by Hew Strachan
Bergson’s lecture on the meaning of the war was published in English in 1915, and reprinted several times. But British philosophers were hesitant about following his example, for two reasons. The first was the uncertainty of some about making the leap from academic to public life. The war promoted emotion and instinct to the detriment of reason and law, and herein lay the second difficulty. The former qualities were more characteristic of the European philosophical tradition, which included not only Nietzsche but also, as the liberal and would-be neutral L. T. Hobhouse, pointed out, Bergson him-self.39
More representative of the British academic profession as a whole than Hobhouse’s doubts about public involvement was an initial reluctance to nationalize the world of learning. A group of nine scholars, mostly from Cambridge, wrote to The Times on 1 August 1914 to protest against a war with Germany, which was ‘leading the way in Arts and Sciences’, on behalf of Serbia and Russia, which most certainly were not. Six weeks later fifty-three writers, including G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and H. G. Wells, were prompted by the government to address the editor of the same newspaper in order to condemn Germany’s appropriation of ‘brute force to impose its culture upon other nations’, but they still confessed their high regard for that same culture. Even on 21 October 1914 117 British academics prefaced their reply to the German professors’ manifesto with an expression of their deep admiration for German scholarship and science, and an affirmation of their ‘ties with Germany, ties of comradeship, of respect, and of affection’.40
The sequence of letters shows a conversion that marches in step with, but not ahead of, the pattern of popular recruiting. Its significance lies less in the fact that British intellectuals, like those of Germany, came to endorse the government line, and more in their determination, again as in Germany, to forsake reflection and research for action. The Oxford History School produced a succession of pamphlets concerning the causes of the war from mid-September 1914. Like the manifestos of the German professors, these publications became the foundation for more officially directed propaganda. But the dons insisted that their reaction was spontaneous: the initiative was their own.
Like those of France, the scholars of Britain were clear that the cause on which their country had embarked was a universal one. The assumption of this burden was a consequence of empire because, in the words of Alfred Zimmern, ‘Of the Great Powers which between them control the destinies of civilisation Great Britain is at once the freest, the largest, and most various’.41 Britain, therefore, supported France not because it now finally felt able to endorse the claim of the ideas of the French Revolution to universality, but out of respect for France’s own evolution to democracy: France, as another Oxford man, the historian Ernest Barker, said, is ‘one of the great seed-beds of liberal thought and ideas’.42
Civilization, a key word in France, was also a central concept in Britain. However, Alfred Zimmern was clear that its meaning was different in Britain: ‘it stands for something moral and social and political. It means, in the first place, the establishment and enforcement of the Rule of Law. . . and, secondly. . . the task of making men fit for free institutions.’ Britain was fighting for ‘Law, Justice, Responsibility, Liberty, Citizenship’, concepts which ‘belong to civilised humanity as a whole’.43 The Oxford historians agreed. In their first pamphlet, Why we are at war: Great Britain’s case, they said that Britain was fighting for ‘the public law of Europe’.44
Law in this case meant the natural law to which the church too subscribed, and which Christianity had appropriated from the Greeks. It meant less international law in a legal sense and more a common morality; it implied that treaties had a sanctity which derived not merely from the honour of those who signed them but also from a Christian world order. ‘If’, G. W. Prothero wrote, ‘international morality is regarded as of no account, a heavy blow is dealt at commercial and private morality as well. The Reign of Law, the greatest mark of civilization is maintained in all its parts.’ Law was, therefore, indivisible: the law which regulated international relations was in principle the same as that which upheld the rights of property, the sanctity of marriage, and the workings of credit.45
The problem was that of giving such academic concepts immediacy. The Oxford historians tried: ‘We are a people in whose blood the cause of law is the vital element.’ Alfred Zimmern went further. As the author of The Greek commonwealth, he was appalled that Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, whose scholarship he admired, could regard Prussia as superior to Athens because Prussia was a monarchy. Zimmern therefore spurned any constitutional definitions of democracy for something much more organic: ‘Democracy is a spirit and an atmosphere, and its essence is trust in the moral instincts of the people.’ He sidestepped the troubling issues of empire, crown, and franchise to emphasize the responsibility which British democracy cast on the individual citizen.46
Bethmann-Hollweg helped. His contemptuous reference to the Belgian guarantee as ‘a scrap of paper’ gave a force to what was otherwise in danger of being either theory or rhetoric. The Belgians became the personification of ideas. Hensley Henson, the dean of Durham, likened them to the Israelites in their sufferings under the tyrannies of Egypt and Babylon.47 ‘A democracy armed with faith is not merely strong,’ Zimmern explained: ‘it is invincible; for its cause will live on, in defeat and disaster, in the breast of every one of its citizens. Belgium is a living testimony to that great truth.’48 Walter Sickert gave these words visual expression. His own opposition to violence was first undermined by the emotional jingoism of the music halls which he painted so well. But it was Belgium that rationalized the shift: in October 1914 he painted The soldiers of King Albert the Ready, based on the defence of Liège, and in January 1915 he exhibited The integrity of Belgium.49
Thanks to Belgium, the Asquith cabinet had been able to rally round the rights of small nations and the sovereignty of international law. Thereafter Asquith was able to invert the sequence. Britain fought not for Belgium, but for what Belgium represented. In a speech on 19 September the prime minister defined Britain’s reasons for entering the war as threefold: first, to uphold ‘the public law of Europe’; secondly, ‘to enforce the independence of free states’; and thirdly, ‘to withstand... the arrogant claim of a single Power to dominate the development of the destinies of Europe’.50 By elevating the principles over the principality, Asquith evaded the knotty issues of Belgium’s pre-war record as a colonial power. The good ousted the bad. For Germany the opposite was the case. Monolithic and militarist, its crime was the assumption that its culture, a product of the state, was appropriate to peoples whose languages and traditions were different. In the circumstances, the notion of there being two Germanies was a difficult one to sustain.
Surprisingly, Lloyd George tried to do so. In a speech in Bangor on 28 February 1915 he expressed his admiration for German music, German science, and ‘the Germany of a virile philosophy that helped to break the shackles of superstition in Europe’. Even now he saw the issue of which Germany would dominate as unresolved, comparing it to a Wagnerian struggle ‘between the good and the evil spirit for the possession of the man’s soul’. The outcome would depend on who won the war. If Germany was victorious, then ‘we shall be vassals, not to the best Germans’, but ‘to a Germany that talks through the vacuous voice of Krupp’s artillery’.51
A few others could still see the distinction. Dean Inge took Nietzsche on his own terms, highlighting his praise of individualism and stressing that his writings justified neither militarism nor racism.52 Alfred Zimmern resisted the temptation to cull extracts from ‘Treitschke’s brilliant and careful work’, or to forget that ‘Nietzsche, like many other prophets, wrote in allegory’.53 But they were increasingly isolated, Zimmern even within his own university. Sir Walter Raleigh, Oxford’s professor of English literature, was delighted to have the excuse ‘to be rid of the German incubus . . . It has done no good, for many years, to scholarship;—indeed, it has produced a kind of
slave-scholarship’.54 Even Zimmern’s fellow classicist Gilbert Murray, a Liberal, a would-be neutral before the war and an ardent internationalist after it, saw the opportunity to reassert a specifically British approach to learning, based on ‘feeling and understanding’ rather than research for its own sake: ‘we are always aiming at culture in Arnold’s sense not Bernhardi’s.’55
Whether Murray read Bernhardi may be doubted; unlike some other British academics, he had never studied at a German university. Ignorance, not least of the German language, underpinned many of the portrayals of German ideology. In France, Bergson’s idea that German philosophy had become the pawn of an alliance between militarism and industrialism was vital to his optimism concerning the war’s outcome: material resources could be exhausted, those of the spirit could not. But Bergson’s interpretation was flawed. It rested on his memories of 1870, and of France’s awareness ever since of its growing inferiority, both demographically and economically. In 1914 Britain’s entry into the war ensured that collectively the Entente had a combined national income 60 per cent greater than that of the Central Powers.56 Not Germany but France now stood to gain from a war of materialism.
Germany’s awareness of its economic inferiority directed its thinking on war along routes very different from those which Bergson—or for that matter Murray—imagined. Despite his place in Entente demonology, Bernhardi perhaps matters least as an indicator of military thought, since he was at odds with much of the prevailing ethos in the general staff. But it is nonetheless worth pointing out that, according to Germany and the next war, war was not to be undertaken lightly, it should be fought according to moral conventions, and it should be limited in its objectives.57 Effectively, Bernhardi gave himself little choice, since he was highly critical of ‘material prosperity, commerce and money-making’,58 the very means which would enable the war to be fought at greater intensity and for more grandiose aims. In this respect at least, Bernhardi aligned himself with the German army collectively. It feared economic progress as a threat to its warlike and warrior qualities.59 Material and demographic inferiority in 1914 confirmed its predisposition to trust in alternative strengths. As the year ebbed away, Moltke pinned his hopes of ultimate German victory not on superior armament or even on greater military efficiency but on ‘the high idealism of the German people’.60
Things of the spirit were the key: Geist was the catchword. Moltke himself was an anthroposophist; in private he admitted, ‘I live entirely in the arts’.61 On the eastern front one of his army commanders, August von Mackensen, put his faith in ‘our inner strength’.62 This was not the vocabulary of professionalism or modernism, let alone materialism. Moreover, these soldiers were expressing themselves in terms similar to those used by academics. In Die Nationen und ihre Philosophie (1915), Wilhelm Wundt rejected the British idea that individual progress was linked to industrial development. He condemned British ethics, which harnessed economic growth to utilitarianism and materialism to positivism, as the path to shallowness and mediocrity.63 The sociologist Werner Sombart produced the most extreme version of this thesis. In Händler und Helden (Traders and heroes) (1915) he described man as living two lives on earth, one superficial and the other spiritual: life itself was a continuing effort to pass from one to the other. The struggle was essentially a personal one, but war gave it transcendant qualities. In these circumstances the free response to duty’s call and the willingness to sacrifice self characterized Sombart’s ‘hero’. Therefore, the significance of war for the state lay not in social Darwinism, not in terms of the state’s standing in relation to its neighbours, but in the nation’s ability to elevate the spirit and will of its people. War found the state at its acme. ‘The sword and the spirit’, Max Scheler wrote, ‘can create a beautiful, worthy marriage.’ Its fertility was proved for him by the link between the Persian wars and Greek philosophy and between the Napoleonic wars and Hegel. ‘The war of 1914’, Sombart concluded, ‘is the war of Nietzsche.’64
Both Sombart and Scheler, born in 1863 and 1874 respectively, belonged to that younger generation which had come to maturity in Wilhelmine Germany after Bismarck’s fall. By contrast, Rudolf Eucken was already 20 when 1866 had inaugurated a promise that he felt had not yet been fulfilled. Before unification Germany had found its identity not in politics but in philosophy, literature, and music. Since then Germans had worked hard to improve their material lot, but in so doing had lost their vocation. Eucken, a Nobel prizewinner and the dominant figure in German philosophy, particularly in spiritual existentialism, hankered for his subject’s return to the centre of national life. The outbreak of the First World War provided him with the opportunity to fulfil his aspirations. Like Sombart, Scheler, and the leaders of the church, he celebrated war’s power to reinvigorate the moral health of the individual. And he went as far or even further in pursuing its collective implications. His 1914 publication, on ‘the world historical significance of the German spirit’, asserted that Germany could not be defeated while it remained truly united and stood fast in its inner strength.65
If Geist was a word that concerned the feelings of the individual but could be extended to the community, Kultur embraced concepts that began with the community but were defined nationally. Sombart quoted Novalis to the effect that ‘all culture derives from the relationship of a man with the state’.66 Kultur was shaped by language and history, but its vitality rested also on the civic virtues to which Geist gave rise—idealism, heroism, subordination to the community.67 Thus, the German professors declared in their October manifesto that ‘Our belief is that the salvation of all European culture depends on the victory for which German “militarism” is fighting, the discipline, the loyalty, the spirit of sacrifice of the united free German people’.68
Kultur’s opponent was ‘civilization’. There was, of course, a paradox here. Germany was civilized, in the sense that it had benefited as much as any state from the advances in science and technology so fundamental to Europe’s primacy in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century. Even Eucken acknowledged this: the distinction of Germans as technicians, traders, and industrialists meant that ‘today people are in the habit of calling us the Americans of Europe’.69 But the civilization which Thomas Mann saw as the opposite of Kultur was itself more cultural than technological.70 In part it was materialistic, and hence damaging to the heroic spirit; in part it was egalitarian, a fruit of 1789. Civilization, according to another philosopher, Paul Natorp, was the culture of society, and that meant a levelling down of the best to conform with the average. It could make a man a slave. Kultur, on the other hand, was liberating. The contrast was Kant’s, but the context in 1914 was no longer moral but political.71
The clash between civilization and culture took German thought back to its late-eighteenth-century roots. In condemning civilization, the philosophers of 1914 were reflecting the rationality of the Enlightenment and the consequences of the French Revolution. They argued that, following what was essentially an alien, French track, philosophy had elevated the rule of law and the rights of the individual, and so had promoted selfishness and materialism. At one level, therefore, the summons of 1914 was a call to rediscover the ideas of the Aufklärung and to refurbish the memory of 1813. More important even than Kant or Hegel in the nationalist context was Fichte. Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation (Speeches to the German nation) (1808) symbolized the engagement of the philospher with the life of the state, and his endowment of the nation with its own identity and his subordination of the individual to the nation connected the themes of the war of liberation with those of 1914. Between 1890 and 1900 Fichte’s philosophy was the subject of only ten noteworthy studies; between 1900 and 1920 over 200 appeared. The context of Fichte’s writing, the defeat at Jena in 1806, and the long path from there to liberation, ensured that his relevance did not dwindle as the adversities of the war multiplied.72
Although France was home to the Enlightenment and to the alleged triumph of its ideas in politics,
France was not, in 1914, Germany’s principal ideological foe. As Paul Natorp was prepared to concede, Germany had derived from revolutionary France both its sense of nationalism and the idea of the nation in arms.73 For writers like Sombart and Scheler, the clashes between Germany and France, or even between Germany and Russia, were second-order issues tacked onto the war of real significance for world history, that between Germany and Britain. The enemy was capitalism, because this was the true threat to the spirit.
Sombart, like Wundt, characterized British philosophy as preoccupied with economics. It had neglected matters of the spirit for practical problems, and the consequences had permeated British life. The elevation of trade resulted in the pursuit of economic self-interest and the subordination of the state. The latter was seen as no more than a necessary evil. War, which for Scheler found the state in its highest form, was for the British superfluous. In their ideal world it would not exist, and when they did fight they did so for economic objectives and, very often, by economic means. The aristocracy was motivated by commerce rather than by honour, and the army and navy were no more than instruments for armed trade and colonial plunder. But the British practised cultural as well as economic imperialism. Their empire swamped alternative languages and traditions. Its aim, J. A. Cramb was quoted as saying, was ‘to give all men within its bounds an English mind’. The ideal of gentlemanly self-restraint curbed the dynamic effects of personality and character. Even in international relations Britain, by the use of balance-of-power theory, elevated weak powers at the expense of the strong. Its own credentials as a democracy were doubtful: it was a colonial power abroad and a centralized state (rather than a federal one, like Germany) at home. Britain nonetheless was bent on persuading the rest of the world that freedom should be defined solely in political terms. The fear, above all, was that the ‘cant’ of capitalism and its political expression, liberalism, was sapping even German culture of its own identity.74 The greatest danger to Germany, in the view of Max Weber’s brother Alfred, was ‘Anglicization’.75
