This book is way too short to contain the vast and furious events it tries to explain. In 1917-18 four empires collapsed (German, Russian, Habsburg, OThis book is way too short to contain the vast and furious events it tries to explain. In 1917-18 four empires collapsed (German, Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman) and dozens of new countries were born or imposed from above; the Bolshevik revolution in Russia drove everyone completely crazy with the notion that either you were a Red and you wanted to exterminate all the capitalist exploiters who had just caused the misery of four years of war, or you wanted to kill all the dangerous Reds before they hung you and your children from a lamp post; so that great paranoid battle was raging across all of Europe at the precise time that everyone was trying to create these newfangled nation states.
Because after you have lived in a huge multicultural empire like Austro-Hungary, and then you are allowed to inaugurate your new nation state, what is it that you will be thinking about? Making your new state ethnically pure, of course! Expelling from your ancestral lands the scurvy foreigners you have had to put up with for so many generations, that’s what.
So here was a rich recipe for chaos indeed – left-right civil wars mixed with land seizures by freebooting militias with a taste for ethnic cleansing. All done under the benign gaze of Woodrow Wilson, president of the USA, who believed that liberal democracy could replace despotic empire as easily as a man could swap a top hat for a bowler.
A FEW FLAVOURSOME QUOTES
Munich, 1919
As the army and Freikorps troops moved into the city more than 600 people were killed during the fighting, many of them civilian bystanders. Summary executions of prisoners continued…53 Russians who had served in the Red Army were tortured and shot in Pasing, an outskirt of Munich.
Hungary, 1919
A Red News article said : “Before they stifle the revolution, suffocate them in their own blood!”… Political violence in the second half of 1919 and the early 1920s took the lives of up to 5000 people.
Ruhr Valley, Germany, 1920
The army leadership had no reservation about opening fire on striking workers. In the event, some 1000 “Red Army” insurgents were killed before the March Rising was finally put down by government troops
Sofia, 1925
An underground group of communist activists detonated a bomb on 16 April 1925 in the roof of Sveta Nedelya Cathdral during a public funeral service for General Konstantin Georgiev, who had been assassinated by communists a few days earlier. The explosion led to the collapse of the cathedral’s roof, killing over 130 mourner, including many senior army officer and politicians
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Now you can see that this book is 446 pages long in paperback, so that seems adequate, surely? But no – a whole 178 pages are taken up with end notes and the index, so this book is a mere 267 pages long, and that’s why I say it is too short. So many revolutions, counter-revolutions, coups, purges, riots, strikes, assassinations – they all begin to blur together. Professor Gerwarth brings the gruesome whirligig to a halt in the year 1923 and tells us that relative peace descended upon Europe, finally. It lasted for a whole six years! In 1929 the effects of the Wall Street crash swept over Europe bringing massive economic destabilisation, leading to another round of extreme politics, the abandonment of democracy and the coming of the jackboot, with World War Two and the Holocaust a few years down the line.
This history, I think, explains why many Europeans of today hold so dearly to the idea of the European Union. ...more
Revived review to mark 100 years to the day after the outbreak of WW1. And this is a very interesting book about that dreadful conflict.
REVISIONISM –Revived review to mark 100 years to the day after the outbreak of WW1. And this is a very interesting book about that dreadful conflict.
REVISIONISM – NO, DON'T LOOK LIKE THAT, IT’S QUITE INTERESTING
There are good revisionists and evil revisionists. The good ones take the standard government-issue version of history, the stuff we all know, and go to town on it. They dismantle all those easy myths, both patriotic and otherwise, and sometimes as they do so they howl with pain. Here are a couple of Good revisionists that spring to my mind –
Khruschev’s revision of Stalinist Soviet history – wow, that was a blast
Charley Gerard and others’ revision of jazz history, putting the great white musicians back into jazz – hmm, controversial!
Elijah Wald and others’ revision of our clichéd ideas of what blues singers were all about - very refreshing
Revisionists have exhumed the buried voices of those who the standard histories have considered to be beneath notice – women! Black people! Gay people! They have all now been invited into the history party, finally. This is all good. But revisionism can be mad, bad and dangerous to know too – the Afrocentrism of Martin Bernal for instance, a remarkable example of special pleading morphing into crazy falsification. And then we get to the beyond-the-pale nutjobs like the Holocaust deniers.
Gary Sheffield is a World War One revisionist. He is here to tell you that all that stuff you know is wrong.
- if you thought it started because of political incompetence and could have been avoided you were wrong;
- if you thought it had no clear aims you were wrong;
- if you thought it was futile you were wrong;
- if you thought it was conducted by incompetent upper-class sociopathic generals who sipped wine and chugged caviar in chateaus far behind the front line as they sent thousands of brave British boys walking into the serried ranks of German machine guns to be butchered meaninglessly and repeatedly then well, er, you were partly right but, er, but mostly wrong.
Revisionism does do things to your head that might make you dizzy and a bit ill because it poses the difficult question – where do you get your information from anyway? Why is this stuff in your head as a fact anyway? Whose fact was it? When did you accept this fact so uncritically? In the foul rag and bone shop of my mind it now seems like everything has been left here by someone else, none of this rubbish is mine, I have not chosen any of it. People just left all these heaps of stuff here. And now it seems like every fact is in contention, everything I knew I don’t know, nothing is resolved, all that is solid melts into the air. I want my lions and donkeys back. I want some firm ground to stand on. I’m sinking.
THE RATHER POOR REPUTATION OF WW1
GS tells us that at the time the war was seen as justified and worthwhile. All this futile & meaningless stuff came later, and for most of the actual war, morale was not a problem. But there was a profound shift of opinion later - it took 10 years. Why? Well, there was a growing realisation of the sheer number of men who had been killed. Like people stunned by a great disaster, and they had no tv in those days, the enormity took a long time to sink in. Then also, they began to notice that Britain had not been transformed into a land fit for heroes, as had been the boast. And furthermore, that the war had not, in fact, resolved anything – the problem of German bellicosity had not gone away. So these thoughts were steaming and bubbling away, and then came the publication of the famous war poets (who according to GS give us “a limited and skewed view”), and the agonising memoirs by Robert Graves, Sassoon and so forth ; and also the book & Hollywood movie All Quiet on the Western Front – that was a real big one.
But GS is quite right to point out that WW1 did not turn Britain or anyone else into pacifists – once appeasement of Hitler had failed, the next war, a mere 21 years after 1918, was accepted as necessary, and men volunteered in their thousands.
ORIGIN OF THE WAR : COMPRESSED VERSION
Germany under Kaiser Bill was (according to our author) the guy who walks into the bar looking for a fight, and if you make eye contact even for a second, YOU’LL DO! He’ll be over in a flash saying “Oi, who you lookin at??” and then you’ll have a problem. Historians call this militarism in a nation. In the days when tiny Portugal and tinier Holland had empires, Germany didn’t, and it felt shut out, and disrespected. It was getting up such a head of steam about this that it was obvious the whole thing was going to blow. But – we know this – everyone in 1910-14 was thinking it would be a short sharp affair. No one had any idea what was in store.
(Except the Devil. He knew, and he was chuckling to himself as he threw some left-over nuns into a blazing cauldron and gave them a poke with a poker.)
Here’s one of GS’s big arguments – it is said that Britain could have kept out of this European affair (the phrase used at the time was “splendid isolation”) . But – here’s the thing – it was believed by the politicians and the generals in Britain that Germany would win any war with France & Russia. The alternative, therefore, was not war or peace, it was war now, which would be reasonably winnable, or war later with Germany occupying most of Europe including the coastal bits of the channel which would make the future war ten times harder. Oh and Britain would have no allies in the future war, because Germany would have conquered all of them.
The war was sold to the people as a war to save democracy; they couldn’t really ask young men to fling themselves into the charnel house to preserve the balance of power in Europe. But that’s what the war was for. And Gary Sheffield is okay with that. And he thinks we should be too.
ATTRITION
You want the clean knock-out, you don’t want the points decision after 12 rounds. It’s brutal, it makes you realise how disagreeable humans are. GS admits that WW1 was a war of attrition – for him that’s not an admission, that’s the way it had to be, considering how rubbish the British Army was in 1914. They just managed to stop the German advance, but it was a close-run thing. Then they got into the serious shelling, machinegunning, poison-gassing and wholesale murder, for four years. The generals were in the business of chipping away at the enemy, bit by bit. It was never going to be a pretty war. They were calculating that if they lost 20,000 men in a particular battle and the German army also lost 20,000 men, that was good for the British because they could replenish their soldiers easier than the Germans. This does not make us modern types happy, in fact it makes us violently squeamish. These days we want to have computer-game type wars, with as few casualties as possible, preferably NONE for our side. Shock & Awe was the apotheosis of this thinking. Look at the figures (between 20 March and 1st may 2003):
US troops killed : 139 Iraqis killed : between 6 and 7 thousand, precise figures unavailable
Now that’s more like it! Much better than WW1!
A REASONABLE COMPARISON BETWEEN WW1 AND WW2
British troops killed in WW1 : 947,000 British troops killed in WW2 : 264,000 Big beast in WW1 : Kaiser Wilhelm II Big beast in WW2: Adolf Hitler
You can see there’s no comparison – in WW2 the Allies had a far more evil force to fight and they did so with less than a third of the casualties.
TRENCH WARFARE
Kitchener himself predicted stalemated trench warfare in 1908. But there was also a belief derived from the Boer War and the Russian-Japanese War that if your side’s firepower was superior, you could suppress your enemy’s capabilities to the point where your infantry could walk across the zone of death (as it was called, no hype there) and attack with machine-gun and bayonet. It was understood that this would involve heavy losses. GS says that the failures of 1914 were due not to this doctrine being wrong but being performed ineptly. Well, yes. I’d say inept, too.
THE WRAP-UP
Well.
I remain unpersuaded. I see now that WW1 was unavoidable in some form. But O, did it have to be like that? Really?
Maybe it's true. But I don't accept it. I reject this truth.
A quote to end with
Lieutenant General Sir John Monash of the Australian Corps, in 1918 :
A modern battle plan is like nothing so much as a score for a musical composition, where the various arms and units are the instruments, and the tasks they perform are their respective musical phrases. Each individual unit must make its entry precisely at the proper moment, and play its phrase in the general harmony.
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POSTSCRIPT - AN UNFORTUNATE LAPSE
Sometimes you read stuff which makes your brain boil over and you have to hit the pause button and vocalise in stentorian astonishment :
WHAT??
WHAT??????
WHAT??????????????????
On page 30 the author is describing the politics of the German Empire leading up to 1914, and how undemocratic Germany was compared to Britain because Germany was not a constitutional parliamentary monarchy. He quotes a former historian as follows:
John Rohl, one of the leading historians of Wilhelm and his court, has painted the dreadful consequences of Germany's archaic political system. Germany's decision to go to war was taken by a small clique with disregard for the consequences of such an awesome step : "a constitutional monarchy with a collective cabinet responsible to parliament and the public would not have acted in such isolation and ignorance and, for this reason alone, would have decided differently."
Now, this book was published in 2001. In 2003 Britain was undoubtedly a constitutional monarchy with a collective cabinet responsible to parliament and the public, and yet - nevertheless - a small clique headed up by Tony Blair decided to go to war with Iraq with (I would say) a criminal disregard for the consequences of such an awesome step.
The irony of this paragraph is truly gob-smacking.
Tony didn't come to the House of Parliament and say "Well, we're thinking about invading Iraq because of all these WMDs, what do you think?". He came & said "Look, it's back me or sack me time, Saddam's a world menace, you have to vote for this, I beseech thee, your families beseech thee, let's get the bastard, come on lads & lasses, once more unto the breach, 9/ll, St George and all of that!"
The vote for war was rammed through the House of Commons while a million people had marched through London with big signs saying "DON'T ATTACK IRAQ!" and "NOT IN MY NAME".
So..... with respect.... I think that in this instance, these vaunted historians have overestimated the loveliness of democracy. Somewhat.
Well, how d'you do, Private Willie McBride, First Class - do you mind if I sit down down here by your graveside? It's so nice to rest for awhile in thWell, how d'you do, Private Willie McBride, First Class - do you mind if I sit down down here by your graveside? It's so nice to rest for awhile in the warm summer sun... I've been walking all day and I'm nearly done in. Well. So, Willie - I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen when you joined the glorious fallen. 1916 - a long time ago now. Well I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean. But Private Willie McBride, it could have been slow and obscene. Let's not think of that. And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind? In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined? And, though you died back in 1916, to that loyal heart you'd be forever nineteen. Or some bollocks like that. That's what they say, isn't it. Sorry to have to tell you but you're probably a stranger, without even a name, peering out from some forgotten glass pane, in an old photograph, in a drawer, torn and tattered and stained, or fading to yellow in a brown leather frame. Well, take a look around now. It's a beautiful day. The sun's shining down on these green fields of France. Feel that, Willie? No, I suppose you don't. The warm wind blows gently, and look, the red poppies are dancing just like they're supposed to. The trenches have all gone, all ploughed under. It's a lovely place now. There's no gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now. But I suppose here in this graveyard it's still No Man's Land - see how many white crosses there are - well, I couldn't count them all. But at least you're not alone, Willie, eh? There was umpteen thousands like you. But you know I can't help but wonder now, Private Willie McBride, First Class - do all those who lie here know why they died? I mean, did you really believe that your war would end wars? Because that's what they said. You'll remember that. Because, you know, the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame, the killing, the dying, it was all done in vain, Willie. It all happened again. And again, and again, and again, and again. Anyway, that's enough from me. I'll bid you good day. I've got another five miles to go. Thanks for your time.
(with many apologies to Eric Bogle and his great song The Green Fields of France)...more
It's 2014 - and the centenary of World War One. I heard a discussion about it the other day and one thing struck me. The idea being suggested was thatIt's 2014 - and the centenary of World War One. I heard a discussion about it the other day and one thing struck me. The idea being suggested was that it would have been BETTER FOR EVERYONE if Germany had WON the First World War. How about that! I never thought of it before, but the logic was compelling. Germany's victory would have stifled Hitler's political career before it got going. There would have been no Versailles treaty, no reparations, no financial catastrophe.....
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