Roskill Lecture 2018: Magaret MacMillan — Reflecting on the Great War Today

[Applause] [Music] so master fellows members of the raw skill family my Lords ladies and gentlemen welcome to the 17th Steven Ross Gill Memorial Lecture my name is Alan packwood I'm lucky enough to be the director of the archive Center we're now going to sort of break with tradition slightly because we're very lucky that the raw skill lecture this year has coincided with the visiting fellowship of an admiral Rear Admiral dr. Chris Perry and it seems highly appropriate to me that we seize this rare opportunity to have one senior former naval person introduce a lecture named for another like Steven Ross kill Chris Perry has enjoyed a full and active naval career being mentioned in dispatches for his role in rescuing stranded SAS soldiers from a glacier in South Georgia and sinking a submarine unlike Steven Ross skill he's an accomplished writer now undertaking research for his next book here in the archive Center working in the raw skill library and even using Steven Ross skills papers so like Steven Ross skill he's a man of both words and actions we think he's probably the only Admiral ever to have properly earned a doctorate as opposed to having just been awarded one but of course he also told me that all naval commanders should be pirates so he hasn't lost that Buccaneer in spirit Kristin [Applause] master fellows my Lords ladies and gentlemen many of you will know that academically I hail from another place one that traditionally favors lam warfare and it's peculiar devotees I'm confident I'm conscious that it's Cambridge that has been a fertile field for iconoclastic naval officers and Soviet spies as it happens now one of the Admirals was the eminent sailor scholar Sir Herbert Richmond as the naval director of operations during the First World War his frequent memoranda about the deficiencies in naval strategy drew the fire of the First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Winston Churchill and the Graham fleet commander in chief Admiral Sir John Jellicoe it didn't help that events proved him right especially about convoys which took until 1917 to Institute Lloyd George wanted him as a cabinet member but he ended up being the first vir Harmsworth professor of imperial and naval history here at Cambridge University and from 1934 to 1946 he was master of downing College Cambridge also became the platform and sanctuary for the considerable abilities of our own captain Stephen Ross killed both as a historian as and as a founding genius of the archive center he had a distinguished naval career in peace and war including the award of a Distinguished Service Cross before applying himself to history his official history of the Royal Navy in world war ii the war at sea has not been bettered in terms of scholarship or judgment since it was published in the 1950s I say that as one who's read every page of three volumes during a six-month deployment to the South Atlantic his biographies including those of hanky and Beattie and models of research and scholarship and more to the point highly readable his art of leadership if read today would save companies tens of thousands of pounds in fees for specialist courses and life coaches consequently the raw skill lecture was established by the college at the suggestion of Corelli Barnett as a suitable memorial to Ross kills life and legacy the lectures are traditionally in the fields of international relations public policy military history this is the 18th 17th I beg your pardon in 1918 20 18 raw skill lecture the first having been given by Lord Carrington then secretary of NATO in 1985 as he had his some time on his hands having been sacked at the start of the Falklands War now the shadows of the first world war loomed large across Steven Roscoe especially in his assessments of the Battle of Jutland Churchill and the career in character of the serpentine Admiral David Beaty raw skills trenchant and professional authority views about the First World War and the interwar period lay at the heart of his intense clash of the historical dreadnoughts with a formidable thorough American historian Arthur Mada here I'm reminded of CP snows two cultures in this case that of the military practitioner and the academic on the one hand academics seem to view naval officers as salt streaked bears of little brain indeed it did not help that as Roscoe wrote the Royal Navy itself has by no means always regarded intelligent men favorably on the other hand seamen scarcely give credence to anyone who has not had a whiff of cordite who cannot or who cannot tell their aft from their forward it was raw skills position as a naval practitioner I witness to events and as an academic that gives his writing its distinct edge and his judgments their objective value Marda with all his penetrating historical insight but professional distance was careful to spend time with senior officers to ensure that he was close to the grain of naval experience that is why it gives me great pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker who if I may say Abra Blee combines the scholarship and deep insight of the academic world with the precision and understanding of the practitioner professor Margaret Macmillan is the professor of history at the University of Toronto and a former warden of San Anthony's College you'll know that her books include women of the Raj Paris 1919 six months that changed the world for which she was the first woman to be awarded the Samuel Johnson prize nixon in china another six six days that changed the world she is also written about the uses and Abey of history her most recent book is the war that ended peace she's a fellow of the Royal Society of literature and at numerous world-class academic institutions she is also on the editorial boards of international history and first world war studies and is a trustee of the Rhodes trust such is the prestige of the raw scale lecture that since accepting to give this particular lecture professor macmillan has been appointed a Companion of Honour and as this year's BBC Reath lecturer she's a long-term friend of the archive Center and it's a pleasure for the college and my privilege to be able to welcome her back her subjects which would have had been constantly on or at the back of the mind of captain Roscoe is reflecting on the Great War today thank you [Applause] thank you very much Admiral Perry that was a very kind introduction indeed and thank you ladies and gentlemen master and fellows for inviting me to give this lecture I can't think of two more appropriate names as we think about the First World War to be identified with this lecture that bat of Stephen Roscoe and that of course of Winston Churchill who were both themselves participants and who reflected on the meaning of that war I regret that I never met Stephen Roskilde although of course I felt I knew him in a way through his wonderful writing including of course his bag of hanky and I have used the archives here they are wonderful they're wonderful resource so I'm very grateful for everything that Churchill college and Stephen Roscoe have done for me as an historian we are as I was saying to someone before we came over here some of us the last generation of those who knew people who were in the First World War and as time goes by we will have cause disappeared both my grandfather's were in the First World War my British grandfather with the Indian Army was at Gallipoli was in Mesopotamia and as children we had his dress uniform in our dressing up box we had no idea what it meant it was just something that was a nice color my Canadian grandfather was a doctor who was with the British Army in Weston for in the Western Front and as children we used to play my grandmother had a curio cabinet was little sort of things in it and we used to play with a hand grenade that my grandfather had brought back as a souvenir from the war she used to keep it in this little curio cabinet we used to roll it around the carpet and tell someone noticed the pin was still in it so that was removed from us we all of us I think have memories of the First World War in one way or another mine through my grandparents who were so affected by it but we've also think been very conscious in the last few years of the First World War because of the various commemorations that have taken place and commemorations I think rightly of those who made the decisions but also those who were affected by them and so commemorations of the ordinary men and women whose lives was so affected by the war how we remember war is always difficult and I think we need to understand that we change our memories of war and the first world war is now I think widely seen as futile dreadful and hideously wasteful that was not always the way people thought of it and of course it depends what country you're in it's very striking to me that in some countries the commemorations have been much more intense and in other countries the Russians have done very little for example to commemorate the first world war for them it's problematic because it led to the Russian Revolution and for them of course the Great Patriotic War as they call it the Second World War is much more important and it's something they commemorate and spend a lot more pay a lot more attention to the Germans have not done all that much to commemorate the first world war because it's a difficult subject for them to commemorate the French and the British I think have done much more and some Commonwealth countries have done more the Americans have not really done very much again for them the Second World War is much more important much more decisive than the First World War so I think we have to remember that different peoples in different places think about the First World War differently but certainly in the english-speaking countries I think the view is one of futility and waste that was not how people thought about it immediately after the war ended and if you look at the commemorations that were done the annual ceremonies that began to coalesce around November the 11th for example the bringing back of the Unknown Soldier these were commemorations of heroes and people talked about our dead heroes and if you look at the early war memorials they were about the heroism of those who had died because at the time people thought the war had been about something and they thought for all its waste and for all its destruction it had actually meant something it had prevented a certain type of society from developing in Europe and saved another type of society it was really only towards the end of the 1920s that we began to get the publication of some of those very moving poetry very moving memoirs of the war where people began to shift their views and so I think we just need to remember that memories change over time what we remember and how we remember has changed over time and people in the 1920s I think would be puzzled by the way in which we remember the war today but I think it is fair to say that even then in the 1920s Europeans had a sense that something had changed they if they were on the winning side I think was satisfied that they had won felt they had done something heroic but there was also a sense that European civilization had wounded itself perhaps irrevocably tremendous sense of loss and you can understand why because if you look at the Europe before 1914 it had enjoyed one of the best centuries in its history there had been Wars but those wars with the exception of the Crimean War had only involved two or three countries they had been generally short was they had generally settled something and so the Wars of Italian unification the Wars of German unification had actually produced something different had settled something the awful thing about the First World War is it doesn't seem to have settled anything and I think that is is part of the reason why people have had over the years so much trouble in dealing with it and I think there was also a sense that Europe had thrown away with both hands its enormous advantages before 1914 yes of course there was social tensions in Europe yes of course there were problems but Europe was taken all together the most prosperous and the most progressive part of the world Europe dominated much of the world through its great empires and through its informal empires through its investment through its migrations of people's out from Europe much of the world was populated by descendants of Europeans London Frankfurt Paris was where you came in London particular if you want to borrow money you came to the big universities of Europe if you want to learn about the latest advances in science and you look to European thought as a model for your own political and and moral and ethical institutions and ways of thinking by 1918 that sense of a Europe that had been in the forefront of the world which was progressing which was going to progress even more of course had gone Stephan's vague the Austrian writer and journalist talked about in his last memoir talked about growing up in the golden age of security he said before 1914 we just assumed things would go on and that they would get better he said and he was writing in 1940 what a myth that was we must agree with Freud he wrote to whom our culture and civilization were merely a thin layer libel at any moment to be pierced by the destructive forces of the underworld shortly after he finished the memoir he was living in Brazil at the time a refugee from Hitler's Germany he and his wife committed suicide because he couldn't face what he feared was going to happen with the Second World War and so there was a sense of tremendous loss of something that had been thrown away and also I think a fear and you see it in a number of European thinkers and writers about a damage to European civilization that something that will never really be chant be recovered Paul valéry the French writer and thinker wrote for an English publication in 1919 an essay in which he said I'll just quote a little bit we later civilizations we to know that we immortal Elam Nineveh Babylon were but beautiful vague names and the total ruin of those world had as little significance for us as their very existence but France England Russia those two would be beautiful names Lusitania too is a beautiful name and we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all we are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life and I think it's partly that feeling in that sense of Lawson and irrevocable damage that leads us back to the first world war in a curious way I think we spend more time worrying pondering and thinking about the First World War than we do about the Second World War we may be wrong and I think we sometimes are but we see the Second World War is much more clear-cut as good versus evil and I think this this is certainly debatable but we see the Second World War as something there's simply much clearer in our minds which had as we see it a desirable outcome we look at the First World War and we keep going back to this question is how could the Europeans have done it and how could they have done it and of course not just to themselves but to the world how much we keep asking did that First World War the Great War of course as it was known then how much did it really change things I mean were the things that were happening anyway even before 1914 of course there were there were changes happening in society but did the First World War take European society in particular down a path that it might not have gone down otherwise and we asked what ifs would there have been the Russian Revolution in 1917 particularly the second phase of it when the Bolsheviks took over would that have happened without the First World War you look back at Russia now and historians have been doing a lot of looking at Russia before 1914 and it was developing very quickly it had one of the highest growth rates of any country has ever had high as high as the Asian Tigers in the 1960s and 1970s it was developing industries it was developing universities it was developing education it was beginning to develop political institutions it might have managed to change in a more peaceful way it might have managed to avoid the horrors of what the Bolsheviks brought without the revolution what if austria-hungary had not gone into the first world war what if there hadn't been a first world war might it have survived that vast multinational Empire in the center of Europe we tend to assume now because those empires disappeared that nationalisms the various nationalisms within them were bound to triumph but what if it got another way what if austria-hungary which is already conceding more and more autonomy to its various ethnic and linguistic groups what if it hadn't gone into the First World War might we have seen something more like a federation like I come from a Federal Society of Canada and we have managed to encompass ethnic and linguistic differences my austria-hungary have done the same might the Ottoman Empire which was already beginning to transform itself and modernized before the First World War might it have survived in some way we'll never know but these are I think important questions and of course the big question which we go on and on about is what caused it what made European nations do this I can't give you an answer there have now it's been estimated I don't know who's counting but someone has done it something like 30,000 works in English alone on the origins of the first world war and that tells you something I mean one of the things that is so appalling when we look at the first world war is we still don't know how it happened we still can't agree the second world war we can agree I think we're pretty clear on how it happened where maybe some disagreements on particular emphases but on the whole we know how it happened then you will notice if you go to a library or a bookstore origins the first world war go on and on and on origins in the second world war a shelf or two again because there is a consensus there was it and we still I think we all never know I don't think it's a question that could be answered was it a breakdown of the balance of power was it somehow showing did the first world war outbreak show the dangers of alliances where you've got Alliance systems which draw not just two protagonists in but draw their Alliance partners in I don't think so myself because those alliances were defensive alliances the triple on Tonto and the Triple Alliance and the great thing about an international alliance or the great question it always seems to me is if you choose to back out who's going to enforce it there is no international body that will levy a fine on you or punish you if you don't hold your alliance Italy was a member of the Triple Alliance it ended up fighting on the side of the untagged it managed to find a way of ignoring its alliance obligations I don't think the Alliance system in itself led inevitably to the first world war what I think was dangerous in the pre 1914 period was that you had great powers sponsoring smaller powers and one of the curiosities of international relations is that the patron the great power often doesn't have that much power over the clients because prestige is involved and the client state knows and I think is encouraged by this knowledge to be reckless that the great power is going to have to defend it or lose prestige and so Russia had made a client of Serbia and when the crisis came in 1914 in saint-petersburg what they were saying is if we don't come to Serbia's defense we lose prestige we lose our position as a great power we will be damaged by this in fact the Tsar was told if Russia didn't come to the defense of Serbia he might lose his throne and his son might never succeed him well we know what happened there and so I think what was it was not the Alliance system itself it was that you had this play of great powers intervening and supporting and backing smaller powers and you had of course in the Balkans a powder keg as many had rightly said of small powers struggling to expand their borders struggling to free themselves still if they were still within either austria-hungary or the Ottoman Empire and once you get an unstable reason region with great powers getting involved and we're seeing this at the moment in the North Pacific and we're seeing it in the Middle East local conflicts become that much more dangerous when you get great power involvement and when great powers get to the position or the point where they feel that they can't back down I tend to think that what also helped to contribute to the First World War and as I say these are not definitive answers that there was an acceptance that an important psychological barrier had been broken at least in the minds of some people that war was necessary that war was coming and once you think that war is coming you tend to behave in ways that make it more likely I find very dangerous at the moment the way in which the American military and certain of the American political and international foreign policy establishment are talking about how the United States is going to have to have a war with China how that is coming well once you start behaving like that once you start assuming that's happening then when you look at the other power you tend to see what they're doing is feeding into that possibility they are you assume planning for war as well and I think this was happening not with everyone in Europe but it was happening with enough people who were assuming that a war was going to come in Berlin in the crisis in 1914 the German High Command put terrific pressure on what was a rather weak civilian government by saying if we we are probably going to have to fight Russia if we are going to have to fight them we have to do it now we will not be strong enough in 1917 because Russia was developing so first it had so much more manpower and it was building railways more and more up of course to the German border because Germany and Russia in those days had a common border there was no Poland to act as a barrier between them you saw exactly the same thing or very much the same thing with the Japanese High Command in 1941 when they said we're probably going to have to fight the United States if we're going to fight them we have to fight them this year because we will not be able to fight them after after after the end of 1941 and so that in itself that acceptance and I think put a type of pressure on and there were those who thought that war was actually a good thing there's a lot of concern before 1914 that European society was getting decadent a lot of worried that young people didn't feel the same sense of patriotism and willingness to sacrifice for their countries that their ancestors had felt and of course on the part of the young I think in some cases there was a willingness to show that yes indeed they did have patriotism and indeed they were willing to sacrifice themselves it's been a very interesting study done of young Germans in 1914 who said we are so tired of hearing from our fathers and our uncles and our grandfathers about how they fought in the German Wars of unification how they built Germany and what do you layabouts doing whether they didn't use the word lay about it in those days but they used something very similar what are you doing you're just lazy you're idle there was a fear that civilization had become too civilized that people had moved into cities and they were getting soft you know they weren't living in the countryside anymore and working on the firms there was a fear that things move too fast there was a whole science not really scientific at all but a whole science around what happened to your nerves if you took trains that move too fast if you took Underground's that move too fast and a whole illness called neurasthenia which was meant to be about how your nerves got jangled by the speed of the modern world and so there was at least again in some circles a feeling that war might be good it might pull the nation together it might stiffen the sinews of the young it was often if I may be unkind men beyond military age who said such things there was a professor of war at Oxford who talked about a healthy bloodletting he himself of course was not going to be shedding his blood but these were the sorts of things of being being said also I think a misapplication of science in another way social Darwinism the ideas of Charles Darwin about the divisions of species his ideas about adaptation his unfortunate phrase the survival of the fittest by which he simply meant those that were best adapted to their environment became a moral phrase in the hands of those who tried to apply don't winnie and ideas to human society and so you had what we now call social Darwinism which argued that the human race can be divided up into species just like you divide up the animal kingdom and that there is a struggle for survival among those species but it became more than that if you don't struggle you don't deserve to survive and so there's a moral obligation laid here and so war is seen in this thinking as a natural part of what you must do to survive and it helped to fuel such thinking help to feel not just an acceptance of war but it helped to fuel a sphere and a hatred of the other because there are different species they're not the same as us and so you've got French military attache is saying from Berlin well course the Germans are different from us that Teutons and we will have to fight them because we are each other's natural enemies and you had French German military attache in Paris saying exactly the same thing and so Europe that wonderful civilized progressive Europe which it had really on the whole such a wonderful 19th century was dangerously I think getting used to the idea of war something that could do European society good and could actually be managed because of course what you also had was an assumption that war would be short virtually all the military planners in the period before 1914 were planning for short sharp decisive offensive Wars very few of them had defensive plans the Russians who should have been thinking defensively because of course the great advantage Russia always has is its space which has blunted as we know one successful invasion after another the Russians were thinking offensively the Germans had had a defensive plan but they didn't update it after 1913 and so the only plan they had was offensive and they still thought in terms of the decisive battle somehow they thought they could move millions of men millions of animals with all their equipment in speedy marches around Europe they could envelop each other they could encircle each other and they could win a decisive battle a few people science fiction writers like HG Wells a banker called Yvonne block few people a French socialists and pacifists called Jean jurors thought that it might not be like that they thought that the European powers were so evenly balanced in force which they were the different alliances likely to fight each other and European capacity thanks to its tremendous industrial advances its tremendous scientific advances its tremendous organizational advances could put millions of men into the field and keep them there and they warned that what Europe might see was stalemate a dreadful and destructive stalemate not short sharp decisive victories Jean sure as the French Socialist who was murdered by a French nationalist as he was trying desperately to prevent the first world war from breaking out worked with a young captain and the year later the young captain captain gerhard was in the trenches and one of his fellow officers said you seem very thoughtful today and jerrod said as they looked out at no-man's land this terrible churned up landscape he said I feel as though all this is familiar to me genres prophesied this hell this total annihilation and this was what europeans had to live with the very strength of their civilization the very capacities that they were so proud of their industrial capacities their economic capacities as scientific capacities their ability to mobilize and inspire their people had resulted in this you know I think what some of the statistics are we'll never know how many died in the first world war because keeping such statistics is always difficult probably 9 million dead in the first world wars is what the historians now agree on a lot of those the majority of those European but a lot who weren't if you go as some of you will have done to the Western Front and look at the the graveyards or look at the memorials at the men in gate you will see Australian names Canadian names Indian names you will see names of peoples Vietnamese names peoples from all over the world some hundred thousand Chinese died in the north of France not as competence but as labour their government had provided them to help build the trenches and supply the trenches and of course probably twice as many men again were wounded sometimes never really to recover to bear those scars for the rest of their lives it was a global war it was a war not just between European powers it was a war between empires and so it brought in the peoples and resources of those empires peoples moved around the world they'd been moving around the world before 1914 but you now got huge numbers of men moving around the world coming to Europe moving into Mesopotamia and moving into Africa to fight this global war the war also was fought around the world there was fighting in Africa fighting in the Middle East fighting in the Far East and in the end of course non European powers were also drawn in Japan and China were both allies in the first world war the United States came in in 1917 Latin American countries were on the Allied side Siam as Thailand used to be known was on the Allied side and so the war changed Europe in ways which were still trying to understand it also changed the world because it changed the balance of power in the world it helped to change the interactions in the world let me just say something of what I think it did to Europe and then look at what it did to the world more generally of course what it did in Europe has changed the political landscape political institutions some of which had lasted for centuries like the austro-hungarian Empire it was just about to celebrate its thousandth anniversary it disappeared and left in its place a number of countries some old like Poland which reemerged and some new like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia which sadly fell to quarreling with each other because these new countries and countries like Poland were based on the principle of ethnic nationalism which divided people up on the basis of cultural identifiers such as religion language custom history folktales music whatever and but which assumed that you could define people very clearly as belonging to the Polish nation or the German nation or the Czech nation or the Slovak nation but history had not left these ethnic groups neatly in different paths on different parcels of land so something like a third of all the people living in the center of Europe between the two world wars were ethnic minorities and countries which were based on an ethnic principle and that as you can imagine was a formula for disaster and it was also a formula for meddling and so when Germany began to recover from the First World War and when it fell of course into the hands of increasingly right-wing and then the Nazi government Germans that government began to worry itself about the fate of Germans living elsewhere under the rule of what it felt to be inferior people and so Germans living under Polish rule or Germans living under Czech rule when I said to be suffering and they must be reunited with Germany and so it was a formula for division what also happened of course was not just the triumph of ethnic nationalism through much of Europe and it began to move into the Middle East but also the arrival of a new political ideology of Bolshevism and I think but you may disagree with me but without the first world war Bolshevism which was a splinter movement very much in a very splintered left wing would not have triumphed and would not have seized control the most populous country in Europe and that impact of Bolshevism on Russia of course itself is something the Russian people are still living with so many of the difficulties that Russia is suffering today so many of the economic problems it has can be traced the political problems it has can be traced right back to the long years of Bolshevik or as they quote came to call themselves communist rule it's why they have such trouble knowing how to deal with 1917 do they celebrate what happened then do they mourn it would they rather I think just ignore it but of course Bolshevism didn't just affect Russia it spread through Europe and in the end it spread through the world they're based on a tightly disciplined hierarchical party with a very clear view of the future it proved to be enormous ly powerful both as a revolutionary organizing principle but also as a revolutionary ideology and millions of people around the world we're going to be moved by Bolshevism by Bolshevik ideas and many millions were going to die because they were on the wrong side of history as far as the Bolsheviks were concerned and so the first world war that shadow is still with us and I think the shadow of vestnik nationalism is still with us what also happened I think is that European society was and I agreed with those who said that something was badly damaged it was changed I'm in some ways for the better what did happen as a result of the war is that women began to participate more in political life it was no longer possible in countries such as Britain to deny them the vote on the grounds that the poor little things wouldn't know what to do with it if they were given it they weren't capable of making complicated decisions once women had filled in all those jobs that men had been doing during the First World War had contributed in so many ways to the war effort it was seen by politicians who had previously opposed the vote for women that in fact women were owed the vote and that they would be able to exercise it properly the working classes grew in many countries in power and authority the unions grew and they their political priorities grew the Labour Party grew in Britain and so previously marginalized groups were given a greater part in their societies although these changes were going to take a long time but the other side of the coin is what happened to Europeans what happened to their face in the future and what happened to their faith in their political leaders and I think there was a loss of faith in Western civilization how could you believe that your civilization was a good one when you looked at what had happened on the western front when you looked at what had happened through so much of Europe how could you continue to believe in God when God had allowed something like the first world war to happen how could you continue to believe in your own elites when they had got you into this war and how could you really look to the future when one of the things that happened as a result of the First World War was that with the political and economic upheaval a lot of people lost their hope in the future they lost the savings for example in Germany in the inflation they had stored up laborious lis over the years for their old age they lost personal stages people who had been Admirals or politicians or bankers suddenly found themselves in certain countries with no money and it was not uncommon to see someone in very distinguished military uniform with distinguished decorations trying to sell a cabbage on a street corner in someone like Vienna or Berlin just to get enough money to eat and so society was disrupted in ways I think that we we are still trying to understand there's also a debate among historians and I think I tend to fall on the side that says that this really did make a difference to Europe that the First World War and the violence of the First World War and the involvement of civilians in the First World War served to brutalize society civilians as so often happens when a war drags on became targets in the war the civilians who lived in Belgium under German occupation the civilians who lived in the north of France under German occupation the civilians who lived under Austrian occupation or under Russian occupation were not well treated they were often brutalized shot out of hand exploited obliged to do forced labor and in Europe after 1918 think you could see a general willingness to accept violence the war ended the Great War ended on November the 11th 1918 but the fighting went on in much of the center of Europe and in Ireland we should never forget Ireland went on until 1923 and so more people encountered war there was war between Poland and Russia a major war a war between Poland and Czechoslovakia there were Wars of course in the Middle East there was an uprising against the British in Iraq and uprising against the French in Syria and a willingness I think on the part of many people to accept that violence was a way of settling political disputes you see a marked increase in brawls in the streets not just the Nazis but the fascists initially and and sometimes the Socialists as well people marching people prepared to beat up their opponents now politics had never been gentle and easy but I think you see really a brutalization of European politics in much of Europe as a result of the first world war and you get very complex struggles in the center of Europe because ethnic nationalism is only one force there's also class war there is also this class struggle ethnic Stargirl national struggle and sometimes these overlap and so as Lithuania struggles to establish itself as a new state the Lithuanians are not just fighting for their independence and trying to keep out of the hands of Russia they're also fighting against their polish landlords and so there is a element of ethnic and class struggle in this and so you get the type of violence which goes on endemic violence right the way through the center of Europe and you get it in Western Europe as well you get violent demonstrations in France for example when the socialists march and when the military or the authorities try and put them down I think violence becomes more accepted you get more there had been political assassination before the war but there is a lot of political assassination after the first world war the two men who signed the Treaty of Versailles on behalf of Germany one of those men men is assassinated for his his having signed that fatal treaty and generally the courts let the asin's off they're given talking to and they are not sent to jail and not punished in any way and you get a violence in the language you get a use of language which again was there before the war but I think it's now more widespread you get people enemies being described as disease vermin lice horse scum Lennon uses such language most Lina uses such language Hitler course is going to use such language and there is talk of cleansing Society curing society of these vermin of these diseases of these people these groups who are poisoning society it is a convenient way to dehumanize them and justify in the end their elimination well it's often said that the First World War not only left European society badly damaged but that it led directly to the second world war my own view is that it did not lead directly and and my short answer to that is if it led in 1918 the end of the First World War and the peace settlements of 1919 led directly to 1939 what was everyone doing for 20 years there was a lot going on and a lot of decisions and a lot of things happening but I think it is fair to say that the first world war created the conditions that made the Second World War possible the peace settlements left too many people unhappy now do we blame those who met in Paris to try and make peace John Maynard Keynes would have done so products of course of Cambridge and I hesitate to disagree with him in this place but I think he was wrong I think he in the economic consequences of the peace which is a marvelous work of polemic he paints those who met in Paris as wicked vindictive or simply incompetent Lloyd George was wicked the British Prime Minister Lloyd George he describes his mother actually made him take some of the ruder descriptions out but he described Lloyd George and his manuscript as half human half goat who comes out of the mists of Wales full of ancient evil with no moral sense at all I mean I think it is absurd he describes Clemenceau as looking like a nearest senior a scenic ape that with hooded who thinks only of revenge on Germany and Woodrow Wilson he describes his someone in a child's game of blindman's buff who is spun round and round and round till he doesn't know which way he's going and is a booby this is not fair and he doesn't take into account what it was they were dealing with yes they were the winners of the war and yes they were representing some of the most powerful nations of the world but they were dealing with ideas which are very powerful they were dealing with the forces of ethnic nationalism they were dealing with the forces of Bolshevism and these were not things that were easily contained and as they were trying to deal with them that power was diminishing day by day because their publics and the Treasuries didn't want to go on supporting the large armies and the large navies and the men in those armies and navies were making it quite clear that they didn't want to stay the French had a fleet in the Black Sea it mutant need Canadian soldiers ran amuck at a camp in North Wales because they were fed up with not being demobilized quickly enough there was real fear among that eyed leaders that they could no longer eye on their own troops because those troops the war was over they did not want to go and fight anywhere else and so the capacity of those who were making peace in Paris to actually project their power was limited and it was getting more limited day by day there's a very telling moment in what was called the Council of four with Lloyd George Clemenceau Prime Minister of Italy Orlando Vittorio Londo and Woodrow Wilson and they're talking about a war which had just broken out a small war which had just broken out between I think it was Poland and Czechoslovakia and they call in marshal for shoes the supreme Allied commander and they say you've got to do something about this yes yes as far as just give me my orders fashion was very good at saying that and so they said well you've got to send some troops and stop it and Farr said absolutely I always obey orders but I don't have any troops and the railways aren't working and I don't think I can do it and he was quite right and so they'd rather disconsolate and why George who was endlessly optimistic so don't worry I have a solution and they all looked at him and he said we will send very stone telegrams to both sides but I think this says something you know that this was not a world in which it was easy to make peace it's not like the end of the Napoleonic Wars where people were ready for peace when the revolutionary fires had it's not like the end of the Second World War when there's a clear and decisive victory this was not a world in which making peace was easy and of course what happened as the conference dragged on in Paris the differences between the different powers become more apparent wartime coalition's often tend to fall to pieces and that's what was happening they came up with a piece it wasn't a satisfactory piece many would agree they thought they had done the best at the time and as they left on June 28 1919 to go back to their countries Wilson and Lloyd George and Clemens clemenceau said to each other we have done our best and as Wilson always believed if there were problems with the peace settlements the League of Nations which was going to be set up would help to deal with them this was a new institution very important new way of bringing together the world's nations well as we know the league didn't fulfill its hopes partly because the United States didn't join it but partly I think because there simply wasn't the will on the part of the British in particular to make it work in the French I think also had their doubts the piece became seen as vindictive and harsh particularly in Germany the Treaty of Versailles which Germany signed was known as the diktat in Germany and it was widely loathed and it was blamed for everything that went wrong in Germany now nobody who loses a battle a war nobody loses a court case ever says it was a fair decision they don't like people don't like losing and the Germans became convinced and that was right across the political spectrum and of course this was fostered by the high command and by various parts of the German estab pre-war establishment the Germans became convinced they hadn't really lost that they could have gone on fighting that the reason they had to ask for an armistice is because they were being stabbed in the back at home and this was a pernicious myth and of course those who were meant to be wielding the dagger were you can probably figure out who would be blamed the Socialists liberals of various sorts and the Jews it was said they had wanted Germany to lose it was a very very dangerous myth it wasn't true if you look at the summer of night eighteen Germany was defeated its line was crumbling German soldiers were moving back towards their own borders and if you look at the terms of the Armistice of November the 11th it's a surrender Germany surrendered all its heavy equipment its high seas fleet its submarine fleet it was a surrender but that's not how it was seen in Germany and perception is very important and Germany was meant to pay reparations to repair the damage it had done to Belgium and de France most of the war on the Western Front had not been fought virtually none had been fought on German soil it had been fought in France and Belgium and they were left very very badly damaged by it and the French and the Belgians said I think and I can sympathize why should we pay we were attacked we didn't start the war and there was Germany over the border its infrastructure intact looking pretty good why should we pay for the damage they did to us the Germans however feeling that they hadn't lost the war felt that reparations were unfair and in the end reparations got blamed for everything an English journalist called Elizabeth this command ran into two offices widows in a small German town who said as a result of the Versailles Treaty we can only send on linen out to be washed once a fortnight instead of weekly everything that went wrong in Germany tended to be blamed so the impact on Europe was not good even those on the winning side I think felt that the peace and the war had been unsatisfactory Italy called the peace the mutilated piece because it didn't get everything it wanted and that helped to feel the rise of Mussolini the British turned away from Europe and turned back to their empire and felt the Europeans were just being on the continent we're just being silly and quarrelsome and the French who were desperate and who feared a renewed German attack you know Clemenceau had seen had been there in 1870 when the Germans had invade the German Confederation had invaded France he'd been there in the second in the first world war and he feared there would be a third war where France would be attacked what also I think is important to remember from this period is what happened to the position of Europe in the world Europe was no longer the central part of the world after 1918 new countries new powers were appearing Japan and the Far East was becoming a major power the first world war was a good war for the Japanese and of course the United States was in the process of translating its enormous economic and industrial capacity into real military power it was not yet a superpower but it was on that road the European empires also began to collapse from within as a result of the war the empires were always built on force of course but they were also built on an acceptance both by those who ruled that they had the right to rule because they were representing a superior civilization and an acceptance by those who have ruled that yes indeed these people had some sort of right to rule them well that didn't survive the first world war many of the Europeans felt but they actually had no right to be ruling other peoples they couldn't do anything for them after what they've done to Europe they didn't feel they had any moral superiority or civilizational superiority and those in the European empires began to think that they really would rather be independent and very strikingly a number of the soldiers who came back who had fought in the Indian forces in Europe or the Vietnamese forces or the Algerian or Moroccan forces who had fought in France came back and became nationalists and helped to shape and lead nationalist movements and I think this also was a result of the First World War and so we look back at that period we look back at the period between 1919 and 1939 as a war were in Waiting a first world war that hadn't finished things some Europeans historians actually talk about Europe's modern 30 Years War that the war at least between 1939 and 1941 was a continuation of the first world war dealing with things that hadn't been settled well are there things that we should worry about today are there things that we should be thinking about today and it seems to me yes indeed there are history never repeats itself exactly but I think there are things that make us concerned there are things that should make us concerned domestic issues inequality the inequalities in European and North American societies were very large before 1914 and that led to huge social tensions I think we're dealing with something the same now the growth both before but certainly after the first world war of a populism which talks about us against them which talk about our people which picks on those who don't seem like us the Jews in the case often of Europe and then in between the wars but also people of different ethnicities today the same sort of thing said about immigrants unspecified from where but I think often meaning Muslim immigrants we also see and I think you saw this in Europe between the wars a loss of faith and democracy and and the the the ability of the elites to actually rule the country satisfactorily and we see the same sorts of international tensions ideas that spread beyond boundaries before the first and after the before and after the first world war it was things such as Bolshevism various types of socialism now more likely to be religious inspired but I think again something that we should at least be concerned about I think we should also be concerned about powers that are prepared to breach the normal conventions of international relations ignore the international institutions that are there Italy did it in 1911 when it attacked the Ottoman Empire contrary to an agreement that European pal has had to keep the Ottoman Empire in existence austria-hungary did it in 1914 when it attacked when it declared war on Serbia Putin I think did it in Ukraine when he seized Crimea and we're not clear what President Trump will do in the way of breaking international norms I think he probably well I think he already is and the question is how much can the international system which depends on norms and institutions and rules of the game how much can it take before we get into trouble and I think where we really should remember the first world war as we look at today we should remember it for all sorts of reasons but we should also be careful of complacency the first world war in my view happened in the summer of 1914 partly because nobody took the prospect seriously enough until it was too late people thought another crisis in the Balkans we've had several of those already we'll sort it out there'll be a conference of ambassadors Sir Edward grey the British Foreign Secretary was so little worried that he went to his cottage outside London and went fishing and bird-watching didn't worry that much he thought well you know he suggested a conference of ambassadors and it was only very late in July that he began to realize that perhaps it wasn't going to work this time and so complacency I think is a danger we have muddled along so far we got through the Cold War without a nuclear war breaking out but we do have to ask ourselves how much pressure and how much strain the international system can take before something breaks and we should remember how lightly and how carelessly your spirits powers entered the war in 1914 we really should remember that thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] margarett thank you very much for that incredibly wide-ranging talk and made even more impressive if you know that she only got off an aeroplane from Canada at 9:00 a.m. this morning and then took the coach from Heathrow and I'm sure that there are going to be an enormous number of questions we only have a very limited time and if you've got a question if you would like to raise your hand then wait for the microphone to come to you if we could ask you to state your name for the record and if we could ask you to keep your questions as short as possible so the floor is open can I question from a gentleman just down here thank you I'm Stewart name from Corpus Christi college I was interested in your comment and I apologize if I've misunderstood you about European societies losing the taste for Empire as a result or as one of the outcomes and yet it took the British nearly 30 years to get out of India another 20 years before the wind of change through Africa and the very first thing they did was with the French war themselves mandates in the Middle East of course they had to do something because the collapse the Ottoman Empire what's your take on that well I think certainly Lloyd George and Clemens Owen and many of the sort of people's in their governments were still thinking very much in terms of 19th century imperialism and with the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire they thought these people clearly can't rule themselves anyway we have interests there we have a perfect right to take them over interestingly enough of course they had to take them as mandates and that was partly because of Woodrow Wilson but partly also because there was an increased sense you couldn't just go parceling out the rest of the world that you had to have some declared purpose and one of Woodrow Wilson's fourteen points was that any colonial adjustments must be made taking into account the desires of the power involved but also equal attention to the needs of the people the interests of the people in those colonies and so I think there is a new mood and you're getting increasing numbers of people in Britain and France was saying what are we doing having empires you know that there's a lot of now sympathy for letting those empires move towards full autonomy but I do think that it takes a while to show but I mean I've my first work I did for my thesis was on the British in India and what is really striking after 1918 is the young officers coming into the ICS say a saying in their letters home and in the in the things they write we don't know how long we'll be here you know we sometimes wonder if we're actually doing any good at all I don't think you would have seen as much of that before 1914 but you know so much of the the Empire depended on the confidence that we are actually superior and we're doing good for these people and you can't really say that after 1918 you know the the glories of European civilization had led to the mud on the battlefields and in Europe and so I think it's going to take some time but I would see that the first world war is a very important stage towards the disappearance of the big European empires very important ok looking for another question ok there's one down here in the second row Malcolm D part of the Ross School family thank you for a fantastic lecture could you just say in your book you mentioned that there's among the causes was popular jingoism popular jingoism oh yeah and then you mentioned the yellow press and then you mentioned the hardening I was a national stereotypes given that we've got jingoism with Trump and Farraj and lots more even the yellow press is replaced by the despicable fake and heat news online and given the hardening of national stereotypes we've got the dispossessed of US and UK so do you think the present day is worse than then or is it I think I mean the similarities are rather worrying I think I mean it's one of the curious things I mean I think we all approve of the spread of literacy and we all prove all most of us approve of the spread of the franchise and the involvement of more and more people in the politics of their country but what that can do is make those politics much more under pressure of immediate sort of interests I mean it was really striking Italy at the end of the first world war was claiming up to the Alps the territory from Austria which was understandable but then it suddenly decided it wanted a whole lot of territory on the other side of the Adriatic including a town which is today called Rica but was then called fiume nobody initially had mentioned for you may until the war ended and suddenly it became the great national cause and people wept and cried and marched in the streets and said we must have humane most of them probably couldn't have found it on a map and so I do think the sort of a danger that passions can easily be aroused for a particular thing and a danger I think in the ways in which and I don't think people are entirely manipulated and I think some of this comes from below I mean that the you know people we have a tendency to divide ourselves up as human beings and I think we're seeing something very similar today as as we saw before the first world war since that my people are good they aren't so good and you get absurd things being said I mean you get you know a French sociology professor at the Sorbonne who says you know I've studied the German skull and there is something wrong with it there's no space for the organ of of compassion you know that this is nonsense why you should be careful believing academics sometimes but you know so you see you get these these stereotypes and identifying and I find the language I mean I do find president Trump's language very worrying for this because he talks about the Mexicans just rapists and criminals you know those people I found some of the language used during the referendum campaign in the UK a bit worrying they are coming here and taking our jobs and what does that mean exactly you know I once I had a number of discussions in Oxford about this and I've someone said you know they're coming and taking on jobs and I said you mean people like me and he said well not exactly and I knew exactly what he meant you know but I think yes I think it is worrying and it's I don't know if it's a byproduct of greater democratization and greater participation of the public but I do think there's always a danger that that we will you know we are fickle creatures and they'll fix on something it'll suddenly become very important then we forget about it six months later but it pushes politicians often I think to doing things they don't really want to do I mean Lord Salisbury the great conservative prime minister said I don't like this public opinion he said I feel like I have a giant lunatic asylum at my back now you could argue that you know that this is too elitist and that you don't want you do want popular participation but I'm not sure popular participation is always a good thing well I think you've proved you can have a job here any time I have several questions lined up but before we go to those I just wonder are there any of our students given that we've turned the questions have turned to a more contemporary events any of the students who are here in the audience who would like to ask a question at this point my name is Josh Thomas student at Wilson College and first of all thank you very much for a very wise lecture what was very interesting my question to you is given the level of feeling surrounding how unsatisfactory the Treaty of Versailles was how significant do you think the Carnot treaties were were they a significant step towards a lasting peace or were they fundamentally flawed so you mean the other treaties with the other defeated nations and the treaty laconic in 1920 oh sorry sorry well no in fact I mean historians are now looking at the 1920s yeah we so often we looked at the 1920s and said it was just a preparation for the 30s which was a preparation for the Second World War and we're now looking at the 20s and saying actually there was some hope there and Locarno was very important because it was an agreement to respect Germany's Western boundaries in other words Germany would not try and change them any more and it was an important step forward Germany then joined the League of Nations and its prime minister at the time with Gustav Stresemann I think was was actually a my veal positive force for good and I think there was some hope and it didn't mention the eastern boundaries and that was always tricky but it is people did talk about it Eastern Locarno a possibility of just simply accepting the boarders and in other words Germany would say it wouldn't try and change them which would have been a great step forward and was at least seen at the time as a great step forward in the West I mean it reassured France it reassured Belgium and the powers agreed to sort of guarantee this and I think the more I look at the 1920s the more I think Europe was on the way to recovering I mean you don't recover quickly from something like the first world war but life was going on its economic production was back to where it had been in 1914 by I think 1925 Germany was becoming more part of the international order even Russia was becoming less of a revolutionary power and beginning to behave in some ways like a more traditional power and the United States which people said turned its back on Europe and became very isolationist in fact was not that isolationist it still tended to be involved it had helped to broker what was meant to be a settlement of German to the German reparations question and so I think there was some hope in the 1920s and and that in a way Woodrow Wilson was writing the treaty no treaty is perfect but treaties can be revised and can be amended and can be changed and this is in fact what was happening with the Treaty of Versailles the trouble is I think the Treaty of Versailles was such a political issue in Germany and it was blamed and you know a lot of it was was created not created but a lot of it was fostered by the German elite so when the German Foreign Ministry had a special unit devoted to releasing documents which it would give to certain American academics for example which would show that Germany hadn't started the war and this was very much designed to undermine the Treaty and the legitimacy of the treaty but you had people like strays a man who talked about fulfilment who said we'll try and work within the terms of the treaty will fulfill it as much as we can we won't do anything more than that and we'll try and revise it and I think there was some hope but what happened at the end of the 20s of course was the Great Depression and that sent domestic politics down really dreadful pathways in a number of countries and led to a you know intensification of national rivalries I'm conscious of the time I'm probably only going to have time for couple more questions we can have that ball Perry down at the front sorry I always give answers that are too long it's my fault yes obviously former naval person um can I ask about the middle classes because I think it's an issue today where you see the middle class collapsing in modern developed societies can I ask you to comment on some of the effects of the First World War in the ideological and economic depression of the bourgeois and the middle classes into poverty twice in fact once in Germany of course because the Versailles settlement but also because the Great Depression and the fact that that is one of the longest shadows of the war the fact that the middle class isn't able to recover in time yeah and it becomes revolutionary ya know I think it's very important I mean I think it depended on which country you were in I mean Britain the British economy was more stable although the middle classes did I think suffer a lowering of the standard of living but it was really I think acute in Germany in the center of Europe and it wasn't just economic it was a loss of status you know it was you have always been someone in your society and suddenly you don't count and you can't feed your family and you can't educate your children and in some cases you don't even know where you belong because so many borders have changed in the center of Europe you know you had been part of the austro-hungarian Empire and then suddenly you you're you're a pole or you're a you're a Slovak or you'll you know and where do you belong and I do think this was important and I think you know a number of the nationalist movements were fueled by people who felt they had nothing to lose as was some of the left-wing movements I mean Arthur Koestler the the writer wrote a very interesting thing and there was book that Richard Crossman edited called the God that failed and he wrote a very interesting thing about he'd grown up in a secure well-to-do family and he said I'd lost everything he said it was a sense of freedom but he said I he became a communist you know it was you know you've lost everything you don't fit in anywhere you look for you look for different don't you look for alternatives so I think it is very important and I think it's a worry today that the middle class is certain countries have been really squeezed and it's when you can't plan for the future and you can't plan for your children I think it really hits home at a very deep personal level okay I'm looking for a final question will go to gentlemen just down here thanks so much Ben Dean part of the rush through families and you touched on the empowerment and enfranchisement or women in Britain but can you just reflect a little bit about what impact you think had on women other nations of both in Europe and more broadly around the world well in a number of nations of course now I can't remember which one's women did get the vote in Canada for example and I think that was very directly a consequence of the war I mean I think we're still coming to terms we're trying to cut not come to terms but try to assess just how much the position of women changed because women came out of the households with I mean they were already working in offices and beginning to go to university and working in shops and so on before the First World War but during the war of course women took on a lot of the jobs that the men had been doing but when the soldiers came back women were encouraged to go back into the household because the men needed the jobs and and it was still seen as you know the male head of the household needed needing the job and so it's sort of one step forward two steps forward one step back I think you know in some ways the position of women change in other ways it didn't and of course there was also the whole the whole the whole section of the population of women who would never marry because so many men had died at a time when marriage was still seen as as a career for women and who really I think you know suffered an enormous sort of emotional deprivation so I think the position of women did change but it was still a long way to go and you know the same thing happened after the second war Second World War you know that there were improvements in the status of women but not across the board and not completely at least that is a sort of semi positive note on which to end I think it's time to give our speaker something stronger than a glass of water but can I at this point call on our master professor des Matheny Donald to give the vote of thanks [Music] well I think you can tell from the reaction you've got that that talk was fantastic so thank you very much speaking as a mere physicist it gave me a lot of food for thought and certainly I mean you referred to your grandparents it very much takes me back to my grandparents my grandfather was a captain in the First World War and was prepared to talk about it a bit he was quite cagey about some of the things he talked about because I think it had such a very significant impact on him but I did this period of history for my own level for those who remember what the levels were and I was taught in fact by a woman by the name of Mary and Miliband who the name will be familiar to many people and she was indeed the parent the mother of the two Miliband's and she taught me I'm sure this was how she had to teach me to get through ólafur but she taught me there was a cause for the first world war and this is what you need to write down this is the answer Arendt Ferdinand was shot that was it and you know it's very easy when you're what 15 just to swallow it and it's it's pretty interesting to think back to what I thought then and what many people yourself obviously included have thought since that's perhaps not quite right the other thing it took me back to in my teenage years was I think it must have been the entrance exam for what was then called Newhall now Marie Edwards and he had to write a general essay and one of the titles and it's stuck in my mind though I absolutely refused to write on it was history teaches us that history teaches us nothing and I think you've shown what a very stupid statement that is there is a huge amount to learn from looking back and turning it into the slightly scary state the of the world we live in now and that is also something I will take away not necessary to enable me to sleep better I have to admit so thank you so much as the audience has heard mudlick flew in this morning and i am really impressed by her stamina she's sitting across from me at dinner so I will see how long her stamina lasts we ended up with the last question about status of women it is noticeable that Margret is actually only the second woman to give this lecture and the first Bridget Kendall is also in the audience which is great to see I hope we will have many more in the years to come it's great also to see three generations of Stephen Ruskin's children and grandchildren here in audience and we will hear more from Nicholas Roscoe after dinner for those who are staying as you've heard you're all welcome to drinks in the Colville so go out and round and as you saw also heard there is a display in the archives about relevant material to this lecture I am asked to say please don't take your drinks up to the archives archives material is very precious we value it so leave your drinks downstairs but finally I'd like you all just to join me in thanking Margaret for an absolutely spectacular [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Churchill College, University of Cambridge

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Keywords: Churchill College, Churchill Archives, History, International Politics, First World War, WW1, War, Historian, Roskill, University of Cambridge, Margaret MacMillan

Id: H-7eWE2-WCs

Length: 74min 17sec (4457 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2018