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Not I, But The Wind… by Frieda Lawrence (1935)

We are so much more than we understand. Understanding is such a little part of us, there is so much in us of unexplored territory that understanding can never grasp.

I believe the chief tie between Lawrence and me was always the wonder of living . . . every little or big thing that happened carried its glamour with it. (p.60)

D.H. Lawrence died of tuberculosis in Vence in the south of France on 2 March 1930. His wife and soul-mate Frieda Lawrence tells us that she initially meant to pay her husband the tribute of complete silence about their 18 turbulent years together. But someone obviously prevailed on her to write a memoir and this book was published in 1935.

I owe it to him and to myself to write the truth as well as I can.

Ceaseless travelling

It’s an odd, uneven, patchwork but compelling work. On the factual front, it is arranged in simple chronological order with a chapter apiece about each of the main eras of their marriage. In particular you learn a lot about the extraordinary number of places they lived in. They were tramps, hobos, perpetual itinerants. At two or three places they seem to have lived for a couple of years, maximum, but some of the chapters describe half a dozen places they moved between, and they are always moving, travelling. After the war to Florence, then Capri, then several different residences in Sicily, before they took up Mabel Luhan’s invitation to join her in Taos, New Mexico, which triggered their round the world journey by ship across the Mediterranean, to Ceylon, to Australia, where they stay at a place on the west coast, before a few days in Sydney, then moving to a cottage 50 k south. Even when they arrived in Toas they moved locations till Mabel kindly gifted them a ranch in the foothills of the Rockies. But after a hard winter Lawrence took Frieda south to Mexico where, again, they never settled, staying in Mexico City, then to a place on Lake Chapara, then somewhere in Oaxaca.

Here it gets complicated because Frieda wanted to go back to Europe to see her mother, so they travelled together to New York, where she caught a ship for Europe (after a flaring argument on the quayside). After heading west to Chicago, then back to Taos, we suddenly find that Lawrence has taken ship for England, where he stays a bit in London, before heading south to France to a quiet place on the Italian border named Spotalino. They take a breather here, but only a few pages later are heading for Switzerland, then jaunts back to Germany to see her family.

What I found mind-boggling about all this is that they were poor, really poor, dirt poor, and yet could afford to up sticks and travel round the world and stay at a bewildering number of places, many if not most of which were in lovely settings. The world they moved through seems in this account to have been simpler and much, much, much cheaper than the world I grew up in fifty years later, and vastly more free and easy than the super-expensive Euro world we live in today.

Domesticity

What comes over is how, at every place they settled in, Lawrence and Frieda set about washing and cleaning and scrubbing, throwing out the awful old furniture and buying old native furniture or even making their own, painting the walls and crockery, turning every place they stayed into a home, no matter how transiently. Whether laying the pipes from a spring or carving a rocking chair, or making sure there were vases of flowers everywhere, the book is flavoured with a lovely sense of beautifying domesticity.

Arguments

Not that it was all sweetness and light. For feminist readers, or anyone looking for ammunition to attack Lawrence, Frieda gives plenty of examples of his temper tantrums, his bullying and abuse: he ridiculed her painting, mocked her in letters to her own mother, threw a glass of wine in her face at a dinner with her own family. He could be a very difficult man to live with. It’s not only ridiculous that such a weedy, frail specimen wrote so cockily about the need for men to be men, about the need for male culture and male struggle and so on – at some points it becomes creepy when he demands her submission to him.

Living intensely

But then, there are two things which redeem the situation. For all his demanding nature, Lawrence let Frieda live as no-one before or since had done. So when they kissed and made up, on the sunny days, she experienced a fullness of life, a richness in moment-to-moment living unlike anything else, wonderful incandescent.

Everything he met had the newness of a creation just that moment come into being. (p.31)

Wherever Lawrence was, the surroundings came alive so intensely. (p.99)

Travelling with him was living new experiences vividly every minute. (p.101)

Living with a genius

The other thing she makes clear is that Lawrence was a genius and genius is difficult.

As for pretending to understand Lawrence or to explain him, I am neither so impertinent nor such a fool. We are so much more than we understand. Understanding is such a little part of us, there is so much in us of unexplored territory that understanding can never grasp. As Lawrence and I were adventurers by nature, we explored.

I only know that I felt the wonder of him always. Sometimes it overwhelmed me, it knocked out all my consciousness as if a flame had burnt me up. I remained in awe and wonder.

Sometimes I hated him and held him off as if he were the devil himself. At other times I took him as you take the weather. Here’s a spring day, glorious sunshine, what a joy!…

I learned that a genius contains the whole gamut of human emotions, from highest to lowest. I learned that a man must be himself, bad or good at any price.

Patchwork

I mentioned it being a bit of a patchwork. This is because it contains quite a few of Lawrence’s letters. A standard biography would consist mostly of the author’s text with selected quotations from the subject’s letters to demonstrate a point. But here Frieda gives you 6, 7, 8 pages describing the events of a particular period (their time in Cornwall during the Great War, say, or their stay in Australia) and then a block of 7, 8, 9, 10 letters from Lawrence in their entirety. There are so many letters, quoted in full, that it’s almost like reading two books, Frieda’s version of events, then Lawrence’s dashed-off letters, side by side.

And not just letters but poems, the text includes half a dozen or so poems which she associates with particular places and times. Towards the end she just includes an essay of Lawrence’s about nightingales. So it’s a sort of mosaic. Or maybe a scrapbook of memories.

Mother

If Frieda was by his side most of their lives who were these letters to? Her mother. Lawrence developed a close relationship with Frieda’s mother and wrote her long, considerate, informative and funny letters describing their latest adventures in Australia or New Mexico or Mexico. He regularly addresses her, jocularly, as die Schwiegermutter (German for mother-in-law). But there are also letters to Frieda’s older sister, Else. Most if not all of these he wrote in German and Frieda has translated.

At moments it almost feels like an edition of Lawrence’s letters with a little light commentary from Frieda. For example, the chapter called ‘Going away together’ has just 2 pages of Frieda and 21 pages of Lawrence’s letters and the ‘Back to Europe’ chapter includes an epic 70 pages of letters. But then again, other chapters are entirely Frieda with no letters at all. So it varies.

Lack of specificity about Lawrence’s writings

About Lawrence’s actual writing, Frieda is often quite vague. She mentions particular works which were written at particular places but rarely goes into any detail, about characters, plot or meaning. Here’s a typical example:

We spent some weeks at Zell-am-See with Nusch, her husband and children at her villa. We bathed and boated and Lawrence wrote his ‘Captain’s Doll’ there. (p.84)

Or:

He wrote ‘Birds, Beasts and Flowers’ and ‘Sea and Sardinia’ at Fontana Vecchia, and also ‘The Lost Girl’. ‘Sea and Sardinia’ he wrote straightaway when we came back from Sardinia in about six weeks. And I don’t think he altered a word of it. (p.100)

Anybody looking for insight into particular works will be disappointed. I was particularly disappointed that there was no detail about the three big legal controversies: the banning of ‘Women in Love’, the banning of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, and the shutting down of the exhibition of his paintings in London.

She does the general psychological impact rather than the details. So in several places she comments on Lawrence’s ability to utterly focus.

Then he would sit in a corner, so quietly and absorbedly, to write. The words seemed to pour out of his hand onto the paper, unconsciously, naturally and without effort, as flowers bloom and birds fly past. His was a strange concentration, he seemed transferred into another world, the world of creation. (p.38)

And, later:

Often before he conceived a new idea he was irritable and disagreeable, but when it had come, the new vision, he could go ahead, and was eager and absorbed. (p.173)

Chapters

  1. Foreword
  2. We Meet
  3. Going Away Together
  4. Isartal
  5. Walking to Italy
  6. 1913 to 1914
  7. The War
  8. Lawrence and My Mother
  9. After the War
  10. America
  11. Going Back to Europe
  12. Nearing the End
  13. Conclusion

1. Foreword

Frieda establishes the setting where she is writing the book. She is back on the ranch, the Kiowa Ranch, which Mabel Luhan gave to them, and where she, Lawrence and, later, the artist Brett, lived together, in 1924 and 1925. Many of the chapters start with her describing the peaceful rural scenery around her, before she starts describing the events of each chapter.

It was still cold last night, though it is the middle of May.

Here the ranch, with the Sangre de Cristo mountain range behind it to the northeast, slopes to the desert. The big pine trees stand like dark sentinels in the night at the edge of the twenty acre alfalfa field. Beyond them floats the desert. You can see far. A few lights twinkle at Ranches de Taos. A shepherd’s fire glows. All is covered by an enormous sky full of stars, stars that hang in the pine trees, in Lawrence’s big tree with his phœnix on it that the Brett painted, stars that lean on the edge of the mountains, stars twinkling out of the Milky Way. It is so still. Only stars, nothing but stars.

This morning early there was still ice on the edge of the irrigation ditch from the Gallina Canyon. There is such a rush of water. The ice is melting high up in the mountains and the water sings through one’s blood.

But now, about midday, it is warm. The desert below circles in rings of shadow and sunshine. The alfalfa field is green, during these last days of sunshine it has turned green.

I am in the little cabin that Lawrence built with the Indians. I sit in the chair that he made with the ‘petit point’ canvas that we bought in the Rue de la Paix in Paris and that I embroidered. It took me a long time, and when I got bored, he did a bit.

It is a nice chair, although a bit rough, carved as it was with only a penknife.

So here I sit and try to write.

2. We Meet

Three and a half pages. Frieda was 33 and had everything a woman was meant to hope for, a respectable marriage to a man successful in his field (the notable philologist Ernest Weekley), a nice home and three lovely children. But a friend had recently been teaching her the new theories of Sigmund Freud which had begun to make her think about the search for an authentic self. So the door was already ajar when Lawrence came to lunch with her husband. They had some time alone together chatting before the meal and found themselves on the same wavelength. Rather vaguely, Frieda describes three or four further meetings, often with the children. The following appears to be the crunch moment:

One day we met at a station in Derbyshire. My two small girls were with us. We went for a long walk through the early-spring woods and fields. The children were running here and there as young creatures will. We came to a small brook, a little stone bridge crossed it. Lawrence made the children some paper boats and put matches in them and let them float downstream under the bridge. Then he put daisies in the brook, and they floated down with their upturned faces. Crouched by the brook, playing there with the children, Lawrence forgot about me completely. Suddenly I knew I loved him. He had touched a new tenderness in me.

3. Going Away Together

Two pages of Frieda’s narrative, 21 pages of his letters to her. They meet at Charing Cross station, take ship across the Channel, travel to Metz. Lawrence met Frieda’s father just the once, and they sat in glowering silence, the hostile aristocrat facing the miner’s son.

4. Isartal

Isartal is a name given to the valley of the River Isar, near Munich, in Bavaria, south Germany. Here, after delays, they met up and started their life together, living cheaply in a little flat lent them by a friend.

This morning I found the wild red columbines that I had first found with him. There they were at my feet, in the hollow where the workmen have been cutting the logs for the new house. A delicate blaze of startling red and yellow, in front of me, the columbines, like gay small flags. A rabbit stood still behind an oak shrub and watched me. A humming-bird hummed at me in consternation, as startled at me as I was at him. These things are Lawrence to me…

When Lawrence first found a gentian, a big single blue one, I remember feeling as if he had a strange communion with it, as if the gentian yielded up its blueness, its very essence, to him. Everything he met had the newness of a creation just that moment come into being.

Lawrence talked about his embattled boyhood, whereas Frieda had a lovely childhood in the garrison town of Metz.

Lawrence’s thriftiness

One day I bathed in the Isar and a heel came off one of my shoes on the rough shore; so I took both shoes off and threw them into the Isar. Lawrence looked at me in amazement. ‘He’s shocked, as I must walk home barefoot, but it’s a lonely road, it doesn’t matter,’ I thought. But it wasn’t that; he was shocked at my wastefulness. He lectured me: ‘A pair of shoes takes a long time to make and you should respect the labour somebody’s put into those shoes.’ To which I answered: ‘Things are there for me and not I for them, so when they are a nuisance I throw them away.’

Frieda’s children

She is mortally wounded about having to abandon her children. Her husband vowed she’d never see them again. Her mourning irritated Lawrence. Selfishly, he wanted her to devote herself to him alone, and have no rivals for her love.

Lawrence’s changeableness

He’d have quick changes of mood and thought. This puzzled me. ‘But Lawrence, last week you said exactly the opposite of what you are saying now.’ ‘And why shouldn’t I? Last week I felt like that, now like this. Why shouldn’t I?’

5. Walking to Italy

In August 1913 they set off to walk from south Germany across the Alps into Italy. It was Lawrence’s birthday en route. It took about 6 weeks. Sometimes they slept in haylofts. They were tramps.

I remember Lawrence saying to me: ‘You always identify yourself with life, why do you?’ I answered: ‘Because I feel like it.’

They danced and sang with the peasants they met en route.

6. 1913 to 1914

Back in London their best friends are John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, a perfect friend. When they finally got married at a registry office, JMM and KM were the witnesses. Lawrence quickly bought a new wedding ring and Frieda gave her old one to Katherine, and it was buried with her when she died (wretchedly young, in 1923) (p.66). Cynthia and Herbert Asquith became friends and Cynthia stuck with them during the bad times of the war and legal prosecution.

They went back to Italy and found a cottage at Lerici and got to know the housekeeper and her family. Here he wrote The Rainbow, originally titled ‘The Sisters’. He was upset when his literary mentor, novelist, literary critic, editor and reviewer of the day, David Garnett, didn’t like it (p.61).

Rejection

When I think that nobody wanted Lawrence’s amazing genius, how he was jeered at, suppressed, turned into nothing, patronized at best, the stupidity of our civilization comes home to me. How necessary he was! How badly needed! Now that he is dead and his great love for his fellowmen is no longer there in the flesh, people sentimentalize over him. (p.63)

Frieda’s lack of social stuffiness

With the dangerous quality of his work he accepted his more than doubtful financial position and I think one of my merits in his eyes was my never being eager to be rich or to play a role in the social world. It was hardly merit on my part, I enjoyed being poor and I didn’t want to play a role in the world.

7. The War

War breaks out. They are in London. They meet Eddie Marsh and Rupert Brooke who already looks doomed. One night they see a zeppelin over Hampstead Heath. They take a cottage in Berkshire. They have a Christmas 1914 meal with guests Gordon Campbell, Koteliansky, the Murrys, the artist Mark Gertler and Gilbert and Mary Cannan.

He goes to meet Bertrand Russell and is introduced to Lady Ottoline Morrell and her clique at Garsington Manor. The Rainbow is published then prosecuted in an obscenity trial at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on 13 November 1915. As a result 1,011 copies were seized and burnt. After this ban, it became unavailable in Britain for 11 years. Lawrence was very bitter indeed and took it out on Frieda and vowed not to write another book.

‘The Rainbow’ appeared and was suppressed. When it happened I felt as though a murder had been done, murder of a new, free utterance on the face of the earth. I thought the book would be hailed as a joyous relief from the ordinary dull stuff, as a way out into new and unknown regions. With his whole struggling soul Lawrence had written it. Then to have it condemned, nobody standing for it—the bitterness of it! He was sex-mad, they said. Little even now do people realize what men like Lawrence do for the body of life, what he did to rescue the fallen angel of sex. Sex had fallen in the gutter, it had to be pulled out. What agony it was to know the flame in him and see it quenched by his fellowmen! ‘I’ll never write another word I mean,’ he said in his bitterness; ‘they aren’t fit for it,’ and for a time the flame in him was quenched. (p.71)

They move to a cottage in Cornwall, along with the Murrys who come to live nearby. Charming details of domestic life. They plan a commune of like-minded artists. But they are spied on and suspected. Their house is repeatedly searched. These sorry events are chronicled in great detail in the famous Nightmare chapter of ‘Kangaroo’. Eventually the authorities gave them three days to pack their bags, and expelled them from Cornwall.

When we were turned out of Cornwall something changed in Lawrence for ever. (p.78)

They go to London to stay with the poet H.D. and Richard Aldington, who would edit so many of Lawrence’s writings and provide introductions to the Penguin editions of his works. Then they go to stay at a cottage in Berkshire which partly heals Lawrence, but even here they are surveilled and followed. Then the Armistice (11 November 1918).

8. Lawrence and My Mother

A short chapter detailing the close relationship between Lawrence and Frieda’s mother who was the much-loved matriarch of the Richthofen household, wonderful mother to her and her two sisters. How much Lawrence enjoyed the company of the three women.

9. After the War

Lawrence doesn’t want to visit Germany immediately after the war so he goes direct to Florence. Frieda meets him there. She arrives at 4am and he insists on taking her on a carriage ride tour of the city in the mist: ‘and ever since Florence is the most beautiful town to me, the lilytown, delicate and flowery’.

Frieda makes passing reference to what I think she implies is the community of gay Brits in Florence but Frieda wasn’t impressed by their ‘wickedness’.

The wickedness there seemed like old maids’ secret rejoicing in wickedness. Corruption is not interesting to me, nor does it frighten me: I find it dull.

They move on to Capri but Frieda didn’t like it.

From Florence we went to Capri. I didn’t like Capri; it was so small an island, it seemed hardly capable to contain all the gossip that flourished there. So Lawrence went to Sicily and took Fontana Vecchia for us, outside Taormina. Living in Sicily after the war years was like coming to life again.

Frieda gives half a dozen letters Lawrence wrote to her mother. One of them is interesting from a literary point of view:

I am not working at the present time. I wrote three long stories since we are here—that will make quite a nice book. I also collected my short stories ready for a book. So, for the moment I am free, I don’t want to begin anything else…

This is interesting because it confirms the sense you have, reading his works chronologically, that after ‘Women in Love’ was published, and the three novellas and the short stories arranged – there was a hiatus. There is a distinct pause and change of pace in Lawrence’s output. And when he resume writing novels they feel considerably different from the pre-war ones, with all three of ‘Aaron’s Rod’, ‘Kangaroo’ and ‘The Plumed Serpent’ feeling below par, what Richard Aldington called improvisations.

Frieda briefly describes their travels and experiences in Sicily. She doesn’t explain any of the reasoning for why they decided to take up Mabel Luhan’s invitation to go and stay in her artists’ colony in Toas, New Mexico, and why Lawrence decided to travel there Eastwards, across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, onto Ceylon and then stopping at Australia. Frieda gives us five of Lawrence’s letters to her mother and daughter, in which he gives wonderfully spooky descriptions of Australia’s uncanniness which haunt his novel ‘Kangaroo’.

Australia is a weird, big country. It feels so empty and untrodden. The minute the night begins to go down, even the towns, even Sydney, which is huge, begins to feel unreal, as if it were only a daytime imagination, and in the night it did not exist. That is a queer sensation: as if life here really had never entered in: as if it were just sprinkled over, and the land lay untouched. (p.115)

10. America

16 pages of text, 22 of letters.

A brisk account of settling at Taos and some of the friends they made. The chief point is the battle with Mabel Dodge for Lawrence’s soul. After just a few pages she’s whisked us off to Mexico.

Lawrence went to Guadalajara and found a house with a patio on the Lake of Chapala. There Lawrence began to write his ‘Plumed Serpent’. He sat by the lake under a pepper tree writing it. (p.122)

After six months or so in Mexico, they went back to the States, going to New York where she caught a ship back to Europe, while Lawrence headed west then south, back to Taos. Then he was persuaded to go back to England. As so often, it descends into a bewildering list of destinations: London, then to Paris, to Strassburg and Baden-Baden, back by ship to America, New York then back to Taos.

Here they had an idyllic summer. Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield came to stay nearby. They laid pipes from the freshwater spring. they had a cow and chickens. In the autumn they went back to Mexico City. Brief anecdote about a lunch with Somerset Maugham who Frieda thought was an acid, unhappy man. Then they rented a house in Oaxaca where Lawrence quickly write ‘Mornings in Mexico’ and revised ‘The Plumed Serpent’. Interestingly, Lawrence later told Frieda he wished he’d ended the novel differently. Anthony Burgess doesn’t like its hanging, indeterminate ending, either. But I think it’s entirely appropriate to Lawrence characters’ endless vacillations.

Here he becomes ill and they go back to Mexico City where a specialist tells them Lawrence has tuberculosis and only a few years to live (p.133).

They had returned to New Mexico with Brett, the artist, and Frieda devotes a couple of pages to describing how unhappy she was at Brett’s slavish devotion to Lawrence so that it turned into a competition for his approval. Throw in Mabel Luhan, the American patron, and you had three women vying for Lawrence’s affections.

11. Going Back to Europe

Leaping over times and details, Frieda says Lawrence wanted to return to Europe and lo and behold they take a house in Spotorno which had been recommended to them by the published Martin Secker. Her grown-up daughter Barbara comes to stay and there is an almighty argument between the three of them with Lawrence throwing a glass of wine in Frieda’s face and Barbara telling Lawrence he doesn’t deserve Frieda. Compounded when Lawrence’s sister, Ada, turns up, and forms an anti-German alliance with her so that Lawrence for a while locks his bedroom door to Frieda.

That spring, they move again, this time to a villa outside Florence – the Villa Mirenda – and, for the first time, she thinks she gets the Italian feel for life. It’s here that he starts writing ‘Lady Chatterley’. This is everything she has to say about it.

Then he wrote ‘Lady Chatterley’. After breakfast – we had it at seven or so – he would take his book and pen and a cushion, followed by John the dog, and go into the woods behind the Mirenda and come back to lunch with what he had written. I read it day by day and wondered how his chapters were built up and how it all came to him. I wondered at his courage and daring to face and write these hidden things that people dare not write or say.

For two years ‘Lady Chatterley’ lay in an old chest that Lawrence had painted a greeny yellow with roses on it, and often when I passed that chest, I thought: ‘Will that book ever come out of there?’

Lawrence asked me: ‘Shall I publish it, or will it only bring me abuse and hatred again?’ I said: ‘You have written it, you believe in it, all right, then publish it.’ So one day we talked it all over with Orioli; we went to a little old-fashioned printer, with a little old printing shop where they had only enough type to do half the book — and ‘Lady Chatterley’ was printed. When it was done, stacks and stacks of ‘Lady C …’, or Our Lady, as we called it — were sitting on the floor of Orioli’s shop. There seemed such a terrific lot of them that I said in terror: ‘We shall never sell all these’. A great many were sold before there was a row; first some did not arrive at their destination in America, then there came abuse from England… but it was done… his last great effort.

He had done it… and future generations will benefit, his own race that he loved and his own class, that is less inhibited, for he spoke out of them and for them, there in Tuscany, where the different culture of another race gave the impetus to his work. (p.172)

Lawrence takes up painting, with absolutely no training. In one of the letters he says:

I seem to be losing my will-to-write altogether: in spite of the fact that I am working at an English novel – but so differently from the way I have written before! I spend much more time painting – have already done three, nearly four, fairly large pictures. I wonder what you’ll say to them when you’ll see them. Painting is more fun than writing, much more of a game, and costs the soul far, far less. (p.196)

Aldous and Maria Huxley come to stay nearby and become good friends. Huxley tried to teach Frieda how to ski but her legs got tangled up and she was always falling over.

But Lawrence gets tired of the country and wants the sea so he goes and finds a place to stay at Port Cros, an island off the south of France. He’s become friendly with Richard Aldington and Frieda tells us it was here that Aldington began his classic novel ‘Death of a Hero’. Then they move to Toulon and spend the winter in the Beau Rivage hotel. Here Lawrence wrote his series of poems titled ‘Pansies’ (p.175).

In the spring they went to Spain, to Barcelona then to Mallorca. See what I mean by their restless, endless travelling? She barely mentions the publication and legal proceedings against Lady Chatterley (‘…what with the abuse of Lady Chatterley and the disapproval of the paintings…’ is as much detail as we get). They both travel to London to see the exhibition of his paintings at the Warren Gallery. It’s not clear from her account whether they’re still there when the paintings were confiscated by the police.

Suddenly Lawrence is in Florence and falls ill again. So Frieda takes him north, to Germany, to the Tegernsee, where they stay in a rough peasant house. From now on it was all about tending to his ill health.

It’s here that Frieda inserts a seven-page essay about the nightingale, which is a sort of commentary on John Keats’s famous poem on the same subject, followed by a huge section of letters, 70 pages, 46 letters, in total! They contain lots and lots about travel arrangements, and all kinds of boring details about publishers and translations and fees and contracts. One of the most striking passages is in a letter to Else where Lawrence gives his response to prosecution brought against his paintings in London.

You hear the pictures are to be returned to me on condition that they are never shown again in England, but sent away to me on the Continent, that they may never pollute that island of lily-livered angels again. What hypocrisy and poltroonery, and how I detest and despise my England. I had rather be a German or anything than belong to such a nation of craven, cowardly hypocrites. My curse on them! They will burn my four picture books, will they? So it is decreed. But they shall burn through the thread of their own existence as a nation, at the same time. Delenda est Cartago – but she will destroy herself, amply. Che nuoia! (p.248)

12. Nearing the End

Moving and upsetting description of Lawrence’s steady decline in the villa Beau Soleil at Bandol, her pity for his painful coughing, the wearisome drawing of breath as his TB progressed, and their mutual forgiveness.

I can only think with awe of those last days of his, as of the rays of the setting sun . . . and the setting sun obliterates all the sordid details of a landscape. So the dreary passages in our lives were wiped out and he said to me: ‘Why, oh why did we quarrel so much?’ and I could see how it grieved him… our terrible quarrels… but I answered: ‘Such as we were, violent creatures, how could we help it?’

It was here, on his deathbed, that he wrote his final work, ‘Apocalypse’. A doctor sent by their friend Mark Gertler, advises he move to a higher altitude, and so he took the exhausting train journey from Toulon to Antibes and then by car up to Vence, to a sanatorium named ‘Ad Astra’ (Latin for ‘To the stars).

There’s no indication how long this all took, though time for lots of visitors, close friends bringing varieties of food to find something he could keep down. I was intrigued to learn he was visited by H.G. Wells. Sometimes he was cruel to her.

One day he said to my daughter: ‘Your mother does not care for me any more, the death in me is repellent to her.’ (p.262)

The fact that she sets this down suggests how much it hurt her. They took him out of the sanatorium to a villa, putting him to bed. Right at the end he was in such pain he cried out for morphine. Fascinating that Aldous and Maria Huxley were there in these last days and it was Aldous who went off to find a doctor to get the drug. He returns with a doctor who injected morphine, he grew calmer, his breathing slowed, became interrupted, then stopped. He was dead. Frieda’s account of her loss, the completeness of her loss, the extinction of someone so full of life, made me cry.

13. Conclusion

In its entirety, this last section consists of a disclaimer:

Now that I have told my story in such a condensed way, letting blow through my mind anything that wanted to blow, I know how little I have said – how much I could say that perhaps would be more interesting. But I wrote what rose up, and here it is.

So there you go.

Thoughts

As I’ve said, there are fascinating biographical titbits scattered throughout, such as Frieda freely admitting she was useless at housework and Lawrence did it all, the strong implication that he was really unpleasant to her during the war years, some upsetting accounts of his nastiness to her – then again, loads of descriptions of bucolic happiness at Taos or their various villas.

But what stands out head and shoulders above all that is their extraordinary freedom to travel. All the world seems to be their oyster. There are hundreds of descriptions of wonderful places that turn the reader quite green with envy.

We are on the top of the island, and look down on green pine-tops, down to the blue sea, and the other islands and the mainland. Since I came I have not been down to the sea again – and Frieda has bathed only once. But it is very pretty. And at night the lights flash at Toulon and Hyères and Lavandou.

Or:

I think of Bandol and our little villa ‘Beau Soleil’ on the sea, the big balcony windows looking toward the sea, another window at the side overlooking a field of yellow narcissus called ‘soleil’ and pine trees beyond and again the sea. I remember sunny days when the waves came flying along with white manes, they looked as if they might come flying right up the terrace into his room.

I wish I’d had even one holiday as fresh and scenic and lovely as Lawrence and Frieda seemed to enjoy on almost every day of their blessed existence.

Credit

‘Not I, But The Wind… by Frieda Lawrence was published in 1935 by William Heinemann. References are to the 1983 Granada paperback edition.

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by Simon on March 17, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Biography, English literature, Great War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on March 17, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/03/17/not-i-but-the-wind-frieda-lawrence/

First World War reviews

Not a recommended reading list, this is just a list of reviews of books I’ve read and exhibitions I’ve visited on the subject of the First World War.

History

Fiction and memoirs

The Good Soldier Švejk

Exhibitions

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by Simon on January 29, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Germany, Great War, History, War, World War One
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Posted by Simon on January 29, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/01/29/first-world-war-reviews/

The Shadow Line: A Confession by Joseph Conrad (1917)

A sudden passion of anxious impatience rushed through my veins, gave me such a sense of the intensity of existence as I have never felt before or since. I discovered how much of a seaman I was, in heart, in mind, and, as it were, physically – a man exclusively of sea and ships; the sea the only world that counted, and the ships, the test of manliness, of temperament, of courage and fidelity – and of love.
(The narrator’s feelings in the early, optimistic, part of ‘The Shadow Line’, p.40)

When I turned my eyes to the ship, I had a morbid vision of her as a floating grave.
(The narrator’s feeling after weeks of being becalmed on a plague ship, page 92)

Conrad’s first novel was published in 1895 when he was 38 years old. By 1917 when ‘The Shadow Line’ appeared, he had published ten novels, six novellas and twenty-five or so short stories, so had a lot of experience under his belt. ‘The Shadow Line’ is often taken to be the masterpiece of Conrad’s late period, although he was to go on and publish four more long novels before his death in 1926 (aged 66).

Conrad coined the phrase ‘shadow line’ to mean the dividing line between youth and maturity, ‘that twilight region between youth and maturity’. A simple summary of the story is that it’s a first-person narrative by a young merchant officer who assumes his first command of a ship as captain, and the series of unfortunate and then disastrous events which follow.

Date: in the Officers’ Home the narrator and Giles read papers which are full of details of Queen Victoria’s first jubilee, which was in 1887. The settings of a lot of Conrad’s stories are much earlier than you assume.

Synopsis

Part 1. In port

The narrator has been mate aboard a merchant ship operating around the Malay Peninsula for 18 months when he impulsively quits his job, citing an obscure feeling of ‘life emptiness’ (p.49).

He arranges to catch a ship home but has 4 days before it leaves so goes to stay in the Officers’ Home. Here the sullen steward tries to keep a letter from him which turns out to be a request to go and visit the harbour master about a possible command. The steward had wanted to hide it because he wanted the command to go to the long-term resident of the Home, a captain named Hamilton who hasn’t paid his bill for ages. This situation and the subterfuge of the steward and the encouragement of old Captain Giles to confront the steward and ask for the message and then the way the steward feels almost suicidal when his little deceit is discovered and Captain Giles has to go and comfort him – all this may appear extremely tangential to a story about a young merchant seaman being given his first command, and yet it takes up a third of the entire narrative, up to page 45 of this 130-page text.

Some of the descriptions of this behaviour (the steward’s, Captain Giles’s) barely make sense and the immense amount of time spent describing this trivial incident warns the reader that the sometimes incomprehensible element in Conrad’s imagining and writing are very dominant here; and, more importantly, give you a strong sense that he’s padding his story out.

Anyway, the harbour master has been looking for him because a British ship’s captain died in Bangkok, there’s a vacancy for the captainship and his previous captain, Kent, strongly recommended him, despite being a bit upset that he’d chosen to leave.

So old Captain Giles helps him pack up his stuff, get some coolies to carry it down to the docks, where he jumps into the steam launch which takes him out to the ship which the harbour master has arranged will transport him to Bangkok. He is aboard it for four days and the captain never ceases his antagonistic hostile attitude because waiting for the narrator, delayed their departure by three hours.

Part 2. His disastrous command

They arrive in Bangkok, he leaves the transporter ship and steps aboard his command.

Putting my foot on her deck for the first time, I received the feeling of deep physical satisfaction. Nothing could equal the fullness of that moment, the ideal completeness of that emotional experience which had come to me without the preliminary toil and disenchantments of an obscure career.

He quickly meets Burns, the first mate, a nervous wanting man who puts him at permanent unease. Burns tells him the story of the old captain’s infatuation with a white woman in Haiphong which kept them there long past their time, how he came onboard after a week’s absence looking ill, and declined quickly during the subsequent voyage, dying in his cabin chair about noon. Towards the end he was full of hate and spitefully told Burns he wished the whole ship would go down with all hands. Now Burns is sullenly convinced the narrator has taken the vacant post which he coveted.

So bad karma but worse is to come, namely 1) endless delay due to ‘silly commercial complications’ in getting the ship loaded and underway, during which 2) the tropical heat brings a lot of the crew down with illness. The steward goes ashore with cholera and dies within the week. Burns is afflicted and, sullenly, resentfully, has to be taken ashore.

Finally after 6 weeks stewing in the humid heat, the captain insists Burns, still too ill to walk unaided, is returned to the ship and they are towed downriver to the estuary. He is excited, sleeps and wakes to the first day of his command etc, but the ship is still cursed. There is virtually no wind and so, like Coleridge’s ship:

Day after day, day after day
We stuck, nor breath nor motion
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean

And they haven’t escaped the contagion. Two more of the crew come down with severe fever. The narrator makes a point of keeping burns, confined to his bed, informed of their lack of movement and is dismayed when the mate attributes it to the evil curse of the late captain.

They just can’t escape from the Bay of Siam. In particular the large mountain of Koh-ring stays within sight day after day, as if they’re bewitched, as if they’re under a spell, and Conrad very deliberately deploys words like magic, spell, bewitched, supernatural evil, evil spell, evil powers, purposeful malevolence, fiendish and so on to create a spooky atmosphere. Meanwhile the disease moves through the entire crew, except for healthy Ransome and the narrator, weakening them and leaving them with ‘a hunted, apprehensive look in their eyes’. Conrad lays on the ghost ship vibe with a trowel.

Eventually you realise that there is precious little plot here, instead the narrative is following the classic Conrad parabola from reasonably sensible, real-world affairs and business, larded with a bit of youthful naivete, which is then slowly and steadily crushed, as the sense of doom and fatedness and futility and slow-mounting horror takes control, until the narrator ends up having visions of the ship as a floating grave and wonders whether he’s going mad.

There were moments when I felt, not only that I would go mad, but that I had gone mad already; so that I dared not open my lips for fear of betraying myself by some insane shriek… (p.100)

It is the usual Conrad hysteria breaking through, the same terrifying hysteria which dominates the end of The Secret Agent.

Next thing that happens is he discovers four of the vials in the medicine chest which should contain quinine are full of some nondescript white crystals. Burns accuses the captain of selling off the quinine ashore for a pretty penny. This only moderate incident is made the peg for the narrator to blame himself immoderately. it feels willed, it feels as if Conrad needed a pretext to place the narrator in the next stage of his transition from youthful optimism to more weathered manhood.

The person I could never forgive was myself. Nothing should ever be taken for granted. The seed of everlasting remorse was sown in my breast. ‘I feel it’s all my fault,’ I exclaimed, ‘mine and nobody else’s. That’s how I feel. I shall never forgive myself.’ ‘That’s very foolish, sir,’ said Mr. Burns fiercely.

And you’re inclined to agree with Burns, the emaciated obsessive. But the narrator goes on becoming more hysterical. He quotes from the journal where he knocks off standard Conrad expressions of horror and futility:

All sense of time is lost in the monotony of expectation, of hope, and of desire… I emerge on deck the ordered arrangement of the stars meets my eye, unclouded, infinitely wearisome. There they are: stars, sun, sea, light, darkness, space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which mankind seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed. Even as I have been decoyed into this awful, this death-haunted command… we were lost in the darkness… (p.97)

What doesn’t help is sick, emaciated Burns’ conviction that the ship really genuinely was cursed by the previous captain and that only when they pass the precise point on the map where burns buried his body at sea, only then will the spell be broken. Privately the narrator is now having Ancient Mariner visions of the entire ship’s crew dying, of it becoming a ghost ship, ‘my appalling vision of a ship floating with a dead crew’. Publicly he tries to keep control of himself and give orders in a calm, rational way.

It feels again and again in these stories that Conrad is giving way to the acute depressions which crippled him in real life. The stories, often with the thinnest of plots, are only as long as they are because draped in cascades of prose which repeats the same idea of horror and futility and anguish and despair again and again:

The memory is now that in those days life was sustained on invincible anguish, as a sort of infernal stimulant

Hundreds of sentences like these drown the reader in thick dark despair. For fifteen days the sick crew endure this hell of being completely becalmed and very ill. Conrad pops in a sentence or two explaining why this was the shadow line, the transition from youth to maturity.

It seems to me that all my life before that momentous day [when they set sail, 15 days earlier] is infinitely remote, a fading memory of light-hearted youth, something on the other side of a shadow. (p.106)

There’s little plot, just an ever-deepening intensification of the jet black atmosphere; literally, because, on that night, some kind of cloud covers the sky and stars and the narrator feels they’ve descended into hell.

The impenetrable blackness beset the ship so close that it seemed that by thrusting one’s hand over the side one could touch some unearthly substance. There was in it an effect of inconceivable terror and of inexpressible mystery… the closing in of a menace from all sides.

Anyway, wading through this hysteria the actual events are that the sky grows pitch black, then there’s an intense downpour of rain which extinguishes the last lights on the ship, plunging them into the blackness of hell etc. In this dark the narrator sees a Shape loom up from the floor, huge and shaggy, and screams with pure unadulterated horror.

Moments later it is revealed to be the emaciated mate, Burns, who’s wrapped himself in a thick coat. He repeats for the hundredth time his conviction that the old captain has doomed the ship and then bursts into hysterical laughter, an ‘insane screeching’. This daunts the drew who think the captain’s gone mad so the narrator has to quickly move to tell them it’s the mate, and ask for help to get him back below decks.

And then a wind comes, the first wind for 18 days, the masts fill and the ship starts moving. The narrator bounds up to the helm, helping Frenchy replace the exhausted Grumbal, while Ransome takes Burns below. He reports that Burns has finally fallen into a deep sleep. The reader guesses all this has happened because they’ve finally passed beyond the spot where the old captain was buried at sea and so broken the curse. And he goes on to state it explicitly:

By the exorcising virtue of Mr. Burns’ awful laugh, the malicious spectre had been laid, the evil spell broken, the curse removed. We were now in the hands of a kind and energetic Providence. It was rushing us on…

And so the ship sails swiftly through the foamy sea and, 40 hours later, arrives back at the same harbour it left 21 days earlier. Conrad describes the immense effort of the weak and feeble hands to reef in the sails and drop anchor. They are flying a signal for medical assistance flying on the mizzen so doctors boats come out to see them. The sick men are taken off. The narrator watches them feeling guilty and responsible. A doctor examines him and recommends a strong sedative for that evening.

Once on shore he bumps into old Captain Giles, which allows Conrad to bring the story round full circle. It also allows him to end it with something like normality, two seamen sharing a meal in the dining room of the Officers’ Home, trying to eclipse the way he has just put us through a steadily intensifying horror show.

When the narrator surprises Captain Giles by saying he’s aiming to recruit a new crew from a recently shipwrecked ship and cast off tomorrow to head for the Indian Ocean, Giles nods approvingly, ‘That’s the way. You’ll do.’

The very final passage of the narrative is the narrator signing Ransome’s termination of contract. Ransome was the only other crewman not afflicted by sickness, was as solid and dependable as a rock, from his clockwork cooking to his encouragement of morale, to his mucking into help with sails and steering. By the end he has become an allegorical figure of devotion to duty. But even he is mortal and is terrified that his faulty heart will give out at any moment. He shakes hands and leaves the ship to the narrator preparing for his next voyage.

And with this highly symbolic apothegm – that none of us know when our common enemy will strike – this harrowing and haunting story ends.

Resemblance to ‘The Secret Sharer’

Obviously the story has lots in common with The Secret Sharer, which also features a captain taking his first command, who becomes possessed by a strange obsession, and keeps going down to the cabin to update a sick man confined there, Leggatt in ‘Sharer’ and the wasted first mate Burns in this story.

Even the location in the Bay of Siam and the ominous and then supernatural power of the mountain island Koh-ring appear in both.

The Great War connection

Conrad wrote the novella after the outbreak of the First World War. His son, Borys, served in (and survived) the war, and ‘The Shadow Line’ is dedicated to him. So plenty of critics have interpreted ‘The Shadow Line’ as Conrad’s response to the Great War. This seems to me most obvious in the descriptions of the haggard band of sick and haunted men, worn down by their ordeal and yet doggedly loyal and dutiful, and the portrait of their pitying and reluctant officer.

Those who were able to walk remained all the time on duty, lying about in the shadows of the main deck, till my voice raised for an order would bring them to their enfeebled feet, a tottering little group, moving patiently about the ship, with hardly a murmur, a whisper amongst them all. And every time I had to raise my voice it was with a pang of remorse and pity.

It’s easy to take the disease which afflicts the ship as a metaphor of war:

The disease disclosed its low type in a startling way. It was not so with many of the men. The wastage of ill-health seemed to idealise the general character of the features, bringing out the unsuspected nobility of some, the strength of others, and in one case revealing an essentially comic aspect.

And this passage seems to be an unambiguous tribute to the suffering of the soldiers:

If I remember all their faces, wasting tragically before my eyes, most of their names have vanished from my memory. The words that passed between us were few and puerile in regard of the situation. I had to force myself to look them in the face. I expected to meet reproachful glances. There were none. The expression of suffering in their eyes was indeed hard enough to bear. But that they couldn’t help. For the rest, I ask myself whether it was the temper of their souls or the sympathy of their imagination that made them so wonderful, so worthy of my undying regard. (p.100)

The thematic structure

His critics follow Conrad’s claims in his boring prefaces that his stories are about ‘morality’ but they aren’t really, are they? They are far more accurately described as harrowing visions of horror and futility. The figure of Ransome is meant to be some kind of rock to which the narrator can cling, a symbol of what is, in the end, Conrad’s extremely simple Victorian belief that (as the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition, Jeremy Hawthorn puts it) ‘work has a moral force and action a therapeutic value’.

A kind of intellectual duality is built into the text, which obviously aims to contrast moral strength with moral dissolution, Ransome’s dutifulness with the narrator’s sense that he has failed, visions of sin and hell with Ransome conceived as an angel and old Captain Giles’s wisdom. These antitheses are all very cleverly worked out and inhabit what you could call the world of liberal sensibility. But the actual experience of reading the text has nothing to do with moral discriminations; it is extraordinarily intense and melodramatic. It is like being hurled into Samuel Beckett land, only even bleaker than Beckett land.

Ransome stepped back two paces and vanished from my sight. At once an uneasiness possessed me, as if some support had been withdrawn. I moved forward, too, outside the circle of light, into the darkness that stood in front of me like a wall. In one stride I penetrated it. Such must have been the darkness before creation. It had closed behind me. I knew I was invisible to the man at the helm. Neither could I see anything. He was alone, I was alone, every man was alone where he stood. And every form was gone too, spar, sail, fittings, rails; everything was blotted out in the dreadful smoothness of that absolute night. (p.113)

The text again and again immerses the reader in such feelings of existential dread, aloneness, crisis and collapse. It makes for an extraordinary experience.

Three elements

As ever, the reader is struck by three really obvious elements of a Conrad story:

  1. it is very wordy, and the style is that of a non-native English speaker, with odd vocabulary (‘unexpugnable’) and unidiomatic word order which frequently reminds you of French rather than English
  2. the wordiness sometimes obscures the events, which themselves sometimes feel odd, not in a profound writerly way, but frequently in a cack-handed, surprisingly amateurish way
  3. although 130 pages long (in the Oxford Classics edition), like so many other Conrad novellas and short stories ‘The Shadow Line’ has a surprisingly large number of characters, named and unnamed

Cast

The unnamed first-person narrator, admits that he has the touchiness of youth. He describes himself as sullen and sarcastic, petulant and grumpy.

On his first ship

Its Arab owner, a Syed, the head of a great House of Straits Arabs, an old, dark little man blind in one eye, in a snowy robe and yellow slippers’.

The Captain, Kent, a man with a thick iron-gray moustache.

The second engineer, John Nieven, ‘a sturdy young Scot, with a smooth face and light eyes’, ‘a fierce misogynist.’

The chief engineer, ‘young, too, but very thin, and with a mist of fluffy brown beard all round his haggard face’, ‘a confirmed dyspeptic’.

Ashore

Unnamed official in the Harbour Office who is sad the narrator is signing off from his ship.

Chief Steward of the Officers’ Home, ‘an unhappy, wizened little man, who if put into a jockey’s rig would have looked the part to perfection’.

The dozing stranger who Giles says is an officer from some Rajah’s yacht.

Hamilton, well-groomed aloof permanent resident of the Officers’ Home who a) regards everyone else as ‘an outsider’ and b) to the despair of the Steward, has never paid his bill.

Captain Giles, seasoned old expert navigator round the Malayan seas.

Mr R, the Head Shipping Master, secretary to…

The Harbourmaster, Captain Ellis, who sends for him and asks if he wants to captain the skipperless ship in Bangkok.

En route to Bangkok

The unnamed captain of the unnamed ship which transports the narrator to Bangkok, ‘a thin, long-armed, long-legged man, with a closely clipped gray beard.’

His command

The steward.

Burns, the first mate, ‘His long, red moustache determined the character of his physiognomy, which struck me as pugnacious in (strange to say) a ghastly sort of way.’

The previous captain, now dead: ‘He was a peculiar man – of sixty-five about – iron gray, hard-faced, obstinate, and uncommunicative. He used to keep the ship loafing at sea for inscrutable reasons. Would come on deck at night sometimes, take some sail off her, God only knows why or wherefore, then go below, shut himself up in his cabin, and play on the violin for hours – till daybreak perhaps. In fact, he spent most of his time day or night playing the violin. That was when the fit took him. Very loud, too.’ (p.58)

The former captain’s white woman in Haiphong, seen only in a photograph.

The doctor of the Legation and Consulate.

Ransome the cook, a fit handsome man who, however, cried off being a dull seaman because he has a heart condition’. Ransome becomes the stoutest, bravest, most loyal and dutiful of the crew throughout the nightmare voyage.

The second officer, ‘a callow youth with an unpromising face.’

Frenchy, a short, gingery, active man with a nose and chin of the Punch type’, ‘To see him coming aft to the wheel comforted one. The blue dungaree trousers turned up the calf, one leg a little higher than the other, the clean check shirt, the white canvas cap, evidently made by himself, made up a whole of peculiar smartness, and the persistent jauntiness of his gait, even, poor fellow, when he couldn’t help tottering, told of his invincible spirit.’

Gambril, ‘the only grizzled person in the ship’.

Vivid phrases

Like diamonds in mud Conrad continually comes up with vivid images.

Captain Giles… began to haul at his gorgeous gold chain till at last the watch came up from the deep pocket like solid truth from a well. (p.27)

The doctor’s glasses were directed at me like two lamps searching the genuineness of my resolution. (p.71)

Cosmic visions

As usual I spotted a couple of Conrad’s cosmic comparisons, the astronomic similes which seem to lift you clean off the surface of the earth and into another dimension or genre.

The darkness had risen around the ship like a mysterious emanation from the dumb and lonely waters. I leaned on the rail and turned my ear to the shadows of the night. Not a sound. My command might have been a planet flying vertiginously on its appointed path in a space of infinite silence. (p.74)

As I’ve repeatedly said, his bleakness often becomes so intense as to carry him out of the realm of realistic literature altogether and into the realm of science fiction.

There was still no man at the helm. The immobility of all things was perfect. If the air had turned black, the sea, for all I knew, might have turned solid. It was no good looking in any direction, watching for any sign, speculating upon the nearness of the moment. When the time came the blackness would overwhelm silently the bit of starlight falling upon the ship, and the end of all things would come without a sigh, stir, or murmur of any kind, and all our hearts would cease to beat like run-down clocks. (p.108)

Conrad’s style

In the first half of the story Conrad’s aim is to make the narrator appear naive and innocent; part of this strategy is to make him feel superior and quick to judge all the other characters. He has the arrogance, the cocksureness of youth. When he is offered the captaincy it makes him feel like he is walking on air, floating with happiness, feels as if he’s in a fairy tale etc. In the second half, well, I’ve described and quoted how the story collapses into horror and terror.

Clunkers

As usual, a lot of the text is only borderline English and Conrad fairly often writes sentences that cross the border, into being non-English and sometimes almost incomprehensible.

‘Well, no,’ I conceded, restraining a desire to laugh at that something mysteriously earnest in delivering the conclusions of his wisdom as though it were the product of prohibited operations. (p.41)

The doctor’s round, full face framed in a light-coloured whisker was the perfection of a dignified amenity. (p.66)

These occasional weirdnesses have a charm of their own. Alternatively, sometimes his sentences aren’t incomprehensible, they’re just poorly written and phrased.

Seizing eagerly upon the elation of the first command thrown into my lap, by the agency of Captain Giles, I had yet an uneasy feeling that such luck as this has got perhaps to be paid for in some way. (p.83)

I said to myself disdainfully that it should take much more than that to affect in the smallest degree my fortitude. (p.86)

French word order

In English we tend to put adjectives and adverbs before the noun or verb. In French they do it the other way round. Very often Conrad writes sentences with the adjective or adjectival phrase following the noun in a pronounced and foreign-feeling way.

He turned to me his face grotesque beyond the fantasies of mad dreams… (p.90)

Ransome’s unperturbed voice uttered pleasantly the words…

Poor quality wisdom writing

Conrad has a related habit which is writing something which starts out looking like it’s going to be a quotable bit of wisdom writing, but then turns out to be disappointingly banal or flat. To be harsh, he sounds like a man who, in the first fifteen years of his career, had written everything interesting and shocking and insightful he was ever going to write, and is now just going through the motions.

People have a great opinion of the advantages of experience. But in this connection experience means always something disagreeable as opposed to the charm and innocence of illusions. (p.65)

It starts off with the flow and feel of something which is going to be profound but ends up, in fact, being both obvious and clunkily phrased.

Credit

The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad was first published as a serial in the English Review from September 1916 to March 1917 and published in book form by J.M. Dent in 1917. Page references are to the 1985 Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition.

Related links

Conrad reviews

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by Simon on December 11, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, English literature, Great War, Novella
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on December 11, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/12/11/the-shadow-line-joseph-conrad/

Shakespeare and War @ the National Army Museum

A tale of two Henries

In 1944 Laurence Olivier produced, directed and starred in a movie version of Shakespeare’s play ‘Henry V’. Shot in bright primary colours it dealt in bright primary patriotic emotions and 30 years later my Dad and his best friend could remember seeing it in the cinema as 12-year-old kids and being stirred by its patriotic fervour, its stirring invocation of England’s valour and fortitude, at a time when German V rockets were falling on London and the south-east. (A V2 rocket fell on the house next door to my Dad’s, killing the occupants. The one time he mentioned it was the only time I ever saw him cry. Britain needed all the patriotism and determination it could muster.)

Installation view of ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum showing posters, cartoons, photos and programmes from the Second World War including a poster for Olivier’s Henry V

Those ardent schoolboys will have noticed that the film was ‘dedicated to the ‘Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture’ because this appears as a caption at the start of the film, but won’t have known that the production was partly funded by the British government as a form of soft propaganda.

Forty five years later, in 1989, the actor widely seen as inheriting Olivier’s mantle, Kenneth Branagh, directed and starred in a new movie version of ‘Henry V’. Much was made of the fact that, instead of stylised sunny sets, the play went for a darker, grittier look, most notably in the battle of Agincourt scenes, filmed on a lovely sunny day in the Olivier version, but in a downpour of rain in the Branagh, which turns the battlefield into a quagmire, spattering all the characters with mud and also gore from the countless bodies which have been hacked and stabbed. Critics weren’t slow to point out that it was made in the aftermath of the Falklands War and so carried a strong message against war and warmongering.

Poster for the original 1984 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Henry V directed by Adrian Noble and starring Kenneth Branagh, as featured in ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum

The same play, the same author, the same plot, the same characters, the same stage directions and the same words – and yet supporting two very different productions, reflecting very different societies, mindsets and values.

These are just two examples of the way Shakespeare’s plays about war – the causes of war, the preparations for war, the experience of war, wartime emotions from terror to exhilaration – and the greatly varying opinions of his many different characters about war and warfare, have been quoted, adapted, distorted, illustrated and recycled, used both to support and attack Britain’s wars, in the 400 years since his death.

Shakespeare and War

The National Army Museum in Chelsea is currently holding a FREE exhibition titled ‘Shakespeare and War’ which sets out to review the huge history of the national playwright’s role in Britain’s many wars and conflicts and how his words, stories, characters and scenes have been used in widely different times and situations.

The exhibition sets out to document how the plays, characters and speeches have been excerpted and exploited propagandists, governments, commentators, satirists and anti-war activists, soldiers and civilians – during the turbulent 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, in 1616. As the curators put it:

The plays have been used to rally the nation at times of crisis and to reflect on the human cost of conflict. But they have also been used to critique war and to consider the more challenging aspects of the military experience. They have inspired soldiers and civilians alike, helping people face adversity on the battlefield and at home.

After Shakespeare

Thus the exhibition starts after Shakespeare’s death. There’s none of the usual fol-de-rol about his biography or the Globe Theatre or the parabola of his career, just the blunt facts that he was a very successful actor-dramatist-manager, who died in 1616, before the British Army even existed.

Instead we are thrown straight into the first major conflict which occurred after his lifetime, the civil war or wars of three kingdoms which broke out 23 years after his death, in 1639, and lasted until Cromwell’s pacification of Scotland in 1653.

The exhibition is divided into six broad historical sections, each of which is introduced by a wall label and then features all sorts of bric-a-brac from the period in question – broadsheets, posters, cartoons, pamphlets which cite or reference, quote or parody scenes, characters or speeches from the plays to suit the purpose of polemicists and propagandists of the moment, paintings or photos of Shakespearian actors or patrons, posters for productions through the ages, and then – in the modern era – recordings of radio and TV productions and so on. At the most basic level, it’s a curiosity shop of historical Shakespeariana.

1. Royal Shakespeare: The Civil War and Beyond

During the English Civil War Shakespeare was often associated with the monarchy. While in prison awaiting trial, King Charles I read Shakespeare’s (Second) Folio (the First and Second Folios were the first attempts to publish all Shakespeare’s works in one volume). The King made notes on its pages and the exhibition has his copy on show. This did not go unnoticed by the great poet and Puritan propagandist, John Milton, who is represented here by a first edition of his pamphlet, Eikonoklastes.

Installation view of the civil war part of ‘Shakespeare and War’, showing, on the left, engravings of Charles I (above) and Cromwell (below) along with Charles’s copy of the Second Folio beneath an English mortuary sword (photo by the author)

This little collocation of objects overflows with meanings. Eikonoklastes was written and published late in 1649 to justify the execution of King Charles which took place on 30 January 1649. It was a point-by-point rebuttal of a pamphlet titled Eikon Basilike, a Royalist propaganda work, which purported to be a spiritual autobiography of the saintly king. The Basilike set Charles up as the type of a perfect enlightened monarch who ruled by the Divine Right of Kings and through the ancient constitution. Milton refuted all these points and more, claiming that Charles’s rule had degenerated to a tyranny over a people who could only be free by executing him and abolishing the monarchy altogether.

Where does Shakespeare come in all this? Well, he was part of the culture wars between the two sides. Theatre was encouraged and sponsored by the King, the Court and aristocrats. Shakespeare’s younger contemporary, Ben Jonson, ended up writing masques – elaborate ritualistic performances, accompanied by music – for the King and Court, which reinforced the ideology of royalty and monarchical rule and in some of which the king himself took part.

In the eyes of radical Puritans all this was blasphemy. Representing people on stage came close to breaking the commandment about not worshipping images. Plays diverted people’s minds away from the only thing they should be contemplating, the glory of God. Playhouses were notorious sites of crime and prostitution. Shakespeare’s plays, even the sternest tragedies, are littered with outrageously rude puns and euphemisms, the kind of thing Parliamentary Puritans had in mind when they accused the theatre of staging ‘spectacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious mirth and levity.’

For all these reasons and more the Puritans protested against the theatre in the years leading up to the war, and this explains why, when Parliament took control of the capital in September 1642, they promptly shut down all the playhouses. Which explains why there’s an engraving of Cromwell in this exhibition showing him wearing a suit of armour above a pile of discarded theatrical bric-a-brac, such as masks and disguises. For 18 long years the theatres were dark. Shakespeare’s Globe was torn down in 1644 and turned into ‘tenements’.

The Restoration

In 1660 the monarchy was restored and Charles II assumed the Crown. His 25-year reign was troubled by political and religious issues along the old civil war schism, at its most fundamental the clash between devotees of the Protestant cause and Charles’s Court which became tainted with accusations of Catholic sympathy, especially after he married the Catholic princess Catherine of Braganza in 1662.

Like his father Charles was a great patron of the arts, including theatre, and his rule saw the flourishing of the movement referred to as Restoration Comedy. The theatre once again became associated with all the vices of Londoners at play, and this, like the theatre of his father, became the target of religious criticism. The ongoing schism between Catholic-leaning court and Protestant nobles came to a head during the three-year reign of Charles’s brother, James II, who with typical Stuart arrogance, not only took a Catholic wife but made it clear that the new infant son she bore him would be raised a Catholic. The Protestant aristocracy rebelled and overthrew him in what their propagandists named The Glorious Revolution, inviting the Protestant Prince of Orange (in modern Holland) to come and be our king.

The curators skimp a bit on this period, displaying just one work, a copy of a book by the playwright John Crowne adapting Henry VI parts 2 and 3 and titled ‘Misery of Civil War’.

Shakespeare’s history plays

The thing is, Shakespeare’s history plays amount to a sustained investigation of the nature of authority and ‘good’ rule. All of them are named after the English king they focus on and ask questions like, What makes a good king? What makes a bad king? Are nobles, or ‘the people’, ever justified in overthrowing a king? If two noble houses fight for the crown, what are ordinary people to do? Follow their conscience, try to avoid the conflict, or fight for their local lord and master? Is there such a thing as a ‘just’ war in which case, how do you define one?

Questions like these echo throughout the obvious plays i.e. the ones about English history, but are also central to the Roman plays and three of the four great tragedies.

The history plays are usually divided into three groups:

  • the series depicting the Wars of the Roses, being: Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III (4 plays)
  • the second tetralogy – including Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V
  • the standalone plays King John, Edward III and Henry VIII

The Roman plays which discuss the nature of authority and leadership focus on Julius Caesar and its sequel, Antony and Cleopatra. Both cover wars and include battle scenes.

The tragedies all feature war, in different ways. Macbeth is about a successful soldier and includes actual battle scenes. King Lear and Hamlet feature the invasion of their respective countries (England by the French and Denmark by the Swedes) but no actual fighting. And Othello is all about a highly successful mercenary general, which features no battles but is drenched in reminiscences of fighting and the rhetoric of battle.

What I’m trying to convey is that these 17 or so plays are rarely about war as such, but but are far more about the nature of power and authority and what happens when authority collapses.

The eight classic history plays are about the collapse of authority in one country and civil war among the English. The two Roman plays are the same: in both the Romans aren’t fighting any external enemy, but among themselves. Similarly, the three tragedies (excluding Othello) are about the collapse of royal authority in one country – the French only invade England in Lear and the Swedes invade Denmark in Hamlet once the native rulers have made a complete horlicks of trying to rule themselves.

And again, although the English come to the aid of the rightful heir to the throne at the end of Macbeth, they only have to do so because, yet again, the ruling class of the country in question (this time Scotland) have made a total mess of ruling themselves, as a result of all the murders Macbeth finds himself voodooed into committing.

Thus, the seventeen or so plays about history are almost entirely about the collapse of political authority in one country leading to civil war. The fifty years from the collapse of Charles I’s power in the 1630s through to the Glorious Revolution in 1688 are, therefore, the most relevant or applicable to Shakespeare’s concerns. It is, therefore, strange and intriguing that contemporaries, apparently, according to this exhibition, made so little application of the huge amount Shakespeare wrote on this subject to the one era in the past 400 years which most suited it.

This little survey of Shakespeare’s history plays also explains something else. Henry V is the only one in which is not about a civil war. Henry V is the only one in which we are not fighting among ourselves, but go abroad and fight somebody else. This explains why Henry V crops up in this exhibition as the spearhead for patriotic fervour more times than the ten other history plays put together – because once we’d sorted out our own political problems via the civil wars and rebellions of the seventeenth century, we turned our warlike energies against foreigners.

2. Revolutionary Shakespeare: Change and Political Debate

The late eighteenth century saw a major global war (against France) and two revolutions (in America and France) which changed the world. In each of these conflicts Shakespeare’s plays, characters and the Shakespeare brand were used to define, critique and support both a patriotic war and new political movements.

The Seven Years War

By the start of the eighteenth century Shakespeare had become established by numerous writers, critics and commentators as a national icon. The exhibition skips over the wars of the early 18th century, in Europe and India:

  • War of the Spanish Succession 1701 to 1714
  • Great Northern War 1717 to 1720
  • War of the Austrian Succession 1740
  • Carnatic Wars 1744 to 1763

Instead it jumps to the Seven Years’ War (1756 to 1763), the war against France which saw British victories on the Continent, in India, in the Caribbean and North America. The exhibition includes a number of interesting mementoes from the war.

David Garrick, the leading figure in London theatre by the mid-century, wrote a Dialogue to preface a 1756 production of The Tempest, in which two characters debate the rights and wrongs of the new war. It reminds us that for hundreds of years actors, managers and playwrights felt perfectly free to preface Shakespeare productions with prologues like this, tailoring the play to the issues of the day, or even cutting and rewriting bits of the plays to reflect current concerns.

In 1768 Edward Capell produced an edition of the plays in which he states what had, by then, become orthodoxy, that the 38 or so plays amount to ‘a part of the kingdom’s riches’. Not only this, but Britain’s standing ‘in the world’ depended on ‘the esteem within which these are held.’

The fact that Shakespeare’s one play which takes a foreign enemy is directed against the French did not escape numerous writers and commentators as Britain embarked on a global struggle against…the French. There’s a playbill for a production of Henry V staged in Covent Garden in 1761 which has two significant aspects. 1) For this occasion, the play was unsubtly subtitled ‘the Conquest of France’ and 2) each of the 23 productions were followed by a lavish recreation of the coronation of King George III which had just taken place (22 September 1761).

If Shakespeare’s association with kingship had been deeply problematic for Milton in the 1640s, long before a century had passed the name of Shakespeare, the Shakespeare brand, had become indissolubly linked to celebration of the solidly Protestant and anti-French monarchy.

The American War of Independence (1775 to 1783)

Following on from, and partly a result of, the Seven Years War, came the American War of Independence. Unsurprisingly, American patriots seeking to break from Britain drew on Shakespeare’s classical histories. Plays like ‘Julius Caesar’ and ‘Coriolanus’ helped support the idea of republican government and liberation from imperial rule.

The two sides (British and American) both staged plays and the curators display playbills from both sides, which use Shakespeare texts to propagandise for their cause. So there’s a playbill for an American production of Julius Caesar which applauds the ‘noble struggles for Liberty by that renowned patriot Marcus Brutus.’

There are rather more relics from the British side and the curators display pictures focusing on New York. This is because early on in the war, the British Army under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Clinton occupied New York City and turned it into a garrison town. Members of the Army staged regular productions of Shakespeare at the newly-renamed Theatre Royal, confirming the by-now well-established link between drama and royalty. the performances were staged ‘with permission’ of Clinton, who was also a patron of the performances. Plays were staged to raise funds for wounded soldiers. The British tended to favour Shakespeare’s monarchical plays, whilst American Patriots used plays with a republican ethos (such as Julius Caesar and Coriolanus) in their satirical prints and posters.

Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Clinton, 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, 1758 (National Army Museum)

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1789 to 1802, 1805 to 1815)

As explained above, Shakespeare’s plays can be used to provide examples of resistance to oppression and corrupt politics and so justify insurrection against corrupt rulers. The French Revolution amounted to a massive ideological upheaval in the thinking of all Europe. In the three years after the initial overthrow of the monarchy in 1789, politicians and intellectuals all across Europe took the sides of either the revolutionary liberators or the rule of monarchy, hierarchy and order. But in 1792 revolutionary France declared war on Austria and Prussia and the conflict became military in nature. Many former sympathisers retracted their support, especially after the situation in Paris descended into The Terror of 1793 to 1794.

The French Revolutionary War lasted from 1792 to 1802, when it was terminated by the Treaty of Amiens. Fighting broke out a year later in what came to be called the Napoleonic Wars which were to last from 1803 to 1815.

During this long period of ideological and military conflict, Shakespeare plays, characters and lines were mobilised to justify both sides of the ideological and military divide. In Britain, politicians, public figures, actors, and the Army drew on the playwright’s characters and speeches to justify their reasons for going to war, and to criticize rebellions against royalty.

This 25-year period also happened to be a golden age of political satire, featuring two of the greatest British caricaturists and cartoonists, James Gillray (1756 to 1815) and Isaac Cruikshank (1764 to 1811). Amid the many visual jokes and references they and many cartoonists and commentators like them used to pillory the politics of the day, Shakespearian references loomed large.

So the exhibition has some excellent cartoons by both men, which invoke Shakespearian references for the purposes of mockery and exaggeration. This print by Cruikshank uses The Tempest to praise the patriotic Tory Prime Minister William Pitt and ridicule his chief political opponent, Charles James Fox, an opponent of the British monarchy who was an initial supporter of the French Revolution.

Prospero and Caliban in the Enchanted Island by Isaac Cruikshank (1798)

Smoothly dressed Pitt is depicted as the wonder-working magician Prospero, telling his creature:

Hence! – fetch us fewel and be quick
Thou wert best – shrugst thou malice?
If thou dost unwillingly what I command
I’ll rack thee with old cramps –

While Fox, portrayed as big ugly Caliban, and wearing a tricolour scarf (symbol of the revolution) shrugs with savage disgust, saying:

I must obey! his art is of such power
It would control a Setebos,
And make a vassal of him.

There’s a brilliantly vivid print by Gillray titled ‘A phantasmagoria – conjuring up an armed skeleton’ which depicts contemporary politicians as the three witches from Macbeth. The print criticises the Treaty of Amiens which was widely seen as a capitulation to France. In the picture the witches are replaced by three leading supporters of the treaty, Henry Addington, Lord Hawkesbury and William Wilberforce and their magic spells for peace have, it is implied, reduced Britannia to a skeleton. Note the sack of gold at bottom left implying that these ‘traitors’ were bribed to betray their country and the French cockerel at bottom right, mockingly standing astride a skinned British lion.

‘A Phantasmagoria; — Scene – Conjuring-Up an Armed-Skeleton’ by James Gillray (1803)

The exhibition includes probably Gillray’s most famous image, ‘The Plumb-pudding in danger; – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper’. The image depicts British Prime Minister William Pitt and French Emperor Napoleon carving up the world between them. I’ve seen it many times but didn’t realise that the epigraph directly under the title, at top right, is an adapted quote from The Tempest, namely ‘”The great globe itself and all that it inherits” is too small to satisfy such insatiable appetites’.

The Plumb-pudding in danger; – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper by James Gillray (1805)

In these cartoons you see something interesting happening. Many of the previous objects (from the Seven Years or American Revolutionary Wars) indicated that Shakespeare was best promulgated via productions of entire plays. Here, in these cartoons, you can see the way that Shakespearian tags and clichés now lend themselves to much more pithy and succinct visual media.

Satirical prints had been around all through the 18th century, in fact they go back to Shakespeare’s day and even earlier. But somehow the Gillray and Cruikshank feel new. They demonstrate how Shakespeare, as well as representing the ‘the kingdom’s riches, according to high-minded editors such as Edward Capell, could also be the source of popular jokes and gags.

From now on, alongside all the stirring patriotic stuff, the exhibition features a strand of often very funny works using Shakespeare for comic purposes.

3. Imperial Shakespeare: The Victorian Army

After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the British Army’s role began to change. Rather than fighting major campaigns on the Continent, it was regularly used to protect and expand Britain’s imperial possessions, to fight Queen Victoria’s ‘small wars‘. But further to what I just mentioned about comedy, my favourite bits from what amounts to the Victorian section of the exhibition, were comic.

It must be said that some of the exhibits in the show seem to bear a pretty slender relationship with its supposed subject, Shakespeare and War. For example, the eighteenth century section has a set of images around the death of General James Wolfe at the 1759 Battle of Quebec which have no direct relation to Shakespeare, don’t quote or cite Shakespeare, seem to have no relationship except that Wolfe’s death was made the subject of ‘patriotic plays’.

Less utterly irrelevant is this entertaining print. In 1823 British aristocrats still carried out duels and this print mocks the practice by having the duellers and their seconds portrayed as monkeys. Apparently the title derives from a quote from ‘The Merchant of Venice’ but it’s a pretty flimsy pretext for including it in an exhibition about Shakespeare and War.

Awful Moments or Monkeys of Honour, colour print by John Lewis Marks after an unknown artist (1823)

More directly relevant if irreverent are the excellent prints taken from a later book, the Military Misreadings of Shakespere by Major Thomas Seccombe. It contains 31 beautifully delineated cartoons of military cockups, clumsiness and pratfalls, each offset by an ironically serious Shakespeare quotation. In this one a beautifully dressed member of the Life Guards has just been thrown by his horse to the accompaniment of a grand quote from Titus Andronicus: ‘That what you cannot, as you would, achieve, you must perforce accomplish as you may’ which thus acquires a completely comic meaning.

‘That what you cannot, as you would, achieve, you must perforce accomplish as you may’ from Military Misreadings of Shakespere (1880)

The Crimean War (1853 to 1856)

It wasn’t all lolz. The great exception to the century of generally small colonial wars which the British Army fought was the Crimean War, the one major conflict we were involved in in the century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and the start of the Great War (1914). This famously highlighted significant problems with the Army’s organization, notably in the famous and futile Charge of the Light Brigade. Newspapers reported on the poor conditions in which soldiers found themselves, leading to demands for improvements and reforms to the Army’s culture and structure.

Only one exhibit relates to this badly managed and bitter war, a watercolour done by the Swedish artist Egron Sellif Lungren which depicts a kind of cinematic reimagining of a production of Henry V (what else?) staged by Charles Kean at the Princess’s Theatre in 1859 i.e. a few years after the war ended. Queen Victoria attended the play and commissioned Lundgren to do a watercolour version of it for her Theatre Album. Of all the scenes in the play Lundgren chose to depict the siege of Honfleur which is not only the setting for Henry’s famous speech ‘Once more unto the breach dear friends’, but will have reminded many people of the long and gruelling British siege of Sebastapol.

Installation view of ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum showing Egron Sellif Lungren’s watercolour plastered across one wall, with Gillray and Cruikshank cartoons on the left

Imperial Shakespeare

Obviously the nineteenth century was the one in which Britain cemented its grasp over the largest land empire the world has ever known, as well as almost total control of the world’s oceans. This is a very big subject indeed and it is not really properly explored. Take just India. Were there no British theatres in India, Shakespeare productions in India? Did the growing Indian middle class every stage Shakespeare productions with Indian casts? Was Shakespeare’s name, plays or quotes never invoked to justify British rule in India? Were there comic or satirical pamphlets or prints using Shakespeare quotes to mock British rule in India? Not in this exhibition, nor anything about the British Army’s involvement in Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East or Far East.

Instead, as I’ve already pointed out, some of the exhibits have only a tenuous or oblique connection to the exhibition topic. For example, a picture caption tells us that amateur theatricals were often staged by regiments and soldiers as peacetime entertainments, which we might well have guessed. And that’s the fairly flimsy pretext for sharing a photo of members of the East Yorkshire regiment staging a production of Hamlet at their barracks in Cheltenham in 1895.

The Cast of Hamlet, Winter Gardens, Cheltenham, 1895 (National Army Museum)

Meanwhile, there’s nothing about the second war of the period which shook British confidence, the Boer War of 1899 to 1902. Were there no Shakespeare productions mounted here in England to raise funds or stir patriotic fervour? Did the besieged populations of Ladysmith, Mafeking or Kimberley put on productions to keep their spirits up? Didn’t domestic commentators or cartoonists use Shakespeare quotes or characters as material? If so, none of it is displayed here.

4. Patriotic Shakespeare: The First World War (1914 to 1918)

During the First World War great service and sacrifice were required of both the Army and the civilian population. As in the last great campaign in Europe a century before, Shakespeare was used in Britain to rally the troops and the country behind a sense of national duty.

As mentioned above, some exhibits are included on pretty flimsy grounds: for example, there’s no real reason to include some of Lord Kitchener’s recruitment posters (Your country needs You) except for the fact that, after Kitchener drowned when the ship he was sailing in hit a German mine (HMS Hampshire, 5 June 1916) the League of the Empire started publishing and presenting special editions of the ‘Complete Works of Shakespeare’ to wounded and disabled soldiers in his name, an edition which quickly became known as ‘the Kitchener Shakespeare’ – but there’s nothing at all about Shakespeare in the famous posters.

‘Lord Kitchener’s Appeal’, recruiting poster, 1914 (National Army Museum)

More tenuous examples include: a sketchbook by a John Henry Jenkins, a front line soldier, which depicted not only trench life but the watercolours of amateur theatricals which the soldiers put on, although Shakespeare is nowhere mentioned; or a 1915 recruitment poster which includes the image of St George and the dragon and so, the curators suggest, might have reminded some viewers of Henry V’s famous call, ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’ Pretty tenuous.

Much more relevant is a book of Shakespeare quotations arranged under themes or headings relevant to the war and distributed to soldiers, ‘Shakespeare in Time of War: Excerpts from the Plays arranged with Topical Allusions’, edited by the artist Francis Colmer and published in 1916.

Another apparently random object is this photo of Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps personnel packing boxes in a factory in 1918. Spot the Shakespeare connection? No, because there isn’t one…

Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps personnel packing boxes in factory, 1918

…until you look at the photo beneath it, which is a photo of Maggie Smale’s all-women production of Henry V, staged in a munitions factory in Leeds which had been operated by the ‘Barnbow Lasses’ during the Great War. Is this to do with feminism? Or pacifism? Or a celebrating of provincial grit? I wasn’t sure.

Still from Maggie Smale’s all-female production of Henry V as featured in ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum. Photo by Mike Oakes

Amateur productions of Shakespeare were mounted across the country, sometimes to raise morale, to entertain wounded soldiers, for the benefit of the public. Three hundred years after his death Shakespeare was not only a well-known brand but possibly the only literary writer a lot of working class people had heard of. As in his own time, he catered for an audience of elite intellectuals, the educated middle classes, and illiterate workers. You can see why Shakespeare productions abounded because he was 1) possibly the only playwright everyone had heard of and 2) safe –unlike more recent troubling playwrights of the previous generation (Shaw, Ibsen etc).

There’s a clip from an official film showing wounded soldiers watching open air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Scenes like this 1) the British heritage which the soldiers were fighting for 2) to a wider audience demonstrated the care the government was taking of its fighting men. This clip appeared alongside footage of scenes of artillery and war preparation, thus dovetailing Britain’s cultural heritage into the war effort.

in my own life I’ve met plenty of people who don’t give a toss about official culture, art or theatre. You’ve got to wonder how many of the sock and maimed soldiers forced to watch this kind of thing actually enjoyed it or even understood it. Because that’s a thing about Shakespeare – unless you’re pretty familiar with the play beforehand, it’s impossible to get the most out of a theatrical production, in fact it’s often impossible to understand what’s going on and especially difficult to get any of the comedy in his plays.

It’s fascinating to learn about the Shakespeare Hut. In February 1916, to commemorate 300 years since his death, this mock-Tudor retreat was opened on a plot of land in Bloomsbury. The hut was built on a site cleared for a planned Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which was abandoned because of the war.

The aim was to provide shelter for wounded Australian or New Zealand troops. Over the next two years it would welcome in more than 100,000 soldiers far from their New Zealand homes. Queen Mary visited in 1917, took up her post behind the tea counter, and poured cups for all the men.

The troops were subjected to regular Shakespeare productions, including an all-female Henry V starring Ellen Terry, one of the most famous actors of her day. Hah! So the Maggie Smale production was following in venerable footsteps.

The exhibition features photographs and playlists from the Hut and you can read more and see photos in an interesting Guardian article about it. Interesting to learn that it the site is now occupied by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

One of the most interesting learnings from the exhibition is about the role of theatricals among British prisoners of war held in Germany. The exhibition focuses on the Ruhleben Camp in Germany which housed some 5,000 POWs. Prisoners were allowed to construct a theatre and, for the same tercentenary which prompted the Shakespeare Hut, staged a series of productions, including Twelfth Night and Othello. The exhibition features photos and a programme from a 1915 production of As You Like It.

In a similar spirit, the British Red Cross mounted a Shakespeare Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in 1917. Quite clearly, if you go looking for Shakespeariana during the First World War, you’ll find it.

Installation view of ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum, showing a poster for the Red Cross Shakespeare Exhibition of 1917 (photo by the author)

5. Democratizing Shakespeare: The Second World War

Same goes for the Second war. Once again Shakespeare was trotted out as the exemplar of the culture and values that were under attack from Nazi Germany, that we were fighting to preserve. The motives and means were very similar to the first war – am dram productions across the country to entertain wounded troops or raise money, leading actors of the day giving patriotic productions in London to stir patriotic fervour, footage of productions shot to be show in cinemas and raise morale.

With the new angle of radio. For the first time productions could be broadcast, to a large radio audience which steadily grew throughout the six war years. As part of the government’s attempt to mobilize society to support the war effort, British theatre was sponsored by the state for the first time in its history.

The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) was created to promote and maintain the fine arts and British cultural life. It later became the Arts Council of Great Britain. The Entertainment National Services Association (ENSA) provided for the forces, organising shows and performances by well-known actors, singers, and comedians.

Photo of an ENSA production staged in a London underground station in 1942 (National Army Museum)

Despite the challenges of wartime, both theatre and Shakespeare thrived. Once again, his words helped to frame the experience of conflict both in Britain and across the world. The exhibition features a recording of a radio programme originally broadcast by the BBC Overseas Services on Shakespeare’s birthday on 23 April 1942. It included extracts from ‘As You Like it’, Henry IV part 1 and, of course, Henry V. It was introduced and performed by leading Shakespearean actors Peggy Ashcroft, Robert Donat, Edith Evans and Ralph Richardson. You can listen to it on headphones and marvel at their phenomenally posh plummy English voices.

There’s a section devoted to the Laurence Olivier production of Henry V described at the start of this review.

And once again there’s a section devoted to British prisoners of war staging Shakespeare productions in camps in Germany. The exhibition includes a list of plays staged at Stalag 383 in Hohenfels, which included ‘The Merchant of Venice’.

6. Just Shakespeare: Adapting After 1945

After the Second World War the patriotic tone of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V lingered throughout the 1950s. But the second half of the 1960s saw radical changes in all aspects of art and culture, with a variety of new approaches to all the arts including theatre. This included the anti-war movements triggered by Vietnam, as well as new attitudes to sex and nudity, which now began to appear in Shakespeare productions.

For 200 years the name and plays of Shakespeare had acted as a kind of recruiting sergeant for the British Army and rallying point for the nation in times of real threat (particularly during the Napoleonic, First and Second World Wars). From the late 60s onwards, Shakespeare’s relationship with the state, the Establishment and the Army came under increasing critical scrutiny. Not in every production, but in an increasing number.

Hence Kenneth Branagh’s 1984 RSC production. Unlike earlier productions it shows the execution of French prisoners onstage and then left the bodies and corpses from the Battle of Agincourt at the back of the stage, behind a gauze curtain, for the later, supposedly reconciling scenes between the English king and his French bride-to-be.

The last section of the exhibition, in the central booth of the (fairly small) exhibition space, takes the Branagh production as setting the tone for productions which followed the Falklands War (1982), the Gulf War (1990 to 1991), and the Iraq War (2003 to 2011).

It includes video clips of stage productions including:

  • a 2013 production of ‘Othello’ which depicts the characters in the modern-day Army uniform used during the Iraq War
  • a 2015 production of ‘Othello’ which features graphic scenes of waterboarding Iraqi suspects
  • ‘Days of Significance’, a play by Roy Williams based on ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ which looks at the impact of British troops who fought in the Iraq War

The strong anti-war flavour of these productions and the pretty intense criticism of the British Army and its techniques, could hardly be more unlike the innocent patriotism of the Shakespeare Hut or the brightly colours optimism of Olivier’s Henry V. If we go to war with Russia I wonder if Shakespeare will be trotted out to inspire patriotic spirit as it was 100 and 70 years ago. I doubt it. Shakespeare hasn’t changed, that’s to say the texts remain pretty much what they were 400 years ago. But our understanding of war, gained in the brutal conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, has made any thoughts about the glamour or heroism of war impossible to modern Brits.

Availability bias

This is a fascinating premise for an exhibition and I thoroughly enjoyed working my way through the wealth of objects and their captions. It proves that Shakespeare is like the Bible, so compendious and diverse that you can find words to justify more or less any opinion on any subject (as demonstrated by the opposing sides in the American War of Independence using Shakespeare to bolster their arguments).

However, it throws up an obvious issue which is to do with the availability of objects to display. The exhibition was curated by – and is based on the scholarly books by – two Shakespeare scholars, Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai, namely Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict. Just from the synopsis on Amazon you can see how a book-length work like this is free to range over all and any productions it likes because words are easy. On the other hand, an exhibition in a museum is severely limited by the objects it can get its hands on.

In fact, like every exhibition at every gallery or museum, this one is an exercise in the art of the possible. Objects which denote important productions or topics may not be available (or may not even exist) while other topics throw up a glut of barely relevant artefacts.

In addition, it’s difficult and expensive to get objects on loan from other collections whereas it’s cheap and easy to get them from your own storeroom, so all exhibitions in all galleries are biased towards the host institution and its collection.

Plus there’s the common problem with any historical overview which is that objects from three or four hundred years ago are rare whereas, as you get closer to the present day, the number of objects rapidly increases, until you are drowning in a surfeit of stuff.

These imbalances in the real world threaten to unbalance or distort the picture painted by any exhibition, an imbalance which is easily managed in books and articles where issues and ideas can be easily conveyed by text alone.

So, at various points, I couldn’t help feeling that the curators had included some objects more because they were just related to one of the conflicts during the period in question than for their Shakespearian relevance. As mentioned above I couldn’t see any Shakespeare connection to the three or four pictures of General Wolfe and the capture of Quebec except that the event was turned into patriotic plays and prints. To put it another way, some of the links between specific conflicts and Shakespeare were pretty tenuous. I still don’t understand why there was an English mortuary sword in the Civil War section except that maybe the curators felt they just needed a physical object, any object, to go alongside the half dozen books and pamphlets.

All the objects (photos, pamphlets, diaries and whatnot) are interesting, it’s just that I was left scratching my head why some of them were included.

Shakespeare and conflict

There’s another, more scholarly, issue. This, as I touched on earlier, is that taken together, Shakespeare’s dozen or so history plays, plus the relevant Roman plays and the tragedies, build up into a subtle, sophisticated, multifaceted meditation on the themes of power, authority, legitimacy, insurrection, rebellion, revolt and overthrow.

Arguably, to really address the topic which this exhibition sets out to explore, you would need a really sound grasp of how all these issues are dramatised and explored in the 20 or so relevant plays, before you even started your review of how they’ve been applied to Britain’s wars and Britain’s Army.

But this, of course, is a massive task – after a lifetime reading Shakespeare I still haven’t read all the history plays and have nothing like a complete grasp of the issues of legitimacy and political power which they raise.

And an exhibition like this has to be practical, finite and manageable. This one achieves what it sets out to do, in a relatively small space, as well as it probably could do. But, in my opinion, the ghost of the larger political, social and cultural issues raised by the plays hover over it, unmentioned and undiscussed.

To take just one aspect of what I’m driving at, many of the characters in the history plays (the ones I’m familiar with) describe and discuss the horror of war, the fear experienced by soldiers, the terror of innocent civilians, the horrific injuries, killing and massacres involved, the fields strewn with bodies, the devastated landscapes and ruined economies. Descriptions of these kinds of things are commonplace in the plays and yet, somehow, hardly occur anywhere in this exhibition.

At some point I realised that this is not an exhibition about Shakespeare and War as about Shakespeare and the British Army. This explains why it’s divided into chronological periods based entirely around conflicts the British Army engaged in right up to the present day, rather than the themes of war encountered in the plays which I have just listed. And this is why, although it’s a very enjoyable trot through British military history, with an emphasis on how Shakespeare’s name, characters and words have been exploited in times of war – it feels, ultimately, despite being packed with shiny objects, intellectually thin.

You can see how an exhibition about Shakespeare and war would actually be something quite different: instead of taking a chronological approach it would take the topics I’ve mentioned several times now – the collapse of authority, civil war, rebellion, interstate war – and then the aspects of war – recruitment, training, fighting, sieges, inspirational rhetoric, the exhilaration of fighting, the horror of wounding, the devastation of the countryside, the mourning of widows – and explore how all of these are described and critiqued in Shakespeare’s multifaceted dramas. It would be something completely different from this exhibition. But then again, maybe what I’ve got in mind would be so wordy and text-heavy that it couldn’t be staged as an exhibition at all.

What this exhibition does, it does very well. It is small but beautifully staged and is FREE.

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by Simon on July 20, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 20, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/07/20/shakespeare-and-war-the-national-army-museum/

On Transience by Sigmund Freud (1916)

Written during the Great War, this little essay is a useful outline of the psychology of atheism. Many adolescents, troubled by the world, realising for the first time the fact of their mortality, ask what’s the point of being alive? This short essay is by way of being Freud’s existentialist response.

Freud tells us he was out walking with a poet (not named in the piece but, in fact, the eminent Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke) who said: ‘Everything will die and pass away, what’s the point of even being alive?’ Freud, solid, sensible, stoic, replied: The brevity of life is all the more reason to value things, flowers, friends, works of art – to appreciate and value them properly while they’re here.

The proneness to decay of all that is beautiful and perfect can, as we know, give rise to two different impulses in the mind. The one leads to the aching despondency felt by the young poet, while the other leads to rebellion against the fact asserted. ‘No! It is impossible that all this loveliness of Nature and Art, of the world of our sensations and of the world outside, will really fade away into nothing. It would be too senseless and too presumptuous to believe it. Somehow or other this loveliness must be able to persist and to escape all the powers of destruction.’

But this demand for immortality is a product of our wishes too unmistakeable to lay claim to reality: what is painful may nonetheless be true. I could not see my way to dispute the transience of all things, nor could I insist upon an exception in favour of what is beautiful and perfect. But I did dispute the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss of its worth.

On the contrary, an increase! Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of an enjoyment. It was incomprehensible, I declared, that the thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it. As regards the beauty of Nature, each time it is destroyed by winter it comes again next year, so that in relation to the length of our lives it can in fact be regarded as eternal. The beauty of the human form and face vanish forever in the course of our own lives, but their evanescence only lends them a fresh charm. A flower which blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely. Nor can I understand any better why the beauty and perfection of a work of art or of an intellectual achievement should lose its worth because of its temporal limitation.

A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire today will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.

So: enjoyment of life is an act of the will, is a choice. Freud’s calm defence of enjoyment (not just of the body, but of the mind) looks back to the calm, sensible hedonism of Horace (Epistles) and anticipates the willed leap of faith into positive action taken by the existentialists.

For my money the best, the most practical and least politically compromised of those post-war European thinkers was Albert Camus. His early essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1939) starts from a meditation on suicide (‘What’s the point of living in a world without God or meaning?’) works its way round to affirming man’s rebellion against a world without God or meaning, and ends up by describing the physical, sensual pleasure of being alive, swimming and sunbathing and smoking by the sea and drinking wine and laughing with friends, sensations which were to be marvellously captured in many of his later novels and stories.

Credit

The history of the translations of Freud’s many works into English form a complicated subject in their own right. The very short essay ‘On Transience’ was first translated into English in 1957 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quote is from the version included in Volume 14 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Art and Literature’, published in 1985.

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by Simon on June 26, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 26, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/on-transience-sigmund-freud/

To Hell and Back: Europe 1914 to 1949 by Ian Kershaw (2015)

This is volume seven in the eight-volume Penguin History of Europe and it is very good. It has to cover a lot of ground and Kershaw does it clearly and authoritatively. He does this more by focusing on broad themes and issues, than getting snarled up in details. It is a high-level overview.

Contents

The period

In Kershaw’s opinion the 20th century is characterised by wars, immense wars, and falls naturally into two halves – the period of the two world wars 1914 to 1945, and then the Cold War, 1945 to 1990.

The Cold War will be dealt with in the ninth and final volume of the series. This volume covers the earlier period but Kershaw makes the point that, as the violence and chaos of the Second War continued after its official end, and that it took a few years for its repercussions – and the shape of the post-war world – to fully emerge, so his account ends not on VE or VJ Day 1945, but goes on till 1949, the year the Berlin Airlift ended (12 May) and the Federal Republic of Germany was created (20 September).

The themes

In Kershaw’s view the 20th century to 1949 was characterised by four large themes or issues:

1. An explosion of ethno-racist nationalism

The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian Empires both ‘liberated’ a lot of peoples who now set up independent nations (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Turkey) – but also confirmed the trend whereby these new nations defined themselves ethnically.

In the big rambling empires all sorts of religious and ethnic groups may have resented each other but managed to live alongside each other, in part because they were all subjects of the emperor or sultan. Ethnic nationalism destroyed this tolerance. At a stroke, if you didn’t speak the national language of the national people who the new nation was set up for, you were an outsider and, by implication and sometimes even by law, a second-class citizen. The Jews were outcast everywhere.

2. Bitter and irreconcilable demands for territorial revisionism

Before he brought America into the war, Woodrow Wilson had declared certain principles, namely that America would be fighting for 1. a peace without conquest (i.e. in the final peace deals, conquerors wouldn’t get to keep the land they’d acquired) and that 2. oppressed peoples would be liberated and given their independence / own nations.

In practice this second one proved tricky because centuries of living under rambling empires had resulted in a tremendous mixing-up of populations. To give an example, a large area in the east of Anatolia was known as Armenia and was the traditional homeland of the Armenian people – but there were large Armenian populations scattered all over the rest of the Ottoman Empire, not least in the area known as Cilicia, at the other end of Anatolia from Armenia proper: so what happens to them?

The victors in the war laboured long and hard over complicated treaties (Versailles, Trianon, Saint Germain), drawing lines on maps and creating new nations states. But it proved impossible not to include in almost all of them large ethnic minorities a) who resented not living in their nation b) who were resented by the majority population for not speaking the national language, having the correct type of name or religion.

And it proved impossible to do this without creating a burning sense of grievance on the part of the nations who lost territory: Germany lost 13% of its pre-war territory and 10% of its population (p.119); Russia lost control of the Baltic states and Finland; Bulgaria also lost some territory, but Hungary lost a whopping 75% of its former pre-WW1 territories so that some three and a half Hungarians found themselves living outside Hungary, many of them in the new enlarged Romania which became nearly twice the size of its 1914 embodiment.

Kershaw gives the chapter where he describes all this the title ‘The Carve-Up’.

3. A prolonged crisis of capitalism, which many thought was terminal, and needed to be replaced by new social structures

The First World War left economic wreckage at every level, from devastated agricultural land through ruined industrial sectors. This was a lot more true in the East where entire regions such as Ukraine, Belarus and Galicia were devastated, than in the relatively static West, where only a relatively small zone about 50 kilometers wide had been devastated by the trench warfare.

At a higher level, all the combatants had had to borrow vast sums to fund their war efforts, and this left many on the brink of bankruptcy. The Western nations had borrowed heavily from the USA. To repay its debt France insisted on huge reparations from Germany. When Germany defaulted on the payments in 1923, France occupied the industrial Ruhr area of Germany, the German government told the workers to go on strike in protest, and the fragile German economy collapsed leading to the famous hyperinflation where you needed a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy a cigarette.

This situation was sorted out at an international conference which enacted the Dawes Plan, a simple triangle whereby America lent money to Germany to rebuild her economy, the German government used the tax revenue generated from its growing economy to pay reparations to France, and France used the German reparations to pay back its immense war loans to America and pledged to buy American products.

This elegant plan underpinned the brittle prosperity of the years 1924 to 1929, the Jazz Era, the Roaring Twenties, the Weimar Years. But, as we all know, it collapsed with the 1929 Wall Street Crash which not only led to prolonged Depression in the States, but demolished the Dawes Plan and plunged Europe into depression, triggering the mounting unemployment and renewed inflation which set the scene for the rise of the Nazis.

Throughout this period, many thinkers and commentators thought the capitalist system was doomed. It seemed to be failing efore their eyes, in America, Britain, France and Germany. Many thought Western civilisation could only survive by mutating into new forms, by evolving new social structures.

4. Acute class conflict, given new impetus by the advent of Bolshevik Russia

There had been class-based uprisings and revolutions throughout the 19th century (maybe the brutal Paris Commune is the most extreme and clearly class-based example) and a wealth of thinkers, not only Marx, had interpreted the grotesque inequality between the new factory and business owners and the deeply impoverished industrial proletariat as a clash of classes.

But the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia transformed the situation. The Bolshevik regime became a symbol and lightning rod for class antagonisms all round the world. It appeared to offer a working example of a genuinely alternative social system, one in which the government sequestered all the means of production and distribution and ran them for the good of the entire people, not just a wealthy few.

But it had two baleful consequences:

1. The Russian Revolution split the Left

From the establishment of the Communist International (or Comintern) in 1919 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the forces of the Left in every country in the world would be divided between communist parties taking direct orders from Moscow, and all the other forces of the Left who, quite often, the communists undermined and sabotaged (see the Spanish Civil War). This was a fatal division of the forces opposing the Right and Fascism, which Kershaw describes as occurring in country after country throughout the period.

2. The Russian Revolution was a galvanising force in the rise of the Right

Right-wing parties everywhere reached out to the newly-enfranchised masses (all European nations expanded their voting base after the war, for the first time creating really mass democracies), especially the large numbers of middle and lower-middle-class voters, and terrified them with visions of blood-thirsty revolutionaries taking over their town or country, lining all ‘class enemies’ (i.e. them) up against the wall, confiscating their businesses and hard-won savings.

One way of looking at it was that, without the very real existence of the Bolshevik regime and the threat from growing communist parties in every country in Europe, there would have been no Fascism.

And the closer you were to Bolshevik Russia, the more pressing the conflict seemed – from Poland which was actually invaded by the Red Army in 1920, to countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary where initial dalliances with left-wing governments quickly gave way to right-wing authoritarian regimes (the Iron Guard in Romania, the royal authoritarian dictatorship of Tsar Boris III in Bulgaria, the right-wing administration of admiral Miklós Horthy in Hungary).

All these trends were exemplified by the central and most important European state, Germany, whose Weimar regime tried to follow Western norms of governance, but was undermined 1) by the extreme social divisions sparked by recurrent economic crises, 2) by the immense and widespread resentment created by the punitive Versailles Treaty, and 3) by a culture of subversion and street violence which the Right, eventually, was to win.

Conclusion

All four elements (nationalism, economic crises, left-wing politics, squabbling over territory) had of course pre-existed all across Europe. But they were driven to new heights of intensity by the First World War and the widespread chaos which followed. And then combined like toxic chemicals, catalysed by the series of political and economic crises, to create unprecedented levels of bitterness, hatred, anger and social division all across Europe between the wars.

The origins of the First World War

There are as many opinions about the origins of the First World War as there are grains of sand on a beach. Kershaw emphasises the folly of the German government sending Austro-Hungary, as it pondered how to punish Serbia for the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, a ‘blank check’, promising to support them come-what-may. This encouraged the Dual Monarchy to outface the Russians, which of course prompted the Russkies to mobilise etc etc.

But reading Kershaw’s account what came over to me as the really decisive source of the crisis was the Austro-Hungarian slowness to act. Other heads of state had been assassinated in the decade leading up to 1914 without sparking a general crisis. The other powers expected Austria to attack Serbia and deliver a short sharp reprimand, maybe occupy Belgrade, demand some reparations before withdrawing etc.

But, as Kershaw puts it, the Austro-Hungarian Empire only had two speeds, very slow or stop, and it took them nearly four weeks to write and send their ultimatum to the Serbian government.

This appalling delay gave all the other European governments time to consider how they could use the crisis for their own ends, not least Germany, whose military leaders told the Kaiser this was a golden opportunity to thrash the Russians before the Russians completed their well-publicised plan to modernise and expand their army, which was due to be completed by 1917. The German High Command persuaded the Kaiser that it was now or never.

If Austro-Hungary had gone in hard and fast with a surprise attack into Serbia within days of the assassination, a conference would have been called among the powers – much as happened after the first and second Moroccan crises (1905 and 1911) or the two Balkan wars (1912 and 1913) – to sort the problem out, probably force Serbia to pay reparations, and defuse tensions among the powers.

So you could argue that it was the byzantine and elephantine bureaucracy of the unwieldy Austro-Hungarian state which caused the cataclysmic conflict which defined the entire 20th century.

This view gives edge to the reading of a novel like Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities with its sustained satire on the pompous ineffectiveness of the Austrian administration. Maybe not so funny after all…

Civilised Western and backward Eastern Europe

There’s a whole genre of books devoted to explaining ‘the Rise of the West’ i.e. how Western empires ended up by the early twentieth century ruling a lot of the rest of the world. Harder to find are books which investigate the simpler question: Why was Western Europe relatively ‘civilised’ whereas regimes got steadily more repressive, undemocratic and authoritarian the further East across Europe you travelled. Kershaw’s book suggests some answers.

1. Western Europe was more ethnically homogeneous than central or Eastern Europe. England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden – these were populated by homogeneous populations of people identifying with the nation, with only tiny, insignificant minorities (Belgium is the exception which proves this rule, with low-lying conflict between the Flemings and the Walloons). Therefore, one of the key triggers of post-war social tension – ethnically jumbled populations with conflicting claims – simply didn’t exist in Western Europe..

A notable exception was Spain where two large ethnically distinct groups, the Catalans and the Basques, combined with a backward, poverty-stricken population to make ruling the country problematic, as its slide towards civil war was to highlight.

2. Nation states in the West were long established. The French could trace their nation back to Charlemagne and the British to Alfred the Great, certainly to Magna Carta in 1216. Both nations had parliaments by the 1200s. That gave them 700 years experience of evolving laws and customs and strategies to manage social conflict. Compare and contrast with Germany, which was only unified in 1871 and whose experiments with self-governance over the next 70 years were not, shall we say, particularly successful. It was only after the British and Americans taught the Germans how to run a modern democracy in the post-war occupation that they finally got it right. Or compare with any of the ‘successor’ states to the collapsed empires – Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, which had barely any experience managing themselves. Spain, though it had existed as a political entity since the Unification of the 1490s, had only just ceased to be a monarchy. Only in 1931 did they expel their king and declare themselves a republic.

So all these nations or administrations had very shallow roots and little experience of self-government.

To put the same thing another way, Kershaw explains that in Western European countries (and the USA) the state had, over time shaped the nation – the institutions of the state had created a national consciousness which identified with these institutions. The institutions of state had become part of the populations sense of nationhood, for example, in Britain, the Queen, the Houses of Parliament, Black Rod, the Leader of the Opposition and so on.

It was the opposite in the new nations of central and eastern Europe. Here ethnically purist nationalisms predated any idea of what a nation was, and the new states were created in the name of ethnically limited nations: Poland for the Poles, Hungary for the Hungarians and so on. The precise political form the new states took was secondary; the aim was to promote the nation.

Thus the institutions of the new democratic states were mostly new and, as they proved themselves incapable of managing the political and economic crises of the 1930s, broad sections of the population had no qualms about overthrowing these institutions and replacing them with different ones. They didn’t have the national identification with Queen and Parliament or President and Congress that the British and Americans have. So they got rid of them and tried something new, which turned out almost always to be rule by the army or authoritarian figures.

Thus in the USA or Britain, most people thought of politics as a simple choice between Labour or Tory, or Republican or Democrat. Most people accepted ‘democracy’ and few people thought about overthrowing it. But the democratic state was such a new invention in the ten new countries of post-war Europe that plenty of politicians, intellectuals and activists could easily imagine overthrowing and replacing it with a different model more appropriate to the times, and almost always more authoritarian.

3. The further East you went, the less industrialised, the less ‘developed’ i.e. the more ‘backward’ countries became. It appears to have been a simple gradient, a line you could draw on a graph. In Britain at the end of the First World War only 10% of the working population worked on the land whereas 72% of the Romanians worked on the land. Rural workers tended to be illiterate and easy to sway towards simplistic, nationalistic regimes in a way the highly educated population of, say, Britain, would have found laughable. Thus Oswald Mosley’s high-profile British Union of Fascists caused well-publicised public disorders, but never had more than 50,000 members, far fewer than the National Trust or the Women’s Institute.

Of course the most easterly European nation was Russia, which – following the West-East rule:

  • had the highest proportion – 80% – of illiterate peasants
  • no tradition of elective democracy – the Tsar only set up a sort of parliament, the Duma, in 1905, but he and the ruling classes made sure it had no power
  • few if any of the institutions of civic society
  • and a ‘culture of violence, brutality and scant regard for human life’ (p.113) as my reviews of some of its classic fiction tend to confirm (Dr Zhivago, Tales From the Don, Red Cavalry, One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich)

The weakness of inter-war democracy

Kershaw has a fascinating passage examining the post-war political systems of every country in Europe (pages 123 to 133) which shows exactly why ‘democracy’ had such thin roots. Later on, a similar survey explains why these weak democracies almost all collapsed into authoritarian regimes by the time of, or during the second war (pages 183 to 192). European democratic systems during this period:

1. Used electoral voting systems which encouraged weak government. Many used variations of proportional representation, which may, on the one hand, have led to general assemblies which were accurate reflections of national views, but also led to weak governments which followed each other with bewildering speed:

  • Spain had 34 governments between 1902 and 1923
  • Portugal 45 administrations between 1910 and 1926
  • Yugoslavia had 45 political parties
  • Italy had 6 changes of government between 1919 and 1922
  • France had six different governments in just over a year, April 1925 to July 1926

2. All this disillusioned much of the population with their mixture of incompetence, endless squabbling, corruption, all too often giving the sense that politicians put party interest above national interest. This allowed right-wing extremists to tar all democratic politicians with neglecting The Nation, even accusations of treason.

3. This created what Kershaw calls a ‘political space’ in the newly-created countries – or countries with new political systems – into which broad sections of the populations were all-too-ready to let a Strong Man step and run the country properly:

  • Admiral Miklos Horthy in Hungary in 1920
  • Mussolini in Italy in 1922
  • General Primo de Rivera in Spain 1923
  • in Albania Ahmed Zogu seized power in 1924 and declared himself King Zog
  • General Pilsudski took control in Poland 1926
  • General Gomes de Costa took power in Portugal in 1926

On the eve of the Second World War only about eleven countries in Europe were functioning democracies and they were all located in the north and the west – Britain, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and tiny Iceland; whereas about 60% of Europe lived in 16 countries under repressive, authoritarian rule with curtailed civil rights and minorities facing discrimination and persecution: in the South, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece; in the East, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia; and slap-bang in the middle, the largest country in Europe, the nation that set the tone, Germany.

What is fascism and how does it take hold?

Kershaw is best known as a historian of Hitler and the Nazis. You can feel the depth of his knowledge when he comes to describe the situation in Germany after the First World War, during the boom years of the mid-1920s, during the Depression (1929 to 1933), and as he explains the reason for the Nazis’ appeal and rise in each of these periods.

All too often histories of the Nazis focus so exclusively on the uniqueness of the German context that the reader is hard-pressed to draw broader conclusions. An excellent thing about this book is that it is a conscious attempt to cover the history of all of Europe, so that in each of the micro-periods it’s divided into, Kershaw goes out of his way to explain the situation in most if not all of Europe’s 30 or so countries; how, for example, the onset of the Depression affected not only Britain, France and Germany (which you always get in the standard histories) but countries right across Europe, from Spain to Greece, Norway to Portugal.

This proves extremely useful when he gets to the rise of the Nazis and their successful seizure of power (Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933 and within 6 months had crushed all other rival sources of power, all other political parties, the parliament, trades unions, universities, professions, every aspect of a modern state had either been Nazified or abolished).

It’s useful because after explaining all this, he goes on to draw general conclusions, to define what Fascism is, to ask Why Fascism succeeded in Italy and Germany and Why Fascism failed everywhere else. This has all kinds of benefits; one is it allows him to draw a distinction between regimes which were right-wing and authoritarian but not actually Fascist, explanations which we can apply to our contemporary situation in 2024.

1. What is Fascism?

Kershaw says that trying to define Fascism is like trying to nail jelly to a wall because its core attribute is hyper-nationalism i.e. glorification of the nation with its special language and history and traditions – and the precise details of each nation’s history and culture will vary according to circumstances.

Thus an attempt to hold a pan-Fascist Congress in Geneva in 1934 failed because a) Germany didn’t bother to turn up and b) the other delegates couldn’t agree joint plans of action.

These caveats notwithstanding, Kershaw says Fascism includes:

  • hyper-nationalist emphasis on the unity of an integral nation which gains its identity from the cleansing of all who don’t belong – foreigners, ethnic minorities, undesirables
  • racial exclusiveness (though not necessarily biological racism of the Nazi type) with an insistence on the special, unique and superior quality of the nation
  • radical, violent commitment to the complete destruction of political enemies – communists, liberals, democrats, sometimes even conservatives
  • emphasis on militarism and manliness, usually involving paramilitary organisations, linked to worship of war as cleansing, purifying the nation etc
  • belief in authoritarian leadership

Some also had irredentist goals i.e. reclaiming lost territory. Some were anti-capitalist, reorganising economies along corporatist lines, abolishing trade unions and directing the economy through corporations of industries.

All these elements are not unique to fascist rule. They can be present in authoritarian, right-wing governments which want to overthrow or dismantle the existing state and replace it with nationalist, authoritarian rule. What distinguishes Fascism is its insistence on total commitment to bend the collective will of the entire population to the creation of an entirely new nation, expressed in ideas like the New Man, New Society.

Most right-wing authoritarian regimes (like all the South American dictatorships of the 1970s) essentially want to conserve the existing social order, and simply eliminate the left-communist, union elements which threaten it. Fascism goes much further. Fascism is a revolutionary movement because it seeks to sweep awaythe existing order and replace it with a new, totally unified society which will produce New Human Beings, a higher form of people who express the quintessence of the Nation and its epic national qualities.

2. Why does Fascism succeed?

1. Elites lose faith in, and control of, democracy The most important factor in the rise of Fascism – of the extreme, radical Right – is whether the forces of conservatism – business, military, financial and social elites – believe they can get their way through the existing political and social order, or not. If these powers in society retain the belief they can work through the existing system they will support it. Only when they have completely lost faith in the existing system, or believe they have lost the ability to control it, will the elites help to, or acquiesce in, overthrowing it.

In this interpretation, the key to avoiding Fascism is ensuring that all or most elements of these powerful elites believe the existing (parliamentary, democratic) system is the best mechanism for getting their way, or some of it. Only when the existing system has been completely discredited, and the elites feel they are losing control of it and look around for alternatives, does the space open up for radical political change.

Rule 1: Keep the ruling elites invested in the parliamentary system.

2. Fascists play up the threat of communism (and atheism) The second factor is the threat of communism as it affects two sectors of society, the elites and the middle classes.

The realistic prospect of a communist regime coming to power and implementing real communist policies (nationalising all industries, confiscating private property) obviously threatens the interests of the business, economic, class elites. If these interests feel that the existing parliamentary system really is going to allow hard-core Socialist or communist governments to administer Socialist policies, then they will intervene to prevent it.

But communism doesn’t just threaten the elite. It also directly threatens the jobs and livelihoods and cultural capital of a large part of the population, the so-called middle classes, which covers a wide range from the professions (doctors, lawyers) at the top through small businessmen, shopkeepers, small craftsmen and artisans and so on.

Historically, the majority of Fascist supporters have not been from the aristocracy or elites (who often look down on fascist vulgarity) but from the threatened and pressurised middle and lower-middle classes. The elites will have a large number of the population on their side if these people, too, feel threatened by radical socialist policies, not only by their economic policies but by their attacks on traditional culture and values, as progressive in our time have mounted a sustained attack on traditional beliefs (around family, gender, racial guilt etc).

Spain 1936 is an example where the newly elected, aggressively socialist government threatened not only the property and livelihoods of the big landowners and big business but a wide tranche of the middle classes, petit-bourgeoisie and so on. They also directly threatened the Catholic church and all its values, patriarchy, the traditional family, the sanctity of marriage and so on, not having calculated how many traditionalists and believers this would antagonise. They created, in other words, an impressively powerful coalition of enemies.

Kershaw has a section specifically addressing the role of the Protestant churches and the Catholic church during the crisis years of the 1930s and the war. What comes over loud and clear is that the Pope and the Catholic Church, although horrified by the Nazis, thought the communists would be even worse.

Same in Spain. It’s well known that Hitler and Mussolini gave material aid to General Franco, flying his troops in from their garrisons in Africa and bombing Republican strongholds. Less well-known that Britain and France, after some hesitation, decided to adopt a policy of strict neutrality.

Rule 2: Avoid the threat of genuinely socialist, let alone communist, policies. This won’t lead to socialist policies, it will trigger the fervent opposition of the majority of the population.

3. Widespread grievances, specially about lost wars or lost land Political parties don’t exist in a vacuum, they need supporters. Voters, populations, peoples don’t migrate to extreme parties without reason. Almost always it is because they feel threatened by loss or are aggrieved because they already have lost important aspects of their lives (jobs, money, status).

A very large number of people in Weimar Germany felt they stood to lose, or already had lost, jobs or status. Classic Nazi members were white-collar workers, small businessmen, former army officers or NCOs, shopkeepers, small craftsmen, farmers, a huge raft of people who had suffered monetary loss under the economic crisis, or loss of status (ex-army officers, unemployed white-collar workers).

The entire German nation was united by a sense of grievance at the unfair provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, the loss of large parts of territory and the punitive reparations.

The Nazis played on the widespread grievances of disparate sectors of the population and claimed to speak for them against a corrupt system which they promised they would sweep away, restoring everyone’s losses (of jobs and status), and restoring the losses of the entire nation.

Rule 3: Don’t give people and peoples long-running grievances.

4. National pride and national enemies The easiest way to address people’s grievances is to bundle them up into all-encompassing calls for a revival of the nation. Pretty much all Germans felt humiliated by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, so it wasn’t rocket science for the Nazis to make one of the main planks a call for National Revival and throwing off national humiliation.

And the easiest way to rally national pride, national revival, national rebirth, is to identify some kind of internal enemy who stands in the way. For the Nazis it was their mad irrational hatred of Jews (who, it is always shocking to recall, made up just 0.76% of the German population). Around the same time Stalin was uniting the mass population behind him by attacking ‘kulaks’, ‘saboteurs’ etc. All authoritarian regimes are quick to identify enemies and rally the majority of the population against them.

It’s tricky because calls for national revival are an extremely common tactic of all politicians, and many people are patriotic in a relatively harmless way. It obviously becomes toxic when it becomes mixed with calls to defeat ‘enemies’, either internal or external. ‘Make America Great Again’ is fine in itself, until you start blaming the Mexicans or the Chinese for the fact that it isn’t, currently, great. Or the Jews. Or the Liberals or the Socialists etc.

Rule 4: Be wary of calls to national pride, nationalism and national revival which rely on demonising an ‘enemy’.

5. Economic crisis Implicit in the above is the context of the economic or social situation becoming so extreme and dire that a) the large percentage of the population cease to have faith in the system b) parties of the extreme Left or extreme Right can come into existence, get a purchase on the population, and get into the political system.

Rule 5: Avoid extreme economic or social failure.

6. Unstable political systems Political systems like proportional representation, which cater to every political element in a society, allow the proliferation of small, often extreme parties. Once established, extreme parties have the potential to grow quickly and challenge the status quo. This is what the Nazis did in Germany.

This is less likely in ‘mature’ democracies with winner-takes-all systems like Britain and the USA. Our systems are dominated by two main parties, which are themselves flexible and changing coalitions of interests, which ensure that most views have a political ‘home’ and give a broad spectrum of beliefs at least the possibility of seeing their views and policies implemented.

Even in a stable democracy like Britain’s, it is still possible for new parties to erupt and threaten the status quo if the social movement/mood they reflect is powerful enough. This is what UKIP did to the British political system in the lead-up to the Brexit Referendum. What Boris Johnson then did was in line with the long tradition of mature Western democracies, he incorporated most of UKIP’s policies (‘Get Brexit Done’) into one of the two mainstream parties (the Conservatives) thus drawing its teeth, neutralising it, and maintaining the stability of the two-party system. If it resulted in the Conservatives moving to the right that in fact reflects the wishes of a large part of the UK population who voted for Brexit and voted for Boris.

Mature democracies incorporate and neutralise radical elements. Immature democracies allow radical elements to establish themselves and attract support.

Rule 6: Incorporate potentially disruptive movements into the existing system – don’t keep them outside to become a focal point for destabilisation.

Kershaw summarises:

Fascism’s triumph depended upon the complete discrediting of state authority, weak political elites who could no longer ensure that a system would operate in their interests, the fragmentation of party politics, and the freedom to build a movement that promised a radical alternative. (p.232)

3. The difference between fascism and authoritarianism

Authoritarianism – authoritarian dictatorships – generally want to keep things as they are or turn the clock back. They all share a loathing and fear of socialism or communism not only because it’s a direct threat to their wealth and power but because it threatens change, threatens to sweep away old values and traditions. Authoritarians want to save the nation by preserving its (conservative) traditions from change.

Fascism, on the contrary, is a revolutionary and dynamic ideology which seeks to sweep away time-honoured and conservative institutions. It seeks a comprehensive rebirth of the nation, freed from the shackles of the past, liberated to fulfil its historic destiny (power, land, international respect), but also to create New People in a New Society.

Thus Kershaw is at pains to point out that, although most European nations became dictatorships on the brink of or during the Second World War – most of these were not fascist. They were military dictatorships first and foremost, which may have used this or that aspect of ‘fascist’ ideology or trappings as suited them, but without the fundamental fascist attribute of wanting to transform society.

  • When General Ioannis Metaxis established his dictatorship in Greece in 1936, his avowed intention was to save the nation from communism, and he tried to set up ‘fascist’ organisations but failed to secure anything like the total social control of a Hitler or Mussolini.
  • When General Edward Smigly-Ridz took control of Poland in 1937 as ‘Leader of the Nation’, the country became more nationalistic and more antisemitic but ‘there was nothing dynamic about this form of authoritarianism. No major attempt was made to mobilise the population. The regime was content to control the society. It had no ambitions to change it’ (p.262).
  • Even General Franco, after his military coup of July 1936, took a year to sort out the political aspects of what was essentially a military project. He co-opted the ideology of the banned Falange Party and coerced all the other right-wing organisations into joining it (p.240), but the party was only ever a political aspect of what remained a military rule. This was the polar opposite Germany, where a fanatically organised, civilian political party controlled the military as just one of the many levers of its total control over society.

Another fairly obvious difference is that some of these authoritarian regimes locked up fascists as well as communists, socialist, liberals, journalists etc. For example, the Polish and Portuguese dictatorships (pages 262 and 264) or Admiral Horthy’s authoritarian regime in Hungary, which banned the genuinely fascist Hungarian National Socialist Party and imprisoned its leader, Ferenc Szálasi (p.263).

In other words, for many authoritarian dictatorships, real hard-core fascism was just one more subversive or disruptive element which needed to be controlled.

One way of thinking about this is the contrast between merely authoritarian regimes and totalitarian regimes. Totalitarian regimes want your soul as well as your body, your mind as well as your vote. They insist on total control of every aspect of their citizens lives in order to create a new type of human being.

Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. (Mussolini)

Another way of thinking about the difference between authoritarian dictatorships and genuinely fascist regimes is that none of the dictatorships threatened the peace of Europe – the Western democracies didn’t lose any sleep about the foreign policy of Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, Portugal. Even Spain, whose drawn-out civil war was violent and traumatic, never threatened to spill beyond its borders, never threatened the peace of Europe.

Unlike the irredentist and imperialist ambitions of the true fascist regimes, Italy and, most of all, Germany.

The rise of the Right and collapse of the Left in the 1930s

Putting the usual culprits Italy and Germany in the context of the wider, in fact of the complete European scene, brings out a fact I had never fully grasped before.

I suppose I knew that the 1930s were the era of The Dictator – although Kershaw’s review of every dictatorship in Europe really rams this fact home. The deeper point is that the catastrophic economic collapse of the early 1930s, which devastated nations, threw millions out of work, and led many to think capitalism was failing – did not produce a shift to the Left, in favour of thinkers and politicians who’d spent a lifetime criticising capitalism and supporting workers movements – it resulted, all across Europe, in a seismic shift to the Right.

The 1930s was the decade of the failure of the Left.

Why? Because despite its appeal to the kind of intellectuals whose works survive and are studied to this day, for the majority of the population the Left, in either its socialist or communist form, threatened the interests of:

  • most of the ruling class
  • most of the middle class
  • most if not all of the peasants – some may have heard rumours about Stalin’s forced collectivisation in Soviet Russia, all knew that the Left wanted to destroy the Church and traditional religion
  • even a portion of the skilled working class who stood to lose their perks and privileges
  • not to mention the large number of criminals and dossers who are generally left out of sociological calculations, the kind of people who fill the pages of novels like Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz

In other words, the hard, radical Left always represents a minority of a society, and is always opposed by a majority in that society.

Which makes it all the more striking that such a disproportionate majority of the intellectuals of many of these societies moved to the Left. Kershaw has a chapter giving a tourist’s-eye view of the ‘intellectual life’ of Europe in the 1930s and 40s (which jumps around superficially, as historians’ quick compliance with the need to mention something about ‘culture’ so often do) – but the general drift is that from Gramsci through Orwell, Sartre to the Frankfurt School, the majority of Europe’s significant intellectuals took a left-wing, often out-and-out communist, view of the continent’s problems.

In other words, a high proportion of the intellectual class of Europe was profoundly out of step with the majority of their populations.

That’s one rather crude interpretation, anyway. The deeper reasons for the shift to the Right bear investigating and pondering. A deep analysis would give insights into why, in our time, years of austerity, uncertainty and economic stagnation since the 2008 Crash have resulted not in a mass outpouring of socialist idealism but, once again, led to the rise of right-wing leaders around the world. At the same time the intellectual and academic classes remain securely embedded in their progressive and left-wing ghettos (universities), out of touch with the populations they claim to interpret, and blankly incredulous of the leaders who keep getting elected (Trump, Johnson).

To return to the period under consideration, Germany’s dynamic Nazi ideology is in fact the exception that proves the rule to most of Europe during the period. So much ink has been spilt about Hitler and the Nazis but they were the product of a very distinctive set of circumstances – to take two of them, the fact that they were in Europe’s largest and most powerful nation, and that the entire nation felt huge grievance over the Versailles Treaty.

Focusing so much on bloody Hitler and his Nazi Party, whose historical situation was unique and so whose precise brand of turbo-charged Fascism is never going to recur, has distracted historians from the much more practical task of analysing the reasons for the rise of right-wing authoritarian regimes in general – which do recur with worrying regularity, which were widespread during the 1930s and 40s, which dominated Latin America and southern Europe in my boyhood (Portugal, Spain, Greece and Turkey all had military dictatorships in the 1970s), and which people worry are now reappearing in the guise of various ‘populist’ leaders.

Historians’ focus on one unique event (the Nazis) is, in my opinion, a distraction from analysing and thinking about how to prevent the far more common (almost mundane) phenomenon of military coups and authoritarian dictatorships.

The accidental rise of Adolf Hitler

As anybody who’s read about the period knows, Hitler didn’t storm to power, he was appointed by political elites who thought they could manipulate and control him to get their way. They did so because in late 1932 the Nazis had secured the largest share of the election vote and so had to be included in whatever government was set up – but, when they finally decided to appoint the vulgar little corporal Chancellor, the behind-the-scenes wheeler-dealers made sure to pack Hitler’s ‘cabinet’ with members of other parties. They thought that would moderate his policies. None of them had any idea how utterly ruthless Hitler would turn out to be in eliminating all these restraints on his power.

So possibly the key fact about Hitler’s rise to power is that it was the result of a mistake in political calculation by Germany’s political elite which had, by late 1932, lost all confidence in the ability of Weimar parliamentary democracy to deal with the country’s severe economic crisis.

Conclusions

Avoiding Fascism

What this analysis suggests is that avoiding Fascism is nothing to do with the Left-wing obsession with promoting workers rights, women’s rights, minority rights and so on. It involves ensuring that the powerful economic, social and military elites of a country continue to have faith in some form of parliamentary democracy as the best mechanism of protecting their interests.

Any political moves which threaten or jeopardise their interests, in effect, open the door to right-wing coups and worse.

Of course you probably require a number of other factors and preconditions, at the very least a) a political culture which accepts or has a tradition of coups, such as Spain’s with its long tradition of pronunciamentos, and b) a really severe economic or social crisis which the parliamentary system manifestly fails to manage.

Avoiding Europe

If you were American or Chinese or anyone looking at Europe from the outside it would be hard to avoid the conclusions that a) Europe is incapable of governing itself, and b) Europe is the most savage, bestial continent on earth.

For all their instability, nothing on the scale of either the First or Second World Wars took place in Latin America, Africa or the Indian sub-continent.

One way of looking at the Cold War is that, at the same time as the Soviet Union acquired a deep buffer zone to protect its western border (i.e. the Eastern Bloc countries) it was also taking control of the very region which contained the most ethnically mixed populations, had shown the most political instability, had been the location of terrible ethnic cleansing and enormous deaths.

In a sense the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe liberated Western Europe from the burden dragging at its heel and, along with massive American financial and military aid, freed it (Western Europe) for the 30 years of economic growth and prosperity which followed.

It was Cecil Rhodes who made a speech in which he told his audience to remember that they were English and so had won first prize in the lottery of life. Obviously, at the time he was referring to our membership of the biggest empire the world had ever seen – but reading accounts of the twentieth century like this give the idea a whole new meaning.

Put simply, being born in England in the twentieth century meant you weren’t born on the continent of Europe which, as Kershaw vividly emphasises, between 1939 and 1945 descended into hell, real hell, the utter collapse of civilisation, mass slaughter, death camps, mass imprisonment and torture, gas chambers, the endless rape and murder of civilians, displacement and starvation.

In the entire catalogue of destruction, devastation and misery that made up the Second World War, the murder of Europe’s Jews was the lowest point of mankind’s descent into the abyss of inhumanity. The fires of the death-camp crematoria were almost literally the physical manifestation of hell on earth. (p.369)

Both my parents lived through the war as children, experiencing the Blitz and then the V-bombs, which wasn’t pleasant. But nonetheless they both had the immeasurable good fortune not to have been born on the Continent of Atrocity, and in the terrible middle years of the 20th century, that really was like winning a prize in the lottery of life.

Understanding Europe

Which leads to a final thought, which I’ll keep brief: maybe it is impossible for an English person to understand Europe. We were never invaded, devastated, forced to collaborate with the conqueror, to round up and deport English Jews, to execute our own socialists and liberals, and then reduced to starvation and chaos amid the smoking ruins of our cities.

The extremity of the experiences of every other nation in continental Europe during the war years (and described by Kershaw in gruelling detail) are beyond our experience or imagining. And so we never experienced anything like the same cultural or political extremity which wartime conditions produced. In the first post-war election in France, the Communist Party won 26% of the vote, in Britain 0.4%, reflecting the two nations very different recent experiences (p.488).

The great thoughts of Gramsci, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Sartre and so on have dazzled generations of British students but bear no relationship at all to the history, culture and politics of the UK and its population. Which is why all those humanities students, drilled in their Benjamin and Lukacs, who voted for Jeremy Corbyn, helped him lead Labour to its most crushing electoral defeat in 50 years.

Brexit

It also explains something about Brexit. The ideal of a European Union has a real meaning for hundreds of millions of Europeans, raised for generations to believe it is better to be politically and economically united than to fight each other to the death as their grand-parents and great-grand-parents did.

But Britain really was an exception to the history of this terrible period, and that ‘exceptionialism’, for better or worse, was, during the period Kershaw describes, and obviously still is, a strong thread in British culture and population.

(I’m not shoehorning Brexit and ‘Europe’ into this review: the last 20 pages of Kershaw’s book explicitly discusses these issues. He describes the descent of the Iron Curtain across Europe, the continent’s division into two blocs being crystallised by the Marshall Plan, announced in June 1947. He quotes several Americans involved in co-ordinating Western Europe’s recovery from the war, not least George Marshall himself complaining that the British wanted to keep aloof from Europe, that the British wanted to benefit from a scheme designed to create an economically unified Europe ‘while at the same time maintaining the position of being not quite a European country’ – quoted page 516.)

I’m not approving or disapproving of Brexit, just pointing out that a book like this, which doesn’t hold back when it comes to describing the terror, murder, torture, holocausts, purges, massacres, reprisals, ethnic cleansing, mass deportations, executions and rapes which took place all across continental Europe during these years, can’t help but make you reflect how lucky we were to escape almost all of it, and how the cultural and political consequences of that very real ‘exceptional’ destiny have shaped our politics right down to the present.

Random facts

The books is full of hundreds of facts, figures and anecdotes. A few grabbed my attention:

In Britain just short of 70,000 civilians were killed by all German bombing in the entire 6-year war. In one night the firebombing of Hamburg killed some 34,000 civilians. The Hiroshima atom bomb is estimated to have killed about 66,000 people on the day, from the blast and fires, although many more died in the weeks and months that followed.

At their core, both world wars were wars between Germany and Russia. I knew the German High Command in 1914 knew they had a window of opportunity to attack Russia before its army came up to full strength, therefore they had an incentive to attack Russia while they still could. I didn’t realise the Germany High Command felt exactly the same in the late 1930s. Thus in both world wars, a – if not the – fundamental factor was the German gamble to take on Russia, and do it in a hurry.

The Irish taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, was one of a very few politicians who sent the Germans a formal note of condolence on the death of Adolf Hitler, 30 April 1945 (p.387).

Hitler loved Disney movies. He was delighted when Goebbels gave him 18 Mickey Mouse cartoons for Christmas 1937 (p.465).

The Venice Film Festival was founded in 1932 in Mussolini’s Italy. Winners of Best Italian Film and Best Foreign Film were awarded ‘Mussolini Cups’ (p.466). I think they should revive that tradition.

Credit

To Hell and Back: Europe 1914 to 1939 by Ian Kershaw was published by Allen Lane in 2015. All references are to the Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

First World War

Russian Revolution

Between the wars

The Weimar Republic

German literature

Czech literature

French literature

Albert Camus

Jean-Paul Sartre

English literature

Graham Greene

George Orwell

The Middle East

The Spanish Civil War

The Second World War

The Holocaust

After the Second World War

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Posted by Simon on May 26, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/to-hell-and-back-europe-1914-to-1949-ian-kershaw/

A Line In The Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East by James Barr

‘I had no idea the French were behaving so tyrannically’
(Winston Churchill, when informed how the French were planning to rig the supposedly ‘free’ elections to be held in Syria in 1943, quoted in ‘A Line In The Sand’, page 249)

‘One should kill the British wherever one finds them. They are pathological liars and that is how they have ruled the whole world.’
(French policeman chatting with a released Jewish terrorist, quoted on page 342)

This is a really shocking book about the long-running rivalry between the British and French in the Middle East, from the outbreak of the First World War through to Britain’s ignominious withdrawal from Palestine in 1947. It makes you really despise, and even hate, the French for their corruption, cowardice, brutality and pomposity.

The book’s last part is a detailed account of Jewish terrorist campaigns against the British, not only in Palestine but in London, where clubs, government buildings and even cabinet members were targeted. I hadn’t realised how extensive it was – Churchill and young Princess Elizabeth were among targets considered for assassination. The terrorist plans of the Jewish Irgun and Stern Gangs put al-Qaeda to shame.

And the murder of hundreds of British soldiers and officials in Palestine (not to mention hundreds of innocent Arabs) and the bomb attacks and letter bomb campaign in mainland Britain were aided and supported by France. Barr has the documentary evidence to prove it.

Imagine if the British secret service had given money and guns to the Islamic terrorists who carried out the Bataclan nightclub massacre. Same thing. The Jewish gangs convinced themselves that terrorism was a valid method of freeing their people from imperialist rule, just like Islamic terrorists want to overthrow the West, liberate the Holy Places and re-establish the Caliphate etc. And you do that by machine-gunning kids in nightclubs. Genius.

It’s not often a book leaves me feeling physically sick and revolted by the moral bankruptcy of the people described, but this one did. The pompous prick de Gaulle, the French diplomatic corp and security services, or the murdering Jewish terrorists – it’s hard to decide which are the more disgusting.

French failure

The French education system tells its citizens that France is home to a unique civilisation and a tradition of unparalleled military gloire. When you look closely, however, you realise it’s a lie. The French were soundly beaten by the British throughout the 18th century, when we seized both Canada and India from useless French forces in the 1750s.

After causing 25 years of mayhem across Europe in the Napoleonic Wars, the French were finally crushed at Waterloo in 1815, and went on to suffer a series of political revolutions in 1830 and 1848.

The failed 1848 revolution in France evolved, through three years of tortuous political shenanigans, into the rule of the characteristically French, jumped-up, pompous ‘Emperor’ Napoleon III.

The rule of this ‘grotesque mediocrity’ (in Marx’s words) came to an inglorious end when Napoleon was suckered by the clever Bismarck into the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 in which the useless French were crushingly defeated and Paris collapsed into a blood-thirsty civil war.

The French came off second best in the Scramble for Africa and were constantly irritated by the feeling that somehow the British had beaten them unfairly, had seized India, Canada and their African colonies using ‘underhand’ tactics.

Running beneath everything is France’s sulky inferiority complex to the British; forever seeking to restore the mythical gloire they fondly associated with Napoleon, and failing time after time, most glaringly at the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, when they rattled sabres and then were forced to ignominiously back down.
(‘The Scramble For Africa’ by Thomas Pakenham)

France’s most notable social achievement at the turn of the century was the Dreyfus Affair which revealed the vast extent of French anti-semitism and just how culturally polarised a nation it was.

Battle lines were drawn between secular liberals and Catholic reactionaries, deep hatreds revised, Frenchmen murdered each other on the issue, and the far-right proto-Fascist Action Française movement was founded.

Although nationalist politics were confined to the margins in France, the ideas at their heart – a nation defined by the exclusion of those deemed not fit to belong to it, Jews quite specifically – remained undiluted as one part of a divided French culture.
(‘To Hell and Back: Europe 1914 to 1949’ by Ian Kershaw, p.18)

At the outbreak of the First World War the French only managed to stem the German attack in 1914 with the help of a British Army. While the British Army (amazingly) held its morale throughout the war, the French army experienced widespread mutinies in 1917.

As this quick review of the history indicates, educated French people suffer from cultural schizophrenia: everything in their tradition tells them that France is unique, a beacon of civilised values, a nation of unparalleled military genius – and yet their actual historical record is one of defeat, division and civil war. The French Revolution developed into a civil war, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 split the nation, the Commune of 1870 left enduring scars, the Dreyfus Affair revealed how divided the country was.

This schizophrenia continued after the First World War. The French people were told they had won the war and yet France experienced a profound economic slump, mass unemployment and a succession of short-lived governments. Something was wrong. Something was undermining French gloire. Someone was conspiring against them. Who could it be? Of course! The British! The old enemy.

Even before the First World War there were tensions between Britain and France. We managed to sign an Entente Cordiale in 1904 but this was less a sign of friendship than a way to try and limit and control their ongoing imperial rivalry, which had led to clashes in Sudan (which the British claimed) and Morocco (which the French claimed).

Britain and France worked reasonably well together in managing the Western front during the First World War, despite recriminations and blame about the various catastrophic military initiatives. But away from the fields of Flanders, the two nations continued their fierce competition. One of the flashpoints was in what we now call the Middle East but which was still, right through the Great War and up until 1923, called the Ottoman Empire.

The sick man of Europe

Throughout the second half of the 19th century the Ottoman Empire was thought to be on its last legs, staggering from one crisis to another in each of which it tended to lose another bit of territory, from the 1878 Russo-Turkish War when the Russians yet again tried to advance as far as Constantinople, through the British annexation of the theoretically Ottoman territory of Egypt in 1882, to the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 which saw bits of the formerly Ottoman Balkans handed over to Serbia and Bulgaria, and the Turco-Italian War of 1912 to 1913 in which Italy seized the Ottoman provinces to the west of Egypt which were eventually consolidated into Italian Libya.

The Ottoman Empire attacks Russia; Russia vows revenge

After some reluctance, and only on the basis of the promise of arms, ammunition, lots of money and German military aid, the ‘Young Turk’ rulers of the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary (in October 1914).

They signaled their entry by a surprise attack on the Russian Black Sea fleet. From that point onwards, an angry Russia was determined to grab big chunks of Ottoman territory, namely Constantinople and its environs in the West, and an extended bite into Anatolia from the Russian-controlled territory of the Caucasus, in the East.

Italians, Greeks, Bulgarians and Russians all had their eyes on seizing more Ottoman territory.

The Sykes-Picot plan

This was the context in which two civil servants, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, one British, one French, drew up a map of how the Ottoman Middle East would be divided by the two countries (assuming the Allies won the war). The plan allotted a French sphere of influence in the north and a British sphere of influence in the south, with the dividing line running from Acre on the Mediterranean coast to Kirkuk in northern Iraq, near the border with Persia.

This map has four colours because the diplomats made a distinction between areas of ‘direct control’ and areas merely of ‘influence’. The yellow area roughly corresponding to modern Israel, was left open subject to further discussion.

The Sykes-Picot plan for the Ottoman Middle East (Source: The Institute for Curriculum Services)

A Line In the Sand

This is the starting point of James Barr’s history, A Line In The Sand, which is notable not so much for its coverage of the wartime context of the plan (which is thin) as for his very detailed survey of what came afterwards i.e. the consequences of the plan over the next 30 years.

This is where the book feels like it adds new and fascinating information. It’s divided into four parts, and the titles give you a good feel of the content:

  1. The Carve-Up, 1915 to 1919
  2. Interwar Tensions, 1920 to 1939
  3. The Secret War, 1940 to 1945
  4. Exit, 1945 to 1949

The Sykes-Picot agreement is portrayed in conventional liberal historiography as a wicked imperialist ‘land grab’ which took no account of the wishes of the native peoples of these areas. But like all such agreements, it can also be seen as an attempt to prevent conflict between rival powers.

In fact, to gain even a basic understanding you need to realise it was just one among many post-war agreements between numerous states, all of which had to do with drawing lines on maps in an attempt to be fair to people’s nationalist aspirations while also reconciling the conflicting wishes of rival governments. Thus the treaties of:

  • Brest-Litovsk, March 1918
  • Versailles, June 1919
  • Saint-Germain-en-Laye, September 1919
  • Neuilly, November 1919
  • Trianon, June 1920
  • Sevres, August 1920
  • Rapallo, November 1920
  • Riga, March 1921
  • Lausanne, July 1923

All of these consisted of drawing lines on maps and trying to get warring parties to agree to them, and all of them ignored the interests of numerous national and ethnic groups on the ground: for example, the Poles and Ruthenians left on the wrong side of the new Polish border with Ukraine, or the three million Germans who found themselves stuck inside the newly invented nation of Czechoslovakia, the Germans isolated in the newly ‘free’ city of Danzig, the Romanians caught inside Bulgaria, the Bulgarians caught inside the new Hungary. And so on and so on.

It was an era of bad maps, of diplomats trying their best to create viable states out of the enormous chaos left by the collapse of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire.

To single out Sykes-Picot for special opprobrium seems silly to me. Bad maps pregnant with all kinds of future problems were being created all over Europe.

Post-war rivals

The 1920s in Syria

Barr doesn’t mention any of these other treaties or situate Syke-Picot in the broader post-war settlement (which is, admittedly, huge and horribly complex). For a really sophisticated account of the agreement (and of the key role played in it by Russia, who Barr doesn’t mention at all) I strongly recommend Sean McMeekin’s brilliant account of the period:

Instead Barr focuses very narrowly on the rivalry between Britain and France in the Middle East which followed the Great War and it’s here that his detailed account of the politicking between the two supposed allies is genuinely eye-opening.

Broadly speaking the French, acting on the Sykes-Picot deal, moved into Syria and Lebanon, where they had long-standing cultural links, with French schools and institutions etc, although it is a mark of French arrogance, insensitivity and stupidity that they also based their claim on the legacy of the crusaders (!), the majority of whom had been French and had only been kicked out of the region as recently as 1291. French premier Clemenceau claimed that France had:

a centuries-old Protectorate, the origins of which date back to the Crusades.’ (quoted page 75)

In fact it was British forces who had first entered Damascus at war’s end (General Edmund Allenby captured Damascus on September 30, 1918) and allowed a political body set up by Syrian intellectuals and politicians, the Syrian Congress, to elect Faisal, son of the Sherif of Mecca, first King of Syria in 1919 and to set up an independent Syrian parliament. The French were furious and insisted that the British bring pressure to bear on Faisal to allow the French to take over Syria in the form of a ‘mandate’.

As so often the French liked to think of themselves as ‘a great power’ and yet somehow, yet again, found themselves beholden to the damn British.

The sequence of events is complex, but basically the Syrians proclaimed an independent state under King Faisal and this triggered the French to a) assert their rights at the international San Remo conference of April 1920, armed with which they b) issued an ultimatum to Faisal to stand down as king and disband his forces. Reluctantly, Faisal did so and fled south into British-controlled Palestine (p.103). King Faisal’s defense minister Yusuf al-‘Azma, ignored the king and led the poorly armed Syrian army to Maysalun where it was crushed by superior French forces, who went on to enter Damascus and assert full French political control.

The first thing the French general who crushed the Syrian army, General Gouraud, did when he entered devastated Damascus was go straight to the tomb of the the great warrior Saladin who fought the Christian crusaders, to tell him: ‘Saladin! We’re back!’ (quoted page 103). The French mandate over Syria ran from 1920 to 1946.

All through this tortuous series of events the French felt the British hadn’t adequately supported them, a feeling which was crystallised by the next event. British forces occupying ‘Iraq’ had been troubled with their own violent uprisings but took a different strategy; rather than impose military rule, the British cast around for someone to make a nominal Arab figurehead of an Iraqi government and settled on… Faisal, the very same Faisal who the French had just run out of Syria. Thus in August 1921, Faisal was crowned Faisal I, king of Iraq (at what was, by all accounts, a sad and miserly ceremony: p.126).

The story of Faisal’s changing fortunes is colourful enough, as is Barr’s account of the initial French and British losses to well-armed and motivated Arab rebels against both their ‘mandates’. But for Barr’s purposes the point of the story is that the French felt that the British choice of Faisal was, yet again, a deliberate snub and insult to them. Touchy bastards.

French rule in Syria proved to be distinctly different from Britain’s rule in Iraq and Palestine, and quickly acquired a reputation for corruption and brutality. This sparked successive Arab risings and armed insurrections. It didn’t help that France herself was undergoing a severe economic crisis in the early 1920s, reflected in political instability as one short-lived administration followed another, creating a national sense of paranoia and bewilderment (p.142). They had supposedly won the war but seemed to be badly losing the peace.

Barr gives a detailed account of the Great Druze Revolt of 1925 to 1927 by the obstinately independent Druze Muslims who lived in the region south of Damascus, sparked by ‘French mistreatment of the Druze population’ (pages 128 to 152). At its climax the French High Commissioner Maurice Sarrail ordered the shelling of the capital city Damascus to flush out rebels, which led to the destruction of much of the Old City. A good example of French civilisation and gloire.

(In fact the French were to shell and bomb Damascus again, in May 1945, after refusing the Syrian government’s request to hand over the French troupes speciales. Instead de Gaulle sent French army reinforcements and then used them to mount a major attack on all the offices of the Syrian government, bombing the parliament building, shooting up Syrian and British offices. The shooting went on for days. One Russian holed up in Damascus’s main hotel said it was worse than Stalingrad. It was described as a ‘reign of terror’, in line with the Terror of the French Revolution, and the Terror unleashed during the 1870 Commune. Some 800 Syrians were killed. Syrian gendarmes were found buried in a mass grave, some of them having been mutilated by the French troops. The Parliament building was left a smoking shell. Eventually, the British government announced they would intervene militarily unless the French desisted. The Syrian authorities were livid and wanted the French officers in command to be tried for war crimes. And de Gaulle? De Gaulle blamed the British and their secret agents for everything. The man was a colossal turd. pp.303-310)

But why were the Arab population of Syria rebelling against them, the French, with their wonderful civilisation and poetry and art? Just because they hanged the natives and used them for forced labour and taxed them to the hilt to run their corrupt administration and displayed the corpses of dead Arabs in the town square? No. Natives love that kind of treatment. There must be something else behind it. Yes! It must be the British aiding the Syrian rebels! (p.152)

French soldiers, administrators and diplomats at all levels came to believe that the Arab insurgents were being funded by the British. Some of the Druze warriors confirmed these suspicions – but they were only repeating propaganda put around by their own leaders to hearten them (p.150).

This wasn’t true – it was not British policy to support Arab insurgents against the French. But, on the other hand, the British had to consider Arab opinion in their area – stretching from the Sinai Peninsula, across the bare desert north of Arabia and then down into the region then known as Mesopotamia, making up the inhabited centres of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, modern Iraq. The British wanted to distinguish liberal British rule from what quickly became known as the corrupt and very brutal French rule in their zone.

To take a small but symbolic example, the British refused to hand over the terrorist leader Muhammed al-Ashmar who the French thought was behind atrocities in Syria, when he crossed over into British territory. This understandably infuriated the French. A host of little issues like this crystallised the French sense that the British were doing everything in their power to undermine their rule.

The Mosul oil pipeline

Another issue which caused bad feeling between the so-called allies was oil. At the very end of the war Britain campaigned hard to seize Mosul in the far north of Iraq, in fact British troops only took possession of the city the day after the armistice of Mudros with the Ottoman Empire took force, and it remained contested territory until the League of Nations confirmed its inclusion in the British mandate in 1926 (p.145).

But that was a trivial detail compared to the long, drawn-out wrangling about who should share the proceeds of the vast oil reserves which were finally discovered around Mosul in 1927 (p.153). A joint venture was set up with American and French companies under the aegis of the Turkish Petroleum Company, around which a great deal of haggling, arguing and threatening took place, gleefully recorded by Barr.

All sides agreed that the pipeline carrying the oil should run west to the Mediterranean coast. It was much cheaper than running the shorter distance south to the Persian Gulf because then it would have to be shipped around Arabia and through the Suez Canal. But should the pipeline run directly west from Mosul, in which case it would pass through French-controlled Syria to a French-controlled port – or take a more southerly route through the empty deserts of north Arabia and hit the coast at Haifa, in British-controlled Palestine. Obviously the Brits preferred this option, but it cost a lot more and was an obvious snub to the French. Barr details the convoluted political, strategic and financial arguments which dogged the project until it finally opened in a bifurcated route, with spurs heading off to British Haifa and French Tripoli, in 1934. The French resented the fact that, yet again, they’d been ganged up on (p.163).

The 1930s in Palestine

Rancour between the two countries came back to bite the British as the crisis in Palestine bubbled up during the 1930s. Small-scale Jewish immigration had been allowed throughout the 1920s not least as a consequence of the notorious Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which a hard-pressed British government tried to rally Jewish support for the Allies by promising the world’s Jews – especially the rich and influential Jews in the United States – a homeland in Palestine. But it was relatively small, in fact it’s surprising to learn that there was net emigration of Jews out of Palestine in 1927.

Still, there was a steady low-level hum of Arab-Jew antagonism, which occasionally flared into serious incidents such as the riots in 1929 which left 271 dead and 580 wounded (p.160).

What changed everything was the rise of the Nazis. The number of Jewish immigrants began to grow as the Nazis seized power of Germany (1933). Although they were often desperate, the Jews nonetheless tended to have more resources than the dirt-poor peasants of Palestine, were much better educated and organised, and so began to buy up extensive tracts of land (p.167). This soon led to resentment, petty disagreements escalated into shooting, then both Arabs and Jews took to carrying out terrorist atrocities, chucking hand grenades into marketplaces, and so on.

Initially a lot of this violence was committed by Arabs, under the supervision of the Arab Higher Committee led by Hajj Mohammed Amin al-Husayni, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. When assassins shot the British assistant district commissioner for north Palestine, the British authorities moved to arrest members of the Higher Committee but it’s military leadership fled to nearby Damascus in French territory, where they were received… like heroes. And when the British turned to the French for help the latter, with a characteristic Gallic shrug, refused (p.175). This period of well organised Arab attacks on British soldiers and locations is known as The Great Arab Revolt, 1936-39.

The British authorities recruited Jews as special constables to go on increasingly illicit ‘night raids’ against suspected Arab terrorist strongholds. One such was Moshe Dayan, future leader of the Israeli Army. But in 1938 a Jew who had shot at an Arab bus, Schlomo Yusef, was hanged by the British – the first Jew to be hanged by the British in Palestine – and this crystallised the opposition of hard-line Jews, specifically the Hagana, to abandon their sympathetic attitude to the Brits and to mount full-blown attacks. On 6 July 1938 two bombs were thrown into a Haifa marketplace killing 21 Arabs (and 6 Jews). On 15 July a bomb in Jerusalem killed ten Arabs. And we’re off on a rollercoaster ride of non-stop killings and atrocities by both Jews and Arabs, with the British authorities haplessly trying to keep order.

Vichy France

The final part of the book turns away from Syria and Iraq to focus on the long, tortured story of the conflict in Palestine. I found the accounts of Jewish terrorism upsetting and the revelation that the French security services aided and abetted Jewish terrorists targeting British soldiers in Palestine and British civilians in London absolutely disgusting.

De Gaulle comes over as an arrogant, lying prick. The British gave him home, shelter, broadcast facilities in London and helped the French Resistance, often at the cost of British lives, so it was disgusting beyond words to read again and again and again and again, the recorded statements of De Gaulle’s haughty contempt for Britain, his disdain of Britain, and the rampant anglophobia which ran right through the French political and military establishment.

In his memoirs de Gaulle recalled with relish how Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, once asked him whether he realised that he had caused “more trouble than all our other European allies put together.” “I don’t doubt it,” de Gaulle replied. “France is a great power.” (p.206)

It is worth remembering that, once Hitler attacked, the cheese-eating surrender monkeys (the ones who were defeated in 1870 and then only survived in 1914 because of British help) capitulated in just five weeks (the Battle of France lasted from 10 May to 25 June 1940).

This was due not least to the profound divisions among the French themselves.

France [in 1936] remained a completely divided country. The hatred of the nationalist Right for the Popular Front went far beyond conventional political opposition. Special vitriol was directed at its leader, Léon Blum, a Jewish intellectual who had been an early supporter of Dreyfus. Blum had been physically assaulted by a nationalist mob in February 1936. And the previous spring, the leader of the far-right Action Française, Charles Maurras, had appallingly denounced Blum as ‘a man to be shot – in the back.’ (To Hell and Back: Europe 1914 to 1949 by Ian Kershaw, page 298)

A popular right-wing slogan was ‘Hitler rather than Blum’. Many – many – French people preferred to be ruled by Hitler than by a Jew. Ponder that fact.

The French political scene [in the 1930s] was notoriously venal and corrupt. (To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-49 by Ian Kershaw, page 237)

The opening part of this episode of The World At War gives a summary of just how chaotic and divided France and its governments were during the build-up to the Second World War.

After their defeat, the French set up the Vichy regime, a right-wing semi-fascist government which enthusiastically co-operated with the Nazis to round up French Jews and send them off to concentration camps (75,000 French Jews were deported to Nazi death camps). Blum was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp where, luckily, he survived.

Yes, proud France! That is how to treat your Jewish politicians! Liberty, Equality, Fraternity indeed. La gloire. La mission civilisatrice.

Somehow de Gaulle blamed all this on the British. Why? Because whenever anything bad happens in France, it isn’t France’s fault – it must be Britain’s fault.

The Vichy government inherited control of Syria and Lebanon. The British led a campaign to oust the Vichy forces – the Syria-Lebanon Campaign of July 1941 – because Vichy had signed an agreement with the Nazis to let them use Syria and Lebanon’s airfields, for possible attacks on Greece or Crete.

The British (and Australian) forces were accompanied by Free French forces supplied by de Gaulle, who assured us that the Vichy army would quickly collapse. He was confident they would rally to him, the Greatest Frenchman in the Word. But they didn’t. They fought back very fiercely. When shown the evidence that he was completely wrong in his military estimate, de Gaulle characteristically said it showed how valiantly Frenchmen fought for any cause and went on to blame Britain’s lack of resources and commitment for the setbacks. It’s always the British fault (p.221).

When the Free French (backed by the British) eventually did succeed in overthrowing the Vichy regime in Syria, they discovered they didn’t have enough personnel to administer it, so a lot of French personnel swapped sides (as they do so easily) and discovered a new-found love of de Gaulle. ‘Ah, mon brave, mon cher, mon ami‘ is the sound of self-serving hypocrisy (p.225).

The British had publicised their campaign to the Arab world by saying they were going to overthrow the brutal Vichy administration. Then de Gaulle kept almost all the Vichy administration in place, thus placing the British in the position of appearing to have lied.

De Gaulle’s unbearable ingratitude and arrogance make reading anything about him difficult. He cultivated a strategy of ‘bad manners and a foul temper’. He gave interviews to American newspapers blaming all setbacks on the British (the same British who were fighting and dying to establish a Free French regime in Syria) (p.228).

When the British tried to make good on the promises they’d made to the Syrian Arabs during the Syria-Lebanon Campaign, to hold free and fair elections, de Gaulle, characteristically, refused. He said it was out of the question for Glorious France to diminish her Glory. He and Churchill had a bitter shouting match about his refusal, after which the British simply cut off de Gaulle’s telegraph links with the outside world for a week to show him that he wasn’t a Great Power, he was just a man in an office with a phone which didn’t work (p.242).

Re. de Gaulle, it’s worth recalling from Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another by Jonathan Fenby, that American President Roosevelt really, really, really despised de Gaulle, as did most of the American administration. They saw him for the jumped-up boaster he was, refused to allow him to attend meetings of the Big Three, and tried to manoeuvre a rival candidate, General Giraud, to replace de Gaulle as leader of the French Committee for National Liberation (p.257).

In November 1943 the French army staged a coup against the democratically elected Arab government of Syria, rounding up the President, the Prime Minister, Faris al-Khoury, and most of the cabinet, throwing them in prison, and letting their Senegalese troops run riot through the streets of Damascus.

It was incidents like this which convinced Roosevelt that de Gaulle had authoritarian, if not actual fascist tendencies, and didn’t deserve to be present at meetings of the Big Three (p.261). Syrian rebels began assembling forces in the hills. The situation threatened to descend into anarchy. And to solve it all…. de Gaulle blamed the whole situation on the British for interfering in French affairs, and threatened to resign (p.261).

Eventually Churchill threatened to use superior British forces to declare martial law in Syria and so de Gaulle, his man on the spot, The General Delegate to the Levant, the alcoholic Jean Helleu, was recalled to Paris along with all of his team responsible for the coup, the Syrian President, Prime Minister and his cabinet were restored to power and France’s name, very gratifyingly, was mud (p.263).

Jewish terrorism and Israel

What makes the last part of the story – from 1943 to 1948 – really weird was the way these formerly very right-wing Vichy French allied with the Jewish resistance against the common enemy, the British. After reading over 100 pages documenting the virulent anglophobia and Brit-hatred of all the senior French politicians, from de Gaulle downwards, the sensible assumption just becomes, If they’re French, they hate the British and, if they’re in a position of power, almost certainly funding anti-British terrorism.

Thus we arrive at the devastating final section in which we learn that, Anglo-French rivalry became so venomous that, in the last days of World War Two, even as British soldiers were fighting and dying to liberate France, the French government was financing and arming Jewish terrorists who were attacking and killing British soldiers in Palestine. What a bunch of bastards.

With the war years and the growth of the Jewish resistance forces, you enter a surreal world of unlikely alliances.

Lehi [often known pejoratively as the Stern Gang] initially sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, offering to fight alongside them against the British in return for the transfer of all Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe to Palestine. Believing that Nazi Germany was a lesser enemy of the Jews than Britain, Lehi twice attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis. (Wikipedia)

Jewish freedom fighters seeking an alliance with the Nazis? (p.268) You can see how real history, the real record of human affairs, like human beings themselves, is faaar more complex, contradictory and irrational than the baby morality of political correctness and identity politics allows.

The British had been forced to make a strategic decision. They were at war with Hitler who controlled the entire continent of Europe. Meanwhile, along with a host of other responsibilities around the world, they were theoretically in charge of Palestine. If more Jews immigrated into Palestine it would inflame the low-level conflict between Arabs and Jews which was already burning there. Arabs or Jews, which side do you want to alienate? Well, the Arab world stretches from the Atlantic to Persia, so the answer is simple: keep the Arabs onside, specially as they populated the lands around the Suez Canal, which was the carotid artery of the British Empire.

Thus, in order to try and keep the Arabs onside, the British government issued a White Paper in 1939 which restricted both Jewish immigration and Jewish land purchases in Palestine. This one step turned the Jews into fierce enemies, and as the war went on and the Holocaust began to be enacted, Jewish anger at the perceived anti-Jewish bias of the British soured into military operations carried out by gangs of terrorists. Helped by the French.

  • The Haganah put its intelligence network in Syria at the disposal of the Free French (p.267)
  • When the Allied attack on the Levant took place the Haganah provided members of its elite units to serve as guides
  • British police trailing suspected members of the Stern Gang saw them get a taxi to the Syrian border, cross the border, and be welcome by a French officer (p.269)
  • In his memoirs a member of the Stern Gang confirmed that the gang was supplied with arms and ammunition by the French regime in Syria, knowing they would be used to kill British soldiers and officials (p.271)
  • A Stern Gang member on trial stated that if Palestine was under a French mandate he was sure the British (who were trying him) would instead be giving him arms (the implication being… like the French were doing) (p.272)
  • A Hebrew-language publication of the gang admitted they were getting arms from the French (p.272)
  • In November 1944 MI6 uncovered proof that the French secret service was supplying money and guns to the Haganah and the Stern Gang – who had, that month, assassinated Britain’s Minister-Resident for the Middle East, Lord Moyne (p.289)
  • The French secret service was sharing with the Zionists information sourced from a French spy inside the British legation (p.290)
  • ‘The French are in collusion with right-wing Jews and known terrorists have lunched with Alessandri [top French security service official]’, (Jewish Agency liaison officer and future mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, quoted page 292)
  • ‘The British government, beset by French-sponsored Jewish terrorism in the Levant…’ (p.298)
  • ‘Now, deeply alarmed at the prospect that France going to be thrown out of the Levant, both the Jewish Agency and the terrorist organisations made contact with the French government to offer their services, (p.309)

France helps the Jewish terrorist campaign in Britain

‘The British government had known for some time that the Irgun and the Stern Gang were planning to use Paris as a base for assassinations of key British politicians including Churchill and Bevin… (p.337)

Barr describes the extensive contacts and meetings between members of the Irgun and Stern Gang with French officials in Paris who supported them in their plans to carry out terrorist attacks in Britain. Lawyer and advisor to Léon Blum, André Blumel, hoped the LEHI would get all the assistance it needed to launch attacks on Britain. (p.338). Senior French lawyer helps terrorists attack Britain.

The first attack was carried out by a student of Jean-Paul Sartre’s, Robert Misrahi, who left a bomb in a raincoat at the Officers Club off Trafalgar Square (p.339).

When a Zionist shipment of arms was impounded by French police in south-west France, the minister of the Interior intervened to ensure that they were sent on to the Zionists in Palestine. When five members of the Stern Gang broke out of a British prison in Eritrea and managed to reach the French colony of Djibouti, the French offered them asylum in France (p.340).

A young woman terrorist, Betty Knout, left a bomb in the toilets of the Colonial Office in Whitehall, which failed to go off and fingerprints and equipment indicated its manufacture by Stern Gang members. When British Special Branch tried to track her down in Paris, the French security services did what they could to block the hunt (p.340).

They launched a letter bomb campaign, sending letter bombs to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Anthony Eden among others.

When a new Zionist point man arrived in Paris, he discovered his predecessor had reached an understanding with the French government: the Irgun and Stern Gang could use Paris as their base providing they didn’t carry out any attacks on British targets on French soil. When Princess Elizabeth paid a visit to France, the French police met the Irgun face to face to make sure they didn’t have a plan to assassinate her. Nice of them, don’t you think (p.343).

Semi-fascist views of the Zionist terrorists

It’s important not to be under the illusion that these were ‘nice’ or sympathetic people:

According to Yaacov Shavit, professor at the Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University, articles Lehi publications wrote about Jewish ‘master race’, contrasting them with Arabs who were seen as a ‘nation of slaves’. Sasha Polakow-Suransky writes: ‘Lehi was also unabashedly racist towards Arabs. Their publications described Jews as a master race and Arabs as a slave race.’ Lehi advocated mass expulsion of all Arabs from Palestine and Transjordan or even their physical annihilation. (Wikipedia)

Timeline of violence in Palestine

Jewish terrorism, and British attempts to stop it, only intensified once the Germans were defeated and peace was declared in Europe on May 1945. Wikipedia has a timeline:

Note how Jewish attacks on British forces are interspersed with British Army attacks on terrorists, the handling of prison breakouts, issues with immigrant ships trying to dock.

Reading this sorry story, the puzzle is why the British government persisted as long as it did. Remember, this was the government of Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan which is routinely remembered in folklore as founding the National Health Service (as memorialised at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games).

It’s easy to say they screwed this up, but what choice did they have? A government’s first responsibility is to try and maintain peace and security by enforcing law and order. This becomes difficult to do in any insurgency situation, and the British authorities made the same mistakes as they had during the Black and Tan period in Ireland 1920 to 1922 and with the same generally negative effects, i.e they often targeted innocent civilians, missing the real culprits but managing to alienate the wider population. Which is what your insurgents want (p.185).

The British just give up

The British unilaterally terminated their Palestine ‘mandate’ on 15 May 1948. The Zionist leadership announced the Israeli Declaration of Independence and Arab armies attacked from north and south.

The role of the Americans

In the later stages of the war and the post-war years America plays a bigger and bigger role. The American administration and American public strongly supported the Jews and raised millions of dollars for them. Jewish intellectuals and businessmen lobbied President Truman very hard. Barr gives a fascinating account of the very effective work of the American league for a Free Palestine run by Hillel Kook, which took out full-page ads in the newspapers, got celebrity endorsement, organised all kinds of publicity campaigns – with texts written by Hollywood scriptwriter Ben Hecht – and significantly influenced American public opinion in favour of the Jewish cause.

All those dollars and all that moral support made a big difference to the Zionists, gave them confidence that they wouldn’t be abandoned or left in the lurch, and the moral encouragement to fight on.

No solution

And finally, the obvious observation that – nobody could come up with a solution. It wasn’t like there was an easy solution to hand and the British stupidly ignored it. All the best diplomats and politicians on the planet had plenty of time and motivation to think up a solution. The Peel Commission, the Woodhead Commission, the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry, the United Nations Commission On Palestine, all tried to find a solution.

But nobody could. They still can’t, to this day, because there is no solution.

My view of the book

I knew nothing about this era (Middle East in the 1920, 30s and 40s) and so was fascinated by everything Barr had to tell.

His book is notable for the immense attention he pays to specific meetings and conversations between key figures on both sides. We are introduced to a large cast of diplomats, soldiers and politicians, with quick pen-portraits of each of them, before Barr, typically, gives us precise exchanges and conversations.

Much of this must be sourced from the minutes of all these meetings, because they often describe the exact words used by, for example, French premier Clemenceau and British Prime Minister Lloyd George, to give one example from hundreds. Barr is strong on the exact words used in crucial meetings, diplomatic notes, letters and diaries and also recently declassified documents, both in the UK and in France.

The book’s weakness is that sometimes this deep immersion in the precise sequence of meetings and notes and memos and speeches and diaries obscures the real significance of key issues or turning points. Big things get buried. Sometimes I had to reread sections to understand what just happened.

The other obvious shortcoming is Barr’s neglect of the wider geopolitical context. I felt this most acutely in the first section about Sykes-Picot which completely ignores the role played by Tsarist Russia, by Germany and, of course, by the Ottoman rulers themselves because I just happened to have read Sean McMeekin’s excellently thorough and insightful account of the same period.

For example, Barr doesn’t mention the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov, who co-signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement because, in addition to the carve up of Syria/Palestine/Iraq, the deal allotted Tsarist Russia a big chunk of Eastern Anatolia, and also gave her her long-cherished dream of Constantinople and the territory around it. Because of the Russians’ heavy involvement, McMeekin thinks the agreement should be known as the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot agreement.

And nowhere does Barr mention the extraordinary fact that one of the baits the Allies dangled in front of Italy while she dithered whether to join the war or not (Italy didn’t enter the war, on the Allies side, until May 1915) was a big slice out of southern Anatolia.

Therefore, a full picture of the Sasonov-Sykes-Picot map looks like this. Note the flesh-coloured patch on the right which was to be given to Russia, along with the city of Constantinople and the territory north and south of it (at the top left), and the extraordinary amount of territory which was going to be handed over to Italy.

Sykes-Picot map showing the territory promised to Russia and Italy

None of this is in Barr’s account, which therefore comes close to being seriously misleading about this period.

It is symptomatic of Barr’s Anglocentrism that instead of all this vital context involving other major powers, he devotes entire chapters (chapters 2 and 3, Enter TE Lawrence and Allenby’s Man, pp.37-64) to Lawrence of Arabia, the pukka English hero, who in fact comes to dominate the whole of the first part of the book. We get a blow-by-blow account of Lawrence’s (rather feeble) military exploits as well as quotes from his letters, diaries, newspaper articles and quotes from his friends.

By ‘Anglocentric’ I mean we get 100-pages about Lawrence and his influence, but nowhere does Barr mention the names of the last two Ottoman sultans who ruled during and after the war (Mehmed V 1909 to 1918, Mehmed VI 1918 to 1922) nor does he name the three Turkish politicians who ruled the Ottoman Empire during the war, Enver, Talaat, and Cerman. The great military and political leader who dominated the final 1923 settlement of the Ottoman Empire at the Treaty of Lausanne, Mustafa Kemal, later to be given the title Ataturk, is mentioned just once.

It’s as if the Ottoman Empire, whose territory the entire book is about, barely exists or matters.

The book’s strength is its weakness. It isn’t interested in the broader geopolitical implications. It is a narrow and very deep dive into the diplomatic minutiae of the troubled relations between Britain and France in the Middle East 1916 to 1946. Barr goes into extreme detail – apparently writing from the minutes and notes taken at specific meetings of various French and British civil servants, ambassadors and leaders – to give you a memo-by-memo account of the behind the scenes conversations and decisions.

But sometimes so detailed, you lose the thread of what’s actually happening. And always, so focused on just Britain and France, that you get no sense at all of the wider geopolitical situation, of events in Turkey, the Caucasus or neighbouring Russia or Persia. Silence.

My view of the two key issues

I think received liberal opinion about Sykes-Picot and the Balfour declaration is too simple-minded.

1. Sykes-Picot

I’m no expert but it seems to me simplistic to attribute all the conflicts in the Middle East to just one agreement out of scores and scores of similar treaties and a whole sequence of very complex events, which flowed before and after it.

If you read Barr, with his exclusive focus on the British and French governments, you get the impression they were responsible for everything bad that ever happened. But if you read McMeekin’s much more comprehensive account, you are immediately plunged into the maze of ethnic tensions and rivalries which plagued the region, from the poisonous enmities all across the Balkans (Serbs, Bulgarians, Croats, Bosnians, Greeks, they all hated each other) to the huge divides which split the Middle East, from the conflict between Shia and Sunni Muslims, to that between ethnic Turks and all their subject peoples – the squabbling tribes of desert bedouin, the Christian Armenians in the East, the Kurds in south-east Anatolia, and so on and on.

Barr doesn’t, for example, even mention the Armenian Genocide of 1915 to 1917, a prime example of the extreme ethnic violence which had roots far back in the 19th century way before the British and French started planning their ‘carve-up’ – or the horrifying ethnic cleansing surrounding the Greco-Turkish war of 1919 to 1923.

When you read McMeekin on the other hand, you reach a really good understanding of why the entire region was a powder keg which had, in fact, already exploded several times before the Great War broke out. The Ottomans had repressed Armenian and Bulgarian uprisings with great brutality and bloodshed throughout the later 19th century.

That’s why the ante-penultimate sultan, Abdul Hamid II (reigned 1876 to 1909) was nicknamed ‘the bloody sultan’ or ‘the red sultan’. It was the historical track record of pogroms, ethnic cleansing and massacres which gave liberals like David Lloyd George such a deeply engrained antipathy to the Ottoman Empire (and, as it turned out, an inclination to give the Greeks deeply misplaced encouragement in their ambitions to invade Anatolia).

Whoever ended up ruling over these regions was going to inherit a very poisoned chalice of ethnic rivalries and enmities. Indeed it’s one of the many strengths of McMeekin’s book that he makes you realise how very astute Mustafa Kemal was, the man who rose to become Turkey’s post-war ruler, when he allowed most of the former empire to be hived off to the British and French by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. All these bickering minorities were their problem now, the fools.

Attributing all the problems of the entire region to one agreement just strikes me as foolish. The Sykes-Picot agreement was merely the formal recognition of at least four nations’ claims on Ottoman territory, was provisional and was soon superseded by a whole raft of other agreements such as:

  • the Anglo-French Declaration promising to establish independent states in the Middle East with freely chosen governments (November 1918)
  • the Agreement of San Remo (April 1920) which defined three ‘class-A’ mandates, ‘Palestine’, ‘Syria’ and ‘Mesopotamia’
  • the Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920) which was a first attempt to ‘carve up’ the Ottoman Empire including Anatolia and its European territory
  • the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which marked the official end of the Allies war against the Ottoman Empire and established the borders of modern Turkey

Why not blame those treaties too? They all contributed to what was, in fact, a continuous flux of conflict, resolution, treaties and agreements which continued throughout the Mandate period and afterwards, right up to the present day.

2. The Balfour Declaration

Similarly, a lot of people blame the Arab-Israeli Conflict on the British government’s Balfour Declaration of 1917. But Zionism existed well before the declaration. Wikipedia defines Zionism as:

the nationalist movement of the Jewish people that espouses the re-establishment of and support for a Jewish state in the territory defined as the historic Land of Israel (roughly corresponding to Canaan, the Holy Land, or the region of Palestine)

And points out that it originated ‘in the late 19th century’ and in Austria and Germany not Britain.

Jews were already emigrating from Europe, and especially anti-semitic Russia, into Palestine well before the Balfour Declaration. To ponder a counter-factual, do people think that, if there had been no Balfour Declaration, Jews would not have emigrated to Palestine? Of course not. A Jewish homeland in Palestine was a central plank of Zionism for decades before Balfour, whether the British government supported it or not, in fact whether any Western government supported or tried to block it.

We shall migrate to Palestine in order to constitute a majority here. If there be need we shall take by force; if the country be too small – we shall expand the boundaries. (speech by David ben-Gurion, quoted page 274)

The fact that net Jewish migration to Palestine was negative in 1927 – ten years after the declaration – shows that the declaration in itself had a negligible effect, it certainly didn’t open any ‘floodgates’.

The most important cause of modern Arab-Israeli conflict was Hitler. The Nazis not only caused the trickle of migration to Palestine to turn into a flood, they – and the experience of the Holocaust – made an entire generation of Jews absolutely determined to establish a Jewish state come what may, no matter who they had to assassinate, murder, letter bomb, massacre and hang to achieve it.

That wasn’t Balfour’s doing. That was Hitler. Hitler made the creation of the state of Israel inevitable.

France’s great 20th century military achievements

  • Syria
  • Indochina
  • Algeria

La gloire!

Credit

A Line In The Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East by James Barr was published by Simon & Schuster UK in 2011. All references are to the Simon & Schuster paperback edition of 2012.

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by Simon on May 22, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 22, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/05/22/a-line-in-the-sand-james-barr/

The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908 to 1923 by Sean McMeekin (2015)

This is a very good book, maybe the definitive one-volume account of the subject currently available.

The Berlin-Baghdad Express

McMeekin’s earlier volume, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898 to 1918, although full of solid history, was conceived and structured as an entertainment, using the erratic history of the Berlin to Baghdad railway project as a thread on which to hang an account of the German High Command’s attempt to raise a Muslim Holy War against her enemies, Britain and France, across the entire territory of the Ottoman Empire and beyond, into Persia and Afghanistan.

It had a chapter apiece devoted to the quixotic missions which the Germans sent out to try and recruit various Muslim leaders to their side, very much dwelling on the colourful characters who led them and the quirky and sometimes comic details of the missions – which, without exception, failed.

In Berlin to Baghdad book McMeekin had a habit of burying references to key historic events in asides or subordinate clauses, which had a cumulatively frustrating effect. I felt I was learning a lot about Max von Oppenheim, the archaeological expert on the ancient Middle East who was put in charge of Germany’s Middle East Bureau – but a lot less about the key events of the war in Turkey.

Similarly, as McMeekin recounted each different mission, as well as the various aspects of German policy in Turkey, he tended to go back and recap events as they related to this or that mission or development, repeatedly going back as far as the 1870s to explain the origin of each thread. I found this repeated going over the same timeframe a number of times also rather confusing.

This book is the opposite. This is the book to read first. This is the definitive account.

In 500 solid pages, with lots of very good maps and no messing about, following a strict chronological order, McMeekin gives us the political, military and diplomatic background to the Ottoman Empire’s involvement in the First World War, a thorough, authoritative account of those disastrous years, and of their sprawling aftermath through the disastrous Greco-Turkish War (1919-23) ending with the Treaty of Lausanne, signed in July 1923, which established the modern republic of Turkey and brought that troubled country’s decade of tribulations to an end.

McMeekin suggests that the bloody decade which stretched from the first of the two Balkan Wars in 1912 to 1913 through to the final peace of the Greco-Turkish War as, taken together, constituting The War of The Ottoman Succession.

Gallipoli

This is the first detailed account of the Gallipoli disaster I’ve read which clearly sets it in the wider context of a) the broader Ottoman theatre of war b) the First World War as a whole. I was a little shocked to learn that the entire Gallipoli campaign was undertaken in response to a request from Russian High Command to draw Ottoman troops away from the Caucasus, where the Russian High Command thought they were being beaten.

One among many bitter ironies is that the Russians were not, in fact, being defeated in the Caucasus, that in fact the Battle of Sarikamish (December 1914 to January 1915), which the Russian leadership panicked and took to be a rout, eventually turned into the worst Ottoman defeat of the war.

But the Russians’ panicky request to the British at Christmas 1914 was enough to crystallise and jog forward British ideas about opening a second front somewhere in Turkey. From a raft of often more practical options, the idea attacking and opening up the Dardanelles (so British ships could sail up to and take Constantinople, and gain access to the Black Sea) soon acquired an unstoppable momentum of its own.

Armenian genocide

As with Gallipoli, so McMeekin also presents the Armenian Genocide in the context of the bigger picture, showing, for example, how the Christian Armenians did rise up against their Ottoman masters in the eastern city of Van, and did co-operate with the attacking Russians to expel the Ottomans and hand the city over, and so did justify the paranoia of the Ottoman High Command that they had a sizeable population of fifth columnists living in potentially vital strategic areas.

For it was not only in the far East of the Empire, in Armenia, a fair proportion of the Armenian population of Cilicia, over on the Mediterranean coast, was also prepared to rise up against the Ottomans, if provided with guns and leadership from the British (pp.223-245).

So McMeekin’s measured and factual account makes it much more understandable why the Ottoman High Command – under pressure from the ongoing British attack at Gallipoli, and terrified by the swift advances by the Russians through the Caucasus – took the sweeping decision to expel all Armenians from all strategically sensitive locations.

None of this excuses the inefficiency they then demonstrated in rounding up huge numbers of people and sending them into the Syrian desert where hundreds of thousands perished, or the gathering mood of violent paranoia which seized local authorities and commanders who took the opportunity to vent their fear and anxiety about the war on helpless civilians, which led to localised pogroms, execution squads and so on. But it does help to explain the paranoid atmosphere in which such things are allowed to happen.

McMeekin emphasises that, once it saw what was happening on the ground, the Ottoman leadership then tried to moderate the expulsion policy and explicitly forbade the punishment of Armenians, but it was too late: at the local level thousands of administrators and soldiers had absorbed the simple message that all Armenians were ‘traitors’ and should be shown no mercy. The net result was the violent killing, or the starving and exhausting to death, of up to one and a half million people, mostly defenceless civilians, an event which was used by Allied propaganda at the time, and has been held against the Turks ever since.

The siege of Kut

Again, I was vaguely aware of the British army’s catastrophe at Kut, a mud-walled town a few hundred miles (230 miles, to be precise) up the Tigris river, where an entire British army was surrounded and besieged by a Turkish army, in a situation reminiscent of the Boer War sieges of Mafeking and Ladysmith (pages 263 to 270, 290 to 293).

But McMeekin’s account helps you see how the Kut disaster was a climax of the up-to-that-point successful campaign to seize the estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Shatt al-Harab, and to win towns as far north as Basra, Qurna and Amara.

He takes you into the British thinking strategic thinking behind the ill-advised decision to push on towards Baghdad, and explains why the Turks turned out to be better dug-in and better led around that city than we expected (p.269). There’s a fascinating thread running alongside the slowly building catastrophe, which was the extreme reluctance of the Russian commander in the field, General N.N. Baratov to come to our aid (pages 290 to 292).

In fact, Russian tardiness / perfidy is a recurrent theme. We only mounted the Gallipoli offensive to help the bloody Russians, but when it ran into trouble and British leaders begged Russia to mount a diversionary attack on the Black Sea environs of Constantinople to help us, the Russians said the right thing, made a few desultory naval preparations but – basically – did nothing.

British take Jerusalem

Similarly, I vaguely knew that the British Army ‘took’ Jerusalem, but it makes a big difference to have it set in context so as to see it as the climax of about three years of on-again, off-again conflict in the Suez and Sinai theatre of war.

Early on, this area had seen several attempts by Germans leading Turkish armies, accompanied by Arab tribesmen, to capture or damage parts of the Suez Canal, which McMeekin had described in the earlier book and now tells again, much more thoroughly and factually. The capture of Jerusalem was the result of a new, far more aggressive British policy  of not just defending the canal, but of attacking far beyond it – known as the Southern Palestine Offensive of November to December 1917, carried out by the Egypt Expeditionary Force led by General Edmund Allenby.

The Balfour Declaration

Similarly, the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. I knew about this but hadn’t realised how it was related to the Russian Revolution. Apparently, world Jewish opinion was split for the first three years of the war about who to support because:

  1. Zionism, as a movement, was actually an Austro-German invention, the brainchild of Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl
  2. the World Zionist Executive was based throughout the war in Berlin
  3. most powerfully, the Western democracies were allied with Russia which had, from time immemorial, been the traditional enemy of Jews and Judaism

But the overthrow of the Tsarist government, and the transition to what everyone hoped would be more liberal democratic rule, tipped the balance of world Jewish opinion, especially in America, where the money came from (pp.352-3), against the Central Powers. The Balfour Declaration was a pretty cynical attempt to take advantage of this shift in Jewish opinion.

The Russian Revolution

God knows how many histories of the Russian Revolution I’ve read, but it was fascinating to view the whole thing from the point of view of the Ottoman Empire.

1916 was actually a good year for the Russians in the Ottoman theatre of war. They won a series of sweeping victories which saw them storm out of the Caucasus and into Anatolia, seizing Van and then the huge military stronghold at Erzerum.

And McMeekin shows how, even as the central government in faraway Petrograd collapsed in early 1917, the Russian Black Sea navy under Admiral Kolchak, chalked up a series of aggressive victories, climaxing with a sizeable naval attack force which steamed right up to the Bosphorus in June 1917.

But the collapse of the Tsarist regime in February 1917 had led to slowly ramifying chaos throughout the army and administration, and the the arrival of Lenin in the capital in April 1917, with his simple and unequivocal policy of ending the war, sowed the seeds of the complete collapse of Russian forces.

McMeekin leaves you with one of those huge historical what-ifs: What if the Russian revolution hadn’t broken out when it did – maybe the Russians would have taken Constantinople, thus ending the war over a year early and permanently changing the face of the Middle East.

The best history is empowering

As these examples show, this is the very best kind of history, the kind which:

  1. lays out very clearly what happened, in a straightforward chronological way so that you experience the sequence of events just as the participants did, and sympathise with the pressures and constraints they were under
  2. and places events in a thoroughly explained context so that you understand exactly what was at stake and so why the participants behaved as they did

McMeekin is slow to judge but, when he does, he has explained enough of the events and the context that you, the reader, feel empowered to either agree or disagree.

Empowerment – and this is what good history is about. 1. It explains what happened, it puts it in the widest possible context, and it empowers you to understand what happened and why, so you can reach your own assessments and conclusions.

2. And it has another, deeper, empowering affect which is to help you understand why things are the way they are in the modern world, our world.

McMeekin explains that, on one level, the entire history of the later Ottoman Empire is about Russia’s relationship with Turkey and the simple facts that the Russians wanted:

  1. to seize all of European Turkey, most of all Constantinople, to reclaim it as a Christian city to be renamed Tsargrad
  2. to make big inroads into eastern Turkey, creating semi-independent states of Armenia and Kurdistan which would be Russian protectorates
  3. the net affects of 1 and 2 being to give Russia complete dominance of the Black Sea and easy access to the Mediterranean

This is the fundamental geopolitical conflict which underlies the entire region. The intrusion into bits of the Empire by the British (in Egypt, Palestine and Iraq) or the French wish to colonise Lebanon and Syria, are in a sense secondary to the fundamental Russo-Turkish conflict whose roots stretch back centuries.

Competition for the Caucasus

McMeekin covers the ‘scramble for the Caucasus’ in the Berlin-Baghdad book but, as with the rest of the subject, it feels much more clear and comprehensible in this version.

It’s the story of how, following the unilateral declaration of peace by the Bolsheviks, the Germans not only stormed across Eastern Europe, sweeping into the Baltic nations in the north and Ukraine in the south – they also got involved in a competition with the Turks for the Caucasus and Transcaucasus.

In other words the Ottoman Army and the German Army found themselves competing to seize Armenia, Georgia, Kurdistan and, above all, racing to seize Baku on the Caspian Sea, important not only for its strategic position, but because of the extensive oil fields in its hinterland.

The story is fascinatingly complex, involving a British force (led by General Dunster) which at one point held the city for 6 weeks (the British got everywhere!) but was forced to withdraw by boat across the Caspian as the hugely outnumbering Turks moved in – and a great deal of ethnic conflict between rival groups on the spot, specifically the native Azeri Muslims and the Christian Armenians.

Events moved very quickly. Local political leaders across the region declared the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic which included the present-day republics of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia which existed from just April to May 1918, but the area around Baku was engulfed in ethnic violence – the so-called March Days massacres from March to April 1918 – and then in May 1918, the leading party in Baku declared independence as the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic.

Nice for them but irrelevant as the Ottoman Army then routed the British and seized the city in September 1918. And only a few years later, most of these countries were reinvented by the Bolsheviks as Socialist Soviet Republics strongly under the control of Moscow, as they would remain for the next 70 years till the collapse of the Soviet Union (so in this region, the Russians won).

The end of the Great War…

The race for Baku was just one example of the chaos which was unleashed over an enormous area by the collapse of the Russian state.

But for McMeekin, it was also an example of the foolishness of the main military ruler of the Ottoman Empire during the entire Great War, Enver Pasha, who over-extended the (by now) under-manned and under-armed Turkish army, by dragging it all the way to the shores of the Caspian in what McMeekin calls ‘a mad gamble’ (p.400) ‘foolish push’ (p.409).

This left the Anatolian heartland under-defended when it suffered attacks by the British from the north in Thrace, from the south up through Palestine, and in Iraq – not to mention the French landings in Cilicia and Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast.

The Empire was forced to sign the Armistice of Mudros with Great Britain on 30 October and Ottoman troops were obliged to withdraw from the whole region in the Caucasus which they’d spent the summer fighting for.

… was not the end of the fighting

The war between France and Britain and the Ottoman Empire theoretically ended with the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918. But McMeekin’s book is fascinating because it shows how invasions, landings, fighting and massacres continued almost unabated at locations across the Empire.

Specifically, it was a revelation to me that the Allied decision to allow the Greeks to land troops in the city of Smyrna on the Aegean coast turned out to be the flashpoint which triggered the end of the Ottoman Empire.

Disgruntled Ottoman officers had been gathering in central Anatolia, away from Constantinople, now occupied by the Allies, who bitterly resented the way the civilian politicians were handing over huge tranches of the Empire to the Allies. These men rallied in Eastern Anatolia under Mustafa Kemal, who became the leader of the hastily assembled Turkish National Movement.

And thus began, as McMeekin puts it, one of the most remarkable and successful political careers of the twentieth century, the transformation of Mustafa Kemal from successful general into Father of his Nation, who was awarded the honorific Atatürk (‘Father of the Turks’) in 1934.

Big ideas

As always, when reading a history on this scale, some events or issues leap out as new (to me) or particularly striking. Maybe not the ones the author intended, but the ones which made me stop and think.

1. The First World War ended in Bulgaria

Brought up on the story of the trenches, I tend to think of the war ending because the German Spring offensive of 1918 broke the Allied lines and advanced 25 miles or so before running out of steam, at which point the Allies counter-attacked, pushing the Germans back to their original lines and then ever-backwards as more and more German soldiers deserted and their military machine collapsed. That’s how it ended.

I knew that Bulgaria had surrendered to the Allies as early 24 September and that that event had had some impact on German High Command, but it is fascinating to read McMeekin’s account which makes the end of the First World War all about the Balkans and Bulgaria.

The British had had a large force (250,000) defending Macedonia and the approach to Greece from Bulgaria, which was allied with Austria and Germany. But the Bulgarians were fed up. In the peace treaties imposed on the new Bolshevik Russian government in May 1918 the Bulgarians got hardly any territory. When the Germans advanced into Ukraine the Bulgarians received hardly any of the grain which was seized. The Bulgarians are Slavs and so there was widespread sympathy for Russia while many ordinary people wondered why their young men were fighting and dying for Germany. And there was abiding antagonism against the Ottomans, their supposed ally, who Bulgaria had had to fight to free itself from and had fought against in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.

All this meant that when an aggressive new French general, Louis Félix Marie François Franchet d’Espèrey, arrived to take command of Allied army in Macedonia, and sent exploratory probes against the Bulgarian line, discovered it was weak, and then unleashed a full frontal assault in the Vardar Offensive of September 1918, that the Bulgarian army and state collapsed.

The Bulgarian army surrendered, mutinied, part even declared an independent mini-republic, and the Bulgarian government was forced to sue for peace on 24 September 1918. When he heard of the Bulgarian surrender, the supreme leader of the German Army, Ludendorff, said they were done for. The Turkish generalissimo, Enver Pasha, said we’re screwed.

The collapse of Bulgaria gave the Allies command of the Balkans, allowing the channeling of armies south-east, the short distance to capture Constantinople, or north against the vulnerable southern flank of Austro-German territory.

In McMeekin’s account, the collapse of Tsarist Russia was certainly a seismic event but it didn’t, of itself, end the war.

The trigger for that event was the surrender of Bulgaria.

2. East and West

Another of the Big Ideas to really dwell on is the difference between the First World War on the Western Front and on the other theatres of war – the Eastern Front in Europe, but also all the warzones in Ottoman territory, namely Gallipoli, the Black Sea, Suez, Mesopotamia, Persia and the Caucasus.

Any English person brought up, like me, on the history and iconography of the Western Front, with its four-year-long stalemate and gruelling trench warfare, will be astonished at the dynamism and tremendously changing fortunes of the combatants on all the other fronts I’ve just listed.

Not only that, but events in the East were intricately interlinked, like a vast clock.

Thus it is one thing to learn that Serbia, the cause of the whole war, which Austria-Hungary had threatened to demolish in the first weeks of the war, was not in fact conquered until over a year later, in November 1915. So far, so vaguely interesting.

But it took my understanding to a whole new level to learn that the fall of Serbia to the Central Powers was the decisive event for Gallipoli. Because, while Serbia was holding out, she had prevented the Germans from shipping men and material easily down through the Balkans to their Ottoman ally. Once Serbia fell, however, the transport routes to Turkey were open, and this was the last straw for strategists in London, who realised the bad situation of the Allied troops stuck on the beaches of the Dardanelles could only deteriorate.

And so the decision to abandon the Gallipoli campaign and remove the troops from the beaches.

This is just one example from the many ways in which McMeekin’s account helps you see how all of these events were not isolated incidents, but how, all across the region from Libya in the West to the Punjab in the East, from the Balkans via Palestine to Suez, across Syria, down into Arabia, or up into the snowy Caucasus mountains, events in one theatre were intricately connected with events in all the others – and how the entire complex machinery was also influenced by events on the immense Eastern Front to their north, which ran from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Basically, the First World War in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, was vastly more complicated, dynamic and interesting than the war in the West. And also pregnant with all kinds of long-running consequences.

3. The ends of wars are incalculably more complex than the beginnings

Real peace didn’t come to Turkey till 1923. In this regard it was not unlike Germany which saw coups and revolutions through 1919, or the vast Russian Civil War which dragged on till 1922 and included an attempt to invade and conquer Poland in 1920, or the political violence which marred Italy until Mussolini’s black shirts seized power in 1922.

Across huge parts of the world, violence, ethnic cleansing and actual wars continued long after the Armistice of November 1918. In fact McMeekin goes so far as to describe the Battle of Sakarya (23 August to 12 September 1921) as ‘the last real battle of the First World War (p.456).

Thus the book’s final hundred pages describe the long, complex, violent and tortuous transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the Turkish Republic, a story which is riveting, not least because of the terrible decisions taken by Prime Minister David Lloyd George, often against the advice of his entire cabinet, namely:

  1. to allow the Greek Army to occupy Smyrna, which led to riots, massacres, and outrage right across Turkey
  2. to occupy Constantinople on March 20 1920 – I had no idea British warships docked in the harbour, and British soldiers backed by armoured cars set up control points at every junction, erecting machine-gun posts in central squares – God, we got everywhere, didn’t we?

And bigger than both of these, the folly of the Allies’ approach of imposing a humiliating peace without providing the means to enforce it.

That said, America also played a key role. Much is always made of the Sykes-Picot Plan to divide the Ottoman Empire up between Britain and France, but McMeekin goes to great pains to emphasise several massive caveats:

1. Sazonov 

That, when it was drawn up, in June 1916, the Sykes-Picot Plan was largely at the behest of the pre-revolutionary Russian government which had more interest in seizing Ottoman territory than the other two combatants, so the plan ought, in McMeekin’s view, to be called the Sazonov-Sykes-Picto Plan because of the dominant influence of Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov.

2. Sèvres 

I was astonished to see that the Treaty of Sèvres (imposed on the new Turkish government in May 1920, reluctantly signed in August 1920) handed a huge amount of territory, the bottom half of present-day Turkey, to Italy. In fact, pretty much all the contents of the Treaty of Sèvres are mind-boggling, it enacted ‘a policy of forcefully dismembering Turkey’ (p.447). As McMeekin brings out, a document better designed to humiliate the Turks and force them into justified rebellion could barely be imagined.

Map showing how the Ottoman Empire was carved up by the Treaty of Sèvres, not only between the French and British, but the Italians, Greeks and Russians as well (Source: Wikipedia, author: Thomas Steiner)

3. States 

That the key player in the final year of the war and the crucial few years after it, was the United States, with some plans being drawn up for America to hold ‘mandates’ over large parts of the Ottoman Empire, namely Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia. Given a choice the native populations wanted the Americans in charge because they thought they would be genuinely disinterested unlike the colonial powers.

Here, as across Central Europe, it was a great blow when, first of all Woodrow Wilson had a stroke which disabled him (October 1919), and then the American Congress refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations.

As the chaos continued, and as David Lloyd George listened to his influential Greek friends and supported a Greek army invasion of Smyrna on the Turkish coast (with its large Greek population), and then its pushing inland to secure their base, only slowly did I realise McMeekin was describing events which are nowadays, with hindsight, referred to as the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922.

I had no idea the Greeks penetrated so far into Anatolia.

Map of the Greco-Turkish War, blue arrows showing the advance of the Greek Army into undefended Anatolia and coming within 50 miles of the new Turkish capital at Ankara before being halted at the Battle of Sakarya (source: Wikipedia, author: Andrei Nacu)

And no idea that the Greeks were encouraged to the hilt by David Lloyd George right up until it began to look like they would lose after their advance was halted by the vital Battle of Sakarya just 50 miles from Ankara.

Nor that the Greeks then forfeited the backing of the French and British and world opinion generally, by the brutality with which they pursued a scorched earth policy in retreat, torching every town and village and railway and facility in their path, also committing atrocities against Muslim Turkish civilians. It’s gruelling reading the eye-witness descriptions of destroyed villages, raped women, and murdered populations. What bastards.

Mustafa Kemal’s impact on Britain

It was a revelation to me to learn that, once Kemal’s Turkish army had driven the Greeks back into the sea and forced the evacuation of Smyrna, and with his eastern border protected by a rock-solid treaty he had signed with Soviet Russia, Kemal now turned his attention to the Bosphorus, to Constantinople, and to Thrace (the thin strip of formerly Turkish territory on the northern, European side of the Straits), all occupied by (relatively small) British forces.

It was news to me that Lloyd George, backed by Winston Churchill, was determined that Kemal would not have either Constantinople or the Straits back again, and so a) wrote to the premiers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa asking them to contribute forces to a second defence of Gallipoli – they all said No – and b) the British public were by now so sick of the war in Turkey, and war generally, that they, and all the newspapers, roundly called for an end to British involvement – STOP THIS NEW WAR! shouted the Daily Mail.

And that it was this crisis which caused the collapse of the coalition government which had ruled Britain and the Empire since 1916.

The Conservatives abandoned the coalition, it collapsed, the Liberals split into two factions and the election of October 1922 resulted in not only a Conservative victory (344 seats) but the Labour Party emerging for the first time as the largest opposition party (142 seats), with the two factions of the Liberal party knocked into third and fourth place. The Liberals, even when they finally recombined, were never to regain the power and influence they enjoyed throughout the nineteenth century.

Thus, McMeekin points out with a flourish, Mustafa Kemal had not only divided the wartime Alliance (the French wanted nothing to do with Lloyd George’s foolish support for the Greeks) and atomised the Commonwealth (all those white Commonwealth countries refusing to help the Old Country) but ended the long history of the Liberal Party as a party of power.

Fascinating new perspectives and insights

Conclusion

Nowadays, it is easy to blame the usual imperialist suspects Britain and France for all the wrongs which were to beset the Middle East for the 100 years since the Treaty of Lausanne finally finalised Turkey’s borders and carved up the rest of the area into ‘mandates’ handed to the victorious powers.

But McMeekin, in his final summing up, is at pains to point out the problems already existing in the troubled periphery:

  • there had already been two Balkan Wars
  • Zionist immigration was set to be a problem in Palestine no matter who took over, Brits, Russians or Germans
  • Arabia was already restless with the Arab tribes jostling for power
  • Mesopotamia had been a hornet’s nest even during Ottoman rule, with the Ottoman authorities telling non-Muslims never to visit it
  • all this before you get to the smouldering cause of Armenian independence

All these problems already existed under the last years of Ottoman rule, the British and French didn’t invent them, they just managed them really badly.

Ataturk’s achievement was to surgically remove all these problems from Ottoman control and delegate them to the imperial powers. He was clever, they were dumb, inheriting insoluble problems. He created an ethnically homogenous and ‘exclusionary state’ whose borders have endured to this day.

As a very specific example, McMeekin cites Kemal’s readiness to hand over the area around Mosul to British control, even though he was well aware of its huge oil deposits. He made the very wise assessment that the benefit of the oil would be outweighed by the disruptive issues he would inherit around managing the ethnic and religious conflicts in the region (between Kurds and Arabs, between Sunni and Shia Muslims). And indeed, the low-level conflicts of the region are alive and kicking to this day.

The Allies for 25 years struggled to rule Palestine, Arabia, Syria, Iraq and eventually withdrew in various states of failure. McMeekin’s mordant conclusion is that the ‘the War of the Ottoman Succession rages on, with no end in sight’ (p.495, final sentence).

For the clear and authoritative way it lays out its amazing story, and for the measured, deep insights it offers into the period it describes and the consequences of these events right up to the present day, this is a brilliant book.

Related reviews

Other blog posts about the First World War

Histories

Memoirs and fiction

Art and music

The Byzantine Empire

John Julius Norwich’s famous trilogy of books describe the first arrival of the Seljuk Turks in the region, their conquest of Anatolia, Byzantine territory and, finally, Constantinople itself.

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by Simon on May 13, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Germany, Great War, History, Middle East, Turkey, World War One
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Posted by Simon on May 13, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/05/13/the-ottoman-endgame-sean-mcmeekin/

The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898 to 1918 by Sean McMeekin (2010)

Memorandum on revolutionizing the Islamic territories of our enemies
(Title of a paper written in October 1914 by German archaeologist and Orientalist Max von Oppenheim which argued for enlisting the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to call on the world’s Muslims to engage in a Holy War or jihad against the colonial powers, France and Great Britain)

This is a colourful and entertaining book about Germany’s military and diplomatic involvement with the Ottoman Empire in the decades leading up to, and then during, the Great War of 1914 to 18.

Kaiser Wilhelm’s enthusiasm for Islam

The first 80 pages or so provide background, describing Kaiser Wilhelm’s first state visit to Turkey in 1889 when he met the reigning Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, and his second visit in 1898 when Wilhelm grandiosely rode into Jerusalem through a breach specially made in its walls.

And they detail the very slow progress made on an ambitious commercial scheme to extend the railway line which already stretched from Hamburg on the Baltic Sea via Berlin to Constantinople, onwards across Anatolia, Syria and Iraq, to Baghdad and thence onto the Persian Gulf at Basra.

This railway project – to create a Berlin to Baghdad Railway – the focus of the opening 70 or 80 pages, although described in detail with lots of facts about the funding, selling bonds on various stock markets, the setting up of companies, the engineering challenges and so on – is really only a pretext or way in to the wider story about German-Ottoman relations, and how cultural, economic and political factors drew the two countries closer together in the years leading up the Great War.

McMeekin describes the Kaiser’s over-excitable whims and enthusiasms. One of the most notorious of these saw Wilhelm make a speech at Saladin’s tomb in Damascus on the 1898 trip, when he declared himself and his Reich a friend to the world’s 300 million Muslims. In private letters he announced that Islam was superior to Christianity, he was intoxicated by his visits and his receptions… only to largely forget his enthusiasms once he was back in Berlin.

German High Command develops an Eastern strategy

But key elements in the German diplomatic and military didn’t forget; they built on this new idea of expanding German influence down through the Balkans into the Middle East. Germany’s European rivals, France and Britain, already had extensive empires with territories all round the world. Even the Dutch and the Italians had farflung colonies.

It was true the Germans had grabbed a few wretched bits of Africa during the notorious scramble for that continent in the 1880s, but now German strategists realised that extending her influence south and east, through the Balkans and into the Middle East was:

1. a far more natural geographical extension of Germany’s existing territory

2. fed into all kinds of cultural fantasies about owning and running the origins of Western civilisation in Babylon, Jerusalem and so on

3. and offered the more practical geopolitical goals of:

  • forestalling Russian expansion into the area, via the Balkans or the Caucasus
  • breaking up the British Empire by seizing control of its most vital strategic asset, the Suez Canal
  • and sparking an uprising of the tens of millions of ‘oppressed’ Muslim subjects of the British, specifically in British India

So the book isn’t at all a dry and dusty account of German-Ottoman diplomatic relations from 1889 to 1918 (although it does, by its nature, contain lots of aspects of this).

It is more a description of this GRAND VISION which entranced generations of German political and military leaders and a score of German entrepreneurs, spies and adventurers, a VISION which inspired official reports with titles like Overview of Revolutionary Activity We Will Undertake in The Islamic-Israelite World and Exposé Concerning The Revolutionising of The Islamic Territories of Our Enemies, a VISION of Germany sparking and leading a Great Uprising of Islam which would overthrow the British Empire and… and…

Well, that was the problem. The Big Vision was intoxicating, but working out the details turned out to be more tricky.

Apparently, there’s controversy among historians about whether the German leadership had any kind of conscious plan to raise the Muslim East against the British before the First World War broke out in August 1914. But once war was declared, a combination of German military and diplomatic officials were dispatched to the Ottoman Empire along with a colourful cast of freelance archaeologists and regional experts who fancied themselves as spies and provocateurs. These all give McMeekin the raw material for a book full of adventures, mishaps, farcical campaigns, ferocious Young Turks and double-dealing Arab sheikhs.

The book proceeds by chapters each of which focuses on an aspect of the decades building up to the First World War, then on specific historical events during 1914 to 18, or on leading personalities, often repeating the chronology as he goes back over the same pre-war period to explain the origins of each thread or theme. Topics covered include:

  • the brutal reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876 to 1909) which combined attempts to modernise the Ottoman Empire with some notorious repressions of Armenians calling for independence, specifically the Hamidian Massacres of 1893 during which up to 300,000 Armenians were killed and which earned Hamid the nickname ‘the Bloody Sultan’
  • the revolution of the Young Turks who overthrew Abdul Hamid, and replaced him with a more compliant ruler during a series of complex events stretching from 1908 into 1909
  • the complex diplomatic manouevring which followed the outbreak of the war in 1914 by which the Central Powers (Germany and Austro-Hungary) tried to persuade the Young Turk government to take the Ottoman Empire in on their side
  • the intricate tribal rivalries in Arabia between fiercely rival tribes such as the ibn Saud, the Ibn Rashid of the Shammar, An-Nuri’s Rwala bedouin and so on

Why the Ottoman Empire joined the First World War

And of course, some time is spent explaining why the Ottomans did, eventually, come into the war, by launching an attack on Russian ports in the Black Sea on 29 October 1914, although their reasons aren’t hard to grasp. The Ottomans:

  1. resented French incursions into Lebanon and Syria
  2. really disliked the ongoing British ‘protectorate’ over Egypt (established in the 1880s) and encroaching British influence in Arabia and the Persian Gulf
  3. and very much feared the permanent threat of attack from Russia, their historic enemy, whose military chiefs and right-wing hawks harboured a long-standing fantasy about invading right down through the (mostly Slavic) Balkans and conquering Constantinople, restoring it as an Orthodox Christian city

This sense of being beset by enemies was steadily compounded through the 1900s as 1) France and Britain signed an Entente, the Entente Cordiale, in 1904, and then 2) Britain reached out to Russia to create the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907 – the two agreements creating what became known as the Triple Entente.

Compared to these three known and feared opponents who were slowly drawing together, the Germans were a relatively unknown quantity who, led by the Kaiser’s impulsive gushing enthusiasm for Islam, and combined with the Germans’ undoubted a) money b) engineering abilities, made them welcome partners in not only building the railway but trying to rejuvenate the crippled Ottoman economy.

The Ottoman Caliph proclaims fatwas against the infidel

But the Germans didn’t just want the Ottomans as military allies. They saw huge potential in getting the Sultan, in his capacity as Caliph of the Muslim world, to raise the entire Muslim world in a Holy War against the infidel… well… the British and French infidel, not the German or Austrian infidel. Maybe the Italian infidel too, although at this early stage of the war nobody knew which side Italy would come in on (Italy entered the First World War on 23 May 1915 on the side of the Entente Powers).

So McMeekin details the diplomatic shenanigans (and the bribes, always the bribes) which led up to the great day, Wednesday November 11th, 1914, when Shaykh al-Islam Ürgüplü Hayri, the highest religious authority of the caliphate in Constantinople, issued five fatwas, calling Muslims across the world for jihad against the Entente countries (Britain, France, Russia) and promising them the status of martyr if they fell in battle.

Three days later, in the name of Sultan-Caliph Mehmed V, the ‘Commander of the Faithful’ (the puppet caliph who had been put in place by the Young Turk government) the decree was read out to a large crowd outside Constantinople’s Fatih Mosque and then huge crowds carrying flags and banners marched through the streets of the Ottoman capital, calling for holy war. Across the Ottoman Empire, imams carried the message of jihad to believers in their Friday sermons, and so on.

This was a seismic even and it had been very expensive – McMeekin calculates German payments to the Young Turk government of £2 million of gold, a loan of £5 million more, and massive shipments of arms on credit to persuade them to join the German side (p.233).

Missions and characters

OK, so now the Germans had gotten the highest authority in the Muslim world to issue a holy order to rise up against the infidel (the British and French infidel, that is), now all that was needed was to organise and lead them. Simples, right?

The book devotes a chapter apiece to the missions of a number of idiosyncratic German adventurers who were sent out by the German military authorities to recruit Muslim allies in their fight against the allies.

Key to the whole undertaking was Max von Oppenheim, archaeologist and Orientalist who, in October 1914, had published a Memorandum on revolutionizing the Islamic territories of our enemies which argued for enlisting the Sultan to call on the world’s Muslims to engage in a Holy War against Germany’s enemies, France and Britain. Seeing the possibilities, the German High Command set up an Intelligence Bureau for the East in Berlin and made Oppenheim its head.

From this position Oppenheim helped plan, equip and select the personnel for a series of missions to be led by noted German archaeologist / linguists / explorers all across the Muslim world, with a view to raising it against the British (the French Muslim colonies of the Maghreb are mentioned a few times but were too far West along North Africa to be of any strategic importance to the European war).

These colourful expeditions included:

  • the mission given the ethnologist and archaeologist Leo Frobenius to stir up the Muslims of Abyssinia and Sudan against the British (pages 145 to 151)
  • the mission led by Austrian orientalist and explorer Alois Musil to recruit the bedouin of Arabia to the German cause (pages 154 to 165)
  • an ill-fated military campaign of Turks and Arabs to try and capture the Suez Canal, led by Freiherr Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, which was badly mauled by the British defenders (pages 167 to 179)
  • Max Oppenheim’s own negotiations with Feisal, son of Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, to recruit the guardian of the Muslim Holy Places onto the German side (pages 191 to 195)
  • the mission of Captain Fritz Klein to the leader of the Shia world, Sheikh Ali el Irakein, the Grand Mufti of Karbala in modern-day Iraq, ‘to spread the fires of Ottoman holy war to the Gulf’ (pages 203 to 208)
  • the even more ambitious mission of Oskar von Niedermayer to the Emir of Afghanistan, with a view to recruiting a force which could invade North-West India through the Khyber Pass and raise all the Muslims of India in rebellion against their imperial masters (pages 209 to 229)

Several things emerge very clearly from McMeekin’s detailed accounts of each of these missions, and slowly dawned on the German High Command:

1. The Muslim world was the opposite of united; it was surprisingly fragmented.

2. The Germans were disconcerted to discover that none of the Arabs they met gave a toss what the Turkish Sultan-Caliph declared in faraway Constantinople. In fact, on one level, the ineffectiveness of the Sultan-Caliph’s call to arms ending up emphasising his irrelevance to most Muslims and, in a roundabout way, undermining the authority of the Ottoman Empire as a whole over its non-Turkish subjects (p.258).

3. Again and again, in different contexts, different German emissaries made the same discovery – that the Turks and the Arabs distrusted or even hated each other.

4. When it came to fighting the Germans could trust the Turks but not the Arabs. At Gallipoli the Arab regiments ran away, and had to be replaced by Turks, who held the line under the brilliant leadership of Mustafa Kemal’ (p.189). As soon as the shooting started during the Turco-German attack on the Suez Canal (3 February 1915), all the bedouin who had been so carefully recruited, turned tail and fled, followed by all the Arab conscripts in the Turkish ranks (p.177). The Turks didn’t trust any of the Arab regiments in their army, and made sure they were all led by Turkish officers.

5. All the Arabs were only in it for the money: whether it was the Arabian bedouin, the north African Arabs of Libya or Sudan, the Shia ruler in Karbala or the Emir of Afghanistan, all of them were currently being subsidised by the British and often their people were being supplied with grain and basic foodstuffs by the British. Therefore, the Germans found themselves having to outbid the British subsidies and handing over eye-watering amounts of money. The Emir of Agfhanistan demanded an annual payment of $15,000 before he signed up with the Germans. Ibn Rashid, headman of the Shammar tribe, had negotiated payment from Turkey of 50,000 rifles, a one-off bribe of 15,000 Turkish pounds (worth $20 million today), a luxury car and a monthly stipend of 220 Turkish pounds – but all that didn’t prevent him carrying out secret negotiations with the French to see if he could get a better deal out of them (p.163). And the Emir of Afghanistan demanded a lump sum of £10 million, the equivalent of $5 billion today, before he signed a treaty allying himself to the Central Powers on 24 January 1916 (p.228).

Gallipoli and the Armenian genocide

The book covers a couple of the best known episodes of the Great War in the Middle East, namely:

  • the catastrophic Gallipoli Campaign, February 1915 to January 1916 (pages 180 to 190)
  • the Armenian genocide, April 1915 to 1917 (pages 241 to 258)

But McMeekin is not interested in presenting comprehensive factual accounts of either. Plenty of other books do that. Both disasters feature in his account only insofar as they affected German plans and policies.

For example, from a German perspective, the main aspects of the Armenian genocide were that:

  1. it could be used by Western propagandists against the German war effort
  2. most of the skilled labour on the still-unfinished Baghdad railway was Armenian, and when they were rounded up and sent off to the wild interior of Anatolia, it deprived the Germans of their main labour force

Which is why the German authorities made complaints all the way up the chain of command until the Head of the German General Staff himself made a formal complaint to the Young Turk government, pointing out that elimination of the Armenian workers was hampering work on the railway which was still – in 1915 – seen as of key strategic importance in carrying arms and ammunition to the Arab Muslims in Mesopotamia or the Gulf so they could rise up against British influence in the region.

The symbolism of the Berlin to Baghdad railway

The Berlin to Baghdad railway which dominated the first 70 or 80 pages of the book thereafter disappears from view for long stretches. As and when it does reappear, it snakes its way through the narrative as a symbol of the tricky and ultimately unworkable relationship between the Reich and the Ottoman Empire (the railway was still not completed in 1918, when the war ended in German and Ottoman defeat).

But the railway also stands as a symbol of McMeekin’s strategy in this book, which is to approach an enormous subject via entertaining episodes, a multifaceted crab-like methodology.

This isn’t at all dry, factual and comprehensive account of Germano-Turkish diplomatic and military relations in the years leading up to, and then during, the First World War.

It is more a collection of themes and threads, each chapter focusing on a particularly exciting episode (ranging from the very well known like Gallipoli through to the relatively obscure, such as Niedermayer’s gruelling trek to distant Afghanistan) and McMeekin deliberately presents them in a popular and almost sensational style, emphasising the personal quirks of his protagonists.

We learn that leading German Orientalist Max von Oppenheim built up a collection of some 150 traditional Turkish costumes, that the Emir of Afghanistan owned the only motor car in his country, a Rolls Royce, that the leader of the military mission to the Ottomans, Liman von Sanders was partly deaf which explained his aloof, distracted manner, and so on. Wherever he can, McMeekin adds these personal touches and colourful details to bring the history to life.

The end of the war

McMeekin’s account of the end of the war feels different from the rest of the book. Up till now we had spent a lot of time getting to know Max von Oppenheim or Liman von Sanders or Young Turks like Enver Bey or Mehmed Talaat, leading ambassadors in Constantinople, Arabs like Feisal of Mecca or non-Arab Muslims like the Emir of Afghanistan. It had, to a surprising extent, been quite a human account, I mean it focuses on individuals that we get to know.

The end of the war in the Ottoman Empire completely changes the scope and scale and tone because, to understand it, you have to fly up to take a vast, God-like overview of the conflict. McMeekin has to explain the February revolution in Russia, how and why the Russian offensives of the summer failed and were pushed back, the dazzling success of the German scheme to send Lenin to St Petersburg in a sealed train, the success of the Bolshevik coup in October, Lenin’s unilateral declaration of peace, the long drawn out peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk – all the while describing the impact of these increasingly fast-moving developments on the main front between the Ottoman Empire and the Russians, located in the Caucasus.

In other words, the last 60 or so pages of the book cease to have the colourful and sometimes comic tone of the earlier accounts of German adventurers and two-faced Arab sheikhs, and become something much more faceless, high-level and brutal.

And complex. The fighting in the Caucasus involved not just the Russians and Turks, but a large number of other nationalities who all took the opportunity of the Russian collapse to push their hopes for independence and statehood, including the Georgians, the Armenians, the Kurds, the Azerbaijanis and many others. I can tell I’m going to have to reread these final sections to get my head round the chaos and complexity which carried on long after the supposed peace treaties had been signed…

Two big ideas

1. Bismarck had made it a lynchpin of his foreign policy to maintain the Holy Alliance first established as far back as 1815 at the Congress of Vienna and promoted by the Austrian diplomat, Metternich during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Holy Alliance bound together the three Central and East European autocracies, Prussia (and its successor state, Germany), Austria-Hungary and Russia. According to McMeekin, within weeks of sacking Bismarck (in 1890), the cocky young Kaiser rejected overtures from Russia to renew Germany and Russia’s understanding, determined to throw out everything the boring old man (Bismarck) had held dear, and to embark on new adventures.

The impact on Russia was to make her even more paranoid about the ambitions of Germany and Austria in ‘her’ backyard of the Balkans – shutting down lines of communication which might have contained the Balkan Crises of the 1910s – and made Russia cast around for other alliances and, in the end, improbably, forge an alliance with the ditziest of the western democracies, France.

All this was explained on page ten and struck me as the most fateful of all the Kaiser’s mistakes and, in a sense, the key to everything which came afterwards.

2. After the peace treaties are finally signed, McMeekin presents an epilogue, which goes on for a long time and develops into a complicated argument about the links between Wilhelmine Germany’s encouragement of an anti-western, anti-Christian and anti-Jewish jihad – which his book has described at some length – and the rabid antisemitism which emerged soon after the German defeat of 1918, and which carried on getting evermore toxic until the Nazis came to power.

This strikes me as being a complex and controversial subject which probably merits a book of its own not a hurried 20-age discussion.

But before he goes off into that big and contentious topic, McMeekin makes a simpler point. Modern Arabs and Western Liberals like to blame the two colonial powers, Britain and France, for everything which went wrong in the Arab world after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the years after the Great War ended, and obviously there is a lot to find fault with.

But this over-familiar line of self-blame among Western liberals completely omits, ignores, writes out of history, the baleful impact of the prolonged, deep (and very expensive) engagement of Wilhelmine Germany with the Ottoman Empire – with Arabs from Tunisia to Yemen, with the Muslim world from Egypt to Afghanistan. And the fact that it was the Germans who went to great lengths to summon up jihad, to set the Muslim world on fire, to create murderous hatred against Westerners and Europeans, and at the same managed to undermine the authority of the Turkish Caliphate, the one central, stabilising authority in the Muslim world.

The Germans rarely get the blame that they deserve.

Summary

So if there’s one thing The Berlin-Baghdad Express sets out to do, and does very well, it is to restore to the record the centrality of the role played by the Germans in the downfall of the Ottoman Empire, and the long-term legacy of German influence across the Middle East.

Other blog posts about the First World War

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Posted by Simon on May 5, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/05/05/berlin-baghdad-express-ottoman-empire-sean-mcmeekin/

The Journey To The East by Hermann Hesse (1932)

A slender novella, 88 pages in the Picador paperback version, The Journey To The East is a first-person narrative told by a former member of the secretive ‘League’ of poets, writers and seekers who, in their different ways, all undertook journeys to the East in ‘the troubled, confused, yet so fruitful period following the Great War’ (p.5).

What sets it apart, at least to begin with, is that it is nothing like a sensible factual account of a straightforward ‘journey’ such as you might read by traditional travel writers like Robert Byron or Peter Fleming.

Instead it is more like a fairy story, in which the ‘travellers’ encounter legendary figures and mythical beasts, pass through fictional lands from fables and fairy tales, and travel not only in space, but in time – back into the past, penetrating ‘into the heroic and the magical’ (p.7).

One day, when I was still quite a new member, someone suddenly mentioned that the giant Agramant was a guest in our leaders’ tent, and was trying to persuade them to make their way across Africa in order to liberate some League members from Moorish captivity. Another time we saw the Goblin, the pitch-maker, the comforter, and we presumed that we should make our way towards the Blue Pot.

The giant Agramant, the Goblin. It is fairy land.

Despite these imaginative frills, though, the League feels like a Christian monastic order – casual phrases continually remind the reader that Hesse had an intensely pious Christian upbringing, against which he rebelled but whose stern moral seriousness he kept for the rest of his life.

Thus newcomers to the League are ‘novitiates’, must take an ‘oath’ to renounce the world and its temptations, must wear a ring proclaiming their membership of the order. The journey is referred to as a ‘pilgrimage’ and the travellers as ‘pilgrims’. The leader of the narrator’s group talks freely about ‘grace’ and ‘repentance’, both utterly Christian concepts.

But at the same time it is a phantasmagoria of all the cultural greats through the ages:

Our League was in no way an off-shoot of the post-war years, but that it had extended throughout the whole of world history, sometimes, to be sure, under the surface, but in an unbroken line, that even certain phases of the World War were nothing else but stages in the history of our League; further, that Zoroaster, Lao Tse, Plato, Xenophon, Pythagoras, Albertus Magnus, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Novalis and Baudelaire were co-founders and brothers of our League.

This is a kind of greatest hits of world culture. And the way the ‘pilgrims’ travel is both a physical path or itinerary, very much in the style of medieval pilgrims –

And as we moved on, so had once pilgrims, emperors and crusaders moved on to liberate the Saviour’s grave, or to study Arabian magic; Spanish knights had traveled this way, as well as German scholars, Irish monks and French poets.

But also an imaginative one, as they travel through realms of magic and myth, experiencing not only all times, but the real and the imaginary on the same terms.

The core of the experience, the thing which, looking back, the narrator realises brought him the greatest happiness, was:

The freedom to experience everything imaginable simultaneously, to exchange outward and inward easily, to move Time and Space about like scenes in a theatre.

When you reflect on this, it sounds increasingly like the adventures of someone in their library – with the leisure time to roam freely over time and space, and between factual and imaginative literature.

The plot

The first-person narrator is ‘a violinist and story-teller’ who joined the League with the aim of travelling to the East to meet the princess Fatima and, if possible, to win her love (we learn that all League members have quirky or idiosyncratic goals, one wants to see the coffin of Mohammed, another to learn the Tao).

But the oddest thing about the story is that… they don’t travel to the East. About a third of the way through the text, the narrator tells us that at an early point of the journey, while they were still in Europe, at a place called Morbio Inferiore, a municipality in Switzerland, one of his team’s most loyal servants, Leo, goes missing, so the entire squad sets out to find him, searching up hill and dale.

Not only do they never find him, but his group begins to squabble amongst itself, loses focus. Somehow the journey was abandoned and he never made it to the East. Now, we learn, the narrator is struggling to set it all down in a written account, in a bid to revive the heady joy of those young days.

Now the narrative cuts to ‘the present’, some ten years after the journey. The narrator tells us it is a long time since he was active in the League, he doesn’t know whether it exists any more, he’s not sure it ever existed and these things ever happened to him.

And now the narrator tells us that the episode of missing Leo has given him writer’s block, he doesn’t know how to tell the episode correctly, and can’t manage to get the story past it.

And in an abrupt and surprising switch, the narrative stops being about any journey to the East whatsoever.

Now, surprisingly, the scene cuts back to the narrator’s home town and becomes spectacularly more realistic and mundane. To address his problem of writer’s block, the narrator goes to meet a friend of his who’s a newspaper editor, named Lukas, and who wrote a successful book of war memoirs.

Discussion of the war memoirs gives rise to a consideration of how difficult it is to describe any human experience, at how you need to create eras or characters or plots to even begin to get it down.

Even further than this, how some experiences are so intense or evanescent, that you can’t even be sure you had them. In which case, how do you describe them? Lukas replies that he wrote his book about the war because he simply had to, whether it was any good or not was secondary, the writing itself was vital therapy, which helped him control ‘the nothingness, chaos and suicide’ which would otherwise have overwhelmed him (p.46)

So. This is less a book about a journey anywhere, and a lot more a book about the difficulty of writing a book. Ah.

When the narrator tells Lukas how, in writing his account of the journey to the East, he’s got blocked on this episode of the missing servant, Leo, Lukas promptly looks Leo up in the telephone directory and finds there is a Andreas Leo living at 69a Seilergraben. Maybe it’s the same guy, he says – as if we’re in a 1930s detective novel and not the imaginative phantasmagoria we started out in. ‘Go and see him,’ the editor suggests.

So the narrator does, and finds 69a Seilergraben to be an apartment in an anonymous building in a quiet street. The narrator knocks on the door, questions the neighbours, hangs around, and goes back on successive days. Finally he sees this Leo exit his apartment block and walk quietly to the park where he sits on a bench and eats dried fruit from a tin.

This is not at all the mystical imaginative phantasmagoria I was promised on the back of the book, is it? This is staggeringly mundane.

The narrator approaches Leo, and tries to remind him of their time back in the League and on the great journey East which, the text confirms, happened some 10 years earlier. But Leo is calmly dismissive and walks off, leaving the narrator standing alone in the park as dusk falls, in the rain.

Now he is rejected like this, we learn the narrator is prone to depression, in fact to despair and thoughts of suicide.

I had experienced similar hours in the past. During such periods of despair it seemed to me as if I, a lost pilgrim, had reached the extreme edge of the world, and there was nothing left for me to do but to satisfy my last desire: to let myself fall from the edge of the world into the void — to death. In the course of time this despair returned many times; the compelling suicidal impulse…

In other words, he shows the same bouncing from one to extreme to the other that characterised the Steppenwolf and his moods of suicidal despair. And very like the author himself, a glance at whose biography reveals attempts at suicide, prolonged psychotherapy, and a spell in a mental sanatorium.

The narrator gets home and sits down, still damp from the rain and writes a long letter to Leo, then falls asleep. When he wakes up Leo, is sitting in his living room. Leo reveals he is still a member of the League and says he will take the narrator to see the current President. Leo leads him through the streets of the quiet town by a circuitous route, stopping at various inconsequential locations including a church, to an anonymous building, which is large and labyrinthine on the inside (reminding me of the labyrinthine buildings Franz Kafka’s protagonists stumble through).

The narrator is led into an enormous room full of shelves lined with books which turn out to be the archive the League. Leo suddenly starts singing and, as in movie special effects, the archive recedes into the distance and in the foreground appears a large judgement chamber.

A jury assembles and a ‘Speaker’, who acts like a judge. It has turned into a sort of court-room, which makes the comparison with Kafka feel overwhelming – a confused little man dragged to judgement before a huge, imposing court which he doesn’t understand. The essence of the Kafkaesque.

For the first time the narrator is named as ‘H.H.’. H.H.? So a barely veiled reference to the author himself which, yet again, could barely be more like the Kafka who named his two most famous protagonists K. and Joseph K. with his own initial.

The ‘Speaker’ refers to H.H. as ‘the self-accused’ and asks him:

‘Is your name H.H.? Did you join in the march through Upper Swabia, and in the festival at Bremgarten? Did you desert your colours shortly after Morbio Inferiore? Did you confess that you wanted to write a story of the Journey to the East? Did you consider yourself hampered by your vow of silence about the League’s secrets?’
I answered question after question with ‘Yes’…

So I was expecting H.H. to get hammered, but, surprisingly, he is now given permission to go right ahead and write a full account of the League and all its laws.

He is handed a copy of the manuscript of the Journey he had been working on and which had got bogged down at that moment when Leo left the group. But now, when he rereads it, he feels it is bodged, clumsy, inaccurate and – further – as he tries to amend it, he watches the letters change shape, become patterns and pictures, illegible, the entire manuscript changes form in front of his eyes.

Rather improbably, the Speaker gives him free run of the immense archive to research his book, which leads to a passage where H.H. rummages through the archives to find records about his friends and then himself, but finds the records written in strange languages and arcane scripts. Slowly he realises there isn’t enough time in the world to go through this immense and probably infinite library.

From all sides the unending spaciousness of the archive chamber confronted me eerily. A new thought, a new pain shot threw me like a flash of lightning. I, in my simplicity, wanted to write the story of the League, I, who could not decipher or understand one-thousandth part of those millions of scripts, books, pictures and references in the archives! Humbled, unspeakably foolish, unspeakably ridiculous, not understanding myself, feeling extremely small, I saw myself standing in the midst of this thing with which I had been allowed to play a little in order to make me realize what the League was and what I was myself.

the court magically re-assembles, with the Speaker presiding. Now we learn that this little episode was a further step in H.H.’s trial, to show him how vain and presumptuous his aim of writing a history of the league was. The Speaker asks if he is ready for the verdict on him, and whether he wants it delivered by the Speaker or the President himself.

In a surreal development, the grand figure who emerges from the bloom of the archive hall turns out to be none other than… Leo! The Leo he had followed into the party, who is himself the Leo who was his group’s servant on the Journey and now he comes to think about it, was the same President who initiated him into the League and gave him his ring.

H.H. is covered in shame and confusion. To think that he could write a history of the League. To think that he had imagined the League had ended or had never existed. Now Leo recounts H.H.s sins against the League. Forgetting about its existence. Losing his League ring. Even their long walk through the town had been a test because H.H. should have gone into the church and worshipped, as is fitting, instead of standing outside locked in his impatient egotism. It is his egotism which made him deny the League and sink into a world plagued with depression and despair.

Again, as in so many of Hesse’s books, which you imagine will be about Eastern philosophy, the most eloquent passages are about misery and despair. Leo tells the jury how H.H.s loss of faith in the League led him down into the pit, and delivers some puzzling lines:

‘The defendant did not know until this hour, or could not really believe, that his apostasy and aberration were a test. For a long time he did not give in. He endured it for many years, knowing nothing about the League, remaining alone, and seeing everything in which he believed in ruins. Finally, he could no longer hide and contain himself. His suffering became too great, and you know that as soon as suffering becomes acute enough, one goes forward. Brother H. was led to despair in his test, and despair is the result of each earnest attempt to understand and vindicate human life. Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side. Defendant H. is no longer a child and is not yet fully awakened. He is still in the midst of despair.’

So: Despair is what you enter when you are no longer a child, when you become a questing adult, and before you are initiated or awakened.

Now President Leo initiates H.H. for a second time, giving him a replacement ring and welcoming him back into the ranks of the League.

This really is nothing at all about any literal Journey To The East, is it? It is about adventures of the spirit, or maybe psychological experiences, in a quiet Swiss town.

Now the President leads H.H. to the final test. He is shown the League archives about himself. Specifically, he is shown several other accounts written by members of his group or party on his Journey of ten years ago. Here he is horrified to read that it is he, H.H. that the other members of the group blamed for Leo’s disappearance, for accusing Leo of having taken key documents with him, it was he, H.H. who was blamed by the rest of the group for spreading dissension.

He learns something about trying to write ‘the truth’ (something which is, to be blunt, fairly obvious), which is that everyone has a different account of what happened, and no ‘truth’ can ever be arrived at.

If the memory of this historian was so very confused and inaccurate, although he apparently made the report in all good faith and with the conviction of its complete veracity – what was the value of my own notes? If ten other accounts by other authors were found about Morbio, Leo and myself, they would presumably all contradict and censure each other.

No, our historical efforts were of no use; there was no point in continuing with them and reading them; one could quietly let them be covered with dust in this section of the archives. ..

How awry, altered and distorted everything and everyone was in these mirrors, how mockingly and unattainably did the face of truth hide itself behind all these reports, counter-reports and legends! What was still truth? What was still credible ?

The final few pages end on an enigmatic moment and symbol. Tucked away in the shelf where his records are stored, he finds a grotesque little statuette, like a pagan idol. Only slowly does he realise it is two-sided, shows two human figures joined at the back. And then slowly makes out that one is a depiction of himself, with blurred features, weak and dying. And as he lights another candle he sees something stirring in the heart of the glass statuette, and realises that some kind of life force is moving from his half of the statuette over into Leo’s

And in the last few sentences of the book he remembers a conversation he had with the servant Leo on the Journey, ten years earlier, amid a wonderful festival early in the journey, where Leo had explained that a pet or writer drains himself in order to give eternal life to his work, just as a mother suckles a baby and gives the babe life, at her own expense. So the poet.

And on this slightly ominous, pregnant image the book ends. The narrator feels very sleepy. He turns to find somewhere to sleep. Maybe enacting exactly the gesture whereby the poet, writer or maker, gives all their spirit and life force to their creation and then expires.

Thoughts

Well, it turns out not to be a literal Journey To The East in the slightest. Anyone expecting a straightforward narrative of a pilgrimage to India will be disappointed and puzzled.

However, anyone familiar with Hesse will be less surprised by its combination of the strangely mundane and the wildly phantasmagorical. This is the same combination as in Steppenwolf, which evolved from being a dull account of a middle-aged boarder in a provincial boarding house into the giddy surrealism of the Magic Theatre.

And Steppenwolf also covered a similar range of emotional or psychological states – to be more precise, it displayed a similar, almost schizophrenic, tendency to jump between extremes of Despair and the giddy heights of ecstatic imaginative delirium.

I had this impression of Hesse as being a lofty propounder of high-minded Eastern philosophy. I wasn’t prepared to encounter so many characters who were so full of despair, self-loathing and so many discussions of suicide.

And I’m still reeling from the way the book is not about a Journey To The East at all; it’s much more about the psychological adventures or journey of a middle-aged man living in a Swiss town. All the key events happen in the narrator’s mind. It is a psychological odyssey.

Building a universe

It’s a small detail, but it’s interesting that Hesse includes among fellow members of the League, not only some of his real-life friends, but characters from his other books.

Thus the character ‘Goldmund’, one of the two leads in Narziss and Goldmund, crops up in his initial memories of the Journey, as does the painter Klingsor, who is the fictional lead of Hesse’s earlier novel Klingsor’s Last Summer.

And when I started reading Hesse’s final novel, The Glass Bead Game, early in the introduction the narrator mentions the League of Journeyers To The East as forerunners of the game. Hesse was quite obviously creating a kind of larger imaginative canon, an imaginarium, in which characters not only from history, not only actual writers and composers, along with mythical and legendary figures, but figures from his own earlier fictions, could meet and mingle on equal terms.

Images of war in The Journey To The East

I am always interested in the social history revealed by older texts. It is striking that Hesse doesn’t just launch straight into his fairy-tale journey, but feels the need to define the times, the era, the period against which his pilgrim is reacting, and that he defines these times by repeated references to the social, economic, cultural and spiritual chaos following Germany’s defeat in the Great War.

Ours have been remarkable times, this period since the World War, troubled and confused, yet, despite this, fertile…

It was shortly after the World War, and the beliefs of the conquered nations were in an extraordinary state of unreality. There was a readiness to believe in things beyond reality…

Have we not just had the experience that a long, horrible, monstrous war has been forgotten, gainsaid, distorted and dismissed by all nations? And now that they have had a short respite, are not the same nations trying to recall by means of exciting war novels what they themselves caused and endured a few years ago?…

At the time that I had the good fortune to join the League – that is, immediately after the end of the World War – our country was full of saviors, prophets, and disciples, of presentiments about the end of the world, or hopes for the dawn of a Third Reich. Shattered by the war, in despair as a result of deprivation and hunger, greatly disillusioned by the seeming futility of all the sacrifices in blood and goods, our people at that time were lured by many phantoms, but there were also many real spiritual advances. There were Bacchanalian dance societies and Anabaptist groups, there was one thing after another that seemed to point to what was wonderful and beyond the veil. There was also at that time a widespread leaning towards Indian, ancient Persian and other Eastern mysteries and religions…

His name is Lukas. He had taken part in the World War and had published a book about it which had a large circulation…

And indeed, from a structural point of view, this editor, Lukas, is included mainly for the discussion he promotes about the struggle he had to write his memoirs of the war, and his eventual conclusion that it was better to write something rather than nothing – even if untrue or less than perfect – if only because the act of writing was so therapeutic and saved him from terrible feelings of despair and suicide.

I’m doing no more than suggest that Hesse, who is generally thought of as a kind of high-minded explorer of timeless values was, in fact, very much a man of his times, and that his thinking was marked and shaped by the great cataclysm which he and his nation lived through just as much as all the other authors of the Weimar period.

Credit

Die Morgenlandfahrt by Hermann Hesse was published in German in 1932. The English translation by Hilda Rosner was published by Peter Owen Ltd in 1956. All references are to the 1995 Picador paperback edition.

Related links

20th century German literature

The Weimar Republic

German history

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by Simon on April 26, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in German literature, Germany, Great War, Novel, Novella, Philosophy, Psychology
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Posted by Simon on April 26, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/04/26/the-journey-to-the-east-hermann-hesse/

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