Norman Stone: From Syria to Iraq, the mess of the first world war is with us still

The European statesmen who went to war in 1914 were extremely well-educated men. Churchill staggered Roosevelt as he could quote reams of quite obscure poetry; the secretary of state for war translated German philosophy; the French president’s brother was a revered mathematician; General von Hindenburg read Faust on campaign (even Corporal Hitler had his Schopenhauer). The only exceptions were probably the aristocrats of the Vienna cabinet, whose definition of scholarship was that it was what one Jew copied down from another. But that world gave us 1914, and a whole set of amazingly bad judgments. No war in modern times has been launched with such a vast failure of cognition. The war would be short, said the bankers and economists, because you could not interrupt trade and you could not finance things with paper; the middle classes would go on strike if you put up income tax to 15p. The Germans would collapse, said British planners of blockade, because they could not survive the loss of exports. Cavalry would sweep all before it, said some generals; but might be stopped by great fortresses, said other generals. Great battleships would collide in the North Sea, said the admirals. These things were not just mistakes; they were hallucinations. Cavalry charges could not happen against modern rifles. Fortresses were an obvious target for high explosive, whereas trenches were not. German exporters, forced into other activities, went into war work and derived explosives from nitrogen in the air by the Haber-Bosch process. People accepted paper money, and uncomplainingly paid taxes of 40 per cent on their incomes. The German battleships spent all but a day or two in harbour, and the sailors, when finally ordered out to sea at the very end, as a last sacrifice, mutinied and overthrew the Kaiser. This ‘war to end war’, as they billed it, was a disaster in itself, but it caused more disasters: fascism, communism and, through the non-resolution of financial problems, the world economic collapse of the 1930s.