that Germany’s war-making power had to be destroyed; and this resolution was so strong that through five years of bloodshed, defeat, and struggle without hope, in which the Allies were often humiliated not only by Germany but even by Turkey, not one of them even suggested the possibility of negotiations. At the end of the war, the Austrian politician Count Ottokar Czernin testified that the Empires had never once in five years received peace feelers from any Allied government - all peace initiatives, such as they were, had started from Germany and Austria. The Allies were resolute, from beginning to end, that no negotiated peace with Germany was worth making; and conversely, the repeated efforts at peace-making on the Austrian and German side shows that the Empires would have regarded a negotiated peace as advantageous to them - in fact, as a kind of victory. And between 1916 and 1917, as German victory seemed to be coming ever closer - Serbia, Russia and Rumania defeated and occupied, Italy in November 1917 reduced to the last extremity, France paralyzed by the largest troop mutiny in the history of the world - each of the three leading allies, in turn, dismissed their existing governments in favour of a new, one, each led by a foremost leader of the non-Marxist left - Lloyd George in Britain, Orlando in Italy, Clemenceau in France - with a mandate to carry on the war at all costs.
In other words, the approach of German victory stimulated nothing in her opponents except an obstinate desire to resist at all costs; as well as, in neutral America, the decision to intervene. The political leaderships of Britain, France, Italy, and America, as well as that of several smaller countries, seemed clear that anything was better than peace with Germany. (Indeed, the same might be said even of the failed republican government of Kerensky in Russia, who intended to go on fighting at all costs - and, as we will see, had the nation on its side.)
Incredibly, even the great mutiny of the French troops in 1917 implied no desire whatever for peace with Germany. The troops simply refused to be thrown away in wasteful attacks; but they would, and did, defend themselves and their country against enemy attacks. This was the common platform of all the 55 divisions that mutinied, and it was the reason why, through all the long months of crisis, the Germans never realized that anything was amiss. Any time they attacked, they met with fierce resistance.
The speed, the depth, and the dramatic intensity of this change, alone, would be enough to show that something more than chance or political calculation lay behind it. The passion to stop Germany at all costs was universal. In nineteen years, Germany had managed to make itself the enemy of the world.
At this point, my readers will be rubbing their eyes. This is a story they know - a German government starting with a divided and squabbling world and, within ten or fifteen years, uniting it all against itself, embarking on a war which they look like they can win till, as a satirist once said, enemies started growing by the roadside, and they were overwhelmed. They know it all; the disasters in France and Russia; the new British government, led by the former bugbear Churchill, with a mandate to prosecute the war at all costs; the forced and late entry of America; the cloud of lesser allies, including Brazil; the iron alliance between the most unlikely of allies, all resolute to do anything rather than accept German victory; the final victory, after which former allies fall out again. But this, surely, is the story of World War Two, not One? Have I got my facts wrong? Indeed I have not. Ask yourselves rather, did you think that Hitler came from nowhere? That was not the impression that contemporary observers, who had known Germany before Hitler and even before the Great War, had. The general feeling in 1939 is in the bitter French joke reported by C.S.Lewis: “Well, that was a good armistice!”
In terms of visible actions, the worst culprit for unleashing the slaughter was not Germany but her ally, Austria-Hungary. It was Austria, rather than Germany, that had a well-developed Secret Service whose actions, as they were progressively discovered, gave strength to the sense of an Austro-German plan to subjugate Europe. Austrian intelligence had penetrated many supposedly enemy countries, interfered in the Papal election of 1902, secretly purchased a controlling share in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro - when this was discovered, at the worst possible moment, in August 1914, it gave the final push to French enthusiasm for the war. And it was Austria who, in 1908, illegally annexated Bosnia-Herzegovina, which it had so far administered on behalf of the Turkish Empire, without informing its supposed ally Italy - a visibly hostile act. From 1908, the estrangement between Italy and her allies became serious. Finally, it was Austria who, in August 1914, made war inevitable, deliberately forcing Serbia into it. Austria, more than any other European power, wanted war, and in 1908 a secret memorandum from the Army chief Conrad explained why: “War must take place now or soon, because the enemy countries, Serbia, Russia and Italy, grow more powerful every day.” This memo called Italy, with which Austria had a treaty of alliance, an enemy power, and showed well enough the secret thoughts of the Austrian leadership. It also indicated a desire to expand territorially into the Balkans, which, while not insane in terms of the mentality of the time - Europe and the USA had just experienced a century of unparalleled territorial growth, and found it easy to imagine that territorial growth was the natural duty of any state - was pointless and damaging in terms of the Austro-Hungarian entity, which would have been saddled with territories that had nothing historically or culturally to share with it. It was, in fact, this territorial ambition that started the war, since Gavrilo Princip and his accomplices had intended to strike at the Austrian plans for Bosnia and the rest of the Balkans.
But if Austria went mad at this time, it was because it had fallen in love with Prussian ways and the Prussian mentality. The subtle and growing sense of unease that spread across Europe from the turn of the century onwards did not originate with any Austrian belligerance; Austria had neither the means nor the influence to scare the rest of Europe, much less to scare it together into one alliance.
It came from Germany. There never was in all the world a more benevolent, balanced and warmly affectionate mind and heart than G.K.Chesterton. Here is his account of a visit to a German university in 1909: Some time after all these events, I had to visit Frankfurt, where I took on rather casually the task of lecturing on English literature to a congress of German schoolmasters. We discussed Walter Scott's Marmion and other metrical romances; we sang English songs over German beer, and had a very pleasant time. But there was already stirring, even among those mild and amiable Germans, something that was not so pleasant; and though they expressed it quite politely, I suddenly found myself once more in the same difficulty about the national and the imperial notion. For, speaking to some of them at large about literature, as to a merely cosmopolitan world of culture, I touched on this preference of mine for what some consider a narrower national idea. I found that they also were puzzled; they assured me, with that gravity with which Germans alone can repeat what they regard as a platitude, that Imperialismus and Patriotismus were the same thing. When they discovered that I did not like Imperialismus, even for my own country, a very curious expression came into their eyes, and a still more curious notion seems to have come into their heads. They formed the extraordinary idea that I was an internationalist indifferent, or even hostile, to English interests. Perhaps they thought Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an alias of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Anyhow, they began to talk more openly, but still vaguely; and there grew gradually on my consciousness the conviction that these extraordinary people really thought that I might accept or approve, on some toshy ethnological or sociological ground or other, the extension of the Teutonic Race at the expense even of the impotence or absorption of my own land. It was a somewhat difficult situation; for they said nothing definite that I had any right to resent; it was merely that I felt in the atmosphere a pressure and a threat. It was Der Tag. After thinking a moment, I said, "Well, gentlemen, if it ever came to anything like that, I think I should have to refer you to the poem of Scott that we have been discussing." And I gravely repeated the answer of Marmion, when King James says that they may meet again in war as far south as Tamworth Castle.
Much honour'd were my humble home,
If in its halls King James should come;
But Nottingham has archers good,
And Yorkshire men are stern of mood;
Northumbrian prickers wild and rude. ...
And many a banner will be torn,
And many a knight to earth be borne,
And many a sheaf of arrows spent,
Ere Scotland's King shall cross the Trent.
I looked at them and they at me, and I think they understood; and there rose up like an enormous shadow over that drinking-hall the terror of things to be.
Chesterton, as usual, had seen right. This mood had been growing for years. It was something that all visitors to Germany, everyone who spoke with Germans, or who followed German cultural development with some care, could not miss. There were, of course, plenty of appeasers, plenty of people who did not want to admit what perversion was seizing a fellow European country, or who thought themselves too clever; but in the end facts were too much for anyone. Horrified accounts of German attitudes and German views were among the things that convinced Italy, America and Brazil to enter the war. Many of them are now available free on the Internet, so that there really is no excuse for the enduring ignorance on this matter. In Project Gutenberg, for instance, you may read Daniel Curtin’s The land of deepening shadow and Thomas F.A.Smith’s What Germany thinks, two cool, documented and rigorous descriptions of the German mind during the war. Even ninety years after the event, reading them is enough to make your hair stand on end, and to admit that not only ten, but fifty million dead were not too much to pay to preserve us from rule by such a power.
The proper comparison for the German mind before and during the war is modern Muslim terrorism. The adoration of hatred (during the war, Germany held regular “hatred days”); the firm belief that God has so ordained the world that “we” must fight wars in which “we” prevail, and that if “we” do not prevail, the fault is with conspiracies managed by evil, subtle inimical political powers; the very slogan “our enemies love life, we love death” - all these things are in common. And where the Muslims have God, the Germans had a brutal, oversimplified, yet professorial and abstract Social Darwinism. Stephen Jay Gould, an excellent amateur culture historian, has rediscovered yet another contemporary account of German minds, Vernon Kellogg’s Headquarters Nights. (It has now been reprinted and is available from Amazon.) Kellogg, an outstanding scientist and a leader of Darwinist thought in America, became involved in neutral relief in Belgium. This brought him into contact with German Headquarters, where he found that many of the generals and officers were former university professors, and, like him, promoters of the theory of evolution. Thus he got an exposure to their minds that scarred him and everyone who read his book. As Gould tells the story,
…he was posted at the headquarters of the German Great General staff, the only American on the premises. Night after night, he listened to dinner discussions and arguments, sometimes in the presence of the Kaiser himself, among Germany’s highest military officers. Headquarters Nights is Kellogg’s account of these exchanges. He arrived in Europe as a pacifist, but left committed to the destruction of German militarism by force.
Kellogg was appalled, above all, at the justification for war and German supremacy advanced by these officers, many of whom had been university professors before the war (FPB’s note; and went back to it afterwards, with the results to be expected. General Karl Haushofer was a Professor of Geopolitics at the University of Munich in the early twenties; his prize student was Rudolf Hess, and Hitler and Goering were also strongly affected by his theories.). They not only proposed an evolutionary rationale, but advocated a particularly crude form of natural selection, defined as inexorable, bloody battle:
Professor von Flussen is Neo-Darwinian, as are most German biologists and natural philosophers. The creed of the all macht (Gould’s note: “all-might”, or omnipotence) of a natural selection based on violent an competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals; all else is illusion and anathema…. This struggle not only must go on, for that is the natural law, but it should go on, so that this natural law may work out, in its cruel, inevitable way, the salvation of the human species… That human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage… should win in the struggle for existence, and this struggle should occur precisely [so] that the various types may be tested, and the best not only preserved, but put in position to impose its kind of social organization - its Kultur - on the others, or alternatively to destroy and replace them. This is the disheartening kind of argument that I faced at Headquarters… Add the additional assumption that the Germans are the chosen race, and that German social and political organization the chosen type of human community life, and you have a wall of logic and convinction that you can break your head against, but can never shatter - by headwork. You long for the muscles of Samson.
…horrible academic casuistry and… convinction that the individual is nothing, the State everything.
Notice, in particular, the insistence on the academic quality of what might be called the German heresy. This obscene perversion of morality and sense had been worked out largely in the most advanced and successful academic sector in Europe. And the rot had been going on for a long time before the war started - remember Chesterton’s German academics in 1909, who, upon finding out that Chesterton’s view of patriotism did not include imperialism, immediately concluded that he must be a racist who believed in the superiority and unity of Teutonic nations. They had no other perspective; they had used all their learning to wipe all other perspectives from their minds.
This attitude was already in embryo in Bismarck’s Prussia, if not indeed in Frederick II’s. Bismarck’s catastrophic success in uniting Germany by wholly dishonourable means (I do not have the space to describe what he did, but it is true that there is not one step in his political process that would not make an honest man blush for shame) riveted on all patriotic Germans the creed that might makes right and that the end justifies the means. Although the papers of Bismarck and his collaborators were kept secret until 1945, in the justified belief that they would disgrace Germany if published, enough was known from the mere public face of the facts - the brutal assault on defenceless Denmark; the partition of the Duchies, to whom independence had been promised, between Austria and Prussia; the faithless assault on Austria, with the result of excluding ten million Austrian Germans from the Reich; and finally, the cold-blooded placing of France in a situation where it literally had no choice but declare war on Prussia - all this meant that a German patriot had the pleasant choice between justifying immorality or condemning the formation of a national state formed wholly by political criminality. And of course, the successful criminals now ruled Germany, and had made the other 35 sovereigns of the German Empire their collaborators.
Moral complicity flowed down the political and social structures of the new Empire like oil, necessary to keep the structure working smoothly, and was further confirmed by the immense industrial success of the new State, which was, by 1900, the second industrial power in the world. There was, in the German mind, a diseased connect between the good, sound, and justified love of country - the thing that made ancient Greeks say “Nobody loves his country because it is great, but because it is his” - and the assertion of immorality, and what is more of the need and justice of immorality, in politics. In the end, the German madness may be defined as follows: a rigidly moralistic belief in immorality. And now I have to make a statement of my own view of human nature. My view is that morality is an innate part of human nature, and that a man or group of people cannot destroy it in themselves without performing something best described as self-rape. And it is also my view that this self-rape, once performed, is not finished with; it remains in the mind and soul as a bleeding wound, creating a constant wellspring of anger, love of cruelty, and desire to humiliate. Having performed this violence upon themselves, those who subject themselves to this self-rape need to make reparations to their permanently injured and maimed soul; and they do so by inflicting upon others wounds comparable to, or worse than, anything they are suffering at their own hand. Hence the crooked, horrible Prussian pleasure in oppression, the Prussian cultural brutality and - be it noted - preference for immorality, not just as being useful, but as being in some sense more moral than morality!
Once again I turn to Chesterton, for his memorable account of the founder of modern Prussia, Frederick II: Everything was young once, even Frederick the Great. It was an appropriate preface to the terrible epic of Prussia that it began with an unnatural tragedy of the loss of youth. That blind and narrow savage who was the boy's father had just sufficient difficulty in stamping out every trace of decency in him, to show that some such traces must have been there. If the younger and greater Frederick ever had a heart, it was a broken heart; broken by the same blow that broke his flute. When his only friend was executed before his eyes, there were two corpses to be borne away; and one to be borne on a high war-horse through victory after victory: but with a small bottle of poison in the pocket. (The terrible crime to which the great writer refers was the hanging of the young prince’s closest friend, in front of his eyes, by his father, who was as nearly insane as anyone can be without being actually committed. The crazy old king believed his son to be homosexual and this man to be his lover. He may have been right, too. And Frederick II certainly did carry a vial of poison with him during his wars, in case he was captured; not unlike his remote Nazi successors.) It is not irrelevant thus to pause upon the high and dark house of his childhood. For the peculiar quality which marks out Prussian arms and ambitions from all others of the kind consists in this wrinkled and premature antiquity. There is something comparatively boyish about the triumphs of all the other tyrants. There was something better than ambition in the beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. He was at least a lover; and his first campaign was like a love-story. All that was pagan in him worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman, and all that was Catholic in him understood the paradox of Our Lady of Victories. Henry VIII, a far less reputable person, was in his early days a good knight of the later and more florid school of chivalry; we might almost say that he was a fine old English gentleman so long as he was young. Even Nero was loved in his first days: and there must have been some cause to make that Christian maiden cast flowers on his dishonourable grave. But the spirit of the great Hohenzollern smelt from the first of the charnel. He came out to his first victory like one broken by defeats; his strength was stripped to the bone and fearful as a fleshless resurrection; for the worst of what could come had already befallen him. The very construction of his kingship was built upon the destruction of his manhood. He had known the final shame; his soul had surrendered to force. He could not redress that wrong; he could only repeat it and repay it. He could make the souls of his soldiers surrender to his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could make the souls of the nations surrender to his soldiers. He could only break men in as he had been broken; while he could break in, he could never break out. He could not slay in anger, nor even sin with simplicity. Thus he stands alone among the conquerors of their kind; his madness was not due to a mere misdirection of courage. Before the whisper of war had come to him the foundations of his audacity had been laid in fear.
Of the work he did in this world there need be no considerable debate. It was romantic, if it be romantic that the dragon should swallow St.George. He turned a small country into a great one: he made a new diplomacy by the fulness and far-flung daring of his lies: he took away from criminality all reproach of carelessness and incompleteness. He achieved an amiable combination of thrift and theft. He undoubtedly gave to stark plunder something of the solidity of property. He protected whatever he stole as simpler men protect whatever they have earned or inherited. He turned his hollow eyes with a sort of loathsome affection upon the territories which had most reluctantly become his: at the end of the Seven Years' War men knew as little how he was to be turned out of Silesia as they knew why he had ever been allowed in it. In Poland, like a devil in possession, he tore asunder the body he inhabited; but it was long before any man dreamed that such disjected limbs could live again. Nor were the effects of his break from Christian tradition confined to Christendom; Macaulay's world-wide generalisation is very true though very Macaulayese. But though, in a long view, he scattered the seeds of war all over the world, his own last days were passed in a long and comparatively prosperous peace; a peace which received and perhaps deserved a certain praise: a peace with which many European peoples were content. For though he did not understand justice, he could understand moderation. He was the most genuine and the most wicked of pacifists. He did not want any more wars. He had tortured and beggared all his neighbours; but he bore them no malice for it. An epitaph which applies just as well to the Chancellor of his successors, Bismarck; and a description of that same mental process of inner and outer rape which I tried to describe.
Crooked and cruel as he was, a militant immoralist disposed to deceive and compel his own king - for the King’s own good, obviously! - Bismarck had nevertheless a gift of common sense. Nobody could withdraw faster if he felt a battle was lost, or dismiss more coldly anyone who made proposals that were rash or did not contribute to the final greatness of Prussia. But his commonsense was his private property, whereas his belief in cruelty and immorality was the collective possession of all Prussia. From the 1890s on, deprived of the habits of mind and influence of Bismarck, Germany went slowly mad; but the roots of this madness, in truth, were deep into the Bismarckian “age of peace”. Prussian Germany had been built on war; the officers’ corps, thoroughly integrated into the landed aristocracy, was its leading social class; immoralism rested snug and untouched in the core of its riot of intellectual and economic activity. It was in the way to use brute force that Bismarck - especially the latter Bismarck, made wise by victories and defeats both - differed from his successors, but not on the basic conception: that at the heart of everything lies the iron fist. Bismarck’s successors felt that they could dispense with his caution, his careful evaluation of opposing forces, his devious way of setting one opponent against another - even to the extent of granting the sizeable mouthful of Tunisia to the arch-enemy, France, if by that means Italy could be further estranged from France and driven to a German alliance. They felt that Germany was powerful enough to look at nobody in the face.
Part of this madness was an increasing incapacity to understand the rest of the world. Germany, in effect, only spoke to itself. Not only among the dominant officers' corps, but even in the Foreign Ministry, one could often hear the view that "we" simply do not care what a lot of damned foreigners were thinking. But more to the point - and once again, Chesterton's experience in Frankfurt is symptomatic - even where Germans were brought up against foreigners, they simply were unable to understand them. Their academic and bookish view of the world simply did not take in the realities of French, British, American, Italian attitudes. As a result, before, during, and after the war, German diplomacy was a series of blunders and blind alleys; the worst and most fateful of which was when they went to negotiate for peace at Versailles under the firm and unbreakable convinction that they had not been defeated, only to find that the squabbling and already divided Allies were at one at least in this, that they HAD been. Germany was so detached from the real world as to be able to suffer a major defeat in war and not notice it.
Another effect of this moral separation from the European norm, this total lack of feeling for European feeling, was that Germany had already before the war built itself the reputation of a bully, a crook, and an immoralist. Too many Europeans and Americans had read German books and listened to German professors; too many of them were already prepared to regard Germany as an international bandit. In that situation, Germany could only escape the reputation of arch-warmonger and enemy of the world by behaving throughout in the most scrupulous way possible. Instead of which, it invaded Belgium for no good reason and in defiance of every treaty; and followed it up with a series of war crimes which, while exaggerated by rumour and dwarfed by her feats in World War Two, were nevertheless real and considerable enough that even German courts, after the war, were forced to hand down a certain amount of convictions.
What this meant was that Germany was condemned, in the court of world opinion, from the moment she invaded Belgium. From then on, the balance in the eyes of world opinion was such that, if Germany never committed a single other crime, she would still be regarded as the aggressor and the arch-criminal; and that even if the Allies committed any amount of crimes, they would be seen as justified by the need to resist German aggression. That Germany, on top of that, committed plenty of war crimes, that her ally Turkey committed even more, and that the Allies - with the obvious exception of Russia - fought really quite clean wars, only added to the moral default of the Central Empires. The Swedish doctor Axel Munthe was a Red Cross volunteer on the German front; like most Swedes, he had started with a presumption in favour of Germany, but what he saw made him conceive a violent hatred of Germany, and an equally burning admiration for the civilized and courageous Allies. (Alas, being a terrible writer, his memories of the war, called Red Cross and Iron Cross, are atrociously overcharged and purple; but what he describes is bad enough.)
Germany learned nothing. The war itself, if anything , deepened this collective pathology. Finding itself regarded as the bandit of the world, Germany only concluded that the enemy had been smarter at propaganda - a legend that has endured ever since. (In fact, Allied propaganda was fairly crude, as may be seen from the furious caricature of Siegfried Sassoon.) It is not some Western propagandist, but Count Czernin, the Austrian leader, who says that “Had Germany been victorious her militarism would have increased enormously. In the summer of 1917 I spoke to several generals of high standing on the Western front, who unanimously declared that after the war armaments must be maintained, but on a very much greater scale. They compared this war with the First Punic War. It would be continued and its continuation be prepared for; in short, the tactics of Versailles. The standard of violence must be planted, and would be the banner of the generals, the Pan-Germans, the Fatherland Party, etc. etc… Emperor, Government and Reichstag floundered helplessly in this torrent of violent purpose". The First Punic War, by the way, was the war in which Rome broke out of the Italian peninsula and lay the bases for its naval power and its conquest of the Mediterranean; the parallel implying that future German conquests would compare to pre-war Germany as the total of the eventual Roman Empire compared to the Italian peninsula. This seems to me a quite firm and final answer to the question, why did ten million men have to die to stop Germany?
Having said this, there still are a lot of myths to be cleared. Were the generals - in particular, the Entente ones - really as incompetent as they have been made out to be? Was the slaughter as crazed and careless? And was the final peace of Versailles really that vindictive, crushing abortion that so many accounts imply? As you can imagine, my view of these things is somewhat different from the Vulgate’s; but all these questions, interesting as they are, also come within another, more broad and encompassing, and more directly connected with our world and our life today. That is: how and why did these orthodoxies come to have the power they gained, even among people who had lived in the war itself and could remember why it was fought? I will deal with these matters in future posts; meanwhile, I would welcome comments and (polite) criticism.