The Long Shadow

The Great War and the Twentieth Century

David Reynolds

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780857206374
• eBook ISBN: 9780857206381
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In Britain we have lost touch with the Great War. Our overriding sense now is of a meaningless, futile bloodbath in the mud of Flanders -- of young men whose lives were cut off in their prime for no evident purpose. But by reducing the conflict to personal tragedies, however moving, we have lost the big picture: the history has been distilled into poetry. In TheLong Shadow, critically acclaimed author David Reynolds seeks to redress the balance by exploring the true impact of 1914-18 on the 20th century. Some of the Great War's legacies were negative and pernicious but others proved transformative in a positive sense. Exploring big themes such as democracy and empire, nationalism and capitalism and re-examining the differing impacts of the War on Britain, Ireland and the United States, TheLong Shadowthrows light on the whole of the last century and demonstrates that 1914-18 is a conflict that Britain, more than any other nation, is still struggling to comprehend. Stunningly broad in its historical perspective, The Long Shadowis a magisterial and seismic re-presentation of the Great War.

PART ONE

LEGACIES

1

NATIONS

The Prussian Junker is the road-hog of Europe . . . if we had stood by when two little nations were being crushed and broken by the brutal hands of barbarism our shame would have rung down the everlasting ages.

David Lloyd George, 19 September 1914

. . . all well-defined national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction . . . without introducing new, or perpetuating old, elements of discord and antagonism that would be likely in time to break the peace of Europe and consequently of the world.

Woodrow Wilson, 11 February 1918¹

During the Paris peace conference the American President and his wife were housed in the Hôtel du Prince Murat – a splendid nineteenth-century palace in the rue de Monceau, full of mementoes from the era of Napoleon. Edith Wilson retained vivid impressions of the red, white and blue sentry box at the gate, the ‘great sweep of the stairs’ and the ‘liveried lackeys’ in attendance – lamenting in her memoirs that ‘if only some of the costs of this sort of useless attention could be diverted to those who stand in need of the necessary things of life, this would be a better world.’ Nor did she forget once entering one of the grand salons to find her husband and his advisers on hands and knees on the floor. They were poring over huge maps of Europe, trying to work out its new frontiers. ‘You look like a lot of little boys playing a game,’ she laughed. The President turned to her gravely. ‘Alas, it is the most serious game ever undertaken, for on the result of it hangs, in my estimation, the future peace of the world.’²

Wilson and his fellow statesmen at Paris in 1919 have often been blamed for creating the mess of post-war Europe but, in reality, the problems were already beyond their control. Never had the map of Europe been redrawn so dramatically. The crisis of 1917–18 destroyed the great dynastic empires that had ruled central, eastern and south-eastern Europe for centuries – the Romanovs, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Ottomans. In August 1914 Europe contained only three republics (Switzerland, France and Portugal); by the end of 1918 there were thirteen. One of them was Germany itself, where the Kaiserreich had been shattered by defeat and revolution. The other nine were states that did not even exist at the start of the war, among them Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia.³

The challenge was to combine independence with interdependence or, as Wilson put it on 11 February 1918, to promote ‘national aspirations’ within a framework of peace and order. But to achieve such goals at the end of the Great War would have required an alchemist not a statesman. This chapter reflects on the fractious new multinational states that were cobbled together on the ruins of empire, often through brutal paramilitary violence. Their fragility would destabilize the continent for much of the twentieth century.⁴

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was also an empire albeit on a small scale – created by centuries of expansion by England – and it did not escape this tornado of empire-breaking and nation-building. The Irish experience of the Great War had many similarities with events on the continent. Ravaged by brutal violence Ireland shattered into two rival states, one fiercely independent, the other sheltering within the UK. But in England, Wales and Scotland the conflict generated a renewed sense of British identity, which would endure for much of the twentieth century.

What is a nation? The French intellectual Ernest Renan posed that question back in 1882, and the debate still rumbles on.⁵ People's sense of identity can take many forms, defined by gender or class or religion. In the past identity was often very local and concrete, expressed through friendship groups, churches or clubs. To feel that one is part of a nation requires a big imaginative leap and national consciousness has often been sharpened, or even generated, by fear of what historians have identified as a hostile ‘Other’ against which to counterpose one's own nation and its values. But nationalism also needs expression in a political structure – a state – in order to gain the legal and emotional leverage over people that is necessary to shape the sense of national identity. In 1800 Europe comprised some five hundred political units, varying hugely in size and viability; by 1900 there were only about twenty.⁶ During the nineteenth century states were forged largely by people's wars, fought in the name of the nation and involving mass armies raised by conscription, for which the prototype was France during the revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. France's wars aroused national consciousness elsewhere, especially in the lands that became Italy and Germany. To quote Thomas Nipperdey's history of modern Germany, ‘in the beginning was Napoleon’.⁷

From these nineteenth-century struggles scholars developed a distinction between a civic nation and an ethnic nation. The former signified a community of laws, institutions and citizenship within a defined territory, whereas an ethnic nation was defined as a community of shared descent, rooted in language, ethnicity and culture. France was seen as the embodiment of civic nationalism, forged by the ideology of the revolution (liberté, égalité, fraternité), Germany as the classic example of ethnic nationalism, steeped in Romantic conceptions of the Volk. This stark contrast between civic and ethnic nations has been questioned by some recent scholars yet the general distinction remains useful.⁸

Before the Great War nation-states were mainly found in western and northern Europe. The late nineteenth century did, however, see a surge of nationalist feeling in central and eastern Europe, rooted in a heightened sense of ethnicity. Initial stirrings were largely cultural, through music and folk myths (sometimes fused together, as Smetana did for the Czechs or Sibelius in Finland). Even more important was the process of systematizing a written national language and teaching it in schools. This idea of a nation was then picked up as propaganda by small groups of politicized intellectuals and agitators before taking off as a genuine mass movement with political clout. By the 1900s some nationalists were more ‘advanced’ in this process than others – the Poles, say, compared with the Slovenes – but hopes of full national independence were largely utopian. In 1914 the big empires, though rickety, still seemed in control. It was the demands of total war that eventually brought them down.⁹

Consider the example of the Habsburg Empire. This was Europe's third most populous state, with over 50 million people, but they included eleven major national groups, several of which harked back to historic states that had been suppressed by the Habsburgs. Allegiance was essentially dynastic, in this case to the phenomenally long-lived Emperor Franz Joseph, who had ruled since 1848. The empire had never recovered from its catastrophic defeat by Bismarck's Germany in 1866, which obliged Franz Joseph to concede what the British would have called Home Rule to Hungary, the largest kingdom in his empire. Henceforth he ruled over a Dual Monarchy, with separate Austrian and Hungarian parliaments and even separate armies alongside the imperial armed forces. Increasingly Hungary proved a dead weight on the operations of the empire, reluctant to pay its share of taxes, especially for the army. In the Austrian domains of the empire, the Germans were the ruling elite – with Bohemians, Moravians and other ethnic groups kept in their place. Within Hungary Romanians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs and Croats – about half the population – were at the mercy of the Magyars who tried with increasing brutality to impose their own language and culture while resisting demands for universal male suffrage. ‘The government will never be able to satisfy every national group,’ sighed Franz Joseph wearily. ‘This is why we must rely on those which are strongest . . . that is, the Germans and the Hungarians.’¹⁰

The greatest challenge for the Habsburgs was the kingdom of Serbia, freed from Ottoman rule since 1878 and determined to bring all the Serbs into a Greater Serbia. Quite who constituted the Serbs was left extremely vague and Serbdom potentially stretched from Macedonia to Hungary. This ‘mythscape’ reflected a capacious definition of the Serbian language and a romanticized folk history dating back to the seminal confrontation between Serbs and the Ottoman Other in 1389 at Kosovo Polje (the field of the Black Birds). Serbia's expansive ambitions, promoted by the Karadjordjević dynasty and by various terrorist groups, culminated in the assassination of the heir to Franz Joseph's throne in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Vienna's determination to deal once and for all with the Serbian menace ignited the July crisis.¹¹

Before the war some Croat and Slovene intellectuals within the Habsburg Empire had talked of sharing a common South Slav (Yugoslav) identity with the Serbs but they were a minority. The striking point about 1914, however, was that imperial loyalties held firm. In the Habsburg campaign to crush Serbia in the autumn of 1914, many of the soldiers were of South Slav extraction. Notwithstanding occasional nationalist outbursts, for most of the war the Habsburg army hung together and fought well, despite an ethnic diversity that seems ludicrous today. For every hundred men in the imperial army in 1914, there were on average 25 Germans, 18 Magyars, 13 Czechs, 11 Serbs and Croats, 9 Poles, 9 Ruthenes, 6 Romanians, 4 Slovaks, 2 Slovenes and 2 Italians. The language of command was German, with a repertoire of eighty different orders, but officers were expected to know the Regimentssprache, the language or languages spoken by their men. Many units operated with two languages, some as many as five. Not so much an army, more a tower of Babel, one might think, yet this polyglot command hung together until 1918 when most soldiers effectively went on strike.¹²

A similar story may be told of the Russian Empire. In 1914 the Romanov dynasty ruled about 170 million people (nearly four times the UK population) across one-sixth of the world's land mass, yet less than half of them were ethnic Russian. The regime failed to create a sense of overall imperial identity, or even a sense of nation among the core Russian population. Belated and often brutal attempts by the last two tsars, Alexander III and his son Nicholas II, to impose Russian language and Orthodox religion served only to inflame nationalist sensitivities. Then, after the abortive revolution of 1905, the government reversed itself with half-hearted political concessions that gave national groups a voice in the new parliament, the Duma. Particularly sensitive was the issue of Poland – a historic state that had been partitioned since 1772 and was now largely under Russian control. Yet, despite a few anti-draft riots, war mobilization in 1914 proceeded relatively smoothly, with nearly 4 million men conscripted on schedule. In all 18.6 million men served in the Russian army during the war, over a tenth of the total population and from all ethnic groups.¹³

During the Great War people from the borderlands of Europe – Poles, Czechs and Croats, even Serbs and Italians – fought on both sides. As conscripts, they had little choice. Discipline was harsh and brutal, propaganda played up the threat from the enemy, and there were significant inducements for continued service. In the Russian army, for instance, a soldier's family would lose their allowance from the state if he deserted or ‘voluntarily’ entered captivity. In any case most troops from rural eastern Europe, where literacy was limited, did not conceive of their identity in clear-cut national terms. ‘Were one to ask the average peasant in the Ukraine his nationality’, scoffed a British diplomat in 1918, ‘he would answer that he is Greek Orthodox; if pressed to say whether he is a Great Russian, a Pole, or an Ukrainian he would probably reply that he is a peasant; and if one insisted on knowing what language he spoke, he would say that he talked “the local tongue” . . . he simply does not think of nationality in the terms familiar to the intelligentsia.’¹⁴

The deepening conflict did help sharpen national consciousness. On the Eastern Front prisoners of war were separated by nationality and then formed into special units to fight against the empire they had previously served. The Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) organized a Polish Legion, as well as special Finnish and Ukrainian units to fight against the Tsar. The Russians formed their Habsburg prisoners into Polish, Czech and Slovak units. Their Czech Legion was bloodied at Zborov in Galicia on 2 July 1917 – in itself a minor engagement but elevated into a founding national myth because the legion routed several Czech regiments that were fighting for the Habsburgs. The result of all this was a keener sense of national identities right across eastern Europe, as well as a brutalized soldiery who would eventually form the core of post-war paramilitary groups.¹⁵

Yet flirting with nationalism in this way did not signify any grand plan for a post-imperial Europe. The Entente Powers (Britain, France and Russia) wanted to preserve the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in slimmer form to balance Germany in central Europe. Nor did the British and French initially support Polish national aspirations, since that would infringe the interests of their Tsarist ally. After America entered the war, Wilson's ‘Fourteen Points’ in January 1918 envisaged ‘an independent Polish state’ but proposed only ‘the freest opportunity of autonomous development’ for the peoples of the Habsburg Empire. It was Lenin and the Bolsheviks who coined the radical phrase ‘national self-determination’, to encourage the break-up of empires in Europe and beyond. Wilson picked up the term but usually without the adjective ‘national’: for him ‘self-determination’ was almost a synonym for ‘popular sovereignty’ or ‘consent of the governed’.¹⁶

By the autumn of 1918, however, statements by the Allies became irrelevant, as the Habsburg and Ottoman armies collapsed and Russia disintegrated in civil war. What exactly would replace them and fill the looming power vacuum depended on a mixture of local power and international influence.

A classic example was the new Czechoslovakia. For Tomáš Masaryk 1918 was spectacular payoff for earlier gambles. An imposing philosophy professor turned Czech nationalist politician, Masaryk already had a predisposition to the West: his academic work was on British and French empiricist philosophy (Hume, Mill and Comte) and, having married the daughter of a wealthy New Yorker, he spoke fluent English. Masaryk fled Prague in late 1914, settling for two years in London where he lived in Hampstead, catching the bus into town to teach Slavonic studies at London University and cultivating his contacts with British officials and journalists. After the fall of the Tsar, he travelled to Russia on a British passport to organize the Czech Legion and then in 1918 to the United States to mobilize American support. He met Wilson on several occasions in the White House and, in a brilliant propaganda coup, read out a Declaration of Common Aims of the Independent Mid-European States from the steps of Independence Hall, Philadelphia – shrine of America's Declaration of Independence in 1776. Thanks to this blend of influence in high places and shrewd public relations, Masaryk had already secured Allied recognition for an independent Czechoslovakia several months before Habsburg rule collapsed. The revolution in Prague at the end of October was ‘a bloodless, gentle takeover of power from officials who no longer wanted to be responsible for the administration of a Habsburg province’. Four years after he had fled Prague, Masaryk returned in triumph as president of a new republic – a position he would hold for seventeen years.¹⁷

Prague's velvet revolution (strangely similar to another in 1989) was emulated across much of the former Habsburg Empire, with committees of local nationalist parties assuming power. By the time the peace conference convened in Paris in mid-January 1919, the shape of post-Habsburg Europe was clear on the ground. Independence had successfully been proclaimed for Czechoslovakia and for a kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed Yugoslavia), leaving Austria and Hungary as rump states. On the Tsarist borderlands, however, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction – Great War
• Part One – Legacies
• Part Two – Refractions
• Conclusion – Long Shadow
• Notes
• Permissions
• Index
• List of Plates