The Wrong-War Look Becomes the Right-War Analysis

“Fashions in historiography change. Today, books about WW I flood the market. Of special concern are the origins of what has always been appropriately dubbed ‘The Great War.’” Sanford Rose

Dolors & Sense

By Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—5/6/2013—When the late Barbara Tuchman published The Guns of August in 1962, the literati were perplexed.

A book about World War I? Nobody wrote about that war—at least not after the outpouring of exculpatory memoirs in the 1920s, plus the definitive histories of Sidney Fay, Bernadotte Schmitt and Luigi Albertini, all written at about the same time.

It wasn’t fashionable. The fashionable conflicts were the Civil War and World War II. At gatherings of historians, Ms. Tuchman got strange glances, what she called “wrong- war looks.”

Fashions in historiography change. Today, books about WW I flood the market. Of special concern are the origins of what has always been appropriately dubbed “The Great War.”

Most of these books ascribe these origins to the usual suspects: militarism, nationalism, imperialism and entangling alliances—disabilities that afflicted all the major actors to varying degrees.

One of these books alleges that there is no “smoking gun”—no political leader or country that is obtrusively guilty.

Doubtless, there is much merit in this thesis, especially as a corrective to the notion, still rehearsed in most textbooks, that Germany and its blustering Kaiser were the principal progenitors of the conflict.

But, try as I may, I can’t surrender the idea that some highly placed individuals and the countries they represented were guiltier than others.

Certainly, there was a war party in Germany, as in the other countries. Many Germans believed that they had to go to war preemptively—before, that is, a rapidly industrializing Tsarist Russia, allied to a revanchist France, got strong enough to overwhelm them.

But neither the Kaiser nor the German chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, was of this party. And although the Kaiser originally gave Austria-Hungary the infamous blank check to discipline Serbia for its role in the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he subsequently tried to cancel that check when the war clouds thickened.

More blame attaches to the Austrian foreign minister, Count Berchtold, who accepted the Kaiser’s initial summons to action but was unaccountably deaf to its countermand.

Of course, prior blame attaches to the Serbian prime minister, Nikola Pasic. He had advance knowledge of the plot to murder the Archduke, but he did little to impede the efforts of the plotters. However, alert to the danger to his country if the plot succeeded, he tried to warn the Austrians, yet in so indirect and oblique a fashion that the warning was easily misinterpreted and ignored.

Readers of my postings know that I ascribe a great deal of responsibility for the war to Britain’s foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey. He could have halted the war drive had he taken one of two opposing actions:

1) Stated unequivocally early in the July 1914 crisis that Britain would remain neutral, which would have curbed the bellicosity of France and thus slowed or halted Russian mobilization to defend its Serbian ally from the impending Austrian invasion.

2) Stated with equal clarity and, most importantly, celerity that Britain would go to war with France and Russia against Germany if she violated Belgian neutrality en route to an invasion of France. This demarche would have terrified the Kaiser and the German chancellor and very likely resulted in German pressure on Austria to agree to compulsory mediation of the dispute with Serbia. The evidence indicates that Germany held out the strongest hopes, actually until the beginning of August, that Britain would remain neutral. If disabused of this notion a month earlier, she would have fundamentally altered her behavior.

Note: Film footage, if brief, of the passing of the Archduke’s funeral cortege actually exists: http://www.firstworldwar.com/video/ferdinandfuneral.htm