bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2000) — Spring 2000 // Printemps 2000, pp. 49–52
THE PITY OF WAR, by Niall Ferguson, Basic
Books, London, 1998, 559 pp. $35.00
For a nation of peace-keepers, peace-mongers and peace-builders, with Pearson’s Nobel Peace Prize in the national display cabinet, it is an irony of history that all of Canada’s wars have been “good wars.” From repelling General Montgomery from the heights of Quebec in 1775 to driving out Milosevic from Kosovo in 1999, our wars have “caught our youth and wakened us from sleeping” (Rupert Brooke, 1914) and left the colony-nation stronger, more certain of its identity, more confident of its future.
The Great War was the crucible of Canadian nationhood. The mobilization of a formidable army was the greatest enterprise ever attempted by Canada and the war was the greatest experience that the Canadian people had ever known. As Donald Creighton (Canada’s First Century) remarks, the Great War brought to a close the existence of the old Canada, an overgrown, awkward, adolescent colonial that only recently ceased to call the Motherland home. It gave birth to a new Canada with an increasingly independent foreign policy, steel and shipbuilding industries, votes for women, the income tax, and a major expansion of federal intervention in the economy. Tried and true Canadian themes played their role: the solitudes of Anglo and Francophone Canada (especially on conscription, introduced in 1917), social and regional resentment, and deep rooted feelings of injustice and alienation over the distribution of the sacrifices and benefits of this great endeavour.
For a nation of scarce seven million souls, the military contribution was impressive. In September 1914, a month after the Declaration of War, 33,000 men from all corners of the country assembled in a field north of Quebec at the hastily built camp of Valcartier. A few weeks later, they sailed to England and by February, took position in the trenches alongside British and French regulars. They made their reputation as formidable troops in April, 1915, when they held the line against the German gas attacks. By 1917, 100,000 strong, they stormed and took Vimy Ridge. They finished the war under the command of Victoria native, Sir Arthur Currie, and played a crucial role as the shock troops of the Allied armies in breaking the German lines at Amiens in August 1918 and launching the 100 days of victory which ended with the Armistice in November 1918. As war progressed the sense of national unity of the Canadian corps became stronger and stronger.
The official historian of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, Colonel G. Nicholson, records that the “troops fought as Canadians and brought back with them a pride of nationhood that they had not known before.” From a part-time militia seasoned with a few regulars, Canada had mobilized more than 650,000 men and women and suffered 232,000 casualties, including almost 60,000 dead.
The contribution to foreign policy independence was equally impressive. We transformed ourselves from a loyal, even sycophantic, daughter of the Empire to a free-minded, obstreperous, demanding member of the Imperial War Cabinet. The Canadian army was modest in scale but superb in quality. Canada had at its peak only four out of some 60 British and Empire divisions in the field. The Great War prime minister, Sir Robert Borden, the first practitioner of ’soft power, levered this contribution to insist upon and acquire a distinct voice for Canada in the conduct of the war and the management of the peace. He rallied his reluctant Dominion colleagues of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa to make common cause against Lloyd George. “I have not come here to participate in any light comedy,” he informed the British prime minister. At the Paris Peace Conference, faced with French and US complaints that separate seats for the Dominions would just add to the British voice, he persuaded them by word and deed that Canada would play its own hand.
In 1914, the Declaration of War by King George V automatically engaged Canada and all the Empire. Borden declared that Canada stood shoulder to shoulder with Britain. Sir Wilfrid Laurier declaimed that the Canadian answer to the call to duty was “ready, aye, ready.” Just eight years later, in 1922, when Churchill, Secretary of State for War, invited the Dominions to contribute troops to defend Imperial interests during the Chanak crisis in Turkey, he received the dry reply from Borden’s successor, Mackenzie King, that Parliament would need to be consulted.
If the Great War was a good war for Canada, it was a disaster for Europe. ’The lamps are going out all over Europe,” the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, sadly and presciently observed in August 1914. The Great War began what the British historian, Hobsbawm (Age Of Extremes), has called the short 20th century. It was the anvil upon which the global power of Europe was irretrievably broken. It bankrupted the winners who fought a war beyond their means and destroyed the losers whose Empires and Emperors tumbled like nine pins. Its powers diminished, its confidence emasculated, no longer the arbiter of world politics, no more the leader in industrial growth, science or art, its new states carved from Imperial ruins descending into tribalism, a vigorous and ominous revolutionary power in the east, Europe plunged into a dark quarter-century from which the western half emerged as a collection of second and third rate powers dependent upon the United States for its security and the eastern half as occupied vassals of the Soviet Empire.
In The Pity of War, the Scot historian, Niall Ferguson argues that Britain must bear the chief blame for the war, “the greatest error of modern history.” There was no compelling British interest at stake and no reason to waste the resources of the Empire to defeat the Kaiser. Had Britain stayed neutral, Wilhelmine Germany would have conquered all of West and Central Europe but posed no threat to the British Empire. “Europe would have been transformed into something not wholly unlike the European Union today — but without the massive contraction in British overseas power entailed by the fighting of two world wars. Hitler and Lenin would have eked out their lives, one as postcard painter, the other as a Zurich-bound ineffectual scribbler of political tracts. This thesis, what modern spinmeisters call the “socko,” is the overlay for a series of fascinating essays on the economics and finance of the war, on the failure of the Allies to enforce the reparations and cleverness of the Weimar government in arguing that payment meant bankruptcy, on the impact on literature and the visual arts, on the reasons why men fought in such appalling conditions. His chapters on the efficiency of the killing machines on both sides of the conflict, and on the dangerous and sometimes short lives of surrendering soldiers are thought-provoking and macabre. As historian Paul Kennedy remarks in The New York Review of Books (Aug. 12/99), Ferguson’s views are radical and opinionated on all these matters but he will be need to be battled archive by archive and footnote by footnote in this exhaustively researched and detailed book.
The Pity of War stands history on its head; Kennedy is too pessimistic about its vulnerability to attack. Historians generally abide by the view that the origins of the war are to be found in an unstable cauldron of rivalries and national anxieties: Germany striving for a place in the sun worried about encirclement by France in the west and a rapidly industrializing Russia in the east; the centuries-old Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires crumbling and destabilizing south and central Europe; a revengeful France anxious to recover the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine; Britain determined to maintain naval supremacy and protect the Empire while Germany saw a powerful navy as an entitlement. Some prominent German historians explicitly blame Germany for the war arguing that it did indeed seek a radical reordering of the political and territorial boundaries of Europe and saw the assassination of the Austrian Heir in June 1914 at Sarajevo as the fuse which would alight the war which it needed. German war aims of annexing Belgium, Luxembourg and large parts of France plus the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk lend credence to these claims.
No one can deny the blunders of diplomacy, such as the Kaiser’s blank cheque to Vienna to deal with the Serbs, or that appetites grew as the war ground on and costs and casualties mounted. Few supporters can be found for French military strategy of ’offensive en outrance’ which would cost more than 100,000 French lives in the first six weeks of the war, the German attack at Verdun which would cost half a million French and German lives or the British assault on the Somme in which 20,000 British soldiers would perish on the first day, most in the first hour. By the conventions of European wars of the past, the stalemate along 400 miles of trenches on the western front in November and the defeat of the Russian armies in the east in 1914, should have called for a settlement. The power of entrenchments, artillery and machine guns, as the US civil war had shown, to prolong battle and emasculate the offensive until the last days of the war argued compellingly for a settlement. But this was a different war, a war fought without limits, a war fought around the world, a war which mobilized millions of soldiers and whole economies, a war which German General Ludendorff called one of nation against nation, people against people, a war to be fought to decision.
A country like a person must live in its own time and circumstance. For the British in those last, languid days of Edwardian England, the times were troubling. The minority Liberal Government of Asquith depended for survival upon Irish nationalist votes; senior British army officers threatened a mutiny if force were used to impose Irish home rule upon Ulster. Even as the crisis in Europe deepened, a badly split Asquith cabinet rendered moot any idea of bold statement of British intentions. Most of the Cabinet were unaware of the extent of British military and naval commitments to France in the event of war with Germany. Had Britain not decided on war once the German troops crossed into Belgium, the government would have given way to the bellicose Conservatives under the Canadian-born Bonar Law and Churchill and Lloyd George of the Asquith cabinet would have joined them. Whatever the options were, the room for manoeuvre for Asquith and Foreign Secretary Grey was exceedingly narrow. The circumstance was scarcely more promising. British policy had been based for centuries on preventing the emergence of a dominant European power on the channel coast. Britain had fought numerous wars against the French to prevent just such a result. To argue that the arrival of the 20th century should have produced a more strategic view by Britain of its interests is wisdom by hindsight. To argue further that sober and serious British statesmanship should have recognized that German domination of the continent would have been benign is far-fetched and far from accepted even today in the UK. Recall that Lady Thatcher sacked a minister for declaring the EU a plot for German hegemony and that the Tory party is riven on the very issue of Europe.
Ferguson would have us believe that diplomacy is a science of moves and countermoves with known and calculable consequences. The reality for diplomats in this new century or the last is that diplomacy is more art than science. The art consists of mastering and articulating national interests and deploying them on a consistently shifting international stage. Unintended consequences, unanticipated reactions, the arrival of new players and new issues on the scene are daily bread of the practical diplomacy. Diplomatic successes and blunders are siblings, less the progeny of rational calculation than vision, professional skill, courage and luck.
No one can look back upon the 20th century without feelings of regret for the awful consequences for Europe of the Great War. Edwardian Britain and its Empire of which Canada was a proud member, the grace and elegance of the third republic in France, the dynamism of Wilhelmine Germany, even the glories of that last summer of peace are the belle epoque and the Europeans threw it away.
The Great War, ’the war to end all wars,’ haunts us still; it is the ghost in the attic of the 20th century, moving the curtains, shaking the crockery: Bosnia, Serbia, Israel, nationalism in the Transcaucasses, all are children of the Great War. Hobsbawm whose lifespan includes the war recalls that his mention of the Second World War to intelligent Americans sometimes produces a puzzled enquiry as to whether there was a First World War. Ferguson reminds us of our history; it is well that he does so.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2000) — Spring 2000 // Printemps 2000, pp. 49–52. Read the rest of this issue →
