Niall Ferguson
THE PITY OF WAR
Chapter One: The Myths of Militarism
Prophets
It is often asserted that the First World War was caused by culture: to be precise, the culture of militarism, which is said to have prepared men so well for war that they yearned for it. Some men certainly foresaw war; but how many actually looked forward to it is doubtful.
If the First World War was caused by self-fulfilling prophecies, then one of the earliest prophets was Headon Hill, whose novel The Spies of Wight(1899) revolves around the sinister machinations of German spies against Britain. This was the beginning of a spate of fictional anticipations of a future Anglo-German war. A. C. Curtis's A New Trafalgar(1902) was one of the first novels to imagine a lightning German naval strike against Britain in the absence of the Channel Squadron; fortunately, the Royal Navy has a lethal new battleship in reserve which wins the day. In Erskine Childers's famous yarn The Riddle of the Sands(1903), the heroes Carruthers and Davies stumble across evidence of a German plan whereby
multitudes of sea-going lighters, carrying full loads of soldiers ... should issue simultaneously in seven ordered fleets from seven shallow outlets and, under the escort of the Imperial navy, traverse the North Sea and throw themselves bodily upon English shores.
Following a similar invasion, Jack Montmorency, the schoolboy hero of L. James's The Boy Galloper(also 1903), has to leave the Prefects' room and don his Cadet Corps uniform to take on the Germans. Perhaps the most famous of all the fictional German invasions was imagined by William Le Queux in his breathless bestseller The Invasion of 1910, first serialized in the Daily Mailin 1906, which imagined a successful invasion of England by a 40,000-strong German army followed by such horrors as `The Battle of Royston' and `The Bombardment of London'. When the Eagle Flies Seaward(1907) increased the invading force to 60,000, but was essentially the same story; both stories end — no doubt to the relief of British readers — with the defeat of the invaders. In R. W. Cole's The Death Trap(1907), it is the Japanese who come to the rescue after the Kaiser's invasion force has landed. It was not until A. J. Dawson's The Message(also 1907) that the prospect of an irretrievable British débâcle — leading to occupation, reparations and the loss of several colonies — had to be faced.
In Dawson's book, significantly, the enemy is within as well as without: while pacifists demonstrate for disarmament in Bloomsbury, a German waiter tells our hero: `Vaire shtrong, sare, ze Sherman Armay.' It turns out that he and thousands of other German immigrants have been acting as pre-invasion intelligence-gatherers, ensuring that `the German Army knew almost to a bale of hay what provender lay between London and the coast'. E. Phillips Oppenheim's A Maker of History(1905) had already started this hare. As `Captain X', the head of German intelligence in London, explains:
There are in this country 290,000 young countrymen of yours and of mine who have served their time, and who can shoot ... Clerks, waiters and hairdressers ... each have their work assigned to them. The forts which guard this great city may be impregnable from without, but from within — that is another matter.
Similarly, in Walter Wood's The Enemy in our Midst(1906) there is a `German Committee of Secret Preparations' covertly laying the foundation for a putsch in London. There were numerous variations on this theme: so many that the phrase `spy fever' seems warranted. In 1909, perhaps Le Queux's most influential novel, Spies of the Kaiser,was published, which posited the existence of a secret network of German spies in Britain. Also in 1909 came Captain Curties's When England Slept; here London is occupied overnight by a German army which has entered the kingdom by stealth over a period of weeks.
Nor were such fantasies confined to penny-dreadful fiction. The traveller and poet Charles Doughty produced some quaintly archaic verses on the subject, notably The Cliffs (1909) and, three years later, The Clouds— bizarre works in which the imagined invaders express the ideas of Le Queux in pseudo-Chaucerian language. Major Guy du Maurier's play An Englishman's Home(1909) translated the same fantasy on to the stage. Schoolboys too had to confront the nightmare of invasion. Beginning in December 1913 the magazine Chumsran a serial about yet another Anglo-German war to come. In 1909 the Aldeburgh Lodge school magazine rather wittily imagined how children would be taught in 1930, assuming that England by then would have become merely `a small island off the western coast of Teutonia'.
Even Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) — one of the few popular writers of the period still read with any respect — tried his hand at the genre. In When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns(1913) his hero, Murrey Yeovil — `bred and reared as a unit of a ruling race' — returns from darkest Asia to find a vanquished Britain `incorporated within the Hohenzollern Empire ... as a Reichsland, a sort of Alsace-Lorraine washed by the North Sea instead of the Rhine', with continental-style cafés in the `Regentstrasse' and on-the-spot fines for walking on the grass in Hyde Park. Though Yeovil yearns to resist the Teutonic occupation, he finds himself deserted by his Tory contemporaries, who have fled (along with George V) to Delhi, leaving behind a despicable crew of collaborators, including Yeovil's own amoral wife, her Bohemian friends, various petty bureaucrats and the `ubiquitous' Jews. Note here the strangely tolerable, even seductive quality of German conquest — at least, to the more decadent Britons. Ernest Oldmeadow's earlier North Sea Bubble(1906) also imagined the Germans wooing their new vassals with universal Christmas gifts and subsidised food. Indeed, the worst atrocities inflicted by the occupiers in Oldmeadow's German Britain are the introduction of a diet of sausages and sauerkraut, the correct spelling of Handel's name in concert programmes and Home Rule for Ireland.
The Germans too had their visions of wars to come. Karl Eisenhart's The Reckoning with England(1900) imagines Britain, defeated in the Boer War, being attacked by France. Britain imposes a naval blockade, ignoring the rights of neutral shipping; and it is this which precipitates war between Britain and Germany. A German secret weapon (the electrically powered battleship) decides the war in the latter's favour, and the joyful Germans reap a rich harvest of British colonies, including Gibraltar. In World War — German Dreams(1904) August Niemann imagined `the armies and fleets of Germany, France and Russia moving together against the common enemy' — Britain — 'who with his polypus arms enfolds the globe'. The French and German navies defeat the Royal Navy and an invasion force lands at the Firth of Forth. Max Heinrichka envisaged (in Germany's Future in 100 Years) an Anglo-German war over Holland, culminating in another successful German invasion. As in Niemann's story, victory allows Germany to acquire the choicest parts of the Empire. Not all German writers were so confident, admittedly. Sink, Burn, Destroy: The Blow Against Germany(1905) reversed the roles: here it is the British navy which defeats the German, and it is Hamburg which has to endure a British invasion.
On the basis of such evidence, it would be easy to argue that the First World War happened at least partly because people expected it to happen. Indeed, books like these continued to be produced even after the prophecy had been fulfilled. Le Queux rushed out The German Spy: A Present-Day Story in late 1914 and Gaumont's previously banned film version of The Invasion of 1910was released under the title If England Were Invaded. Paul Georg Münch's Hindenburg's March on London, which imagined the victor of Tannenberg leading a successful cross-Channel invasion, was published in 1915.
Such fantasies, however, need to be seen in a wider context. Not all prophets of war expected it to be between England and Germany. In fact, hardly any pre-1900 works in the genre concerned a German enemy. With uncanny prescience, the authors of The Great War of 189—, published in 1891 in the illustrated weekly Black and White, began their imagined war in the Balkans with a royal assassination (an attempt on the life of Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria, apparently by Russian agents). When Serbia seizes the moment to declare war on Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary occupies Belgrade, prompting Russia to send troops into Bulgaria. Germany honours her treaty obligations by mobilizing against Russia in support of Austria-Hungary, while France honours hers by declaring war on Germany in support of Russia. However, there is a twist in the tale. Having initially remained neutral — despite the German violation of Belgian neutrality — Britain lands troops at Trebizond in support of Turkey, prompting France and Russia to declare war on her. There follows a major engagement between the British and French navies off Sardinia and two short, decisive battles outside Paris between the French and German armies — the second won by a heroic French charge. In Louis Tracy's The Final War(1893), Germany and France conspire to invade and conquer Britain, but at the eleventh hour the Germans defect to the British side and it is Paris which falls to Lord Roberts: a triumph for combined Anglo-Saxon might. Even William Le Queux had started his scaremongering career as a Francophobe and Russophobe, not a Germanophobe: his The Poisoned Bullet(also 1893) has the Russians and French invading Britain. The later England's Peril: A Story of the Secret Servicehas as its villain the chief of the French Secret Service `Gaston La Touche'.
The Boer War precipitated a spate of similar anti-French stories: The Campaign of Douai (1899), London's Peril (1900), The Great French War of 1901, The New Battle of Dorking, The Coming Waterloo and Max Pemberton's Pro Patria (all 1901), two of which featured a French invasion launched through a Channel tunnel. In Louis Tracy's The Invaders(1901), the invasion of Britain is a joint Franco-German venture. The same fearful combination features in A New Trafalgar (1902) and in The Death Trap(1907), though the French by now show an admirably perfidious tendency to desert their German confederates. The same theme attracted French writers, like the author of La Guerre avec l'Angleterre (1900).
There are similar variations in the German prophetic literature. Rudolf Martin's science-fiction extravaganza Berlin — Baghdad(1907) visualized `The German World Empire in the Age of Airship Travel, 1910-1931'; but here the principal conflict is between Germany and a post-revolutionary Russia. An ultimatum to England — prior to the complete unification of Europe under German leadership — comes as something of an afterthought and is soon forgotten when the Russians launch an air attack on India.
It should also be stressed that many contemporaries found the more febrile of the scaremongers simply laughable. In 1910 Charles Lowe, a former Times correspondent in Berlin, inveighed against books like Le Queux's Spies of the Kaiser, not because he did not believe that the German General Staff sent officers to gather information on England and other potential foes, but because the evidence adduced by writers like Le Queux was so slight. In 1908 Punchcruelly sent up Colonel Mark Lockwood, one of the most vociferous of spy maniacs in the House of Commons. A year later A. A. Milne lampooned Le Queux in `The Secret of the Army Aeroplane', also published in Punch:
`Tell us the whole facts, Ray,' urged Vera Vallance, the pretty fair-haired daughter of the Admiral Sir Charles Vallance, to whom he was engaged.
`Well, dear, they are briefly as follows,' he replied, with an affectionate glance at her ... `Last Tuesday a man with his moustache brushed up the wrong way alighted at Basingstoke station and inquired for the refreshment-room. This leads me to believe that a dastardly attempt is about to be made to wrest the supremacy of the air from our grasp.'
`And even in the face of this the Government denies the activity of German spies in England!' I exclaimed bitterly.
Perhaps the best of all these satires is P. G. Wodehouse's The Swoop! or, How Clarence Saved England: A Tale of the Great Invasion (1909), a wonderful reductio ad absurdumin which the country is simultaneously overrun (on the August Bank Holiday) by the Germans, the Russians, the Swiss, the Chinese, Monaco, Morocco and `the Mad Mullah'. Here the idea of a German invasion has become so commonplace that a newsvendor's poster reads as follows:
SURREYDOINGBADLY
German Army Lands in England
Frantically turning to the late news column, Wodehouse's Boy Scout hero finds the fateful news inserted almost invisibly between cricket scores and the late racing results. `Fry not out, 104. Surrey 147 for 8. A German army landed in Essex this afternoon. Loamshire Handicap: Spring Chicken, 1; Salome, 2; Yip-i-addy, 3. Seven ran.' Heath Robinson's eleven cartoons on the subject of German spies in The Sketch(1910) are almost as funny, depicting Germans disguised as birds, Germans dangling from trees in Epping Forest, Germans in bathing costumes raiding Yarmouth beach — even Germans disguised as exhibits in the Graeco-Roman galleries of the British Museum.
Germans too could see the absurdity of war prophecy. There is an obviously humorous map of the world of 1907 in which the British Empire is reduced to Iceland, leaving the rest — including even `Kgl. Preuss. Reg. Bez. Grossbritannien' — to Germany. Carl Siwinna's Guide for Fantasy Strategists(1908) rather laboriously but effectively demolishes the war prophets on both sides of the Channel.
Above all, the more bellicose prophets of war need to be set alongside those more pessimistic writers who perceptively foresaw that a major European war would be a calamity. H. G. Wells's War in the Air(1908) — unlike its German equivalent by Rudolf Martins — offers an airborne apocalypse, in which European civilization is `blown up' by bombardments from airships, leaving only `ruins and unburied dead, and shrunken yellow-faced survivors in a mortal apathy'. One of the most influential of all British books on the subject of future war argued that the consequences would be so economically calamitous that war would simply not happen: this, at least, was how many readers interpreted Norman Angell's The Great Illusion (see below).
Nor were all German prophets of war unequivocal `hawks'. In The Collapse of the Old World(1906), `Seestern' (Ferdinand Grauthoff, the editor of the Leipziger Neuesten Nachrichten) predicted that a minor clash between Britain and Germany over a colonial question such as Samoa could lead to `crash and ruin' and the `annihilation' of `peaceful civilization'. In retaliation for the imagined Samoese spat, the Royal Navy attacks Cuxhaven, precipitating a full-scale European war. This proves disastrously costly to both sides. The story ends with a prescient prophecy (delivered, intriguingly, by the former Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour):
THE DESTINY OF THE WORLD NO LONGER LIES IN THE HANDS OF THE TWO NAVAL POWERS OF THE GERMANIC RACE, NO LONGER WITH BRITAIN AND GERMANY, but on land it has fallen to Russia, and on sea to the United States of America. St Petersburg and Washington have taken the place of Berlin and London.
In a similar vein, Karl Bleibtreu's Offensive Invasion against England(1907) envisaged an ultimately disastrous German naval strike against British naval bases (an inversion of the `Copenhagen complex' of an analogous British attack which haunted the imaginations of German naval planners). Despite inflicting heavy losses, the Germans cannot hold out against a British blockade; the end result is once again to weaken both sides. Thus `every European war could only benefit the other continents of the world ... A naval war between the British and the Germans would be the beginning of the end — the collapse of the British Empire and of the European supremacy in Asia and Africa. Only a lasting friendly union of the two great Germanic races can save Europe.' Both Grauthoff and Bleibtreu conclude with ardent and rather modern-sounding appeals for European unity.
Obviously, the fact that so many different authors felt the need to imagine some kind of future war tempts us to conclude that a war was likely in the second decade of the twentieth century. But it is worth noting that of all the authors discussed above, not one accurately foresaw what the 1914-18 war would be like. As we shall see, the idea of a German invasion of Britain, the most popular of all scenarios, was entirely divorced from strategic reality. Ninety per cent of war fiction betrayed a colossal ignorance of the technical constraints with which armies, navies and air forces on all sides had to contend. In fact, only a handful of pre-war writers can be said to have forecast with any degree of accuracy what a war would be like.
One was Marx's collaborator Friedrich Engels, who in 1887 envisaged a
world war of never before seen extension and intensity, if the system of mutual outbidding in armament, carried to the extreme, finally bears its natural fruits ... [E]ight to ten million soldiers will slaughter each other and strip Europe bare as no swarm of locusts has ever done before. The devastations of the Thirty Years War condensed into three or four years and spread all over the continent; famine, epidemics, general barbarization of armies and masses, provoked by sheer desperation; utter chaos in our trade, industry and commerce, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their traditional wisdom in such a way that the crowns roll in the gutter by the dozens and there will be nobody to pick them up; absolute impossibility to foresee how all this will end and who will be victors in that struggle; only one result absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the creation of circumstances for the final victory of the working class.