The Great War
By ROBERT BLAKE
Lice Talleyrand, who maintained that the true douceur de vivre had been experienced only by those who lived before 1789, mankind has all down history looked back nostalgically to the golden ages of the past. Under the scrutiny of the historian these tend to dissolve into mere dreams, but there is one which deserves some claim to reality : the forty-three years of peace, progress and prosperity between 1871 and 1914 Were, anyway for • most of Europe, a genuine golden age. It has been compared by one of our most eminent historians to the age of the Antonines. In it there grew up a generation to Which war, fanaticism, massacre and revolution, instead of appearing—as they have to nearly every previous generation--typical manifestations of the human spirit, seemed on the contrary to be monstrous deviations from normality. There- fore, when war broke out in 1914—that terrible War which, despite all the horrors occurring' since, still deserves the name of Great—it came as a fiercer shock to civilised Europe than any war before or since. Moreover, it marked the end of an epoch. The year 1914, not 1939, is the true turning point, of twentieth-century history, the moment which unleashed the forces of barbarism that arc with us still.
, HOW could it have happened? The question has been asked ever since, and answered in a hundred different ways. Was it the fault of Prus- sian militarism, Russian mobilisation, or French desire for revanche? Was Vienna the real Culprit, or did a Serbian plot start the whole thing off? Another set of explanations were per- sonal : the Kaiser's jealousy of his uncle's big fleet, the weakness of Bethman, the recklessness o,c Conrad, the folly of Sazonov. Then people ad- duced a whole series of profounder and more cosmic sink causes : imperialism, capitalism: the old triPl°rnaeY, the balance of power, the secret ni-eadties • . . the list is endless. No subject in 1::°"ern times has had more attention from the Historians, and still no simple answer emerges. Now, however, with the publication in England of ,,,,, the last volume of the late Luigi Albertini's admirably translated magnum opus* we arc probably as near to a final account of the remoter origins and immediate causes of the great dis- aste.r„ as we ever will be. Future historians are unlikely to be able to do much more than write footnotes Is to this truly monumental and very great work. Albertini was a distinguished news- paper editor forced into silence by Mussolini. He devoted the rest of his life to the completion of *-r, AritE:.0.1OGINS OF 111E WAR OF 1914. By Luigi .1as1be'inI translated and edited by Isabella M. sey. (Oxford University Press, 70s.)
these volumes. His industry and tenacity were amazing. Not' only did he wade through the gigantic documentation of his subject, but he personally interrogated many of the survivors who had played a part in the events : Count Berchtold, the Kaiser, Jules Cambon, Maurice Paleologue—to name only a few. He also had the advantage of writing after the publication of almost all the more important documents.
What conclusions emerge from all his labours? One thing at least is clear. No one need worry about the justice of the famous war-guilt clause in the Versailles Treaty (its expediency is another matter). The rulers of Imperial Germany may not have been as wicked or as guilty as Hitler, but theirs remains the prime responsibility. The real guilt lay with a man who was dead before the war began—Count Schlieffen, author of the famous `plan'---or rather with the statesmen who allowed the plan to dominate their minds to such a degree that no alternative was even considered. In retrospect this seems incredible. The Schlieffen plan, whatever its military merits, was politically insane. It meant that Germany could only fight a European war in one particular way—by attacking France through Belgium, thus ensuring the British intervention which was ultimately fatal to German hopes. German apologists have often claimed that Russian mobilisation made war inevitable. So it did in a sense, but it would not have done so had any alternative existed to the Schlieffen plan. Suppose, for example, the Germans had remained on the defensive in the West and attacked eastwards, as the elder Moltke had once' advocated, can anyone believe that Britain would have intervened, with Belgian neutrality inviolate, in order to support a French offensive against Germany? Mobilisation did not necessarily mean war for the other great Powers. Their plans left room for political manueuvre. But the Germans had no plan except the launching of a preventive war against France. This was their crime.
Of course there were plenty of errors and mis- calculations by the statesmen of other countries too. Albertini condemns Sazonov for his wholly unnecessary ordering of Russian mobilisation, and he is very critical of Grey whom he con- siders to have been far too slow and hesitant. It is a melancholy tale of missed opportunities, of incompetence and muddle. In the last resort a war can only begin because of specific decisions by specific people. In that sense no war is evitable, and it is in the triviality and inadequacy of the personalities who tried so feebly to con- trol events that Albertini finds the deeper cause of the disaster. No one wanted war, but no one realised what war meant. The years 1866 and 187() were the precedents. It was too much to ex- pect the statesmen of Europe in the last days of European world supremacy to look outside their Continent and reflect upon the grimmest of all struggles in recent times, the true precedent for 1914—the American Civil War. Perhaps the real question which we should ask is not why' war broke out but why peace had lasted for so) long. Perhaps the real failure of the statesmen of 1914 was that they did not realise the infinite difficulties, the constant vigilance, the careful calculation of forces, the subtle manoeuvres, which are necessary to preserve civilised mart from self-destruction. They had taken peace for granted for too long, and they were not sufficiently' afraid of war. That, at least, is an error that their successors in 1957 can have no excuse for making,.
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