Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday, when the nation fell silent to commemorate those who died defending our… what exactly? That question can’t arise in relation to the Second World War, but Remembrance Sunday has more to do with the First one.
And there a question implying doubt is legitimate. What did those millions die for? There was no real reason for the First World War, apart from words. It was to glossocratic messages that the masses responded, not to any fundamental need.
Such messages can’t be dismissed easily. Their power is irrational and therefore has to be absolute to have any effect. And nothing promotes absolute power as effectively as a war can, the bloodier, the better. “The strongest chains for the people are forged from victorious swords”, as Clausewitz put it.
Neither side was averse to making cosmic claims. They were both fighting to save civilisation, making the world safe not just for democracy (the demented Wilson was welcome to that one) but also for true faith, world commerce, family, security, children, church and prosperity. Both sides were out to defend those in their own eyes, and to rape them in the eyes of the other side.
Almost instantly the war acquired a character that went beyond any national grievances or economic interests. The world was rife with proposals for unifying the control of global resources in a single body that could also administer international taxes aimed at levelling inequalities among nations.
The air was dense with phrases like ‘World Organisation’, ‘The United States of the Earth’, ‘The Confederation of the World’, ‘A World Union of Free Peoples’ and, finally, ‘The League of Nations’. And both sides saw themselves as defenders of international law.
The British, for example, eschewed self-interest as the reason for joining the conflict, opting instead for depicting the war as a holy crusade for the law of the nations. Not to be outdone, the French organised a Committee for the Defence of International Law.
The Germans were at first taken aback by this sudden outburst of affection for global legality, but they quickly recovered to fight back. Belgium, according to them, wasn’t neutral in the international-law sense of the word. It was conducting secret military negotiations with the British aimed against Germany. The British weren’t squeaky-clean either. They were systematically violating the trading rights of neutrals on the high seas.
So Germany was really fighting for the freedom of the seas and the rights of smaller nations to engage in peaceful trade without being harassed by the dastardly Royal Navy. However, the Entente wouldn’t allow Germany to claim the monopoly of defending the small and weak.
It was the allies who were after liberating the oppressed nations, by which they no longer meant just Alsace and Lorraine. This time they meant the oppressed minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Polish minority in Germany (not to be confused with the German minority in Poland, whose plight was a casus belli for Germany’s next war).
Funny you should mention oppressed minorities, replied the Germans who hated to be outdone by anybody, especially the British. It was they, the Germans, who were fighting to liberate the small nations of the world. More specifically, such small nations as India, Ireland, Egypt and the entire African continent.
Each side was out to save civilisation, nothing less. A week after the war began the London Evening Standard was already carrying headlines screaming Civilisation at Issue. France was fighting a guerre contre les barbares, while Germany was laying about her for her Kultur.
Germany, the nation of composers and philosophers, had established a spiritual ascendancy thanks to her industry, fecundity, wisdom and morality. The British were usurers (a role they were to cede to the Jews before long); the Germans were Teutonic heirs to Arminius and Alaric. The British were unable to see beyond their utilitarian little noses, as demonstrated by their philosophers; the Germans had the sagacity to penetrate the meaning of life, as proved by their thinkers. The war was fought for heroic, self-sacrificing Bildung and against the pecuniary British.
Not at all, sale Boche, objected the French. The war was waged by one (good) race against another (bad) one. The Gauls of France and Belgium were fighting the Hun, and never mind Bildung. This racial argument secretly appealed to the Germans who decided to store it for future use.
While every belligerent country claimed that God was on her side, La Croix in France made the case with a forthrightness not normally associated with the French: “The story of France is the story of God. Long live Christ who loves the Franks.” “La Guerre Sainte”, echoed L’Echo de Paris, and La Croix agreed in principle but wanted to expand: it was “a war of Catholic France against Protestant Germany”.
Hold on a minute, the British begged to differ. The French, though on the side of the angels in this one, couldn’t claim exclusive possession of God.
The Bishop of Hereford explained this succinctly: “Amidst all the burden of gloom and sorrow which this dreadful war lays upon us we can at least thank God that it brings that better day a long step nearer for the generations in front of us.” (Which generations were to lose, conservatively, 200 million in assorted wars and purges, but then, to be fair, the good bishop had no way of knowing this.)
To a British musical promoter, that was really a war between different types of music: “The future belongs to the young hero who will have the courage to exclude from his library all the works of Handel, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Brahms and Richard Strauss…, who will draw from the depths of his own being tone pictures of all that is beautiful in the wonderful poetry of Great Britain, and find the vigorous rhythms that will tell of the dauntless spirit of those who go to death singing ‘Tipperary’.” Or rap, as it eventually turned out.
Still, the impresario displayed much insight: the underlying aims of the war weren’t geopolitical but cultural.
America’s role is instructive. President Wilson wasn’t bashful about his desire to replace the traditional order with a modern world led by America.
That’s why the message spewed out by the Creel Committee (the world’s biggest propaganda outfit) went beyond amateurish attacks on the bloodthirsty Hun. Every piece of promotional literature put out by Creel, every speech by Wilson, was an incitement to revolution, both political and social, across Europe.
Thus America had no quarrel with the industrious people of Germany; it was the oppressive Junkers class that was the enemy. No peace, no armistice was possible until the existing social order and political arrangement were destroyed – in other words, until a revolution took place.
Likewise, Wilson had no quarrel with the quirky people inhabiting the British Empire; it was the Empire itself that he abhorred. Even though for tactical reasons that particular message couldn’t yet be enunciated in so many words, dismantling the offending institution was clearly one of Wilson’s, and later Roosevelt’s, key objectives.
A fanatic of a single world government, Wilson was at the same time a great champion of national self-determination. Anticipating a possible confusion on the part of the reader, there was no contradiction there at all. The first was the end; the second, the means.
The marginal peoples of the empires, all those Czechs, Poles, Finns and Serbs couldn’t make good any promise of self-determination without first destroying all traditional states. QED.
Thus, when the Tsarist regime collapsed in Russia, Wilson was ecstatic. Here was another democracy hatched out of the dark recesses of absolutism. That the new ‘democracy’ was so weak that it couldn’t keep her troops at the front mattered little. This wasn’t about winning the world war but about winning the war for the world.
That’s why Wilson, Lloyd George and their followers constantly downplayed the risk of Bolshevik takeover, and failed to respond to it properly once it took place. They had much greater affinity with the Bolsheviks than with any traditional empires.
The Great War is often described as Europe’s suicide, and in some ways it was just that. Above all, however, it was the murder of Christendom within Europe’s borders, the triumph of crass, soulless modernity.
Whatever trust had existed between Europeans and their governments was gassed out of existence in Flanders and shot up to pieces in East Prussia. Trust was replaced with cynicism at best, hatred at worst. As a result, Europe was left at the mercy of glossocratic tyranny, which in short order ushered in the two most infernal regimes in history.
So yes, we must remember our fallen heroes, thank them posthumously, pray for them. But every time we fall silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we must also remember the only way to make sure they didn’t die in vain.
And that’s learning the lessons their tragic fate taught. Lest we forget.