The British public hoped for a short conflict, but the secretary of state for war, Lord Kitchener, foresaw that it would last for years and that Britain’s small standing army would need massive expansion. Initial German successes in Belgium and France were stemmed in part by the British Expeditionary Force and the two sides settled into a slow, grim slog for territory, characterised as trench warfare.
For much of the war the British population had little detailed or accurate information about what was happening on the various fronts. The press played its part in concealing the truth, publishing rumours of German atrocities and spinning defeats as successes. Even so, the mounting toll of casualties could not be hidden, eventually approaching three-quarters of a million British dead (although this was far less than suffered by the French, Russian and German armies). The upper and middle classes, which supplied most of the junior officers who led attacks, were especially hard hit. Eton, for instance, lost 1,157 former pupils out of 5,619 who served.
After much debate, conscription was introduced in Britain for men between the ages of 18 and 41 in 1916; the age limit was raised to 50 two years later. Before then, recruitment had been supplied by volunteers – “Your Country Needs You”, as the famous poster had it. There had been political hesitation particularly over imposing armed service on working class men, who often did not have the vote since they were not property owners.
The continued strain of the war exposed many fracture lines. Suffragists kept up the pressure to give the vote to women, although some of the main campaigners focused their efforts on encouraging women to do war work to show their worth. Long-standing tensions within Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, as to whether it should take its orders from London led in 1916 to the Easter Rising in Dublin (and eventually to an independent Republic). In Russia, catastrophe in battle ultimately led to the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917.
Many efforts were made to break the deadlock in the trenches. British efforts to outflank their enemies by forcing the Dardanelles and seizing Constantinople were thwarted by the Turks at Gallipoli, notwithstanding much gallantry and suffering by Australian and New Zealand troops, among many others. The failure led in time to the resignation from the cabinet of Winston Churchill, seen as the architect of the plan at the Admiralty.
By then, revelations in The Times about a shortage of artillery shells held responsible for recent setbacks on the Western Front led to Asquith being forced in mid-1915 to reconstitute his government as a coalition with the Conservatives and the first Labour cabinet minister. Lloyd George was placed in charge of a nationalised munitions policy and his successful implementation of it, together with the backing of The Times’s owner Lord Northcliffe, enabled him to unseat Asquith as prime minister at the end of 1916.
This was only shortly after the end of the prolonged Battle of the Somme, which came to symbolise the apparent futility of the conflict and its mass carnage. Civilians on the home front had also felt the effects of war as never before, with Zeppelins carrying out the first air raids over Britain and the depredations of submarines leading by 1918 to extensive rationing.
U-boat attacks on shipping bound for Britain, most notoriously the sinking of the liner Lusitania in 1915, with American passengers aboard, helped prompt President Woodrow Wilson to bring his nation to the Allied cause in 1917. The tide of the war did not turn decisively, however, until the summer of 1918, when breakthroughs on the Western Front and widespread discontent with the Kaiser in Germany led to his abdication and the signing of armistices in November.
The reverberations of the war would be felt for decades to come. The old order had been decisively shattered. Not only would the map of Europe, and indeed of the world, have to be redrawn as empires were dismembered and new nations created, but society’s assumptions had been shaken by the conflict, not least that as to which class was the only one fit to govern. And millions of those who had been affected by the war would have to live for the rest of their lives with the effects of wounds, shellshock, poison gas, grief and trauma. These letters were to prove to be the last snapshots of a vanishing age.
Notwithstanding that the letters in this anthology were written at a time when views that might give offence today were tolerated, the original language, style and format of them as they appeared in the newspaper has not been amended. The date on the letter is that on which it first appeared in the newspaper, and an index of the letter-writers can be found at the end of the book. Explanatory footnotes have been added where some clarification of the subject matter of a letter may be of use.
JAMES OWEN AND SAMANTHA WYNDHAM
THE MENACE OF WAR
DOMINANCE OF RUSSIA OR GERMANY
1 August 1914
SIR,—A NATION’S FIRST duty is to its own people. We are asked to intervene in the Continental war because unless we do so we shall be “isolated.” The isolation which will result for us if we keep out of this war is that, while other nations are torn and weakened by war, we shall not be, and by that fact might conceivably for a long time be the strongest Power in Europe, and, by virtue of our strength and isolation, its arbiter, perhaps, to useful ends.
We are told that if we allow Germany to become victorious she would be so powerful as to threaten our existence by the occupation of Belgium, Holland, and possibly the North of France. But, as your article of to-day’s date so well points out, it was the difficulty which Germany found in Alsace-Lorraine which prevented her from acting against us during the South African War. If one province, so largely German in its origin and history, could create this embarrassment, what trouble will not Germany pile up for herself if she should attempt the absorption of a Belgium, a Holland, and a Normandy? She would have created for herself embarrassments compared with which Alsace and Poland would be a trifle; and Russia, with her 160,000,000, would in a year or two be as great a menace to her as ever.
The object and effect of our entering into this war would be to ensure the victory of Russia and her Slavonic allies. Will a dominant Slavonic federation of, say, 200,000,000 autocratically governed people, with a very rudimentary civilization, but heavily equipped for military aggression, be a less dangerous factor in Europe than a dominant Germany of 65,000,000 highly civilized and mainly given to the arts of trade and commerce?
The last war we fought on the Continent was for the purpose of preventing the growth of Russia. We are now asked to fight one for the purpose of promoting it. It is now universally admitted that our last Continental war—the Crimean War—was a monstrous error and miscalculation. Would this intervention be any wiser or likely to be better in its results?
On several occasions Sir Edward Grey has solemnly declared that we are not bound by any agreement to support France, and there is certainly no moral obligation on the part of the English people so to do. We can best serve civilization, Europe—including France—and ourselves by remaining the one Power in Europe that has not yielded to the war madness.
This, I believe, will be found to be the firm conviction of the overwhelming majority of the English people.
Yours faithfully,
NORMAN ANGELL
TRAVELLING FROM GERMANY
6 August 1914
SIR,—IN TO-DAY’S ISSUE of The Times you publish a letter by John Jay Chapman to which I and, I am sure, many others must take serious exception.
Your correspondent describes in lurid terms the sufferings experienced by travellers in Germany the last few days. “The hand of ruthless force which regarded neither God nor man was laid on them. Every decency of existing society had vanished. No appeal to any principle