WW1 - Our History 13 (Vol. 2 New Series)

No. 13

HISTORY Vol. 2 New Series

£1.50

WW1: causes, consequences and the struggle against it by John Ellison

Britain’s Road to Socialism The latest edition of the CP’s programme - presents and analyses capitalism and imperialism in its current form; answers the questions of how a revolutionary transformation might be brought about in 21st Century Britain; and what a socialist and communist society in Britain might look like.

The first edition was published in 1951 after nearly six years of discussion and debate across the CP, labour movement and working class. Over its 8 editions it has sold more than a million copies in Britain and helped to shape and develop the struggle of the working class for more than half a century.

Published by the Communist Party July 2014 Copyright © Communist Party 2014 Author: John Ellison Series Editor: Graham Stevenson ISBN 978-1-908315-25-0

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HISTORY 1

Our History No. 13

No. 13

Vol. 2, New Series

ÂŁ1.50

The First World War 1914-18 Causes, consequences – and the struggle against it

by John Ellison CONTENTS page

1. Causes 2. The price of war 3. The coming of war 4. Britain justifies war 5. The growth of empires pre-1900 6. Sowing the seeds of war 7. Socialist responses to the prospect of war 8. The secret treaties 9. The struggle against the war 10. Why and how the war ended 11. The peace settlement 12. Mooning at Marxism 13. Epitaph on the war 14. Note on Sources

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1. Causes Why did this unprecedented catastrophe of a war come to happen, involving so many countries, and so many millions of people, producing so much destruction of life and property, and so much waste of resources?

In the Left Book Club classic World Politics (1936), which passionately identified the imperative need for the mobilisation of a “mass peace front against the immediate menace of new world war”, the outstanding Marxist analyst, Rajani Palme Dutt (1896-1974), put his finger firmly on the root cause of the 1914-18 conflict. “The war of 1914,” he wrote, “was inevitable in the sense that imperialism could find no other solution for its conflicts.

The inescapable driving force of growing capitalist concentration and accumulation, and the consequent dynamic of the continual hunt for new profits on the part of the antagonistic groupings, compelled it.”

He enlarged on this: “There could be no peaceful solution, that is to say, no equal division of the spoils, because of the inequality of capitalism and the unequal rate of capitalist development. German iron and steel was advancing, British declining; Britain held the majority of colonial possessions; Germany with a more rapidly developing capitalism was late in the field.”

As for how, within a particular advanced capitalist nation, the imperialist The First World War 1914-18

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hunt for new markets and profits could end up with a decision to make war, Dutt (pictured right) elaborated further: “No statesman or capitalist can think for capitalism as a whole … if they could, they would cease to be capitalists. Not the particular ambition or intrigue of this or that individual or group (the majority of whom probably did not directly will the war in the form or at the moment it broke out, but only willed the particular advantages to their side which made it inevitable), but the inexorable collective outcome of their individual wills, which in the aggregate only reflected the existing forces of capitalism that they did not themselves understand – this was the real ‘origin of the war’.”

These paragraphs set out the Marxist viewpoint with characteristic succinctness and clarity. The competing “imperialists” were the ruling classes of those countries who had empires and sought to maintain or enlarge them. Britain and France had colonial empires and sought to retain them, while imperial Germany’s interest was to expand its lately acquired and relatively small empire, which was much smaller than France’s, which in turn was much smaller than Britain’s.

Amongst European countries, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal had significant if lesser colonial possessions too; while Turkey had colonial possessions in the Middle East. Japan for its part had acquired Korea, and – allied to Britain – was sinking its teeth into Chinese territory.

Germany’s difficulty was that, having industrialised late, long after Britain and France, and having therefore come late to empire-building, there was not much unclaimed colonial territory left to commandeer. Even the United States, while preferring to avoid colonial conquest, was eagerly occupied in the economic penetration of South America, and equally eager for more of the same in Europe. And the more military materials it supplied to Britain during the war, the stronger the case for supplying soldiers too. Before long the US was to become the world’s greatest creditor.

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Empires had been acquired by compulsion, not by donation from the subject peoples, and Britain’s empire occupied roughly a quarter of the earth’s surface. In 1919 Field-Marshal Haig, Britain’s former Western Front commander, declared in relation to Britain’s colonial assets. “I am not one who is ashamed of the wars that were fought to open the markets of the world to our traders.” “In the global ocean,” wrote Britain’s most distinguished modern Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, in The Age of Empire (1987), “all states were sharks, and all statesmen knew it.”

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2. The price of the war The enormity of the cost to be borne was not, at the outset, guessed at by the governments of the participating countries. In Britain’s case, Foreign Secretary Grey demonstrated that he had no inkling of the consequences for the nation of the decision to make war. Addressing the House of Commons on August 3, apparently making an effort to balance the arguments for and against, he said: “If we are engaged in war, we shall suffer but little more than we shall suffer if we stand aside.”

The “butcher’s bill” from the war was beyond imagination, and anything near exact totals will never be available. Military deaths from all combatant armies? Around 13 million, including presumed dead. Wounded? More than 20 million.

Civilian deaths – through shelling, air raids, sinking of merchant ships, forced deportations, massacres – add another 12 million or so. If the British-only figures are extracted, we meet with three quarters of a million military deaths, while the empire’s contribution adds another 200,000, of which almost a third were Indian. Damage to homes, agriculture, factories, shipping? The cost of war expenditure which could have been diverted to the means of life instead of the means of death? Both were colossal and incalculable.

Within this canvas of tragedy, there were substantial failures to limit human losses arising from military tactics which assumed that soldiers should advance in suicidal conditions whatever the relative military gain.

Such tactics were adopted by commanders situated a safe distance from the actual fighting and distinguished more by their top drawer social class origins than by intelligence and appreciation of the implications of developments in weaponry – illustrated by a continuing curious faith in The First World War 1914-18

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the high military value of soldiers on horseback.

Thus it was possible, in autumn 1915, after several weeks of a British offensive - the battle of Loos - for Haig (pictured right) to write, after a mile or two of ground had been gained in front of previously occupied trenches, at the price of over 61,000 British casualties, that his attack “was a complete success.”

The Loos battle – a conspicuous military setback by any standards other than Haig’s - brought about his promotion to Western Front commander-in-chief in succession to the less predictable Sir John French, who was back-watered to Home Forces commander. Even earlier, the government had converted itself into a Liberal-Unionist (i.e. Conservative)-Labour coalition; and in late 1916 the languid Liberal Herbert Asquith was replaced as prime minister by the demagogic and more ruthlessly effective “Liberal” David Lloyd George.

In summer 1916, another offensive from the trenches – the Somme – could only have made real progress if back-to-back layers of barbed wire supported by machine-gun posts on the German side had been destroyed by the preceding extended artillery bombardment. They hadn’t been.

The attack still went ahead. First day? Over 57,000 casualties. Told on the second day that casualties exceeded 40,000 so far, Haig reported to his diary that, in view of the numbers engaged and the length of front attacked: “This cannot be considered severe.”

Summer and autumn 1917 witnessed the Passchendaele offensive. British and empire casualties were at least 260,000, thousands of whom died from drowning while advancing through liquid mud ponds. Maximum distance gained – five miles. And Haig stayed in place, as did the Western Front.

In addition to the battlefield losses were the more than three hundred British men executed for desertion and the like following court-martial and commander-in-chief approval – granted pardons almost a century The First World War 1914-18

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later. Today, we would describe most of these men as suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder.

If Haig had been given absolute authority over civilians at home, additional executions may have been plentiful. Writing to his wife in April 1915 about the shortage of shells, and their frequent defectiveness, he blamed the British worker, who in his view had too many holidays and drank too much alcohol. “Take and shoot two or three of them,” he told his wife, “and the ‘Drink habit’ would cease.”

In January 1918 the weekly Herald, edited by Christian socialist George Lansbury (pictured left), and Britain’s most widely read Labour newspaper, commented from a different standpoint on Haig’s dispatch to Whitehall about the latest disastrous battle: “All these dispatches ‘explaining’ reverses or disappointments amount to very little explanation.

They ‘explain’ that the Germans broke through because they were strong enough to break through; that our men did so-and-so because their numbers and disposition were such as to necessitate their doing so – and so forth. But it is noticeable that it is the general whose dispositions are in question who does the explaining; he is free to say what he likes about the conduct of his subordinates. What we would like to see is a report drawn up by privates and regimental officers on the Higher Command…”.

Haig, after the war, received his unjust reward: a present from Parliament of £100,000, an earldom and a mansion. The First World War was also a class war. And it incubated revolution in Russia, Germany, and elsewhere; and also stimulated movement towards the foundation, in 1920, chiefly from three small socialist parties, of a Party of a new type – the Communist Party.

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3. The coming of war Peace unravelled from the moment of Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia in late July 1914, a month after a Serbian nationalist extremist had assassinated the nephew and heir to the imperial throne of AustriaHungary, the dominant power in central and eastern Europe (see p43 for contemporary political map).

The assassination arose from a chance opportunity with a pistol after a botched bomb attack. It was the last and deadliest of a series of terrorist outrages on Bosnia’s Austrian rulers; and it occurred against the backdrop of Austria’s annexation of the previously Turkish province of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, and of the Serbian nationalists’ dream of a “Greater Serbia”.

The occupant of the Austrian throne, Emperor Franz Joseph, had been seeking an excuse for an attack on independent Serbia, and the assassination tabled a good one.

The “Austria-Serbia dispute” had been for years past the likely point of combustion of a European conflict, and had been so identified in the manifesto of the Basle Socialist International Conference in 1912. It was in the Balkans, wrote A.L. Morton in his A People’s History of England, “that the greatest possibilities of diplomatic aggravation existed.”

Over the next two weeks, consciousness of war danger grew in British Labour circles. Labour Party chairman W C Anderson wrote in the Independent Labour Party’s Labour Leader on 9 July: “Official statements issued … raise the suspicion that Austria-Hungary looks upon the present as a favourable opportunity for picking a quarrel with her Serbian neighbour … This is a dangerous game, for, the moment the peace is broken, various Big Powers will be drawn in.”.

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Kaiser’s Germany gave it full backing by 5th July. The declaration of war on Serbia on the 28th July immediately tugged Serbia’s long-time “patron and protector”, Tsarist Russia, into the frame. Largely out of fear of a threat to its southern trade route to the Mediterranean via the Black Sea and the Dardenelle Straits, the Tsar ordered mobilisation of Russia’s huge army.

“So” to quote Morton again, “the train ran from point to point, till the European powder magazine, so zealously crammed with explosives by the labour of a generation, went up in one vast roar.”

More countries were swept up into the conflict by the activation of commitments made to allies. On 1st August Germany declared war on Russia. The next day Germany issued an ultimatum to Belgium, requiring free passage through Belgium for its army, as France’s formidable frontier fortifications were a major deterrent to a frontal assault. The day after, Germany declared war on France and France-bound troops crossed into Belgium. On 4th August Britain, acting on previously secret (and repeatedly denied) promises made to France, declared war on Germany. Austria’s declaration of war on Russia followed two days later. Britain and France’s respective declarations of war on Austria a few days later completed formalities authorising mutual massacre on an unimaginable scale.

Over time yet more countries were to enter the fray. Japan, eager to wrest from Germany some Pacific island groups and even control of a piece of Chinese territory, declared war on Germany on 23rd August. Turkey, in early November, declared war on the Entente powers, i.e. Britain, France and Russia. In May 1915 Italy joined in against Austria-Hungary following secret bribes from its prospective allies. Bulgaria attacked Serbia in October 1915, while Greece declared war on what are usually The First World War 1914-18

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termed the Central Powers (see page 43) in July 1916 and Romania (encouraged by more bribes) declared war on Austria the following month.

The US declared war on Germany in April 1917, influenced by developments in Russia which were damaging military prospects for Britain and its allies.

So it was that many millions of lives were shattered because, as the radical Liberal Edmund Morel wrote in Truth and the War (published as a book in 1916 and earlier in the form of contributions to the Labour Leader), “one of the great ones of the earth had fallen beneath the hand of the assassins in a far distant country, because the other great ones had quarrelled as a result of that crime, because the rulers of Christian Europe had for years been squandering the substance of their peoples in piling up weapons destructive of human life until all Europe was one great arsenal, and had planned and schemed against each other through their appointed agents”.

Responsibility, wrote Morel, was “distributed” He had understood much of what lay behind the catastrophe. Throughout the war (save for when he was in prison) he worked ceaselessly for peace, both through his extensive authorship and through the campaigning Union of Democratic Control, of which he was the leading spirit and which advocated a less militaristic foreign policy for Britain.

The pivotal decision, which made war on so extensive a scale inevitable, in the view of Eric Hobsbawm, was the German government’s decision to give Austria full support, i.e. “not to de-fuse the situation”. Hobsbawm acknowledged too that statesmen taking crucial steps towards war in July 1914 “did not really believe they were starting a world war” bearing in mind that disputes had been, over the years before, so frequently patched up.

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4. Britain justifies war When Britain’s Liberal government declared war on Germany, making common cause through this decision with the governments of France, Belgium, Tsarist Russia, nationalist Serbia and even Japan, on the one hand, against the Central Powers on the other, a public defence of Britain’s motives was patently necessary.

Prime Minister Herbert Asquith told the House of Commons on 5th August 1914 that Britain was fighting “not for aggression or the advancement of its own interests, but for principles whose maintenance is vital to the civilized world.”

The declaration of the war flowed from the non-response of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm-headed government to Britain’s ultimatum demanding a halt to Germany’s already begun invasion of Belgium, its safest army route to France. So Asquith’s government, in siding with Belgium and France, was supporting them against Germany’s undisputed initial aggression. It was therefore, apparently, in defence of “principles whose maintenance is vital to the civilized world”. In this way the war was sold to the people of Britain as a defence of “little” Belgium.

In words to similar effect from Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer and successor in late 1916 to Asquith, Britain was “fighting barbarism”.

In the absence of a widely circulated and plausible alternative analysis, and in the presence of an overwhelmingly war-like and governmentmanipulated Press, this was enough to persuade the mass of the British people to accept the war, to accept mass recruiting, and to accept the horrific consequences - privations at home and endless sacrifices on the battlefield.

So, if we put aside for a moment Palme Dutt’s earlier argument, did Britain go to war, “not for aggression or the advancement of its own interests”, but to defend civilised standards and to fight barbarism?

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Take the “saving Belgium” argument first. Although the 1839 Treaty of London committed Britain to protect Belgium against any attacker—a “scrap of paper” declared Germany—this argument becomes an empty claim if the inquirer delves into the British Foreign Office archives.

These tell us that the British government had not ruled out supporting the crossing of Belgium’s frontiers by the French if it transpired that the French attacked Germany via the Belgium route. A 1908 minute made by Sir Charles Hardinge, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs states: “Supposing that France violated the neutrality of Belgium in a war against Germany, it is, under present circumstances, doubtful whether England or Russia would move a finger to maintain Belgian neutrality, while, if the neutrality of Belgium were violated by Germany it is probable that the converse would be true.”

In the second place, it is pikestaff plain that Britain was not a respecter of the independence of other nations save when convenient. The British government was not, at that time, after all, disposed to act with like benevolence towards China. Within weeks, a thousand-strong British military unit was seeking, together with Japanese forces, to wrest control from Germany of the port of Tsingtao and the area around it in eastern China, without the slightest signal of agreement from the Chinese authorities. Tsingtao is these days Qingdao, Shandong province. The German government had seized it in the late 1890s, and the Chinese government, from weakness, had conceded the area. So, “saving Belgium” – right; saving China - wrong.

Britain, indeed, had one standard for its approach to the territorial integrity of Belgium, and another to the territorial integrity of countries which were already colonies or might join Britain’s collection, whether labelled colonies or not. These included Ireland, a victim of centuries of The First World War 1914-18

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economic exploitation, and still denied the right to independence.

Ireland’s independence, like China’s, counted less than the defence of Belgium’s neutrality.

At Easter 1916 came Ireland’s Easter Rebellion (see picture), which was bloodily suppressed by troops under demoted Sir John French. The uprising was followed by summary executions of its leaders, and the repression underlined Ireland’s subordinate status. It also intensified the passion in Ireland for freedom.

Equally deprived of home rule – and of neutrality for that matter - was India, dominated by Britain for more than a century past, and now conscripted into the war on Britain’s behalf in 1914 without consultation with its people.

The war’s origins, considered Hobsbawm, lay not in unilaterally determined aggression, but “in the nature of a progressively deteriorating international situation which increasingly escaped from the control of governments.” He suggested that the question of whose fault it was is “as trivial as the question whether William the Conqueror had a good legal case for invading England is for the study of why warriors from Scandinavia found themselves conquering numerous areas of Europe in the 10th and 11th centuries.”

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5. The growth of empires pre-1900 In the period of the ‘Great Depression’ between 1873 and 1896, Britain’s economy suffered from a prolonged fall in prices, profits and interest rates. It was during that period that a drive to enlarge its imperial frontiers was inaugurated and pressed forward. During the 1880s this required formal imperialism through taking over portions of Africa. But it also meant, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, this time from Industry and Empire (1968), “the informal imperialism of foreign investment”, and in this Britain faced serious competition. Later, industrialising France and Germany were among its rivals for the acquisition of new colonies and for acquiring “spheres of influence” and economic satellites.

One British objective was Egypt, formally part of the Turkish Empire, now increasingly detached – and increasingly a debtor of British capitalists, who had lent large sums for the construction of railways and other transport infrastructure.

Though initially managing to suppress sufficiently the burgeoning Egyptian independence movement, a British occupying force which had advanced south into Sudan was defeated by local Arab forces in 1885. In 1898 another imperial army managed to avenge the earlier defeat with a battle-cum-massacre by machine guns at Omdurman. The army commander in charge of the massacre, who presided over a supplementary slaughter of wounded the following day, was Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener, who was granted a reward of £30,000 by Parliament for a job well done. Henceforth for Sudan came railways, and from Sudan (as from Egypt) came cheap cotton exports.

Britain, hand in glove at this time with Italy, was in competition with France, which also stared greedily at the Sudan, and meanwhile supplied arms to Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia), which Italy also coveted. Italy’s plans for Abyssinia, however, suffered a setback through defeat at the battle of Adowa in 1896.

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The British Empire in 1914 The rivalry between Britain and France came close to armed conflict following the Omdurman massacre, when British forces met up-river from Omdurman at Fashoda with a small French force. A careful weighing of the odds caused the French, after some months of deliberation, to prefer retreat to a clash of arms.

Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, meanwhile, had long-term aims to extend influence eastwards, as well as to obtain African colonies. Of the latter, in the mid-1880s, it named and claimed four of these as Germany’s, in west Africa, Togo and Cameroon; in east Africa, present-day Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania.

Russia and Japan, on the other hand, both of which developed industry later than advanced European countries, faced each other off in the Far East, ready to do battle for Korea and Manchuria.

France, after losing Alsace and Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, had, in the words of Friedrich Engels, in 1891, been driven into the arms of Tsarist Russia, while imperial Germany had also managed to achieve concord with the Tsar. Over the same period a “mad competition The First World War 1914-18

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in armaments” had begun and continued. Was there not, wrote Engels, “every day still handing over our heads the Damocles’ sword of war, on the first day of which all the chartered covenants of princes will be scattered like chaff?” In that year of 1891 France and Russia entered into formal alliance. France thereby promised to support reactionary and semifeudal “holy” Tsarist Russia if that country were attacked.

Until about 1900 Britain was most frequently in dispute with France, the next most active colonising Power. By that year the two countries had harvested the richest colonial booty, in Africa, Asia and Australasia.

Britain had formally assumed control of Nigeria in 1900, having already acquired Uganda and Kenya. Britain also provoked, notoriously, a war between 1899 and 1902 against the Dutch Boers who had direct control of two regions of southern Africa – the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

The motives were partly strategic, and partly to benefit from Transvaal’s rich gold deposits. The conduct of the war, in terms of the herding of Boer families into concentration camps, was despicable. As for the majority black non-settler people of the region, they were regarded by both sides as having no say about their country’s future.

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6. Sowing the seeds of war The most economically and militarily powerful countries in the conflict were Britain and Germany, and from 1900 onwards the potential for war between them - and between Germany and a Franco-Russian alliance - was manifest. In 1904 the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia was formed.

As Lenin, in the spring of 1916, wrote in his “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” (the most developed Marxist summary analysis of its subject by that time): “Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one is the condition for the other, giving rise to alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle out of the single basis of imperialist connections and the relations between world economics and world politics.”

The alliance system, as Hobsbawm wrote, became a time-bomb, and the diplomatic crises between European powers in 1905, 1908 and 1911 were ugly auguries of war.

As early as 1888 William Morris, poet, artist, designer and potent advocate for socialism had expressed awareness of the war danger. He stated that “for years past we English have been rather shy” of what he called “gunpowder and bayonet wars”, adding: “except of those happy occasions when we could carry them on at no so sort of risk to ourselves, when the killing was all on one side, or at all events when we hoped it would be.”

Presumably he had in mind British exploits such as the most recent invasion of Afghanistan in 1878, the war against the Zulu nation (now part of South Africa) beginning in January 1879, as well as the occupation of Egypt in 1882 – when the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy was established.

He expressed grave and perceptive concern for the future: “We have been The First World War 1914-18

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shy of gunpowder war with a respectable enemy for a long while, and I will tell you why: It is because we have had the lion’s share of the worldmarket ... but now this is changing in a most significant way … we are losing or have lost that lion’s share; it is now a desperate ‘competition’ between the great nations of civilisation for the world market, and tomorrow it may be a desperate war for that end.”

A letter written in February of that same year of 1888 by Engels, contemplating the likelihood of a general European war, shows that he had more advanced notions about the characteristics of a future European war than did Haig and his peer group generals decades later when such a war was upon them. He wrote that the war would very probably be “a war of positions with varied success on the French frontier; a war of attack leading to the capture of the Polish fortresses on the Russian frontier; and a revolution in Petersburg, which will at once make the gentlemen who are conducting the war see everything in an entirely different light. One thing is certain: there will be no more quick decisions and triumphal marches either to Berlin or Paris.”

In another letter, in March 1889 Engels wrote that war represented “the most terrible contingency … there will be 10 to 15 million combatants, an unheard of devastation, universal suppression of our movement, the recrudescence of chauvinism in every country”.

Engels continued to fear a major war in the few years left to him. In 1905, a decade after his death, radical economist J. A. Hobson published a classic study entitled Imperialism, which concluded that it implied “militarism now and ruinous wars in the near future.”

Then in May 1911, the leading Polish socialist Rosa Luxemburg, long resident in Germany, looked back over the period since the mid-1890s, and wrote this in a German socialist newspaper on ‘Peace Utopias’: “We have had this: in 1895 the war between Japan and China, which is the prelude to the East Asiatic period of imperialism; in 1898 the war between The First World War 1914-18

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Spain and the United States; in 1899-1902 the British Boer War in South Africa; in 1900 the campaign of the European Powers in China; in 1904 the Russo-Japanese war; in 1904-07, the German Herero War in Africa; and then there was the military intervention of Russia in 1908 in Persia; at the present moment the military intervention of France in Morocco, without mentioning the incessant colonial skirmishes in Asia and in Africa - more important still is the after-effect of these wars.”

She went on: “The war with China was followed in Japan by a military reorganisation which made it possible 10 years later to undertake the war against Russia and which made Japan the predominant military power in the Pacific. The Boer War resulted in a military organisation of England, the strengthening of her armed forces on land … The Chinese campaign was accompanied in Germany by a thorough military organisation, the great Naval Law of 1900, which marks the beginning of the competition of Germany with England on the sea and the sharpening of the antagonisms between these two nations.”

Luxemburg continued, soberly sizing up the world situation: “(The) Entente, between Russia, Great Britain and France … led to a sharpening of the crisis in the Balkans, accelerated the outbreak of the Turkish Revolution, encouraged Russia to military action in Persia and led to a rapprochement between Turkey and Germany which, in its turn, rendered the Anglo-German antagonisms more acute … In view of all this, how is it possible to speak of tendencies towards peace in bourgeois development which are supposed to neutralise and overcome its tendencies towards war?”

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Could the internal logic of capitalist development be defied? She proceeded to consider the one theoretical escape route available: “… if all the present day states seriously and sincerely want to call a halt to the armaments race, they must begin to dismantle their trade policies, and to give up their colonial raiding expeditions as well as their policy of maintaining spheres of influence all over the world – in short, in both foreign and domestic politics they must begin to do the exact opposite of what is now the very essence of capitalist class state politics.”

This they did not do and were never likely to do.

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7. Socialist responses to the prospect of war Much alive to the threat from ever more heavily armed capitalist states, leaders of the socialist current within the Second International at the 1907 Stuttgart Congress affirmed their commitment to do their utmost to prevent war and, if it occurred, to intervene promptly to bring it to an end. The promise, in terms drafted by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, was to use “all the appropriate means, which naturally vary and rise according to the degree of sharpening of the class struggle and of the general political agitation.”

This commitment was confirmed at further Congresses – at which Britain had delegations (which included Independent Labour Party leader James Keir Hardie) in 1910 (Copenhagen) and 1912 (Basle). It was to prove, when war arrived, an unachievable promise.

Amid the welter of major issues occupying the socialist press in Britain, at the end of January 1914 there came from the columns of the Labour Leader a powerful and prescient warning of possible early war.

The Labour Leader was the weekly organ of the Independent Labour Party, which had programmatically socialist objectives, unlike the Labour Party at the time. Its editor, Fenner Brockway, then in his mid-20s and destined to be a life-long socialist and anti-imperialist, wrote: “The strained relations in Europe revolve around the antagonism of the German and British Governments. Austria and Italy are allied with Germany in the Triple Alliance; France and Russia with Great Britain in the Triple Entente. The nations of each group are building navies and marshalling armies against the other, Europe is divided into two military camps, and any morning the bugle may be sounded for battle.”

Brockway referred back to what had happened during the Agadir crisis of The First World War 1914-18

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July-August 1911. France had been given by Britain a free hand to extend its interest in Morocco, while Germany wanted a share for itself. A German gunboat, the Panther, had been sent to the Moroccan port of Agadir. Germany, an underdog in imperial terms, was pressing for a place on the top table.

Dispatch of the gunboat caused the French government and its British ally to bristle and to warn Germany off Morocco, a warning which Germany heeded in return for the receipt of a piece of central African territory, which was not France’s to give, but to which France relinquished its claim.

Brockway commented: “I need not pause to suggest the ghastly horrors which would have been committed had the thin thread upon which the peace of Europe depended been snapped. Inevitably the whole of Europe would have been involved, and millions of people would have been stricken down either on the battlefield or by starvation and disease. And for whom did the Liberal Government threaten the peace of Europe? For a few financiers in London and Paris. There was no quarrel between the people of Great Britain and Germany”.

He was speaking, of course, on behalf of plenty of others who shared this nightmare insight.

Another leading socialist who had campaigned for years past to raise popular awareness of the imperialist drive to war was Scotland’s John Maclean. Both were to be imprisoned during the war - Brockway for refusing conscription, Maclean for anti-conscription agitation. Rosa Luxemburg, as early as February 1914, was in Hamburg indicted for inciting soldiers to disobedience in a speech the previous September, receiving a one year prison sentence which she served the following year.

Many years later their perspective on the war’s causes was endorsed by The First World War 1914-18

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Eric Hobsbawm: “The blocs, reinforced by inflexible plans for strategy and mobilisation, grew more rigid, the continent drifted uncontrollably towards battle, through a series of international crises which, after 1905, were increasingly settled by ‘brinkmanship’, i.e. by the threat of war.”

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8. The secret treaties After the Bolshevik revolution in November 1917 the Lenin government published the secret treaties between the Allies discovered in the Foreign Office archives of the Tsar. The Manchester Guardian was the one British national newspaper which published these agreements. They showed very clearly that each of the Allies was out to grab what it could. In the spring of 1918 left-wing papers, such as the Herald and Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought, published them too. A member of the Independent Labour Party and a future Labour MP, Seymour Cocks, also published a booklet on the subject.

The “Italian Treaty” was dated 26th April 1915 and was signed on behalf of Britain, France, Italy and Russia. It consisted of pledges to Italy in exchange for her participation in the war on the Allied side. Under “the future treaty of peace”, Italy was to receive territories in the present possession of Austria and Turkey. From Austria, Italy was to have the Trentino district, the whole of the Southern Tyrol, Trieste and the province of Dalmatia. Italy, which had taken Libya from Turkey following war in 1912, was also to have her entitlement to that country confirmed, plus a share of war indemnities payable to the Allies. Further, “should France and Great Britain extend their colonial possessions in Africa at the expense of Germany”, Italy was to be free to extend her possessions in Eritrea and Somaliland.

Another agreement, made between Russia and the Allies in spring 1916, gave France some Turkish-ruled lands – the sea-board of Syria, southern Turkey’s Adana province and part of Armenia, while Britain was to receive much of Iraq and to have special rights in the ports of Haifa and Jaffa, plus part of Persia. Palestine was to be a protectorate under France, Britain and Russia. Russia was to receive parts of Armenia and Kurdistan.

In August 1916 a military-political convention between Russia and The First World War 1914-18

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A graphic and damning geographical illustration of the effect of all these agreements was a Socialist War Map of the world, more exactly defined, perhaps, as a “Capitalist War Map�, which was printed in red and white and black by the Glasgow-based Socialist in April 1918.

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9. The struggle against the war So what did the anti-war movement do, across Europe, to stop the continent’s transformation into a graveyard? A preamble comment must be to note that the number of adherents to the view-point of internationalist-minded socialists in Britain may have been in the order of 100,000 or fewer. Of those consciously guided by Marxism, how many? A few thousand? Whatever the figure in 1914, it rose significantly by 1918.

In Britain, repeated wake-up calls from anti-war socialists such as Keir Hardie, George Lansbury and John Maclean, had reached back across the years. In mid-April 1914 the Independent Labour Party’s annual conference at Bradford was an occasion for more. “This conference protests”, the Labour Leader reported, “against the ever-increasing burden of armaments and preparations for war, welcomes the growing international solidarity of the workers as a potent force for peace”.

On the last day of April 1914 an article by Keir Hardie in the same paper focused on the risk of war. He wrote: “war cannot be made without the consent of the common people. True, their consent is not asked, but if the rulers know that the workers will not fight each other no war will ever be declared. That much is obvious, and a consideration of that fact is an additional argument for the Anti-War strike propaganda of the International Socialist Bureau.”

An emergency meeting of the Bureau at Brussels almost at the end of July was attended by Hardie, France’s Jean Jaures, and Germany’s Rosa Luxemburg, whose conviction for anti-war agitation – and pending prison sentence – was no deterrent to her continued campaigning activity.

This meeting produced a call for increased pressure on governments to maintain peace, while in Berlin some 100,000 people demonstrated against war.

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But when war began, the majority leaderships of the chief labour parties rallied to their respective governments. Rosa Luxemburg and Wilhelm Liebknecht led a minority of anti-war German socialists against it, while Russia’s Bolshevik Party led by Lenin maintained a fixed anti-war position. In France, on the last day of July, the anti-war socialist leader Jaures was assassinated by a “patriotic” Frenchman.

On August 2 1914 the largest of many anti-war rallies around Britain took place in Trafalgar Square. Four days later, with war official, the Labour Leader shouted: “Down with the War!” declaring to its readers: “You have no quarrel with Germany … The quarrel is between the ruling classes of Europe”.

Hardie wrote: “The angel of death with blood-stained wings is hovering over Europe”. Shortly after, he was howled down by war supporters when speaking in Wales at Aberdare, while John Maclean was to face the question “Why don’t you enlist?” when addressing a Glasgow audience at the end of the month. Answered Maclean: “I have been enlisted for 15 years in the Socialist Army, which is the only army worth fighting for, God damn all other armies.” For such remarks he was soon fined and, refusing to pay, imprisoned.

In London’s East End, Sylvia Pankhurst, who had just been released from prison for suffragette activities, campaigned against the war from the beginning, quietly at first, in the face of the patriotic wave, but then loudly for the duration through her Women’s Dreadnought, and through public meetings.

In December 1914, the first of many trenchant articles demanding an end to the war was printed in Lansbury’s Herald, whose anti-war stance had softened following the war’s outbreak.

Indirect resistance to the war, in some parts of Britain more than others, took the form of defiance at work of demands made of workers, most The First World War 1914-18

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famously in Scotland’s Clydeside, from early 1915 onwards. On the Western Front, between offensives, when warfare was relatively low-key, a “live and let live” attitude towards the enemy was common, and in autumn 1917 thousands of British troops engaged in defiant rioting at the base camp at Etaples before order was restored with the help of a soldier’s execution.

In 1916 around 200,000 people in Britain signed a petition prepared by the anti-war movement calling for a negotiated peace. This was also the year when the British Socialist Party, previously the Social Democratic Federation, freed itself at its annual conference of the imperialist elements which had tarnished it, and henceforth, through its paper The Call, consistently campaigned from a Marxist perspective against the war.

That year too, with conscription of men for the army in full flood, the left-leaning No Conscription Fellowship supported refusers of conscription who faced tribunals tasked with considering whether they could be classed as conscientious objectors, and agitated against conscription through its weekly Tribunal - which at its peak had a readership of 100,000. One CO was asked at his tribunal hearing: “Are you doing work of national importance?” He replied: “No, I’m doing work of international importance.”

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repeatedly. While a good many accepted non-combatant service, a much smaller group took the “absolutist” position and refused any kind of warconnected service. Of these more than 30, who were shipped to France to be put under military discipline, only escaped the firing squad as a result of direct NCF representations to Asquith.

The first Russian revolution of February 1917 provided great impetus to the anti-war movement in Britain, and led to a national conference in June in Leeds. This had been convened by a group representing the Independent Labour Party, the British Socialist Party and Sylvia Pankhurst’s East End-based Workers’ Socialist Federation. It was attended by well over a thousand delegates and pressed for a peace based on no annexations and indemnities. Then came the October Bolshevik insurrection which took Russia out of the war and into a socialist revolution.

These events transformed the climate of progressive debate in Britain, aided by the presence in London of an ambassador appointed from Russia, Maxim Litvinov, who in early 1918 popularised the Bolshevik call for peace without either annexations or indemnities on socialist platforms.

That the government was troubled by increasingly open opposition to the war’s continuance was evidenced by a series of prosecutions. Edmund Morel, who had been under close surveillance by Special Branch police agents looking for an opportunity to silence him, was arrested in late 1917 and given six months’ hard prison labour for a technical violation of an obscure Defence of the Realm Act regulation.

Earlier in 1917, a socialist and anti-war Derby family, the Wheeldons, faced a major show trial for a ludicrously unlikely plot to assassinate Lloyd George. The prosecution case was cobbled together with the help of police agent provocateurs and evidence manufacturers – leading to a disgraceful 10 year sentence for the mother, and substantial sentences for her daughter and son-in-law. (See Our History, No. 10.)

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In Glasgow in spring 1918 John Maclean was charged with making seditious speeches. In court he declared from the dock: “I am not here, then, as the accused. I am here as the accuser of capital, dripping with blood from head to foot”. A sentence of five years’ penal servitude “for talking” ensued, though he was released after the armistice.

The eminent anti-war progressive philosopher Bertrand Russell, closely associated with the Tribunal, was prosecuted that spring for a Tribunal article which remarked that American soldiers stationed in Britain might be employed as strike-breakers, receiving a prison sentence of six months.

The Tribunal itself was driven underground by the carting away of its printing press by police. The Government had decided that the 4,000-plus censors at work keeping mainstream newspapers in order were not enough to keep the nation in order.

Even in the last weeks of war Sylvia Pankhurst was in court for a speech to a Derbyshire Labour Party meeting, where she used words denigrating the war quoted by the prosecution, which included: “It was a sordid scramble between two rival groups of capitalists who were struggling to get control of the world’s raw materials.”

Much earlier in the year had come a government decision to extend conscription to Ireland, provoking a general strike there and the prospect of mass resistance – which in turn led to the internment of more than 100 Sinn Fein nationalists including their leader Eamon De Valera. Fearful of the consequences, the government put the Irish conscription plan on hold and never implemented it.

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During the course of the year, indeed, public disaffection was on the rise, both in the form of an increased number of strikes, and in the form of more open anti-war activity. The official support given to the war by most trade unions saw the rise of shop steward militancy. In the face of government attempts to prohibit strike action, to undermine skilled workers with “dilution” of labour, and to stop workers changing jobs without permission – and in spring 1917 to force previously exempted engineers into the army – there were many local and not-so-local strikes, often followed by significant concessions to the strikers. Symbolic of this workforce resistance was the staging in 1917 of a national shop stewards’ conference in Derby.

On May Day in Scotland some 90,000 marchers made their way to Glasgow Green to hear many speakers, and uttered a loud call for peace and an end to capitalism. In London’s Finsbury Park, on the other hand, the May Day rally there was banned days before by the Home Secretary. Nevertheless something like 1,000 people took part in the illegal demonstration there, before being dispersed by mounted police.

This intimidation did not prevent another rally on the same site the following month from taking place without disruption, while in July the first of a series of large demonstrations in Glasgow called for the release of John Maclean – this one attacked by several hundred police.

The socialist papers which continued to appear, despite repeated police raids, included the Herald (which the Government feared was too popular to be closed down), the Glasgow-based Socialist, the British Socialist Party’s The Call, and the Workers’ Dreadnought, formerly the Women’s Dreadnought. The war they waged against the war stopped only when the war stopped.

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10. Why and how the war ended Rajani Palme Dutt, quoted early in this pamphlet, was the long-term editor of Labour Monthly between 1921 and his death in 1974. He also edited the Morning Star’s predecessor the Daily Worker between 1936 and 1938. In World Politics he considered how the war slipped out of the control of those who set it in train: “Every imperialism was staking its all upon victory ... All the calculations of the rival statesmen and general staffs were defeated by the event, and the war was rapidly revealed as an independent force which had passed beyond all possibility of control.”

Palme Dutt was imprisoned in 1916 for refusing conscription.

The war had a variety of outcomes, not limited to victories for one side and defeats for the other; not limited to the loss of imperial thrones in Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany. The war had a particular outcome, as Dutt remarked, which was not anticipated by emperors and other war-makers: “The Russian Revolution ended the war in the East.

The German Revolution ended the war in the West.”

In August and September 1918 the Western Front edged eastwards, encouraged by the injection of large numbers of American troops and military material, and also by a more effective use of tanks; while disheartened soldiers in the German lines increasingly questioned why they were fighting. (By this time, foreign anti-Soviet adventures had begun. Small British forces with hostile intentions were at Archangel in the north and Baku in the south, while a much larger Japanese contingent had landed in eastern Siberia.)

In Germany strikes and peace demonstrations in a hungry country were staged on a large scale in October 1918, while many thousands of army deserters took refuge in Berlin. Refusing orders to go to sea for a naval attack on the British, mutinous sailors took over the ships and the port of Kiel, raising the red flag. In Berlin Karl Liebknecht declared a soviet republic, and the Kaiser left for exile. The general desire for peace had The First World War 1914-18

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overwhelmed the generals and politicians, while the advancing Allies were still largely outside Germany’s borders.

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11. The “peace settlement” The actual divvying up of the loot between the victorious Powers after the war was done at the Versailles conference of 1919. It didn’t exactly follow the secret treaties, notably because one of the treaty-makers, Tsarist Russia, had disappeared from the scene. The Bolshevik anti-imperialist government stayed aloof from the share-out.

That the treaties confirmed the victorious governments had their hands deep in the world’s till is undeniable. German colonies were divided between Belgium, the United Kingdom, some British Dominions, France, and Japan.

Britain and France divided German West Africa (Cameroon and Togo); while German East Africa (a colony in the African Great Lakes region) was also split. Britain got Tanganyika (these days Tanzania, merged with Zanzibar). Belgium got Rwanda and Burundi, save for a sliver of territory for Portugal. Britain thus got the lion’s share - the “missing link” in its chain of possessions from the Cape to Cairo.

On top of that, Britain got Palestine and Iraq. Syria and Lebanon were donated to France. In short, much of the Middle East, unlike Belgium, was not to be “saved” but designated as appetising dishes to which the world’s foremost imperialists could freely help themselves.

Japan gained Germany’s Pacific islands (the Marshall Islands, the Carolines, the Marianas, the Palau Islands) and Kiautschou in China.

German Samoa was assigned to New Zealand; German New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and Nauru to Australia. While South Africa - which was still a British dominion at the time - got German South-West Africa (now Namibia).

Many of these acquisitions were disguised as responsibilities. Mandates were hastily invented, wrote A.J.P. Taylor in his English History 1914The First World War 1914-18

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1945, “to save appearances”.

Besides being condemned to pay off an enormous tribute to the victors, Germany lost the coal of the Saar region, most of its iron ore supply and also its merchant navy, besides the colonies it had acquired. Thus the war resulted in the division of the territorial winnings of the conquerors – Britain doing well out of the horse-trading at Versailles and the thrusting back of would-be imperial Germany into an inferior place below the top table.

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12. Mooning at Marxism?

One ubiquitous historian of the war and its causes, notably in his lengthy 1998 work The Pity of War is “telly don” Professor Niall Ferguson.

Ferguson has enthusiastically supported Britain’s participation in the aggressive foreign wars launched by the United States in recent times.

His cheerleading for the British Empire as a serious contribution to “global welfare” is unambiguous, and his antipathy to Marxism is both explicit and contemptuous. And while his book does contain accessibly presented (if selective) information, its overall value is limited by the lightweight and slippery manner with which he addresses the war’s causes.

His first chapter opens with consideration of the argument that a culture of militarism, projected by propaganda, fear-mongering and prophecy, brought about the war. It is an example of Ferguson’s predilection for putting up an obviously exaggerated or distorted view-point in order to knock it down in throwaway fashion. He rejects the argument briskly on the grounds that, immediately prior to the war, popular anti-militarism had gained the upper hand.

While it is true that everywhere popular enthusiasm for war was absent before it began, it is plain enough that the initiation of an armaments race in Britain in competition with a rival project in Germany would have itself stimulated a culture of militarism, whether or not enveloping the mass of people, and that a culture of militarism could contribute to the likelihood of war. But Ferguson chooses here not to look behind war propaganda for its own causes and context. Not to explore the issue further, and just to offer a quick-fire conclusion, is an example of Ferguson’s “brilliance”.

He goes on, bold enough to consider, or so it seems at first, the argument that the war was the consequence of imperialist rivalries. He announces that this argument continued to be made by historians of the Soviet Union and eastern European communist countries until the dissolution of socialist political structures in 1989-91 as if these developments put paid The First World War 1914-18

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to the Marxist critique of capitalism. Juvenile stuff from a “brilliant” historian, but then comes Ferguson’s “killer point” – that while, superficially, it was reasonable to think that rival capitalist interests, notably competing arms industries, were in conflict with each other, there was “scarcely any evidence that these interests made businessmen want a major European war.”

And that is his case, as if Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin insisted that businessmen in Germany or Britain in August 1914 individually or collectively, for the most part, wanted the war that took place. Of Ferguson’s argument Palme Dutt had made short shrift in World Politics almost 80 years ago, as quoted early in this pamphlet.

Eric Hobsbawm reaches into the same issue in some detail in The Age of Empire. He states: “If capitalist development and imperialism must bear responsibility for the uncontrolled slide into world conflict, it is impossible to argue that many capitalists themselves were conscious warmongers.”

In this regard he accepts the validity of Norman Angell’s conclusion, in his book The Great Illusion (1910), that the business consensus was that peace, not war, benefited capital.

But at the same time, as Hobsbawm goes on to say: “The development of capitalism inevitably pushed the world in the direction An ironic cartoon from the time depicting mining magnate & polof state rivalry, imperialist expansion, itician Cecil Rhodes as the conflict and war … all powers without “colossus” of Africa exception were in an expansionist and conquering mood.” Even Britain, he points out “whose posture was fundamentally defensive, since her problem was The First World War 1914-18

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how to protect hitherto uncontested global dominance against the new intruders, attacked the South African republics.”

So, in answer to Ferguson’s show of producing an interesting rabbit from his hat to clinch his case - in the shape of the assertion that British businessmen did not want war as proof of the supposed inaccuracy of the Marxist case - Dutt and Hobsbawm reveal Ferguson as a wholesale retailer of hot air.

Ferguson is not done. Having dismissed the Marxist assessment, he proceeds, in The Pity of War, to borrow pieces of its supporting structure without acknowledging the fact. He looks closely at the amicable diplomatic relations between Britain and Germany in the 1880s and 1890s, and at the less friendly relations during that time between Britain and France. He then states that between 1900 and 1906 Germany posed “the greatest threat” to Britain’s position. Borrowing more of the Marxist case in The Empire (2003), he records how Britain had led the “Scramble for Africa” and was in the forefront of a further “Scramble for the Far East”, while also occupying the role of “the world’s banker, investing immense sums around the world.” These building blocks of the socialist analysis for the war’s causes are thus paraded as if belonging elsewhere.

In his 2006 book The War of the World (which generated a TV series), Ferguson perfunctorily concedes that: “The Left had predicted for decades that militarism and imperialism would eventually produce an almighty crisis.”

The “Left” viewpoint here is apparently lucky to have even a passing mention from Ferguson, for in dropping the subject abruptly, he explains: “For the reality is that the First World War was a shock, not a long anticipated crisis.” In fact, rather obviously, it could be, and was, both.

Neither socialists - who in more than one country predicted war - nor anybody else, could predict precisely where or when it would come. The war did come as a shock and also tragically confirmed the rationality of The First World War 1914-18

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the prediction. All in all, the thoughts of Ferguson about the socialist view of the war’s causes amount to as much of a brilliant historian’s coup as if he had simply bared his bottom and mooned at the messages of Marxism.

Ferguson’s value to the ruling ideology of the West in presenting historical material concerning the war in books, and with generous TV time, lies in his persistence in disguising, intentionally or not, the war’s actual origins and causes, while leaving readers and viewers entertained, a talent which has endeared him to the mass media. If, of course, Ferguson were to accept the umbilical connection between pre-1914 imperialism and war, it would be less easy for him to proclaim the British Empire’s contribution to “global welfare”.

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13. Epitaph on the war A well-known epitaph couplet on the war came from the pen of imperialism-and-war-enthusiast and author Rudyard Kipling, whose eagerness may eventually have been dampened by the Western Front death of his own son, whose under-age enlistment he had actively facilitated. The couplet runs:

“If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

If one word is changed, the rhyme achieves deadly accuracy. It becomes:

“If any question why we died, Tell them because our rulers lied.”

In late December 1917, while politicians were absorbing the latest evidence of stalemate and casualty statistics, Prime Minister Lloyd George, who had heard from a pro-war embedded journalist of the realities of the fighting on the western front, admitted to the Manchester Guardian’s editor, C.P. Scott: “If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship will not pass the truth.”

Had rulers, and their press and propaganda creatures, spoken the truth, as did (among many A Bolshevik poster from during WW1 depicting a others) Keir Hardie (who died in 1915), John revolutionary sailor Maclean, Fenner Brockway, Edmund Morel, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Seymour Cocks in Britain, and as did Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, legions of young men would have resisted joining up. The war that took place would have been unachievable.

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As it was, defeated Germany was down-graded to a status which laid neat foundation stones for another terrible conflict; and an early and vicious blow to the prospects of a socialist future for Germany and perhaps western Europe was the murder of both Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919.

Ambassador Litvinov, meanwhile, was back in Russia (after his exchange with a British representative-cum-anti-Bolshevik-plotter). In that country an endeavour was underway to build a socialist society from a mainly rural and backward economic base, in the face of huge war damage, widespread hunger, a civil war and foreign invasion war brought by various capitalist Powers including Britain, to stop the experiment in its tracks.

In seeking first to avert the war, and later to bring about its cessation – sometimes earning for themselves severe penalties for refusing to take part in it or for writing or “talking” against it – socialists were expressing both their abhorrence of the extremes of capitalism and their conviction that a socialist future was vital for humanity.

The war over, in Britain socialists assigned themselves the task of seeking and pressing for temporary gains for working people while building political forces for a more distant and more fundamental change. Their confidence and determination, much demonstrated during the war, would feature prominently in the time to come.

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14. Note on sources Besides those named in the text, I have drawn heavily on To End All Wars – Adam Hochschild (2011), and less heavily on E.D. Morel – F. Seymour Cocks (1920), Sylvia Pankhurst – Katherine Connelly (2013), Rosa Luxemburg – Harry Harmer (2008), Keir Hardie – Kenneth O. Morgan (1975), My Life – George Lansbury (1928), The British Labour Movement – Morton and Tate (1979), The First Casualty – Philip Knightley (1982), Century of War – Gabriel Kolko (1994) and The Internationale- R. Palme Dutt (1964). Among other works consulted were The Common People – G.D.H. Cole (1949), The Scramble for Africa – Thomas Pakenham (1992) and The Rise and Fall of the British Empire – Lawrence James (1998).

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Imperialist alliances and power blocks during the First World War

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