Lord Davies of Stamford
Main Page: Lord Davies of Stamford (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, having read the three brilliant doorstop books recently published on the run-up to and the early stages of the First World War: Max Hastings’s Catastrophe, Margaret MacMillan’s, The War That Ended Peace, and Christopher Clark’s, The Sleepwalkers, and having studied the diplomatic background to the war as my special subject—here, I have common ground with the noble Lord, Lord Thomas; I studied in the Oxford School of Modern History nearly 60 years ago—I hope that I am reasonably well equipped to make a contribution to this important debate, which could be of real value if we draw sensible conclusions from what went so appallingly wrong 100 years ago. Here, I offer a few slightly random thoughts mainly drawn from the diplomatic background to the conflict.
First, it is misconceived and misleading to spend a lot of time trying to identify a villain or villains, to play another round of the blame game. That was tried in the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the war, and it was not a brilliant success. The hard fact is that there was a systematic failure of diplomacy by what were in those days known as the great powers, responsibility for which was very widely shared.
Secondly, we should recognise that this was a period of weak and diffuse leadership in every one of the main European powers. There were no Bismarcks or Salisburys around to check the slide towards war.
Thirdly, the war was an unmitigated disaster for all the European participants, both the victors and the vanquished—the suffering citizens of Europe, who gained little or no benefit from the sacrifices which they so stoically underwent. The only powers which emerged strengthened were two non-European powers, the United States of America and Japan, neither of which played any role in the onset of war.
Fourthly, it is odd that not a single woman was involved in the decisions that led to war. Nor was there a single woman in any of the parliaments of the protagonists. That shows what a change has taken place since then.
Fifthly, the act that triggered this war, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, was what we would now call an act of state-sponsored terrorism. Sixthly, a Europe that was governed by a closely interwoven network of cultural and, in the case of the monarchs themselves, family ties and which was economically very interdependent—much more interdependent than Europe had ever been since the time of the Roman empire—was unable to resist the slide into war. That point was made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London.
Seventhly, the so-called concert of Europe, the informal network of great powers, which had prevented war at the time of the two Moroccan crises and which had localised war in the two Balkan wars which preceded the Great War, was unravelled and collapsed in 1914 under the strain of events.
Eighthly, at least one of the great powers, Germany, had war plans which in the event of war with Russia—which was of course the event which occurred—required it to launch a pre-emptive strike against France and, in doing so, to march across two countries, Belgium and Luxembourg, whose neutrality it had guaranteed. Not one of its civilian leaders ever thought to challenge those war plans or note that they were a straightforward defiance of international law.
Ninthly, neither the military nor the diplomats—both of whom were very professional groups—gave much good advice to their political masters. Tenthly, all the participants, without exception, seemed genuinely to believe that they were acting defensively in response to external pressures over which they had no control: that they had no choice but to act as they did. As Margaret MacMillan said at the end of her brilliant book, there always are choices.
Britain’s diplomacy seems to me—I do not wish to be unduly censorious—to have been both confused and confusing during the period in the run-up to the war. It left everyone guessing, including the members of the Cabinet. The Government in office then were of course distracted by the potential breaking away of a part of the United Kingdom, and they were split down the middle between those who believed that our vital national interests were involved in the events on continental Europe and those who wanted to have nothing to do with them. I wonder where I have heard that before.
Are there any lessons for us to be drawn from all that? Plenty, I suggest, although not through drawing precise political parallels. Above all, there are risks in periods when power relationships are changing rapidly and both rising and declining powers feel insecure and are tempted into errors of judgment. That, I fear, is what we have around us now. That is when you most need something stronger than loose networks, when you need the multilateral alliances and disciplines which we have built up since the Second World War in the United Nations, in NATO, in the European Union and in other international organisations. That is when you cannot afford to turn your back on any of them.
I hope that when Europe’s leaders visit Ypres tomorrow evening, they will look at the inscription on the Menin Gate, which reads:
“Under this arch lie the bodies of 55,000 servicemen whose remains could not be identified”.
I hope that they will reflect on how far we have travelled together in the past 70 years and how much more now unites us than divides us.
Lord Lyell (Con)
My Lords, I hope that I have not changed my name to Davies of Stamford, because my name appears next on the list. Is that right?
Lord Davies of Stamford
I apologise but I was advised that the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, had withdrawn his name. I was wrongly informed and I apologise to him and to the House.
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, I entirely agree with the brilliant analysis of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and although I have never discussed this matter with him the House will find that I have come to very similar conclusions.
Unlike the Second World War or the mass murders of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung and Pol Pot, the First World War was not the result of deliberate human evil but of human folly. Nobody wanted a war in 1914. Although everybody, including ourselves, had contingency plans, nobody planned to have that war or expected it. It was not until 26 July, when the Austrian ultimatum was sent to Serbia, that anybody realised quite how great a risk there was of having a global war. I totally agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that it is therefore absurd to look around for some national guilt and say, “This was the guilty nation”.
Nevertheless, a number of individuals need to stand before the bar of history; Berchtold, the Austrian Foreign Minister, who drew up that ultimatum in such a way that it was most unlikely that the Serbs would accept it; Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, who bullied Nicholas II into signing the order for general mobilisation; and Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, who succeeded in suppressing the response of Wilhelm II to the Serbian response to the ultimatum. Wilhelm II had said he thought that the Serbian response had solved the problem and resolved the crisis but Bethmann-Hollweg made sure that that minute went no further. It certainly was not transmitted to the Austrians.
There is also our own Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who never told the Germans that we would go to war over Belgium. That was a fatal error. Indeed, Grey obviously felt extremely sensitive about potential criticism on that score because in his memoirs, Twenty-Five Years, published about 10 years later, he said that he could not have been more definite with the Germans because he did not have a Cabinet decision to go on. There is no evidence that he asked for such a decision or that Asquith thought that one was necessary. If we accept Grey’s excuse, the whole British Government bear a major responsibility for those dire events.
Nevertheless, when the war broke out, there is no doubt that for four and a half years the most remarkable qualities of indescribable human courage were shown by fighting men on all sides, obeying orders that were often quite murderously incompetent. I think that all of us have in our mind’s eye, and we should keep it there, the picture that has been referred to so many times today of 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme: hundreds of thousands of young men being ordered, if you please, to advance at no more than two miles an hour hundreds of yards towards the German machine guns. They had been told that the wire had been cut and destroyed by artillery, but of course it had not. They had been told that the Germans had been killed in their front-line trenches, but of course they had not and were safe in their dugouts. Still the young men kept on. They did not make much progress, which is not very surprising. After losing several thousand men a day, Haig would invariably write in his diary, to his wife, to the King or perhaps to more than one of the above that the losses had not been too great really, all things considered, and he was making progress. Of course he was not.
Unfortunately, during that war we were very badly supplied with good-quality leadership from either the military or the politicians of the day. Almost all the leading generals suffered from three serious failings. One was that they had been brought up on the doctrine of uncompromising offensive—l’offensive à l’outrance. If they had been to America and studied the American Civil War—if they had been to Vicksburg and Gettysburg—they might have changed their minds, but their memories were of the Franco-Prussian War or, in our case, of colonial wars.
The second failing was that they were all extraordinarily arrogant. They were very slow to learn lessons from experience and very unwilling to accept the possible benefits of new technology. The third failing was that, presumably as a result of those first two qualities, they all gave disastrously overoptimistic advice to their political bosses. Almost all the commanders and generals fall into those categories: in our case, French and Haig; in the French case, Joffre and Nivelle; in the German case, von Moltke, Falkenhayn and of course Ludendorff; in the Russian case, Sukhomlinov, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, Rennenkampf and the ill fated Samsonov; in the Austrian case, Conrad; and in the Italian case, Cardona—I believe that those strictures apply entirely fairly to all of them.
There were some exceptions. When Pétain took over in 1917, he understood that it was a defenders’ war and drew the obvious, if rather unheroic, conclusion that, “Il faut attendre les Américains et les chars”. Another accolade must go to Brusilov, who was the only general who planned and carried out a successful offensive on the Entente side in the whole of the war before the last few months after the exhaustion of Germany in 1918; they were few and far between. Plumer was almost certainly the best of the British generals but that is not saying very much.
The political leaders were also very poor. One problem was that they would not stand up to their generals. Ludendorff more or less became the leader of Germany after 1916, and after he got rid of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in 1917 no one would stand up to him at all. The Kaiser had a good opportunity to do so after the Reichstag peace resolution in July 1917 but he never did, so there were major political failings there. The whole British and French political establishment was completely enchanted and captivated by Nivelle, which shows pretty bad judgment. Lloyd George despised the terrible duo of Haig and Robertson just as much as many of us do today in retrospect, but he never steeled himself to move against them.
Unable to win the war, the politicians were unable to make a peace. There must have been 30 wars between the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which established the sort of international system that lasted until 1914, and 1914 itself—certainly if you include Turkey, which you must. Almost all of them were settled by some form of negotiation, but no such negotiation took place before the final exhaustion of the central powers in 1918 and after the loss of those 10 million or more men in combat. Then we had a peace that itself did not last and, as we all know, sowed the seeds of a second and even more global conflict only 20 years later.
So what do we do about that situation? We have a responsibility to the fallen, to those now living and to those who are to come. We have a responsibility precisely to be wise in hindsight, to draw the right conclusions and ensure that it does not happen again. Here I totally agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hannay: there was something fundamentally wrong with the international system in 1914. There was also too much nationalism, jingoism and of course militarism. In our case, the emotion was directed mainly at the Navy but that did not make much difference.
There was also something obviously wrong with the whole system of states, which was not resilient. Things went even more wrong with the international system set up in 1919, which did not last 20 years before we had another war. So we have to look at that. It would be nice to say, “What we need is simply better generals and politicians”. However, the one thing that you cannot do, because it is illogical, is determine the contingent elements in life; all you can determine is the structural elements. We need to look at the structures and at the international system. Some will say that NATO provides us with the protections that we need and makes impossible another war in Europe. Maybe, but we have had alliances since the beginning of time and they have not stopped wars. One needs to go further than that; one needs a more structured system in which there is actual sharing of sovereignty and pooling of decision-making—in other words, the European Union. What a tragedy that we did not have the EU before 1914, and indeed after the disaster of the First World War and before the second. We have it now, and what a terrible irony it would be if, as we commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of that terrible war, we either pull out of the EU or do our best to weaken it ourselves.