Douglas Newton - The Darkest Days: The truth behind Britain's rush to war, 1914

Why did Britain go to war in 1914? There are some old lies that explain this: "poor little Belgium", German troops "murdering babies" and that old canard, "for the defence of democracy". There are some more complex lies - that Britain was pulled into the war because of treaties and obligations to France and Russia, which place the war as an outgrowth of the complex game of thrones that Europe was in the early 20th century. However, Douglas Newton's brilliant book argues something very different. Britain went to war in 1914 because a small group of right-wing politicians, egged on and encouraged by a fanatically anti-German right-wing media pushed the boundaries at every stage making war more and more likely with every hour that passed.

Newton's book argues that Britain's involvement in the war was not inevitable. Indeed Europe wide, and eventual global war, was not inevitable either. But once Britain entered the conflict World War became a reality. Not least because the very first thing the British military did was to move to seize German colonial assets. 

The book covers a relatively short space of time. Remembering that old quip by Lenin, that there are "weeks when decades happen", the few days before in early August 1914 saw a mass of meetings, telegrams, arguments and diplomacy. It also saw a lot of anti-war organising, protest, resignations from the cabinet and a British government on the brink of collapse. The latter is usually neglected by historians.

War, according to Newton, was not inevitable primarily because there were significant sections of the British population - from the working classes to the liberal cabinet - that did not want war. Newton's focus is very much the machinations of the cabinet and leading politicians. In the cabinet, four ministers  John Burns, John Morley, John Simon and Lord Beaumont offerd their resignations at varous stages as the crisis progressed. These were principled men, whose opposition to the war was based on politics as well as morals and religion. However they were men who were wedded to the parliamentary system and national interests. Despite their resignations PM Herbert Asquith kept this crucial news from the British people and from parliament. Unwilling to allow a chink to appear in the armour of the British government on the verge of war, the four rebels kept their mouths shut. Asquith worked hard to pressure them to keep quiet, and this allowed the government to portray themselves as united. 

The drive to war was however also engineered by those who wanted it. Winston Churchill in particular as First Lord of the Admiralty, played an inglorious (and undemocratic) role, escalated tensions by mobilising and concentrating the British navy, encouraging a feeling of crisis and putting further pressure on the German leadership. 

Perhaps the most shocking thing to those who have faith in parliamentary process is that the declaration of war was never put to the test of parliamentary debate. Asquith's cleverness in hiding the fractures in the cabinet meant that when he spoke to Parliament and implied an ultimatum was being presented to Germany, 

the Radicals did not challenge Asquith. Why? Perhaps they still believd in the promised major debate before any declaration of war. But most likely, the Radicals chose to tread cuatiously and wait for confirmation of the facts from Belgium. It is possible, too, that the suddend adjournment of the House, under a recent and controversial Speaker's ruling 'that was little understood', caught the Radicals off guard.

The Radicals, says Newton, "simply lost their courage and chose silence on Tuesday 4 August". But it was not even the whole cabinet that made the decision for war. Newton points out that decision was made by "a small clique bunkered down in the Cabinet room. A mere coffee table's worth of the Cabinet". Later Newton adds, the King and three members of the Pricy Council declared war: "Faithfully reflecting the pre-democratic order, four men had launched Britain's war. There was not one elected man among them."

It was a sordid process of duplicity and cowardice. But it was not inevitable. Not least because as the crisis rapidly spiriled all sorts of activists, including trade unions, mobilised to try and stop the war. If I was worried that Newton's book would solely focus on the machinations of the political class, I was disabused of this fear by the chapters looking at the protest meetings, anti-war rallies and the newspapers of those who opposed the war. Despite the shortness of time, impressive numbers mobilised, and had those in the cabinet made their resignations public, its possible that this movement would have grown phenomenally and Britain would have been unable to join the conflict. Millions of lives might have been saved. It is in this spirit that Douglas Newton concludes his wonderful book:

How should Britain's Great War be remembered after a century? In a 'national spirit'? Perhaps the idea that for Britain there was no alternative to war, no error in her handling of the crisis, and no deed left undone in pursuit of peace is an essential consolation. But it is fairy dust. There is really only one story worth telling about the Great War: it was a common European tragedy - a filthy, disgusting and hideous episode of industrialised killing. Not the first, and not the last. It was unredeemed by victory. The uplifting element of the story lies in the struggle to avert it.

This is a remarkable book that will be denounced for its revisionism. But as we live in a world where nations commit genocide and go unpunished; Presidents bomb enemies without debate among their elected representatives and arms spending spirals upwards, its a story worth learning.

Related Reviews

Nation - War on War
Sherry - Empire and Revolution: A socialist history of the First World War
Zurbrugg - Not Our War: Writings Against the First World War

Lyn MacDonald - Somme

Lyn MacDonald's Somme was the third of her books on World War One, drawing on her huge and detailed collection of reminisances and memoires of former soldiers. Like the first, They Called It Passchendaele, which told the story of the Third Battle of Ypres, it is an unflinching account of the brutality of trench warfare. Somme however, deals with the most famous of the bloodbaths of the Western Front. MacDonald starts with the meticulous, detailed and finely tuned battle plan that would see millions of shells fired at the German trenches, followed by coordinated attacks timed to the second. British troops would carry mirrors and flags so that their generals could track their victorious march. The reality was a blood bath. The detailed instructions gave no room for flexibility on the ground. As the Germans took out the first over the top, following troops had no idea what to do, as their objectives were not even close. As Sergeant Jim Myer's of the Machine Gun Corps recalled:

The biggest mistake that was made on manoeuvres and training was that we were never told what to do in case of failure. All this time we'd gone backwards and forwards, training, doing it over and over again like clockwork and then when we had to advance, when it came to the bit, we didn't know what to do! Nothing seemed to be arranged in case of failure.

Thousands, upon thousands, died. MacDonald's interviewees tell the stories of individual tragedy, and bravery. Of the groups of "Pals", from the same village, factory, industry, even sports teams, who died together. The survivors left shocked and demoralised by what they had seen. Corporal Harry Shaw, of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, summed up that first attack:

Whatever was gained, it wasn't worth the price that the men had paid to gain that advantage. It was no advantage to anybody. It was just sheer bloody murder. That's the only words you can use for it.

Most of the accounts MacDonald draws on are of front line troops. But a great strength of the book is that it gives a sense of the scale of the undertaking. She includes the voices and accounts of people who drove the ambulances, salvaged broken equipment for recycling into more shells and guns, and the people who laid roads, cooked food and reported for the press. But it is the horror of the front, the chaos of battle and the sheer bloody uselessness of the high command that will stay with the reader. The Battle for High Wood will stick with me, as troops captured and area, only to see it slip from the grasp as their Generals ordered in cavalry that took a whole day to arrive. The thousands who died in the follow up should never have died there.

Somme is not a detailed history of the battle. At times its hard to follow events, or even grasp the scale of particular attacks. The pictures are also unclear to me. But this is not a book to be read for detailed accounts. This is the human story of the slaughter of Kitchener's Army, "shipping clerks, errand-boys, stevedores, railway porters, grocers' assistants, postmen". 

Related Reviews

Macdonald - Passchendaele: The Story of the Third Battle of Ypres 1917
Sherry - Empire and Revolution
Zurbrugg - Not Our War
Romains - Verdun

Malcolm Brown & Patricia Meehan - Scapa Flow

Scapa Flow is at the heart of Orkney, an enormous natural harbour today curiously devoid of ships. Yet in both World Wars it was the base of Britain's main naval fleet - the location from where many ships set out to fight the German Navy at Jutland in 1916 and the home base for ships that fought the Bismark and escorted the Russia convoys. Most importantly it was home to tens of thousands of servicemen and women in both World Wars, troops from the navy, airforce and army who looked after the guns, fuelled the aircraft and above all crewed and maintained hundreds of ships.

Malcolm Brown & Patricia Meehan's brilliant oral history of Scapa Flow tells their story. It arose out of a strange set of circumstances - the BBC made a programme about Scapa Flow, introduced by Ludovic Kennedy who served there. The authors placed an ad in the Radio Times asking for reminiscences and were inundated with replies. Realising they had too much material for one programme, they used much of the remainder in writing this book.

So the history here is told mostly in the voices of the women and men who served in this lonely part of Orkney. Some of the stories are horrible - the accounts of the tragedies of HMS Vanguard in World War One and HMS Royal Oak in the second - are awful. Hundreds of lives lost in a moment. One gets a real sense of how these tragedies shocked those who witnessed them or those who cleared up afterward. One sailor remembered how a diver had seen the bodies of dead men still in their bunks after the sinking of the Royal Oak. Other tragedies such as the sinking of HMS Hampshire and the death of hundreds of sailors, plus the unlamented Lord Kitchener (architect of much slaughter) are also closely associated with Scapa Flow.

The Flow today is filled with wrecks and a favourite location for divers. Many of these are German ships, whose crews took them there for surrender after World War One. The scuttling of the ships was a memorable and shocking event, but I was struck by the accounts here that tell of how badly the German sailors were treated by the British authorities - lacking food, entertainment or much else. It was interesting to hear of a passing reference to a Sailors' Council in the German fleet at Orkney - not least because the crews had been part of the mutiny that began the German Revolution in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. Sadly this did not spread to the British!

But actually one thing you get from these accounts is how dull and monotonous life in Scapa was. Not a few correspondents bemoan that they are not on active service, but standing guard in appalling weather waiting for action, that by and large never came. It is interesting that in both wars caution on the part of the British Naval command essentially left many warships and their crews languishing in Scapa Flow. Boredom, games, drink and loneliness characterise many accounts. Some of these are tragic, like the men who killed themselves from depression. Others are sad, such as the two guardsmen left for weeks alone who desperately tried to stretch out the weekly visits by the men who brought them supplies.

There is no doubt, with hindsight, that those in Orkney during both wars had a relatively good deal - they would probably survive. But the boredom brought with it its own difficulties and while the correspondents often remember the islands and their people fondly, they mostly remember how dull it was. Readers looking for exciting accounts of battle will not find it here. What readers will find is an insight into the war away from the frontlines, boredom and loneliness, with occasional moments of terror and tragedy. As such this excellent oral history is probably of much greater interest that you might expect.

Related Reviews

Terkel - 'The Good War': An Oral History of World War Two
Lund and Ludlam – Trawlers Go to War
Lund & Ludlam - PQ17: Convoy to Hell
Wickham-Jones - Orkney: A Historical Guide

V. M. Yeates - Winged Victory

Having recently finished Derek Robinson's classic novel of war in the air Goshawk Squadron, I was directed towards V.M. Yeats' book Winged Victory. This, I was told, is the definitive novel about the subject written in the aftermath of World War One by someone who had reached Ace status flying Sopwith Camels on the Western Front.

Winged Victory deserves its accolades. It is a powerful denunciation of that particular war and what it did to the men who fought it. The key figure in the book, Tom Cundall, who we can suppose is a proxy for Yeates himself, begins the novel relatively cynical, but by the end has been destroyed emotionally and psychologically by the deaths of his friends and the strain of combat.

Ironically this is a novel where little happens. The main characters in the story exist against the backdrop of wider conflict, but their space in the war is reduced down to small areas, intense, short lived conflict with enemy planes or horrible periods of dangerous ground strafing. Despite their height above the battlefield the pilots, like the men in the trenches, lack the over-view of the war. Inevitably their is a disconnect - from far behind the lines the squadron is ordered into the air, despite the weather meaning its dangerous to fly and the enemy can't be scene. Pilots die on the whims of commanders, through accident or through enemy action they don't even see. Names come and go, and few pilots last long enough to develop the skills and instincts to survive. Even fewer pilots last the six months that Tom endures; and increasingly he copes through heavy drinking.

Tom and his closest friends try to understand the war. Tom's and some of his friends blame a nebulous group of financiers and capitalists who are making massive profits out of the war - given the book was written in the early 1930s I was struck by occasional references to Jewish people. Tom's closest friend Seddon argues:

Do you think we're fighting for England? In private life I'm a ruddy bank clerk, and it's some of those big bank balances we're fighting for. They're not England: they're what gangs of financiers, Jew and Gentile, get out of England. It's too damn funny the way people think England belongs to them because they've nearly all got the vote, whereas its parceled out among a lot of blasted tradesmen who run it as a business for their own profit.

These ideas are confused. Later Seddon sees the war as originating in "Germanic revolt against the International Jew". It's impossible to know whether Yeates intended Seddon's anti-Semitism here as commentary on the growth of fascism in Europe while he was writing, or whether they reflected real arguments in the mess halls of his squadron in 1918. But they have the ring of truth of the type of debates that take place when people are struggling to understand what is going on around them; and the only source of information is propaganda.

Tom is pulled in different directions. On his leave he sees the green pastures of England from his train window, but also visits the East London slums to try and understand what they are fighting for. But by the end of the novel he no longer sees England as his own. The decline in belief in the war - the rapid erosion of patriotism, or indeed humanity, is a great theme in this microcosm of wider arguments around the conflict.

Furious arguments like these, the occasional fantasy of life after the war, heavy drinking, food and a preoccupation with women are the only things that keep the men going between combat. But even these aren't enough and boredom is the day to day reality.

Some will read Winged Victory for its accounts of combat. But there's much more to this than a tale of flying. This is a detailed account of the way the war ruined lives; it demolishes the myth of Biggles and "knights of the air", replacing it with alienated, scared, confused and drunk young men, desperate to survive but with little hope. It deserves to be read alongside great anti-war novels like All Quiet on the Western Front or Catch-22.

Related Reviews

Robinson - Goshawk Squadron
Macdonald - Passchendaele
Romains - Verdun
Bücher - In the Line 1914-1918

William A. Pelz - A People's History of the German Revolution

November 2018 marks the centenary of the start of the German Revolution. This was, as William Pelz notes in the conclusion to his book, an event of utmost significance. "Had", he writes, "the German Revolution been radical and purged the old state apparatus, there would most likely have been no Nazi seizure of power, no Third Reich, no World War II, no Holocaust." It would also, we should add, have strengthened the position of Soviet Russia and most certainly prevented that revolution's isolation and degeneracy. The world would be a very different, and likely better, place.

But the German Revolution is barely remembered. Pelz notes that few of his students had ever heard of it, and Chris Harman, famously called it the "Lost Revolution". So it is welcome that this new book has been published that can rescue the events of 1918 and 1919 for a new generation of activists. It is also good that this history has been written by someone broadly sympathetic to the Revolution and the people who made it.

Pelz locates the German Revolution as a culmination of a process that begins before World War One. This is the growth of the mass German socialist party the SPD. This, Pelz argues, was revolutionary in tone yet had developed a significant base within the system. Pelz quotes historian Lynn Abrams, "A working-class family could purchase its groceries at the socialist cooperative, borrow books from the Social Democratic library, exercise at a workers' sports club, sing in the workers' choir, if necessary call on the workers Samaritan Association in the event of an accident and draw on the workers' burial fund upon the death of a family member." But Pelz shows how the SPD had helped develop a "highly politicised working class" within which a "striking six percent put forth that there most important wish was to 'settle accounts with the capitalists.'"

It was this that led them to support German involvement in the war and then to take a counter-revolutionary attitude to the anti-war and then revolutionary movements. Pelz also shows the way that the deprivations of the war and the reality of life in the trenches helped create the spark for the events that began in late 1918. He also argues, convincingly, that anti-war sentiment was very strong in the German army quite early in the conflict.

The book is called "A People's History" and Pelz highlights the role of ordinary people in making the Revolution. In particular he celebrates the central (and often downplayed) involvement of women in the movements - first during the war when they played major roles in food riots - but then during the revolution itself. Women had been sucked into the factories as the men were sent to the front and played a crucial role in overthrowing the Kaiser and ending the war. I found these sections the most interesting and people who have read other accounts of the German Revolution will find much new material here.

I did have some problems with Pelz's account. Most important of these is that Pelz repeatedly dismisses those who argue that what was central to the defeat of the Revolution was the lack of a revolutionary "Bolshevik" type party. He particularly singles out Chris Harman for this criticism. But Pelz seems to misunderstand the role of such a party. The key problem with the German Revolution, as Pelz himself acknowledges, was that at particular points no strong enough force existed outside the SPD to hold back or drive forward the movement. Even when the German Communist Party (KPD) was formed this was too immature to play such a role. Lenin's Bolsheviks' in Russia were able to play that role and thus lead an insurrection after a year of revolutionary turmoil in which they had proved themselves to the masses. The existence of such a party in Germany, built long before World War One started, could have made sure the ups and downs of 1919 helped develop the working class movement in ways that ironed out its weaknesses.

This is most clear when looking at Pelz's discussion of the January 1919 Spartakist Uprising. This clearly should not have taken place - it's failure to involve a majority of the working class simply allowed the right to accelerate their repression. Instead Pelz argues that the alternative would have been a "revolutionary committee" that could have "deposed" the government and formed a new one based on the "left-wing USPD, the KPD and revolutionary shop stewards in Berlin". That may or may not have been successful as Pelz points out, possible leading to a bloody Paris Commune or a second "socialist" revolution. But surely the reason this didn't happen was the lack of clear revolutionary leadership - and had that existed in a party - the question of a workers' government might have been moot.

Chris Harman quotes Rosa Luxemburg before she was murdered. The defeat's cause lay she said, on "the contradiction between the powerful, resolute and offensive appearance of the Berlin masses on the one hand, and the irresoluteness, timidity and indecision of the Berlin leadership on the other". Harman then continues, "With a powerful revolutionary party, the Berlin working class would probably not have walked into the trap laid by Ebert, Noske and the generals".

To be fair to Pelz, he has not set out to right a manual for Revolutionaries, but a pure work of history. But the problem is that he also knows that had the German Revolution been successful it would have likely prevented the horrors that followed in the "midnight of the century". That success would have relied on the involvement of the masses in history which Pelz celebrates. But it also required political leadership that was prepared to take it forward. So while Pelz's book has much of interest, I recommend that it is read alongside other accounts such as that by Pierre Broue or Chris Harman's work.

Related Reviews

Broué - The German Revolution 1917-1923
Reissner - Hamburg at the Barricades
Fernbach - In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi
Hoffrogge - Working Class Politics in the German Revolution
Trotsky - Lessons of October
Hippe - And Red is the Colour of Our Flag

Georg Bücher - In the Line 1914-1918

A recent visit to the World War One battlefields of Flanders has awakened an interest in that horrific conflict, but having read a number of books written by British authors that contained eyewitness accounts from Allied troops, I was pleased to find this book by a German soldier. Georg Bücher's In the Line was a well known book when it was first published, but has been out of print for many years and this new edition seems timed for the 100th anniversary of the end of the war.

German accounts of World War One are always tainted by the Second one. This is in part because of the way that Hitler used Germany's defeat as a corner-stone of his propaganda. In particular the punitive Treaty of Versailles and the idea that Germany's army was "stabbed in the back". So Bücher's account is interesting on two levels.

The first of these is his own experiences. Bücher was the only one of a group of friends who made it all the way through the war. Given the scale of the slaughter this in itself is incredible. He fought at Verdun, the Somme and Passchendaele among other major battles, and saw his best friends killed. For those who know their military history of the War there is a lot here in terms of the experience of soldiers in the opposite trenches. This was little different to that of the Allies, though it got worse towards the end of the war. Mud, lice, shell-shock, dirt and the constant discussion of women and the quest for alcohol. Bücher also describes some other events, including this shocking account of a counter-attack against French-Senegalese troops to, Bücher says, "avenge" dead German soldiers "brutally mutilated by the Senegalese". Bücher also uses language that is offensive to us today, perhaps reflecting his politics (more on that later):

With death before us we drove the howling Senegalese back into our old trenches, where lay the comrades, foully mutilated and still shuddering... what mutilations! Eyes gone, dirt and mud in their mouths and noses, bayonets through their wrists and cheeks. The sight was more than we could bear - it turned us into madmen. Yet we did not-murder: we only fought with the fury of annihilation...drive the drunken bellowing, stinking black horde into the dug-outs. There was no mercy...

Bücher's racism here, becomes combined with anger at the madness of war and those who make men kill each other,

At Lorette we were avengers; but our vengeance was taken only on the black beasts. The pity was that Riedel's spade could not batter in the heads of those who were actually responsible: the white-skinned officers by whose permission and orders the blacks had been soaked in absinthe before the attack.

Either deliberately, or accidentally, Bücher frequently is guilty of double-standards. Enemies who are drunk must have been forced to drink by their officers, though he and his friends are frequently drunk. He claims his forces are not murdering, yet his best friend prefers to use a spade to kill the enemy. This is hypocrisy, but it gives a sense of the reality of total, industrial slaughter.

The account follows Bücher's war, including a period when he is hospitalised. It is a very personal war, and he and his comrades frequently set out to avenge the death of a friend. They debate the progress of the conflict, but actually care only for events in their small section. Hatred is reserved for the enemy, and cynicism for their own generals.

The second reason this book is interesting is that it is produced in the 1930s response to accusations that the German army was cowardly. Frequently Bücher denies this, but one wonders where his political sympathies lay at this point. He often notes how Social Democrat propaganda is sapping the morale of his comrades (though he conflates this sometimes with enemy propaganda) and one of his friends, who is a pacifist, redeems himself in Bücher's eyes by dying bravely in battle. Bücher condemns those behind the lines who fail to understand his experience and concludes

In the unspeakable horrors of the western front we had heard something more than the voice of death...no life without struggle; no life without death; no security without weapons... Avalanches may roll, winds of fury rage, unchained powers hold mastery for a time. As with nature, so is it in the life of the individual, of the masses, of a nation: one hour passes, another follows and with it the sun may shine again. Therefore: Si pacem vis...

By the time he writes this, has Bücher come under the influence of the Nazis? His language seems to echo their language of destiny and the importance of war in shaping the population. If so, it seems strange that Bücher even mentioned that he was elected a "chosen member of the soldier's council" in the revolutionary wave that ended World War One.

I've not been able to find out more about Bücher's life - it would be interesting to know where he ended up. His politics are not of the left, and perhaps he was influenced while writing by the increasing right-wing atmosphere in the late 1920s. So these memoirs are interesting in that they depict the experiences of an ordinary German soldier in World War One, but they also give us an insight into how some of the veterans felt a decade after the war ended. Certainly one can imagine Hitler approving of some of the sentiments in Bücher's book.

In a review in the Spectator in 1932 Graham Greene mocked the author's writing. The book is terribly over-written in places, but to me that underlines the authenticity of the book. One wanders what Greene made of the politics...

One final thing. Potential readers should be aware that this book is full of typographical errors. Many of them seem like errors from the scanning of the text. It is a shame that the publishers didn't correct these.

Related Reviews

MacDonald - Passchendaele
Zurbrugg - Not Our War
Kershaw - To Hell and Back
Sherry - Empire and Revolution
Stone - The Eastern Front

Lyn Macdonald - Passchendaele: The Story of the Third Battle of Ypres 1917

I picked up Lyn Macdonald's Passchendaele quite by chance. I was looking for a history of the battle to read prior to visiting the World War One battlefields at Ypres. My random selection turned out to be extremely fortuitous - Passchendaele is the perfect book to read to understand the slaughter that was the Third Battle of Ypres. The strength of the book lies in the powerful testaments from those who fought in the battle. These eyewitness accounts are often horrific, tragic and emotional. But they contain a wealth of detail that means that the battle isn't simply an abstract tale of regiments moving here and there, and thousands being killed or maimed, but rather a deeply personal experience.

The battle for Passchendaele takes place in the context of the Ypres Salient, a bulge in the allied lines into German captured terroritry. Straightening the line out, and then pushing onwards cost the lives of thousands and was less about defeating the enemy than making sure that trench warfare continued. By the time of the Third Battle (the earlier two were conflicts that set the scene for the later confrontation) the British High Command had an ambition of moving so far forward they would capture the channel ports from the enemy and cut off their access to submarine bases, thus aiding the cross Atlantic supply convoys. It was a laudable aim, but in the context of trench warfare, the weather and the German defences it was fantasy.

I was struck that British politicians, particularly Lloyd George understood this instinctively. Field Marshall Haig however liberally interpreted his orders and turned preparations into a major offensive. Summer weather turned into a horribly wet autumn. Flanders turned into a sea of mud. Perhaps 40,000 bodies still lie under this mud, and our guide showed us six recent graves of soldiers who'd recently been found. Veterans recalling watching friends and comrades slowly drown in mud, begging to be shot will remain with me forever.

I wrote that the accounts of eyewitnesses (both soldiers and non-combatants such as civilians and nurses) were horrific. At the beginning of the book Lyn Macdonald apologises in advance, but reminds the reader that this is all true. It's an apt point to make. Almost exactly 100 years to the day when I visited Ypres, the Germans began their Spring Offensive of 1918. In a few days of intense fighting, they wiped out the limited gains the Allies had made towards Passchendaele. Tens of thousands of men were slaughtered in an utterly pointless few years of fighting. If you do ever visit Ypres, then I'd recommend Lyn Macdonald's book, but even if you cannot go to France and Belgium then read her book. It deserves a wide readership lest we forget the true horrors of what took place between 1914 and 1918

Related Reviews

Kershaw - To Hell and BackCockfield - With Snow on their Boots

Sherry - Empire and Revolution
Zurbrugg - Not Our War
Romains - Verdun

Dave Sherry - Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and the Festival of the Oppressed

I've already reviewed Dave Sherry's new book on the Russian Revolution for Socialist Worker, and I hope you'll read that in conjunction with these additional comments. Having read Sherry's book for a second time I wanted to add a few more thoughts.

As the centenary progresses, more and more books are being published. But Sherry's book is by far the best I've read. In part this is because he puts great emphasis on the role of ordinary people in the Revolution. But it is also because he gets across the grand sweep of events - the way in which the Revolution was a process, where things happened and peoples ideas changed. Political organisations that failed to grasp this, were unable to adapt to new circumstances lost their ability to shape things as their support vanished. Take this summary of the February events:

For the Mensheviks, years of mechanical adherence to the orthodox formula, that Russian socialism would have to wait until capitalism was fully developed and assumed complete political power, blinded them to the developing situation. Their attempt to half the revolution... left the Mensheviks into supporting the new capitalist government... The paradoxical character of the February Revolution, a bourgeois' revolution undertaken by workers and soldiers, brutally exposed the social weakness of the bourgeoisie, once the crutch of the Tsarist state had been knocked out from under it.

In a sense the Revolution fed itself. As workers and peasants collectively began to understand their immense power. The "act of ridding Russia of its monarchy gave people a sense of how society can be changed, and when the Provisional government refused to stop the war, it failed to stop the momentum for revolutionary change."

Sherry explains this process well, and shows how the Bolshevik party led by Lenin, were able to both shape and learn from the movement. This wasn't inevitable and the party almost made the same mistake as the Mensheviks in the post-February period. Sherry shows that Lenin's arrival in Russia in April led to a row that redirected the Bolshevik organisation towards workers' revolution. But crucially this could only happen because the Party was so rooted in working class organisations and struggles. It was the reality of revolution as experienced by the working class, principally in Petrograd, that meant Lenin's instincts were accepted by the bulk of the Bolshevik Party.

Towards the end of the book, after summarising the numerous revolutions and mass working class actions that have taken place world wide since 1917, Sherry reminds us that only the Russian Revolution in 1917 led on to a workers' state, albeit briefly. As he writes:

Without Lenin and the Bolsheviks it is inconceivable that a coalition of workers, soldiers and peasants would have taken power in 1917. The absence of revolutionary leadership and such a bold socialist workers' party in all the other revolutionary upheavals that have challenged capitalism through the last 100 years, explains why 1917 is unique. Times change but we can still learn from the past. That is why it is such a tragedy that Lenin's real legacy has been hidden or distorted by what passes for bourgeois scholarship.

And there has never been such a need for such revolutionary organisation. The Russian Revolution matters not because of historical curiosity, but because "it provides an alternative view of what is possible when society polarises and socialists organise to offer hope and unity in place of fear and division". If you only read one book on 1917 it should be this one, because these lessons are crucial today for a new generation of socialists. As Dave Sherry concludes:

Across the world there is a revolt against the people at the top of society - the one percent. It can go left or right and it is the job of all of us who want a better, safer world to shape it and pull it in a socialist direction.

Related Reviews on 1917

Smith - Russia in Revolution
Lenin - Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?
Serge - Year One of the Russian Revolution
Cliff - Lenin: All Power to the Soviets
Smith - Red Petrograd
Trotsky - Lessons of October

Related Reviews of books by Dave Sherry

Sherry - Empire and Revolution: A Socialist History of the First World War
Sherry - John Maclean
Sherry - Occupy!

Ian Kershaw - To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

Part one of Ian Kershaw's two volume history of Europe in the twentieth century covers some of the most violent and barbaric periods in humanity's history. In particular Kershaw looks at why the First World War led to the Second World War - arguing that there are three key factors in the period after the end of of World War One. These are the rise of nationalistic movements across Europe, the crisis of capitalism (which he notes many contemporaries, not just those on the left, saw as the final crisis of the system) and the class struggle, particularly in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

Kershaw's task then, is to argue why it was that in some countries fascist, or anti-democratic forces rose and in others they didn't. While Kershaw's history is readable and comprehensive (he never neglects events in countries that are not normally part of mainstream histories of Europe) he tends to deal with generalities that mean sometimes his analysis can seem shallow. One major problem I had was that Kershaw tends to lump the revolutionary left together with the anti-democratic practises of the far-right and fascist movements. This is because he argues they were both revolutionary movements dedicated to the over-through of the existing order and the creation of a new one. The problem with this analysis is that it assumes that the revolutionary organisation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia, and other movements across Europe were opposed to bourgeois democracy without having a democratic alternative - neglecting the revolutionary democracy of workers, soldiers, sailors and peasants councils and Soviets.

Kershaw is too good a historian to argue that Lenin led inevitably to Stalin, or that Stalin's view of socialism was the same as those of thousands of ordinary revolutionaries. But this weakness means that his only alternative to the totalitarian states that rose in Germany, Italy and Spain (and he includes Russia as well) was parliamentary democracy. Parliamentary democracy was of course something worth defending in the face of fascism (notably something the Bolsheviks did at the time of Kornilov in the summer of 1917) but it was also a system that filed millions of people - as Kershaw shows in his careful studies of the reality of life in the 1920s and 1930s for millions of people across Europe.

At specific points in the period Kershaw is discussing, there was the potential for the left to break out and build a revolutionary alternative, or at the least the beginnings of one. Kershaw notes that the best moments for this were when the revolutionary left (essentially the various Communist Parties) and the social democrats united against a common foe. He bemoans the failure to do that in German and notes how important it was to stopping the growth of fascism in France. But his lack of clarity on the limitations of Stalin's politics means that he sees this unity inevitably failing as the left cannot find common ground other than opposition to fascism.

These important criticisms aside, Kershaw never pretends to be writing a revolutionary socialist history of Europe. What he has written is however very useful as he covers enormous ground, from the changing role of women, to the growth of trade unionism, the repeated failure of capitalism to escape economic crisis as well as fascinating summaries of popular music and the importance of the growth of radio and so on. Readers who have a detailed knowledge of particular periods, or aspects of European history will no doubt find omissions, but in as a general introduction this book is very useful. It's worth noting that while painting a general picture across Europe, Kershaw never forgets the role of the individual, nor the impact of these events on ordinary people. There are many anecdotes, funny, inspiring or painful that illuminate the big changes taking place.

There are of courses places we will disgree. I think Kershaw is probably too soft on the failure of senior members of the Catholic Church, particularly the Pope, to condemn the Holocaust. I think he gives to much credit to the Pope and underestimates the importance that him speaking out would have had. That said, no reader will be able to read Kershaw's detailed discussion of the two world wars, the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, or the impact of ongoing economic crisis on ordinary people without drawing parallels with Europe today. As we once again see the rise of the far-right in many countries and ongoing economic crisis I would argue that we need to build a stronger revolutionary left capable of working with much wider forces to build the struggle for a socialist alternative to capitalism. Ian Kershaw wouldn't necessarily agree with me on that, but his book is one full of insights that will encourage the reader to think more widely on how we can defeat racism and fascism today.

Related Reviews

Kershaw - The End
Beevor - The Second World War

Jamie H. Cockfield - With Snow On Their Boots

The disintegration, mutiny and rebellion of Russia's troops on the Eastern Front was a central part of both the Russian Revolution and the ending of World War One. The soldiers, sick of the harsh conditions, the pointless battles, the lack of ammunition and supplies as well as the vicious discipline of the Imperial Army, refused to fight en-masse. Their rebellion helped drive the Revolution as the government that followed the fall of the Tsar refused to end the war.

But a less well known story, which follows a similar path, is the tale of the Russian Expeditionary Force that fought in France on the Western Front. Jamie Cockfield's book is the first recent book that I have found on this topic, though there are frequent references to the rebellion in accounts of 1917, such as Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution.

The presence of thousands of Russian troops in France from 1916 has its origins in the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two nations. France lacked manpower to fight in the trenches, particularly after the mincing machine of Verdun. Russia on the other hand had an enormous population but lacked the material resources to fight the Germans in the East. One Russian soldier who eventually made it back to Russia in the 1920s called his memoirs of his regiment's time in France as "Sold for Shells", an apt description of the transfer of men for munitions that took place. Of course, there was more to it than a simple economic transaction. Cockfield's book details the complex diplomatic discussions that preceded the embarkation of nearly 20,000 troops. Russia wanted to demonstrate its commitment to the war effort, and France hoped that the presence of Russian soldiers would demonstrate the broad coalition that was committed to fighting Germany. 400,000 troops were promised by the Russians though only two groups embarked. The differences in these two brigades' origins had a fundamental impact upon what took place on French soil.

Thus the arrival of the Russian troops was met with parades, flag waving and speeches that extolled the brotherhood of the allies. Yet even early on in their arrival in France, the Russian troops were typically neglected. During their involvement in one of the most brutal and vicious of the battles of the Western Front, the Nivelle Offensive, the Russian soldiers proved brave and tenacious combatants, officers and men winning medals for bravery and sacrifice. But the military disaster of this offensive led to an enormous mutiny in the French army, which was infected by a collective desire to stop fighting.

The Russian units too rebelled. Isolated from both the French army and events in Russia they had little idea what was taking place. But lack of supplies, conditions at the front and the horror of the war fed the propaganda they were beginning to receive from leftist Russian exiles in France. The (mistaken) belief that they were accorded second rate rations and medical care by the French also helped feed rebellion. Another important factor was that the Russians were still under the discipline that they would have experienced in the East. Their officers were rude and occasionally violent. In the early days of their arrival in France, angry soldiers had actually killed a Russian officer and control had only been reasserted by the imprisonment of several and the shooting of other ringleaders.

In a theme that was to become a key part of the French authorities concerns, the mutiny in the French Army was blamed on the negative influence of the Russians. As Cockfield stresses, "the blame for it fell, however, not on the real causes but on the innocent Russian bridages that had fought so well in Champagne.... It became convenient, therefore, to blame the Russians."

Yet there was clearly something taking place in the Russian units. The soldiers were organising, and their methods of organizing bore striking similarities to what was taking place in Russia. "On May 10 [1917] the radicals ordered new elections for a series of committees, one deputy for every fifty men and a separate Soviet of Officers' Deputies." Cockfield points out that an observer of the Russian army was "stupefied" that the "revolutionary methods adopted by the soldiers in Russia had been accepted so quickly". The troops went further than elections, with the Third Brigade acquiring its own printing press and publishing a newspaper.

The actions of agitators clearly had an effect. A newspaper influenced by Trotsky in exile had poured in revolutionary propaganda. But Cockfield notes that in the most radical of the two brigades, the First, most of the men were from Moscow factories and would have had experience, or at least knowledge, of the Bolsheviks' arguments during the 1905 revolution. The other brigade was mostly men from peasant areas who were more isolated from such rebellious ideas.

For their mutiny, the Russians were isolated and dispersed, as the rebellion grew and the refusal to fight continued the soldiers grew more confident. As the Kerensky government continued the war, and then the Bolshevik uprising began the presence of the troops went from being an embarrassment to the French to a major problem. For the revolutionaries in Russia it was a superb opportunity to make propaganda. Cockfield suggests that the Bolsheviks exaggerated stories of hardship, hunger and deprivation among the troops, though he also acknowledges they experienced real difficulties.

Eventually the refusal of the Russian troops to disarm led to military confrontation. Though cleverly, the French used the most loyal Russian troops in the Third Brigade against those in the First. After several days of shelling, and a handful of casualties (Cockfield says that later claims by the Bolsheviks that 100s died have no evidence) the soldiers gave in, to face more imprisonment while the authorities debated what to do. Cockfield notes though, that "notes of the ministry of foreign affairs, rather details before and very detailed afterward are nonexistent for the three days of the battle."

With the armistice on the Eastern Front, the troops had further arguments to refuse to fight. After all, why should they take up arms while no other Russian was still in the war. Some soldiers were given work in France, others remained in camps or were shipped to the Middle East. Those troops were were loyal and wanted to fight, did so, and eventually went on to form a small (but ineffective) core to the French intervention against the Russian Revolution in Russia. The shelling of Russians by Russians forming, for Cockfield, "a dress rehearsal for the Russian Civil War."

Eventually most of the Russians made it home, though many did not, and many were trapped in France. Cockfield meticulous history of this strange military and revolutionary episode details much of the rebellion and the lives of the soldiers. Those interested in the Russian Revolution will find much of interest here, not least the parallels in rebellion. The book is marred, in my opinion, by Cockfield's tirades against the Bolsheviks and their Revolution. While being scrupulously fair to those soldiers who are his subject, his accounts of the situation in Russia drifts, on occasion, into anti-Bolshevik propaganda. Writing of those who infiltrated France to ferment rebellion, Cockfield suggests that "many were by now Russian Leftists of some sort who were prostituting themselves for German gold, as Lenin did, and held little if any real allegiance to specific Bolshevik ideology."

Such statements ill-become a work of serious history and will certainly annoy readers who are more sympathetic to the Revolution and have knowledge of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Nonetheless, even with this personal bias, Cockfield captures the mood of those who hated the Revolution. At the surrender of the rebel First Brigade, an American General told another commander, "I did not believe, general, that you would get rid of this bunch of lice so elegantly."

While I also disagree with Jamie Cockfield's analysis of the Russian Revolution, I do recommend this book to those people who are trying to understand the Russian Revolution and find out the real history of World War One. The story of mass, armed rebellion on the Western Front among Russian (and French) troops is unlikely to appear in many commemorative books and programs. But it is a story that should be told, if only to remember those 1000s of Russian men, trapped in France, who only wanted to return home.

Related Reviews

Stone - The Eastern Front
Sherry - Empire & Revolution: A socialist history of the First World War

Rosa Luxemburg - The Junius Pamphlet

Rosa Luxemburg's Junius Pamphlet was written between February and April 1915 while the author was imprisoned for her anti-war agitation. It was smuggled out, but not published, Luxemburg finding it on her desk when she was released in January 1916. The pamphlet is an extraordinarily powerful work. It begins by describing how quickly the scene has been transformed, from the wild joy and celebration at the outbreak of war, to the sullen acceptance at the slaughter in the trenches a few months later. And as the soldiers die in their thousands, companies make fortunes from providing the food, clothing and weapons for the war "while profits are springing, like weeds, from the fields of the dead".

But this is much more than an anti-war pamphlet in which Rosa Luxemburg does two things. She tries to explain the origins of the war, describing in detail the Imperialist system but also why German Social Democracy, the most powerful and developed socialist organisation of workers in the world surrendered so readily at the outbreak of hostilities.

Luxemburg warns that the world has changed, there is no return to the pre-war situation for socialists and revolutionaries. Interestingly, this is very similar to Lenin's position taken around the Zimmerwald conferences.

"It is a foolish delusion to believe that we need to only live through the war, as a rabbit hides under the bush to await the end of a thunderstorm, to trot merrily off in his old accustomed gait when all is over. The world war has changed the condition of our struggle, and has changed us most of all."

Luxemburg traces the origins of the war in the development of capitalism. Much like Lenin and Bukharin used the outbreak of the war to clarify their understanding of Imperialism, Luxemburg's Junius Pamphlet explains the logic of imperialism through analysing Germany's historic development. In particular she notes the importance of "two naval bills" which promote a different era of politics, a "change from Bismarckian continental policies to 'Welt Politik'." She notes that once the decision was made to build and expand a German navy, war was inevitable, "The naval bill of December 11, 1899 was a declaration of war by Germany, which England answered on August 4, 1914."

But Luxemburg's analsysis is more than a simple argument that Germany was competing with England for markets and resources,

"It should be noted that this fight for naval supremacy had nothing in common with the economic rivalry for the world market.... Side by side with England, one nation after another had stepped into the world market, capitalism developed automatically, and with gigantic strides, into world economy."

Britain and Germany were, Luxemburg argues, interdependent, but

"When Germany unfolded its banner of naval power and world policies it announced the desire for new and far reaching conquest in the world by German imperialism... Naval building and military armaments becmae the glorious business of Germany industry, opening up a boundless prospect for further operations by trust and bank capital in the whole wide world."

Luxemburg analyses this linking up between state and capital through he study of Turkey in which Germany had poured large amounts of investment into in the later half of the 19th century. The German banks loaning money to build harbours and railways, tying Turkey's exports into German companies and forcing the countryside to pay rent for the privilege of this development, since industry was not advanced enough to pay the debt.

Luxemburg's understanding of the development of late capitalism rested on the way that the advanced capitalist nations required the under-developed world to absorb surplus value. It's a position that has been critiqued since by other Marxists. However it is not a major flaw in this work which seeks to try and understand the origins of the world war within a clash of states fighting to carve up the world in the interests of their home-grown capital.

The second half of this book is a polemic deployed against the arguments of German social democracy in their support for the war. Luxemburg tackles these positions powerfully, showing how the leaders of the socialist left use half-remembered quotes from Marx and Engels to argue that their was a duty to fight Tsarist Russia. But in doing so, they undermine and set back the growing Russian working class movement. The world of Imperialism is very different from the world of 19th century Europe when Russia could be considered the prison house of nations.

The betrayal of German socialist movement (and indeed that of most of Europe) still has the power to shock. Knowing now what we know of the Somme, Verdun and the rest of the slaughter is to view the betrayal with hindsight. But even in the first weeks of the war, Luxemburg understood how rotten German socialism had become. Take this quote from a newspaper of the German SPD. Note that this was an organisation that still claimed the inheritance of Marx and Engels.

“As for us, we are convinced that our labour unionists can do more than deal out blows. Modern mass armies have by no means simplified the work of their generals. It is practically impossible to move forward large troop divisions in close marching order under the deadly fire of modern artillery. Ranks must be carefully widened, must be more accurately controlled. Modern warfare requires discipline and clearness of vision not only in the divisions but in every individual soldier. The war will show how vastly human material has been improved by the educational work of the labour unions, how well their activity will serve the nation in these times of awful stress. The Russian and the French soldier may be capable of marvellous deeds of bravery. But in cool, collected consideration none will surpass the German labour unionists. Then too, many of our organised workers know the ways and byways of the borderland as well as they know their own pockets, and not a few of them are accomplished linguists. The Prussian advance in 1866 has been termed a schoolmasters’ victory. This will be a victory of labour union leaders”

It is no surprise then, that the Junius Pamphlet ends with a call for revolution. Though Luxemburg, unlike Lenin, avoids calling for the defeat of her own ruling class. Instead calling for neither victory nor defeat. While the difference is slight, it perhaps reflects the different emphasis of the two revolutionaries, as well as their different experience of reformist socialist organisation. Luxemburg writes that

"For war as such, whatever its military outcome may be, is the greatest conceivable defeat of the cause of the European proletariat. The overthrow of war and the speedy forcing of peace, but the international revolutionary action of the proletariat, alone can bring it to the only possible victory."

While praising the book, Lenin critiqued a number of aspects of the Junius Pamphlet in a review which all readers of the booklet should also read. In particular he noted that "Junius" (he wasn't aware of the real identity of the author) abandons internationalism in favour of a "national programme" when suggesting how revolutionaries should have acted in 1914. Lenin argues that the problem is that the author hasn't broken completely from the old organisation.

"Junius has not completely rid himself of the “environment” of the German Social-Democrats, even the Lefts, who are afraid of a split, who are afraid to follow revolutionary slogans to their logical conclusions. This is a mistaken fear, and the Left Social-Democrats of Germany must and will rid themselves of it. They will do so in the course of the struggle against the social-chauvinists."

This meant that "Junius" panders to their politics.

"Secondly, Junius apparently wanted to achieve something in the nature of the Menshevik “theory of stages,” of sad memory; he wanted to begin to carry out the revolutionary programme from the end that is “more suitable,” “more popular” and more acceptable to the petty-bourgeoisie. It is something like the plan “to outwit history,” to outwit the philistines. He seems to say: surely, nobody would oppose a better way of defending the real fatherland; that real fatherland is the Great German Republic, and the best defence is a militia, a permanent parliament, etc. Once it was accepted, that programme would automatically lead to the next stage-to the socialist revolution."

In other words, Lenin thought that "Junius" was influenced by the very pressures that had set the SPD down the road of supporting the war in the first place, i.e. the concerns about being pushed outside of the legal methods of operating for socialists, fear of losing parliamentary influence etc.

Lenin's had of course spotted Luxemburg's greatest mistake. For all her brilliance, she hadn't yet broken with the errors of the old SPD. - though she was on that road with the call for a "New International". Lenin finishes his review with this point.

"Probably, it was reasoning of this kind that consciously or semi-consciously determined Junius’ tactics. Needless to say, such reasoning is fallacious, Junius’ pamphlet conjures up in our mind the picture of a lone man who has no comrades in an illegal organisation accustomed to thinking out revolutionary slogans to their conclusion and systematically educating the masses in their spirit. But this shortcoming—it would be a grave error to forget this-is not Junius’ personal failing, but the result of the weakness of all the German Lefts, who have become entangled in the vile net of Kautskyist hypocrisy, pedantry and “friendliness” towards the opportunists. Junius’ adherents have managed in spite of their isolation to begin the publication of illegal leaflets and to start the war against Kautskyism. They will succeed in going further along the right road."

In the Theses on the Tasks of International Social Democracy included with the Junius Pamphlet and adopted by Luxemburg and her comrades, the revolutionaries understand that the key task was to fight for the overthrow of capitalism. Their opportunity would come in November 1918 with the outbreak of the German Revolution.

Related Reviews

Luxemburg - Reform or Revolution
Luxemburg - The Mass Strike
Sherry - Empire and Revolution: a Socialist History of World War One
Nation - War on War
Campbell - A Rebels' Guide to Rosa Luxemburg

R. Craig Nation - War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left and the Origins of Communist Internationalism

Most of this book deals with the machinations of a tiny number of socialists during World War One. The anti-war socialists who gathered in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald on September 5th 1915 represented few others. Many years afterwards in his autobiography Leon Trotsky joked that "half a century after the formation of the First International it was still possible to fit all the internationalists in Europe into four coaches."

Before the outbreak of World War One, the international socialist movement, united in the Second International, had promised strikes, mass opposition and rebellion against the war. Instead they almost completely capitulated and supported their nation states. Overnight, the Second International turned into a toothless beast. Most of its constituent groups supported their own ruling class' role in the slaughter of the trenches. Those individual members who didn't were in no way united in how their opposition to the conflict should manifest itself. There were those that supported a defensive war, those who wanted to issue the simple demand for "peace" and those, like Lenin, who argued that the war needed to be turned into "a civil war" that could overthrow capitalism.

Nation's book is tremendously important, because he shows how Lenin's political clarity and firmness of action was able to create a very small, but important, Zimmerwald Left. Lenin hoped that this would become the basis for a new, revolutionary, Third International. The author explains,

"Lenin's response to the crisis stood out for its forcefulness and consistency. The Bolsheviks were not a sect, and with a unified organization, emigre cadres dispersed throughout the European continent, and a foreign bureau in neutral Switzerland at the nerve center of what would become the socialist antiwar movement, they were well placed to serve as a goad to radical elements elsewhere."

Lenin and his closest allies believed that the war would lead to revolution. His orientation on the Zimmerwald movement through 1915 and until the Russian Revolution was because he saw the importance of a clear revolutionary vision.

"The war's origins were perceived to lie in the contradictions of advanced capitalism. What was unfolding was not a contest for culture or democracy, but a predatory war of imperialism. The International's surrender to nationalism was considered to be a direct consequence of revisionism; at issue was not merely a tactical choice, but the long-term orientation of the socialist labor movement. Internationalism was essential to the meaning of socialism and its premises demanded that the war be opposed by rejecting the Burgfrieden [a truce between the left and the ruling class for the duration of the war] and supporting popular protest actions. Most important, the struggle against the war must be linked to the restoration of an authentically revolutionary Marxism".

Lenin's opponents in the Zimmerwald movement saw it differently. They hoped for a negotiated piece and saw the conference as an opportunity to rebuild what had been lost, to return to the pre-war comfort of the Second International. A secondary aim from the moderates "was to neutralize the extreme left". This obviously contrasted with the aim of Lenin and his supporters who were "outspoken in demanding a clean break with the compromised past."

The major difference was the attitude to the demand for peace. This, for the majority of those involved in Zimmerwald, had to be the key demand. The central organising figure, the Swiss socialist Robert Grimm wrote to a leading Russian Menshevik in May 1915, "Nothing can be achieved through the official parties [but a] conference of opposition elements naturally does not mean a split. In my opinion it should concern itself only with the establishment of a tactical line for the struggle against the war."

Grimm and the majority socialists betrayed their hesitancy by rejecting calls for "mass actions". In this they were following the right-wing of the movement who were fearful of undermining their nation states' ability to fight the war. Instead, abstract demands for peace, where the key demand. Grimm called for the participation of "all parties or factions" that "support the renewal or continuation of the class struggle, oppose the Burgfrieden, and are ready to take up the struggle for peace." Responding to this, Zinoviev, a close ally of Lenin insisted that "theoretical clarity is more important than the question of peace".

This sounds strange, after all, peace surely was the aim of the anti-war left in the midst of the carnage of World War One? But Lenin, Zinoviev and their allies were looking forwards. Their analysis was that the war would lead to revolution, and the demand for peace was a abstract slogan that could mean anything to anyone. What they wanted was an end to war, and this meant the end of capitalism. This meant turning the imperial war into a revolutionary war of the oppressed classes against the ruling class. On this point turned all the debates at Zimmerwald. The left lost all the votes, but Lenin created in the process a Zimmerwald Left that was able to become the nucleus of a larger force in the struggles to come.

Nation explains the Zimmerwald process and the follow up conference at Kiental meant that,

"The revolutionary left, though still an isolated minority was infused with new confidence. In a number of cases pressures led to outright schisms and the creation of independent Zimmerwaldist or left radical parties. In France the minoritaires were on the verge of winning control of the part from Within. The Zimmerwald Left seldom entered directly into the disintegration of traditional organizations, but its arguments were influential. In every significant national movement a left radical faction aligned with Lenin's position had come into being well prior to the fall of the czar."

These small groups were to become the essential basis for the Third International when it was launched in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, as well as, in some cases, the revolutionary struggles that gripped Europe in the same period. Again Nation explains,

"International communism did not spring from the 'accident' of revolution, nor was it ever a simple extension of the Bolsheviks' fight to seize and maintain state power. Its roots lay in the left opposition's reaction to the socialist collapse of 1914 and the international movement of protest against the war that followed."

"As the self-declared precursor of the third International, the Zimmerwald Left accomplished several meaningful; steps forward... it established a political identify and made itself a part of the landscape on the international left... By 1917 Lenin could claim to speak for a small but dynamic tendency with the capacity to grow."

That said, the groups were small and in some of the key battles were to prove hopelessly inadequate. This book is an excellent explanation of the importance the Zimmerwald process and Lenin's theoretical and organisational contribution to this. Indeed the author celebrates the clarity of thought of Lenin in understanding both the needs of the revolutionary movement and the potential for revolution. When revolution broke out in 1917 in Russia, Zimmerwald did not become irrelevant. The book shows how the organisation played an important role in spreading the message of revolution, as well as giving the Bolsheviks' an opportunity (both before and after October) of getting their message out to the rest of the world. 

This is an important study and for readers trying to understand the dynamics of the opposition to World War One I would suggest it is an essential read. But it is not without fault.

Firstly I think the author underestimates the scale of revolution at the end of World War One. He writes that in April 1917 it was still possible for Lenin "to consider the arrival of the European revolution as imminent" but that by the time of Brest-Litovsk this expectation had to be abandoned. This might be fair, but it misses the point that within months revolution had broken out in Germany and mass movements, Soviets and workers' councils were erected in many different countries. Yet Nation dismisses the German Revolution in barely a couple of pages, suggesting it ended in January 1919 without noting that it wasn't completely defeated until 1923, and, as a number of authors have shown, the revolutionary movement on occasion came close to victory.

Secondly I think Nation has a simplistic understanding of the politics of the revolutionaries. It is simply not true to suggest that "International communism was built upon the conviction, enunciated by Gerrard Winstanley centuries before and by Leonhard Frank in his passionate antiwar novel Man is Good during 1918, that war was only the ultimate expression of man's inhumanity to man." The politics of the Third International rested on the work of Marx and Engels, in particular the idea that "the emancipation of the working class had to be the act of the working class".

In his short summary of the work of the Third International, Nation again betrays his ignorance. For instance he doesn't see how the Comintern attempted to develop new ways of relating to the ebb and flow of revolutionary struggle, in particular, the theory of the United Front. For Nation the Third International was simply an international group modeled on Lenin's Bolsheviks that could centrally steer the constituent parties. Here, and elsewhere, Nation fails to clearly explain the break that took place between the revolutionary movement of the Bolsheviks and later Communist Parties from the Stalin era onward.

From Wikipedia: Coloured lithography of the Hotel
"Beau Séjour" in Zimmerwald, where the delegates lived.

Finally the author attempts in a postscript chapter to link the revolutionary movements of the early 21st century to the state of the Communist Parties of the world in 1989 when the book was first published. Hindsight is of course always very clear, and I doubt this book would have been written in the same way after the Berlin Wall had come down.

But Nation fails to grasp the rupture that took place between the revolutionary internationalism of Lenin and the first few years of the Third International with the politics of Stalin and Socialism in One Country. In places the author comes close to suggesting that this began with Lenin. While Lenin and the Bolsheviks certainly had "no choice" but to work to ensure the survival of the Russian Revolution in the face of the failure of the German Revolution, this was far from a decision to "to coexist with the capitalist world system".

Finally Nation dismisses Lenin's ideas of revolutionary organisation in the modern world and instead suggests that what is really important today is Lenin's "priority accorded to the 'utopian' ideals of visionary internationalism and of socialism itself as ethical norms, sources of motivation and standards for political conduct." Given what Lenin's Bolsheviks achieved this seems a rather limited ambition.

These conclusions are a shame, because Nation's book is mostly an excellent introduction to the Lenin's method, based on his Marxist politics. The summary of Lenin's actions, the historical importance of Zimmerwald and the Zimmerwald Left and the writings of Lenin during this period are ones that revolutionaries today can learn much from and Nation does an excellent job of explaining them. I would suggest that readers don't bother with the final postscript, but enjoy the in depth study of a period that the author, rightly, considers to be central to the shaping of the 20th century world and modern revolutionary movement.

Related Reviews

Sherry - Empire and Revolution: A socialist history of World War One
Zurbrugg - Not Our War: Writings Against the First World War
Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade
Cliff - All Power to the Soviets

Dave Sherry - Empire and Revolution: A socialist history of the First World War

As we mark the centenary of the start of the First World War there are any number of books that tell us the slaughter was inevitable, justified, or simply a terrible mistake. Dave Sherry's Empire and Revolution is one of the few that argues exactly the opposite. Sherry argues that the war should not have happened, because the mass socialist parties that existed in Europe prior to the war had the power to prevent it. He points out that the war had its roots in the very nature of capitalism. Most importantly, he says that the war ended not because of military victory, or because of the economic superiority of one side or the other. Rather, through mutiny, rebellion, strikes and revolution, ordinary people in all the belligerent nations, in uniform or in the workplace, had made it impossible for the ruling classes to continue the war.

Firstly the betrayal. The start of World War One was no great surprise. All the left political organisations knew it was on the horizon. Sherry even quotes Frederich Engels back in 1887 predicting a European war in which "Eight to ten million soldiers will slaughter each other and devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts".

In countless meetings of trade unions, and socialist groups, workers passed anti-war motions. International conferences and national bodies declared for general strikes in the event of war. Yet when it came to it, the vast majority of "official" socialism decided to back their nation state. The greatest betrayal was the German SPD, but our own Labour Party bares its own weight of responsibility. As Dave Sherry writes, despite being allied with the despotic Russian Tsar, the British Labour Party argued it was a war for democracy (even though there was a greater franchise in Germany that in Britain).

"Ramsay MacDonald was a pacifist and when he voiced doubts about the conflict he was deposed by the patriotic trade union bureaucracy and replaced by Arthur Henderson. In 1915 Henderson was rewarded with a cabinet post... It was Henderson who arranged the 1915 Treasury Agreement, by which the unions abandoned many of their defences, including the right to strike."

Ben Tillet, the famous, dockers' leader even toured the country encouraging recruitment, "In a strike I am for my class, right or wrong; in a war I am for my country, right or wrong".

Sherry argues that the support for the war among the populations of the different country was varied. Initially there was euphoria among some, though this didn't tend to be in the working class districts. Many workers were encouraged by the bosses to join up, others joined up because they would get no unemployment relief if they didn't, "Want and Hunger are, unfortunately... the invisible recruiting sergeants of a great portion of our army" wrote the UKs National Service League.

Once the scale of the slaughter became apparent and shortages begun to bite, many immediately protested. One of the great strengths of Sherry's book is that he brings out how the anti-war movement great, often in parallel, in many different countries. In Russia, Germany, Italy, Britain, France and Austria, within a few years of the war starting, there were protests, strikes and mass meetings against hunger, housing shortages, rents, low pay as well as enlistment. Far from all being in it together, the majority of people were suffering badly, and as the killing continued, the anger grew.

Few commentators at the moment dare to remember that it was the Revolution in Russia that brought the war to an end of the Eastern Front. Sherry tells us the story of how Lenin's Bolsheviks went from being a small, but politically clear group, to a mass working class party through their anti-war agitation and their involvement in the movements during the war. But he also details the mass strikes that erupted in Vienna, Glasgow and countless other places, and crucially, Sherry devotes a section to the German situation.

In 1917-1918 "more than two million soldiers deserted in what one German researcher in the 1920s called 'the hidden military strike'." This was accompanied by growing unrest on the home front, strikes and mutinies. It was the rank and file in the army who "built 10,000 revolutionary soldiers' councils" who helped the the First World War.

But this book is more than the story of how the old left failed to prevent the war and a new, revolutionary left, brought it to an end. Dave Sherry also discusses the revolt in the trenches, the role of Empire and the colonial experience. While I felt this section could have been developed further, Sherry does make it clear that the war was not only fought by the capitalist nations with the aim of expanding colonies and empires, but also required the use of those colonies to continue. By 1918, for instance, one million Indian troops were serving in the "major" theatres of the war. Sherry quotes the historian Robert Holland who points out that this meant, "The true worth of the Indian army to Britain lay in its reserve role that allowed British troops to be diverted to France from East Africa, Palestine and Egypt."

When troops from the Caribbean arrived in France they experienced racism, being forced to work as ancillaries and support troops. When they returned home they became part of mass anti-colonial movements. The best socialists understood that the war was being fought to subjugate the people of the world into the various Empires. Indeed, in the aftermath of the conflict, Britain added millions of square miles to its territories.

Sherry concludes the book by arguing that learning the true history of the war is not just to celebrate those who opposed it. But to learn the lessons of their victories and defeats to build a movement against the capitalist system that breeds war, racism and imperialism. He contrasts how in February 1917, the Bolsheviks in Russia at 20,000 cadres. In Germany, the revolution that lost, there were barely 3000 revolutionaries, ones who "had no united organisation, no tradition of working within a common discipline, no way of arriving at an agreed strategy or tactics". Dave Sherry's book then is important for learning the truth about what happened between 1914 and 1918. But it is also an essential tool in trying to build socialist organisation today.

Related Reviews

Sherry - John Maclean: Red Clydesider
Zurbrugg - Not Our War: Writings Against the First World War
Sherry - Occupy! A Short History of Workers' Occupations