Max Hastings on Catastrophe 1914, and Breaking Conceptions of “Blame” Over World War I : Cullen Murphy
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Journalist Max Hastings has been skillfully educating readers and television viewers about military history for more than four decades now, and his latest effort—Catastrophe 1914, which covers the origins of the First World War and the first months of fighting—is a terrific crescendo to a series of books that has covered World War II, the Korean War, and even the battle for the Falkland Islands. He spoke with VF Daily about entering the W.W. I canon, and breaking long-held myths about the peaceful pre-war era.
VF Daily: In popular memory there’s an image of an idyllic pre-war Edwardian summer, as if it never occurred to anyone that the status quo might be shaken to its core, or that the shaking had already started. How would you correct that view?
Max Hastings: The only thing that was idyllic about Europe’s summer of 1914 was the weather. The preceding decade or two had witnessed the continent overtaken by a ferment of passions and frustrations, scientific and industrial novelties, and irreconcilable political ambitions which caused many of the era’s principals—if not Europe’s crowned heads—to recognize that the old order could not hold. To be sure, dukes were still attended by footmen wearing white hair powder; smart households were accustomed to eat dinners of 10 or 12 courses; and dueling was not quite extinct. But it was plain that these things were coming to an end, and that the future would be arbitrated by the will of the masses, or those skilled in manipulating it, not by the whims of the traditional ruling class.
Every nation was racked by industrial strife and strikes, as the workforce voiced its demands for a larger share of growing prosperity ever more vociferously. Some serious people in Britain thought the country threatened by revolution. Britain was also menaced by a real prospect of civil war over Ireland, with the Conservative opposition in Parliament—incredibly, as it seems to us now—publicly telling the army not to enforce the Irish Home Rule Bill in Ulster.
Huge change was overwhelming the continent even before war came. Winston Churchill wrote later: “Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent or vital has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.”
The volume of historical writing on the First World War is immense, and over time trends in historiography have gone in a variety of directions. Can you give us some idea of what historians have said over the years about the origins of the war, and then place Catastrophe in that context?
In the decades after 1918, a profound disillusionment with the war set in, fueled by the fact that what the democracies had been told was “a war to end wars”—a conflict that would produce a moral and social regeneration in Western Europe—achieved nothing of the sort. A view gained currency that everybody shared blame for the disaster that unfolded in 1914.
But, in 1953, a seminal book by Italian historian Luigi Albertini was published in English, based on huge research and many interviews with key players, asserting overwhelming German responsibility. This was followed by the 1967 English publication of Fritz Fischer’s Germany’s War Aims in the First World War, which even more explicitly pinned the blame on his country, citing new documents, despite the bonfire in the Berlin archives which had taken place in 1918–19 to remove evidence of German “war guilt.” After a huge controversy in Germany in which Fischer was much vilified, his view was widely accepted and has remained so in considerable measure ever since.
It is in Britain, the U.S., and France that much modern work has been published challenging Fischer’s thesis. Sean McMeekin suggests that the conflict was largely Russia’s fault. Niall Ferguson places heavy responsibility on Britain, and suggested in all seriousness in a book a few years ago that the British could have stayed neutral and that a German victory would simply have created “something like the European Union” half a century earlier. Christopher Clark last year published a highly influential book, The Sleepwalkers, in which he argued that:
I have great respect for Christopher Clark, and his book must be taken seriously by any historian of this period. But I disagree with most of his key points. They seem, to me, to be founded much more upon speculation than on credible new evidence, and I think he much underestimates German irresponsibility. In Catastrophe, I suggest that Fischer over-egged the pudding by suggesting that Germany deliberately conspired to bring about a big European war in 1914; but it is indisputable that Germany willed a Balkan war, urging the Austrians to invade Serbia, which led to everything else. Germany alone had the power to halt the escalating crisis at any time in July, by telling the Austrians to stop, and Berlin refused to exercise such power. Though no one nation deserves all the blame, for this reason Germany seems to deserve more than anybody else.
Although responsibility for the fact that Europe had a war in 1914 will always be a focus of controversy, it seems to me harder credibly to argue that once such a conflict became inevitable, Britain could have stayed out. If Germany had won, which it probably would have done against France and Russia alone, a highly militarized autocracy—a pretty brutal and malign force, dominated by the generals—would have been in charge, its appetite for dominance inevitably increased by victory on the continent. I am convinced that Germany would have gone to war with Britain within a year or two—with a Britain obliged to fight alone—and that a German triumph would have been disastrous for freedom and democracy.
How do Germans today regard the argument that lays blame so heavily on German shoulders?
It is ironic that most young Germans are brought up to accept that their country bore a considerable responsibility for the war, while it is in Britain and other former Allied nations that most doubts—unnecessarily flagellatory, in my view—about the justice of the cause are expressed by academics. To put the matter bluntly: while it is quite mistaken directly to compare the kaiser’s Germany with that of the Nazis a generation later, the country was in the hands of some pretty nasty people. The systematic slaughter of some 6,400 perfectly innocent Belgian and French civilians of all ages and both sexes by the German army during its autumn assault, as hostages or in alleged reprisal for imagined guerilla attacks, was approved by Berlin at the highest level. German behavior scarcely suggests that their victory would have been a triumph for European civilization.
A great deal of information is currently available about the First World War—official and unofficial, from many archives and many countries—that historians of previous generations did not have. What difference does this make for our understanding, and specifically for the writing of your book?
I believe that the 21st century has produced more new theories and speculation about the events of 1914 than credible new evidence. The problem for all historians of the period will always be that so many of the principal actors distorted the record to serve their own interests, and so much archival material was destroyed. Critically, we know that in 1918–19 the German government ordered and carried out a ruthless weeding of its files, to remove evidence the Allies might use to support their claims of German war guilt. But we do not know, and never will, exactly what was burned.
The broad thrust of what happened during July is not much disputed among responsible historians. Most of the controversies derive from rival interpretations.
One has to be careful about drawing “lessons” from history, especially over-specific lessons, and there’s a long catalogue of history being cited to serve various agendas. At the same time, the notion that history has nothing to teach us seems preposterous to most people outside academe. What’s the broad lesson you would draw from the story you tell?
That there is almost no limit to the capacity of national leaders for colossal folly. If we marvel at the actions of the rulers of Europe in 1914 and ask ourselves how they could have acted in such a fashion, look instead at the conduct of European governments through the last few years of the euro crisis. Here, too, they have remained in denial, as they do to this day, pursuing fantasy policies and avowing absolute untruths about indebtedness and plausible paths to the future. Today, fortunately, there is no prospect of a European war becoming the consequence of their follies. But it becomes much easier to understand the almost insane conduct of governments in 1914—and especially of the German government—if we consider the example of modern times.
The greatest of all ironies of 1914, I should add, is that if Germany had prevented a war and had simply continued the awesome march of its economy and industries, its dominance of Europe within a decade or two would have been irresistible, without a shot being fired. It was the huge folly of the kaiser and those around him that, like most leaders of their era, they measured strength by counting soldiers. The Schlieffen Plan, in my view, was always a fantasy, unless the French and British had suffered absolute collapse on the battlefield. But the soaring advance of German manufacturing and trading was a force in world affairs far stronger than any fleet of dreadnoughts.
Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War by Max Hastings (Sep 24, 2013) – Deckle Edge
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