LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

From Cameron Hazlehurst, Cyril Ray, Ian Harvey, Sarah Gainham and others.

Historians at war

Sir: The aim of Politicians at War, is to describe and explain the first stages of Lloyd George's wartime ascent to the premiership. I did not set out to write a general political history of the war. Rather, with the emergence of Lloyd George as the major under- lying theme, I first examined how and why Britain declared war on Germany. Then, as was pointed out in my prefatory note, the book 'illustrates some of the polit- ical developments of the autumn and winter of 1914-15, and investig- ates the coming of coalition in May 1915.'

Politicians at War is neither biography nor what Dr Patrick Cosgrave (sPEcrATort, April 3) dismisses as 'pure political history.' Still less does the book purport to be what Dr Cosgrave calls 'the real history of the real war.' If I had been writing books about the disintegration of the Liberal party, or the military and diplomatic history of the war, or indeed a biography of Lloyd George, the sources and structure of the works would have been very different. As it is, whatever light (or dark- ness) is cast on these subjects is incidental to the book's main pur- poses.

Dr Cosgrave is evidently much distressed about my book. If I have understood him correctly, his complaint is that Politicians at War is an unoriginal, though none- theless dangerous, discussion of a non-subject. To put it more suc- cintly: what is right isn't new; what is new is wrong. According to him I have either not read or not understood the documents from which 'the true story' must be reconstructed.

Dr Cosgrave's idea of what con- stitutes 'the true story' is first stated with somewhat bashful arbitrariness: it is 'the military— or, so to speak, the "real" —history of the war and, as part of this, the history of the central direction of the war, the Supreme Command and the diplomacy of the period.' But, having displayed a commen- dable hesitancy about so bold a pronouncement, Dr Cosgrave pro- ceeds to discard the protecting quotation marks which enveloped the concept of 'real' history. He seeks to proclaim the 'true' history and to proscribe a heresy. Unfortunately, the whole of his onslaught rests on a misconcep- tion of the nature of the source material available to students of early twentieth-century British history. Dr Cosgrave argues that there are 'two main sorts of material to be examined' by any- one writing about politics and war in 1914-15. This, in itself, is a grossly misleading oversimplifica- tion. In practice, the attempt to enumerate two sorts of material collapses as soon as Dr Cosgrave begins. The 'political story', he tells us, is to be found in 'basically the Cabinet and associated papers and the private collections of politicians.' But the 'real history' of the war, as he defines it, is revealed in 'the papers of the Cabinet and the Committee of Imperial Defence . . . along with the great Foreign Office archives.'

By saying that the Cabinet papers and the CID papers (pre- sumably these count as 'associated papers') are essential to both of his kinds of history, Dr Cosgrave destroys the very case he is trying to establish. For the only source uniquely appropriate to the so- called 'real' history thus appears to be 'the great Foreign Office archives.' There is, astonishingly, no reference to the Admiralty, War Office, Treasury, Board of Trade, Colonial Office, and other important departmental records. And, the War Council, the effective controlling authority on war policy from 25 November 1914 onwards, is not mentioned anywhere in Dr Cosgrave's polemic.

If all that he were advocating was that what he describes as 'the central, interlinking, public archive' should be studied by all scholars interested in the conduct of the war, there would be little disagreement between us. (In addi- tion to the items cited in the biblio- graphy, Politicians at War is underpinned by an unadvertised acquaintance with material in the Foreign Office, Admiralty, War Office, Colonial Office, and other records which were not strictly relevant to the subjects treated.) But Dr Cosgrave's argument goes further. There are, he would have us believe, certain mysteries about the use of diplomatic and military archives into which 'the average political historian' is not initiated.

The fundamental error in the 'real history' doctrine is the belief that there is a clear distinction between 'the private papers of government politicians' and 'the papers dealing with the practical problems which the war brought.' This strange dogma might have appeared to have a fraction of credibility if Dr Cosgrave had pro- duced a single significant example in which 'the papers' make the conclusions of Politicians at War untenable.

Dr Cosgrave does offer one prolonged demonstration of 'the real force of the complaint that Dr Hazlehurst has failed to read— or, if he has read, has failed to understood—the papers.' The trouble is that his example does not come from 'the papers' at all. It is a silly complaint that I make no reference to an incident during Grey's speech to the House of Commons on 3 August 1914. The incident has frequently been dis- cussed by historians; it adds no point of substance to my story and I deliberately left it out. Dr Cosgrave actually gives a tenden- tious version of what happened; and the conclusion about Grey's dishonesty which he labours to prove with this episode i exactly the conclusion to be found in Politicians at War.

The rest of Dr Cosgrave's argu- ments all in different ways illus- trate the powerful miasmic force of the 'true history.' Dealing with Sir Edward Grey for example, he writes: 'Dr Hazlehurst records the fact that Grey gave a wholly mis- leading account of his interview with the German Ambassador at the Cabinet of 31 July. ...' However, according to Dr Cos- grave, I fail `to make anything' of this fact and also of Grey's apparent suppression of some later German proposals.

As it happens, the 'face that I record is that Asquith (not Grey) gave a misleading account of the Foreign Secretary's telegraphic exchange with the British Ambas-

sador in Berlin (not an 'interview with the German Ambassador'). Moreover, so far from making nothing of this 'fact' I place it in the appropriate part of a narrative which demonstrates that after 29 July 1914 Grey 'directed his efforts to bracing his colleagues for the worst.' But the most important point of all is that this particular 'fact' could not have been found in the Foreign Office archives, or in any other part of the Public Records. The information comes from the diary of a cabinet min- ister, Jack Pease, one of those sources which Dr Cosgrave dis- misses as 'the papers of minor figures, distant from the centre of decision.' In speaking about 'an interview with the German Am- bassador' Dr Gosgrave unwittingly reproduces a part of Pease's hurried account which is obviously a mistake. But he fails to acknow- ledge the valuable information which the diary does contain.

What Dr Cosgrave does not admit, or perhaps has not yet dis- covered, is that there are many subjects on which the massive Public Records provide little or partial enlightenment. Many documents have been removed by ministers from their official papers; much vital discussion and decision- making was never formally recorded. To take two subjects with which Dr Cosgrave himself is no doubt familiar: no complete account of how Britain went to war with Turkey, or of the genesis in 1914-15 of alternative strategic plans for eastern campaigns, could ever be written from official files alone.

Before he ventures to propose his own revisions to accepted notions about war politics, Dr Cos- grave must first make sure that he knows what those he criticises have actually written. What, it may be asked, is his evidence for the statement that Politicians at War presents a picture of Britain 'slipping into war by accident'? Which 'crucial quotations for the early part of the story' come from Lord Lansdowne's later letters? Where, in my account of the com- ing of war, is 'Asquith's emotional dependence on Venetia Stanley emphasised to the exclusion of almost everything else'? Which books or documents will remedy the ignorance resulting from the 'fact' that 'Dr Hazlehurst has not read enough to enable him to get to know that dry, cynical, arro- gant, lawyer's mind at its best'?

When Dr Cosgrave comes to thinking about his own ideas he might attempt to explain why the extraordinarily misleading and superficial views of Lord Eustace Percy (who was twenty-six and a Third Secretary at the British Em- bassy in Washington in 1914) should be thought to be so much more helpful a guide to 'the real problem of war management' than the opinions recorded in the papers of the war managers themselves.

One day Dr Cosgrave may pub- lish important contributions to our understanding of early twentieth- century British history. But he will do little service either to history or to . himself until he explores more thoroughly the political world of Asquithian Britain, and until he begins to write more charitably about those with whom he dis- agrees.