After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  In the course of 1918, the Entente’s production, possession and deployment of artillery at last began to outstrip that of the Germans. In February 1917, Germany had 7,130 guns at the Front; by the spring of 1918, it had only 6,172. Whereas artillery regiments had composed only 18 per cent of the French army in 1915, by the end of the war it was 37 per cent. A quarter of the British army, that is half a million men, were in the Royal Artillery. By the end of the war, France’s heavy artillery had risen from 300 big guns to 5,700. Britain manufactured 3,226 guns in 1915, but 10,680 in 1918, and shell production was always ahead of consumption. There was no repeat of the shell scandal which ruined Kitchener’s career. In the last fights on European soil during 1918, therefore, the Allied generals Haig, Pétain and Pershing simply had more military hardware than their adversaries. They could go on pounding and shooting and killing for longer. At Amiens in March 1918 a British battalion would number 500 men and be in possession of 30 Lewis guns, eight mortars and six tanks, compared with a British battalion of 1,000 men on the Somme in 1916 with four Lewis light machine guns between them. The offensive at Amiens broke the German line, and broke their nerve. General Ludendorff suffered from violent mood swings, sometimes believing in the imminence of a victory, and sometimes in despair. The final attack on Amiens on 8 August 1918 was dubbed by Ludendorff ‘the black day of the German army’, with 27,000 casualties and 12,000 surrenders. By the end of September his nerve had cracked completely. He fell to the floor and foamed at the mouth, according to some accounts. By then, both the political and military leadership in Germany was weak. George von Hertling, the short-lived Chancellor, resigned, to be succeeded on 3 October by Prince Max of Baden. Both Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia and Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, military commanders as well as royal personages,* could see the writing on the wall not only for the German army but for the monarchy. By the end of October, their allies in Austria-Hungary were suffering from revolutions, in both Vienna and Budapest. Austria secured an armistice on 3 November, Germany on the 11th and Hungary on the 13th. Kaiser Wilhelm, whom many in the Entente regarded as a war criminal responsible for the conflict, abdicated, and fled to Holland. Kaiser Karl was merely driven from his throne, without abdicating. It was as a republic that Germany signed the Armistice, and it was to a republic, ‘the greatest republic of the West’, as Lloyd George called it, that Europe now looked to heal its wounds and pay its bills.

  It is hard to think of anything in history which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim. On 11 November 1918, Lloyd George told the House of Commons the conditions of the Armistice, and concluded: ‘Thus at eleven o’clock this morning came to an end the cruellest and most terrible war that has ever scourged mankind. I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars.’2 At the beginning of the year, on 5 January 1918, he had addressed a conference of trade union leaders, and set out what he believed to be the aims of the war. ‘We are not fighting a war of aggression against the German people … nor are we fighting to destroy Austria-Hungary or to deprive Turkey of its capital or of the rich and renowned lands of Asia Minor and Thrace.’ Rather, said Lloyd George with a sleight of hand which could scarcely deny that the effects of the war would destroy the old empires and autocracies, they were fighting so that French democracy, and the national independence of other nations, above all Poland, could be established on true democratic principles.3

  In fact, as could easily be seen before the war ended, the defeat of Turkey and Austria-Hungary would inevitably lead to a collapse of their hegemonies. What could be fairer, or more consonant with the ideas of human justice, than that the peoples of the world should, as far as was possible, be independent and self-determining, with their own languages, religions and cultures?

  One of the grimmest consequences of nationalist aspiration in recent years had been the fate of the Armenians. On the Caucasus Front between Russia and Turkey, the Turks blamed their losses of men and land on the indigenous Armenian population, whom they accused of aiding and abetting the invader. On 8 April 1915, thousands of Armenian men were shot, and women and children, in hundreds of thousands, were deported southward to Cilicia and Syria. The Armenians appealed for help to the German ambassador in Constantinople, who was afraid of offending his Turkish allies. By 19 April 50,000 more Armenian civilians had been murdered. To this day, there is dispute about the numbers of Armenians massacred by the Turks, though few sources outside Turkish governments set the total figure of slaughtered Armenians at less than 800,000. The grisly precedent had been set, which would be repeated throughout the twentieth century, of whole categories of civilian populations, and ultimately whole races, being the target of programmes of obliteration. Hitler would ask: ‘Who remembers the Armenians today?’4

  Hindsight, the historians’ parlour-game, can lead from false premise to false conclusion. Because we see the fateful consequences of our forebears’ actions, we can wrongly suppose that, had they done differently, things would have been better. That is not necessarily the case. Yes – had Germany won the war speedily, as they supposed they would, and reached Paris by the summer of 1914, there might have been no Russian Revolution. Certainly, the Armistice terms would not have punished Germany and there might, therefore, have been no economic crises in the 1920s, no disastrous unemployment, no rise of National Socialism. But there is no point in such speculations, since history deals not with what might have been, but what was. Even an outright German victory might not have prevented a German revolution at home, and a spread of social problems very similar to the ones which engulfed Europe in the postwar years.

  Likewise, President Wilson’s optimistic dream, of a peaceful world of independent, democratic nation-states, can be seen to be the fateful origin of German grievances in the 1930s. All hopeful and kindly minded people could cheer at the restoration of an independent Poland, but what would be the feelings of the German-speaking populations of Stettin or Danzig, that their fates should be determined? Lloyd George and President Wilson met together in a hotel in Paris, and unrealistically decided to make Danzig an ‘independent city’. What of Upper Silesia, which until the war had provided Germany with a quarter of its output of coal, 81 per cent of its zinc, and 34 per cent of its lead? Poland’s pianist-Prime Minister in waiting, Ignace Paderewski, with his great shock of red hair streaked with grey, could demand it all. The Germans could retort that in that case, there was no possibility of paying the heavy reparations extracted by France. A botched compromise would be the result, with bits owned by Germany, other territory by the new Poland, and both sides discontented. In the Baltic, similarly, the dreams of a Princeton professor needed to be examined bit by bit to see how wonderful they would be in practice. An independent Lithuania – who could quarrel with that? The answer, in 1919, was the Germans, the Poles and the Russians. Lloyd George warmed to the idea of Lithuanian independence; he saw it as a country the same size as his native Wales. Until the twenty-first century, when it enjoys the protective umbrella of NATO and the EU, a small country such as this could not survive in the wolf-pack.

  The Bolsheviks drove the Poles out of Vilna in 1920, and to compensate for the trouble, Lithuania took over the Baltic port of Memel, with a 92 per cent German population. Sooner or later, some German leader was going to march in to take it back.

  The Paris Peace Conference dispensed recipes for war. The powerful nations dished out independence: which meant it was not independence. Something which has been given you through the benevolence of a higher power is not true independence: it is a sign that you are not strong enough to stand on your own. Imperialism had had its day. But they were unable in 1919 to devise a system such as the present European Union, which has the imperial characteristic of ‘diluting both the democratic and the nationalistic principles in the interest of a wider union of peoples’.5

  The final peace treaty was signed at Versailles in July 1919, in that
very Hall of Mirrors where in 1871 France had acknowledged her defeat, and where the German nation had at the selfsame moment been born. Perhaps if the treaty, and the negotiations which preceded it, had happened on neutral soil, there might have been happier consequences. But the fact of France’s wounds, France’s griefs, France’s rage and France’s fear for the future would not go away, wherever the treaty had been signed.

  For half a year, Paris was ‘the capital of the world’,6 its streets, hotels, restaurants teeming with foreign nationals hoping for a new political future, or to make a splash, or, like Lawrence of Arabia in his Arab costume, to do both. In our twenty-first century, some European writers whose first language is English have looked to America as to a culture more vivid, a linguistic tradition more vibrant than the moribund shell of old England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland. During the First World War, this was not so. American writers still looked towards Europe for their inspiration.

  Henry James had been their beacon, their light, their Moses leading towards the Promised Land. He felt, on his visits back to the United States, that he was weighing ‘prosperity against posterity’. To his sister Alice he had confided: ‘I could come back to America (could be carried back on a stretcher) to die – but never, never to live.’7 When the war started, he was desolated. He visited wounded soldiers in hospital. He stayed with Asquith, when Prime Minister, at Walmer Castle in Kent. He became so emotionally caught up in the horror and tragedy of the war that he applied for British citizenship and was admitted by the king to the Order of Merit.

  James had been worried all his life by the fact that two of his brothers had fought in the American Civil War, whereas he had been too ill to do so. Like many peace-loving men, he was haunted by an interest in war and had been a lifelong Napoleonic obsessive. As the war dragged on, he absorbed himself increasingly in reading Napoleonic memoirs. Theodora Bosanquet, his typist – or his typewriter as he would have said – still came regularly to take his dictation in his Chelsea apartment. Even when he suffered a series of strokes, in December 1915, he needed her presence, and she would note that, when he was in a coma, his hand passed to and fro over the bed-sheet as if it were writing. After one of these attacks, when he surfaced and resumed his dictation, Miss Bosanquet was aware that James had undergone a change of personality. The war was on his mind, but, like Lord Northcliffe, his character had been subsumed by that of Bonaparte. ‘Wondrous enough certainly,’ Napoleon dictated to the typist, ‘wondrous enough certainly to have a finger in such a concert and to feel ourselves touch the large old phrase into the right amplitude.’ The French emperor was in some confusion, but he was evidently preparing for battle. Images of conflict and ‘the grand air of gallantry’ possessed him. ‘They pluck in terror from the imperial eagle, and with no greater credit in consequence than that they face, keeping their equipoise, the awful bloody beak that he turns round upon them.’ The next day, Napoleon was taken for a drive in ‘some motor-car or other’. The statement he had to make was ‘for all the world as if we had brought it on and given our push and our touch to great events. The Bonapartes have a kind of bronze distinction that extends to their finger-tips.’ He also dictated messages to his ‘dear and most esteemed brother and sister’, about the decoration of various apartments in the Louvre and the Tuileries ‘which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workmen who are to take them in hand’.8

  The announcement of his OM came with the New Year, 1916. He received the news at his Chelsea flat in Carlyle Mansions. He had recovered from being Napoleon, but he lasted only until 23 February. His sister-in-law, Mrs William James, was with him, and it was she who arranged the funeral at Chelsea Old Church, followed by cremation at Golders Green. They sang ‘For All the Saints’ and ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’.

  James, the greatest novelist of his age, was also a mirror of it, a parable. His later novels in particular had ceased merely to be stories of individuals trying to puzzle out one another’s mysteries, and became reflections of the uneasy relationship which existed between the Old World and the New. To this extent, there was some parallel between the distinguished old American Man of Letters, dictating Napoleonic schemes for human improvement from his Chelsea deathbed, and the Princeton professor’s blueprint for the postwar world settlement – President Wilson’s Fourteen Points.

  These Points, which had first been expounded to the Congress on 8 January 1918, were to be the underlying template of the Parisian Armistice, signed in July 1919. Their guiding principle, as we have seen, was self-determination. The peoples of the former Austria-Hungary, of the Ottoman Empire, should be given autonomy. The frontiers of Italy – a nation which, like Germany, had never really existed until modern times – were to be drawn ‘along clearly recognizable lines of nationality’. Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were to be conjured out of the map.

  Although the American president came from the state of Virginia, where everything from children’s schooling to buying a tram ticket was determined along racial lines, his kindly liberal mind did not make any distinction, in his plans for a bright European future, between nationality and race. The fourteenth of his Points was that a ‘general association of nations must be formed to guarantee political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike’. Hence was born the League of Nations.

  The tragic flaw in the dream was the failure to distinguish between nations and ethnicity. Nation-states were not things of nature. In the case of France, and to a smaller extent Britain, they had grown up, and been defined, over many centuries, into the political entities which they were in 1918. Poland was an ancient kingdom which for years had been subsumed or threatened by greater kingdoms and empires. Germany and Italy, as we have seen, were not nation-states as France was a nation-state. They were very recent conglomerations: groups of states and kingdoms and duchies. As soon as the independent nation-state was seen, by kindly minded and well-intentioned liberals, as the ideal after which all peoples in the world should aspire, how were they expected to define their nationality? By language? As we have already seen, in Poland, Slovenia, the new Czechoslovakia and Austria there were many cities and territories where German-speakers were in the majority. When times grew hard – and they were destined to grow very hard indeed – such people would inevitably be drawn to the call for a Greater Germany – Grossdeutschland. In Turkey, it had already been demonstrated how you define nationality: in terms not of language alone, but of blood. The Armenian massacres of 1915 were not merely a harbinger of things to come because they showed no government could control civilian populations simply by culling. They were also a brutal answer to an intellectual question: what is a nation? The old world did not ask this question. The ploughman, the merchant, the young child and the grandmother went about their business in Damascus, Constantinople, Bucharest or Linz without needing to define themselves in national terms. Once the principle of their political existence was to be defined nationally, it was bound to be asked whether someone of Albanian ethnicity could really count as a true Bosnian, or an Armenian as a true Turk, or a Jew as a true Pole. Empires, and aristocratic hierarchies, had been half done away with in 1848, and 1918–19 finished the business. The new League of Nations was never going to possess the authority of the sultans in Constantinople, nor of the Habs burg emperors in Vienna. America had become ‘repulsive and appalling’ to Henry James,9 and one reason for this was that it had become a racial mixture. The modern sensibility is shocked that so kindly and broad-visioned a man as James should be what we call racist, but we should fail to understand the past if we did not see that almost everyone in the past was.

  Though the James family had an admirable Civil War record and had fought not merely for liberation but alongside the ‘darks’ in a negro regiment, Henry James could still feel America was spoilt by the recent influx of European flotsam and jetsam. Yet that was in some senses of its self-identity what America was and is: Irish, Italian, Dutch, Polish-Jewish, Indian – after a genera
tion or two, you are American. In idea, you are American from the moment you collect your naturalization papers. Strong as this idea is, and not merely strong but admirable as it is, no American in 1919 would have believed that it had come to pass as a social reality except in theory. It was decades before racial segregation ended in the southern states. Recent immigrants lived in their own urban areas and retained much of their own identity. America was big enough, and untidy enough, and rich enough to live with the ideal, and work out the details piecemeal. Ironically, it was how the old empires got by, also – Jews, Armenians, Turks, Germans, Slavs and others knocked together in a multi-ethnic city such as Sarajevo because they had to, and because the umbrella of the imperium protected them rather as the Federal Laws of the United States, and their Constitution, remained the ultimate point of unity.

  If President Wilson had been gifted with magical foresight, he might have devoted the six months of the Paris Peace Conference to reestablishing the Habsburgs in political power in Vienna, and helping the Turks undo the work of Young Turk modernizers in favour of a restored Sultanate. He could have urged upon the newly empowered Imperia a greater degree of liberalism and tolerance, and pumped money into all their more benign industries and enterprises. Instead, he supported nationalism. Every sort of nationalism, that is to say, except German nationalism. And he, together with Lloyd George, felt unable to resist all of France’s demands.