Still in the summer of 1914…

The BBC continues to mark the commencement of the First World War, and my only explanation for the corporation compressing so many radio and television programmes in to these few weeks is a presumption that no-one would watch in late July/early August.  Alternatively, someone in Broadcasting House was sufficiently prescient as to anticipate a crisis in the Caucasus that has uncomfortable echoes of a great power confrontation in the Balkans a century ago.  Having said that, the conflict that is already a frequent point of reference is not the Great War but the Crimean War, with a fascinating article in last Saturday’s Guardian by Orlando Figes explaining why Crimea is so firmly lodged in the Russian national psyche – Putin apparently has a portrait of Nicholas I in the ante-room leading to his office, and one can see why he draws inspiration from strong czars such as Nicholas, Alexander, and Peter (hapless Nicholas II looms so large in our twentieth-century historical landscape that we too often forget about his powerful predecessors – does Putin see strong Romanov autocrats as his role models rather than Stalin?).  But back to the BBC’s already comprehensive coverage of the First World War – surely this level of intensity can not be maintained for four years, as if so we will all be thoroughly sick of it all by 2018.  I have yet to watch Niall Ferguson’s 90 minutes riposte to Max Hastings’ punchy defence last Tuesday of the Liberal Government’s decision to choose war.  Sir Max, aided by a distinguished set of commentators that included not one but two regius professors (Hew Strachan and Michael Howard), made a telling case re the German Army’s appalling behaviour in Belgium and northern France in the late summer and autumn of 1914 – in the process leaving me eager to visit the rebuilt Louvain, which looked amazing.  I wasn’t so sure of his portrayal of Wilhelmine Germany, or his exaggerated demonisation of the Kaiser, who was a nasty piece of work but not I suspect ‘clinically unsound’, whatever that term means.  Hastings noted that all German men had the vote and the SPD was the largest party in the Reichstage, but insisted that the Social Democrats were an impotent political force; and yet his head nodded furiously when Margaret McMillan suggested the German High Command were eager for war so as to forestall any imminent triumph of social democracy in Germany: either Germany was a paper constitutional monarchy, or it wasn’t.  Overall I felt Hastings, despite one or two wince-making moments (nothing like Paxman episode one!), had a reasonable stab at making the case for war, even though like so many of his ilk he displayed his ignorance of Edwardian Liberalism and projected a two-dimensional picture of Sir Edward Grey (Eyre Crowe if looking down must welcome the fact he never rates a mention – the half-German who a la Lindemann and Mountbatten warns against the Germans on the basis of familial knowledge).   All this discussion provides an appropriate backdrop given that in the chapter I am writing Richard Fairey has reached August 1914 and, unbeknown to his employers at Short Brothers or indeed past commentators, is already planning his own company.  Every crisis is an opportunity, whether Vladimir Putin or Dick Fairey…