The SPECTATOR REVIEW of BOOKS
Joseph Lee on Victorian social history Reviews by John Danby, Simon Raven, David Hare and Christopher Sykes. Auberon Waugh on new novels
Patrick Cosgrave: Politicians at war
For his first book*, Dr Hazlehurst has done an enormous amount of work, read a large number of hitherto unknown private papers, and contributed a number of very interesting insights into Liberal party politics in his period. That this book darkens rather than enhances our under- standing is in a very important sense less because of any lack of ability on Dr Hazlehurst's part than because of his uncritical subscription to the historio- graphical conventions of the subject about which he is writing. Of a period which has exercised an undiminished fascination down to the present day, it may be said that its predominant feature has been the presence of two great themes, each having the spellbinding power of classical tragedy. The first was the immersion of Britain in the greatest war she has ever known, a war which. in the end, destroyed her power. The second was the simul- taneous destruction of the great Liberal party. Events so fell out that, for the historian, there were two main sorts of material to be examined if the story was to be told. One—basically the Cabinet and associated papers and the private collections of politicians—gave particular emphasis to the political story, the fall of the Liberals and the rise of Lloyd George. Another consisted of material for the military—or. so to speak, the 'real'—history of the war and, as part of this, the history of the central direction of the war, the Supreme Command and the diplomacy of the period: and, here again, the papers of the Cabinet and the Committee of Imperial Defence are central, along with the great Foreign Office archive. Three separate groups of historians have studied the prob- lem from different angles, each searching in the papers for different stories. (Only very recently has Dr Paul Guinn made an important, if initial, effort to see all the parts together.) Of the three groups, only the purely military historians have, as a group, substantially advanced and im- proved the quality of our understanding of What happened, while the diplomatic his- *Politicians at War: July 1914 to May 1915 Cameron Hazlehurst (Cape £3.25) torians have scarcely begun to publish, because their section of the archive has only recently been opened to inspection.
The professional dilemma was greatest for the pure political historian, like Dr Hazlehurst. For one thing, the handling of a diplomatic or military archive requires a special trainino.c' which the average political historian does not receive. For another, the military and diplomatic archives were closed for a long time, though they were open when Dr Hazle- hurst was preparing his book. Finally, it is the case that even good historians of politics were preceded in the field by Lord Beaverbrook, who possessed historical sensitivity amounting to genius. (I exclude Dr A. J. P. Taylor from the list because, despite his brilliant dicta on the subject, he has never devoted a major study to the politics of the. first world war: which is why his life of Lord Beaverbrook is so eagerly awaited.) Beaverbrook was a chronicler, but not, as it is fashionable nowadays to assume, merely a chronicler of high intrigue. One of the reasons why he is paramount, not merely among political historians, but among general historians of the period as well, is the place the 'real' war occupies in his pages. Not many facts about it are overtly there, but the narrative is impreg- nated with it. It is ever present, exerting its pressure on the story, because in Beaver- brook's day-to-day meetings with the main actors this was so plainly the moving influence on their actions. What this con- temporary could live and feel, the historian must try to recapture by diligent research. And it is of great consequence because the political action of the time—the rise and fall of reputations, the calculations of indi- viduals, the crushing of the life out of a great party—all depended, step by step, on events at the fronts of war. The essence of Beaverbrook's achievement is shown by the fact that Dr Hazlehurst's principal argu- ment, and the one thought, to judge from reviews of his book, to be most original— that, up to 1915 at any rate, Lloyd George was not a daemon intriguer, but an able patriot, who was rather uncertain in his political calculation—is fully and explicitly stated in Beaverbrook's Politicians and the War.
One of the most important parts of Dr Hazlehurst's book deals with the sequence of events leading to Britain's declaration of war in AugUst 1914: It is important. not only because of the subject itself, but because of the way this section sets the pattern of the book. Muddle, in Dr Hazle- hurst's view, was predominant. Pusillanim- ity and hypocrisy marked the deliberations of the Cabinet on the question of Belgium: Asquith was above all influenced by the imperative of party unity and the need for a distraction from Ulm.... and nobody grasped the issues involved in the decisions to be taken.
There is. however, a good deal of muddle in the account offered by Dr Hazlehurst.
There is. for one thing, no considered assessment of the Prime Minister, Asquith. Partly this is because Asquith's emo- tional dependence on Venetia Stanley is emphasised to the exclusion of almost everything else. including other stimulants. Partly it is because Dr 1-fazlehurst has not read enough to enable him to get to know that dry, cynical, arrogant, lawyer's mind at its best. Partly it is because he has not read widely enough to understand the way Asquith was slipping spasmodically into lethargic befuddlement for some time before the war.
But the real force of the complaint that Dr Hazlehurst has failed to read—or, if he has read, has failed to understand—the papers can be shown by a close look at the way he deals with the role of the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, in the days before the war, since his errors in handling Grey go far to undermine his whole picture of Britain slipping into war by accident.
The Foreign Secretary's unparalleled reputation for probity was, as Dr Hazle- hurst rightly maintains, a vital factor in gaining support for his eventual policy of war. In his famous speech to the House of Commons on 3 August 1914, Grey cer- tainly swung the country towards war. Dr Hazlehurst finds the contemporary belief that this was a great speech 'puzzling'; it was, he says, 'undistinguished'; its presen- tation of Grey's case 'fumbling and evasive'. Yet,he admits that Grey achieved his aim. By demonstrating that the govern- ment had no prior commitment to France, he relieved Liberal consciences, which were tender on the subject of secret diplo- macy, and was thus left free to argue that the invasion of Belgium by Germany was an affront to British morality and self- interest alike, and a just casus be//i. it is a striking fact—and a remarkable key to the Liberal conscience—that the second pro- position would not have been effective without the first, though, logically, if Bel- gium was so important, the Government must have been judged to have failed in its duty if it had not come loan arrange- ment with France earlier.
What Dr Hazlehurst fails to grasp is the mingled dishonesty and brilliance of Grey's tactics in the House of Commons on 3 August. As part of his case that Britain had no commitment to France, he read his letter to the French Ambassador of 22 November 1912 (a letter extracted from him by the Cabinet when they discovered that Britain had been involved in military talks with France since 1905, just before the Liberals had come to power). If a European crisis arose, the letter said, 'the plans of the General Staffs would at once be taken into consideration, and the Governments would then decide what ef- fect should be given to them'. This crucial sentence, unlike the rest of the letter, might well have been taken by a substantial body of Liberal neutralists to state or imply a hitherto secret commitment to France. So Grey did not read it out. If Dr. Hazlehurst knows of this omission (there is no sug- gestion that he does) he does not under- stand its importance.
Dr Hazlehurst records the fact that Grey gave a wholly misleading account of his interview with the German Ambassador at the Cabinet of 31 July, and failed to report further vital conversations with Lichnow- sky, especially at the Cabinet of 2 August, when he made proposals that forced his colleagues to decide between Germany and himself. He fails, however, to make any- thing of these points, though, if we take them in conjunction with the whole pattern of Grey's diplomacy, it is perfectly clear that his settled (and successful) policy, if he could not keep the other Powers at peace, was tO bring Britain into their war. In other words though Grey was the de- cisive factor in bringing Britain into war, he does not appear in this role in Dr Hazle- hurst's book at all.
Moreover, the new research in private papers that Dr Hazlehurst has undertaken (his publishers advertise sixty collections) actually leads him, in certain important respects. further away from the truth. For the new research is, naturally, in the papers of minor figures, distant from the centre of decision : and there is a law here—that the further a man is from. power, the more evident will discussion of principle and personal indecision be in his records, since, among other things, he has more time for them. (The distance Dr Hazlehurst gets from real problems and issues is also shown, in the sterile argument he conducts with Professor Gollin and Dr Taylor about the question whether Liberal laissez-faire principles of administration could continue or whether a more dirigiste approach was necessary to the management of war; when in fact, the real problem of war manage- ment which had such a decisive effect on political calculations and fates was, as Lord Eustace Percy put it, that the exist- ing system was 'so absolutely futile that it amounts to leaving the Cabinet as sole co- ordinating organ—for which function it is the least conceivable effective body in the world'.) The historian cannot write the true story of this agonising clash between political habit and the demands of war from the private papers of government politicians alone: to understand the argument he Must first know thoroughly the papers dealing with the practical problems which the war brought. Though the myth of Lloyd George's war leadership may well break down under really close inspection, it can nonetheless be said that the reason why he and the Conservatives understood the relationship between politics and war much better than the Liberals, was because they carried less ideological baggage. The greater fitness and ability of Conservative leaders for war has been demonstrated in Mr. Robert Blake's admirable and, when it appeared, pioneering biography of Bonar Law; in retrospect, it makes Asquith's conviction that the Tories were second-raters look somewhat pathetic. For though many other factors were involved in the decline of the Liberal party, and though we may never be able to decide finally on the crucial ones, one influence was certainly incomprehension and in- adequacy in the face of martial calamity.
Dr Hazlehurst is, then, a victim of the historiographical myth that there is an exclusively political history of the war. It leads him to curious passes. Crucial quota- tions for the early part of the story come from Lord Lansdowne's letters of live years later. Grey's attitude he describes in all essentials through the reported con- versations of his enemies at the Foreign Office. And three chapters are devoted to chasing hares raised by a rather incom- petent conspiracy-minded American his- torian. This sort of thing we have to tolerate in an amateur like Mr Roy Jenkins, whose biography of Asquith is even more misleading. But we rightly. expect more of professional history. As it is, the three myths which Dr Hazlehurst claims to have exploded—that the invasion of Belgium caused the war, that the Cabinet was divided between pacifists and warriors, and that party antagonism died on 3 August 1914—have already been exploded by Lord Bcaverbrook ; and the . explanations with which Dr Hazlehurst re- places them arc even more misloading because they appear to be supported by a solid structure of scholarship.
We must now recognise that the history of 1914-18 cannot be written from a purely political viewpoint. If we are to advance in understanding, or even to recapture lost ground. we must delve more deeply, and with greater perception, into the central. interlinking, public archive. It is the merit of Dr Hazlehurst's misadventure to help us to see the way ahead, past narrow specialism, to the real history of a real war.
Previous page
