Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the sense that it was ninety-nine years before another general European war broke out, and it can be argued that the nineteenth Century was the most settled and productive in the whole history of mankind. But the peacemakers of 1814–15 were an unusual group: a congress of reactionaries among whom Lord Castlereagh appeared a revolutionary firebrand and the Duke of Wellington an egregious progressive. Their working assumptions rested on the brutal denial of all the innovatory politicalnotions of the previous quarter-century. In particular, they shared avowed beliefs, almost untinged by cynicism, in power-balances and agreed spheres of interest, dynastic marriages, private understandings between sovereigns and gentlemen subject to a common code (except in extremis) , and in the private ownership of territory by legitimate descent. A king or emperor deprived of possessions in one part of Europe could be ‘compensated’, as the term went, elsewhere, irrespective of the nationality, language or culture of the inhabitants. They termed this a ‘transference of souls’, following the Russian expression used of the sale of an estate with its serfs, glebae adscripti. 51
    Such options were not available to the peacemakers of 1919. A peace of exhaustion, such as Westphalia, based on the military lines, was unthinkable: both sides were exhausted enough but one, by virtue of the armistice, had gained an overwhelming military advantage. The French had occupied all the Rhine bridgeheads by 6 December 1918. The British operated an inshore blockade, for the Germans had surrendered their fleet and their minefields by 21 November. A peace by diktat was thus available.
    However, that did not mean that the Allies could restore the old world, even had they so wished. The old world was decomposing even before war broke out. In France, the anti-cleticals had been in power for a decade, and the last election before the war showed a further swing to the Left. In Germany, the 1912 election, for the first time, made the Socialists the biggest single party. In Italy, the Giolitti government was the most radical in its history as a united country. In Britain the Conservative leader A.J. Balfour described his catastrophic defeat in 1906 as ‘a faint echo of the same movement which has produced massacres in St Petersburg, riots in Vienna and Socialist processions in Berlin’. Even the Russian autocracy was trying to liberalize itself. The Habsburgs anxiously sought new constitutional planks to shore themselves up. Europe on the eve of war was run by worried would-be progressives, earnestly seeking to satisfy rising expectations, eager above all to cultivate and appease youth.
    It is a myth that European youth was ruthlessly sacrificed in 1914 by selfish and cynical age. The speeches of pre-war politicians were crammed with appeals to youth. Youth movements were a European phenomenon, especially in Germany where 25,000 members of the Wandervögel clubs hiked, strummed guitars, protested about pollution and the growth of cities, and damned the old. Opinion-formers like Max Weber and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck demanded that youth be brought to the helm. The nation, wrote Bruck, ‘needs a change of blood, an insurrection of the sons against the fathers, a substitution of the old by the young’. 52 All over Europe, sociologistswere assiduously studying youth to find out what it thought and wanted.
    And of course what youth wanted was war. The first pampered ‘youth generation’ went enthusiastically to a war which their elders, almost without exception, accepted with horror or fatalistic despair. Among articulate middle-class youth it was, at the outset at least, the most popular war in history. They dropped their guitars and seized their rifles. Charles Péguy wrote that he went ‘eagerly’ to the front (and death). Henri de Montherlant reported that he ‘loved life at the front, the bath in the elemental, the annihilation of the intelligence