Lying Down In Front Of The Kaiser

Counterfactual history is the absolute pits, so it's a shame it's sometimes also necessary. I remember I got a book called What If? and its sequel when I was about 12, and for future reference, it is the perfect gift for a 12-year-old with an interest in history. It's for anyone older than 12 that I worry for if they're indulging in this game: it is basically an pre-adolescent fantasy trip where you skip through the corridors of history, righting wrongs or fighting battles the way they ought to have been fought, imagining the stories playing out with your own guiding hand safely turning the Mongols away from Baghdad or playing havok with a Hitler-run Europe. I am almost certain that this sort of thing appeals to male historians more than female ones. It's a case of playing slightly more sophisticated pew-pew games.

Take that, Napoleon

Nevertheless, there are times when we need it, and this year we're going to face one such time, because we really need to deal with the counterfactuals of WWI.  That's because if we're going to talk about remembrance and nobility and sacrifice, we also owe it to the past to properly critique the decisions made. We need to start thinking about what was right for Europe in 1914. And we cannot be too squeamish about the results.

We're going to be told a lot about the courage and heroism of the combatants in that war and our need to remember it. So let's start with the most difficult possibility: that courage was disastrous for Europe. Had the BEF thrown down their arms and fled at Mons and the French broken and collapsed at the Marne as they would 25 years later, we would have been spared both the Nazis and the Soviets and many millions would have lived rather than died. How can we praise the courage that doomed Europe to destruction? The Gove school of history seems to run that Imperial Germany was a threat to liberty and democracy. Of course, the French and the British ruled undemocratically over almost half the world, but broadly this is true: Germany was indeed a regressive and militaristic state. But you don't make countries progressive by beating them on the battlefield.

I would argue that the priority of Europe in 1914 was achieving a content and stable Germany. The problem of Germany's vast power compared with its European neighbours has been unsolved since the country's formation. Ironically today the problem is that Berlin has Europe on a plate in way Bismarck, Wilhelm and Hitler could only dream of, and yet refuses to take the driving seat. Acknowledging the obvious early on - that Germany was a country quite capable of taking on Britain, France and Russia and later America on its own twice in three decades, the second time from a standing start - would be to acknowledge that Germany was simply too powerful to oppose. From a balance of power point of view, it was right to let Germany win precisely because that was the correct balance of power.

The probable natural size of Germany at this time

A Germany in control of Europe after a swift war would undoubtedly follow protocol of the times - extract reparations, a couple of territorial concessions, presumably colonial (I doubt there was much more of France they wanted), demand disarmament of their enemies, and then leave, safe in the knowledge that they were safe from the other Great Powers for the time being. What then? The Kaiser might have been popular for winning a war, but there wasn't much he could have done to prevent the growing power of parliament. The business interests of a newly wealthy Germany would agitate for more political power, and without the fear of Lenin's Russian Bolsheviks it is difficult to imagine the SDP running into too much opposition either. Remember that there was universal manhood suffrage in the Reichstag, and the SDPs could only run up against Bismarckian anti-politics for so long. Eventually aristocratic power would have to relent and give way. There would be no stab in the back theory, no Jews under the bed. A country needs time to accept that the old order wasn't working, and a relatively content post-victory Germany was the place for that to happen.

What of France? Would the Nazi Party have turned up there instead? It's possible. Anti-semitism in France was virulent, and would doubtless have found its way into the post-defeat rationalisations. I doubt we'd see an exact mirror of Germany, though, for a number of reasons. Firstly, democracy was simply more ingrained in France than Germany. Fascism certainly had roots there, but the Third Republic had lasted long enough and suffered enough crises to suggest that another defeat wouldn't kill it off. The Nazis required the threat of Soviet communism to make it the more attractive out of two non-democratic options - a world with Lenin sat pontificating in Zurich would not have that threat. Secondly, the war would not have killed off millions of Frenchmen, emptied the treasury and destroyed the industrial plant. It's difficult to imagine even crippling reparations would have had the same effect as four years of war eventually did. The resentment simply wouldn't be there on the scale of Weimar. And lastly, there were fewer Jews in France. Crude, I know, but true.

Russia also does relatively well out of the counterfactual, assuming they were also crushed by the German war machine. Fewer war dead, lots of lost territory but a monarchy still intact. Probably a doomed monarchy, true, but only as far as a February revolution, not as far as an October revolution. The long descent into political reform beckons, but it does not beckon Lenin, who the Germans probably won't even let back into Russia.

Britain is largely undamaged, if humiliated, and goes back to watching its Empire decline. Wilfred Owen publishes thirty-two books of poetry, witnessing a creative peak in 1935 before succumbing to the allure of Yeats' mystic rose, whereupon he churns out tranches of junk symbology into an undignified retirement.

When he was still respectable

You see, I'm doing it already. We don't really need to go too far, though. The point is clear enough. The fact that the combatants in a war are brave is irrelevant. It's even irrelevant if they're fighting for liberalism against illiberalism, if that illiberalism would be better ironed out if it won. We must not let the poppy allow us to forget the truth, as Alan Bennett warned. This is not a question of patriotism, but of the hard truth. I love my country very dearly, but in 1914, I would rather my countrymen had dropped their rifles and surrendered.