Courtney McGrailAfter writing recently about the Battle of Verdun and the literature of the Great War, I decided that as the anniversary of the Somme would be well marked by State and media, no reference to it would be needed here.
But my mind has been changed by the publication of Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq Invasion, from which Mr Tony Blair, a Catholic convert whose conscience has long been on prominent display, comes out very badly.
In marking the anniversary of the Somme, Europe has chosen very wisely to show reverence to the courage, sacrifice and sad loss of so many fine people from the generation of the 1890s. What has been avoided, and this is where the commemorations connect with Chilcot, is the question: Who caused the Great War? Who was to blame?
For the Allies the answer was easy: it was the Kaiser’s War. But it has to be recalled that though Germany sought “a place in the sun” among the great colonial powers, the greatest land grabs of the time were made by France, Britain and Belgium – or rather Belgium’s Catholic ruler who made the Congo his private slave estate.
The German Empire was easy to present to the world too as a one-man state. Yet the credits for the navy which were voted by the Reichstag in 1897 to pay for Germany’s increased fleet were merely to counter the very real threat to Germany of the far greater fleets of Britain.
Philosophy
By 1900 Britain’s fear of Germany, a nation it had long admired for its music and philosophy even as it envied its remarkable industrial and scientific growth, had increased. She went into an alliance with France, which many Britons saw as the hereditary enemy, and with Russia, which many saw as a religious tyranny.
But in planning for the war, the generals conceived it in terms of the last war. In this case the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which brought about the fall of the Third Empire and the installation of the Third Republic. The Germans, too, planed for war, a similar swift move as in 1870 through Belgium to circumvent the French defences.
But the rapid German advance was stalled at the Marne. The generals on both sides fell back upon a different idea of war, not from 1870, but from the war before that, the appalling Crimean invasion of the 1850s, settling for static war rather than mobile war.
The huge losses of WWI were due, not to the nature of war, but the failures and stupidity of political and military planners on both sides. They sacrificed their sons and grandchildren, not for a grand cause but for the usual reason for which wars have always been fought: envy, greed and malice.
These kinds of ‘guilty men’ are still with us, as the Chilcot account of the Iraq Invasion reveals. All these wars had to depended too on misleading the public, and obtaining “democratic votes” to wage war, and the wage further war. And when it was all over, lying about it until the historians could get to work.
Philosophers and traditional theologians are given to discussing the concept of a “just war”. Doubtless Mr Blair would have considered Iraq a just war.
But the flaw in the concept of just war is that it depends on the notion that those deciding the matter, whether members of parliaments or totalitarian rulers, are in full possession of all the relevant facts.
The truth is they never are. They go war with almost no regard for any concept of truth or fact. War of any kind, no matter how dressed up and favourably regarded at the time, should always be wrong to the philosopher and sinful to the theologian.
A third world war is coming. The guilty men of the future are already planning it. Perhaps we should stop worrying about who caused WWI and concentrate on preventing WWIII.
General Sir Richard Shirreff argues in his fear-filled new book 2017: War with Russia (Coronet, £20.00) that disaster awaits us, perhaps in months. “The chilling fact is that because Russia hardwires nuclear thinking and capability to every aspect of their defence capability, this would be nuclear war.”