Lest We Forget

Like most people of my generation, I grew up with a mystery. I felt Iunderstood the Second World War. The attempt to dominate and destroy, toeliminate the people of other races -- though raised to unprecedented levels bythe Nazis - is a familiar historical theme. The need to stop Hitler wasabsolute, and the dreadful sacrifices of the Second World War were unavoidable.

But the First World War, which ended 90 years ago today, seemedincomprehensible. The class interests of the men sent to kill each other werethe same. While Germany was clearly the aggressor, the outlook of the opposingpowers - seeking to expand their colonies and to dominate European trade -- wasnot wildly different. Ugly as the German state was, no one could characterisethe war at its outbreak -- with Tsarist Russia on the side of the Entente Powers-- as a simple struggle between democracy and dictatorship. Neither did thisresemble the current war in Iraq, in which legislators send the children ofanother class to die. The chances of being killed were at least five timeshigher for men who had been students at Oxford or Cambridge in 1914 than theywere for manual workers(1). The First World War was an act of socialcannibalism, in which statesmen and generals on both sides murdered their ownoffspring. How could it have happened?

On July 1st 1999, consumed by the urge to understand the war before the centurywas over, I visited Thiepval on the Somme. This was the anniversary of the firstgreat attack on the German salients, which caused devastating losses for Britishand Irish troops. Men carrying flutes and dressed in orange sashes --commemorating the Ulster Division -- paced about. Beneath the arches of theLutyens memorial a circle of evangelical Christians hugged and screamed andululated, while a little boy dressed in combat gear played around their legswith a plastic machine-gun. I goggled at the names on the monument -- the 73,000commemorate only the British and South Africans who fell on the Somme and whosebodies were not recovered -- but I couldn’t grasp the scale of what I saw.

Dizzied by these conflicting sights, unable to connect, I wandered behind theold German lines and into a field of sugar beet. Walking between the rows,trying to clear my head, I noticed a spherical pebble. I picked it up. It wasstrangely heavy. Then I looked around and saw that the field was covered withthe same odd little balls. Almost every stone was in fact metal. Within a minuteI picked up more grapeshot than I could hold. I found shell casings, twistedbullets, fragments of barbed wire, chips of armour plating. I stopped,overwhelmed by shock and recognition. It was a field of lead and steel; andevery piece had been manufactured to kill someone.

There are plenty of words to describe the horrors of World War Two. But therewere none, as far as I could discover, that captured the character of the FirstWorld War. So I constructed one from the Greek word ephebos, a young man offighting age. Ephebicide is the wanton mass slaughter of the young by the old.But how did it happen, and why?

In his fascinating book The Last Great War, published a fortnight ago,Adrian Gregory shows that the notion that Britain was carried to war on a waveof patriotic enthusiasm is false(2). The crowds that gathered around BuckinghamPalace and in Downing Street when war was declared seem to have been morecurious than excited. Most people appear to have greeted the war withresignation or dismay. Nor does voluntary enlistment provide clear evidence ofenthusiasm. It is true that some wanted to fight, and others saw war as a moreexciting prospect that working in a dead-end office job(3). But Gregory showsthat voluntarism wasn’t all that it seemed. For many men fighting was the onlyemployment on offer. The largest numbers volunteered not at the very beginningof war, but after the disaster at Mons on August 24th, when it became clear thatthere was a genuine threat to national defence(4).

The speed with which the war began and Britain joined made effective resistanceimpossible to organise. By the time the anti-war meetings had been called, itwas too late. And by then there was a genuine need to stop Germany. It was asrational to seek to curtail German expansionism in August 1914 as it was inSeptember 1939.

But the narratives, like Gregory’s, which suggest that World War One wasinevitable begin late in the sequence of events(5). Another anniversary, almostforgotten in this country, falls tomorrow. On November 12th 1924, Edmund DeneMorel died. Morel had been a shipping clerk, based in Liverpool and Antwerp, whohad noticed, in the late 1890s, that while ships belonging to King Leopold werereturning from the Congo to Belgium full of ivory, rubber and other goods, theywere departing with nothing but soldiers and ammunition. He realised thatLeopold’s colony must be a slave state, and launched an astonishing andultimately successful effort to break the king’s grip(6). For a while hebecame a national hero. A few years later he became a national villain.

During his Congo campaign, Morel had become extremely suspicious of the secretdiplomacy pursued by the British foreign office. In 1911, he showed how a secretunderstanding between Britain and France over the control of Morocco, followedby a campaign in the British press based on misleading foreign office briefings,had stitched up Germany and very nearly caused a European war(7). In February1912 he warned that "no greater disaster could befall both peoples [Britainand Germany], and all that is most worthy of preservation in moderncivilization, than a war between them."(8) Convinced that Britain had struck asecond secret agreement with France, that would drag us into any war whichinvolved Russia, he campaigned for such treaties to be made public; forrecognition that Germany had been hoodwinked over Morocco and for the Britishgovernment to seek to broker a reconciliation between France and Germany.

In response British ministers lied. The prime minister and the foreign secretaryrepeatedly denied that there was any secret agreement with France(9). Only onthe day before war was declared did the foreign secretary admit that a treatyhad been in place since 1906. It ensured that Britain would have to fight fromthe moment Russia mobilised. Morel continued to oppose the war and became, untilhis dramatic rehabilitation after 1918, one of the most reviled men in Britain.

Could the Great War have been averted if, in 1911, the British government haddone as Morel suggested? No one knows, as no such attempt was made. Far fromseeking to broker a European peace, Britain, pursuing its self-interesteddiplomatic intrigues, helped to make war more likely. Germany was the aggressor;but the image of affronted virtue cultivated by Britain was a false one. Faced,earlier in the century, with the possibilities of peace, the old men of Europehad decided that they would rather kill their children than change theirpolicies.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Adrian Gregory, 2008. The Last Great War: British society and the First WorldWar, p.290. Cambridge University Press.

2. ibid, pp9-17; 24-30.

3. ibid, p31.

4. ibid, p32.

5. Another example is Gary Sheffield, November 2008. TheOrigins of World War One. BBC Online.

6. See Adam Hochschild, 1999. King Leopold’s Ghost. Pan Macmillan, London.

7. F. Seymour Cocks, 1920. E. D. Morel: the man and his work. George Allen &Unwin, London. The text of this book is available online

8. ED Morel, 1912. Morocco in Diplomacy. Quoted by F. Seymour Cocks, ibid.

9. Asquith denied it on March 10th 1913 and March 24th 1913. Grey denied it onApril 28th 1914 and June 11th 1914.