War and the Big Picture

As we skitter towards another Continental war that may finally see the end of our country let us look back to the start of our ruin. If enough can understand what 1914 cost us then perhaps we can turn back, even now.

There are over 100,000 war memorials in the UK erected in memory of our soldiers killed in WWI. They were paid for by local communities not by the Government.

Each name on the stone cross is someone who might otherwise have lived a humble and productive everyday life. Moreover, someone who was fit enough to fight, which in some places put them in a minority: AI says we discovered how Britain had been failing the people at the call-up for the Second Boer War (1899–1902):

Roughly 30% to 40% of British recruits—and up to 60% to 90% in impoverished industrial cities—were physically unfit for military service due to malnutrition, rickets, and poor health.

Across the nation locally we grieve on Remembrance Sunday and important people lay wreaths on the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

Yet one British PM after another bangs the drum for Ukraine - that and abandoning the strategically important Chagos Islands are two of the few early significant commitments made by our current, Brezhnev-eyebrowed Andy Pandy. Who takes our Premiers aside and gives them their starting orders?

What were (some of) the (social) consequences of the Great War?

Over 700,000 British servicemen dead, with another couple of hundred thousand from the wider Empire. Add in the prisoners, wounded and crippled and the toll rises to some three million, for our side alone.

So many widows and bereaved mothers. So many with disabled and disfigured husbands. How many who never even had the opportunity of marriage and family life?

As common soldier Michael Williams tells the incognito King Henry V:

But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all “We died at such a place,” some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left.

Henry replies that it is for men to sort out their own lives so they can if need be, die with a clear conscience. There, that was easy! You won’t out-talk a politician.

But surely there had to be some compelling reason for us to declare war on Germany in August 1914?

Mmmm… not exactly.

Germany wanted to expand into Russia whose naval/military weakness had been highlighted ten years earlier when beaten in a war with Japan. To avoid having to fight on two fronts the German strategy was first to defeat France within a few weeks before Russia could mobilise sufficiently to resist an invasion by the Kaiser’s armies.

France had been defeated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and fear of France had helped persuade southern Germanic States to join what then became a large unified Germany.

The French were heavily fortified along their common border with Germany, so the latter’s Schlieffen Plan was to cut through Belgium instead and then head for Paris. The French thought they could halt German forces in Belgium and counter-strike through the French-German border with Berlin in their sights.

What did this tussle have to do with us and our global, sea-based empire?

We had to cast around for a justification, a casus belli. We found it in the multinational 1839 Treaty of London that guaranteed majority-Catholic Belgium’s independence from the Protestant Netherlands.

Not all the British Cabinet was aware of the determination of certain parties within and outside the Government to get involved. But the military correspondent of the Times, Colonel Repington was okayed by Lord Esher and Sir George Clarke at the War Office to open negotiations with the French Government, seeking an assurance from the French that France would not be the first to violate Belgian neutrality and telling them that whoever did so would “automatically” bring us into the field in defence of our treaty obligations. This had never previously been officially confirmed.

Nor was the prospect of British assistance initially welcomed by the French. In 1910 the future Marshal of France Ferdinand Foch was asked what minimum size of force we would need to send to help and he replied “A single British soldier - and we will see to it that he will be killed.”

In 1912 Viscount Haldane went to Germany to secure an agreement that they would keep their navy smaller than ours; for that they demanded a guarantee of British neutrality in the event of a Franco-British war, which was not offered. Haldane came away convinced that

“once the German war party had got into the saddle it would be war not merely for the overthrow of France or Russia but for the domination of the world.”

So all our stone crosses mark the consequences of a geopolitical strategy first systematically described by a British geographer in 1904; about which more anon.

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The latter half of this post draws on Chapter Three of Barbara Tuchman’s meticulous study “The Guns of August” - thanks to Peter Hitchens for the lead.