[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Lest We Forget

[Bill Totten]

Could the First World War have been stopped?

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (November 11 2008)

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

But the First World War, which ended ninety years ago today, seemed
incomprehensible. The class interests of the men sent to kill each other
were the same. While Germany was clearly the aggressor, the outlook of
the opposing powers - seeking to expand their colonies and to dominate
European trade - was not wildly different. Ugly as the German state was,
no one could characterise the war at its outbreak - with Tsarist Russia
on the side of the Entente Powers - as a simple struggle between
democracy and dictatorship. Neither did this resemble the current war in
Iraq, in which legislators send the children of another class to die.
The chances of being killed were at least five times higher for men who
had been students at Oxford or Cambridge in 1914 than they were for
manual workers {1}. The First World War was an act of social
cannibalism, in which statesmen and generals on both sides murdered
their own offspring. How could it have happened?

On July 1st 1999, consumed by the urge to understand the war before the
century was over, I visited Thiepval on the Somme. This was the
anniversary of the first great attack on the German salients, which
caused devastating losses for British and Irish troops. Men carrying
flutes and dressed in orange sashes - commemorating the Ulster Division
- paced about. Beneath the arches of the Lutyens memorial a circle of
evangelical Christians hugged and screamed and ululated, while a little
boy dressed in combat gear played around their legs with a plastic
machine-gun. I goggled at the names on the monument - the 73,000
commemorate only the British and South Africans who fell on the Somme
and whose bodies 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 the old 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 was strangely heavy. Then I looked around and saw
that the field was covered with the same odd little balls. Almost every
stone was in fact metal. Within a minute I picked up more grapeshot than
I could hold. I found shell casings, twisted bullets, fragments of
barbed wire, chips of armour plating. I stopped, overwhelmed by shock
and recognition. It was a field of lead and steel; and every piece had
been manufactured to kill someone.

There are plenty of words to describe the horrors of World War Two. But
there were none, as far as I could discover, that captured the character
of the First World War. So I constructed one from the Greek word
ephebos, a young man of fighting 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 wave of patriotic enthusiasm is false {2}. The crowds that gathered
around Buckingham Palace and in Downing Street when war was declared
seem to have been more curious than excited. Most people appear to have
greeted the war with resignation or dismay. Nor does voluntary
enlistment provide clear evidence of enthusiasm. It is true that some
wanted to fight, and others saw war as a more exciting prospect that
working in a dead-end office job {3}. But Gregory shows that voluntarism
wasn't all that it seemed. For many men fighting was the only employment
on offer. The largest numbers volunteered not at the very beginning of
war, but after the disaster at Mons on August 24th, when it became clear
that there was a genuine threat to national defence {4}.

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

But the narratives, like Gregory's, which suggest that World War One was
inevitable begin late in the sequence of events {5}. Another
anniversary, almost forgotten in this country, falls tomorrow. On
November 12th 1924, Edmund Dene Morel died. Morel had been a shipping
clerk, based in Liverpool and Antwerp, who had noticed, in the late
1890s, that while ships belonging to King Leopold were returning from
the Congo to Belgium full of ivory, rubber and other goods, they were
departing with nothing but soldiers and ammunition. He realised that
Leopold's colony must be a slave state, and launched an astonishing and
ultimately successful effort to break the king's grip {6}. For a while
he became a national hero. A few years later he became a national villain.

During his Congo campaign, Morel had become extremely suspicious of the
secret diplomacy pursued by the British foreign office. In 1911, he
showed how a secret understanding between Britain and France over the
control of Morocco, followed by 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 February 1912 he warned that "no
greater disaster could befall both peoples [Britain and Germany], and
all that is most worthy of preservation in modern civilization, than a
war between them". {8} Convinced that Britain had struck a second secret
agreement with France, that would drag us into any war which involved
Russia, he campaigned for such treaties to be made public; for
recognition that Germany had been hoodwinked over Morocco and for the
British government to seek to broker a reconciliation between France and
Germany.

In response British ministers lied. The prime minister and the foreign
secretary repeatedly denied that there was any secret agreement with
France {9}. Only on the day before war was declared did the foreign
secretary admit that a treaty had been in place since 1906. It ensured
that Britain would have to fight from the moment Russia mobilised. Morel
continued to oppose the war and became, until his 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 had done as Morel suggested? No one knows, as no such attempt
was made. Far from seeking to broker a European peace, Britain, pursuing
its self-interested diplomatic 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 Europe had decided that
they would rather kill their children than change their policies.

www.monbiot.com

References:

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

2. ibid, pages 9-17; 24-30.

3. ibid, page 31.

4. ibid, page 32.

5. Another example is Gary Sheffield, November 2008. The Origins of
World War One. BBC Online.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/origins_01.shtml

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 at:
http://ia331337.us.archive.org/3/items/edmorelmanhiswor00cockuoft/edmorelmanhiswor00cockuoft_djvu.txt

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 on April 28th 1914 and June 11th 1914.

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/11/11/lest-we-forget/


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