It approaches the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, so it is entirely appropriate that I have now, after some months, finally finished the Christopher Clark account of how Europe went to war in 1914. This morning's take is rather long but rather good.
When I was very small the story was the the war was caused by railway timetables. That the business of getting hundreds of thousands of troops to the front by rail was so complicated and so tricky, that once you had started you couldn't stop. And the powers involved, particularly the great powers, were terrified that the other lot would start first and would get in the first, possibly killer punch.
I then moved onto 'The Good Soldier Švejk', a book with which I had a long and happy relationship, now dormant, from which I learned that the Austro-Hungarian empire was a sometimes brutal shambles which by 1914 or so, if not earlier, had reached its sell by date, along with the neighbouring Ottoman Empire.
More recently (see June 28th 2010 in the other place) I read some memoirs from Viscount Grey, the bird watching Foreign Secretary at the time and came away with the feeling that given where things had got to by July 1914 we did not have much choice but to join in on the side of the French and the Russians. As someone in the Clark book said at the time, if we stood aside and the Germans won that would be pretty bad and if we stood aside and the French & Russians won that would be pretty bad too. The former because the Germans would rule the roost in Europe and rapidly become a bigger cheese than ourselves, the latter because the Russians would then make trouble in various parts of our ever so important (at least it seemed so at the time) eastern empire. So joining in was the lesser evil.
I now take from Clark various other thoughts.
First, that the Serbians were a crude and bloodthirsty lot back in 1914 and don't seem to have got all that much better since. The Serbian government was involved, perhaps in a more or less deniable way, in the assassinations at Sarajevo and the Austrian government's ultimatum to the Serbs was not as unreasonable as is sometimes claimed. The Serbs had done wrong and should, in some way or another, have bent the knee.
Second, that power is a very diffuse thing. We talk of Britain doing this and France doing that, but this is just a summary of a very complex process involving quite a big cast of bureaucrats and soldiers, a process which was not that much different in the nominal autocracies such as Germany and Russia from that in the nominal democracies such as Britain and France.
Third, that in our eagerness to finish off the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, we quite overlooked the good things that they had been doing, not least holding together very mixed populations, in keeping the peace. Something that we continued to overlook when we finished off Saddam Hussein.
Fourth, that the Russians in some sense started it. If they had been content to let the Austrian sort out the Serbs, not got into a passion about their fellow Slavs down south and not mobilised (first), then maybe the Germans and the French would have stayed quiet. We would just have had the fourth Balkan War (or whatever) and not the first World War.
And railway timetables with which I started still had a role. The great powers, or at least their soldiers, seemed to be very keen on getting in first, of concentrating then unleashing overwhelming force, the knock-out blow. Perhaps this was a legacy of the campaigns of the first Napoleon; perhaps too many of the generals involved aspired to emulate his stunning (albeit sanguinary) victory at Austerlitz.
Fifth, the small matter of Ireland. The British government was preoccupied with Ireland in the summer of 1914, might even have been grinding to a satisfactory outcome, and did not pay enough attention to affairs across the other sea. Furthermore, the Conservatives, who were trying to block what most people, not least the Irish, saw as progress in Ireland, thought that a continental war would be a good way of stalling on Ireland. A foreign diversion to calm things down at home. And Churchill's activities as First Sea Lord at the time look unpleasantly bellicose; he enjoyed fighting and was certainly up for a crack at the Germans.
Sixth, that the business of blaming one country or one person or another is not terribly helpful. Blame is only helpful in a context where there are rules, norms and justice; where someone or something can be found to have broken the rules and should therefore be punished or be made to do something restorative. But here, apart from the initial Serbian assassinations, symptoms of unrealistic and uncontrolled Serbian (or should it be Servian) ambitions, not much was done which was clearly against the rules. Even Germany going into neutral Belgium, our
casus belli, does not seem that terrible to me; I don't think that small countries in strategic positions can expect their neutrality to count for much and the Belgiums could have opted to have had it all dressed up as a well paid transit rather than an invasion. And for a lot of the rest of it there were no rules.
Illustration courtesy of Google and Wikipedia, reasonably typical of the way that the Serbs romanticise their bloody and messy past: the dying Pavle Orlović is given water by a maiden.
