“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. ”
Marcus Tullius Cicero

And I can’t even imagine trying to teach the history of the war using only a great, but entirely one-sided, novel.

We are becomng a much governed nation, governed by all mannder of councils and boards and officers, central and local, high and low, exercising the powers which have been committed to them by statute.

Maitland was looking back to the living memory of true laissez faire. But if Taylor overstated the smallness of the State’s role before the war, he did not exaggerate the vast expansion it experienced during the war.

Given the balance of technologies that existed at the time, WWI would have been dreadfully bloody in any cases, but the lack of imagination of all too many senior officers–coupled with their unwillingness to “go and see”–made things a lot worse than they needed to be.

David, there is some truth to that summary. But it leaves some things out. For example, you look at the enormous French losses in 1915, in local attacks which history does not even attach names to. And you think the French were crazy. But then you realize, they were terrified that the Germans would finish off Russia, and they wanted to help the Russians, who were getting clobbered, so they continued the attacks. Same thing with the Somme. The British thought their artillery would crush the German defenses. But whether it did or not, their ally France was bleeding to death at Verdun, and needed help. There is a lot more tragedy and a lot less stupidity in the management of World War I than we like to believe.

Veryretired, I largely concur with your musings, especially as to the long term destruction which is still not fully played out.

No harm in repeating the famous passage from the beginning of AJP Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.

It is also worth remarking that the ferocity of the deadliness of these staid, outmoded tactics destroyed several ruling groups, and the lives of millions of soldiers and civilians, every bit as effectively as the later, more technologically and tactically advanced efforts of the belligerents in WW2.

The poisonous effects of WW1, however, which led directly to the rise of marxism, fascism, and nazism in Europe, and the popularity and widespread experimentation with various collectivist forms of governmental structure around the world, are still reverberating through, and damaging, the course of world social and cultural development to this day.

It has only been within the past few years, almost the other end of the century, that the last of the gruesome experiments with totalitarianism finally came to an end.

Ironically, it was the “new utopia” that ended as the poet predicted—”not with a bang, but a whimper”, while the much reviled commercial social order of the West flourishes as a global phenomenon.

I apologize. I think this has drifted off topic even more than I usually manage to do in my wanderings.

“They did WHAT? And they did it AGAIN? And they kept on DOING it?”

I also don’t agree generally that the monarchies were falling apart in 1914. Russia had excellent economic growth in the decade before World War I. The war destroyed the Empires. Had there not been a horrendous war, there is no saying how they would have carried on, maybe until today. Germany, of course, was the wonder of the world, despite having a crazy government. How it might have evolved if the Kaiser had been rational, or if the war had ended sooner, cannot be answered. But the mere fact that these countries were monarchies is not, in my view, a strike against them.

“Every nation has a right to be independent.” I can’t agree with this. What group of people constitutes a nation? Can that ever be agreed upon? Woodrow Wilson thought there was a “right to national self-determination”. This was consistent with the advanced liberal views of the day, but it led to a lot more trouble than it was worth.

There is a saying in the law is “no right, no remedy”. The reverse is true, to “no remedy, no right”. There is nowhere for a “nation” to get its “right” recognized, except through political bargaining, or rebellion or revolution. It is not a question of rights, except on a rhetorical level. It is about political prudence. Nothing is gained by talking about rights in this context.

I don’t think you are off point, or saying too much. Long comments that are intelligent are appreciated.

Lex,
sorry for being unclear, but I don’t see (after rereading 3 times) how anything in what I said above made you form your impressions.
-I didn’t equal Habsburgs and Eastern bloc.
-I didn’t compare the history of Czechoslovakia under Habsburgs and Soviets at all. I don’t know how I “seem to be putting them together”.
-I didn’t advocate violent revolutions, you don’t need to explain to me that gradual change is better than bloody violence.
-I was responding to your words “But the larger fact is that people had it relatively good in the Austro-Hungarian empire and they did not have the imagination to see thatn at the time”. I would imagine some British oficial would say the same about those crazy American colonists – they don’t know how good they have it under the Crown, they just riot without having foresight to see the grief it will bring them in the future.

Every nation has a right to be independent. The size of it is irrelevant. No Big Boss has a right to forcefully keep people with national identity and desire to be independent in the bondage of Empire. [I'm afraid to bring in example of Chechnya - can't imagine what you can read into that! But yes, same with Chechnya - they have a right to separation.] If Czechs wanted their independence, they surely had a right to get it.

Thousands of deaths after the break-up of Jugoslavia is a direct result of artificiality of the federation. You can’t keep all these animals in one carriage if all they had dreamed of, for the duration, to break apart! Jugoslavia wasn’t a melting pot, it was a pressure-cooker on the high flame, with steam-valve pushed down.
I was talking a week ago to a friend of mine, Croatian living in Brooklyn. “They are all on frendliest terms in Ljublyana now”, she said, “now – when they got what they wanted for centuries: separation”.

Are you a monarchist, Lexington? I don’t understand this apology for the Empires. I am confident that monarchy was dead by 1913. At least in Russian Empire. I would even go further and say that wherever monarchies exist now, they are mostly decorative – if by some reason any king or princess decided to evoke their powers and make real political decisions, their days would come to the abrupt end – sentimental admiration of tradition, drawing crowds at ceremonies notwithstanding. I see it as direct result of WWI.

OK, rant’s over. I took too much space already – and too far away from the topic of the post.

– Cicero

And I think concentrating solely on the British Empire view is a big mistake, the French too took vast casualties and also had their own empire hauling in colonials to feed into the fray, and their own (In my opinion, insane) agenda.

Looking at the war fromthe other side of the hill is very instructive.

Also I think something must be made of the limitations of command and control. Once the mobilizations started, no one could afford not to follow suit and implement war plans. To stop would have left countries at mercy.

If he wants something of a more scholarly bent for the reading list, Martel’s Origins of the First World War and Robson’s First World War, both part of the Seminiar Stuides in History Series, are both not too bad and relatively short.

As to Massie, Dreadnought is excellent on the personalities and grand forces at play in the Anglo-German naval race. I was less impressed with Castles of the Sea, on the war itself, primarily because, when you get down to it, there simply weren’t very many battles between surface combatants. The maps in Castles also stink; I couldn’t make heads or tails of the maneuvering in the Battle of the Falklands, and simply putting a little circle on a map near the Falkland Islands wasn’t any help.

All this WWI stuff really reminds me I still need to get to Ferguson’s The Pity of War. Pity.

I agree that freedom is better than serfdom. But that is a false dichotomy. The people of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were not face with those options. I have to disagree that the monarchy was performing poorly. Sound currency, secure property, good economic growth in a large free-trade zone, inter-ethnic peace, increasing levels of political freedom, a trend toward a federal-type solution for the regions. Had the war not come there is no reason to think these trends would not have continued.

Let me get my lawyer in here to cite some authority. Tom, how did you put that?

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

OK. So, as always with politics, it is a question of making a prudential judgment about what is better, the status quo, including the trends embedded in the status quo, and working within that framework, or something else — to decide when things are no longer “sufferable”. I don’t think you can reasonably say that the Czechs, to stick with them, in the 88 years after 1918 to today — including Nazi and Soviet occupation, had a better time of it than they did in the prior 88 years. Sometimes — rarely — the way to stop being oppressed is to take up arms and throw off the current regime. This always seems appealing when you read about it. Sometimes it is to push the existing system, like the pre-war Czechs were doing, by boring incremental steps. This has the virtue of getting few people killed.

I do not think that there is any real analogy between resisting the communist regimes after 1945 and the Habsburgs. The communists were far, far worse, and risking life and limb to oppose them was probably the correct course all along. Their rule was not “sufferable”, it was intolerable, and it showed no sign of moderating and evolving into something better. You seem to be putting those things together. I don’t really see any comparison.

As to whether Yugoslavia is better off broken up, I suppose the hundreds of thousands of dead people have to be calculated into the analysis of whether it is better off ununited. Should there never had been a Yugoslavia? Maybe, but that is not really relevant to whether it should have been broken up, or how it should have been broken up.

Spelling out the Russian:

The trilogy is called “Khozhdeniye po mukam”; first part is called “Syostri”, can’t remember the second part but the third one is “Khmuroye Utro”. Story of the two sisters, Katya and Dasha, and the two men they end up with in the end.

This is me being thoroughly pedantic.

As for the Czechs, and, indeed, other East Europeans, they may have done well for themselves by the end of the twentieth century but just a few decades of rather unpleasant experience intervened between 1918 and 1989. Freedom was not precisely part of it most of the time.

The quote that applies is (something like) “those who do not have historical knowledge essentially remain children”. Wish I could recall the author, sorry.

Monarchy, Austrian or Russian, was performing badly and overstayed their welcome in their countries. Changes were inevitable; why the society was so easily stirred towards violence and not towards liberal democracy is a matter of endless speculation (and might be an interesting topic for an university course). One thing I’m sure of: you can’t stop desire change intolerable situation in fear that the process might turn for the worse. How people would ever progress, than?
Besides, your example with Czechs isn’t convincing. I think they are, in fact, did very well for themselves in the end of 20th century, exactly because they have learned the lessons of the past – don’t rely on the Big countries, don’t ASK for your freedom – work for it yourself, or you’ll end up a pawn in the game of your “betters”, be it Britain or Russia.

In my eyes – freedom is always better than serfdom. Yugoslavia, a concoction of British and French diplomacy, is better off UN-united. Poland is better off as an independent state, not a part of Austrian and Russian empires. So is Ukraine and all other former SSSR republics. So the political lesson is probably the opposite one then what you speak of.

So I am not sure that we disagree very much about anything.

And no, I have not yet read Svejk. But I have read many references to it, I am aware of the theme and thrust and tone of the book, and I have read the first chapter or so, and I am waiting for the current translation which is being prepared to be finished. So, it is very much on my radar. I’ll get to Svejk.

The fact that Hasek could not foresee the disasters coming along is not his fault, of course, since no one can do that. But the larger fact is that people had it relatively good in the Austro-Hungarian empire and they did not have the imagination to see thatn at the time. The Czechs in particular were the most vehement about breaking it up and getting their own country, and they did not end up having a good 20th Century. This teaches a larger political lesson, that the seemingly intolerable is often the best of a bunch of bad options. Most people most of the time don’t want to hear that.