Sir Michael Howard: They knew there would be war — but not so terrible

When the First World War started 100 years today it was expected to be bloody but brief and decisive

Slaughter: British troops before the battle of the Somme, in which a million men were wounded or killed (Picture: Channel Five)

Channel Five

Sir Michael Howard

4 August 2014

When Winston Churchill wrote his history of what we now call the First World War he gave it the far more appropriate title — The World Crisis. His contemporary David Lloyd George described it in even more apocalyptic terms: “a deluge, a convulsion of nature … a cyclone which is tearing up the roots of modern society … an earthquake that is upheaving the very rocks of European life”.

They did not exaggerate. The First World War was not just a war but a gigantic, global catastrophe of which military events were only one aspect — and of those the fighting on the Western Front was only one. Concentrating on this means ignoring the gigantic battles on the Eastern Front, the events in the Middle East and the war at sea; but it is right to do so. It was, after all, on the fields of France and Flanders that those young men died whose names are so unforgettably inscribed on village memorials throughout our land. But to understand why they died, and in such numbers and in the way that they did, we have to study “the world crisis” in a very much broader context.

When war did break out in 1914 no one was very surprised: it had been expected and prepared for ever since the last conflict in Western Europe in 1871. But only a few had expected the war that they got — a war terrible not only because of the numbers who perished in it, but for the lasting wounds it inflicted on European civilisation; wounds from which we have not yet recovered and perhaps never will.

Some had foreseen the nature of the war. One great soldier, Helmuth von Moltke, warned the German Reichstag as early as 1890 that the next war would be a Volkskrieg, a war of peoples, a war of nations. And first there had to be nations to make such a war. The nation-state had developed in the 19th century. Throughout Western Europe, schoolchildren were being taught that they belonged to the greatest nation in the world — the British, the German, the French, not least the Serb — and one for which they must be prepared, if necessary, to die. By the beginning of the 20th century statesmen had to take account of a public opinion, especially among the urban middle classes, that was swayed by irrational but immensely powerful concerns for national greatness and national honour.

Indeed “irrationality” was beginning to permeate not just political thinking but the whole of European culture. Young intellectuals were increasingly bored with the peaceful, orderly, bourgeois societies in which they had grown up. When war did come it was the young men of the best-educated classes who welcomed it with most enthusiasm.

Rupert Brooke was typical of his generation of poets throughout Europe in thanking God for having matched him with His hour. The young Winston Churchill declared: “I know that this war is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I cannot help it — I love every second I live!” Even German minister of war General Erich von Falkenhayn — highly educated if no longer young — exclaimed when war broke out: “Even if everything goes smash, it will have been worth it!”

These people were not exceptional: older and wiser heads like Sir Edward Grey certainly saw the war as the catastrophe that it was: but there were many, not least in the urban working classes, who saw it as liberation, a holiday from the tedium of everyday life.

But more important were the very rational calculations of the army leaders and their chiefs of staff. The experience of the last European war — only 40 years earlier — had shown that God was on the side of the big battalions: that victory went, as Nathaniel Bedford Forrest deathlessly remarked, to the side that got there “fustest with the mostest”. In 1870, the Germans had got there with the mostest because they had universal conscription, and they got there fustest because they had the best railways and the best organisation for mobilising their manpower.

It was taken for granted that war, when it came, would consist of battles between these gigantic armies. And it was further taken for granted that these battles would be decisive: the war would be over in a matter of weeks. It was assumed that the war could be kept short by taking the offensive. Given the huge advantage afforded the defence by modern weapons, it was accepted that this would inevitably entail enormous casualties; but it was believed that this advantage would be overcome by that further intangible, irrational factor — morale: morale strong enough to carry its possessor through shell and machine-gun to settle matters, as they had always been settled in war, with the bayonet and the sword.

If anyone had any doubts about this, they had only to consider the war between Russia and Japan in 1904, only 10 years earlier. There the Japanese had taken the offensive from the beginning. They had suffered terrible losses in the process. But they had won.

So when the nation-states of Europe did go to war in 1914, and when their armies did suffer terrible losses, no one was surprised; and it would be a full year before their peoples began to object. Units that did not suffer heavy casualties, indeed, were seen as “lacking in moral fibre”. Such losses were seen as evidence not of the incompetence of the generals but of the warlike qualities of the men they commanded and the greatness of the nation that could produce such heroes.

If we are to understand why the Great War was conducted in the way that it was, and why the peoples of Europe accepted their losses so willingly and for so long, we need some conception of the mentalité of 1914. If the war had indeed been as brief, bloody and decisive as was generally expected, we would certainly now be commemorating it in a very different way.

Apart from anything else, we would probably have lost it.

This is an extract of an article to be published in the August issue of the RUSI Journal, published by the Royal United Services Institute. Michael Howard is emeritus professor, Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

Sir Michael Howard: They knew there would be war — but not so terrible

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