“I
died in hell – (They called it Passchendaele)”
Siegfried
Sassoon, Memorial Tablet (Great War),
October 1918
Passchendaele
Alphen, Netherlands. 2
August, 2017. Why do democracies fight wars? Monday marked the centenary of
the start of the Third Battle of Ypres, or ‘Passchendaele’, as it has come to
be known. The operational objective of
Field Marshal Haig’s ‘offensive’ was to seize what passes for high ground to
the south and east of the Belgian town of Ypres (‘Wipers’, to a lost generation
of Tommies), en route to seizing the Belgian ports, including Antwerp, from
which German submarines were operating. The strategic aim was to bleed Germany
white through a battle of attrition, which in 1917 seemed the shortest bloody
route to eventual victory. In fact both
sides bled and profusely in a battle lasting over a hundred days that was
gruesome even by the standards of that most gruesome of wars. In the struggle
between men, mud, machine guns, and military mayhem some 500,000 were killed,
of which 300,000 were British, Imperial and Dominion forces. Canada came of age
as a nation on the shallow, blood-soaked rise beneath Passchendaele village, as
the bravery of its young men carved a blood-soaked maple leaf in mud that freed
the spirit of a new nation from an old one.
Third Ypres
Like many Britons (at
least the ones educated enough to know that World War One even happened), and as
someone who knows Ypres and its environs, as I write I am thinking of those
young men who saw their youth eviscerated in the murderous morass of ‘Third
Ypres’. And yet my focus is not the
history of a battle, nor indeed the appalling suffering of those who engaged in
it. In fact, in some important strategic and tactical ways Third Ypres marked a
shift in the war in favour of the Allied cause.
No, my focus is on what the commemorations of that epic battle say about
democracies, particularly European democracies, their attitude to war today,
and the danger that systemic war is being made more, not less likely.
Sunday’s BBC coverage of the
commemoration of the battle was for the most part refreshingly honest, and yet
still failed to place Third Ypres in its strategic context. As history was
ground up to fit the values of this age the BBC still said far more about the defeatist,
pacifist Britain of today, than the Britain that a century ago fought and
ultimately won a war as vital to the freedom of Europe as World War One Part Two;
World War Two.
There was, sadly, the usual
coterie of ‘commentators’ and ‘experts’ presenting the ‘facts’ of the past
through the politically-correct lens of today.
There was also the now normal, and dare I say North American-inspired, Oh, What a Lovely War, Blackadder Goes Forth nonsense. World
War One was a kind of European civil war in which a collection of ostensibly
civilised states, led by clinically-insane leaders, engaged in form of mass societal
suicide as part of a an epic macabre theatre
d’absurde.
Why Passchendaele
Here’s the very unfashionable
thing: World War One had to be fought by the democracies, a ‘long’ war was the
only way to defeat Kaiser Wilhelm, and Third Ypres was far better fought by the
Allies than contemporary convention permits. In 1914 Wilhemine Germany as an
aggressive, expansionist, autocratic state beset by internal contradictions and
weaknesses that emerged from a militaristic and ultra-nationalistic Prussian
elite. At Oxford I became a devotee of the German historian Fritz Fischer,
whose book Germany’s War Aims in the
First World War, (Griff nach der
Weltmacht: der Kriegzielpolitik des kaizerlichen Deutschland 1914-1998) demonstrated
conclusively, and yet controversially (even in the Federal Republic of Germany
of the 1960s), that Kaiser Wilhelm and the Prussian elite planned, triggered,
and executed World War One as policy. In other words. World War One was no
accident or tragi-comedy of mutual strategic error.
Like most autocracies the
Kaiser desperately needed a swift victory as the Germany of the time was simply
not strong enough on its own to prevail. The Kaiser, and more specifically the Schlieffenplan, were thwarted because
the Western democracies, albeit in concert with autocratic, Tsarist Russia, were
just strong enough to prevent the rapid victory Berlin envisaged, as it sought
to turn the rest of Europe into a form of colony. However, the Western democracies, albeit very
different to today’s democracies, as was the America of the time, as ever took
time to muster the martial energy and the many industrial, military, and
ultimately manpower advantages available to them. It was in that meat-grinding gap between
Wilhelmine Germany’s initial plunge into war, the blunting of German military
ambitions (the miracle on the Marne et al), and the eventual defeat of the
Kaiser with the decisive British 'Blitzkreig' victory at Amiens in August 1918, that the
hell of Passchendaele took place.
Passchendaele Today
There is an old saying to
the effect that whilst ‘you’ might ignore war, war will not ignore ‘you’. Today, ‘we’ look back at Passchendaele as if
such a battle was a curious if deadly artefact of ‘ancient’ history that could
never again come to pass in Europe. Indeed, there is a kind of wilful, naive
denial in the Europe of today about such political events, as we seek to will
away systemic war. This view is normally reinforced by the laudable, if equally
naïve view that if one adheres to one’s ‘nice’ values, and purposively ignore
narrow interests, systemic war simply can never again happen. Indeed, ‘it must never happen again’ is
invariably the pious sub-text of commemorations. And yet a twenty-first century
Passchendaele is not at all unthinkable. In the 1930s there was another name
for such piety; appeasement.
Wars are not prevented
because ‘nice’ people are ‘nice’, and in so being see no evil, hear no evil, or
think no evil of others, however ‘evil’ they may be. Wars are prevented because
‘nice’ people, and the oft not-so-nice people who are charged with leading and
defending them, are given the means to prevent decidedly not-at-all nice people
believing a quick war might, just might be a viable policy option to in an
invariably domestic extremis, that by
definition is equally invariably of their own making. Or, to put it another
way, it is a profound mistake for liberals to see the world of the illiberals
through liberal eyes.
In this world there are
more than enough not-so-very-nice at all people who clearly believe the very
‘niceness’ of the European democracies is in fact a weakness that yet again makes
‘limited war’ a possibility. And, that such
a very quick war would, of course, achieve clear war aims – domestic and
foreign - decisively. However, history demonstrates that wars are always
limited until they start. Indeed, those who start such wars have traditionally
done so firm in the belief that their ‘might’ will trump ‘right’, often because
‘right’ has decided that weakness is strength firm in the belief that systemic
war must never happen again.
How to Prevent Passchendaele
21#
Rather than appease
reality for fear of history, or lose themselves yet more deeply in misplaced globalist
or Universalist ideology, Europe’s democracies must again think about how to
fight such a war. The leaders of democracies today are bound by the same
responsibility to strike the same balance between deterrence and defence as they
were then. However, it is a balance that
can only be struck by properly understanding, and at least matching, the
capability of potential threats.
That peace aim can only be
credibly achieved by demonstrating that the democracies are not only thinking
about future war, they are even preparing to fight one. Only such ‘posture’ renders
the political threshold for autocracies so high that even starting a ‘limited
war’ is simply not worth the risk. Remember, such regimes have a very different
view of the utility of war than democracies, and set the political threshold for
war at a much lower level.
Why democracies
fight wars? To prevent them. Sassoon was right; war is hell. However, Plato was, sadly, also right: “Only the dead have seen the end of war”.
Have a nice day!
Julian Lindley-French
