Some Desperate Glory (2 page)

They would all be part of Britain's Greatest War. More than twice as many British were killed in the First World War as in the Second. From 1914 until 1918 British forces were essential to the Allies' success whereas, after 1942, most of the fighting against Germany and Japan was done by the Russians or the Americans.

The western front in particular came as shock to a people that hadn't been involved in a war on the European continent since the time of Napoleon. The country had never known conscription, when young men were forced to fight. The war damaged Britain, perhaps fatally, through massive financial indebtedness; and there began to be stirrings in the empire, in India and among what were called the colonies of white settlement such as Australia, after battlefield losses in the British cause during incompetently planned campaigns. The old idea of imperial Britain, safe from European involvement, had gone. Britain, still a great power, seemed more vulnerable – a drifting and declining force.

The war ate deep into the nation's sense of itself; every family was affected through death or wounding. Such was the war's extent that the break with an earlier peace became a powerful myth, of shattered calm or beauty, of broken illusion. Its relentless course, the reason why the heirs of western civilization began it, still seems a mystery. Could it really be that the great nations of Europe had let themselves drift into such chaos?

War was not generally expected until a few days before it began. The European crisis was acted out among politicians and diplomats, away from the people. A typical response was that of H. G. Wells's fictional literary man, the well-informed Mr Britling from the novel
Mr Britling Sees It Through
, who sat in the garden of his country house imagining that yet another flare-up in the Balkans must soon fade.

Hadn't war held off for forty years? ‘It may hold off forever,' Mr Britling thought, in the early summer of 1914. He admitted that if Germany attacked France through Belgium, Britain would have to go to war (‘of course we should fight') because of treaty obligations. But the Germans knew this and ‘they aren't altogether idiots'. ‘Why should Germany attack France?… It's just a dream of their military journalists…' The impasse over Ireland, where the Ulster Protestants in the north would not countenance the British government's plans for Irish Home Rule, seemed much more serious. Not until 29 July and the bank holiday weekend did things change.

News of the German ultimatum to Belgium came on 3 August. What had brought about this switch from years of British aloofness? Britain had watched while Bismarck humiliated Austria and France and created the German empire. There'd been trouble in the Balkans for years, among the peripheral lands of the declining Ottoman and Habsburg empires, places that to most Britons were as fantastical as the late-Victorian best-selling novel
The Prisoner of Zenda
. Crises provoked by assassinations, even small wars, had been resolved peacefully before, or at least with the bloodshed of others. Surely this time would be no different.

To protect her imperial position and to preserve the balance of power in Europe had been Britain's aim; Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister at the end of Queen Victoria's reign, tried to ensure this while staying free of continental entanglements. But the unification of Germany, after Prussia's victory over France in 1870, had begun the disruption by creating a strong, neurotic, assertive presence at the centre of Europe. A new economic, military and would-be imperial power surged ahead of France and challenged Britain. Germany felt vulnerable, threatened by encirclement, fearful of the French desire for revenge and of the potential of a vast and mysterious Russia.

The British ventured tentatively into foreign alliances as the twentieth century began. A treaty was signed with Japan in 1902; there were understandings – or ententes – with France in 1904 and with Russia in 1907. Military and naval talks – unofficial, not known even to most of the cabinet – began with France, senior British officers cycling across Flanders and Picardy to assess possible battlefields. The concern about Germany was fuelled by its Emperor William II's aggressive speeches, by his foolhardy posturing and by German naval expansion. As early as the 1890s, novelists were imagining a German invasion. The German army, buttressed by conscription, had been building up for years, in an atmosphere of brash nationalism, dwarfing the small British all-volunteer force designed principally for colonial wars; now the Royal Navy, seen as Britain's ultimate protection, was threatened perhaps with future parity with Germany, even with eclipse.

Britain began to seem weak, old-fashioned, against this new, rich and fascinating giant. In E. M. Forster's
The Longest Journey
(published in 1907) an elderly woman questions a Cambridge undergraduate who'd been to Germany. Was the country's scholarship overestimated? Had it impressed him? ‘Were we so totally unfitted to repel invasion?'

A campaign in favour of conscription was launched, under Lord Roberts, the hero of Kipling and of the Boer War. To the Liberal government, ideologically opposed to militarism or to state intervention, this seemed wrong and, at a time of high spending on the new welfare state, too expensive. In 1911 and 1912, senior British diplomats at the Foreign Office wanted an open alliance with Russia and France. It was thought, however, that neither the public nor Liberal opinion would stand for this, particularly if it involved Tsarist Russia, the great autocracy and oppressor of her own and subject peoples such as the Poles.

In Germany, there was doubt that Britain would fight for Belgium or join France and Russia in a war. In August 1913, the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey had, with German cooperation, mediated successfully between Austria and Russia and Turkey at a London conference on the Balkans. As late as July 1914, as Serbia was rejecting Austria's demands following the assassination at Sarajevo of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, Asquith's cabinet was confident that Britain could keep out of any conflict, even if Germany, Austria's ally, sent troops through southern Belgium into northern France. But the ministers of the old world proved unable to force or to guide Serbia and Austria – and their allies – back to peace. So the generals – men like Siegfried Sassoon's ‘cheery old card' who ‘did for' the men by ‘his plan of attack' – went to war as a result of political and diplomatic failure. Britain's small, poorly equipped army had been given to its commanders by the politicians.

On 2 August the Germans demanded clear passage through the whole of Belgium to enable them to attack France. The King of the Belgians refused the demand and asked for British support, under the treaty that guaranteed his country's neutrality.

It fell to the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey to guide Britain's declaration of war through parliament. He feared that elements of his own Liberal party would be against the war, although he knew he could count on the support of the Conservative Opposition. On 30 July the Liberal paper the
Manchester Guardian
had opposed the idea that Britain should guarantee ‘the peace of Europe'; the parliamentary Liberal party also resolved against being ‘dragged into conflict'. But once Belgium – poor little Belgium – had been invaded by the bully Germany the cause became almost a liberal one, of maintaining treaty obligations and international order.

Sir Edward was thought to be the steadiest of hands, not at all showy, personifying a serene Britain that was the opposite of the bumptious German Reich. The reality was rather different. In fact the country was in the grip of a series of strikes; women demanding the vote were resorting to violence; there was open rebellion against British rule in Ireland; and a new artistic modernism arriving from Europe had moved even the young, fox-hunting Siegfried Sassoon. The Foreign Secretary's passions, however, were fly-fishing and watching birds. He was a countryman who loved his cottage garden on the banks of the River Test and could quote endlessly from Wordsworth – a man whose refusal to be bamboozled by foreigners was shown by his inability to speak any of their languages.

The Conservatives liked Grey who, although a Liberal, had imperialist sympathies that had been shown in his support for the Boer War. On becoming Foreign Secretary in 1905, he mostly continued with the policies of the previous Conservative government but became more involved in Europe, agreeing to unofficial staff talks with the French. Grey should feature alongside bungling generals in the questions asked by poets and very many others. Had there been enough preparations for the war? Could it have been avoided? Was the country incapable of sensing a new world?

Victorian complacencies and confidence may have been fading, but Britain was still proudly set apart from the continent as head of the greatest empire in history. It was to India with its military life of pig sticking and retinues of servants that Julian Grenfell went as a young army officer, to get away from his parents' world of slippery brightness, what his mother called ‘the gospel of joy'; then he went to South Africa.

Both countries formed part of the pre-1914 army's duties as an imperial police force. In South Africa, he found his work – facing down strikes in the mines of what he told his mother was ‘this utterly abominable country' – disappointing. It showed ‘the utter beastliness of both sides – the Jews at the Rand Club who loaf about and drink all day, and the Dutch and Dagos who curse and shoot in the streets'. Grenfell sought relief in challenging all comers at army boxing matches. He dreamed of farming in remote Kenya.

Britain had begun to seem ugly and constricted. E. M. Forster's early novels – particularly
Howards End
and
The Longest Journey
– show a regret for the suburbanization of the country near London and the vulgar commercialization of English life. Near the end of
The Longest Journey
the suburbs of Salisbury – ‘ugly cataracts of brick' – are condemned as neglecting ‘the poise of the earth … They are the modern spirit.' Forster admits that ‘the country is not paradise … But there is room in it and leisure.' Towns seem ‘excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves'.

Howards End
pits the cultured, sensitive, liberal and brave Schlegel sisters against the crude, materialistic Wilcoxes. Forster admits that it is the Wilcoxes who make things happen, even if they have no poetry, no sense of the past. Who owns England, the novel asks, the people who are narrowly practical or those with imagination? The Schlegels are half German, with the German concern for
Kultur
and the spirit. In London restaurants there's talk of how the German Emperor wants war. The sisters' father had left the new Germany after 1871 because he hated its vulgarity, power hunger and materialism. To the Schlegels, the British equivalent of this is jingoistic imperialism, the religion of the empire.

The Schlegels get the better of the Wilcoxes. But worrying questions are asked. Is the country – the fields and woods of Hertfordshire, near Howards End, that are encroached on by London – now irrelevant? Can't countrymen, who work the fields, still be England's hope? Are the English reduced to being comrades, not warriors or lovers, scorned by visiting Germans for their dreary music or inability to engage in intellectual discussion? Where is the greatness? Even old London is being pulled down, sacrificed to developers' greed.

H. G. Wells showed similar disdain for pre-1914 England. Wells's character Mr Britling is a successful writer who lives in a comfortable country house in Essex yet senses complacency and frivolity, an intellectual laziness.
Mr Britling Sees It Through
describes a drifting place, beset by unaddressed problems such as a rebellious Ireland and uncompetitive industry, a soft country of gentrified farm buildings and a political philosophy of wait and see, a slack but lucky country where too many intelligent people passed ‘indolent days leaving everything to someone else'. To a German visitor, it's pleasant but not serious, an informal, quite chaotic place where people are kind but not polite. The whispers of change – from Ireland, from the empire, from Germany, ‘intimations of the future' – were there to be heard, while the British, like ‘everlasting children in an everlasting nursery', played on.

Even in the Whitechapel of Isaac Rosenberg's childhood, there were dreams of the past – of the lost vast spaces of the Russian Jewish pale of settlement. London's East End was far from any quaint notion of English country life, but Isaac's mother made gardens at their various homes. Rosenberg wanted to move from the city to the country if he survived the war. Many in Whitechapel had an ultimate yearning – that of a new life in the United States, seen as the golden land.

Isaac Rosenberg had an outsider's oblique vision. He met the artists David Bomberg and Mark Gertler at the Slade and resembled them in his bold use of colour but held back from their experimental art in favour of traditional representation of people and nature. Introspective, unable to afford models, Rosenberg went in for self-portraits, for conventional landscapes, partly because these were more likely to sell. Unlike Bomberg, he painted nature rather than the city.

In November 1913 he found himself in different company when Mark Gertler introduced him to the civil servant, art collector and friend of writers Edward Marsh. They met at the Café Royal, once the haunt of Oscar Wilde and London's
fin de siècle
decadents, still a place where Isaac could also meet Yeats and Ezra Pound. The sociable ‘Eddie' Marsh featured in many poets' lives; the boy from Whitechapel, some of whose friends were Marxists, was now within reach of Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon (Sassoon's rich Sephardic Jewish Iraqi forebears were quite different to the Lithuanian Ashkenazim Rosenbergs).

Eddie Marsh, a homosexual made impotent by mumps in adolescence, had a chirruping, squeaky voice and could seem afloat on a wash of anecdotes, quotations and social urbanity. Yet even Marsh knew there had to be change, although he thought that this had to be grafted on to the best of the past. ‘Nine-tenths of the Tradition may be rubbish,' he wrote, ‘but the remaining tenth is priceless, and no one who tries to dispense with it can hope to do anything that is good.' A classical scholar and son of a successful surgeon, he was mocked by Julian Grenfell's Eton and Balliol set. Patrick Shaw-Stewart, a friend of Grenfell, was invited to breakfast by Marsh and jokingly left a cheque under his plate as a tip for the host.