George V (1910-1936)

Last Years of Peace (1910-1914)

The new king, George V, was almost forty-five. As the second son of Edward VII he had pursued a career as a naval officer for fifteen years until 1892, when his elder brother, the sickly Duke of Clarence, died and he became heir to the throne. As a result of his years in the Senior Service, George V was sensible, businesslike and disciplined. He had a great sense of the empire, much of which he had visited on duty tours. To mark his becoming Emperor of India at the end of his coronation year, he gave a magnificent Durbar, or gathering, at Delhi. George’s wife was Princess Mary of Teck. The granddaughter of one of George IV’s brothers, the Duke of Cambridge, she had been born and brought up in England. They had six sons and daughters.

Hard-working and realistic, after his father’s funeral George V called a round-table Constitutional Conference with all the party leaders to seek a consensus on what should be done about the Parliament Bill. But, with no agreement reached and reluctant to see the crown interfere in politics, the Liberals decided on a second election. George V insisted that the bill should actually be voted on by the House of Lords before Asquith called a new election, in order for the Conservative peers to propose alternative suggestions. But the king also agreed, as William IV had done in the crisis over the 1832 Reform Bill, to create around 250 peers to swing the Parliament Bill through the second chamber if the Lords rejected it.

In December 1910 the Liberal government’s position was reaffirmed. The electoral result was practically unchanged: the Liberals and the Unionists had the same number of seats, 272 each, the Irish Nationalists had 84, an increase of two, while Labour’s share stood at 40. The new Parliament Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons in May 1911 to great excitement and amid ungentlemanly scenes. The son of the Marquis of Salisbury, Lord Hugh Cecil, lost control of himself and heckled the prime minister so ferociously that he had to stop speaking. In the House of Lords a ‘Die-Hard’ group of peers started a last-ditch movement to get the peers to refuse the bill. But by July the message had got through. However furious the Lords might be about their ancient rights being trampled underfoot, the threat of being swamped ensured that by August 1911 enough had abstained for the bill to pass.

But there was yet more trouble for the government. An epidemic of strikes paralysed the country throughout the summer. Agitation and vituperation had surrounded the Parliament Bill. There was a feeling of alarm at the changing nature of things–not everyone in Britain was progressively minded, as the last elections had made clear. Then suddenly, at the end of June, a serious war scare began.

The German government had sent a gunboat, the Panther, to seize the port of Agadir in Morocco. Over the previous couple of years, German relations with Britain had improved under a new German chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, for he was intent on breaking up the over-cosy relationship between France, Britain and Russia. The kaiser himself had appeared to be in a more friendly mood, even visiting London in the early summer of 1911 for the unveiling of a memorial to his grandmother Queen Victoria. But, after the naval panic of 1909 and the generally threatening stance of the German government, the Panther could have meant anything. During the seventeen days when the German government refused to disclose its intentions, the world held its breath.

Rumours abounded that Germany was preparing for war and about to march through Belgium. Reports of the military camps in Germany, where the peacetime army approached a million men, and the increased number of German soldiers up against the Belgian frontier did nothing to dispel this. The strange elongated railway platforms, which could only have been built for troops, along the German frontier with Belgium had long been noticed by the British military. An Official Secrets Act was brought in for the first time to protect against the spying known to be going on in the dockyards and all over the country. The letters of anyone suspected of getting orders from Germany were opened.

The year 1911 saw the hottest summer for forty years. London sweltered in the heat as anxiety mounted about what Germany would do next. What did she want; did she want war? So anxious was even the pacifist Cabinet about Germany having control of a port from which her warships could raid British ships moving into the Mediterranean or across the Atlantic that it warned that Britain would go to war if the Panther was not removed. The Germans began to back down. They made it clear that they did not desire war with Britain or with anyone else. The Panther gunboat turned out to be their undiplomatic response to the French breaching the international agreement at Algeçiras that Morocco should be a free-trade area. Taking advantage of internal unrest there, the French were moving to annex the colony. Germany thought her commercial interests were being ignored by the French. The Panther was her way of asserting her right to interfere in Morocco if she chose.

In September, as negotiations went on with Germany, Britain was nevertheless believed to be so close to hostilities that soldiers were sent to guard the south-eastern railway lines. There was considerable anxiety about the strength of the French army, as its manpower was only three-quarters of the Germans. The once dim shape of conflict was becoming clearer. In November the Agadir crisis was over. The Germans had been given some more territory, 100,000 square miles in the Congo, so that the Panther could be withdrawn. But by 1912 the British military establishment had become immovably pessimistic about Germany’s future intentions. Haldane, who had pushed Britain into a state of greater military preparedness with a General Staff and the British Expeditionary Force, had in 1911 insisted on a War Book being drawn up. This was a plan for each government department setting out the procedures they should follow in the event of war. Another attempt at ending the naval race between Britain and Germany by a reduction in ships had foundered. The proposed German limitations were not large enough, and they were dependent on Britain ending her Entente with France and Russia and making an alliance with Germany only. To that Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, could not agree.

After Grey had turned down the German offer, the German naval estimates for 1912 were larger than ever. Britain’s reaction was to remove, very ostentatiously, the whole of her magnificent battle fleet from Toulon and away from the Mediterranean. Henceforth the two navies of the Anglo-French Entente were to divide the guarding of their respective waters between them. The French were to be responsible for the Mediterranean, while the British were to protect the Channel and North Sea.

The military links between the French and English governments became soldered together. Unknown to most of the Cabinet except for the foreign secretary and the prime minister Asquith, in 1912 France and England began to share military secrets and to second staff to one another’s armies.

Morally speaking there was now an alliance in all but name: an attack by Germany on France’s Channel ports or her northern and western coasts must, in the French view, bring Britain into the war. But the British government nevertheless refused to make it official. British public opinion would not allow the country to fight for France if France attacked Germany first. Three-quarters of the Liberal Cabinet were pacifists who would not countenance an alliance with France, and the government continued to wish not to alarm Germany with an alliance she would perceive as aimed at her. If it did come to war, the two Entente governments would meet to hammer out what would be their next move, whether in fact they would act together. With this curious position the French had to be content. But the actions of the Liberal government spoke louder than words. Early in 1912, spurred by the Agadir crisis, Asquith set up the Invasion Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, which met off and on until 1914. Discussions on how to get troops to France began to absorb government attention.

The Agadir episode had been seen by other countries as a sign that force was rewarded, that aggression paid. During September 1911 when the Admiralty was quarrelling with the army about war procedure (the Admiralty wanted the army to stay offshore in boats while most of the battles were fought at sea), Italy successfully invaded Tripoli in north Africa. She had no difficulty in swiftly defeating its nominal overlord Turkey, which was racked by the chaos of a new regime. Italy’s success gave hope to all the unsatisfied Balkan countries for their own war against Turkey.

Against this background of international lawlessness the peaceful fabric of British life, which had successfully survived the upheavals of the industrial revolution, frayed to breaking point. The trade unions, the suffragettes, the Conservative and Ulster Unionists, all one way and another were dissatisfied by too many or too few government reforms. Despite the Parliament Bill, many of the more recent elements in politics–the working classes, the trade unionists and the militant suffragettes–were disappointed by the slow nature of the Parliamentary process. All broke with traditional or legal methods of expressing themselves; anarchy loomed.

During 1912–14 Britain was swept by a series of national strikes that almost brought the country to her knees. Labour had lost 25 per cent of their seats at the January 1910 election. From fifty-three MPs their numbers went down to forty. It confirmed the blue-collar workers’ disillusionment with Parliament as a way of addressing their concerns. The single-ballot system was weighted against a third party, which made it hard for Labour to get elected, and its supporters felt that they were not being represented in numbers proportionate to the Labour party membership. This bitterness was aggravated after 1909 when sixteen Labour MPs had to go without salaries after the Osborne case had dried up the party’s funds. The Liberal-supporting railwayman W. V. Osborne had successfully challenged his trade union’s compulsory levy to the Labour party, the Law Lords ruling that trade unions could no longer provide for Parliamentary representation by a compulsory levy. In 1911 the Liberals remedied this when they instituted the payment of MPs, a Chartist demand since the 1840s.

But the damage was done. The optimism which the historic number of Labour MPs in Parliament had created turned to anger when they appeared to make so little difference. Hardship remained widespread for many industrial workers. Wages had remained the same from the beginning of the century, even though prices and the cost of living had risen. People wanted instant solutions, which the threat of stoppages provided. Thanks to Labour pressure, laws relating to strike action had recently been relaxed. As a result the country was rocked by them. To the short-sighted they seemed an easier route to power than Parliament; some trade unionists came under the influence of the French Trade Union or Syndicalist movement which distrusted Parliamentary methods, preferring the strike as a method of operation. The Syndicalists looked to a Utopian future where trade unions would form the basic unit of society.

In 1910 the government reluctantly used troops against miners in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales who had attacked a pithead to get more pay. At first it sent only London policemen. The Liberals were disturbed by the thought of using soldiers in industrial disputes, believing that the owners were frequently as unreasonable as the men. But the use of troops deepened the unions’ sense of grievance. During the summer of 1911, in the midst of the Agadir crisis, another rash of strikes by the seamen’s, firemen’s and dockers’ unions brought the Port of London to a standstill until there were pay rises all round. It was followed by what was very nearly a national railway strike to protest against the deaths of two rioting dockers in Liverpool fired on by soldiers. The strike shut down most of the industrial midlands for four days. So tense was the situation, and so great was the fear of revolutionary action, that troops were brought into the centre of London. In the blistering heat their tents crowded the dried-up lawns of St James’s Park, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, which were more usually thronged with prams. But Lloyd George was skilful in his handling of the union. The new leader of the Parliamentary Labour party, Ramsay MacDonald, joined the negotiations and the railway strike ended with no recriminations and no job losses.

Permanent machinery was set up to sort out the railwaymen’s grievances. The generally sympathetic treatment the unions received helped ensure that, despite talks between the dockers, the miners and the railwaymen about a general strike, in Britain strikes never became a revolutionary instrument for social change. In 1912 after a new miners’ strike for a minimum wage, when the intransigence of the owners prevented attempts to fix it mutually at local level, the Liberals passed a minimum-wage bill. By 1913 there was still less room for discontent when the government rescinded the Osborne judgement. The 1913 Trade Union Act made it legal for trade union levies to be spent on politics as long as members were canvassed for their views. Any member of a different political persuasion could decline to contribute.

The strikes petered out, but London was now subjected to an arson campaign. This was conducted by a militant branch of the suffragette movement, the Women’s Social and Political Union, or WSPU, founded in 1903 when the Independent Labour party failed to include women’s suffrage in their programme. It was run by the charismatic Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Sylvia and Christabel; Christabel had been prevented from reading for the bar, despite her law degree, because she was of the female sex.

The 1907 Qualification of Women Act allowed women, married or single, to be councillors, aldermen or mayors and to sit on county and borough councils, but the Parliamentary vote continued to be denied them. Thousands of women marched for the vote, but nothing was done. Mrs Pankhurst, her daughters and other suffragettes were imprisoned several times for causing public disorder when they heckled Liberal election rallies. Two attempts at franchise reform failed, the first because the Liberal government would not introduce a bill to enfranchise single women with property, as that would mean increasing the vote of the traditionally Conservative spinster. In frustration the Pankhursts decided to abandon constitutional means.

Letterboxes, a school, a railway station were set on fire. The British Museum was attacked, as was the orchid house at Kew. The suffragettes even went for the Tower of London. Across England members of the society, who numbered around 40,000 women, hoisted up the long skirts that continued to be de rigueur in the early twentieth century and stole out after dark to cut telephone wires. They even tied themselves to the railings of 10 Downing Street. Soon several hundred suffragettes were locked up in Holloway Women’s Prison. Moreover, once the suffragettes were incarcerated they went on hunger strike. As some began to die, the anxious prison authorities turned to force feeding. But there were fears about its legality. In desperation the home secretary Reginald McKenna introduced the so-called Cat and Mouse Act, which allowed hunger strikers to be released and to be rearrested without further proceedings once they had recovered at home. One of the Pankhurst suffragettes, the forty-one-year-old Emily Davison, threw herself under George V’s horse at the 1913 Derby and died from her injuries. The WSPU’s extremism alienated many more moderate campaigners for women’s suffrage like the veteran campaigner Emily Davies, one of the founders of Girton College, Cambridge. When Christabel Pankhurst escaped to Paris after a warrant was issued for her arrest, much of the agitation died down.

Within Britain there was a growing sense of despondency. The confidence which had been so manifest in 1906 was ebbing away, chased by vague but prevalent fears about a coming conflagration. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 by an iceberg underlined the frailty even of modern man and his engineering. Even more haunting to the pre-1914 imagination was the fate of Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. Nature was not tamed as easily as the twentieth century thought.

At Christmas 1912 Captain Robert Scott and four others including Captain Lawrence Oates reached the South Pole, only to discover that the Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it. When the frostbite on Oates’s feet began to endanger the expedition’s progress, Oates sacrificed himself for his friends by walking out of his tent into the blizzard. ‘I am just going outside and may be some time,’ he said. His body was never found, but his words became revered for their very British understatement. Captain Scott and the rest of the expedition failed to reach the food depot they were seeking. When an Antarctic search party at last reached them in November 1913 it was to find them dead in their tents several miles away. Beside Scott’s body was the journal in which he detailed Oates’s heroic end.

Even the Asquith government, which had taken power as the essence of probity and high-mindedness, was rocked by financial scandal. The telegraph signal company Marconi was awarded the contract to provide a radio service throughout the empire under the aegis of the Post Office. But in 1912 it was alleged that both the postmaster-general Herbert Samuel and the attorney-general Sir Rufus Isaacs held shares in the company and had not declared their interest. Both parties were cleared of insider dealing, Samuel outright and Isaacs because he had only bought shares from the American branch of the company after Marconi had won the contract. However, the secretary of the American company turned out to be Isaacs’ brother. The suspicion that Rufus Isaacs had used his influence to secure the contract for Marconi would not go away. There was a feeling that something underhand had been going on, even if it could not quite be pinned down. The affair left a cloud over the Liberals.

Above all, Asquith was unable to control the situation in Ireland. Since 1912 when preparations for the Third Home Rule Bill began, Sir Edward Carson, the formidable solicitor-general in the last Conservative government, and the MP James Craig had assembled a private Protestant army named the Ulster Volunteers to resist Home Rule in Ulster. Now that the automatic Unionist majority in the Lords could no longer prevent Home Rule, they would put their trust in force. Andrew Bonar Law, the inexperienced leader of the Conservatives and Unionists who succeeded Balfour, encouraged this lawless behaviour. In a series of astonishing speeches, he pledged the Conservatives to defend Ulster physically against the British government if it tried to enforce Home Rule. He even went to Ireland to take the salute of the Ulster Unionist troops as they paraded.

On 28 September 1912 the whole of Belfast closed down to sign the Solemn League and Covenant to resist Home Rule. The hooting sirens of the shipyards and the machines of the factories stopped as nearly 500,000 people lined up to sign the pledge by which they refused to recognize the authority of any Home Rule Parliament. Most of Ulster seemed to be armed. Many of the men signed the pledge in their own blood.

But, although half of Ulster, the Protestants, was against Home Rule, the other half was Catholic and in favour of it. Moreover the head of the Irish Nationalist MPs, John Redmond, could not give up Ulster and Irish unity. By going for Home Rule instead of independence, Redmond had already sacrificed much. For the past few years his leadership had been challenged by Sinn Fein, the total-independence movement in Ireland, which had become notably popular in southern Ireland among blue-collar workers politicized during a series of strikes in 1912 and 1913. In Dublin an army of strikers called the Irish Volunteers had grown up under two leaders, James Connolly and James Larkin, who had none of Redmond’s scruples about violence. The Irish Volunteers started drilling like the Ulster Volunteers. By 1914 they were 100,000 strong, and a third of them were in the north.

As the situation in northern and southern Ireland became more intemperate, with both sides plotting to import arms, the Home Rule Bill was passed twice by the House of Commons and thrown out twice by the House of Lords. But, by the autumn of 1913 as Home Rule came closer to implementation, the government was becoming increasingly uneasy at the idea of imposing Home Rule on Ulster. Perhaps it would be impossible to coerce Ulster; in any case it was very un Liberal to coerce anyone.

Under George V’s aegis, discussions were opened between all parties at Balmoral to discuss the possibility of excluding Ulster. Redmond reluctantly agreed to partition, angering many of the Sinn Feiners and further weakening his position with the Irish Volunteers. The question was, where should the exclusion line run? The talks continued throughout the winter of 1913–14, while the two illegal armies of southern and northern Irish drilled regardless.

The apparent favouring of the Unionist side was epitomized by the government turning a blind eye to what was called the Larne gun-running in April 1914 when the Ulstermen landed 30,000 rifles and a million rounds of ammunition. The police and coastguards made no real attempt to stop the operation. But in July that year, when the Irish Volunteers landed guns at Howth near Dublin, troops were called out to stop them. Protesters threw things at troops in Dublin, provoking the soldiers to fire into the crowds, killing three and wounding forty more. This more than ever aggravated relations between Dublin and Westminster, and between Redmond and the Irish Volunteers.

Meanwhile the very loyalty of the army in Ireland had been called into question. The commander-in-chief of the army in Ireland, Sir Arthur Paget, who had strong Unionist sympathies, had chosen to ignore the tradition that the British army was apolitical and that its first duty was to obey the civilian government. In an episode known as the Curragh ‘mutiny’ after the area where the army was based, in March 1914 Paget told officers that he could not order those who disapproved of Home Rule, especially if their homes were in the north, to impose it on Ulster. He recommended that those who did not wish to coerce Ulster should resign from the army. No fewer than fifty officers out of seventy said they would resign if ordered north.

The secretary for war who had encouraged Paget’s extraordinary dereliction of duty was sacked after this became public. Nevertheless the officers concerned could not be court-martialled, as there was an increasing anxiety at top government levels that some kind of war was not far off. The atmosphere in Europe in late May 1914 to an American observer Colonel House was ‘militarism run stark mad’. The French had vastly added to their conscripts. There were constant rumours that the German army was the real force behind its country’s foreign policy, that it had insisted on a war tax and had called in all foreign loans.

May and June passed. In May it seemed that a way out of the Irish impasse had been found. It was a typical piece of Lloyd George cunning: there would be an amendment to the Home Rule Bill that any county, if a majority of its voters agreed, could vote itself out of Home Rule for six years. The Nationalists concurred, but the House of Lords insisted on changing the amendment: the whole of Ulster must be excluded from Home Rule without a time limit. However, when the altered bill returned to the Commons on 14 July, the government’s attention was shifting away from the passions of Ireland to the wider world.

For on 28 June the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the archduke Franz Ferdinand, had been assassinated by a Bosnian Serb in Sarajevo. Austria–Hungary had long been wanting to crush the Serbs. With her military establishment hot to strike, she was using the excuse to reach the brink of war. The question was, would she drag all the other allied nations of Europe in with her? Anxious telegrams flew between the chancelleries of Europe.

While the world once more held its breath, discussions on the Irish Home Rule Bill pressed on. The bill could not be accepted by the Commons in its amended state, but there had to be a resolution to the crisis. So uncompromising was the atmosphere that at Asquith’s instigation on 18 July another round-table conference was called at Buckingham Palace. Redmond and the Nationalists accepted the exclusion of Ulster, and the Unionists agreed to Home Rule for the rest of Ireland. But the conference broke down over the counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone. With their equally mixed Catholic and Protestant populations, should they be part of northern or southern Ireland? The drilling continued in both parts of the country. Though there was as yet no civil war, the threat remained. However, the whole matter was overtaken by events in the outside world. The conference broke up without conclusion, to reconvene in the autumn. Just as its members were rising from their seats, the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey came in, carrying the ultimatum which Austria–Hungary had sent to Serbia on 24 July. Although Serbia replied in the most abject manner, Austria–Hungary broke off relations and began to bombard her capital, Belgrade. It was the beginning of the First World War.

In September 1914, when Parliament returned after Britain had declared war in August, the position of the Irish Home Rule Bill was still fraught with confusion. The bill was meant to become law, as was a bill disestablishing the Welsh Church, because they had both successfully passed three times through the House of Commons. Although no agreement over Ulster had been reached, Asquith at first announced that the exclusion of Ulster should be added to the bill. When the Irish Home Rulers, whose seats the Liberals continued to rely on for their majority, refused to countenance this, Asquith said that the bill would have to go on to the statute book in its original form. At this the Unionists left the House of Commons in protest. Irish Home Rule and the disestablishment of the Welsh Church went on to the statute book, but with another act tacked on to them suspending both bills from coming into operation until six months after the end of the war. The issue was thus shelved.

But now we must return to the outbreak of the First World War, or the Great War as it was originally known–or, as the Fabian writer H. G. Wells and its more hopeful participants called it, the War that Will End War. Before 1914 the peace in Europe had been fragile, but it had held, partly because a great deal was done to placate Germany, partly because Germany herself refrained from hostilities. She had made herself extremely unpopular with France and Britain by continually threatening war, but she had not actually brought it about.

Despite Britain’s distrust of German intentions, she continued until 1913 to try to convince Germany of her friendliness. That year another attempt had been made at calming down the atmosphere by offering a twelve-month ‘naval holiday’ between the two countries, but that was turned down. By 1914 Lloyd George had made the speech warning off the Panther, and three-quarters of the government had reverted to their old radical pacifist colours. They believed that the best hope of peace was for Britain to reduce the number of ships built.

Agreements were reached in Germany’s favour about longstanding disputes over colonies in Africa, the Baghdad railway and the Persian Gulf. Despite the close relationship between the French and British military, Britain still would not enter into an official alliance with France and Russia because Grey did not want to inflame the situation with Germany. This would later be criticized on the ground that, if Britain had shown she intended to fight for France, Germany would never have gone to war.

However, in 1913 there was a tremendous upset in the Balkans which completely altered the power structure there in Russia’s favour. When under Russian auspices the Balkan League Wars reduced European Turkey to a tiny corner thirty miles wide, and made Russia’s influence paramount at Constantinople, some kind of war over the Balkans looked unavoidable. Kept out of central Asia and the Persian Gulf by the Entente with Britain, and out of China after her defeat by Japan in 1904, Russia had been forced back on her old stamping ground, the Balkans. She was the Slav nationalities’ traditional champion. She decided to concentrate once more on her old objective of being the favoured power at Constantinople and controlling the Dardanelles, that vital conduit between her ships and ports on the Black Sea and the Aegean–Mediterranean.

But this threatened both the ambitions of Germany to expand into the Middle East, because it put in doubt the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway which was projected to run straight through Constantinople, and the very existence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What made war in the near future imperative for that empire was the imminent threat to her from Serbia. In 1908 the Serbs had been prevented from attacking Austria–Hungary by Russia’s weakness and Germany’s strength. They had sulkily obeyed German diplomats’ warning to put an end to the Serbian propaganda in government-sponsored newspapers and disarmed their gathering troops. But after Serbia’s victories in 1913, which had doubled her size, all the Serb areas of the Habsburg Empire were in a fever of nationalist excitement.

It was quite evident to Austria that Serbia was no longer to be restrained by what the great powers wanted. From 1913 on, Serbian irredentism or expansionism expressed in endless newspaper articles was demanding a war to gather to the Serbian motherland the six million Serbs spread throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Moreover Serbia had not only doubled in size but she had shown that her soldiers could defeat the German-trained Turkish troops, who were supposed to be the best in the Balkans. There was a real danger that in a war with the empire Serbia might win. The situation seemed so menacing that scarcely had the Balkan War peace treaties been signed than Austria–Hungary had decided that the moment had come to attack Serbia. Backed by Italy, Germany managed to restrain Austria–Hungary. The war never took place because Germany was the one ally Austria–Hungary could not move without. So, despite all the fears that Europe had about Germany, it was Germany which prevented war in 1913.

Just the same, the threat of an impending clash in the Balkans remained. Strategists in the armies of three great powers, Russia, Austria–Hungary and Germany, believed that a war for influence would come at some point. Thus when in July 1914 two Bosnian Serbs assassinated the heir to the Austro–Hungarian Empire, the archduke Ferdinand, it both seemed to be the signal that the Serbs were about to attack the empire and the perfect excuse for Austria–Hungary to fight a limited war to scotch ‘the nest of vipers’–as her generals called Serbia. This time, in 1914, Germany did little to hold her back.

It was an alarming situation and desperate remedies seemed called for. Given her paranoid fears Germany could not afford to let her only ally be broken up by Serb nationalists. Many of the top generals in both the Austro-Hungarian and the German armies viewed some kind of limited preventive war in the Balkans as a solution to their difficulties, while they had the military advantage in armaments and personnel. The general European balance would be tilted against Germany and Austria–Hungary within a few years. But, for now, the army of Serbia’s chief ally, Russia, was still in the throes of modernization. A group of General Staff officers within the German army did much to convince their government that this would be a good time for that limited war in order to assert German influence in the Balkans. The kaiser told the emperor Franz Joseph that Austria–Hungary had his support.

But the idea of a limited war was a chimera. Serbia’s ally Russia had too much at stake not to begin her laborious process of mobilization. That decision inevitably dragged France into the war. When Russia would not cancel the orders for mobilization, Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August and on France on the 2nd. War plans drawn up in 1905 took precedence over common sense: the German plan was predicated on attacking France and defeating her within six weeks, then turning east to dispose of Russia.

After the worldwide slaughter that ensued, for the war was anything but local, some members of the pre-war German government claimed they had hoped Britain would restrain Russia from mobilizing. The British ambassador had in fact pleaded with Russia not to do so. But the complex system of alliances had a series of automatic consequences. As one writer put it, ‘the guns went off by themselves’.

For Britain, declaring war was less simple. She was legally bound by treaty to defend Belgium, whose existence she had guaranteed at her birth in 1839 and reaffirmed in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. The Anglo-French naval arrangements which had the British guarding the Channel for both countries surely made war with Germany inevitable. But, until German troops actually advanced into Belgium, Grey was doubtful that his Cabinet and British public opinion would agree to war. The most he could tell the French ambassador was that the German fleet would not be allowed into the Channel. The army and navy nevertheless sent out their secret code and signal books to the French, albeit with an embargo on their use.

The pacifist element in Cabinet remained so powerful that when Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty, insisted on calling out the fleet reserves, eight or nine ministers said it was unnecessary. Fortunately for Britain the maverick and impulsive genius Churchill had decided earlier in the week that the international situation looked so alarming that he should quietly send the portion of the fleet not needed to guard the Channel to hide at its ‘war station’ up above Britain in the secret harbour of the Orkneys, Scapa Flow. The main fleet was thus out of the way of surprise attack by German torpedoes.

Meanwhile there was no certainty about how the Belgians would respond if asked to allow German troops to pass through their country to France. Many in the Cabinet thought Belgium might not resist. There was even a suspicion that there was a secret agreement between Belgium and Germany to allow the German armies free passage into France. Thanks to the atrocities in the Congo, Belgium’s stock was not high; a secret agreement would explain why there was such a high level of German military preparations all along the Belgo-German border. Nevertheless, after much argument, a majority of the Cabinet finally agreed that violation of Belgian neutrality would bring Britain into the war.

By evening that Sunday, 2 August, war for Britain suddenly seemed very near. It was then that a twelve-hour ultimatum was handed to the Belgian government by the Germans requesting that their armies be allowed to pass through its territories into north-eastern France. But the new Belgian king Albert I was of a very different calibre to his uncle Leopold II. On Monday, 3 August the Belgians, led by their king, refused to allow the German armies in. They would fight. King Albert sent a telegram to George V personally appealing for help.

That afternoon Grey made an eloquent speech to the House of Commons which both explained Britain’s legal obligations to Belgium and argued the case for intervention, for only Parliament could decide whether Britain went to war. He described the Channel guarantee to France, and requested all present to ask themselves what friendship or Entente meant when that friend was threatened by a foe like Germany. He did not believe that, even if Britain stood aside, she would be in a position after the war to undo what had happened in the course of it, to prevent the whole of western Europe falling under the domination of a single power. And he added, ‘I am quite sure that our moral position would be such as to have lost us all respect.’

In the House of Commons Bonar Law and the Conservatives gave their support. John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalists, also pledged his MPs to Grey. Support for war became unanimous, other than among Labour MPs, many of whom remained true to their pacifist roots. Grey had not argued the case for intervention in a spirit of enthusiasm. He believed that this war could lead to the destruction of civilization. ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime,’ he said that evening as he stood by the window of the Foreign Office.

The next day the order was given to mobilize the reserves. Britain still had not declared war. A twelve-hour ultimatum was given to Germany, which had invaded Belgium that morning. If Germany did not withdraw from Belgium and respect her neutrality, she would be at war with Great Britain. On the very hot night of 4 August at 11 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, twelve o’clock in Berlin, the British ultimatum ran out. Outside the Houses of Parliament a crowd had gathered; just before eleven it began to sing ‘God Save the King’. As Big Ben tolled, the deadline expired without a single German soldier moving out of Belgium. Soon afterwards and all through the night, messages flashed halfway across the world in code telling the British Empire that it was at war with Germany.

As day broke on 5 August, thanks to Haldane the six divisions of the British Expeditionary Force under its commander-in-chief John French were ready to land in France. Fourteen territorial divisions were deputed to guard the British Isles. The immediate problem, however, was to get the six regular divisions across the Channel. This took from 9 to 22 August. For three days, when the crossing was at its height, the fleet stood guard. The operation was extremely tense, owing to fears that the troopships would be torpedoed by the Germans, but nothing happened. The Grand Fleet sailed back unscathed to its hideaway position above Britain at Scapa Flow. By the 24th British troops were in the middle of France and had begun fighting the Germans.

Lord Kitchener, the new secretary of state for war, warned against optimism. Unlike other British generals, he said that the struggle would not be over in a few weeks but might take several years. In his view the war could be won only by battles fought on land, not by seapower. A huge recruiting drive would be immediately necessary to supplement the army by half a million male volunteers. It was a mark of Liberal Britain that even in these desperate times it was believed the population would not stand for conscription.

At the outbreak of the First World War Britain faced major problems. Unlike those of the central powers, as Austria–Hungary and Germany became known, her economy was not geared for war. For this was a war that she had been conspicuously reluctant to wage and had done almost everything to avoid. Even if she recruited enough men for ‘Kitchener’s Army’ she did not have enough guns, nor enough factories to produce guns, nor enough shells to arm them.

Today we can see that commercial and colonial rivalries created impossible stresses between the great powers and were among the most important underlying causes of the First World War. On the other hand, to those alive at the time the most striking feature about the pre-war world was the sense of menace which emanated from united Germany and her militaristic culture. Even though Austria had begun the war, Germany was assumed to be responsible. The consensus in most British households was that Germany had been wanting a war, and with the First World War she got it.

The First World War (1914–1918)

The British professional army, the highly trained 150,000-strong British Expeditionary Force (BEF), went straight to France, but the immense portion of the earth covered by the British Empire meant that British military operations took place all over the globe. Two million soldiers from the empire were occupied in what were called sideshows separate from the main action–British armies fought to take over the German colonies in Africa, and troops were poured into the Middle Eastern section of the Ottoman Empire, to protect the Suez Canal and India after Turkey had declared war on the side of the central powers in October 1914.

When the war finally ended, after four years of immense suffering, France and Britain divided between them much of the old Ottoman Empire which their armies were occupying. The British Empire was larger than ever, for Britain added Mesopotamia, renamed Iraq in 1921, and Palestine to her realms in an unofficial form of imperialism, what one historian has called the ‘scramble for Turkey’. Britain for thirty years became an influential power in the Middle East. But it was an illusion. The expense of the First World War ruined British global hegemony, along with that of France, and made way for America’s emergence as a superpower. The post-war settlement was really France’s and Britain’s last hurrah as the great imperial powers they had been for the previous 200 years. Despite Britain’s celebrated naval superiority, which cast a cordon round Germany and began to starve her to death, despite the courage of the immense French armies, what finally tipped the balance and won the First World War was not those nations, but the industrial might and money of America.

The first few months of the First World War determined the shape of what became known as the western front, the location of a three-and-a-half-year campaign by British, French and British Empire troops to keep the Germans from overrunning France. As we have seen, the German military strategy, the Schlieffen Plan, was predicated on France being conquered in six weeks, before the old-fashioned Russian war machine had been completely mobilized. However, the plan, which was intended to prevent the German armies fighting a war on two fronts, was not fulfilled.

In August 1914 the immense fortresses guarding Belgium’s frontier had been as much use as toy forts in stopping the German war machine. Over a million German soldiers swept through Belgium and swarmed over north-eastern France. But their progress was considerably held up at the Battle of Mons on 23 August by the BEF, which the Kaiser had called a ‘contemptible little army’. And though by early September, to the horror of the inhabitants of Paris (many of whom remembered the 1870–1 Siege of Paris), the German armies were within forty miles of the French capital, the war in France was not the lightning strike and rolling up of the French and British armies that the Schlieffen Plan envisaged. The British and French troops were far more of a match than had been anticipated by the Germans. Moreover the number of German soldiers in France had been weakened by the need to send troops to what became known as the eastern front to deal with the Russians.

The Russians had invaded East Prussia before they were quite ready to do so as a diversionary tactic to help France. As a result, at one of the decisive battles of the war, the Battle of the Marne between 6 and 12 September 1914, the German armies’ encircling manoeuvre to pen in the French army was defeated. When the German troops were attacked in the rear by the French chief of staff General Joffre with the BEF, the roll-up of the French armies around Paris had to be abandoned because General von Kluck was forced to retreat. The victory of the Marne wrecked the Schlieffen Plan right at the outset. Until 1917, when the Russian Revolution broke out and Lenin’s new government sued for peace, Germany had to fight on two fronts, which was what she had been determined to avoid. She was never able to turn her back on France and concentrate on Russia.

Furthermore, a key ingredient of the original Schlieffen Plan had been abandoned–striking at France through Holland as well as through Belgium–which shortened the defensive line. An attack through Holland would probably have outflanked Belgian resistance and so have prevented the British from establishing defensive positions from Ypres to the coast, which secured the Channel ports for them. As it was, the German armies were pushed back to the Aisne river, and had to race the allied armies to the North Sea. Had the Germans arrived first this could have had a doubly disastrous effect: the British would have had to take some of their troops out of France to provide a Home Guard, and it would have prevented their landing further British troops in France to reinforce the allied armies. The first Battle of Ypres in Flanders, Belgium from 19 October to 11 November 1914 prevented this, at the cost of literally decimating, that is killing one in ten soldiers of the BEF, the young men so carefully groomed for warfare for the previous seven years.

What remained of both armies settled down to sit out the winter in trenches opposite one another. There they would remain in growing numbers for the next three and a half years. By the end of the war German and English soldiers had begun playing football with one another at Christmas, so surreal had the situation become. The trenches–the form of warfare which most characterized the First World War–were a visible stalemate. The two sides, the allies and the central powers, opposed each other in two continuous lines of soldiers sheltered in deep ditch dugouts. These trenches ran from the coast of Belgium, dipped south into industrial northern France and skimmed the French border with Alsace and Lorraine until they reached the frontier of Switzerland.

In December 1914 the war became real to the people of Scarborough, Whitby and Hartlepool, when they were bombarded by German warships. It was the first enemy assault on British civilians since Charles II’s reign, when the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway. By Christmas one million men of all shapes and beliefs had volunteered for the British army to defend their homeland. They were inspired by Lord Kitchener’s recruiting campaign, not least the famous poster of Kitchener pointing his finger at the observer with the legend beneath, ‘Your country needs YOU’.

By 1916, when conscription was brought in, as many as two and a half million Britons had volunteered to fight. After a short training in how to handle a gun they crossed the Channel to reinforce the trenches–often organized in neighbourhood battalions. For the first time ever Britain put an enormous land army into the field to prevent the Germans overrunning France. The Kitchener armies were indispensable. By the end of 1915 the old professional army, 150,000 soldiers, had been wiped out.

Over the next three years more than a million French, British and empire troops died in the trenches, often for just a few feet of land. Keeping the line steady took a terrible toll in lives. The only way the French and British could move forward and drive the Germans out, or the Germans move forward into France, was by colossal artillery barrages to clear the enemy. Then the infantry would leap out of their trenches and charge ‘over the top’. The line never moved more than about twenty miles east or west, and it never really broke until 1917. It merely bulged until other men were rushed in to close the gaps.

The flower of the rising generation died and were hastily buried in the earth of Flanders. Those battlefields, or slaughterfields, destroyed many of the best and bravest who had volunteered early, unhappily for Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. The number of junior officers killed–that is, the ablest young soldiers–was especially high because so much of the action required leading from the front to take out machine-gun nests.

On the eastern front, on the other side of Europe, things did not look more promising despite the enormous numbers of Russian troops and their proverbial stoicism. The gallantry of the Russian attack on East Prussia helped save Paris and the allies, but during battles at Tannenberg at the end of August 1914, and then in early September by the Masurian Lakes, 250,000 Russians were killed. The strategy of two brilliant German officers, Generals von Hindenburg and Ludendorff, produced a triumph for their armies. Though the Russians overran the Austrian province of Galicia, by the summer of 1915 the Germans had thrown them back to the Duna river.

The Ottoman Empire had entered the war in the hope of retrieving Egypt and Cyprus from Britain. It thus posed a threat to the Suez Canal, and an additional 250,000 empire troops had to be sent to guard it. British and French troops began attacking the Turks all over their Middle Eastern empire. Indian troops provided the bulk of the soldiers for the campaign in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) which began in 1915, though they were forced to surrender in 1916 after being besieged at Kut-el-amara on the Tigris.

In May 1915 Italy declared for the allies, after weighing up what she would get out of the war and having already had her differences with the Ottoman Empire when she seized Tripoli. She had always had close links with England and she intended after the war to consolidate her Risorgimento by taking more territory from Austria. In the secret Treaty of London of 26 April the allies had assured Italy that she would gain the southern Tyrol, the Trentino, Istria and the Dalmatian coast. Bulgaria, which might have joined the allies, came in on the German side and successfully invaded Serbia in October.

Nineteen-fifteen was not a good year for the allies. Britain, which was so entirely dependent on her colonies for food, began to have her shipping sunk by German torpedoes and submarines. Submarine warfare was a naval innovation in whose development Germany had taken the lead. The first Zeppelins, pneumatic grey airships in the sky, appeared over London in May and thereafter became one of the features of the war, attacking many British cities. A mass onslaught was carried out by fourteen German airships from the Humber to the Thames in September 1916.

There were also raids by aircraft. The first British plane had flown in 1908 and the Frenchman Louis Blériot crossed the Channel in 1909. Although it was not until the next war that the Royal Air Force was to come into its own, by 1912 its predecessor–the Royal Flying Corps–had been established, and by 1914 around 120 aircraft, divided between the army and navy, were being used for reconnaissance. In April 1918 in response to the air-raids the Royal Air Force came into existence as a separate service.

Meanwhile the British public, already appalled at losing their sons, husbands and brothers in such numbers, were scandalized when commander-in-chief of the BEF, General Sir John French, announced that his men were dying for lack of shells. This was so whipped up by the press that it came to be widely believed that it was government inefficiency that was losing the war, and the Liberal administration was forced to enter a coalition in May 1915 with the Conservatives and some Labour MPs. But with the coalition’s appointment of Lloyd George as minister of munitions the production of shells increased dramatically. The energy and ingenuity of the Welsh Wizard made him the dominant figure in the government, and he soon began running the war effort more or less single-handed. In a coup effected with the help of the Conservatives he would replace Asquith as prime minister at the end of the following year.

Lloyd George’s rule of thumb, as he candidly revealed, was that all generals underestimated their soldiers’ needs and never ordered enough shells: one should take what the generals ordered and multiply it by three. Thanks to enterprising manufacturers, many of whom were friends of Lloyd George, munitions factories were set up all over the country. Though unionized labour was inadequate for the numbers of shells required, unions were reluctant to allow dilution–that is, to have unskilled workers brought in. But Lloyd George made a deal with the unions: for the length of the war they would accept women and unskilled workers, provided that the position returned to normal at the end of the war. He also promised to restrict profits while the war was on and union rights were temporarily in abeyance; and the unions were to participate in deciding how their industries were run via workers’ committees. The trade unions thus vastly increased their role, and doubled their membership, during the war. These arrangements–what Lloyd George called ‘the great charter for labour’–were a stroke of genius. He had reassured factory workers, and the resulting enthusiasm for the war and for the government had the effect of increasing productivity. The charter lessened the danger from strikes, which might have bought about Britain’s defeat–for the pre-war influence of syndicalism continued, even if it was temporarily overcome by patriotism.

But, despite the increased number of shells less than a year after Ypres the Battle of Loos between 25 September and 13 October 1915 killed 50,000 British soldiers. Britain was stunned. The nation was not used to deaths on this scale. The Germans began nerve-gas warfare using mustard gas. Gas masks became a feature of the war, something else to load down the poor Tommy, as the British soldier was nicknamed. Its victims frequently had to be sent home and often became lifelong invalids racked by uncontrollable nerve-storms.

The worst setback of 1915 was the Dardanelles catastrophe. The static nature of the western front and the troubles besetting Russia’s armies, which were running low in munitions and food in the early part of the year, prompted Churchill and Lloyd George to conclude that another front should be opened somewhere to break the deadlock in the west. Lloyd George had hopes of a Balkan front based on Salonika to strike north against Austria–Hungary, but it was Churchill’s proposal to land in the Dardanelles on the Gallipoli Peninsula that was taken up. The expeditionary force should seize Constantinople, remove the Ottoman Empire from the war and from there run supply lines to Russia through the Black Sea.

But this ingenious attempt to break away from the stalemate of the western front was poorly executed. Mines prevented British and French warships forcing the Dardanelles, and it was decided that only by landing troops could the peninsula be taken. That operation became the province of the British army. The naval attack which could have backed up the assault was, astonishingly enough, called off–as the entire operation should have been. Since it was quite obvious to the Turks what was about to happen, they moved their guns forward on to the cliffs above the allied soldiers. The 75,000-strong force, many of whom were Australian and New Zealanders, the Anzacs, were landed at the far end of the Gallipoli Peninsula. There they stayed, unable to advance because of the Turkish gun emplacements above them. For seven months, from 25 April (later designated Anzac Day) until December, when they were at last evacuated, the soldiers were stuck at Gallipoli. Many of them never managed to get off the beach, dying there as the Turkish guns picked them off like flies. The blame for their ordeal fell on Churchill, who fell from office.

The argument was to continue throughout the war between westerners–who believed that the main war effort should be concentrated on the western front, where the war would be won after a long siege–and the easterners–who believed that the western front was taking an intolerable toll on lives with very little to show for it. The catastrophe of Gallipoli gave a great fillip to the western-fronters.

The western front remained the chief arena of the world war, to which troops from the other theatres of war, the sideshows like the Middle East, would often be seconded when major force was needed. Nevertheless, throughout the war what Lloyd George called knocking away Germany’s props–her allies Bulgaria, Turkey and Austria–Hungary–continued to be almost as important a strategy. Although Lloyd George became disenchanted with Salonika, in Macedonia, as a base for the allied armies attacking Austria–Hungary on her weakest frontier from the south, he was a keen supporter of an Italian front which thrust at Austria–Hungary from the north. It would be the knocking away of the props that finally forced the German high command to accept that the central powers had lost.

But if the non-western-fronters were unpopular and Churchill’s reputation was under a cloud, Lloyd George’s inventive spirit continued to transform the war effort. The government became a major employer. By the end of the war the Munitions Ministry was employing three million people in the new factories. A superb state-run war economy was pouring out so many munitions that Britain could provide shells for her allies as well as for her own troops.

After Kitchener was drowned on the way to Russia in early June 1916, Lloyd George took his place as secretary for war. It was a low moment. Kitchener’s death had deeply affected British morale, and there continued to be fears about Irish stability after the failure of the Easter Rising, a republican attempt to seize power in Dublin. Ireland, always Britain’s Achilles’ heel, had decided to make the most of her neighbour’s travails. The majority of the rebels, incluiding the Gaelic schoolteacher Padraic Pearse who had founded the Irish Volunteers, were shot. One of them, a mathematics teacher named Eamon De Valera, who went on to be the first president of the Republic of Ireland, could not be executed because he had an American passport. Sir Roger Casement, the former British consul who had landed from a submarine with German arms and German money, was tried at a summary hearing and subsequently shot. The trial dismayed many as not living up to the highest standards of British justice. On the other hand, to side with Germany was treasonous when Britain was involved in what continued to be a life-and-death struggle against the central powers.

Nineteen-sixteen was also the year of the Somme. This battle, which lasted from 1 July to 18 November, changed the British people’s attitude to the war. Kitchener was not alive to see 20,000 of ‘his’ soldiers, who had volunteered for the war, die together in their neighbourhood battalions on the first day of the campaign. The new British commander-in-chief Sir Douglas Haig believed that he could make Britain’s breakout against the German trenches across the Somme river in north-eastern France. All the powers had hoped to make 1916 the year that changed the war. The Somme campaign was intended to distract the Germans’ attention from their major offensive against the French at Verdun, which had begun in February.

Verdun, south of the Ardennes, was one of the most important fortresses protecting the French frontier. It had enormous historical and patriotic resonance; the German commander General von Falkenhayn believed that the French would throw everything into defending it. Attacking Verdun would attract Frenchmen from all over the western front and the Germans would then be able to bleed France to death. Germany now perceived Britain, whose fleet was completing a blockade of German ports, as her chief enemy. Although she had abandoned the idea of invading Britain, her commanders believed that, if they could knock out France at Verdun, Britain would have lost her ‘best sword’ on the continent.

The Somme offensive was a disaster–the breakout never happened. Yet the offensive continued for five months, during which around 400,000 British soldiers died or were wounded. Haig did not seem to care how many there were of them. Every day from 1 July thousands of men, many of whom were inexperienced youths in their teens, were sent out of their trenches without sufficient use of artillery beforehand. They were picked off by the Germans as they came. The losses were so great that the British army decided to introduce the tank as a last-chance experiment in September to flatten the German defences.

At the Somme the British wounded alone amounted to half a million. The poppies sold before Remembrance Day were chosen as a symbol of the dead because men were cut down as easily as the poppies which had first covered the Flanders fields. So complete was the slaughter of the first day of the Somme that there was no one left to dispose of the corpses. The soldiers’ rotting bodies had to lie where they fell, often in no-man’s land, the area between two armies–a reminder of what lay in store for those sitting in the trenches tensely waiting for the order to go. The trenches were often knee deep in water, giving rise to a disease named trench foot.

Day after day men dutifully went over the top as they were ordered, yet their deaths seemed to make no perceptible difference. A feeling of futility and anger set in against the generals who were so careless of their soldiers’ lives. It proved hard to shake off, even if by 1917 it was clear that the Somme had succeeded in its objective of preventing the French war effort from collapsing and had weakened the German line. The Germans were forced to retreat to what was called the Hindenburg Line, a fortified zone behind the western front designed to halt any allied breakthrough. Nevertheless, to those who lived through the battle, it seemed that their friends had lost their lives for something as paltry as a few more miles of French land. The cost was too high. An anti-war feeling developed, in which a substantial element was hostility to Haig.

To put extra vim into the war effort, in 1916 Lloyd George cut the nation’s public drinking hours. Pubs had to close at two o’clock in the afternoon, which they continued to do until the end of the century. British losses finally forced Lloyd George that year to bring in conscription. So strong was the British tradition of anti-militarism that it was not until then, two years into the war, that the authorities dared take this step, though almost every other continental government assumed that it had a right to call up its nation’s citizens for the army. Again unlike anywhere else in Europe, once conscription had been introduced, against the wishes of the Liberal party, conscientious objectors were allowed to go before special tribunals and explain why they would not fight. Many of them drove ambulances as a way of contributing to the war without killing people. Conscription was part of a dawning realization that different rules applied during total war, that there was no place for British individualism, that the whole nation had to contribute to the war effort if Britain was going to win. Until that point the British had been confident that the war would end before such a move became necessary.

The superior quality of the Royal Navy, the best fleet in Europe since Cromwell, unbeatable since Trafalgar, told for the most part. In most of the battles around the globe between German and British fleets, Germany generally came off worse. However, the first big-ship encounter between the two fleets off Coronel in Chile in November 1914 was won by Germany’s Pacific Squadron. This was the first British naval defeat for a hundred years and, like the bombardment of the east coast of England, greatly shocked public opinion. But the British got their revenge when Germany’s Pacific Squadron was destroyed at the Battle of the Falkland Islands a few weeks later.

The two High Seas Fleets whose naval race had contributed so signally to pre-war tensions were kept out of the way until May 1916. Then, in their only engagement, they fought the Battle of Jutland. Although it confirmed British naval superiority in the North Sea this was really just a skirmish. German ships caused greater losses among the British fleet than they sustained themselves, but by the evening the German fleet was hurrying back to the Baltic. It did not venture out into the North Sea again for the rest of the war, but was kept pinned down by the threat of the British ships awaiting them.

As we have noted, the First World War saw the first use of submarines, on both sides. The Germans earned the condemnation of the world in the spring of 1915 when they began to sink ships on sight without warning, regardless of whether they were warships or unarmed vessels. The sinking of the transatlantic liner the Lusitania in May 1915 at the Old Head of Kinsale off Cork, with the loss of 1,201 lives, some of whom were mothers with babes in arms, created extraordinary revulsion. Many of the Lusitania’s passengers were Americans, and by chance some were friends of President Woodrow Wilson. Alarmed by an official US protest, for America was strictly neutral, Germany announced that henceforth she would attack only warships.

America remained outside the war until April 1917 when she came in on the allied side. It was just in time, for the eastern front collapsed when the Bolshevik Revolution began in Russia that autumn. There were powerful pro-German influences at work in America. As in the War of 1812, much of American opinion continued to see Britain as the enemy. Moreover, Britain’s blockade of Germany violated the principle of the freedom of the seas, and Americans believed that it was typical of Britain’s imperialist desire for world domination. They also objected to the British navy searching neutral ships and seizing contraband. Nevertheless, as a sign of the even-handed United States attitude to both sides, by the end of 1916 President Wilson was suggesting that he should broker a negotiated peace.

This angered the allied powers. They did not like being seen as the moral equivalent of Germany: they too wished for a negotiated peace but one based on victories over Germany. However, it was expedient to bring America’s overwhelming financial and industrial weight into the war on the allies’ side and to end the stalemate, so Wilson’s ideas could not be treated brusquely. Discussions with the Americans about war aims had to be couched in terms that would please the then strongly anti-imperialist American people and their leaders in Congress. A doctrine of national self-determination for small countries began to be evolved which had not been the original purpose of the war at all.

The entry of America into the war on the allied side became more certain at the beginning of 1917, up to which point she had continued trying to get food to Germany via Scandinavian ports. The German high command was now desperate to take Britain out of the war and believed that it could be done by starving the British into submission. Unarmed civilian shipping was no longer to be excluded from submarine warfare; instead on 1 February 1917 a campaign of ‘unrestricted submarine warfare’ was begun against any vessels visiting British ports. With a hundred U-boats operating in British waters the German high command reckoned that Britain would be forced to pull out of the war after five months. In the face of this threat Lloyd George, who had become prime minister of the coalition government the previous December, once again showed his peerless executive qualities. He overrode the Admiralty and revived the convoy system which had been a feature of the Napoleonic Wars. Royal Navy destroyers accompanied merchant shipping and enough food got to Britain to keep her going despite the lethal creatures lurking off her coast.

And help was now at hand from across the Atlantic. Wilson had broken off diplomatic relations with Germany on 3 February because America could not approve unrestricted submarine warfare. And on the 23rd a telegram intercepted by British Naval Intelligence from the German foreign minister, Dr Alfred Zimmermann to the German embassy in Washington revealed that Germany was negotiating with the two threats to America’s backyard, Japan and Mexico. Mexico was asked to invade the United States if the Americans declared war on Germany. Coming into the war on the allied side, as an independent or associated power, and thus not subject to allied command, was made easier for Wilson when in March the first stage of the Russian Revolution began. The reactionary tsar abdicated and was replaced by a republic which the American republic could support.

The advent of America into the war in April 1917 boosted the sinking allied morale; it also considerably shortened the length of the conflict. The British Empire’s blockade of Germany was no longer being breached by America. That in the end would bring Germany to her knees, just as the prospect of unlimited manpower from North America meant that the allies must eventually defeat the central powers in the field. The arrival of 300,000 American recruits in the spring put fresh strength into the allied armed forces.

However, the second Russian Revolution of October 1917 almost undid all the advantage to the allied cause that America’s entry had brought. The communist-inspired Bolshevik Revolution orchestrated by Vladimir Lenin persuaded the starving Russian soldiers to desert their theatres of war to return home from what they called the capitalist war and seek ‘bread, peace and land’. The central powers therefore no longer needed half a million men stationed on the eastern front. But the Bolshevik Revolution rekindled the old revolutionary ideas which had been so prevalent in Europe before the war. Strikes increased in Britain as blue-collar workers were reminded of their historic antipathy towards their masters. In a moment of great danger for France, anti-war revolutionary propaganda and the army’s carelessness with soldiers’ lives in the Nivelle offensive on the Aisne in 1917 persuaded perhaps as many as 100,000 soldiers in the French army to mutiny. They were overcome only with difficulty.

Fortunately England’s government was in the deft hands of Lloyd George, who with the help of the Labour MPs managed to surmount the political and industrial unrest in the country. Though there were calls for peace, and one with ‘no annexations and no indemnities’, the support of the trade unions–which under Lloyd George enjoyed what was in effect a partnership with government–ensured that these voices never amounted to much.

There was better news, too, from the Middle East by 1917. The Ottoman Empire fragmented rapidly under the impact of the British army based in Egypt. Jerusalem was captured under the enterprising cavalryman General Allenby. Hussein the hereditary Grand Sharif of Mecca, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, had already brought the desert tribes on to the allied side with great effect, getting the Arabs to rise against their Turkish overlords whom they had detested for six centuries. The high commission at Cairo was run by scholarly and romantic orientalists. One of them, an archaeologist named T. E. Lawrence who was soon to become famous as Lawrence of Arabia, became the military adviser of Hussein’s son Prince Faisal.

Lloyd George might be able to encourage the British to pull together by attending to the soldiers’ needs, by promoting managerial improvement in industry, and by introducing universal suffrage in February 1918 for men over the age of nineteen and women over thirty. But the generalship of the war on the western front continued to create anxiety. The hundreds of thousands of deaths and casualties and the absence of results seemed to mean nothing to Haig. On 31 July 1917 he began another offensive in Flanders, known as Passchendaele, intended to make up for the catastrophic French campaign earlier that year and free Belgium. It lasted until 6 November and only compounded his unpopularity.

By moving north-west the British were to fight out of the Ypres triangle through Passchendaele, reach the Belgian coast and then turn on the German army. Haig had been given warnings about drainage problems in the area. He chose to ignore them. The wettest August for years turned the countryside to mud. The ‘mud of Flanders’ was an all-too literal expression to describe conditions which made it impossible to move forward at all. Even the new weapon, the tank, did not work. It sank. The offensive died in the mud, along with 240,000 British casualties. The pessimistic War Cabinet, whose members were anxious that there should not be a second Somme, had asked Haig to cancel the campaign if its first efforts showed no likelihood of success. But Haig persisted with the Passchendaele offensive for three long months, before he would accept that it was pointless.

There was discontent at home with food and fuel shortages; rationing would be invented in the last year of the war. The consensus in the national government was breaking down, and only Lloyd George’s adroit management kept Labour in the Cabinet. The Italians were roundly defeated by their old enemy the Austrians at the Battle of Caporetto, so French and British troops had to be diverted from the western front to help them. By now Britain was blithely lending her allies huge sums of money to finance the war, and no less blithely borrowing similar quantities from America. In many countries the war effort was in danger of faltering completely. British convoys made sure the allies got food while the Germans began to starve.

The beginning of 1918 was Germany’s last chance to achieve a breakout on the western front and overrun France. For three months the dice were loaded in their favour: the need for an eastern front had come to an end in March 1918 after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk took Russia out of the war. Though units of the central powers’ forces remained behind to supervise the transfer of food and oil supplies from the important Romanian oilfields, the surplus eastern front troops would reach the western front long before the American troops landed to replenish the sagging allied lines.

On 21 March 1918 German troops began a massive offensive along a huge front of four miles, almost destroying an entire British army, the Fifth, in the process. But, although the line of the western front was pushed in, gallant troops under an excellent French commander-in-chief, General Foch, who now had sole command of allied troops, rushed in to fill the gaps. Eventually in July and August a counter-offensive was begun by the British and French, whose efforts were better co-ordinated now that the two armies were united under a single command.

As the summer drew to an end, the British in the north began to push the German armies back. It was the end of trench warfare. In late September the British finally broke through the Hindenburg Line. In the Middle East Allenby’s victories in Syria and Palestine continued. The British army had not only reached Mosul but was marching west towards Constantinople to be joined by troops from Aleppo. Meanwhile victories in the Balkans allowed the allies based on Salonika to fan outwards like a plume. Bulgaria had surrendered on 30 September. Allied forces reached the lower Danube, the Hungarian Plain and central Europe further west, as well as threatening Constantinople. Caught in a pincer movement the Turks signed an armistice on 30 October. That same month Austria–Hungary, which was rapidly disintegrating into ethnic groups, was defeated by Italy. She surrendered on 3 November. Germany’s armies were still undefeated in the field, though they were beginning to crumple under the vigour of the American troops. But at last the German high command concluded that Germany could not continue, with her armies and people at the end of their tether. As well as being exhausted and demoralized, the German people were starving as a result of the British blockade.

On 3 October the German government had asked President Wilson to dictate the terms for peace. As the war went on, an increasing number of Social Democrats in Germany voted against the government being allowed to prosecute the war any longer. The Fourteen Points Wilson had suggested as a fair basis for peace in January were accepted by Germany on 23 October. On 7 November envoys passed through the lines to accept the armistice document from the British and French military representatives Admiral Wemyss and General Foch who were seated together in a railway carriage. The terms required the German armies to retire behind their pre-1914 borders.

But there was now a mutiny in the German navy at Kiel that signalled the end of the old regime. In early November, imitating Russia, councils of soldiers and workmen established themselves all over northern Germany and overthrew their militaristic rulers. The kaiser fled to Holland. Despite calls for him to be hanged, the Dutch government refused to give him up. The Republic of Germany was announced in Berlin, and on 11 November, early in the morning, the new republican and socialist German government signed the armistice in the Forest of Compiègne. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns fell silent and the First World War came to an end.

After the armistice, discussions about how the world should be reconstructed in the wake of the Great War took place at the Paris Peace Conference which began in January 1919, attended by seventy delegates representing the thirty-two allied and associated powers. But drawing up the separate peace treaties for the defeated central powers was mainly the work of the Big Four, as they were known: Lloyd George for Britain, whose national coalition had been re-elected at the end of 1918, Prime Minister Clemenceau for France, Prime Minister Orlando for Italy and President Wilson.

Peacemaking and the Rise of Fascism (1918–1936)

As Sir Edward Grey had predicted, the lights of European civilization had been practically extinguished. The old pre-war European world lay in ruins. France and Belgium were devastated. Farmland everywhere was smoking or abandoned, so there was not enough food. Millions of servicemen and ex-servicemen were trying to get home, men who had lost whatever idealism had first inspired them to fight. Many of them had become fairly barbaric after what they had seen. Many of them were half starved or ill.

The Dominions had lost huge numbers of their citizens. Although no request for help from the Dominions had been made by the British government, of their own volition they had sent hundreds of thousands of men to fight. There were 60,000 Australian war dead–indeed, one in ten of Australia’s total male population had been killed or wounded; and 56,700 Canadians had been killed and 150,000 seriously wounded–one in twenty of the male population.

The fields of north-eastern France and Belgium were as unusable as if they had been annexed by a foreign power. They were a kingdom of two million dead. All over Europe there was chaos. The great railway lines running across France, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire which had brought soldiers so swiftly to every front were buckled and broken. The manufacturing output of everyday goods in Britain was almost nonexistent after the switch to an all-out war economy. Many of the frontiers and signposts of the continent had been changed, as territories were gained and lost by the endless tramp of different armies advancing and retreating.

Everything, not just millions of people but the familiar landmarks of the pre-1914 world, seemed to have vanished and been swallowed up in the cataclysm. The 700,000 horses Britain had imported into France had become redundant in the course of the war, which transformed tank and air warfare–they belonged to an old-fashioned, more chivalrous time. The post-war world was strange and often unnerving. Four empires came to an end as a result of the Great War, three of which had been the earth’s permanent furniture for centuries: the Russian, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian and the German. Before 1914 the British Empire, with its investments all over the world, had been the biggest creditor nation and the United States the biggest debtor nation. Now, it would emerge after the war, the positions had been reversed.

The Russian Empire had lost Poland, the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine, all acquired in the eighteenth century, so it no longer reached the Baltic Sea or the Black Sea and ceased to be a great power. Communist ideas and workers’ councils, which had taken root in Russia, threatened revolution in many European countries, most of all in Germany and Italy where their simple solutions appealed to people exhausted by the misery of war; there was anyway a vacuum as religious belief faltered in the face of the widespread horrors. The nature of Russia’s internal revolution was so antipathetic to the existing structure in the rest of the world that the Soviet government had withdrawn from the world’s councils–it had no interest in participating in a world order it wished to see abolished by a universal workers’ revolution. Russia had always had an enigmatic quality for the rest of Europe. When, from 1919, she developed an instrument for exporting revolution, the Communist International, or Comintern, she became a dangerous enemy.

Unfortunately for the permanence of the peacemaking process, the conflict had been too overwhelming and too many people had died for it to be arranged in the disinterested fashion it should have been. Around the world ten million soldiers had died in the Great War. Seventeen million soldiers were wounded, of whom five million would live out the rest of their lives as chronic invalids. These were numbers almost beyond the capacity of human beings to understand. The effect of losing one-third of the young men of the next European generation was as devastating demographically and psychologically as the Black Death.

There were four million European widows; in France, whose population had been hit hardest by the war, one in four children were fatherless. The period which succeeded the war could not help but be one of sorrow, suffering and pessimism. The British nurse Edith Cavell, executed by the Germans in Brussels, had become a wartime heroine to the British. Her most famous words, inscribed on the statue erected to her in London, were ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone,’ but the French had little room for anything else. Even though a government was in place in Germany which had thrown off her militaristic leaders, she was treated as if she were still ruled by Prussian autocrats and she continued to be blamed for the world catastrophe. All of this was compounded by a pandemic of the influenza known as Spanish flu. Originating in South Africa and hitting half a million German soldiers in June 1918, Spanish flu swept through the war-weakened populations killing another ten million people. It was a time of the darkest gloom.

The vindictive and punitive peace imposed on Germany by France to ensure that her old enemy could never threaten her again ruined beyond repair what before 1914 had been the dynamo of the European economy. But it also destabilized the entire structure of German civilization. As in all European countries, ordinary life in Germany was already tottering because of the hardship of the war. The Versailles Treaty with Germany, signed at the Paris Peace Conference on 28 June 1919, paved the way in the post-war period for a desperate people to seek desperate solutions. Germany was being treated as a pariah. Economic misery and despair over her reduced status meant she soon became an aggressive pariah threatening the post-war settlement.

Unlike the reshaping of Europe in 1815, there was no equivalent of Wellington to act as a restraining influence, a statesman who had thought of the consequences of embittering Germany by her treatment. Lloyd George had won the 1918 election by talking of squeezing Germany ‘until the pips squeak’. After the war Germans would become united by their belief that they had been treated unfairly at the Paris Peace Conference, and by their consequent desire for revenge. In 1815, after twenty years of French war, the allies’ policy of not treating France too harshly had ensured that she could soon return to the European family of nations in a constructive spirit. That lesson was forgotten in 1919. What has to be remembered was that the French were too fearful of Germany to treat her magnanimously. They were also determined to have their pound of flesh and make the Germans feel the same pain they had inflicted on the French after the Franco-Prussian War. Twice in forty years Germany had come close to destroying France. The French aim under Clemenceau was straightforward: it was to make certain that it never could happen again. So deep was the hatred felt by France for Germany that it was believed that in order to bind the Leviathan he must be crippled first.

Germany was no longer permitted to have a navy (apart from a small surface fleet for security in the Baltic) or air force. Her army was to be the same size as Belgium’s, a limit of 100,000 men, without a General Staff, to prevent German militarism becoming the threat to world peace it had been in 1914. Alsace and Lorraine were naturally enough returned to France, though for forty years they had been the centre of Germany’s iron production and her new steel industry. Much of Germany’s own territory was also removed from her. The Saar Basin, the centre for coal and a source of her great industrial wealth, was to be run by the League of Nations. It was to be the subject of a plebiscite in fifteen years’ time when its inhabitants could choose whether to be reunited with Germany or join France. In the interim the money raised by its coal sales went to France. Although Germany kept Holstein and southern Schleswig, northern Schleswig was also to decide its future by plebiscite.

In the east, Germany lost not only three million of her population when West Prussia and Posen became part of the new Poland, whose frontiers returned to something close to what they had been in the eighteenth century before the partitions. Germany’s remaining territory was also insultingly separated from East Prussia, spiritual home of the German Empire, by a strip of land known as the Polish Corridor which gave Poland access to the sea. She also lost many of her coalfields too, particularly after another plebiscite joined Upper Silesia to Poland, as well as much of her iron and steelworks. Owing to her entirely German population the port of Danzig (the Polish Gdansk) on the Baltic at the top of the Polish Corridor, was not given to Poland. However, in order for Poland’s trade to continue freely Danzig was made a free city administered by the League of Nations. All in all, in Europe Germany lost about four million citizens through transfers of territory.

In fact even these measures to break up Germany did not really satisfy France’s need for security. She had first demanded that her eastern frontier be advanced to the Rhine. She had to be content with a neutralized Saar Basin, the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland–that is, all Germany to the west of the Rhine and fifty kilometres to the east of it. President Woodrow Wilson pledged that with Britain the USA would guarantee France’s frontiers. As far as the Germans were concerned, the self-determination which had been one of the themes of the conference scarcely counted. But France still did not have enough.

Having been thwarted in her attempt to get the kaiser hung as a war criminal, France had to be satisfied with what appeared to be a war-guilt clause which began the reparations section of the peace treaty. This clause was intended to be a technical statement, that Germany would pay ‘compensation for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies and their property by the aggression of Germany, by land, by sea and from the air’. But it was believed for ever more to attribute the whole guilt for the war to the German people. It was another reason for Germans to be angry about the treaty–many of them considered that the allied powers had been just as much to blame for the war. ‘The stab in the back’ theory about the republican government started to circulate in Germany: that government, it was alleged, could never be trusted, for it had signed the treacherous peace even though the German armies had never been defeated.

The war-guilt clause would have meant that only France would obtain reparations from Germany, as most of the destructive action had taken place on her territory. Lloyd George now insisted that a clause be included covering pensions for widows and orphans of British soldiers killed in action. In 1921, after much discussion, the total cost of what Germany owed the two countries was reckoned at over £6,000 million. With all Germany’s colonies also confiscated from her, so that after the war she could trade only in Europe, these reparations were beyond Germany’s capacity to pay.

Nothing was discussed in person with the German delegation; they were able to raise their objections only in writing. They scarcely had time to do so–the peace treaty was more or less imposed on them. The treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, the very room in which Germany had proclaimed her new empire to the humiliation of the French in 1871. It was now used by the French to humiliate the Germans. By the end of the next decade the view that Germany had been treated too harshly at the peace conference and deserved to have the Versailles Treaty revised had become common currency in Britain. The economist John Maynard Keynes resigned as the British Treasury’s chief representative at the conference and quickly wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he expressed in vigorous language his conviction that Germany had been harshly treated.

President Wilson himself optimistically believed that the League of Nations, the international body to regulate the world which was an integral part of the peace treaties, would find a way of adjusting those parts which were unworkable. No peace conference started out with more idealistic aims than that which remade Europe in 1919. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points had promised a new world order based on doing away with the old patterns of secret diplomacy, arranging equality of trading conditions and providing an impartial adjustment of all colonial claims. The levelling of the pre-1914 civilization could be a positive thing if a better world was built on the ashes of the old. Most of the world’s nations, including much of Germany, were dominated by a profound wish that never again should the destruction of war be allowed to ravage their lives.

Many of them, like Canada and other Dominions who were representing themselves for the first time instead of being spoken for by British imperial statesmen, came to the peace conference enthusiastically. They were inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations to outlaw war and to protect the rights of small nations. A worldwide reduction of armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety, which would make the world ‘safe for democracy’ as Wilson put it, offered a chance to escape from the blind destruction of the past. The League, which Wilson spent much time and effort explaining, was to be set up in Geneva, Switzerland and every nation was invited to join and send members to its international assembly.

Wilson’s novel idea, that all the peace treaties should have the League’s charter as an integral and dominating part, was adopted by all the delegates. The charter was a reflection of the peace movements which had grown up during the war, as well as of the Disarmament Conferences before 1914, to find international procedures for arbitration. The powers which signed the Covenant of the League of Nations were mindful of the uncontrollable process of acceleration by which small wars could become big ones. By putting their names to the Covenant they vowed to refer their disagreements to the League for discussion before taking up arms. They also vowed to go to the aid of any fellow member which had been attacked and to act against any member which used force against the League.

It was heady stuff. The world was so exhausted by the war that none of the statesmen in Paris could imagine any country ever wanting to repeat such an experience. The dream of global peace seemed to have achieved reality. The peace conference proposed to resettle Europe along lines of self-determination to prevent the sort of quarrel the Serbs had had with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Habsburg Empire was already no more, and the Habsburgs were deposed after the armistice. Their immense territories were broken up into states on ethnic lines. By the Treaty of St Germain, signed with the new Austrian Republic, Austria became a small landlocked country of seven million people forbidden to join up with Germany. Bohemia, Moravia and part of northern Hungary, which were inhabited by western Slavs (the Czechs, Slovaks and Ruthenians), were united to create the Republic of Czechoslovakia. Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, inhabited by the southern Slavs, were united under Serbia to form the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Italy, though balked of Dalmatia, obtained Trentino, Trieste, South Tyrol and Istria. Hungary, meanwhile, which lost almost three-quarters of her post-1867 kingdom–Romania acquired the whole of Transylvania–in 1920 reluctantly signed the Treaty of Trianon.

Bulgaria, as an ally of the central powers, by the Treaty of Neuilly had to cede large areas to Greece and the new Yugoslavia. The independence of Finland, and of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia was preserved. Russia meanwhile would make no peace treaty. Although initially British and French troops were sent to help the White or conservative forces within Russia against the Bolsheviks, an impasse was reached and they were evacuated.

The treaty agreeing peace with the Ottoman Empire, the Treaty of Sèvres, was not completed until 1920. It destroyed the 300-year-old Ottoman Empire, more or less expelled the Turks from Europe apart from Constantinople, made Armenia and Kurdistan independent, and removed from them Arabia, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Syria, Cyprus and what they owned in north Africa. Greece was to be given much of Asiatic Turkey behind Smyrna.

President Wilson intended that European imperialism should wither away. Former German colonies or Turkish possessions, even if they were taken over by the old imperial powers, were now to be called mandates. By an article of the Covenant of the League, the great powers like France and Britain were commanded to govern the mandates in the interests of their inhabitants until they were ready to be admitted to the League of Nations. Thus a better world was supposed to be remodelled at the peace conference. Unfortunately, although all the peace treaties were predicated on the League of Nations, despite his enthusiasm for the new world order President Wilson had made an elementary mistake. He failed to convince Congress of the importance of the United States guaranteeing the post-war settlement, so despite his own internationalism after the war she returned to her usual isolationism. Congress rejected US participation in the League of Nations, yet the whole new settlement was based on US support for the League. Nor would America guarantee France’s borders against Germany.

As for imperialism withering away, it was really lack of money as far as Britain was concerned–with the post-war slump and debts owed to America of £900 million–that in the end hurried forward the end of empire. Lord Curzon, foreign secretary from October 1919, and much of the India Office might be excited by the mandate system which gave Britain Mesopotania and Palestine to administer as an unofficial way of extending the empire. The importance of the oil-rich Middle East had been recognized before the war and the area offered new markets now that India had her own growing manufacturing industry. With Russia locked in internal revolution, Britain had no rival in the Middle East. But a severe post-war slump prevented Britain from imposing herself on the mandated territories as she would have done in the past. The old empire itself was under attack from nationalists in India. In Ireland a war of independence against the British broke out the year after the war ended. There was a rebellion in Egypt, which had been made a British protectorate at the beginning of the war and wanted immediate independence.

Mesopotamia was in a state of revolt and despite her oilfields most members of the British government had no wish to spend money on subduing her. Though the British retained a great deal of influence, in 1921 they made her into the kingdom of Iraq. Eleven years later in 1932 the mandate ended and Iraq achieved full independence. Faisal, the son of the Hashemite Sharif Hussein, became her king as a reward for his father’s help during the war. This partly offset the obligation on the British to fulfil their wartime promise of creating an independent Arab state in Syria and Palestine, as did carving the independent mandate of Jordan out of their mandate for Palestine. Faisal’s brother, Hussein’s other son Abdullah, became Jordan’s emir. Though a British resident initially controlled both her economic and her financial policy, in 1946 the mandated territory became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Palestine posed more of a problem because of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which had been critical in keeping influential Jewish opinion in America onside during the war. This recognized the rights of the Jewish race to establish a national homeland in Palestine, so long as no harm was inflicted on the native Arab inhabitants. At the end of the nineteenth century, the victimization of Jews (especially in eastern Europe) had seen the growth of a powerful Zionist movement, whose objective was to establish a homeland for the Jews in their ancestral home of Palestine. In consequence, between 1882 and 1914 Palestine attracted 60,000 Jewish immigrants, bringing the Jewish population to about 85,000. The question of how many Jewish people could settle in the Jewish homeland without upsetting the lives of the 600,000 Arab Palestinians was to be the subject of much debate within the British government over the next twenty-five years. Sympathy for Jewish settlers who were attacked by Arabs wrestled with official British fears that the poorly educated Palestinians would soon be at a disadvantage in a small country with a land shortage.

The First World War had made the territorial extent of the British Empire greater than ever, but it dramatically loosened its already lax bonds. Before 1914 the imperial government was in the last resort responsible for the foreign policy of the entire empire. But by the end of the war the effect of their vast losses, their separate representation at the peace conference and their membership of the League of Nations set the Dominions on the path to real nationhood. They began to make it clear that in future wars their assistance could not be taken for granted. Separate ambassadorial representation to other countries, a lack of imperial ships to defend the empire east of Suez and a definitive Imperial Conference in 1926 resulted in the 1931 Statute of Westminster. This recognized the changed and wholly independent status of the Dominions, though they remained ‘united by a common allegiance to the Crown and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of nations’.

But India was not part of the magic circle of the Dominions. She was very disappointed at not being rewarded as she had hoped after her efforts during the war. One and a half million Indians had fought for the empire, and India had been admitted to the Imperial Conference in 1917. Like the Dominions, India had achieved separate representation in the Assembly of the League of Nations. Many Indians, particularly Mohandas Gandhi, who had studied law in London and was a member of the Inner Temple, had believed in the liberty-loving nature of a Britain ruled by Parliament. They had assumed that India would achieve Dominion status immediately after the war. But it did not happen.

The Indian professional classes felt fobbed off by the 1919 Government of India Act which they were offered instead. It gave India a two-chambered Parliamentary system and allowed Indians to form the majority on the Central Legislative Council, but the diarchal arrangement kept law and order and taxation in the hands of non-Indians. Moreover the legislature could not remove the executive. The notorious Amritsar Massacre in 1919, when General Dyer shot dead 379 unarmed civilians in the Punjab who were protesting against new security laws, crystallized the growing discontent with British rule. People lost faith in the Raj’s promises. For the next seven years, led by Gandhi, India embarked on a new movement for independence with frequent strikes and the boycotting of British goods.

India was inspired by the empire’s other ‘poor relation’, Ireland. In a series of dramatic moves she was casting off British authority. The harsh punishment of those Irishmen involved in the Easter Rising caused Sinn Fein and the revolutionaries to triumph over the moderate Home Rulers in the first election after the war and withdraw from Westminster. Seventy-three of them gathered in the Mansion House in Dublin and announced that they constituted an independent Irish Parliament, which they called the Dáil Éireann, meaning the Parliament of the Irish Republic. A provisional government was elected with De Valera as president. By 1919 there was all-out war between Britain and southern Ireland.

The charismatic Michael Collins, known as the ‘big fella’, minister of finance in the new Dáil, was southern Ireland’s commander. His unorthodox army, the old National Volunteers, who wore trench coats and trilby hats, vanished into the shadows after each guerrilla exploit. His charm and his daring refusal to wear much disguise while bicycling about Dublin gave Collins the status of a folk hero. Even though 8,000 ex-soldiers were drafted in to supplement the Royal Irish Constabulary, the south of Ireland became ungovernable. Because the RIC did not have enough of their usual dark-green uniforms, the new policemen wore khaki, with the black belts and dark-green caps of the RIC. The savagery with which they hunted down the Irish guerrillas got them the caustic nickname of the Black and Tans, after a pack of hounds from County Tipperary. British politicians became sickened by what was going on in Ireland and demanded a political solution.

When Lloyd George was informed by British military chiefs that it would take a military campaign involving 100,000 men to subdue Ireland, he baulked at such an enterprise so soon after the trauma of the Great War. Money was needed to reconstruct Britain, not to fight Ireland. In 1921 the two sides began a series of negotiations. The Anglo-Irish Treaty in December resolved the Ulster Unionist problem by partitioning Ireland, turning southern Ireland into a Dominion called the Irish Free State.

But even this did not bring peace. In 1922 the Irish Civil War broke out between the pro-treaty forces headed by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith and those like De Valera who believed that Ireland should become a republic inclusive of Ulster. As the death toll in Ireland mounted, assassinations by the newly formed military organization of the anti-treaty nationalists, the Irish Republican Army, or IRA (Collins was one of the victims), were followed by dawn executions of suspects without trial by the Irish Free State government. Eventually the cool, calculating, bespectacled De Valera, who was suspected of ordering Collins’s assassination, called a halt to the anti-treaty IRA’s warfare. The civil war petered out. The struggle should go forward by political means, De Valera said, though at elections he made use of terrorist pressure from the IRA to get out the vote for the rapidly enlarging Fianna Fáil republican party.

If the empire was in tumult in the early 1920s, there was much misery and dislocation in Britain herself, despite the release from war. From 1916 to 1918, when Labour seceded from the national government, Britain had continued to be ruled nominally by the coalition of three parties, though in reality the controlling figure was the amazingly energetic Lloyd George. Parliament should have been dissolved in 1916 but as an election in wartime would have been impossible, acts had been passed from time to time prolonging its life, and thus the life of the coalition. In 1918 Lloyd George and Bonar Law, the leader of the Conservatives, saw no reason not to carry on as before. They agreed that the task of returning Britain to a peacetime existence also deserved government by consensus. In the coupon election of 1918 (so called because Lloyd George and Bonar Law had written a letter or coupon asking the parties not to oppose one another) the coalition–now the 335 coalition Conservatives and 133 coalition Liberals–was successfully returned. The new government lasted until 1922. The electorate had trebled again as a result of the 1918 Electoral Reform Act. If he wanted to be prime minister again, Lloyd George had to fulfil his election promise to make Britain ‘a land fit for heroes to live in’.

With such an enlarged electorate, many of whom were working class, numerous measures for social reform were required. The reforms Lloyd George promised were even more sweeping than those achieved before the war. The state would pay for housing, what were called council houses, to replace the slums that still disfigured towns. By the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1920 all workers were entitled to benefit for fifteen weeks as long as they had paid twelve weeks’ contributions. But soon many of the measures–including a new Education Act in 1918 which was intended to increase teachers’ salaries, provide for the compulsory attendance at school of children up to fourteen and establish continuation schools for boys and girls up to eighteen–proved impossible to implement. They were too great an expense for a country still getting back on her feet. The boom the war caused in munitions and a resurgence of the textile trade after the war were followed by a slump in 1921. There were two million people out of work. Domestic service, which had been an immense source of employment before the war, had almost vanished as few people could afford to employ servants any more. Before 1914 even the most meagre households with pretensions to being middle-class had some kind of help.

Britain did not have the severe problems suffered by some European countries. Germany lacked half her heavy industry and was bent under the huge weight of reparations. France was only beginning to rebuild her agriculture and industry, and she had to do that with almost a third of her manpower missing. Strikes had crippled Italy to the point where she feared a communist workers’ takeover. In 1922 terrified of revolutionary chaos Italy abandoned Parliamentary democracy for one-party or totalitarian rule at the hands of violent ex-servicemen in the Fascist party under their leader Benito Mussolini. Parliamentary government had been discredited by a peace settlement which brought her none of the colonies she desired in Africa to add to Libya, and gave much of what she had been promised by the Treaty of London to Yugoslavia. Named after the fasces or bundle of twigs that Roman senators carried as a symbol of their authority, the intensely nationalistic fascists were anti-capitalistic and anti-clerical, but also abhorred socialism and communism. Awash with comforting and simplistic slogans in the nihilistic post-war atmosphere, paying lipservice to the certainties of monarchy and Church, the fascists’ squads of paramilitaries restored order, purpose and international prestige to an extremely unstable country. The consequence was that by the end of the decade the Fascist party had become completely entwined with all Italian institutions, from social clubs to town councils.

But though the British might be free to take their usual pleasure in expressing their political opinions, the country was deeply burdened by America’s insistence on being repaid her war loans immediately. Britain had financed much of the war for her European allies, but she had not demanded prompt payment of her debts, because most European countries were in no position to comply. Hampered by shortage of money, diminished populations and the need to work on the ruined land to make it fit for cultivation, the European economies were only slowly getting back to pre-war production levels.

In Britain the coal and cotton export markets collapsed. The businessman Sir Ernest Geddes, appointed to work out where the government could save money, and known as the Geddes Axe, hacked back many of Lloyd George’s promises. ‘A land fit for heroes’ became an ironic saying. The general post-war discontent manifested itself in strikes and lockouts. In industries where she had led the world, Britain was falling behind because she had not invested in new machinery. Nevertheless she remained the world’s leading shipbuilder for another forty years, as befitted a country whose navy had been the best in the world for over a century.

But even that bit of glory had come to an end. The Washington Naval Agreement at the end of 1921 was a sign of the changing times when Britain agreed to parity with America in warships. She could no longer afford to build the ships or bases to defend the empire in its entirety. For the next twenty years Singapore, which was meant to be a great defensive naval base for the empire east of Suez, was not fortified properly or supplied with an adequate number of ships to defend herself.

All of the Royal Navy’s ships were built in Britain, where her welders and engineers had an expertise envied by all other advanced countries. However, especially on what became known as ‘red’ Clydeside near Glasgow, the home of so much of Britain’s shipbuilding since the nineteenth century, a fiery love of striking and militant socialist trade unionism proved fatal to the industry. A smaller navy, and the strikes which lost the yards business, combined to put shipbuilding in Britain into continuous decline.

Lloyd George lived on until 1945, but by 1922 his political day was drawing to a close amid a great deal of bitterness. He had been absent too much in Paris at the peace conference trying to hold back the French, and the Conservatives were beginning to chafe under his grip. He had split the Liberal party when he ousted Asquith, so he had few followers there. His reputation began to be harmed by tales about his honours list, about how as in the days of James I a baronetcy was to be had for £10,000, a peerage for £50,000 and so on. In the grim atmosphere of the slump tongues wagged about how well his entrepreneurial friends had done out of the war. Moreover, many Conservatives did not like the way Lloyd George had relinquished southern Ireland.

Lloyd George’s fall was engineered by the ‘knights of the shires’, as Tory backbenchers have often been known, over the Chanak Crisis. They were worried that Lloyd George was about to resume the war against Turkey, whose republican government under Mustapha Kemal had refused to accept the peace treaty which gave Greece Smyrna. In a revolt in October 1922 they voted at the Carlton Club to resume independence as Conservatives. As Kemal’s victorious army advanced towards the Dardanelles, where a neutral zone had been created, the danger of a collision with the British garrison at Chanak was averted only by the tact of General Charles Harington. The Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923 restored to Turkey at the expense of Greece much of the European territory of which she was to have been deprived.

The Chanak Crisis was the final nail in Lloyd George’s coffin. He resigned, the coalition ended and the Conservative leader Bonar Law briefly formed a Conservative ministry from 1922 to 1923 until ill-health forced him to retire. The genial pipe-smoking iron manufacturer Stanley Baldwin, the epitome of British pragmatism, became prime minister for a year. He made the mistake of abandoning free trade at the December 1923 election which he had called to shore up his position, hoping that tariff reform would help the disastrous level of unemployment. But although the Conservatives returned to power as the party with the largest number of seats in the House of Commons, and Baldwin remained prime minister, he lacked a majority. With a puff of ancient free trade breath, the fading Liberals reunited under Asquith joined with the Labour party to extinguish tariff reform by a vote of no confidence. As the largest of the opposition parties, Labour was then asked by George V to form a minority government pending a general election. On 23 January 1924 Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a Scottish farmworker, was sworn in as leader of the first Labour government. He became foreign secretary as well as prime minister.

The excitement within the Labour party at achieving office for the first time after the disappointments of the post-war period was tremendous, though the government lasted for only eight months. Being dependent on the Liberals to remain in power, the Labour government could not bring in some of its more extreme ideas, such as taking key industries into state ownership, as Clause 4 of their 1917 manifesto demanded, or ‘the gradual building up of a new social order’ by wealth redistribution, as their constitution decreed. In the privacy of his diary George V wondered what his grandmother Queen Victoria would have thought of a government whose members were ‘all socialists’, but he believed that they should ‘be given a chance’.

Nonetheless, the conservatively minded feared the Labour government as if it were the prelude to a Bolshevik Revolution. In the recent past, Labour councils such as Clydeside and the London Borough of Poplar had flown the red flag of revolution. Under the high-minded idealist George Lansbury, who in the 1930s briefly became leader of the Labour party, Poplar Council became a byword for the defiance of central government by local authorities. Poplar Labour councillors were frequently imprisoned or otherwise in trouble for refusing, because theirs was a poor council, to pay as much as rich local authorities towards the upkeep of the London County Council. They made a habit of paying out more poor relief than their rates afforded.

In fact the short-lived Labour minority government was decent, sensible and constructive. Its members were anxious to prove themselves trustworthy and responsible custodians of government. Such policies as they implemented in their eight months were for the most part a continuation of Lloyd George’s. Many of the Labour party’s leaders, including home secretary Arthur Henderson, were vehemently opposed to the tyranny and ideology of the communist system in Russia, which some of them had seen at first hand. They were determined that Britain with her Parliamentary democracy should not adopt anything like it. Labour constantly refused to allow the few thousand members of the British Communist party (founded in 1920) to link up with Labour. Communists were not permitted to be Labour candidates or even to be members of the Labour party.

With the former professions of ministers ranging from engine-driving to furnace-stoking, their principal aim was to raise the expectations of the working class. A new Education Bill made a first tier of secondary education the right of the many instead of the preserve of the few who could afford private education. It became the state’s duty to provide senior classes for children up to the age of fourteen, not just primary schooling. It was hoped to raise the school-leaving age to fifteen, though costs would make this impossible for some years. Labour once more attempted to tackle the housing shortage by committing the government to a fifteen-year scheme of expanding council housing available to rent. The bill passed easily through Parliament. The duty of the government to provide houses was becoming part of the post-war consensus, part of the ever greater expansion of the state’s responsibilities for its citizenry. But although insurance for the unemployed was extended, Labour could find little more to do for them. Their number was still hovering about the one-million mark. It was an issue that Britain, the workshop of the world, had never had to tackle before.

Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, like many Labour people, was an idealistic socialist and committed internationalist. He had voted against Britain entering the war, believing that wars benefited only imperialists and arms merchants and destroyed the working classes, who were used as cannon fodder. He was a fervent proponent of international organizations to ensure that no war ever happened again and he attended League of Nations gatherings at Geneva which he hoped would remedy what was unsatisfactory about the peace treaties.

For Franco-German relations continued to be destructive and fraught with hatred. America and Britain were not part of the European continent, which had been menaced by Germany for half a century, so their statesmen possessed no intuitive understanding of France’s feelings about her neighbour. She had agreed to a peace treaty which did not bring her frontier up to the Rhine because she believed that she had America’s wing to shelter under. Once America refused to join the League of Nations, France, terrified once again for her security, became trigger-happy. Thus when Germany in 1923 defaulted on her reparations payments to France, French troops were rushed into the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland, to make her pay. For a year the French occupied the Ruhr while German industry came to a halt in a show of defiance against the invader. The French left in 1924, but they had already inflicted the damage on the German economy which made the German mark collapse. By the end of 1923, inflation was so out of control that one American dollar was worth hundreds of millions of marks. With the mark worth so little, people had to bring wheelbarrows full of paper money to pay even small bills. Germany was meanwhile bedevilled by assassination attempts and coups.

Nevertheless the internationalists in Europe like MacDonald were determined to help. Germany was not left to sink. In 1924 an American scheme, the Dawes Plan, adjusted the reparations burden to make it less harsh. By 1929 the Allied Reparations Commission had found the reparations to be disproportionately heavy on Germany, and they were reduced to less than a third of the total established in 1921. By the mid-1920s not all seemed bad. The German mark recovered.

A better era seemed to be ushered in for Germany under the gifted republican statesman Gustav Stresemann. Though Germany had never ceased to campaign to revise Versailles, in 1925 she at last appeared to have officially accepted her western frontier with France when she signed the Locarno Treaty. Germany was admitted to the League of Nations and the Rhineland was demilitarized. By 1926 she was no longer seen as a pariah nation. In 1928 the Kellogg–Briand Pact, produced by an American and a Frenchman, attempted to eliminate war as an instrument of national policy. Its multilateral treaty almost made up for America not joining the League.

The first Labour government had shown itself to be moderate and unexceptionable and contained reassuring personnel from Asquith’s last Cabinet, such as Lord Haldane who became lord chancellor. Nevertheless a trade treaty and a loan which Labour tried to negotiate with Soviet Russia and what purported to be revolutionary instructions from the Soviet government did for the government. Four days before the general election in October 1924 the Daily Mail’s publication of a letter from one of the Russian Bolshevik leaders named Zinoviev which appeared to be addressed to Labour gave the country a fright.

The Conservatives returned to power under their new leader Stanley Baldwin. Although Labour was out, only forty Liberals were returned as opposed to 151 Labour and 413 Conservatives. The 1924 election is therefore interesting because it marks the real eclipse of the Liberal party. Labour had received one million more votes and had effectively become the second party in the British two-party system.

Baldwin now had a decent overall majority. Always seen chewing on his pipe he was a reassuring figure in troubled times, although his comfortable image disguised a mind like a trap. He was a formidable Parliamentary operator. The economic depression which began in 1921 had not ended, and indeed was about to get worse. Among Baldwin’s Cabinet was Winston Churchill as chancellor of the Exchequer. He had last been a Conservative in 1903 when he had resigned over tariff reform. Many in the Conservative party believed that the only way to defeat the depression was to return to the pre-1914 monetary system, by which the pound sterling was fixed at a price reflecting its gold reserves. In 1925 therefore with Churchill as chancellor the country returned to the gold standard. It was a disaster that resulted in massive deflation and the overvaluing of the pound. Manufacturers exporting abroad found their order books diminishing because the strong pound made their products too expensive.

The economic depression created a crisis in the British coal industry. Until 1914 Britain had been the world’s greatest exporter, but many industrialized countries had begun to mine their own coal. The coal industry would have declined more rapidly had it not benefited from France’s invasion of Germany’s Ruhr coalfields. By 1926 the writing was on the wall. As part of the war economy the huge industry had been taken out of private hands and run by the government. After the war the miners did not want the coalfields to return to private ownership because the wages offered were lower than those paid by the government. For several months they refused to return to work, though as a lure they were offered a seven-hour day. The simple truth was that British coal was too expensive. The mine owners asked for wage reductions and slightly increased hours. A Royal Commission of Inquiry achieved little, and the government eventually appeared to come down on the side of the owners when it recommended that the working day go back to eight hours. The miners took their case to the General Council of the Trades Union Congress. On 3 May 1926 a general strike was declared.

But this was not the start of the revolution in Britain that had been feared–and hoped for by Russia. Though the railwaymen, printers, and iron and steel trades came out in sympathy with their fellow workers, it was a social event rather than a political one. There was little professed desire to overthrow the government. The general strike–that formidable weapon by which workers could bring a country to its knees–was not applied very ruthlessly. The responsible, upright TUC had no wish to endanger the country’s health; hospital and agricultural workers were excluded from the strike.

There was some violence by police and union members but after nine days, by 12 May, Britain could breathe again. The general strike had been called off, no revolution had taken place and Britain had kept going thanks to all kinds of enthusiastic volunteers from students to businessmen driving the buses. The working man had the Labour party to represent him in Parliament. Another Labour government would be a better way of making sure his voice was heard than the destruction of the general strike. Britain had no stomach for the way strikes were used abroad, with such lethal effects.

Only the miners remained on strike, staying out for another seven months until December 1926. Once their union funds were exhausted, they had to return to work. The strike had lasting effects on the coal industry. Many coalminers remained out of work because pits could not be reopened. The high rate of unemployment which followed in the industry forced lower wages and longer hours on the miners. To prevent another countrywide stoppage, in 1927 the Conservatives brought in a new Trade Disputes Act. General strikes were outlawed, and henceforth trade union contributions for political ends like supporting the Labour party had to be individually earmarked by the member concerned.

Although the Conservatives had weakened the trade unions, progressive social reform continued. One of the most notable effects of the war was that all parties now accepted that the state should play a far greater role in British life as a beneficent provider. The Ministry of Health, created to deal with insurance and health issues, was not disbanded after the war, as state provision for pensions and insurance continued to expand. The minister of health Neville Chamberlain, Joe’s son, finally did away with the last remnants of the punitive approach to the destitute by abolishing the Elizabethan guardians of the poor. Instead the destitute became the responsibility of county councils, whose Public Assistance Committees provided new buildings and assistance for the old and sick who had nowhere else to go. The Conservative government, which in 1928 carried the Fifth Reform Act allowing women the vote at twenty-one in line with men, brought in a more generous state pension scheme. The Widows, Orphans and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act of 1925 allowed insured people to draw an old age pension at sixty-five and gave pensions to widows and allowances for bereaved children under fourteen.

The Conservatives also established the National Grid which provided cheap state-owned electricity across the country via a wire and pylon system run by the government-owned Central Electricity Board. By 1939 two-thirds of Britain had electricity, though in wilder parts of the country its supply could be less certain. Swans or snow on the line in the Highlands of Scotland often left local people without electricity for a day or two.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, created in 1927 by a group of radio companies, was also set up as a state monopoly owned by the government. Established by royal charter, the BBC was intended to have high ethical standards, which it has largely maintained. Its refusal to take advertising has always given it an editorial freedom and integrity. Soon most homes possessed a wireless. The BBC tradition of high-mindedness and public service broadcasting was encouraged by its first chairman, the Scot Lord Reith, who believed in a mission to improve Britain through his corporation. For many Britons, until the 1944 Education Act established free secondary schooling, BBC Radio served as a form of further education. The impartiality of the BBC, jealously guarded, made it one of the great British institutions of the twentieth century. Envied by other countries it remains a testament to the British love of fair play. The BBC Radio World Service has traditionally been a forum giving political exiles the chance to speak and broadcast to their homelands.

British women’s lives changed dramatically during the war. With three and a half million men called up to fight in France, women had to take over many of their jobs on farms or in munitions factories. Those serving as nurses on the western front earned the heartfelt respect of the men. As a reflection of the new seriousness with which they were viewed, women were admitted to membership of Oxford University in 1920–though it was not until 1948 that they could receive full degrees at Cambridge. Other acts of 1918 and 1919, recognizing their war work, revolutionized the civic position of women by removing sex qualifications for admission to the professions and to seats in the House of Commons. One of the best-known beneficiaries of this was the American-born Nancy Astor. She was the first woman to sit in the House of Commons when in 1919 she took over her husband Waldorf Astor’s seat for Plymouth Sutton after he inherited his father’s viscountcy. She remained an MP for twenty-five years.

When all British women over twenty-one became entitled to vote in 1928, they had stolen a march on their more protected French contemporaries–in France the vote for women only came in 1944. In Switzerland it was 1971. As a sign of their independence, skirts rose and women took up the fashion of bobbing or cutting their hair short, a fashion prompted by the need to keep it out of machinery during the war. The long lustrous locks piled up in elaborate folds so characteristic of the pre-war era vanished.

Jazz music, which began in the black part of New Orleans and spread throughout America, crossed the Atlantic to Europe in the 1920s and became all the rage. Millions of young people bought phonographs to hear recordings and dance the wild Charleston. Such enthusiasms showed that they belonged to the new world which rejected the boring and destructive ideas of the old. Inspired by sheer relief at the ending of the war and by the world’s subsequent recovery, well-to-do people became hedonistic. Instead of being associated with the war, France exploited her holiday resorts such as Juan les Pins and Biarritz, to become the playground of the young, rich and gifted, particularly Americans like the writer Scott Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald gave this short-lived breathing space between the wars its nickname, the Jazz Age. ‘Seize the day’ was its motto–with so many young people dead, who could say who would be alive tomorrow? A rather desperate frivolity reigned. From the mid-1920s onwards, London theatres were full of Noël Coward’s bitter-sweet sophisticated comedies about world-weary, liberated young people. Divorce–a stigma before 1914–started to become accepted as something that happened. Being realistic, being true to yourself, was what mattered now that so many of the old certainties of European civilization from religion to the army had disintegrated or been found wanting. The young Evelyn Waugh’s cynical and often cruel novels, including Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930) were hugely popular.

Despite the weakening of the trade union movement in the aftermath of the general strike, the Labour party returned to power for another two years in 1929. Though Labour had 287 MPs against Conservatives’ 261, and the Liberals had a sorry 59, Labour was still in a minority. Once again an attempt was made to co-operate with the Liberals but it was not very successful. Nineteen-twenty-nine was the year the worldwide great depression began. It started with the Wall Street Crash in America, which wiped millions off the value of shares in October. The newspapers were full of ruined financiers committing suicide by jumping out of skyscrapers.

The Crash put an end to America’s capacity to prop up the European monetary system, as she had done ever since the Great War ended. US financiers were forced to call in their loans. German banks failed. Between 1929 and 1932 the American economy shrank by almost 40 per cent. But the desperation of the unemployed in the dustbowl of America was as nothing to the political effects of the depression in Europe. The economic collapse wiped out responsible democratic governments which world statesmen were relying on to keep the peace.

The truth was that the European economic system had not properly recovered eleven years after the war had ended. In many ways it was not to recover for another seventy years. Europe’s problems had been masked by America’s readiness to bail out the post-war European economies, Germany’s in particular. After the war German goods were not bought by other countries in the quantities needed to rebuild the German economy. They needed to restart their own economies and began to manufacture goods themselves which they had previously bought from Germany. The Russian market, a major source of revenue before the war, after the Revolution was effectively nonexistent. The war-guilt reparations imposed on Germany could not be paid without massive loans from the US, so when the American loans were withdrawn Germany’s economy collapsed in 1929.

German foreign trade fell by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932, wiping out completely the savings of the middle classes. The situation was worse than that of 1923. Professional and well-to-do people went from leading an affluent life to penury, forced to sublet every room of their apartments. The effect hyperinflation had on Berlin, for example, may be vividly glimpsed in the writings of Christopher Isherwood. Conspiracy theories began to circulate, of which the most pernicious were ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, forged documents purporting to show that there was a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and ruin everyone who was not Jewish. In their distress the German people not only lost their faith in democracy, they lost their faith in reason. They were looking for scapegoats, and the scapegoats put forward by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party, or Nazis, who were attracting growing support, were Jews, big business controlled by Jews, foreigners, communists and the Versailles Peace Treaty.

In Britain the Conservatives had been voted out in 1929 for failing to solve the unemployment problem. But under Labour in the next two years unemployment soared to levels the country had never experienced before. Factories closed and men started being laid off in massive numbers in the north, in all the industries which had made Britain’s fortune in the past: in coal, the iron and steel industries, shipbuilding, clothing. In some towns like Jarrow in Tyneside, once the home of the Venerable Bede, the unemployment level reached 75 per cent. Investors started to withdraw money from London. By July 1930 unemployment had jumped by almost a million. It was rising so fast that it was expected that one-third of the workforce would soon have no jobs. But the deepening industrial depression was beyond the control of any government because it was due to worldwide pressures and the way the war had thrown international trade into confusion.

This catastrophe left Labour reeling. A rich young Labour minister named Sir Oswald Mosley, influenced by the writings of John Maynard Keynes, in 1930 suggested greater state control of industry and more state-financed public works along the lines of the New Deal that President Roosevelt would use to get America on her feet again. But the Cabinet rejected these remedies and Mosley, who was hot-blooded and impetuous, resigned from the government and from his party. When the New party he attempted to found with six other former Labour MPs had no success, Mosley decided that Parliament was going to be no use to him. In 1932 he dumped the New party and created the British Union of Fascists. He had been deeply affected by a visit to fascist Italy where the system of public works, state monopolies of heavy industry and attempts at economic self-sufficiency gave the impression that the employment crisis had been solved.

Labour under its austere chancellor Philip Snowden believed that retrenchment and ultimately more loans from America were the only way out of the depression. But America had more stringent ideas for balancing the budget than Britain did. Her financiers would not lend the funds required unless the Labour government agreed to reduce the money spent by the state. When MacDonald proposed to the Labour Cabinet in August 1931 that unemployment benefit for the very poorest should be reduced by 10 per cent, as well as the incomes of teachers and members of the armed forces, ministers were so disgusted that most of them resigned. MacDonald therefore formed a National Government with the help of members of both the Conservative and Liberal parties to restore British credit abroad and maintain the value of the pound sterling. Three other Labour members of the Cabinet, including Chancellor Snowden, remained with him. Many members of the Labour party never forgave him for what they regarded as his class treachery.

To counteract severe unemployment in the north the national government in 1934 gave special statutory relief for depressed areas, but ministers seemed unmoved by deputations from the old heavy industries of the north-east, such as the Jarrow Marchers accompanied by their MP Ellen Wilkinson, begging for help. The means test introduced by the government for people unemployed for over six months–which involved public officials entering homes to assess whether household effects could be used to raise an income–intensified the anger of the Labour party against MacDonald. To many, the insensitive way the means test was carried out was a return to the era of the Dickensian workhouse. To this day the term ‘means test’ remains politically unacceptable.

The National Government never actually put through many of the economies which had caused so many Labour ministers to resign. Alarmed by a peaceful ‘mutiny’ by 12,000 sailors at Invergordon, the government modified the pay cuts. But because no more money could be borrowed, while £200 million in gold had been withdrawn from London since July, the government went off the gold standard in September 1931. It was feared that this might be disastrous, but in fact it was a great success as it made the pound cheap and British goods cheaper. The export trade began to revive.

Later that year MacDonald went to the polls to seek legitimacy, and the election produced an overwhelming mandate for the National Government, which won 558 seats (471 of these were Conservatives). The Labour party, which had only fifty-two seats, was led in opposition by George Lansbury. Though MacDonald remained prime minister, the National Government became increasingly Conservative in tone. With Neville Chamberlain back as chancellor–Snowden became lord privy seal–protection was adopted as a remedy for the economic crisis, a 10 per cent levy being slapped on most imports, especially manufactured goods. This resulted in the resignation of the Liberal free traders from its ranks.

In 1932 at the Imperial Conference in Ottawa Britain hoped to establish the policy of imperial preference in trade, giving advantageous tariffs within the empire. The Dominions, however, agreed only where it would not hurt their own produce. Ottawa thus achieved very little. But the national government managed to balance the budget and revive the national credit, so in 1934 the unemployment pay cuts were restored, and by 1936 Britain had come out of recession. At its height, just under three million people had been unemployed. Meanwhile the lack of American investment in Europe had been making it harder to pay reparations and war debts, so in 1931 the American president Herbert Hoover accepted a one-year moratorium. The following year Germany’s reparations payments were permanently suspended after the Lausanne war-debts conference. Unable to repay the United States without being repaid herself, by 1933 Britain waived her allies’ old debts and abandoned repayment of the £900 million she owed to the United States. This only increased America’s view that meddling in the old world did her no good, and she continued to be strongly isolationist.

An extremely powerful disarmament movement took hold of the British people in the first half of the 1930s. In 1935 the Peace Ballot organized by the League of Nations Union and distributed by enthusiasts found that 90 per cent of the British people still favoured multilateral disarmament. There was more belief than ever before in ‘collective security’ and of submitting all disputes to the League of Nations to prevent the suffering of another war. In 1933 when the Oxford Union, the university debating society, passed the motion ‘This House will not fight for King and Country’, it was the high point of a distinctly anti-war feeling. People passionately believed that peace was the only option. But the early 1930s were also the time when it became clear that the Paris peace settlement based on collective security and orchestrated by the League would not last in its present form. For the system to work everybody had to obey the rules. In 1930 MacDonald presided over a London Conference on Naval Disarmament attended by Britain, the USA, France, Italy and Japan. Yet a year later Japan had seized Manchuria in China and pulled out of the League of Nations when it condemned her.

Despite the promises embodied in the Covenant of the League, no further action was taken against Japan. With most economies at a standstill League members could do nothing except express moral disapproval. The League’s creators had not imagined that by the 1930s there would be governments which did not subscribe to the honourable conventions of the past and did not care if they lost the good opinion of the world. Once Japan had led the way the whole rationale of the League of Nations dissolved. Even so, people still believed in it, and the Word Disarmament Conference which met in 1932 at MacDonald’s urging was the high point of the British government’s acceptance of that belief.

But the conference was a dismal failure. The French would not agree to their arms being reduced to equality with Germany’s official quota, unless British troops patrolled her eastern frontier. They were tormented by the prospect of German militarism reviving, for it was an open secret that Germany was rearming. Britain was in no financial position to send troops to guard the Franco-German borders and rejected the proposal. Meanwhile the Germans and their new leader Hitler, who had come to power in January 1933, chose to represent themselves as insulted by the French. By October that year Germany had withdrawn from the Disarmament Conference and left the League of Nations.

Adolf Hitler had been elected on a very clear programme: to destroy the humiliation of Versailles and to reclaim the land removed from Germany. In his book Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’), he had openly described his plans to exterminate races he believed were either evil like the Jews or stupid like the Slavs. He outlined a policy of occupying territory in the east to give the superior German race living space, or Lebensraum. But at the time the book was written in the 1920s no one could take Mein Kampf seriously. Hitler was then a would-be painter and political activist who had been imprisoned for a failed coup in Munich. Yet only a few days after he took over as chancellor he had removed civil liberties for Jewish people, and two years later racist laws were in place forbidding Jewish people to marry non-Jews; by 1938 half the Jewish population of Germany had left in despair.

Hitler’s actions effectively destroyed the principle of collective security based on disarming to the lowest point, but its enthusiasts refused to accept that. For the rest of the decade Winston Churchill was one of the strongest voices urging action against Nazi Germany. As early as April 1933, he warned Parliament, ‘One of the things which we were told after the Great War would be a security for us was that Germany would be a democracy with Parliamentary institutions. All that has been swept away. You have dictatorship, most grim dictatorship.’ If Germany was allowed to rearm, he said, she would soon snatch back her lost territories–territories which bands of unemployed German youths were aggressively campaigning for, ‘singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army, eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland’. Churchill believed that MacDonald’s ideas, for all their nobility, were a load of hot air, that while he talked of Britain dropping four air-force divisions, European factories were filling with arms. ‘I cannot recall any time when the gap between the kind of words statesmen used and what was actually happening in many countries was so great as it is now,’ he told the Commons.

After Germany’s withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference the government acknowledged to some extent that the ideas of disarmament and reduction of armaments to the lowest point were no longer viable. In 1934 a new air-defence programme was announced, increasing the RAF by forty-one squadrons, and the following year the government published a White Paper which recognized the need for greater military provision. Nevertheless, at a popular level disarmament went on being the remedy for the world’s ills. There was a general reluctance to contemplate the possibility of war. Moreover the British government, like many Britons, felt that Germany had been treated too harshly and was sympathetic to Hitler’s revision of Versailles. For that reason, nothing happened in 1935 when Hitler told the world that he had created an air force, or when he started military conscription again to add another thirty-six divisions to his army. The British had thought they had protected themselves by signing a treaty with Hitler that limited the German navy to 35 per cent the size of the British, and submarine strength to 45 per cent.

At the same time, neither the British nor the French wanted to alienate Mussolini, the Italian leader. In April 1935, at the Stresa Conference called specifically to discuss Hitler’s announcement that Germany would no longer be bound by the arms limitations of Versailles, Britain, France and Italy sought agreement on forming a common front against German rearmament. Nevertheless Mussolini had more in common with Hitler as a fellow dictator whose regime was based on violence than with the western democracies of France and Britain.

Despite joining the Stresa Front in October that year Italy, which had been very disappointed by the territories she had gained in the peace treaties, flouted the precepts of the League of Nations and invaded Ethiopia in pursuit of her dream of a north African empire. Reluctantly, because she still wanted Mussolini as an ally, Britain along with the rest of the League imposed sanctions on Italy. But the Italian forces did not withdraw.

The French and British governments now behaved very curiously: they decided to ignore the League of Nations and make a deal with Mussolini. By the secret Hoare–Laval Pact, signed by the British foreign secretary Samuel Hoare and the French prime minister Pierre Laval, they offered Italy a partition plan that gave her two-thirds of Ethiopia. In December the agreement leaked out and aroused such anger in Britain that Hoare had to resign. Italy nevertheless remained in possession of most of Ethiopia. The Anglo-French policy of appeasement, of allowing dictators to take chunks of territory at will in preference to fighting a war, had begun to take shape.

MacDonald the idealist grew too ill to remain in office and at the general election in November 1935 Baldwin became prime minister, his National Government winning a majority of 245. The public-school-educated barrister Clement Attlee had been elected to lead the Labour party, which, though it remained out of office, now had 154 seats in Parliament, a gain of one hundred.

Having seen that nothing had happened to Mussolini over Ethiopia, on 7 March 1936 Hitler moved his troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, proclaiming that Germany would no longer abide by the peace treaties. Versailles was at last visibly dead in the water. France was devastated by this move. The buffer between her and Germany had been removed, and she was left staring at a militarized frontier with Germany that now bristled with soldiers.

But Britain, France’s ally, did not share her fears. British ministers were distracted by the many other issues demanding their attention which seemed just as important as containing the European dictators. In Mandated Palestine, British troops were required in greater numbers because of clashes between the indigenous Arabs and Jewish settlers. As the decade went on, growing numbers of Jewish refugees fled there from Germany, though a 1930 government White Paper on Palestine emphasized the resulting plight of the Arabs. It warned of the possibility that they might be swamped by a Jewish majority if there was not a temporary end to Jewish immigration.

But the real issue preoccupying British statesmen and British newspapers was India. In 1931 the architect Edwin Lutyens completed his masterpiece, the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, little knowing that it was only to be used for another sixteen years. All kinds of excuses continued to be found for preventing India from obtaining independence or even reaching Dominion status. There was now an articulate party called the Muslim League under Mohammed Jinnah, who like Gandhi was a lawyer. Jinnah was beginning to call for the partition of India to surmount the racial hatred between Muslims and Hindus.

With the great business of India linking so many members of the British middle classes, the subject of Indian independence obsessed Britain in the 1930s. Generations of Britons had been Indian civil servants, tea-brokers, planters and district commissioners; they were incensed at the way their businesses were being ruined by Gandhi’s boycott of British goods.

By 1927, with Congress refusing to recognize the provincial legislatures because they would be satisfied with nothing less than full responsible government, Indian discontent produced a new Parliamentary Commission. Members of all three British political parties were sent to India to investigate her grievances. Though it was headed by the distinguished Liberal Sir John Simon, former attorney-general and home secretary, it did not contain a single Indian member. The viceroy Lord Irwin, the future Lord Halifax, who had become friendly with Gandhi, had already stated in 1929 that Dominion status was the ultimate goal of the British government for India. But this was not good enough for the militant Indian politicians, nor did the Simon Commission promise it when the report was published in 1930.

Neither did the Government of India Act of 1935. This act was brought in when it was at last acknowledged that talks with Gandhi were the only solution, after 100,000 people had been imprisoned for taking part in his civil disobedience campaigns. It created a federal structure so that the national administration could reflect the diversity of the provinces within the country, an arrangement which the Indian princely state rulers led by the Maharajah of Bikaner agreed to participate in. But, although this gave responsible self-government to the provinces, it still was not the self-government of a Dominion. At national level despite a federal legislature to which Cabinet ministers were responsible, the ultimate say on foreign affairs, defence and religion continued to lie with the viceroy. The new constitution was considered not to have taken into consideration properly the rights of the Muslims and to have given too much power to the Indian princes. It had nonetheless just begun to be implemented when the Second World War broke out.

The Cambridge don E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, which highlighted the uneasy relationship between the British and their colonial subjects, was published in 1924, and soon reached classic status in Britain. Nevertheless complacency was an overwhelming characteristic of the empire in the 1930s. This was partly because the empire and British influence seemed as prevalent as ever. A treaty of 1936 put an end to the occupation of Egypt, but British troops still guarded the Suez Canal, and there was a clause allowing Britain to reoccupy the country in the event of any threat to her interests.

British businessmen, officials, civil servants and advisers continued knocking around in Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo and other famous British expat haunts. Shrewd deals made in the nineteenth century ensured that the empire still controlled parts of the Gulf States, such as Kuwait whose foreign policy was run by Britain until 1961. To the growing number of Arab nationalists in the Middle East, nothing much seemed to have changed. When in 1924 the warlike Wahhabi tribe under their leader Ibn Saud pushed the sharif Hussein out of Mecca, uniting the whole of Arabia under what would become the Saudi royal family, they negotiated their borders with the British.

Though Iraq was no longer a Mandate after 1932, rebelling Iraqi tribesmen were still strafed by British aeroplanes. The Brooke dynasty of white rajahs continued to rule Sarawak, a state in Malaysia on the island of Borneo, as they had done for nearly a century. The Malaysian rubber planters, as was candidly observed by the novelist Somerset Maugham, whiled away their time with chota pegs brought to them by natives they called ‘boys’, as if nothing would ever disturb the empire. Few of them took much notice that Britain was no longer absolutely assured of being able to defend the far eastern parts of the empire like Singapore and Malaya, whose rubber in the age of the motor car had become very alluring to the Japanese.

In Britain life went on much as usual. The publisher Victor Gollancz had started the Left Book Club in 1935, a vehicle for attacking fascism and promoting left-wing ideas which two years later had half a million subscribers. Gollancz and his supporters wanted to wake Britain up to the fact that in Italy fascism had destroyed free speech and imprisoned its opponents, while in Germany it had become a daily occurrence for Jews to be beaten up, robbed and sometimes killed. Yet the British and their government attempted to ignore what was going on in Europe. Britain continued to be a predictable, mainly tranquil land where all classes were passionate about games. Too many of her people were shutting their eyes to the impending cataclysm of world war.