'EAR more than any other year before or since was
this the punctuation-mark of the twentieth- century,' writes Mr. James Cameron in the pre- face to 1914; and he has had the good idea of compiling a sort of historical scrapbook about it though perhaps 'scrapbook' does less than Justice to the intelligence and discrimination Which he has brought to his task.
suspect that most people are more readily interested in the recent past than in any other Part of history; it has the irresistible fascination of those old newspapers which one sometimes comes across, when packing, in the bottom of suitcases. It is, or anyhow it seems, easier to understand and to find our way about in than earlier periods, for we know already something about it, if only by hearsay: while if we actually lived through it we take a queer, proprietary Pride in the story of events which were landmarks In our youth or childhood, and are amused rather than disconcerted to find how widely our (as it were) personal versions of them differ from What actually happened.
It is one of Mr. Cameron's great virtues that he writes about 1914 with an underlying sym- Pathy for the characters on his crowded canvas and a deep sense of the tragedy in which they Were involved. Although many of the events he Chronicles were ludicrous or unbecoming, he re- fuses to treat the past as if it was something that the cat had brought in; his manner is mercifully tree from condescension, and the faits divers with Which he illustrates the main thread of his narra- tive are fairly chosen, for they help to bring the Period to life and are not merely thrown in as comic relief. He has done, in short, a good job.
It is a moot point, and one on which Mr. Cameron does not touch, whether there was more Muddle in 1914 than there was in 1939; but there was certainly more illusion. The First War took Britain by surprise, bursting on a tar from united country out of the cloudless Bank Holiday blue; it was not until the last days of July, 1914, that the newspapers gave prominence 10 a contingency which in 1939 had been in the headlines, on and off, for many anxious months. Kitchener was almost alone in foreseeing a long War (the Schlieffen plan was based partly on its author's belief that `no Power could possibly conduct a modern war for more than a week or two.), and in the leading echelons of the BEF, Which crossed the Channel early in August, officers were obsessed with the fear that they would be left out of the hunt. The misapprehensions
entertained during the Phoney War included none on quite this scale.
Yet there are certain curious similarities between the first acts of both tragedies (that of the second must be extended into the summer of 1940, after the war had ceased to be phoney). The same spy-fever led to the same wholesale round- ing up of aliens, some of whom in both wars were driven to suicide; but in 1939-40 xenophobia produced no consequences quite so sensational as the enforced resignation of the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, or so un-protoco- laire as the suggestion, made by the Daily Mail and John Bull, that patriots should raid St. George's Chapel at Windsor and remove the Kaiser's Garter Banner and those of seven other enemy Knights, a step which King George V only authorised in May, 1915, under pressure from the Prime Minister.
The fear of invasion, which became briefly acute in November, 1914, had about it, like its longer-lived counterpart in 1940, 'something simultaneously dreadful and exciting'; but there was no Home Guard, and the duties, rights and legal status of civilians who might resort to arms in defence of their homes were examined with a nicety which did not bother their sons.
In France inter-allied misunderstandings and antipathies bedevilled the course of operations in both wars, and in both wars the French Govern- ment left Paris for Bordeaux. In 1914 the British censorship earned the odium which twenty-five years later was reserved for the less negative follies of the Ministry of Information. Neutral shipping and neutral susceptibilities presented basically the same problems in both crises : so did refugees on the lines of communication.
But of course there were differences, too— big differences. In 1914 nobody worried about air-power, though both belligerents made spirited use of their few and puny flying-machines. In 1939 everybody worried about it, and perhaps it was because in Britain the civilian population was or believed itself to be in danger that it be- haved, on the whole, with more good sense and decorum than it did at the beginning of the First War. Nobody distributed white feathers. The con- trast between the flesh-pots of Blighty and the rigours of the front were, thanks partly to the blackout, less marked in 1939 than in 1914. There was less credulity, less flag-waving. An old land was a generation older.
Curiously enough, more British civilians were killed by enemy action in the first six months of the First War than in the first six months of the Second. On December 16, 1914, a German cruiser force bombarded Scarborough, Whitby and Hartlepool for half an hour before withdrawing, unscathed, under cover of mist. Nearly 500 people lost their lives. An official communiqué, making light of the affair and giving a gross under- estimate of the casualties, aroused general in- dignation. From the Admiralty Mr. Churchill wrote to the Mayor of Scarborough : 'Viewed in its larger aspect, the incident is one of the most instructive and encouraging that has happened in the war. Nothing proves more plainly the effectiveness of British naval pressure than the frenzy of hatred aroused against us.' This was a stout-hearted attempt to put an humiliation in perspective; but it did not succeed, and it did not deserve to succeed.
1914 was not our finest hour, but it marked an intensely interesting crisis in our history. Mr. Cameron has deserved well of his readers by his skilful evocation of it. His publishers I find less entitled to praise. The book, which is only 200 pages long, cries out for illustrations and im- peratively demands a map.
PETER FLEM ING
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