The Rest Is History - 9. Causes of the First World War

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

Whose fault was it? Does the question even make sense? Are wars always somebody's "fault"? Was it really the first global war? And should Britain have fought, or stayed out? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest is History. This, I'm proud to say, is the podcast that refuses to be bound by format. Sometimes we like to ask the big questions. What are the lessons of history, for instance? And sometimes we like to narrow our focus to a single year, the extraordinary events of 1981.

And sometimes we want to take you back to your nervous teens waiting to turn over your history exam paper. And today is just such a day. Our question has been asked and answered every June for decades. What are the causes of the First World War? Dominic Sandbrook is with us. And fair to say, I think, Dominic, having talked to you about this, that you have some kind of quite radical views on the subject. Yeah, heretical views. Yes, contrarian, I think, is the word that's always applied to you.

But before we get onto those contrarian views of yours, could you, for the benefit of me, who never actually did the First World War for A-level, could you just run down, give us a story. How was it that the world went to war? Golly, that's a very big question. Well, I'll try to do it as quickly as possible. So the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was divided into really two main alliance blocks. So you had Russia and France with sort of Britain semi attached to the Russian and French alliance called the Entente. And then you had the central powers,

which were Austria-Hungary, which was the Habsburg Empire, and the newly formed Empire of Germany. And in 1914, in the end of June 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as many of our listeners will know, was assassinated in Sarajevo in Bosnia by a Bosnian Serb gunman called Gavrilo Princip. And the Austrians were furious, as you might expect, and they wanted to launch a punitive war against Serbia. So after a bit of faffing around, they did. They'd got the Germans, their friends, to kind of underwrite it, to say they'd support them. So the Austrians attacked Serbia. Russia, which saw itself as the Serbians' protector, objected to this. They declared war on Austria. They mobilized against Austria. The Germans then piled in against Russia, which also

meant piling in against France because France was allied to the Russians. So now you had the two blocs against one another. And then there's a little bit of dithering for a couple of days while everybody wonders what Britain will do, because Britain is friends, very close friends with the French, but not necessarily formally bound to intervene alongside them and there's a bit of a debate in Britain but then everybody's minds are made up because the Germans in order to deal with the French go through neutral Belgium which by treaty they are not allowed to do and under the same treaty Britain feels duty bound to intervene and look after the belgians so over we go across the channel um and as the title of the podcast has it the rest is history brilliant absolutely brilliant

um okay this is uh we're both british um and i apologize to non-British listeners, but we are going to start with a very Anglo-centric tweet sent to us by Virgo Sam. And she says, following up on the climax of your account there, we, Britain, should have stayed out of World War One. All it did was cause another world war. That is a thesis that's been pushed very heavily by Neil Ferguson, distinguished historian of the First World War, who published as a counterfactual what would have happened had Britain stayed out. So, Dominic, if we had not gone to war, what would have happened? Well, the first thing to say is that could easily have happened, right?

That we could easily have not gone to war. So right up till really the very beginning of August 1914, the people in the Liberal government at the time, many of them thought we shouldn't get involved. And even, some of them even said, you know, if the Germans go into Belgium, if they only go through the bottom, if they just pass through and they don't make a great fuss and a hullabaloo, we can kind of let them get away with it. Winston Churchill,

who was a great warmonger, said, you know, if they only just pass through Belgium a little bit, then maybe there's not really a cause for war. So we could easily not have done it. And the reason we did it was because people thought it was the least worst option. I mean, that's the case with all these things. People just thought, well, you know what, if we don't do it, if we don't intervene and the Germans win, they'll be the masters of Europe, we'll be isolated, they'll have all the channel ports, we will be sort of squeezed out and we'll lose our empire, which was basically the consideration at the back of people's minds. We can't lose the empire, we can't let the Germans win. Now, as it happened,

we did lose their empire. We lost it, you know, 50 years later. And, you know, Germany right now is by far the leading economic power in Europe, in continental Europe. And what happened as a result of the First World War? We had to fight a Second World War, as Virgo Sam says. You had the rise of communism in the Soviet Union and the Cold War with all the costs of that involved. You had the terrific costs of the Second World War, the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust, all the rest of it. So we don't know what would have happened if we'd stayed out. But could it seriously have been worse than what did happen? Now, of course, they couldn't have known that at the time, but we know that now. So? Now, of course, they couldn't have known that at the time, but we know that now.

So with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to be obvious that we shouldn't have. If we had stayed out, then presumably Germany would have won. And one of the reasons why Germany would probably have won is that we were kind of, we had agreed with the French that our navy would patrol the channel.

Yes, that's right. The French had no naval presence at all in the channel. That's absolutely right. So we essentially would have sold the French down the line. And the French ambassador famously said that he was waiting to see if the word honour was going to be deleted from the English dictionary while he was waiting for the British to make their mind up. I see a lot of the French thought we wouldn't do it because they thought they're perfidious,

you know, they're treacherous shits, the British. They probably will sell us out. And a lot of French, you know, are sort of crying and oh woe is me, the Brits, they never, you know, they always let you down basically. And a lot of people abroad, the general assumption abroad was that Britain probably wouldn't get involved. So the Kaiser, for example, who has this huge complex about Britain, because he's the grandson of Queen Victoria, and he thinks his British relatives have always looked down on him. And he has this sort of, this sort of almost tragicomic sense of inadequacy, because, you know, cousin George and Uncle Eddie are always sort of laughing at his German way he thinks

the brits you know surely the british will not intervene surely they won't do it and as you say i think um there was a question of honor so for the liberal government at the time they thought you know we've made this pledge to the french we actually can't we'll lose our good name if we don't if we do the dirty on them them. And if we leave them to face the might of basically the most modern professional army in Europe, which was the German army, because the Germans had already wiped the floor with the French in 1870-71. They probably have beaten them again in 1914, and then turned to deal with Russia. So I think it's a plausible assumption that Germany would have won. Right. So this question of whether Britain should have entered the war, and the framing that

we could easily not have done. So ultimately, it comes down to the decision of basically of individual ministers. Yeah. And that really focuses in on the much broader question of are the causes of the First World War sweeping? You know, is it the nature of capitalism? Is it the nature of imperialism? Is it the nature of industrial civilization in Europe? Or is it because the Archduke's car took a wrong turning in Sarajevo? And people have argued both, haven't they? And there's a sense really, in which the fascination, I mean, I would guess that this is the question that has been most discussed, most debated, most disagreed about it. Christopher Clarke in his brilliant book, The Sleepwalkers, says that even

he, who seems to have read everything on the subject, that actually it's impossible because so much has been written about it that no one person could ever read it all. Yeah. The fascination of this topic is that it's like a kind of Rorschach test for someone as a historian. If you emphasise the contingent, then there's plenty to prove that. If you emphasise Marxist or whatever theories, then there's plenty for you there as well. So essentially, the question gives you back your reflection as a historian.

It does. Do you think that's fair? I think it does. I think it's very fair, Tom. I think that's a very good point. And I think it's an unanswerable question, isn't it? It's like, why did they... The other big question is,

why did the Roman Empire fall? And they're ultimately unanswerable questions. There's no formula that will explain it, because it depends how you would, you know, how you would address the question. But also the weird thing, I think, about this question about the origins of the First World War is, in some ways, it's quite obvious why it started. So it started because the Austrians felt they couldn't tolerate any longer Serbia kind of gnawing away at their southern borders. And they thought the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, which Serbia has probably colluded in or covered up, or there's this sort of murky stuff going on with the government in Belgrade.

And they thought, we can't tolerate this anymore. We have to act. Now, that's not an unfathomable response. That's actually a perfectly, you know, in the grand sweep of history, it's a perfectly rational way to deal with a threat to your southern border. And the weird thing about the origins of the First World War is we don't have the same debate with every other war. It's just this one because of the death toll,

because it was so cataclysmic, I think. We obsess over the way that it started as though it's some great mystery. We don't do that with the Napoleonic Wars or the Seven Years' War

or the Thirty Years' War. It's perfectly obvious why they started. Wars are not anomalous. They're not aberrant. They're the norm. But isn't it because there'd been a century of peace yeah but well the war happens in the context of you know europe essentially um is at peace the great powers i mean i know you have the prussia doing its stuff and getting sand in people's face but but but by and large there is

no kind of seismic great power conflict of the order of the Napoleonic Wars until the First World War. And so the question then becomes, what is it that drives all these people? And I think we kind of visualise in our mind people in, you know, hats with feathers and ladies in sweeping dresses and, you know, formal tea on lawns. And we have a kind of sense of this Edwardian world that then just gets detonated.

And it's not just because of the First World War. As you say, it's also because communism overthrows the Tsarist regime. Fascism comes to stamp its place in the heart of Europe's most civilised nation. So it's the sense of all these horrors that follow. Why does it explode? Is it a tinderbox or is it an accident? Well, I think it's obviously not an accident because it could have happened earlier.

There were two or three occasions. So, for example, when Austria had annexed Bosnia in 1908, the Russians were in a terrible state about it and there was talk then, could there be war? There were constant clashes between the Germans and the French. So the Germans and the French had bad blood from 1870-71 when Prussia had wiped the floor with France

and the German empire had been unified. And I think I'm right that at that point, opinion in Britain was very pro-Prussian. Yes, it was. Majority opinion in Britain was very pro-Prussian. Yes, it was. Majority opinion in Britain welcomed the humbling of France. Yeah, we changed for an obvious reason. We changed because Germany becomes too successful. So, you know, the French were number one enemies for a long time.

And in fact, there's a very good example of that, of a man called William Le Quex. And he writes these invasion stories. So fantasies, basically, about Britain being invaded by foreigners. The Battle of Dorking. Exactly, this kind of thing. His most famous one is called The Invasion in 1910,

which was commissioned by the Daily Mail. And the Germans went through town after town and they were specifically designed to be towns with very high Daily Mail circulation. And the Mail did a map. The Daily Mail is famous scaremongering, isn't it? This is outrageous claims, Tom. But it sold a million copies, which tells you how popular it was.

But his first edition of it, which had been written, he based it on an earlier book in which it was the Russians and the French who invaded us. So the reason the villains changed was because Germany had overtaken us, German manufacturers had overtaken us economically, the Germans had tried to compete with us in building a navy and lots of dreadnoughts, the Kaiser had done all his sort of mad posturing

and strutting around and moaning about his relatives. So people had turned against Germany and Germany had become public enemy number one, whereas previously it had been France. I mean, one reason we were allied to France, you could argue, is because the French had declined a bit in the sort of league table of nations. They'd gone from being sort of number one or number two to number three or number four. And they were the obvious people for us to ally with rather than the Germans, which might have been the case earlier on. The Neil Ferguson argument is that we didn't ally with Germany because actually the Germans were too weak. Do you buy that? I think there's a bit of truth in that. So that's slightly allied

to the Chris Clark argument, which is that we ally with the Russians in particular because we're frightened of them. So it was a kind of appeasement. Yes. Yeah, we're frightened because of the empire, because Russia can sweep down through Afghanistan into India and everything revolves around keeping India. So, yes.

So I think you don't understand why Britain enters the First World War unless you understand how obsessed people were with India. India is, you know, classically stereotypically the jewel in the crown if you lose that you lose your status as domination you must keep India and Russia is the big threat to India so the best way to protect yourself against the Russians taking India is not to fight the Russians or make allies against them but to have them on your side and that wasn't such a necessarily a ludicrous calculation but inevitably because the Russians and the Germans are rivals, that means Germany ends up being on the other side of the equation.

So it's actually more advantageous to us to ally with the Russians, who we hate, than the Germans, whom we don't, which is a kind of weird. And I'm just going to kind of serve you up a nice juicy half-volley here. Was there any chance, do you think, that Britain might have sided with Germany? And if we had, how would that have affected the calculus? Well, you see, you know perfectly well, Tom, that this is my really... I'm here to serve. This is my really heretical view. You see, I oscillate between thinking that we shouldn't have fought the First World War

or that we definitely should, but on the other side. Attack the French. Yeah, I think we should have attacked the French. Yes. I think the security of the Channel Islands has been much underrated as a priority for Britain. No, I think we should have... You seriously think we should have sided with Germany against France? Well, think how it would work, right?

So Germany is the rising power. Germany is the dynamic, modern new force on the world stage. If we had allied ourselves with Germany, which was not impossible, by the way, there were people, Joseph Chamberlain in the late 19th century and then Lord Haldane during the Edwardian period, who were very pro-German and who made, you know, sort of slightly feeble overtures to the Germans about the possibility of an alliance.

So imagine we've been allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Fighting the Russians is no, you know, is no sort of, you know, nothing to worry about. I mean, the Russians are bad guys. They have a very, the most violent, repressive regime in Europe. The Russian elite hold down their population. You know, it's easy to see how you could make a justification for being against them. Little Belgium, who we always sort of talk about so sentimentally, are running the most rapacious repulsive of all european colonies in africa in the congo serbia is basically a kind of terrorist state and that leaves france and of course the french are our ancestral enemies if we're not anti-french then we are nothing

so i think you can create a great justification for us being on the side of the central powers germany is in many ways one of the most democratic societies in Europe in the early 20th century. This sort of image that they're basically proto-Nazis is rubbish. German trade unions were the strongest in Europe. The German Social Democratic Party. You know, the Kaiser is just a bit of a... He's Mr Toad. He's not Hitler.

Okay, okay, okay. So the Kaiser, he comes to cows and he wears the wrong yachting shoes and the British royal family laugh at him. And so he goes back and he launches a huge programme of naval building. Have I got that right? Yeah, I think that's an A-level, that's an A-star, isn't it? Yeah, thanks. But the reason Britain doesn't ally with Germany is because the Germans are busy building up their fleet.

And that is the way, you know, if the Royal Navy is threatened by a rival European fleet, then it's terrible. I mean, I remember reading Saki's novel When William Came. Yeah. When William Came, which is about the Germans launching a naval attack and winning and occupying Britain. And one of the things expressed in that is that if the Royal Navy gets knocked out, then the sea becomes a kind of prison. Yeah. And don't forget, Britain doesn't really have much of an army.

So Britain's army is pitiful compared with everybody else's army. Yes. So that would be very easy and and also if um if we don't have a navy and an occupying power does then that that navy can just starve us if there's any hint of exactly yes so the the paranoia in Britain about the naval race is not in time I mean it's not kind of mad is it it's no it's not completely mad i mean it's basically um your classic we were talking about in an earlier podcast about rising powers and declining powers and britain in the early 20th century i think feels itself to be a declining power we'd fought the boer war in which we'd been close to humiliated um there's a real sense that you know there's that sort of Rudyard Kipling recessional poem for people who know that, sort of the sense of melancholy about our empire,

that our best days are probably behind us. Germany is the coming force. So when they start building battleships, when they build dreadnoughts of their own, people get a real tizzy about it, and not unreasonably. They think, you know, we are a country that relies, we're a trading country, we rely on trade, we rely on imports, and if we don't get them, we're in a terrible mess. OK, Dominic, could you put down your pen? Your time is up. We are going to continue with the examination after a break. But for now, we'll be back in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are discussing what caused the First World War, very modestly.

We've had about 15 minutes, I think. We'll have another 15 minutes to try and answer that question. Then we'll have done it, surely. Yeah. Okay, so lots of feedback for this question on Twitter. And we have a quote here from Dan Jackson, author of Northumbrians, wonderful book. He says, I think there's a crossover between last week's subject and this,

because in August 1914, there was a culture war raging in the UK over Irish home rule. And I know that Dan did his doctorate on that subject. Tellingly, when Franz Ferdinand got shot, Asquith wrote to his wife saying, well, at least we won't have to talk about Ireland for a while. And there's a famous comment by Churchill, wasn't there, in I think 1922, where he talked about how the whole map of Europe had changed with the war. But as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. So, I mean, that is an interesting point that actually had the First World War not happened, then there may well have been a civil war, certainly within Ireland and perhaps within Great Britain as well. So interesting. Completely forgotten.

And actually, you said earlier, you said before the break, you were talking about the sweeping dresses and the straw hats and people in the beaches eating ice cream and all the rest of it. And that's our image of Edwardian Britain, that it's this prelapsarian paradise. Yeah, the Larkin poem. All going to be blown away. And it's completely wrong because actually Britain felt like a country

on the brink of civil war about home rule for Ireland. There had been people smuggling guns into Ireland. There had been virtual mutiny in the army. And in fact, one reason that Britain's entry to the First World War was a bit of a shambles is that for the first few weeks after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, basically the government is just sitting around arguing about Ireland and staring at maps of Tyrone instead of staring at maps of Serbia, which they should have been doing. Am I not right that, is it Erskine Childers who wrote The Riddle of the Sands, which was a kind of invasion scare novel? And didn't he end up kind of gun running for the IRA or something? Have I got that right? Right, exactly. Yes, he did. He smuggled guns into ireland exactly right so he writes so he's actually the link between these two stories he writes um uh the the classics book

about german spies and about the germans plotting to invade britain and then later on he's executed for his role in smuggling guns in for the ira so yeah the the irish issue i mean this that's a funny thing isn't it if If Gavrilo Princip waited for the Archduke outside a cake shop, now if he'd gone into the cake, if he'd, you know, if he'd had a sweet tooth, he'd been distracted, he'd gone in to get a bit of strudel or baklava, I suppose, if it was Sarajevo, the Archduke's car had gone past. Who knows, you know, shots might have rung out in Belfast two weeks later. And now we've been doing this podcast about the Great Civil War of 1914 to 1918 in Ireland. OK, here's another one from Tom Richards.

We're on to Blackadder because I think it's inevitable. Discuss the First World War without talking about Blackadder. In Blackadder Goes Forth, Edmund says, the real reason for the whole thing was that it was too much effort not to have a war. In true school essay style, my question is, to what extent do you think this is or isn't accurate that's a good question it is a good question but i don't think no i don't that's quite right i think the way to think of it is that um for all the different actors the austrians the rrians, the Russians, the Germans, the French, having a war looks like the least worst option. So not having a war is like a very bad option because you'll lose a lot of power and prestige.

And you're, you know, they all feel like a war is coming and that it's in their interest to have it now. There is also a degree of fatalism, isn't i mean so we talked about all this fiction i mean the effect of this must be kind of to anesthetize people to the prospect of it or at least familiarize them with it um yeah i think that's absolutely right the people think there will be a war so the german generals all think there is going to be a war with russia and we should a lot of them think we should have it now. We should have it sooner rather than later

because Russia is rapidly industrialising, building railways and becoming much more sort of developed and modern. And that basically, if we fight them in 1925, we could lose. We're going to lose. If we fight them now, if we get it over with, this is the time. That's what the Austrians think. They think if we don't fight Serbia now, we'll be in a weaker position when we do fight them.

And all of those, you know, people have sort of striven very hard to find psychological reasons for that. But to me, a very obvious explanation is that's not a weird thing to think. I mean, wars do happen. Wars happen all the time. And isn't it also, but also it's,

to what extent is the the image of um mountaineers linked by ropes an accurate one that well the one one person falls off and then another one falls off and then another one falls off i mean you've said that britain could easily not have joined the war but that is a part of what happens isn't it that it's it's easier to kind of just follow the guy who's already fallen into the abyss because you're joined by a rope than to kind of try and cling on. Yeah, I think that's definitely true for Germany. So once Austria was fighting, Germany had to get involved. I think the real, to me, and maybe some people will disagree with this,

but to me, the real break moment, the real moment where you think, you didn't have to do that, is Russia. So Russia could have let Austria fight Serbia and not intervened. It wouldn't have been the end of the world for the Russians. They could have just let it go and let it be a little local war. But they felt for reasons of prestige and status and because they were worried about, they had their eyes on Constantinople, which was their long-term goal. They thought, no, we can't let that go. We have to get involved. They actually thought they'd appease the Austrians too often.

Okay, so that touches on two other very popular theories for why the First World War happens. One is Ottoman Empire, sick man of Europe, that it's seen to be in an advanced state of disintegration and the jackals are circling. They want to carve bits off so that's that's a part of it and the other one is um particularly with russia is that it mobilizes and it's such a kind of vast ponderous beast that the moment it's mobilized it becomes impossible

to stop and so that's the kind of agp taylor line that it's um you know the railway timetables of europe meant that it couldn't be stopped. I mean, the Ottoman Empire is breaking up. There have been the Balkan Wars in 1912 to 13. So the emergence of places like Albania, people fighting over Macedonia. So yeah, when empires break up, people fight over their remains. And that was always going to happen with the Ottomans.

And as for the railway timetables, I mean, H.AA.P. Taylor who's sort of the Neil Ferguson of his day um pushed the argument a little bit too far for sort of TV effect I think but it's true that when Russia Russia has to mobilize because it's so big so it mobilizes earlier and when they did it you know the Tsar didn't want to sign the order the The Tsar resisted and resisted. And he said to his courtiers, when we do this, it will be very hard to stop it. Because it's that thing, you know, when one person tools up, you've got to do it too. Yeah, but also the time it takes for these powers to mobilize, it's going on while diplomatic efforts are happening.

And so the two are kind of pulling at each other. Yeah, you're right. And the classic example of that, Tom, is the telegrams that the Kaiser and the Tsar sent to each other, the Willy-Nicky telegrams, as they're called, where they start off sort of saying, you know, we're great friends, we've always been pals, let's not, you know, let's make sure this doesn't happen i'm going to do my best i hope you're going to do your best and even as they're doing it their generals are putting the machinery into pro into action yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and that's a kind of shadow that then hangs over the cold war i guess that there's a kind of memory of that and that must be one of the reasons why nuclear war doesn't happen. Yeah, that's, I think you're absolutely right. Everybody knows the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example.

You know, the First World War was very much on people's minds, that we can't... Yeah, I bet. We can't go over the brink as they did. Everything must be so carefully deliberated. Yeah. And I suppose also that was really only two powers, whereas part of the mess of the first world war is it's multiple powers

all yeah it makes it more complicated anyway here's here here are two paired tweets i'm going to read them both one is from uh james who says did the first world war cause europe to stop being the center of the world um and chris sparkles um australian here should the australians kiwis and pacific islanders have been in the First World War? So they go together well. Yeah. It's a world war. Does.

I mean, just as the kind of the the the ropes of alliance pull European powers into war. So also do the the ropes of dominion status and so on pull canada and australia and new zealand and indeed india and other other other colonies and indeed french as well into um fighting in in europe um should they have been in the first world war i mean i mean it had to be they had to be really because they were part of the empire and actually that had happened before so in the seven years war and the napoleonic wars there was never you know there was never a sort of deal that you'll you know you'll stay out of it a thousand miles away and let the powers in europe

get on with it i mean the colonies have been dragged into both those i mean anybody who's read the um if you're those patrick o'brien um. I tried and found them unreadable. Oh, Tom, no, no, no. It was all just about rope and stuff. That just washes over you. No one knows what that means. All this stuff about sails. I think it's so boring.

But in those books, in those books, often they're taking place, it's about the Napoleonic Wars, for people who don't know, and it's about ships at war. But often they're taking place on the far side of the world, on the other side of South America or something.

So there had been global wars before. I mean, this wasn't the first global war, and not the first war in which colonists had been involved. The 18th century is full of proxy wars and colonists fighting each other in North America and stuff. So it was inevitable. It could never have been otherwise. There is the argument, isn't there,

that another cause of the First World War is that the colonial, the European colonial powers are honing their ability to kill in the colonies. Yeah. So in a way, one of, I think one of the great novels about the First World War is actually written in the late 19th century, which is H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. It's a kind of portrayal of an immensely superior power incinerating London. And at the beginning of the novel, Wells overtly compares what the Martians do to Britain to what the British have

done to the Tasmanians. Yes, he does. You're right. Aboriginal people in Tasmania who effectively get wiped out. And so there's, I think, I mean, I think clearly the First World War does devastate Europe's financial, economic, cultural, moral power. But there is an argument that it's a kind of, you know, it's the empire striking back, it's the colony striking back, it's a kind of tragic payback for what the colonial powers have been doing in, say, in Africa. I've heard that argument, Tom.

I sometimes wonder whether that argument is sort of historians of empire just desperately trying to put themselves centre stage. So that would illustrate the argument that it's a Rorschach test, that you find it, you find reflecting that your own interests. It's not like European powers needed to hone their killing techniques in Africa and Asia. I mean, in the Napoleonic Wars and the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian War, they had proved themselves eminently capable of killing each other on European fields. Yeah. OK. Well, actually, let's go on to another question, because in a sense, this is again about the mirror that literature has held up to the war. And we're back to Blackadder. Has Blackadder distorted our views of World War One?

Has it been helpful in our understanding? Not just Blackadder. The First World War poets. Yeah it been helpful in our understanding? Not just Blackadder, the First World War poets, Oh What a Lovely War, all of that, lines led by donkeys, the whole tradition. There's a danger in talking about this that you turn into Michael Gove. Michael Gove basically denounced Blackadder and said that lefty historians like me who thought that we shouldn't have fought

the First World War were merely sort of peddling Richard Curtis's... Did he just say lefty historians like me? Yeah, like me who thought that we shouldn't have fought the First World War when we were sort of peddling Richard Curtis's... Did you just say lefty historians like me? Yeah, like me. Yeah, well, that's what Michael Gove would clearly think. So I think he, I think, Tom, you're enjoying it. I can see on my screen Tom is laughing far too much. Yes, famous left-wing historian Dominic Sambro. Could I just say that I played a key role in that? In what? Getting Michael Gove interested in the First World War because I was on Start the Week with Margaret Macmillan and with Michael Gove.

This really is the podcast that brings you brushes with greatness. And after we'd done it, Margaret was talking more about the First World War and we talked about the revision of Siri. I mentioned Gary Sheffield's biography of General Hague and Michael Gove clearly, this was just before Christmas, clearly went back home and read it. And then after New Year,

started contributing to the debate on the character and nature of the First World War. So I like to think that I too have played my humble part in the historiography of the First World War. Anyway, yes, sorry, I interrupted you. But it's also the poets, isn't it? It's also Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon. Everybody does them at GTSC or at least they did. And that sort of image of the war is all mud and blood and misery.

I mean, it's a funny thing about Oh, What a Lovely War. I did Oh, What a Lovely War at school. We did a production of it. And it's this great anti-war play at the end of the 1960s by Joan Joan Littlewood and her theatre workshop and a classic left wing agitprop basically and there's a great story about a group of First World War veterans going to an early performance of Oh What a Lovely War and the story is you know they sat through it there were a lot of songs and the songs are meant to be ironic because they're all going to die but the veterans didn't see it that way at all they sang along very happily with the songs and then afterwards they all went to the bar and they weren't standing around traumatized saying oh i never talked about this all the rest of it they

were telling each other anecdotes about people who've had their hand blown off or old johnny who i stood next to me had his head shot off by a german and then we played football with him a week later or you know this kind of thing so the idea that people hated it and a lot of people actually wrote home and said they were enjoying themselves in the war because their life back at home in the factory was so grim but the Wilfred Owen Oh What A Lovely War Blackadder take on it as a disastrous muddy bloody mistake I mean that's basically your take as well isn't it I mean you're saying that that it was such a calamity that we should never have got involved in it. But there is definitely, you know,

there is definitely the kind of revisionist school is that it was a necessary war. Well, I don't think it was a necessary war. I mean, I think that's balderdash, frankly. I know if Gary Sheffield has listened to this, he'll have his head in his hands. But I don't buy that at all. I don't think it was a necessary war.

Top left-wing historian speaks out. The man they cannot gag. I think the Guardian are on the phone right now, actually. I think... Come on, let's have some more of your left-wing nonsense, Dominic. But I don't think it wasn't... It clearly just wasn't all mud, blood and misery. I mean, it just wasn't. So there's lots of aspects mud, blood and misery. I mean, it just wasn't.

So there's lots of aspects to the war. Actually, we haven't talked about the war in Italy, the war in the Middle East, the war in the air. You know, there's much more to it than sort of Baldrick in the trenches, which has been reduced to. OK, well, I just want to stick on this because 50-something Gardner, he's hammering home at this point as well.

If the UK had stayed out, would the First World War have been a rerun of 1871, so the Franco-Prussian War? Given what actually happened, difficult to see how quick German victory would have been a worse outcome for UK. So that's basically what you're saying, isn't it? I mean, what's the worst that happens? We have a big economic competition with the Germans in the 1920s and 30s.

I mean, maybe we even fight a war with them. That's the worst case scenario. But I mean, since we did that anyway... Do we know what the German plans for victory were? They wanted a kind of economic community, didn't they? Well, this is Neil Ferguson's claim. He basically says they want to set up the EU, which I think most people regard as a bit of a stretch.

I think the truth is they went into it without great plans. Then once the war started, they did develop a statement of war aims, which were very punitive. They basically wanted to turn the Low Countries into a kind of German fiefdom. They wanted everybody to be in a German-dominated customs union. What were their plans for France? Well, France would be reduced to a kind of German satellite. And for Britain? So if we'd entered and been defeated, do we know what Germany's plans for Britain were?

No, I don't think they had clear plans for Britain. Clearly would have given up a lot of the empire. They would have demanded the confiscation of colonies. Whether we would have had to take part in some German economic unions is hard to say. But of course, the truth with all these things is that what resulted at the end of the war was never what anybody had planned. So, I mean, we didn't get exactly the results after the First World War that we thought we would get beforehand because we didn't really have clear plans. People's war plans were always changing. And by 1918-19, the emergence of revolution in Russia

and the fears of the spread of Bolshevism mean everything has been thrown into confusion. So as a left-wing historian, obviously we should look at the Marxist take on the First World War. And Lenin's view on it was that it was the kind of end times for capitalism and imperialism. Yes, that wasn't a prediction that really worked out. No, and I don't think it's a result of the search for profit and search for markets and all that kind of stuff that's a necessary result of imperialism. I don't think you need to go down the sort of Marxist line

to explain it to you. I mean, I think it starts for the reason most wars start, which is fear. People always think, I mean, maybe you'll have a different take on this going back to the sort of Persian wars and all that sort of stuff. I don't think wars start generally because of greed or because of hatred or any of those things. I think they generally start because people are afraid and they think that war is the least worst option. Because if you don't choose war, you will be poorer or weaker or, you know, your enemies will attack you. I mean,

that's the classic reason that you think they're going to fight you, so you do it first. But I think those are the real reasons. There is also the argument, isn't there, that people quite wanted it, that people were quite excited about it, that people felt that a century of peace had been too long. For some people, that's true of peace had been too long. For some people, that's true. Time for a rematch. I mean, if you ever read this sort of Italian futurist poets, for example, I mean, they were itching for... I know you read them all the time, Tom.

And in Germany, they were kind of enthusiasts for Nietzsche. Yeah, Rupert Brooke in Britain britain you know said you know will be what is it the line about um swimmers leaping into water and washing away the kind of dirt of ordinary civilized life i mean a lot of people kind of bought that that idea there was this sort of cult of there was a cult of violence i think um although plainly it is also the case that people did did entirely understand what a calamity was going to be. I mean, I guess the famous Edward Grey thing about the lights going out over Europe and we won't even lit again in our lifetime. I mean, that's nothing if not a statement that this is going to be a calamity beyond our imaginings.

So it's kind of strange mix of of jingoism and kind of bleak horror. And actually, everybody who knew anything about it, so all the people who were the policymakers, they all did know how terrible it was going to be. So the German generals, Helmut von Moltke, for example, who was the German sort of chief of staff, he had told the Kaiser a couple of years before, when there is a war, it will be absolutely awful.

And even if we win, we will come out of it exhausted and poorer, and it will be absolutely awful and even if we win we will come out of it exhausted and poorer and it will be incredibly draining and we will be a different country afterwards so they they didn't go into it thinking it was going to be jolly kind of flag waving you know it was it was going to be a sort of um a pageant they didn't think mostly that it was going to be over by christmas either did they that's no that's a myth yeah that is a myth i mean some of the soldiers did some of the ordinary soldiers um but none of the generals really think oh this is going to be easy it's going to be a walk in the park i mean of course they don't you know they're not idiots they look at the there's this sort of image that we have the blackadder image that the people in charge are really foolish and

it's actually the ordinary people who are really smart and clued up. And I think that's completely wrong. A lot of the, as it were, the ordinary people who went out to fight had no idea where they were going and what they were doing. There's all these stories about peasants in France or in Russia coming in from the fields and they're told, you're at war, you have to go and fight. They don't know who they're fighting for, who they're fighting against.

The whole thing is a mystery to them. And the people in charge, the scary thing in some ways, is that they did know what they were doing. They were intelligent, they were well informed, but they did it anyway. They did it anyway. And that could kind of be an epitaph for so much that we've been discussing on this podcast. Point of all history. Today, that is it for today. If you know anyone studying 20th century history, do please send them a link to this podcast and they can listen to left-wing historian Dominic Sandbrook giving his revisionist take

and tell them it'll save them hours of revision. Though there's no guarantee it'll get them a good grade, of course. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with The Rest Is History. Goodbye for now. Auf Wiedersehen. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening,

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