Easter and the Great War

Easter and the First World War is for many synonymous with Dublin in 1916, and on a day when Gerry Adams is being held in custody with reference to PSNI inquiries into one of the Provisional IRA’s most notorious killings there is good reason to reflect upon how the centenary of the rising will be marked, both sides of the border.  Easter 1916 is crudely where I am in telling Richard Fairey’s story, but in the wider world attention is focused upon events two years earlier; and across the British archipelago in the spring of 1914 Ireland was very much on people’s mind as the Home Rule crisis appeared to be coming to a head – as a consequence of the 1911 Parliament Act enactment of the third Home Rule bill was imminent, hence the intensification of Unionist protest and outright resistance in Ulster.  Add to the political and sectarian divisions in Ireland the heightened activities of the suffragettes (in popular perception today overshadowing the more widely supported lobbying of the suffragists), the impact upon industrial relations of a larger and more strident labour movement, and the polarisation of Westminster politics in the five years since Lloyd George first introduced his ‘People’s Budget’, and it’s scarcely surprising that events in Europe, particularly tensions in the Balkans, were not in the forefront of people’s minds.  Thus at Easter 1914 Asquith’s Liberal administration, since the two elections of 1910 technically a minority government, was not prioritising foreign policy.  Sir Edward Grey, and his senior officials in the Foreign Office and the diplomatic service, enjoyed a remarkable degree of autonomy.  Critics later criticised the Foreign Secretary for his lack of accountability to the rest of the cabinet, let alone parliament and the wider public, and he does not emerge well from the two studies of the Great War’s origins which I took with me to North America.  As noted in a previous blog, Grey was a respected ornithologist and fly fisherman whose frequent presence on the Test provides an indirect connection with CRF.  He was probably in Scotland for the Easter holiday one hundred years ago, with most of his cabinet colleagues similarly ensconced in country houses the length and breadth of the kingdom.  Sean McMeekin, in July 1914: The Countdown To War, which focuses upon the immediate backdrop to the great powers’ respective declarations of war, criticises the Foreign Office for not recognising the urgency of the situation sooner and for Grey not sending clearer signals to his continental counterparts re Britain’s position: namely crisis resolution, but in the final analysis realising the military commitment to France that had underpinned the entente cordiale since the second Moroccan crisis if not earlier.  That military commitment was not of course evident to the majority of Grey’s cabinet colleagues, hence the increasingly intense debate between senior ministers as the situation in the Balkans moved towards a third war in as many years, but this time embracing the great powers.  The strength of hostility towards Wilhelmine Germany inside the Foreign Office, with piquant irony articulated most forcefully by Eyre Crowe, is examined closely by Christopher Clark in his magisterial The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War In 1914, which richly deserves the plaudits bestowed on it by historians of every complexion and opinion.  I have always wanted to give Grey the benefit of the doubt, placing emphasis upon how in the summer of 1914  he saw realisation of the entente‘s secret army and naval commitments to France as an essentially moral obligation.  However, both Clark and McMeekin make clear that, while not sharing Churchill’s eagerness to take on Germany, Grey had a clear conception in his own mind that standing shoulder to shoulder with the Third Republic, even if that meant gritting one’s liberal teeth and fighting alongside tsarist autocracy, had by the second decade of the new century become a key principle of British foreign policy.  In this respect he was at one with the Unionists, and indeed Balfour in opposition remained a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence; but he did not convey this hardening position to most of his cabinet colleagues (although crucially, since his Mansion House speech in July 1911 Lloyd George had been on side – old Radical allies simply didn’t realise this), nor to the Wilhelmstrasse – or some might suggest to elements within the French political elite.  Grey and Asquith, as one time Liberal Imperialists allied in seeking to prevent Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman becoming PM (the ‘Relugas Compact’ of late 1905 failed, to the ultimate benefit of the Liberals when fighting the 1906 election), shared a common cause, even if the Prime Minister probably did not appreciate just how far advanced staff talks with the French were; although clearly he was aware of the French and British navies now concentrating their fleets upon the Mediterranean and the North Sea respectively.  Having said all that, as Niall Ferguson frequently points out, a British declaration of war was by no means inevitable in August 1914.  If only because of what happened across the next four years I have always been open to the case for Britain not going to war, although I can see that a deeply divided Liberal Government would have been forced to resign, and its Unionist successor would have entered the conflict alongside France and Russia on a surge of patriotism up and down the country.  Lloyd George’s resignation would of course have been the ultimate veto, but this did not occur – as was also the case when Gordon Brown supported Tony Blair’s case for invading Iraq in March 2003.  Reading Clark’s astonishingly scholarly study of Balkan power politics across the century preceding the First World War I became increasingly appalled that Britain found itself in August 1914 an ally of a bandit state like Serbia (if you want to understand Serbian nationalism in the contemporary world then read Christopher Clark’s book;  no wonder Milosevic and all the other rogues who terrorised the Balkans for so long – and continue to do so – behave in the way they do given the history of their malevolent ‘nation’).  Similarly, it is hard not to contest McMeekin’s explicit and Clark’s implicit charge that Russia and then France (primarily in the form of President Poincare) bear considerable responsibility for the war not being contained within the south-east of Europe, as Austria-Hungary and then Germany desired.  Finishing The Sleepwalkers is clearly a priority re reading, while for writing I must complete my inaugural lecture.  With the introduction to the second, paperback edition of ‘Mick’ Mannock, Fighter Pilot drafted before Easter, once my thoughts on Keith Douglas are down on paper and ready for delivery on 9 June then I can adopt a twin-track approach to the next stage of the Fairey project: research on the post-1915 papers transferred from Yeovilton to the Hartley Library and commencing the first (in practice third) chapter.  All this against a backdrop of marking and an acceleration in First World War centenary activities – which brings me back to Easter, in that in the week preceding the holiday weekend when I went to Boston for the marathon (3:49:13 incidentally) my colleague Mike Hammond and myself went to Canterbury: at the University of Kent we co-hosted with Professors Mark Connelly and David Welch a two -day conference on ‘The Great War and the Moving Image’.  Mark and in particular David were terrific in organising the event, which I felt was a real success, and my thanks to them for all their hard work – plus of course to the speakers.  This is a blog and not the home of a conference report, so I will say no more except to point out that the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television will at some point in the future publish a special issue based upon the conference proceedings – secure yourself a copy, hopefully in time to read next Easter!