The Legacy of the Great War: Ninety Years On

Epilogue

185 epilogue Hew Strachan, All Souls College, Oxford It rained heavily in Glasgow on the morning of 2 August 1914. Despite that and despite the conventions of the Scottish Sabbath, after lunch Thomas Livingstone, a shipping clerk, walked from his home in the south side of the city, across the River Clyde, to the town center. He wanted to find out the latest news. As recent historians of the phenomenon known as “war enthusiasm” have pointed out, the crowds which gathered in the streets and public places of the cities of Europe at the end of July and the beginning of August 1914 did so less out of a desperation to fight than out of curiosity. Without radio or television, and certainly without CNN or Fox News, they relied on the latest editions of the newspapers to keep abreast of the unfolding crisis. Theirs was a literate generation, and the big press barons responded to their education with cheap papers, often publishing several editions a day. Britain was not yet in the war, and not all the newspapers were clear that it should be. On the same day, C. P. Scott, the editor of the Liberal Manchester Guardian, sent a telegram to the Chancellor of the Exchequer , David Lloyd George, which began with a description and ended with a threat (at least for an ambitious politician): “Feeling of intense exasperation among leading Liberals here at prospect of Government embarking on war. No man who is responsible can lead us again.”1 At one level Scott’s anxiety was well founded. Later that same day, Sunday 186 Hew Strachan or not, Lloyd George’s friend in what proved to be Britain’s last Liberal government, Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, met the French naval attaché to draw up the preliminary steps to coordinate the operations of their two navies, and shortly after 7 p.m. he signaled to the commander-in-chief of the British fleet in the Mediterranean that he should prepare for joint action with the French fleet. “Situation very critical,” Churchill’s message concluded; “Be prepared to meet surprise attacks.”2 However, Scott might have been reassured if he had been able to read the letter which the prime minister, H. H. Asquith, then aged sixty­-one, penned that night to his twenty-seven-year-old lover, Venetia Stanley. For Asquith the worst event of that Sunday was the absence of a letter from Venetia, but he conceded that it had been “pretty black” for other reasons as well. The prime minister had received the German ambassador to London over breakfast and assured the tearful emissary that Britain had no desire to intervene. Later in the morning, at a meeting of the cabinet, Asquith’s dominant fear was that, if Britain were to enter the war, it would split the government and turn the bulk of his own party, the Liberals, against him. Britain, he told Venetia, had “no obligation of any kind either to France or Russia to give them military or naval help.”3 From these internal divisions, and given the lack of resolution that they indicate, it can be easy to interpret the First World War, for Britain at any rate, as “a war of choice.” Alone of the original belligerents, it did not confront an infringement of its territorial integrity. Even after Lloyd George made his name as the prime minister who had won the war, he remained sufficiently sensitive to Scott’s warning to play down his own part in the British decision to enter the conflict. The crisis which had broken on 23 July 1914, when Austria-Hungary issued its ultimatum to Serbia, threatened hostilities only in the Balkans. This was the third Balkan war in fewer years, and neither of the first two had prompted anything more than saber rattling outside the region. By the time that Tommy Livingstone reached the center of Glasgow on the afternoon of Sunday, 2 August 1914, the third Balkan war had become the first general European war since 1815. The newspapers told him that Germany had declared war on Russia, that Russia had invaded Austria, and that Germany had crossed the French frontier. However, in the eyes of Liberals like Scott, not even war on this scale warranted British intervention. Epilogue 187 Britain might lie adjacent to Europe, but in 1914, unlike 2008, it was not of Europe. Scott then...