by SIMON HEFFER
Sightless witness: British troops blinded by mustard gas in the German spring offensive. PHOTO/Hulton Archive/Getty
First, an understanding of the history of power, international relations since (at least) the Congress of Berlin and of European diplomacy is required to illuminate the catastrophe of August 1914. One also requires a knowledge of the political heritage and divisions in certain countries that played a leading role in the drama: Austria-Hungary and its tensions with Serbia before and after the annexation of Bosnia; the question of Belgian neutrality; the history of the rivalry between King Edward VII and his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm II, which helped create sufficient distrust in the kaiser of the British that it coloured his feelings towards this country after Edward had died and his far less provocative son George V succeeded to the throne; the feelings in France since the war with Prussia of 1870-71; and the growing chaos in Russia and its relations with states in eastern Europe.
Second, one needs the skills of the advanced military historian not simply to outline strategy and tactics after war breaks out, and to recount the movements of troops and the joining of battle, but also to link these with the political direction (or, sometimes, lack of it) of the chancelleries of Europe. Here the documentary evidence takes on a new importance, following the chain of events from politician to general to the man in the trench. One must understand the democratic pressures on politicians – in those countries with a reasonable semblance of democracy – to advance the interests of their country through warfare: understanding why, for instance, such a deluge of young men joined Kitchener’s army in the first three months of the war, and the cultural pressure not simply on them to do so, but on the government to make the most of their service.
Third – and this is neglected by too many historians of the war in a way it seldom is of the war against Hitler – there is the question of life away from the front. The political pressures and civilian unrest that led to the dissolution of first the Romanov, and then the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires in 1917-18 say as much about the effect of the war and its pervasive influence in the ensuing decades as the final outcome itself. In Britain a prime minister was deposed and a coalition formed that would, in effect, kill one of its component parts in the years immediately after the war. A few Zeppelin raids did not constitute the Blitzkrieg that so disrupted the life of civilians during the Second World War, and Germany occupied relatively little foreign territory compared to its subjugation of Europe in 1940-44; but the profound effect
the war had on the lives of people away from the front is also a neglected subject.
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