Jerome K Jerome, the author of Three Men in a Boat, was well beyond military age in the first world war but felt fiercely that he had to join the fray. “Here was the biggest thing in history taking place within earshot,” he wrote in his autobiography. “At Greenwich, when the wind was in the right direction, one could hear the guns.” He was too old for the army, but walking along Bond Street one day he met his solicitor, unexpectedly clad in a resplendent quasi-military outfit. A few hours later Jerome had enlisted in a volunteer ambulance unit raised by a French countess, who also designed the rather fetching uniforms. Soon he was under fire, evacuating French wounded and dead on pay of two and half sous a day.
“The general opinion” of the average poilu, he recorded, was that “the English had started the war to capture German trade, and had dragged France into it. There was no persuading them of their mistake.” Those French conscripts were not alone in fastening on explanations for the catastrophe which meet the human need for something that apportions blame and makes all clear. There is, naturally, no such explanation. The causes, course and consequences of the war have been the subject of an ever shifting argument which began even as hostilities commenced and is very much with us today. Indeed it has recently been sharpened by the parallels some see, notably between a rising China and the then rising Germany, in the pre-1914 period in Europe and the world at the beginning of the 21st century. To which we can now add a restive Russia.
The war was famously misunderstood even as it happened. Europe expected a short war but got a long one. It expected a correction of the international balance, but got its ruination. It expected gallant charges but got slaughter. The war correspondent Philip Gibbs later bemoaned “our immeasurable ignorance as to the meaning of modern warfare. We knew just nothing about its methods and machinery nor about its immensity of range and destruction.” But even though sanguine views of the war’s likely duration and intensity were at the beginning to the fore, beneath them ran a current of fear. Every state, except America, feared for its future. They saw themselves encircled, blocked, threatened with demotion or even disappearance. German chancellor Bethmann Hollweg wondered “if there is any purpose in planting new trees” on his estate near Berlin, as “in a few years the Russians would be here anyway”.
But insecurity was greatest in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, which saw a domino process, driven by nationalism and assisted by their enemies, which could – and, because of the war, indeed did – lead to their dismemberment. The virtues of these two empires were only later understood, and mourned. The works of Joseph Roth, newly popular in recent years in the English-speaking world, can be seen as one long love letter to the Habsburg empire, whose compromises and complexities allowed for a day-to-day coexistence between nationalities and religions that we have only recaptured – if we have – as the European Union has developed. The Ottomans kept in check, far more successfully than any later political masters, the ethnic and religious fissures of their population – something to think about as Aleppo and Gaza burn.
There are so many points at which now and then touch. In January 100 years ago two young men disembarked at that same Gaza, supposedly on their way to map biblical sites but actually to scout the Ottoman borderland in case of war with Turkey. One was TE Lawrence. A few months later Russian and Austrian armies were clashing in Ukraine in the first major battles of the war. Collective security was the answer to the national paranoia that led to war, but in 1914, in 1945, and even in 2014, it was and is not an easy or definitive answer. The historian Adam Tooze has written of the gigantic and uncompleted task of managing “the vast unwieldy dynamic of the modern world”. In the Middle East, in the Pacific and in Europe itself, that task remains unfinished.