Did we drift into war?

Norman Stone

The First World War Keith Robbins (Oxford University Press £12.50)

The Oxford Opus series, of which this book is part, consists of little books on big subjects. Its standard has been high, and Keith Robbins maintains the standard. He has, of course, severe problems of com- petition in writing about the First World War, for there are many good books on it: A. J. P. Taylor's Oh-What-a-Lovely-War essay displays him at his best; and there is an excellent account by the French historian, Marc Ferro (Routledge paper- back, regularly reprinted), which imposes a satisfactory pattern on the War.

Keith Robbins finds himself a niche despite this competition, because his book has more detail, and discusses matters that his competitors avoid (war poets, for in- stance). This is possible because he has con- fined the military and naval chronology essentially to an early chapter, while he uses the rest of the chapters to discuss explana- tory themes in the kind of depth you can en- joy once you are freed from the require- ments of chronology. The drama, here, is less, but the encyclopaedic content is greater: there are good accounts of logistics (of which strategy is really an appendix), the home fronts, the technology of war, the diplomacy of war-aims and peace-moves, and 'the experience of war' — i.e. the war poets, and much else. The book's standard of accuracy is generally high, so far as I can judge, the style is clear and lively, and there is a good bibliography, particularly useful for its list of books on the diplomatic side (of which there are now many: Fritz Fischer's condemnation of German behaviour has been matched, since, by French and British historians discovering that their own countries' war-aims were not exactly without blemish).

Robbins made his reputation with a book on the Munich Agreement of 1938 — an episode that owed much to British feelings of guilt at the way Germany had been treated after the First World War — and if his book has a fault it lies in excessive fair- mindedness. His account of the war's origins is on 'we all slithered into war' lines. This view has been taken up as a kind of CND parable, nowhere better stated than by A. J. P. Taylor. In Taylor's, splendid sentences, July 1914 appears as a crisis of muddle, understood by no one and, in the end, the pace is not made by men's inten- tions, but by the weaponry and the war- plans. No one wanted European war: it came about because Russian mobilisation, which was meant only as a gesture of warn- ing to Germany, triggered off a war-plan that was the Germans' only one. The vast stockpile of complicated armament really exploded by itself, and the moral is: si bellum vis, pars bellum.

Robbins takes this line, in substance, and refuses to find anyone 'guilty' of causing European war. Can we, in fact, be so cer- tain? Fritz Fischer pronounced several years ago that the war guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles had been quite accurate — the German government conspired to bring about war as soon as the Archduke's murder gave a good pretext. It must be said that a great deal of the evidence that has emerged since then, from German and Austrian sources, tends to bear Fischer out. Of course, there was a great need for secrecy, then and later, for the British and the social democrats had to have wool pull- ed over their eyes, the Kaiser was given to wobbling, and getting the Austrians to do anything positive was very, very difficult in- deed. Even so, if Fischer is right, then the decision for German mobilisation, i.e. for European war, was taken before news had come in of Russian mobilisation. We badly need James Jo11's forthcoming book on the origins of 1914; however, for the moment, the balance of evidence seems to me to favour, not the 'slithering into war' argu- ment, but the old war guilt clause. In other words, we are talking, not about an arms- race exploding by itself, but rather about how to deter rogue powers. The answer is not at all simple, for you can argue that the main reason for Berlin's behaviour in July 1914 was a fear (quite justified) that Ger- many's enemies would soon be too power-

The Spectator 28 April 1984 ful. In the spring and early summer of 1914, Central European generals and statesmen could hardly meet at all without one or the other saying, 'The sooner, the better it True, t needed an accident, the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to set things in motion. But accidents are never quite ac- cidental. When the war started, it turned out to he vastly different from anything that the generals had foreseen. Robbins is very goo°

on Was

one central theme of all this, the s- jointed technology of the age: for it this, more than anything else, that made the war go on for so long. The technologY available to the defender was, if proper,IY used, superior to that available to toe attacker. Armies had virtually everything fire-power, mobility for rapid movement O. reserves, huge numbers, almost inexhanstl- ble supplies of everything (the Germans took their explosives quite literally from the air, through the Haber-Bosch process). But they did not have mobility on the battle- field itself; indeed, since they could not use cavalry, their mobility was lower than at any previous time. That problem would 11(4 be solved until the days of tanks and half" tracks, and even in 1918 these were — as Robbins rightly says — too rudimentary{Victory came, in the end, from a collapse German morale, brought about tion. by attri- In these circumstances, Robbins is in to spare the generals much of the savage criticism they once earned: they did, after all, face an unutterably difficult task, as politicians demanded immediate resal,ts . i

from untrained troops and officers brought up in quite different experiences. Of course, some of the generals were fabulously tn.!: suitable, and Robbins has a field-day

wlt" the Gallipoli campaign, in which one senior figure found himself involved in an torpor tant capacity after serving his time Lieutenant of the Tower of London. It as curious to note that German generals never came in for quite such a drubbing from their own people as British ones did. ll0 Were the Germans any more comP no, To To judge from the Schlieffen Plan, 0,_; They, like everyone else, made the essential initial mistake of thinking that the w, would be over in six weeks or so — which_ case the Schlieffen Plan made sense. go", bins notes the 'short-war illusion', arl'_ wonders why it was so widespread. Surelyoa large part of the answer is not military, but financial. This was an era b le ev to

regarded inflation as the plague, and "

when Pe°1)._ bmuosdineesst s taxes Besides, Ehuorpoepleesasnl y injurious as thought to depend on trade, Pwri°ths po rtifv vial there would be unemployment and so

upheaval. These reflections caused the R

sian, Ivan Bloch, to write a famous book 0.1" war in which he showed how ruinous I..' would be for trade, and hence for the at be bet. ; tinuation of war. Oddly enough, he thought that agricultural Russia would

placed than the industrial and How wrong they all were. countries to carry on war, even for a Ye r• exporttrai