Crtice o prvom svetskom ratu

[Prospero]

How darkness descended over Europe in August 1914

 

On the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, historian Hew Strachan profiles Sir Edward Grey, whose words are behind a national commemoration

 

 

Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916, could not actually recall saying 'the lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life’ Photo: © Classic Image / Alamy

 

By Hew Strachan

7:00AM BST 02 Aug 2014

 

 

"The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life”. In his 1925 memoirs, Sir Edward Grey said that he could not recall uttering this lament for Europe as he looked out from his office over Saint James’ Park at dusk on August 3, 1914, but the words have ever after been attributed to the then foreign secretary. And they will prompt a nationwide act of commemoration on the centenary of the declaration of war on Germany. At an official service in Westminster Abbey on Monday night the candles will be snuffed one by one, until only a burning oil lamp remains at the Grave of the Unknown Warrior. At 11pm, that lamp will be extinguished, marking the exact time the British Empire entered the war. And from 10pm, for an hour, the lights will go out at landmark sites, including the Houses of Parliament, Durham Cathedral, Blackpool Illuminations and Liverpool’s Liver Building.

 

Sir Edward Grey had become foreign secretary on the formation of the Liberal government in December 1905, and remained in post until the end of 1916, so becoming the longest-serving holder of the post. Sir Edward brought diplomatic gravitas to his work in 1914. He had already convened the meeting of ambassadors that had contained and concluded the two Balkan wars of 1912-13. When the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on June 28 prompted a third Balkan crisis, it seemed unlikely to have any direct effect on British interests, but Sir Edward might still prove central to its resolution. If the “concert of Europe”, the international order created in 1814-15 after the Napoleonic wars, still had life, the foreign secretary was the person best placed to animate it.

 

Sir Edward’s qualifications for such responsibility were of recent coinage. Notoriously idle as a young man, he had been sent down from Oxford, but returned to get a third in jurisprudence. He entered politics as much through Whig inheritance as ambition. He spoke no foreign language and, when foreign secretary, never travelled abroad – or at least not until he had to accompany King George V to Paris in April 1914. He seemed happier as a country gentleman, enjoying his enthusiasms of fishing and ornithology. His first wife increasingly refused to come to London, remaining at Fallodon, the family seat in Northumberland. Their life together was chaste and childless, but not unaffectionate.

 

Apparent contradictions also apply to Sir Edward’s conduct in July 1914. The navigation of the developing crisis required him to pursue two policies. On the one hand, he wanted to ensure peace in Europe. On the other, he could not afford to jeopardise the security structure that the ententes with France and Russia had created for the Empire.

 

After the Archduke’s assassination, Sir Edward had to deter Germany from supporting Austria-Hungary, while not giving so much confidence in British support to France and Russia as to encourage them to belligerence. He had to be determined when speaking to Berlin while appearing irresolute with Paris and St Petersburg. His twin-track approach would make him seem devious and even dishonest in all three capitals. It was also a course forced on him by domestic politics. He could not follow through the logic of his policy, predicated on the ententes, without risking a split in his Liberal Party, and in the government. In the last week of July, as a Balkan conflict threatened to escalate into a wider European war, about half of the Cabinet was clear that Britain should stay out of it.

 

Sir Edward’s balancing act was to attract the ire of David Lloyd George; in his memoirs, the future prime minister accused the foreign secretary of indecisiveness in those crucial weeks. However, as the archives were opened, Sir Edward increasingly won plaudits from historians. They identified the sources of anti-German feeling in the Foreign Office before 1914 as not the foreign secretary, but his officials. In January 1907, one of them, Eyre Crowe, had written a memorandum which argued that the Kaiser’s assertiveness was forcing the Anglo-French entente to take on an increasingly anti-German orientation. On July 31, 1914, Sir Eyre (as he now was) captured the frustrations felt by many with the foreign secretary’s policy, telling him that, if Britain could not engage in a big war, it would “mean her abdication as an independent state”.

 

When the ultimatum to Germany expired, Sir Edward refused to exult, even if in the end it was Britain which declared war on Germany. “I hate war, I hate war,” he would say. He regarded the declaration as a failure, and doubted whether Europe would ever regain its pre-eminent place in the world.

 

His critics, then and now, have seen such remarks as hand-wringing and duplicitous. The previous Conservative government had in 1895 moved from “splendid isolation” to embrace the need to form alliances. But it was Sir Edward who narrowed these options by excluding the possibility of a deal with Germany. As a Liberal Imperialist, concerned by the evidence of British decline in the South African war, Sir Edward increasingly fixed Britain to France and then to Russia. The latter relationship may have looked frayed by 1914, but that with France was buttressed by military and naval talks. The result was not so much a balance of power in Europe as the isolation of Germany.

 

Sir Edward may have refused, even late in July, to refer to France and Russia as “allies”, but Britain’s relationships with them were the foundations of his policy. Less, therefore, separated him from his officials than his utterances in Cabinet, or the civil servants’ frustrations with him, suggested. The cardinal error committed in July by Sir Edward and his officials was their refusal to distinguish between Germany and Austria-Hungary. He could not accept that the Balkan policy pursued by Vienna after the Archduke’s murder was not made in Berlin.

 

So when, on July 26 the foreign secretary tried to reactivate the idea of an ambassadorial conference to resolve the crisis, he miscalculated twice over. First, Austria-Hungary knew that a conference would only postpone, not remove, the threat to its survival from Serbia. Second, Germany was not necessarily his natural partner in bringing the two opposed alliance blocs to the table. In the end, general European war had effectively broken out before Britain made its decision. Germany invaded Belgium only as a consequence of the fact that it was already committed to war with France.

 

Belgium may have mattered to neither of them, but it was of enormous significance to Sir Edward. It enabled the twin tracks of his policy finally to converge. The invasion threatened the balance of power in Europe and Britain’s sea lanes. By breaching an international treaty, Germany united British self-interest with wider moral principle. Belgium enabled Britain to enter the war united as to its “necessity”, even if there were many different versions of what that might mean.

 

This was Sir Edward’s triumph: national unity was the sine qua non of Britain’s capacity to wage a major war. And yet his understanding of the strategy required by such a conflict was rudimentary. His speech on August 3 setting out Britain’s options has been described as a great parliamentary moment, but that may reflect its portentousness rather than content. In it, he imagined that Britain’s principal contribution would be naval and economic. He suggested that the diminutive British Expeditionary Force would fulfil the role of imperial defence, rather than go to France and become a mass army.

 

That gap between this policy and the war that followed does much to explain the twilit mood of Sir Edward’s memoirs. In his success in July 1914 lay the seeds of his sense of ultimate failure.

 

Everyone in the UK is invited to turn their lights out at 10pm on August 4 to mark the centenary, leaving on a single light or candle to mark the moment.

Sir Hew Strachan is the Chichele Professor of the History of War and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is a member of the World War I Centenary Advisory Board

[Prospero]

Lu Rokvel:
 

The State’s Worst Atrocity
Mises Daily: Thursday, August 07, 2014 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
 
 

“The lamps are going out all over Europe,” Sir Edward Grey famously said on the eve of World War I. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
It was 100 years ago last week that Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, setting in motion the unspeakable calamity that contemporaries dubbed the Great War. Well in excess of ten million people perished, and by some estimates, many more.

Numbers, even staggering ones like this, can scarcely convey the depth and breadth of the destruction. The war was an ongoing slaughter of devastating proportions. Tens of thousands perished in campaigns that moved the front just a matter of yards. It was World War I that gave us the term “basket case,” by which was meant a quadruple amputee. Other now-familiar tools of warfare came into common use: the machine gun, the tank, even poison gas. Rarely has the State’s machinery of senseless destruction been on more macabre display.

The scholarly pendulum has swung back in the direction of German atrocities having indeed been committed in Belgium, though perhaps not quite as gruesome as the tales of babies being passed from bayonet to bayonet that were disseminated to Americans early in the war. In turn, a vastly larger number of Germans, with estimates as high as 750,000, died as a result of the British hunger blockade that violated longstanding norms of international conduct, even during wartime.

The machinery of State propaganda reached heights never before seen. Whole peoples were systematically demonized in the service of the warmakers. Sound money was abandoned, to return only briefly and in a hobbled form during the interwar period.

To be sure, some socialists opposed the war, since it pitted the working classes of the world against each other. Others, intoxicated by the spirit of nationalism, abandoned socialism (at least in its internationalist aspects) and plunged into the war with gusto. Among these: Benito Mussolini.

And yet there is scarcely an atrocity that States cause that another State, in the name of peace, cannot make indescribably worse.

The intervention by Woodrow Wilson, against the wishes of most Americans — were that not so, neither the draft nor the ceaseless propaganda would have been necessary — was one of the most catastrophic decisions ever made, by anyone. It set in motion a sequence of events whose consequences would reverberate throughout the twentieth century.

One can make a case, not merely plausible but indeed quite compelling, that in the absence of Wilson’s intervention, the entire litany of twentieth-century horrors could have been avoided. Without a punitive peace, which only Wilson’s intervention made possible, the Nazis would have had no natural constituency, and no path to power. The Bolshevik Revolution, which succeeded only because of the unpopularity of the war, might not have occurred if the promise of coming American support had not kept that war going.

Even George Kennan, a pillar of the establishment, admitted in retrospect: “Today if one were offered the chance of having back again the Germany of 1913 — a Germany run by conservative but relatively moderate people, no Nazis and no Communists — a vigorous Germany, full of energy and confidence, able to play a part again in the balancing-off of Russian power in Europe, in many ways it would not sound so bad.”

Meanwhile, the Turkish collapse, writes Philip Jenkins, led some Muslims to seek a different basis on which to unify, and that in turn has encouraged the most illiberal forms of Islam.

Oh, but everyone is against war, right?

Yes, just about everyone makes the perfunctory nod to the tragedy of war, that war is a last resort only, and that everyone sincerely regrets having to go to war.

But war has been at the heart of much modern ideology. For years, Theodore Roosevelt had exulted at the prospect of war. Peace was for the weak and flabby. The strains of war were a school of discipline and manliness, without which nations degenerate. Fascists, in turn, urged their countries to adopt for domestic use the patterns of military life: regimentation, limitations on dissent, the common pursuit of a single goal, proper reverence for The Leader, the subordination of all other allegiances in favor of loyalty to the State, and the priority of the “public interest” over mere private interests.

If the fascist right has been rightly associated with militarism, that isn’t because the revolutionary left has been any less dedicated to organized violence. Robert Nisbet wrote,

 

Napoleon was the perfect exemplar of revolution as well as of war, not merely in France but throughout almost all of Europe, and even beyond. Marx and Engels were both keen students of war, profoundly appreciative of its properties with respect to large-scale institutional change. From Trotsky and his Red Army down to Mao and Chou En-lai in China today, the uniform of the soldier has been the uniform of the revolutionist.

 

For their part, those people we associate with progressivism in the United States, with only a handful of exceptions, overwhelmingly favored intervening in the war. They favored it not only out of the bipartisan sense of American righteousness that goes back as far as one cares to look, but also precisely because they knew war meant bigger and more intrusive government. They knew it would make people accustomed to the idea that they can be called upon to carry out the State’s program, whatever it may be.

Murray N. Rothbard drew up the indictment of the Progressives on this count. He added that the standard view of historians that World War I amounted to the end of Progressivism was exactly backward: World War I, with its economic planning, the impetus it gave to government growth, and its disparagement of private property and the mundane concerns of bourgeois life, represented the culmination of everything the Progressive movement represented.

By contrast, war is the very negation of the libertarian creed. It disrupts the international division of labor. It treats human beings as disposable commodities in the service of State ambition. It undermines commerce, sound money, and private property. It results in an increase of State power. It demands the substitution of the great national effort in place of the private interests of free individuals. It urges us to sympathize not with our fellow men around the world, but with the handful of people who happen to administer the State apparatus that rules over us. We are encouraged to wave the flags and sing the songs of our expropriators, as the poor souls on the other side do the same.

In the hands of commerce and the market, the fruits of capitalist civilization improve living standards and lift people out of destitution. But the political class cannot be trusted with these good things. The very success of the market economy has meant more resources to be siphoned off by the warmakers. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in Nation, State, and Economy (1919):

 

War has become more fearful and destructive than ever before because it is now waged with all the means of the highly developed technique that the free economy has created. Bourgeois civilization has built railroads and electric power plants, has invented explosives and airplanes, in order to create wealth. Imperialism has placed the tools of peace in the service of destruction. With modern means it would be easy to wipe out humanity at one blow. In horrible madness Caligula wished that the entire Roman people had one head so that he could strike it off. The civilization of the twentieth century has made it possible for the raving madness of the modern imperialists to realize similar bloody dreams. By pressing a button one can expose thousands to destruction. It was the fate of civilization that it was unable to keep the external means that it had created out of the hands of those who had remained estranged from its spirit. Modern tyrants have things much easier than their predecessors ...

 

Nothing in the world is easier than opposing a war that ended long ago. It takes no real courage to be against the Vietnam War in 2014. What takes courage is opposing a war while it is being fought — when the propaganda and intimidation of the public are at their height — or even before it breaks out in the first place. With the memory of the moral and material catastrophe of World War I before us 100 years later, let us pledge never again to be fooled and exploited by the State and its violent pastimes.

 

[bergasa19]

 

Obeležavanje godišnjice Velikog rata u Britaniji izgubilo je svaki osećaj za meru. Sve se pretvorilo u medijski tematski park, nesvarljivu mešavinu televizijske sapunice i horor filma. Više ni obična šetnja ulicom ili gledanje televizije ne mogu da prođu bez bombardovanja dnevnicima, poezijom, spomenarima i pesmama iz Velikog rata. Na BBC-u vlada ratna pomama. Veliki rat i pozorište, Veliki rat i promenadni koncerti, Veliki rat i recepti, Veliki rat i baštovanstvo. Pa onda Veliki rat i Komonvelt, Veliki rat i feminizam, Veliki rat i modne revije. Iz štampe je navodno izašlo 8000 naslova o ratu. Kraljevska pošta je u opticaj pustila posebne pakete, “klasičan, prestižan i ceremonijalni”, posvećene ratu a koji vam “donose užitak u pričama i markicama”. Užitak?

Simon Jenkins

[Prospero]

Nisam video kod naših medija, pa evo sa ITAR-TASSa:
 

WWI monument to Serbian and Russian soldiers dispatched from Russia to Belgrade
 August 08, 14:56 UTC+4 

The granite cut cross topped by the bronze statue of St. George the Victorious will be installed in a park outside Belgrade’s Kalemegdan fortress, a scene of fierce WWI battles, by September 18

ST. PETERSBURG, August 08. /ITAR-TASS/. A monument to Serbian and Russian soldiers who died on WWI battlefields was dispatched from St. Petersburg to the Serbian capital Belgrade on Friday. The granite cut cross topped by the bronze statue of St. George the Victorious will be installed in a park outside Belgrade’s Kalemegdan fortress, a scene of fierce WWI battles, by September 18.
 
“The Kalemegdan fortress and the park adjacent to it are located in the heart of Belgrade. They have the same meaning for it as the Peter and Paul’s Fortress for St. Petersburg or the Kremlin for Moscow. The decision to install the monument here is very important for Russian-Serbian friendship,” Mikhail Petrov, the deputy director of a company that made the cross, told ITAR-TASS.
Serbia will become a second country after France to have a WWI memorial to Russian soldiers, designed by St. Petersburg sculptor Andrei Charkin, in its territory.
Russia has three monuments to WWI heroes installed in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Russia’s westernmost enclave of Kaliningrad.

[Dr Arslanagić]

Simon Jenkins

 

Pornografija nasilja

 

No dobro, očekivano je da Dženkins napiše ovako nešto i da Peščanik to prenese.

[kapetanm]

Prospero daj neki titl

[Prospero]

Za šta?

[kapetanm]

Pa za te tekstove. Valjda je cilj da ih se razume bez recnika.

[Prospero]

Ne znam na šta misliš. kad smo prevodili nešto sa engleskog?

 

Kvotuj šta te interesuje, pa da vidimo...

[kapetanm]

Pazi, ja razumem, uz malo muke, al, sto se kaze precutno je pravilo da je forum za neku diskusiju. Sad da bi svako imaao mogucnost za to red je da mu se tema servira na jeziku koji razume

[Prospero]

A bre kapetane, mali milion tekstova na forumu je kačen na engleskom; ovo je jedna od tema koja nije lokalnog karaktera pa nije čudno što ih ima.

 

Strogo formalno, upotreba engleskog je potpisana i pečatirana u pravilima:

 

 

 

 Dozvoljena je upotreba srpskog, bosanskog, hrvatskog, crnogorskog, engleskog jezika u raspravi sa bližnjima.

 

Ima i google translate, dovoljno je precizan za razumevanje.

 

 

Zaista se ne mogu obavezati da prevodim tekstove niti da upućujem druge da to rade. Obično dopišemo neku svoju impresiju ili ponekad u tekstu obeležimo ono što smatramo najbitnijim.

[porucnik vasic]

Како би се овај термин правилно превео на српски?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4ger_(military)

[Prospero]

Nikako, "jegerski"puk, "lovacki" se ne koristi u tom kontekstu.

by TT

[MancMellow]

Mislim da može "streljački puk"

[Prospero]

"стрелковые войска" je klasičan ruski naziv za pešadiju, jegeri su "laka pešadija", možda sličniji komitama kad bi oni bili regularna vojska.