ARTHUR MARWICK ON BRITAIN DURING 1910-1914

Arthur Marwick, The Deluge

(New York: W.W. Norton & Co.; 1970), p. 10.

The condition of Britain in the four years before 1914 was not really such a happy one a whirlpool of industrial strife and suffragette agitation, of Ulstermen openly preparing for civil war in Ireland and last-ditch Tories misbehaving themselves in the House of Commons.

Similar waves and eddies of violence afflicted other European countries.

Indeed the war can be seen as an irresistible flooding-over of tensions too great to be contained in the existing social and world setting: philosophers and poets had glorified it in advance, futurist painters had elevated it to an aesthetic canon, even peoples had seemed eager for it.

But the war also had more precise economic and political causes.

From the point of view of British participation, four sets of circumstances are critical: the rivalries and conflicts in the Balkans between the several minor nations and the two major powers Austria-Hungary and Russia seemingly remote but productive of the immediate cause of the war; the growing awareness in Britain that her world economic position was steadily being challenged by Germany; the conviction that any German aggrandizement on the European continent would fatally upset the balance of power; and, fourthly, the manner in which pre-war diplomacy had resolved the manifold cross-conflicts and jealousies of many nations into the rigid and highly dangerous line-up of two armed camps.

In the end, the decisions and the miscalculations that brought war as a definite fact were those of diplomatists and statesmen with one qualification: behind the statesmen stood the general staffs and strategic planners; or rather, the military, believing that the modern technology of war had made speedy action and the perfect interlocking of alliances essential, had jumped in front of the statesmen.

Once the first hesitant moves to war had been made, the military authorities ensured that there could be no turning back.

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