“Civilization—To Your Health!
[A Great War-Era Postcard Featuring an Image by the Dutch Artist, Louis Raemaekers]
World War One—the “Great War”—certainly counts as one of the major events in modern human history. Its effects were felt for decades after the guns fell silent—and in important respects (not least, the political borders of the nations in the mid-East) are still being felt.
The most popular recent treatment of the Great War and its origins is The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914,[1] written by a Cambridge history professor, Christopher Clark. Sleepwalkers appeared in 2012, and remains an Editors’ Pick on Amazon. Because of “recency bias” (and the fact that the curiosity of most readers will be satisfied with one 700-page treatment of the subject), what many people think they know about the war and its origins comes from Sleepwalkers. That is unfortunate for at least two reasons. There are many important lessons to be learned by understanding how the tragedy of the Great War came about. In important particulars, however, those lessons will not be learned from Clark’s account. In fact, Clark’s account overlooked—or intentionally omitted—many of the facts bearing on the war’s origins, as established by the impeccable research of important scholars before Sleepwalkers was written. It is difficult to believe that Clark was not familiar with that scholarship, which allows for the disturbing inference that he was prepared to have his readers form an understanding of the Great War’s origins that is at odds with facts of consequence . . . that he was prepared to permit the world to “unlearn” the relevant, important lessons of history. That is a serious charge to level against a man occupying an academic position—indeed, as a historian. But those very inferences have either been expressly drawn by eminent scholars or are inherent in the accounts of participants in relevant events. In all cases, these are men whose bona fides make their assessments difficult to ignore.
* * *
A few years ago, I fell into the Great War rabbit hole. The more I learned of the period, the more I felt compelled to learn. The befeathered royals; the trenches; the poison gas; the zeppelin attacks; the battle-dead burned in piles because their numbers were too great for burial . . . and the dotted line that connected all of that to “flappers,” the Lost Generation, and Hitler. Even now I do not question my obsession. How can anyone not want to know?
I read the accounts of witnesses and participants (Churchill, Graves, Barthas, Tirpitz), and histories and analyses written later by those with insight and eloquence (Tuchman, Massie, Fussell, Keegan, Taylor, Ecksteins), and many more. Among these was a 1961 book by the German historiographer, Fritz Fischer,[2] to which this essay will have occasion to return.
With so much excellence abroad, almost everything I read expanded my knowledge and understanding. Even the two-volume memoir of German Admiral Tirpitz, with its fulminations against Britain and its pronouncement that “the wall [of Germany’s defense] was overthrown from behind,” contributed to my understanding of the German revanchism that followed the war, and of the “stab in the back” myth that led to Hitler’s concentration camps and mass murders.
One book was an exception. Although Sleepwalkers received much acclaim, and won many prizes, Clark’s work advances propositions that appear to detract from a real understanding of the matters the book purports to illuminate. My own credentials may not accredit my criticism of the work of a Cambridge historian, but for present purposes I merely hold the robes and mortarboards of more formidable critics.
My encounter with Sleepwalkers was immediately preceded by days profitably spent with Robert K. Massie’s magisterial Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War.[3] Massie elaborates the origins, course, and consequences of Germany’s attempt, beginning in the closing years of the Nineteenth Century, to overturn the hitherto unchallenged supremacy of Great Britain’s navy. The seminal event in that contest was Britain’s 1906 launch of HMS Dreadnought, a battleship so superior in speed and armament that it rendered all preexisting warships obsolete, which in a stroke (and ironically) nullified Britain’s naval advantage and created a fresh contest for command of the waves—a race to construct “dreadnoughts” (the appellation given, generically, to all ships of the new and superior characteristics).
As Dreadnought recounts, Britain had for centuries relied on naval supremacy to protect her mercantile fleet and defend her home islands and colonies. In the Eighteenth Century, Lord Blackstone defined England’s view when he declared that the Royal Navy “hath ever been its greatest defense and ornament . . . the floating bulwark of the island.”
Based on that history it was understandable that Britons—from government ministers to “the man on the street”—viewed Germany’s naval challenge as an existential threat. Indeed, more than a decade before the Great War began, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, architect of the German fleet construction, made no secret of his view that Britain was Germany’s principal enemy. It was in that light, and in that that atmosphere, that invasion scares proliferated in Britain, and the seeds of suspicion and enmity between the two nations simmered.
Britain was single-mindedly focused on winning the dreadnought race, believing her security to be in the balance. Owing largely to her need to raise and equip forces for a land war on her frontiers, Germany lost the dreadnought race—with fateful consequences. Supremacy at sea permitted Great Britain to blockade German ports during the war, depriving Germany of imported war materiel and starving her population. Germany’s means of retaliation was a “submarine blockade” of Britain, sinking in that undertaking, along with Allied flag vessels, merchant ships of neutral nations. That campaign was instrumental in bringing the United States into the war against Germany, with the result known to all.
In Sleepwalkers Clark discounts the contribution of the dreadnought competition to Britain’s perception of Germany as a hostile power in the years preceding the outbreak of the war. He goes so far as to write that Germany’s decision to build a battleship fleet was not “a . . . provocation that permanently soured relations” between the nations.[4] “Nor did German naval construction have the mesmerizing effect on British strategists that has sometimes been claimed for it,” states Clark.[5] Counterposed against that conclusion is not only Massie’s scholarship, but Winston Churchill’s placement of “The Growth of the German Navy” as the very first chapter of his celebrated multi-volume work, The Great War—a chapter tellingly entitled “Milestones to Armageddon.”[6] Churchill was a minister in Britain’s government during the relevant period (becoming First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911), and thus participated in the events and had first-hand familiarity with the passions that he and Clark so differently describe.
In stating that Britain was less alarmed by the German naval program “than is often supposed,”[7] Clark ignores earlier works like Churchill’s and Massie’s histories. Instead he supports his conclusion thusly: “In 1905, the director of British naval intelligence could confidently describe Britain’s naval preponderance over Germany as ‘overwhelming.’”[8] Clark ignores the fact that it was not until 1906 that HMS Dreadnought was launched—effectively beginning a new competition for naval supremacy. Clark must have been aware of that seminal event, the date of its occurrence, and its consequences, and his attachment of significance to the quoted 1905 remark thus is baffling—if his aim was to write a truly enlightening account of the relevant history.
In fairness, Clark’s book does acknowledge the dreadnought competition.[9] He admits that “[t]he naval scares that periodically swept through the British press and naval circles were real enough”—but he dismisses their significance by claiming they were confined to “the British press and political circles.”[10]
In fact, the whole of the British polity (and not just some especially interested cohort) was galvanized by the threat seen in Germany’s ship-building: wrote Churchill, “[a]ll sorts of sober-minded people in England began to be profoundly disquieted.”[11] Churchill describes how the number of dreadnoughts proposed in the 1909 budget of the British government was altered under public pressure. “We want eight, and we won’t wait!” was the chant heard on England’s streets. The government ultimately acquiesced. As Churchill recalled, “The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight.”[12]
Thus, contrary to Clark’s contention, Britons in all quarters did not, in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of war, share the complacent confidence in British naval superiority reflected in the 1905 quote to which he suggests his readers attach significance. Britain’s perceptions of Germany’s intentions during the period before the war’s advent are reflected in the views of John Fisher, Tirpitz’s British counterpart and, as Britain’s First Sea Lord, the guiding hand behind Britain’s ship-building during the relevant years. Fisher’s view, expressed in 1908, was that Germany would initiate war with Britain in October of 1914, when completion of the widening of Germany’s Kiel Canal would permit Germany to easily move its larger warships from the Baltic to the North Sea.[13]
Clark’s assertion that Britain was less alarmed by the German naval program “than is often supposed” is the representation of an academic, written at a remove from events, both in time and distance. In contrast is the stated belief of Lord Selborne, then First Lord of the Britain’s Admiralty, who, in 1902, told the British Cabinet that “[t]he Admiralty had proof that that the German Navy was being constructed with a view to being able to fight the British Navy[.]”[14] Churchill, who also was in the very middle of the relevant events and passions, did not “suppose” Britons of all ranks and stations to be alarmed by German ship-building; he knew it for a fact:
What did Germany want this great navy for? Against whom, exceptus, could she measure it, match it, or use it? There was a deep and growing feeling, no longer confined to political and diplomatic circles, that the Prussians meant mischief[.]
. . .
Britain [had] been made to feel that hands were being laid upon the very foundations of her existence. Swiftly, surely, methodically, a German Navy was coming into being at our doors which must expose us to dangers only to be warded off by strenuous exertions, and by a vigilance almost as tense as that of actual war.[15]
In short, contrary to Clark’s pronouncement that Germany’s challenge to Britain’s naval supremacy was not a “provocation [that] soured relations” between the nations,[16] in fact it was viewed by Britons in all walks as an existential threat—creating a felt defensive imperative (in the fresh recollections of Churchill) “almost as tense as that of actual war.”
* * *
Of course, the outbreak of the Great War’s hostilities, in August of 1914, found Britain and Germany on opposite sides of the conflict. At this point, and given where this critique of Sleepwalkersis heading, it becomes necessary to acknowledge that the historical record does not support the conclusion that German political and military policymakers (with the possible exception of Tirpitz) had been seeking to instigate war with Britain—at that moment.[17] Accepting Sleepwalkers’ suggestion that no prewar tensions would have disposed Britain to view Germany as a menacing power would support the inference that the outbreak of hostilities between the two nations was the unfortunate product of some misunderstanding of the moment. On the basis of the preceding citations and quotations, however, it is seen that (i) Germany’s intentional challenge to British naval supremacy encouraged Britain to view Germany as a hostile power, making the outbreak of war between those two nations more likely; and (ii) Clark, in Sleepwalkers, made efforts to persuade readers that such views did not exist in Britain—contrary to what “is often supposed.” In the case of Germany’s war against France and Russia, on the other hand, the case can be made (and persuasively has been made) that Germany actually instigated those hostilities—and that Clark was at pains to obscure the facts relevant to those conclusions, as well . . . all in furtherance of Sleepwalkers’ purpose to exonerate Germany from responsibility for the war.
* * *
Even before finishing The Sleepwalkers, doubts regarding the accuracy of Clark’s account of Anglo-German naval rivalry—its significance and consequences—prompted me to investigate whether other readers had noted weaknesses in Clark’s account of the Great War’s origins . . . weaknesses that perhaps even derogated from its authority as “history.” Among the critical appraisals of Sleepwalkersthat I encountered was a review of the book by the prominent British journalist and historian, Nigel Jones, entitled “Let’s not be Beastly to the Germans,” which appeared in the September 26, 2012 number of Britain’s Spectator. As Jones read it, Sleepwalkers is, at bottom, the lengthy rearticulation of an old thesis, “of a Europe blindly stumbling into war more or less accidentally.” However, Jones notes, long before Clark wrote his book “th[at] thesis was comprehensively demolished”: historical scholarship had unearthed documents “revealing how the war was actually the result of design, rather than accident—and a design with Made in Germany written all over it.” How does Jones explain what he implicitly (but unmistakably) saw as Clark’s purposeful whitewashing of Germany’s responsibility for the Great War? His review suggests that Clark’s scholarship amounted to an effort to ingratiate himself with Germany, pointing out that Clark—“such a Teutonophile”—was already the recipient of the ‘Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany,’ “although he doesn’t say whether [it came] encrusted with diamond clusters and oak leaves.” Jones seems clearly to impute Clark’s skewing of history to an agenda, and bias.
I also encountered the judgment of Clark’s book pronounced by C. G. Röhl. Röhl was, like Clark, a history professor. In 2015, Röhl published in the journal, International Affairs, the revised text of a lecture he had given the previous year at the University of Sussex, entitled “Goodbye to all that (again?): the Fischer thesis, the new revisionism and the meaning of the First World War.” It is clear that the impetus for Röhl’s lecture was the publication of The Sleepwalkers. In his article, Röhl describes Clark’s book as “brilliant but flawed.”
In finding Sleepwalkers “flawed,” Röhl did not mention Clark’s minimization of the historical impacts of the fleet competition between Germany and Great Britain, much less point to Germany’s initiation of that competition as an element of the relevant history that made armed conflict between Germany and Britain more likely. Röhl’s problems with Clark’s book concerned deficiencies he plainly found to be more fundamental. His indictment of Sleepwalkers mirrors Jones’s, but goes further in laying bare the rotten “factual” foundations purportedly supporting Clark’s entire view concerning the Great War’s origins.
The principal flaw noted by Röhl thus concerns Clark’s elaboration of supposed facts “in respect of German intentions”—specifically, intentions regarding the initiation of a general European war.
Röhl believes that the exhaustive scholarship of Fritz Fischer had established beyond doubt that German ultra-nationalists and industrialists had connived with senior members of Germany’s government (to and including the Kaiser) to ensure the outbreak of a general European war, with the aim of establishing German domination of the continent and permitting German annexation of territory seized from defeated enemies. Röhl believed that primary sources that came to light after the appearance of Fischer’s book served only to further support the latter’s conclusions in those regards. Although he chose not to particularize his criticism of Clark’s book, it is clear by implication that he was troubled, not only by Clark’s failure to confront and controvert Fischer’s conclusions, but by his failure even to acknowledge the documentary record on which those conclusions rest. In expressly characterizing Sleepwalkers as a prime exemplar of “revisionism,” Röhl damned the purported “history” it presented as skewed:
[Clark] and other revisionists largely exonerate the Kaiser’s Germany from responsibility for the First World War. While claiming to argue that war broke out by accident, with no government being more a fault than any other, in practice Clark places the blame to a large extent on little Serbia, followed by Russia, France and Britain in that order, presenting Austria-Hungary as doing its genuine best to avoid war and simply omitting altogether the evidence of any German intention to bring the war about [emphasis added].
What is noteworthy is that Röhl did not write that Clark had “overlooked” Fischer’s discoveries and conclusions, but rather that he had “omitted” them. Intentionality is thus implied, and Röhl (like Jones) must be read as levelling against Clark the most serious indictment that may be directed at a work of purported scholarship: dishonesty.
Clearly a believer in the urgency of Santayana’s warning concerning “[t]hose who cannot remember the past,” Röhl does not regard Clark’s revisionism with anger, as a betrayal of the moral code that comes with the scholar’s robes: he finds it, instead, “dismaying, as it involves the sidelining or suppression of so much of the knowledge we have gained through painstaking research over the past 50 years.” Although he takes heart in the Arabic proverb pronouncing that “even God cannot change the past,” and in his belief, as a historian, that “the past has an awkward habit of leaving an indelible record on scraps of paper,” in the face of Clark’s demonstration that those scraps of paper can be purposefully ignored, Röhl is moved to ask, ruefully,
Once proof of German plans to unleash war in 1914 with the intention of dominating the Continent had been discovered, were historians still free to assert that no such intention existed and that war had broken out by accident after all? . . . Is one interpretation as good as any other, the evidence to be used on a take it or leave it basis?
Röhl believed that such revisionism as Clark’s book represents “raises fundamental questions about the nature of historical evidence[.]” Fischer’s painstaking scholarship had, after all, “changed our perception of the First World War forever—or so we thought.”
Germany’s “Schlieffen Plan,” first formulated years before the war broke out, contemplated that the German Army would prosecute an attack on France through neutral Belgium. Fischer’s history concluded that an object of the German government’s instigation of hostilities between Austria and Serbia, and thence, inevitably, Russia, was to give Germany the chance to put the Schlieffen Plan into effect without appearing to be the aggressor. “[W]e have got to appear as though the war had been forced on us,” German Chancellor Bethmann had cautioned his governmental colleagues.[18] On the false pretext that the step was being taken to defend against France’s planned attack on Germany, the German Army began its massive incursion into Belgium on August 3, 1914, beginning the Great War on its Western Front.
There is an account that France’s Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, in responding to one asking how future historians would assess responsibility for the Great War, stated: “They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.”[19]
So Clemenceau thought.
But perhaps we must simply give the matter more time, and have the history written by Christopher Clark.
FOOTNOTES
[1] London: Allen Lane, 2012 (“Sleepwalkers”).
[2] Fischer, Fritz, 1908-1999, Germany’s Aims in the First World War, 1967 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company) (“Fischer”).
[3] Massie, Robert K., Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War, 1991 (New York: Random House) (“Massie”).
[4] Sleepwalkers, 197.
[5] Id., 150.
[6] Churchill, Winston, The World Crisis: Part I 1911-1914, 1933 (London: George Newine), first published 1923 (London: Thornton Butterworth) (“Churchill”).
[9] Id., 150-51.
[10] Id., 150.
[11] Churchill at 14 (emphasis added).
[12] Id., 13.
[13] Massie, 407.
[14] Id., 185.
[15] Churchill, 14 (emphasis added).
[16] Sleepwalkers, 197.
[17] In fact, not only Tirpitz but the German nationalist ideologues in political ascendency during the prewar period viewed Britain as the ultimate obstacle to Germany’s achievement of its rightful place in the world order—believed, indeed, that Britain and the Pax Britannica were the embodiment of all that was wrong with the oppressive status quo. Massie, 172 (Britain identified as Germany’s enemy in Tirpitz’s 1897 Naval Bill); Ecksteins, Modris, Rites of Spring: the Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, 1990 (New York: Anchor Books) (“Ecksteins”), at 82 (determination on the part of German nationalists that Germany break out of the world order of the Pax Britannica). Britain, in turn, understood the German design to achieve continental hegemony—and appreciated the consequences of Britain’s isolation if that goal were to be achieved. Preventing Germany from achieving continental hegemony was thus the principal goal of the British war effort. Ecksteins, 116.
[18] Fischer, 70.
[19] Blackburn, Simon, On Truth: a Guide for the Perplexed, 2005 (London: Oxford University Press), 88.