In 1939 Britain’s most popular and widely read historian of the period, Arthur Bryant, made the terrible mistake of writing a book explaining how the First World War of 1914 was leading to a Second World War. That was the 1940 book, Unfinished Victory.

Arthur Bryant was the author of around 60 well-selling books, including The Spirit of Conservatism, a multi-volume series on the life of Samuel Pepys, Humanity in Politics, The Man and the Hour: Studies of Six Great Men of Our Time (Edward VII; Lenin; Briand; Pilsudski; Mussolini; Hitler), King Charles II, Years of Victory, 1802–1812, The Age of Elegance, 1812–1822, The Age of Chivalry, Protestant Island, The Elizabethan Deliverance, two volumes of the Alanbrooke diaries etc. etc. These publications were very much in the vein of Our Island Story, well-researched but popular history narratives, about Britain’s greatness in the world. They were readable and very popular indeed.

Arthur Bryant was also a four decade long regular contributor to the very popular weekly magazine Illustrated London News which more often than not contained essays by Bryant on popular historic themes for the man on the Clapham omnibus.

In the introduction to Unfinished Victory which he called ‘Historian’s Testament’ Bryant explained his motivation for writing it:

“I wrote it as an historian’s attempt to retell the story of those events — forgotten in the press and clamour of contemporary news — which after 1918 set the course of mankind for a second time down the fatal and eversteepening incline towards a second Armageddon. I did so with a full realisation that much that I had to relate ran counter to the prevailing view held both in this country and in Germany. I knew that many would blame me for reminding them of what they preferred to forget. But I hoped, sometimes against hope, that an historian’s relation of what had happened — almost inevitably as it now seems — might conceivably help to direct opinion in Britain and Germany, where the consequences and causes of those events had been in turn misunderstood, towards a calmer and less reproachful atmosphere in which the problems of Europe could be understood and later settled in peace. It was a presumptuous hope and, as the upshot has proved, a vain one.

For events outstripped me…

We foresaw the calamity for we recalled the causes from which it sprang, but we were unable to avert it. Last August all that we had dreaded came to pass. I laid my barely completed manuscript aside, as I thought for ever.

Yet nothing in this world stands still. The war which today seems permanent will one day come to an end. We believe that, after whatever dangers and sufferings, we shall attain our war aims as we did before. When we have done so, we shall have to strive for other aims which the sword alone cannot win. Last time we failed to achieve them. The price of that failure is the blood now being shed…

Because of that failure mankind has returned for a second time in a generation to the shambles. To some of us who fought in the last war, the events of August 1939 brought a spasm of torturing bitterness. For it seemed for a moment as though the sacrifice of a million comrades had been in vain. We were again at war with the same defeated enemy, and for the same ends. After the greatest victory of modern times our elders had lost the peace. This time a younger generation has to bear the brunt of the battle. And through their courage and endurance it may be for us to make the peace. Shall we be able to frame a better and more enduring one, and one worthy of their sacrifice?

The last peace was not worthy of the men who died to win it. For it did not endure, and therefore robbed them of their victory.” (pp. ix-xii)

Bryant, having experienced the Great War with the Royal Flying Corps in France, developed a deep antagonism to the Treaty of Versailles, and a belief that a just peace with Germany would have prevented another world war. He had begun as a “hater of the Hun” with a dislike of all things German, but, having seen the aftermath of the war, and the treatment of the Germans in it he underwent a transformation.

In the introduction to Unfinished Victory Bryant suggested that British policy toward Germany had fallen fatally between two stools:

“Since we would not bring ourselves to destroy the German people, and could only have permanently broken up Germany by such destruction, the only sensible course was to make a peace based on the proposition that we had got, for good or ill, to inhabit the same world. We had taught a bully by hard knocks, as we are now having to teach him again, the lesson that force without morality does not pay. Had we been content with that — had we been true to the old fashion of England in letting our enemy rise and giving him our hand — we might not now be having to repeat the work of 1914-18 a second time. In our anxiety, or that of our allies, to delay the day of Germany’s recovery as long as possible, we undid the whole worth of our lesson by teaching a contradictory one — that only by force and violence was she ever likely to free herself from the painful shackles in which we had bound her. For the moment it mattered little, since she was powerless. But we forgot that the will of our own people to keep her so would not last for ever, and, that presently, true to our tradition and forgetting the past aggression, we should tire of sitting on an injured and revengeful Germany’s head and let her rise. In the fulness of time, as was inevitable, we did so.” (p.xiii)

Of course, this was the problem with the Balance of Power policy. The moment Germany was vanquished Britain began thinking about the danger of France dominating Europe and it refused the more punitive settlement, involving German dismemberment, that the French demanded for their future security. Allying with the US, before Washington retreated within itself, Britain achieved this.

But having imposed a fairly punitive settlement upon ultra-democratic Weimar Germany Britain then began assisting Hitler and his Nazis in revising the Treaty imposed upon it. What lesson did that teach Germany?

Bryant gives a good account of how Britain, victorious in the Great War, was not all it seemed in the aftermath. It had become brittle and was quite unfitted to the role of mastery it had assumed as the result of its victory, as a result of the war it won:

“When the war was over the soldier returned to England to earn his living. His chief ambition was to forget the war as quickly as possible. He therefore turned his back on a continent which had given him so much trouble and shut his ears against its affairs. He left them to those whom he regarded — most unjustly as the event has shown — as mere intellectuals and international busybodies.

This, no doubt, was a pity. But he lived on an island which had only concerned itself with the affairs of Europe at intervals and which had plenty of troubles and disputes of its own to occupy it. He knew nothing of what was happening to Germans at that time because he was solely and wholeheartedly concerned in the affairs of his own country. They were disturbed enough to keep him fully occupied. For though 1919 brought Britain victory, it brought her also, as is inevitable with the waste and destruction of modern war, a host of difficulties. The revolutions that had come to so many great nations on the war-rent continent threatened her also… The moment the tension relaxed with the Armistice, grave differences between class and class made themselves felt.

The post-war sufferings of Germany therefore made little impression on the British people. They left foreign affairs to those who understood them or claimed to. All they were resolved on was not to have anything to do with them themselves, above all not to get involved in any more troublesome wars. Only one aspect of foreign affairs made any appeal to them. That was the League of Nations.

The Englishman… detested the idea of any further wars, partly out of a genuine desire to see everyone at peace and still more out of a very real sense of the evil, wastefulness and futility of modern war. He had learnt that a world war on the modern scale of destruction gained even the victors nothing. He therefore gladly joined the League of Nations Union, when solicited to do so, and gave his pennies to support an institution which he thought was outlawing war for ever. He did not — knowing so little about the real state of the continent — realise that the League’s constitution prevented it from becoming an agency for peaceful change, and that without some such machinery to effect natural changes in a world that can never be static, some sort of an explosion was sooner or later inevitable.

For some years both the League of Nations and a kind of vague, well-meaning pacifism were exceedingly fashionable in England. Few people thought very deeply about either, but it was generally believed that wars were solely brought about by stupid generals, ambitious and insanely imperialist statesmen and sinister armament manufacturers, and that all that was necessary to prevent war was for everyone to declare their loathing of the whole foolish and wicked business and roundly refuse to take any part in it…

The rise of Adolf Hitler to power at the head of a movement to restore Germany to its place in the world, if necessary, by force of arms, was, therefore, little understood in this country. For the British people, knowing nothing of what the Germans had suffered since the war, failed to realise the causes and social implications of the Nazi revolution. But they disapproved intensely of a creed which appealed to force in settling international disputes. Because of their long and insular absorption in their own affairs they were unconscious of the fact that no other means of settling such disputes had been offered to a disarmed Germany. They imagined these matters could be settled to everyone’s satisfaction by the League.

They therefore saw the German Führer, not as the iron restorer of a broken nation but as a loud voiced intruder who threatened to disturb the peace of the world for reasons which they could not comprehend. They did not realise that Europe was not the peaceful place it appeared to be or that the German people had long been suffering under a sense of grievance, both economic and political. They only saw a vast number of Germans in uniforms who looked to them remarkably like the Prussians who had invaded Belgium in 1914 and forced them from their peacetime callings to the distasteful and horrible business of killing their fellow creatures in muddy trenches in Flanders and northern France…

The successive stages of German rearmament, being achieved by sudden and unilateral action, produced the same effect on a people to whom law and legal forms were second nature. The reintroduction of conscription, the creation of the German Air Force, the re-fortification of the Rhineland, were all one-sided breaches of treaties in law, however justifiable they may have seemed in equity. They left the impression — one that became tragically endorsed by time — that the new German Government did not regard treaties as binding. To a German who knew that a revolution had taken place in his country and that his Government had attained power by its promise to abrogate the Treaty of Versailles, the enforced signature of a pre-revolutionary German Government might well not seem binding. He may have felt that no other way of removing treaty anomalies and inequalities was open to his country. But there was no Englishman, however much he may have sympathised with German aspirations, who did not feel equally strongly that it would have been better for the growth of understanding between the two nations had Germany shown more patience and respect for legality.

For slowly, partly as a result of Hitler’s dramatic activities, the British people were resuming their interest in foreign affairs…

It was to make resort to force henceforward impossible that the British man in the street had fought in the Great War, and so enabled his rulers to make whatever its disputed failings, the Treaty of Versailles. It was not the individual clauses of that Treaty that the ordinary Englishman regarded as sacred — he recognised that his politicians, perhaps inevitably, had made rather an unsuccessful patchwork job of it in a difficult time — but the principle enshrined in the Covenant of the League that international disputes should no longer be settled by armed conflict. For that ideal and in that belief a million British had given their lives, not ungladly. The Nazi leaders now seemed set on proving that they had done so in vain. Germany had not only recovered her former strength but had fallen into all her old faults of brutal bearing and reliance on military force that had destroyed the old Europe in 1914…

At this time the Prime Minister was pursuing a policy of Appeasement. Its aim was to establish personal contact with the rulers of the Totalitarian States, and by a friendly discussion of certain political and even more serious economic grievances to recreate a European Concert and so prevent a war between the rival ideological and economic blocs into which Europe was divided.” (pp.xx-xxv)

Appeasement is a dirty word these days which has completely lost its historical meaning. It is now merely a term of abuse to deter settlement of conflict, when such things are unwanted, against authoritarians bent on world supremacy, no matter how limited their resources. Its core in the 1930s was a process of incoherent Imperial unravelling, brought about by the state of the damaged British mind as a result of the winning of the war of 1914 which made it never the same again. Britain understood that it had dictated unequal treaties at the moment of its supreme power, in 1919, but had become unwilling to continue to enforce them as it went into confusion of purpose in the world.

Britain in the 1930s, though having achieved a position of undisputed world dominance, was no longer able to think to any purpose and was therefore no longer able to act purposely in the world, within its vast dominions or without, in the world it reordered in the course of its victorious war.

Bryant, an admirer of the oligarchical government that had made Britain great, knew that the political decay of Britain had come about through the onset of democracy which the conscription and mass participation of the middle class in popular war, for the first time, had produced. As a historian he knew that the Empire had been constructed by the Whig aristocracy and not by a democracy led by demagogues like Lloyd George, who represented nothing but the forces he felt around him at any one time, that put and kept him in office.

The democracy, as Bryant noted, did not trouble itself with foreign affairs after the catastrophe the masses had suffered in 1914. It hoped for peace and left things to the League. But the British political class, resting atop the democracy, was now unthinking and purposeless and it would neither discard Imperial power as the central structure of world order, nor allow the League to live up to its pretensions, or, indeed, encourage the states of the world to revert to the old system of alliances. Perhaps, in its heart of hearts it knew the future and was waiting for America to ride to the rescue, fulfil its destiny and take charge of the world it had prised from bankrupt Britain.

But America was unready at that point, and the old, but decaying master, remained on the throne.

De Valera, who had previously embraced the League thoroughly, saw that it was failing and he suggested that there be a Great Power conference to make a new settlement in Europe in place of the Versailles settlement which he saw was no longer functional, and which was proving dysfunctional in the way it was providing the dictators with a soft target which they could gain prestige out of by winning revisions of it through their own efforts.

But the British Government rejected De Valera’s realistic proposal that there should be a reversion to Great Power politics for the purpose of settling European affairs and taking the wind out of the sails of the dictators. The British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden insisted the League was sacrosanct, even though Britain ignored it completely and acted unilaterally as a Great Power when going to war again in 1939. Who was this upstart of a “Spanish Jew” anyway to tell Britain how to conduct its business in the world?

ArthurBryant had a noble aim and naively thought he would serve his country’s and humanity’s interests by doing something to help prevent the descent toward the inevitable he was seeing before his own eyes. Knowledge, he believed, had come too late in 1914 and it was the time to speak before, rather than after, a second catastrophe occurred. And he went, on Chamberlain’s request, to Germany in order to talk sense to the Germans before it was too late for Europe. He played an active part, therefore, in Appeasement.

Even after Britain’s Declaration of War on Germany, Bryant continued his quest for peace. He supported Hitler’s peace proposals of October 1939 and continued to argue in the Illustrated London News against the War. This, of course, was the period of the “phoney war” in which Britain, having declared War in defence of Poland, did not fire one bullet to divert the German army from Poland. Instead, it supported Finland against Russia, indicating it was at war with the wrong enemy and was more eager to fight the Soviets than the Nazis. Churchill was not Prime Minister at that point, only head of the Admiralty, but the policy was consistent with his earlier stated view that Fascism was the preservative against Communism.

Britain’s commitment to the war of 1939 was, therefore, quite ambiguous, and very much less than its decisive springing into action in 1914.

*

The historian Andrew Roberts is bemused at the gall of Arthur Bryant in continuing anti-war sentiment, including persistence with the publication of Unfinished Victory, well into early 1940, months after the Declaration of War. In August 1914 the Liberal opposition to war which seemed so strong only days before Sir Edward Grey declared it, melted away in an instant and the men who had dedicated their lives to peace suddenly became enthusiastic warmongers, giving the Great War its strong moral dimension.

Roberts is supposed to be a historian and his speciality is Churchill, but he doesn’t seem to realise what Bryant instinctively realised – that Britain was not fighting a real war against Germany the second time, until May 1940. Bryant knew this because he had witnessed the British warfighting in the first 9 months of the First World War and it was of an entirely different character and magnitude than its paltry efforts in Europe during the Second World War which consisting of a few skirmishes at sea and a botched expeditionary force to Norway to fight God knows who? 

So just as Unfinished Victory went into publication real war actually broke out in France when Hitler had enough of the nonsense and was not content to wait around for ever. The character of England changed completely to warfighting and propaganda mode. And this time there was no retreat from the narrative written by Churchill, himself, to justify the British blundering into war that finally put paid to Empire along with 50 million souls.

Sir Arthur Bryant, realising his terrible error, attempted to buy up every copy of Unfinished Victory he could lay his hands upon. His well-intentioned book now had all the appearance of a shit he had done on an altar to Churchill.

A recent book by a naval historian, Andrew Lambert, called The British Way of War: Julian Corbett and the Battle for a National Strategy, pointed out something quite obvious but never said in the Churchill derived histories. That is the fact that Britain fought its Second World War much more in the tradition of its earlier limited liability wars of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries. That was because it realised that the First World War was a terrible mistake in that a smallish continental expeditionary force had become embroiled in a great war of attrition, and quickly worn away, meant it had to be replaced by a conscripted army of millions. In fact, a number of armies of unprecedented commitment to continental allies and continental fighting. Britain had fatally departed from its traditional limited way of warfare, which involved the use of sea power and blockade, focused amphibious landings at sensitive points of the enemy and the paying of allies to do the main attritional fighting and bear the losses. Julian Corbett, a naval historian and strategic thinker, had warned against this departure from the traditional British way of war but he had been ignored by the conscriptionists who wanted their big war.

Mindful of this Churchill fought a traditional British war from 1940 with the British army disappearing off the continent very quickly after the reverse in France in May 1940 and only returning there after the Americans insisted upon it in 1944 and the Soviets had broken the back of the bulk of the German army in the east. Meanwhile, Churchill waged a sea war, a bombing war on German cities and pinprick war of commandos and peripheral engagements against vastly stretched German forces, not to any great purpose or decision, and mostly involving defeat. The character of this war is fully reflected in British war movies, which are largely about great escapes, bouncing bombs and commando raids.

The British Second World War on Germany had, of course, nothing whatever to do with the Jews.

In Unfinished Victory Bryant made sharp criticisms of Jewish profiteers and communists in the Weimar Republic. Furthermore, like most other people of his time (notably Churchill, in an Illustrated London Herald article from 1920), Bryant felt no compunction about pointing to the Jewish over-representation among the Bolsheviks and Left in general. Like most Englishmen of his time, he did not care much for his Jewish contemporaries. That is very different, however, from saying that he favoured any violence against Jews, or that he welcomed National-Socialist ideology in any but the most limited form. The mainstream view of the Jews in England, particularly on the Right, is one of the things that motivated the Balfour Declaration, which aimed to range the cosmopolitan Jew by turning him from a force for international disruption into a stable national element within a state, under the auspices of the Empire.

Unfinished Victory describes German Jews as having “often conferred, especially in the realms of learning, science, and medicine, the greatest distinction on their adopted country.” Bryant called Nazi persecution “revolting and sickening” referring to Hitler’s racial theories as “repulsive gibberish, his ambitions barbarous and ridiculous, his motives cruel and sadistic.” A letter by Bryant to The Times in 1939 condemned the “barbarous act” of Germany invading Poland.

Bryant was neither a pacifist nor a follower of Oswald Mosley and he favoured British rearmament. He was probably at one with Lord Londonderry in that.

In his 1994 book Eminent Churchillians (dedicated to David Trimble’s biographer, Dean Godson) Andrew Roberts devotes a chapter to Bryant entitled Patriotism: The Last Refuge of Sir Arthur Bryant. It is a particularly vicious assassination of the fondly remembered historian in which Roberts says:

“Bryant was a Nazi sympathiser and fascist fellow-traveller, who only narrowly escaped internment as a potential traitor in 1940. He was also, incidentally, a supreme toady, fraudulent scholar and humbug.” (p.288)

Knowing Roberts unconditional support for the genocidal activities of Israel today his unwarranted and extravagant hatred of Sir Arthur Bryant is, of course, explicable.

Roberts wrote of Sir Arthur Bryant in 1994:

“The Germans must have hardly believed their luck that a historian with such good credentials and connections as Bryant should regurgitate their propaganda for them. Such conduct was, of course, highly unprofessional.” (p.306)

In the light of such a statement what are we to make of “a historian with such good credentials and connections” as Baron Roberts of Belgravia’s unconditional support and defence of Israel and its activities today? Hitler had not done anything of the extensive killing that Israel has done, by April 1940. In fact, his general’s conduct of war at the point was positively gentlemanly compared that of Israel’s over the last 34 months.

Macmillan’s, the publishers of Unfinished Victory, agreed to its publication in April 1940, despite the state of war existing against Germany. The decision was made by Harold Macmillan himself – Tory MP and future Prime Minister. No problem, it seems, was even had with one perfectly judged line in which Bryant referred to the “Cromwellian fervour of the SS” which presumably passed muster in those days.

Bryant had a great many admirers across the political spectrum for a “Nazi sympathiser and fascist fellow-traveller”. These included many Prime Ministers ranging from Baldwin to Churchill to Thatcher on the Conservative side, to Atlee, Wilson and Callaghan on the Labour wing of the British establishment. Michael Foot was also a great fan as was the anti-appeaser A.L. Rowse of All Souls. In April 1984 Harold Wilson wrote to Mrs Thatcher proposing Bryant “the great patriot” and “our greatest historian” for the Order of Merit. These illustrious pillars of the political establishment appeared with Archbishops, Generals and Royalty, by Bryant’s side at various celebrations of his life over the post-war years and who proclaimed their appreciation of his talents as a historian and popular writer. Bryant was knighted in 1954 and achieved the very rare title of Companion of Honour in 1967.

It was, therefore, accepted that Bryant while acting with the best of patriotic intentions before the War had begun in earnest, in May 1940, had adjusted to the changed situation immediately and adjusted his patriotic stance from one of Appeasement to one of war historian and propagandist. Unfinished Victory was not unsound but merely most unfortunate in its timing.

Bryant, who had been educational adviser to Conservative Central Office from 1927, was urged to stand as a Conservative parliamentary candidate in the 1945 election, which Churchill was expected to win, as victorious war leader. But Bryant turned down the approach. His editing of Lord Alanbrooke’s diaries, which spoiled the post-war British narrative somewhat, then brought him into conflict with Churchill’s fervent champions. On the issue of Europe, Bryant felt closer to the old-fashioned anti–Common Market British Left of Michael Foot and Tony Benn than to Thatcher, Edward Heath, or anyone else among the post-Churchill Conservatives. He wrote of Thatcher’s economic dogmas with a certain amused detachment, saying that they might have been fitting in the 18th century, but were meaningless in the circumstances of the 20th Century.

In Eminent Churchillians Roberts suggests that Bryant’s Nazi sympathies were unknown to his illustrious admirers and were only exposed by the expiry of the 50 Year Rule and the opening of his private papers. However, Roberts’ evidence for Arthur Bryant being a “Nazi sympathiser and fascist fellow-traveller” is pretty weak if he is suggesting that Bryant was much different from mainstream conservatives in Britain at the time. And, of course, what he is really doing is contrasting Bryant with the anti-Appeasers who supported Churchill.

But most crucially, there is little or nothing that Bryant said privately that differs in any substantial way with that he wrote publicly in both the Illustrated London News and in Unfinished Victory. And his great and good admirers continued to admire him and honour him after reading all his writings.

Roberts criticises Bryant for stating that Hitler had “reawakened” Germany. But isn’t that exactly what Roberts’ great hero, Churchill, praised Hitler and Mussolini for doing? Churchill has a chapter on Adolf Hitler in his 1936 Great Contemporaries book. He said in a letter to The Times: “I have always said that if Great Britain was defeated in war, I hope we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations. I am sorry, however, that he has not been mellowed by the great success which has attended him.” (The Times, 7 November 1938).

Churchill, who had Sir Arthur Bryant knighted, was always an admirer of the historian, both before and after the war, and if he had thought him some strange Nazi or Fascist that would have been impossible.

There are further cheap digs by Roberts, including the fact that Bryant wanted Tory MP Sir Arnold Wilson “who had an admiration for many aspects of the Nazi regime” (p.293) to write on “aspects of Germany.” But Roberts must surely know that the illustrious Arnold Wilson had been the first governor of Mesopotamia, was a very popular author and was killed in his 50s over Dunkirk, after volunteering as an air gunner for the RAF (Sir Arnold Wilson is immortalised in the famous British war movie of 1942, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing).

Roberts also cites the extraordinary description of Bryant of Churchill as a “warmonger” (p.294) in support of his Nazi/fascist theory!

Roberts for all his recent attacks on “woke Britain” is up to a similar game himself as the people he condemns for rewriting his country’s history. Woke manufactures a multi-cultural, progressive country out of a state that was a mono-cultural racial hierarchy, while Roberts distorts the history of Britain in support of the predominant fantasy Churchillian narrative that puts a comforting moral gloss on catastrophic British blundering of global proportions that lost the Empire and made killing fields of many parts of the world for generations. 

*

Chapters from Bryant’s very interesting and informative Unfinished Victory will be republished in the next few editions of Irish Foreign Affairs with the aim of giving it the attention it deserves.

Bryant’s first chapter deals with the effect the primary means Britain had at its disposal to win the First World War and impose a settlement upon a truly vanquished Germany had on the course of events and the outbreak of a Second World War in 1939. This was the Royal Navy starvation blockade of Germany, Austria and Central Europe.

At the time when Bryant was writing a discreet silence had been maintained in Britain about what the Blockade of Europe had done, particularly in Germany. A single book called The Naval Blockade 1914-18, had been published by Lieutenant Louis Guichard of the French Navy. Nothing appeared in England.

A writer under the pseudonym “A.C.D.” reviewed Guichard’s book for the influential ‘Naval Review’ of August 1930 and had this to say:

“The blockade constituted the economic background of the war. It was largely devised, engineered and operated by England. But there is no English history of it. It was unique. It represented the bridge between the naval and economic operations of the war; its ramifications spread like a vast network over the economic life of the whole world; it overturned the previous structure of International Law. But if anyone wishes to make a comprehensive study of its workings, he will find it difficult to find a guide for the Official History has little to say about it. This omission has constituted a serious gap in the history of the war.” (Naval Review, Volume XVIII, No.3, p. 597)

Was “A.C.D.” Archibald Colquhoun Bell?

The Royal Navy blockade of Germany, as Bryant notes, had been the decisive factor in Germany’s defeat, from Britain’s view. It proved to be effective in cutting off Germany’s imports of food and material and led to the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare which brought America into the war and tightened the noose around Germany further. And it was maintained for eight months after the official ending of the war, resulting in the starvation of more than half a million civilians, mostly children, in order to turn Germany’s conditional surrender at the Armistice into an unconditional one in July 1919. Job done!

Most readers will be under the impression that the Great War finished in November 1918, and they will be totally unaware that the Allies continued the war against Germany for another eight months as Bryant relates.

Lieutenant Guichard wondered why in 1930 there was no history of the blockade despite its central importance in the war. Actually, one had indeed been commissioned to study the effects of such an important war-winning weapon that would more than likely be called upon again.

The Official History of the Blockade by Archibald Colquhoun Bell had actually been completed in 1921 and produced and printed in 1937 – a couple of years before Bryant’s Unfinished Victory. But no one had seen it and it has a stamp on it declaring it for “Official Purposes Only”. A limited number of copies were produced for the Ministries of state in Whitehall. But it was not released for general circulation until it was issued by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in 1961. The Nazis having obtained a copy through a sympathiser published a German version in 1943.

It is one of the most interesting records of the Great War, being strongly factual and only minimally propagandist and details the intricate planning of the Admiralty and Committee of Imperial Defence, going back a decade before the Great War, and the comprehensive measures that were taken in execution of the blockade of Germany.

It can only be presumed that while it was considered of vital importance to produce a detailed analysis of it for future reference it was not politic to draw the public interest to it and what it had done. To this day the blockade only merits a passing mention in histories of the Great War and schoolbooks. And there are very few who know how many died as a result of it.

Professor A.C. Bell, using German data, argued that the food blockade achieved its pre-war objective of successfully fomented revolution in Germany and finally caused the collapse of the Kaiser’s government. In Bell’s study, contemporary accounts, records from the British Ministry of Blockade, British and German cabinet minutes, and demographic evidence from German sources, are used to show the extent to which famine conditions prevailed throughout Germany.

Bell’s official history confirms the truth of what Bryant wrote in Unfinished Victory about the Blockade. Bell reveals that it was estimated that the average adult required 2,300 calories daily to preserve health and strength in 1914. By 1917 the blockade had succeeded in reducing the calorie intake of Germans in the towns and cities to 1,000 per person. The Royal Navy had also succeeded in reducing the consumption of meat to only 10 per cent of its pre-war level.

Bell cites the figure of 300,000 deaths within Germany specifically owing to the blockade as it really began to bite during 1918. He puts the total number of deaths from the blockade during 1914 to the Armistice in November 1918 at 760,000. And 250,000 Germans died in the eight months of blockade after the Armistice as the Royal Navy was used against a defenceless Germany to produce acquiescence to the peace treaty.

That means that the Royal Navy blockade killed over a million civilians behind the lines during the course of the war according to its official historian (Recently our knowledge of the Blockade has been added to by Eamon Dyas in his The Evolution Of Britain’s Strategy During The First World War series (Volume One: Blockading the Germans and Volume Two: Starving The Germans, available from Athol Books).

The Official History of the Blockade describes the exercise in counting the number of defenceless Germans killed by the Royal Navy as “frivolous.” Killing the poor, the unborn, the young and women was not what the great planning, effort and machinery that went into the Blockade was all about. The killing of innocents was a mere by-product of the actual objective. As Bell states the important question was: “What damage was done to the national resistance of Germany?”

The Official History in answering this question concludes that the great achievement of the Royal Navy campaign was to “infect the German people with an anger against authority, wherever situated.” (p.674) 

Just before the Armistice famine conditions were prevalent in many German cities and industrial regions. More than 3,500 people were dying each day of hunger and malnutrition in those months. In the eight months from the signing of the Armistice to the lifting of the blockade at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the records indicate that in Germany, an additional 250,000 deaths occurred among civilians, above the normal pre-war death rate. Forty per cent of these deaths occurred in November 1918 alone, as the British extended the blockade after the Armistice. Deaths were particularly severe among women and children. Women in childbirth perished at a massive rate and infant mortality soared.

The official observers sent from Britain to Germany between December 1918 and April 1919, to verify German statements at the Armistice negotiations that famine was imminent in Germany, were instructed to confirm whether the food shortages would lead to starvation and thus create a “tendency to increase Bolshevism.” Most of them reported that Germany was indeed on the verge of starvation, and that Bolshevism was probable if the Royal Navy continued to restrict the food supply.

There was an important balance to be achieved between grinding Germany down and not producing Bolshevism. It was never asked what if that balance produced something in between the grinding of Germany down and Bolshevism? But that question was answered with National Socialism.

The visit of the official observers was followed by a fact-finding mission to Germany by Winston Churchill’s War Department. It concluded that most essential foods in Germany would run out in the early spring, while the harvest for 1919 would probably yield only about half of the average pre-war crop.

The report, dated 16th February 1919, concluded that “while Germany is still an enemy country, it would be inadvisable to remove the menace of starvation by a too sudden and abundant supply of foodstuffs. This menace is a powerful lever for negotiation at an important moment.”

It seems that Arthur Bryant was too kind to Churchill in his Unfinished Victory. Churchill knew what the blockade was all about and knew the tap had to be turned off at the right moment to prevent the German revolutionary chaos producing a Bolshevik development. And at that point it was politic to make a great show of humanitarianism toward the Germans, whom Churchill had plans for in fighting Russia.

In Parliament, in early March 1919, Churchill warned of the possible consequences of the Blockade policy if it was pursued to a finish. He suggested it was now time to make peace with Germany before it was too late:

“We have strong armies ready to advance at the shortest notice. Germany is very near starvation. There was an imminent danger of a collapse of the entire structure of German social and national life under the pressure of hunger and malnutrition. Now is therefore the time to settle. To delay indefinitely would be to run a grave risk… of having another great area of the world sunk with Bolshevist anarchy. That would be a very grave event.”  (The Times, 4.3.1919)

The Prime Minister, Lloyd George, responding to this fear of the starvation blockade resulting in Bolshevism, began to refine the blockade (although it was not wound up for another 3 months, when a German capitulation to the Treaty of Versailles was finally secured).

Another ferocious speech by Churchill, made at the moment of decision for Lloyd George over the Bullitt/Lenin peace proposals with the Bolsheviks, seems to have put considerable pressure on the Prime Minister. At the Aldwych in London, on 11 April 1919, Churchill told his audience:

“Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, the most degrading… The atrocities by Lenin and Trotsky are incomparably more hideous… than any for which the Kaiser himself is responsible. There is also to be remembered – whatever crimes the Germans have committed… at any rate they stuck to their allies. They misled them, they exploited them, but… they did not desert or betray them. It may have been honour among thieves, but that is better than honour among murderers… Every British and French soldier lost last year was really done to death by Lenin and Trotsky… by the treacherous desertion of an ally without parallel in the history of the world… A way of atonement is open to Germany. By combating Bolshevism, by being the bulwark against it, Germany may take the first step toward ultimate reunion with the civilised world.” (The Times, 12.4.1919)

Churchill’s slogan was: “Feed Germany: Fight Bolshevism: Make Germany Fight Bolshevism!” (Anthony Read, The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism, p.166.) He held that there should be “Peace with the German people, war with the Bolshevik tyranny” according to Lord Riddell (Intimate Diary of the Peace Conference and after 1918-23, p.50.)

When the Prime Minister heard about Churchill’s spectacular onslaught, he is said to have exclaimed: “He has Bolshevism on the brain. Now he wants to make a treaty with the Germans to fight the Bolsheviks. He wants to employ German troops, and he is mad for operations in Russia.” (Lord Riddell, Intimate Diary of the Peace Conference and after 1918-23, p.50.)

In 1919 Churchill tried to act in accordance with the world he had operated within before the Great War, on the presumptions that had existed before 1914. He wished to secure the position that had been hard won and defend the civilisation Britain had gained predominance within along with exercising the duty to defend it. The War Britain had won had wrecked much of what was European civilisation and rendered others incapable of its defence against that which had been produced that now threatened it.

All the British Government was anti-Bolshevik, but Churchill was the most anti-Communist member of the War Cabinet and saw the defeat of what he later called, “the Bolshevik poison,” as the main issue in the world in 1919. In the Aftermath volume of his World Crisis Churchill made clear his hatred of Bolshevism and what he thought it had brought forth:

“… not a wounded Russia only, but a poisoned Russia, an infected Russia, a plague-bearing Russia; a Russia of armed hordes… accompanied and preceded by swarms of typhus-bearing vermin which slew the bodies of men, and political doctrines which destroyed the health and even the soul of nations.” (The World Crisis, Aftermath, p.263.)

Churchill asserted that Bolshevism had to be destroyed lest it infect civilisation everywhere. That is why he proposed a British alliance with the Germany Britain had only just defeated, for a war on Bolshevism (as an alternative to it being punished for War Guilt). In his view the appearance of Bolshevism demanded a common civilizational defence and the hysterical moral propaganda of the Great War on Germany needed to be cast aside because of the necessities of the new situation.

Churchill outlined his views in a Memorandum to the Prime Minister that he wrote, criticising Government, i.e., Lloyd George’s, policy on Russia:

“Since the Armistice my policy would have been ‘Peace with the German people, war on the Bolshevik tyranny’. Willingly or unavoidably, you have followed something very near the reverse… we are now face to face with the results. They are terrible. We may win maybe but we are within measurable distance of universal collapse and anarchy throughout Europe and Asia. Russia has gone into ruin. What is left of her is in the power of these deadly snakes.” (The World Crisis, Aftermath, p.257.)

It was said that the War of 1914 was a “war for civilisation” on Britain’s part – “Civilisation and the Barbarian” as it was put by Professor Tom Kettle in the Liberal press. Churchill knew that that was all propaganda. In 1919 there was a real war for civilisation taking place between European civilization and Bolshevism.

Churchill was later to lavish praise on both Mussolini and Hitler for defending Western civilisation against the Bolshevik threat. In 1919 he identified the influence of the Bolshevik State acting upon the situation of flux caused by the Great War and its settlement at Versailles as threatening the foundations of civilisation in Europe. Fascism was needed as a bulwark against Bolshevism and Churchill supported it on this basis as an antidote to poison. He proposed that Germany could atone for its War Guilt by acting as a European bulwark against Bolshevism and Hitler subsequently took Churchill at his word.

Churchill saw a strong link between what happened in Russia and what happened in Germany. In a Memorandum written later in 1919 he described this:

“Generally speaking, it may be said that there are two Russias and two Germanies, a Bolshevik and an anti-Bolshevik Russia, and a pro-Bolshevik and an anti-Bolshevik Germany. Both Germanies look to Russia as their only means of regaining world power. Either by the pro-Bolshevik or anti-Bolshevik road Germany is determined to get hold of Russia… the moment the Allies take steps which are fundamentally injurious to anti-Bolshevik Russia, and make it clear they do not care whether it is crushed or not, both the Russian hands will be stretched out alternatively for Germany to clasp, and either in one way or another these two mighty branches of the human race will come together in effective action.” [1]

Whilst Germany had revolutionised Russia, Britain had revolutionised Germany. The point now was to abort both revolutions lest they become one big one combined against European civilisation and Britain.

Balfour, the author of the Balfour Declaration only a year or so earlier, who was at the time British Foreign Secretary, summed up the value to British interests of the continuation of the Blockade in a joint War Office and Foreign Office memorandum, prepared on 21st January 1919, arguing that it would speed up the signing of the peace treaty. It would help to control the prices of Germany’s food imports and provide a direct supply of food and raw materials to those provinces and proletariats resisting Bolshevism. By ensuring that the distribution of food and other supplies remained exclusively under the control of the Royal Navy and by using starvation as a weapon of war the Germans could be squeezed until they submitted to the full Allied demands and made fight against Bolshevism.

It appears that Balfour and Churchill, in their activities in 1919, were very much progenitors of what was to happen in Germany in the 1920s and what it produced in consequence in the 1930s. Bryant does not say that explicitly in Unfinished Victory as he is far too patriotic to do so. But historic logic points to that fact.

The reader surely cannot help seeing the connection between these two major progenitors, Balfour and Churchill, of what happened in Germany and what happened in Palestine. We are seeing today how history has a oneness about it in the events in which the parallels between Nazi Germany and the Jewish State established and cultivated by Balfour and Churchill are clearly visible. And it is all a consequence of the British Foreign Policy of the Unfinished Victory.

And, of course, the historian Lord Roberts of Belgravia is a fierce supporter of both Churchill and Israel.

Sir Arthur Bryant’s account of the Blockade in 1940, as Britain unleashed its main weapon of war against Germany for a second time in a generation, surely came at a very inconvenient time. But history must judge him, in spite of his (pro-Israel) detractors, as surely a far better man than they.

Pat Walsh

ARTHUR BRYANT (1940) UNFINISHED VICTORY

CHAPTER I

FAMINE OVER EUROPE

“I saw in vision the worm in the wheat

And in the shops nothing for people to eat;

Nothing for sale in Stupidity Street.”

RALPH HODGSON

In the middle of the war famine came to central Europe. As other combatants fell away, the two most powerful and dogged nations in the world, Britain and Germany, settled down to death grips. Germany’s weapon was the giant machine — militarism ruthless and enthroned — that directed every activity to one purpose, victory by battle. Britain possessed a weapon still more terrible. By the invisible use of sea power, with its far armada of shadowy masts and guns lurking among the barren islands of the north, the strength of Britain was exercised not against the fighting man but against every man, woman and child living in the territories of the Central Powers.

When Germany retaliated with unrestricted submarine warfare — the inexcusable and indubitably illegal murder of defenceless women and children, as it seemed to us — the war became a starving match between the two greatest commercial nations of Europe.

To both trade was a necessity: both had to import or die. Had the fight gone the other way, Britain, with her dependence on foreign foodstuffs, would have perished in a few weeks. There were moments, as in the spring of 1917, when she looked like doing so, whenone out of every four ships that left her shores failed to return, and when her most famous admiral declared that she could not sustain the war into 1918.

But the British Navy held the trump cards after all. The Unterseebooten were mastered. The blockade continued. Slowly the noose of starvation tightened round Teuton bodies. For long an obstinate people, less immediately vulnerable in their dependence on trade than their enemies, held out. But the end was certain. The cold, remorseless pressure of the Admiralty never weakened.

One saw its consequences in the German food-lines in the industrial towns, where pale-faced, depressed-looking women who had never set eyes on the sea stood motionless in long queues in the wind and rain for the bare necessities of life. For potatoes, for beet, for flour, for coal, for soap and washing powder, for shoes and clothing and thread, the womenfolk of Germany and Austria-Hungary waited morning after morning for four grey years.

After 1917 the bread, fat and milk were distributed by rationing zones, but for the other commodities the food-lines remained. Often when those at the end of the line reached the shop after hours of standing and shuffling, there was nothing left to buy. At the fringe of the line policemen stood to keep order and drive away the human jackals, who watched for their opportunity in the pinched faces and strained, anxious eyes of the younger and prettier girls. An American visitor to the working-class quarters of Berlin, Vienna and Budapest in the winter of 1916 could not find one face in the food-lines that did not show signs of hunger. “In the case of the young women and the children the skin was drawn down to the bone and bloodless. Eyes had fallen deeper into the sockets. From the lips all colour had gone and the tufts of hair that fell over parchmented foreheads seemed dull and famished.”

As the war continued, the rations distributed grew increasingly meagre. Even by the end of 1916 the allowance of eggs was down to one per head per week, and potatoes — for many the staple and sometimes sole dietary — to a few pounds. In the summer of 1918 it was reckoned that among the urban population of Germany the daily consumption had sunk from the 2280 calories regarded as the indispensable minimum in pre-war days to a bare 1000. That of flour fell from 320 grams to 160, of meat and fat from 1050 to 135, and of butter from 28 to 7. In Vienna in the autumn of 1918 the flour ration was down to a quarter of a pound a week. Milk was almost unobtainable and was reserved solely for nursing mothers and children. In the first year of the war alone, the daily milk supply of Berlin dropped from a million to a hundred and fifty thousand litres.

In the last two years of the war, nearly 800,000 non-combatants died in Germany from starvation or diseases directly attributed to under-nourishment — about fifty times more than were drowned by submarine attacks on British shipping. The biggest mortality was among children between the ages of five and fifteen, where the death-rate increased by 55 per cent. Tuberculosis alone accounted for 145,000 civilian deaths in 1918, or double the pre-war figure. Adding the death-roll of the Austro- Hungarians, those whom the blockade killed alone exceeded the million British fighters who fell in action. Such, for those who do not possess it is the effect of sea power. And such — in a far more terrible and sudden form – would be the fate of the people of these overcrowded islands if, through their own neglect or rashness, they ever lost that power.

This human wastage was accompanied by every circumstance of misery. Pleasure and vitality went out of the lives of more than a hundred million people. The food with which men and women fought their long losing battle against starvation was of the most miserable quality. The bread was dark-brown in colour, sometimes like clay in composition and sometimes dry and brittle with fragments of straw and sand buried in it. It had a sour flavour and caused indigestion and heartburn. Jam was made of turnip, tea of blackberry leaves and nutshells or the flowers of the lime-tree, coffee of beans. Many people subsisted for weeks on a sweet greenish pulp made of potatoes that had frozen in transit through the deterioration of rolling stock. Clover and the leaves of field plants took the place of cabbages and Carrots: and dogs and cats vanished from the streets.

In the luxury hotels of Berlin hungry fashionables regaled themselves on such refinements of the time as aniline “foam” cakes, dry grass tea and ingenious deceptive dishes compounded of the white of egg and gelatine. One was hungry within an hour even after

The most expensive meal. Sweet things were virtually unattainable…

All real food was kept for the fighting man… Food was the staple subject of conversation for all classes. In the co-operative dining-rooms of Vienna famous poets, painters, architects and musicians, now penniless, begged humbly for their daily pittance of soup. The last days of the old Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria were made bitter by his people’s cry for bread. The word “want’’ was writ large across the whole of central Europe.

The same all-consuming need touched every department of life. Every scrap and crumb had to be saved. Old rags and iron had become precious as gold: the very sweepings of the street fetched fancy prices. At the University of Dresden the students carried the contents of their waste-paper baskets once a fortnight to the local paper dealer to be exchanged for the wherewithal to buy minute quantities of food. Many schools had to be closed down in the winter because of the lack of lighting in the streets. In the country, bands of children scoured the hedges for berries. Everything capable of conversion into one of the innumerable commodities which that unsleeping Navy withheld was required for Ersatz.

Ersatz was the word of the time. It comprised every sort of substitute, from concoctions of gelatine made to look like white sugar to clothes and boots and dainty leather-looking suitcases made of paper. There was a grim joke current in 1918 of a man who ate an Ersatz beefsteak of so revolting a nature that he resolved to make an end of his life. But the rope he bought to hang himself broke, being Ersatz, and the poison he bought to swallow was Ersatz too, and did him no harm. So he was forced to go on existing.

It was not only food that was lacking. New clothes and linen were beyond the reach of all but the richest. The only people who could afford them were food profiteers, speculators and landowners…

A typical case that came before a School Care Committee in the summer of 1919 helps one to realise what all this meant to the individual citizen. A war widow — there were nearly a million of them in the country at the time — had eight children ranging in age from four to fourteen…

One child has caught scabies . . . another has an infectious skin disease (impetigo). Naturally the whole family are infected. Hardly had they got over one illness than another sets in.

The mother has to go to work as the means left by her husband are insufficient to procure the necessities of life. She cannot carry out the treatment for the illnesses. She goes to hospital with her eight children, at the expense of the State. Hardly has the family been dismissed from the hospital than the twelve-year-old daughter gets discharging glands on her arm. The child has to wear the same woollen frock for weeks without it being washed (lack of soap). The mother has, of course, seen the trouble and wanted to bandage the arm, but she has no old linen. It is impossible to buy bandages on account of the high prices.

The poor woman was the kind of person whom, in the almost inevitable mood then prevailing in England, one spoke of as a Hun and regarded as collectively and individually responsible for the war.

Lack of soap and warm water —for the great majority coal was almost unprocurable, — lack of bed and personal linen reduced a cleanly and frugal people to a race of slatternly scarecrows. Such soap as there was, made of a gritty, earthy mixture minus any fats, played havoc with threadbare garments, sheets and towels. Faced by such obstacles, even the finest characters degenerated. Many wearied, starving women, who were denying themselves their own rations to feed their children, gave up even trying to be clean. In infant welfare centres after the war it was common to find new-born babies and nurslings with sores up to the armpits. Among the working classes, conditions of indescribable filth prevailed in houses that had formerly been spotless. Children slept on vermin-crawling mattresses of old waste paper — straw was too precious for such use, being needed for bread — and it was common to find two or three adults sharing a bed without sheets. The evil was aggravated by the compression of living space caused by the complete cessation of house-building during the war. Paint was practically unprocurable. Its lack reduced the whole of central Europe to a uniform, colourless grey which was matched by the faces of the people…

The consequences of this on the health and morale of the civilian population was one of the most terrible of all the evils of the war. The whole of central Europe, comprising 150 millions, was sick, physically and spiritually. The average weight of the urban population sank by 20 per cent. Tuberculosis, phthisis, dysentery, intestinal catarrh and other diseases caused or aggravated by under-nourishment were rampant: at Nuremberg after the war 50 per cent of the children had T.B. The hospitals, suffering as they were from the universal want, could do little…

The heaviest weight of the blockade fell on nursing mothers: the incidence of puerperal fever doubled. Owing to the lack of feeding stuffs for the cattle, milk was not only scarce but of the poorest quality. The consequent fall in the birth-rate is reckoned to have cost Germany three and a half million future citizens, which with her two million war dead and her close on a million starved, brought her war losses to over six millions or nearly 10 per cent of her population. Children born during the latter part of the blockade averaged only four or five Pounds in weight. In Bohemia in February 1919, 20 per cent of the babies were born dead and 40 per cent were dying within the first month of birth. A visitor to Cologne hospital in the same year reported boys and girls of six years old with tiny, shrivelled bodies covered with queer, inelastic skin that could be moved about in folds or smoothed flat, soft skulls that yielded to pressure, and bones so soft that they could be bent by the touch. Wherever the German poor were gathered together in that starving time, an unpleasant odour assailed the nostrils. It reminded those who first noticed it of the smell of a distant corpse. It was the symptom of a universal malnutrition, of the waste of tissue in underfed bodies undergoing a process of decay not dissimilar to that which sets in at death.

That there was no compunction for all this among the English — a humane people — is a testimony to the mesmeric powers of modern war. It is not true to say that the English did not know that German women, children and old men were starving, for they were frequently told so in the columns of their newspapers. But after a few weeks of war losses and propaganda, one ceased to think of one’s official enemies as human beings. Fat Hans tightening his belt and whining about his meagre rations was a good joke even in so respectable and humanitarian journal as Punch. The enemy’s occasional and always promptly flouted feelers for peace were set down as the cowardly reaction of greedy and appetites to a perpetual diet of sardines. That starvation implied anything more in terms of human suffering never occurred to the people of triple-guarded Britain. One sardonic jest of the period — it was never clear whether it was intended as a joke or an atrocity — was the story that the Germans boiled down their war dead in corpse factories to make substitute butter.

But though the kindly English were cheered by the news that hunger was playing havoc with their enemies’ wives and little ones, they never for one moment pictured the reality of it. They had commanded the wealth of the world for so long that it was not easy for them even to conceive of starvation: Of the imminent possibility of themselves being starved into submission by the submarine campaign they were kept in blissful ignorance by the censor.

The bulk of the population never knew how near the U-boats came to triumph, or realised what it would have meant to them had they done so.

As for the British rationing schemes at the end of the war, they seldom amounted to much more than an inconvenience to the well-to-do classes. Food queues, ration cards and a dearth of certain commodities were a burden to the poor and at times a very real hardship, but they never constituted a major tragedy. Lord Rhondda, the Food Controller, and Sir Arthur Yapp, formerly of the Y.M.C.A., respectfully invited people to eat a little less… The meaning of war as it was understood by her enemies was never really brought home to her civilian population.

It was this that explains the first of the tragic mistakes that threw away the victories of 1918, unwittingly betrayed the dead and led imperceptibly but inevitably to the present situation of Europe. In November 1918, sooner than face another winter of starvation, the German people, broken by blockade, forced their Government to surrender. But though the rain of shells and bullets ceased, the war against non-combatants continued. In fact it was intensified, for the Baltic, hitherto open to German merchantmen and fishermen, was now closed by the British Navy.

The rough fish that had helped to eke out the people’s starvation rations ceased altogether. Despite the entreaties of the German delegates — and it should be added of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army — Article 26 of the Armistice laid it down that all German ships found on the high seas should be sequestered. It was not that men like Foch and Clemenceau were inhuman, but, like the war-worn people they represented, they had long ceased to regard Germans as fellow creatures. The ditch that had divided the peoples of Europe for four years had been dug too deep for bridging.

It was only by degrees that tales of the plight of Germany began to percolate to the Allied countries. At first they were disbelieved or contemptuously rejected as what the most popular of English dailies described as a “Hun Food Snivel”. The millions who had suffered from the war, and especially those who had lost their loved ones or endured the insolences of rapine and invasion, felt no compunction at the thought that the cruel enemy was at last cringing on his knees. They did not visualise his suffering in terms of hollow-eyed, despairing women and tragic children with vast pulpy heads tubercular bones and shrivelled bodies. They would certainly have acted otherwise had they done so. It is a tantalising reflection to think how much unhappiness and bitterness Europe might have been spared had the peace dictators met not in Paris but in starving Berlin or Vienna or even on the Rhine.

It was in Britain and America to their honour that among the victors men first began to awake to the realisation of what was happening to their former foes. A handful of Anglo-Saxon pioneers, travelling in the terra incognita of central Europe on military or political business, were suddenly made aware of the presence of a vast human calamity. For as they gazed out of the train or from the windows of their hotels, they saw a wintry world that bore no resemblance to that which they had left behind —a country of dimmed lights and of shabby, broken-down houses…

The people in the streets were like pale ghosts, listless and dejected with sunken yellow cheeks, flat breasts and hollow eyes. If one had the money, it is true one could stay at luxurious hotels and sit among well-dressed people — rich Jews from Galicia or native profiteers — eating and drinking fabulously expensive food and wine. It was not here that the strangers from afar sensed the breath of famine in the air. There was little actual starvation in the streets, for the Germans are a proud and sensitive people. Emaciated women of the better classes put rouge on their cheeks to hide their unnatural pallor.

It was to attics and cellars that the lonely went and retired to die.

An anonymous visitor to Germany — a Quaker — wrote in that first winter of the peace: ‘‘The picture is etched upon my mind. A man emaciated, half clothed, propped up between a perambulator and a tiled stove, feeding the baby he was too weak to lift. He was feeding the baby with a paste made of black bread and cooked in water with the addition of a little lard and salt. That was the only food he had.” “The starvation is done quietly and decently at home. And when death comes, it comes in the form of influenza, tuberculosis, heart-failure or one of the new and mysterious diseases caused by the war, it carries off its exhausted victims.” At Frankfurt, even as late as March 1920, the funerals never ceased all day.

It was the testimony of such travellers that provided the first frail bridges for reviving humanity…

Yet the process of awakening realisation was tragically slow. At the first renewal of the Armistice on December 13th, Germany made a plea — pathetic in the light of her former strength — for leave to import wheat, fats, maize, oats, rice, condensed milk, meat extracts and medical stores. Though renewed German resistance was now out of the question, and though a clause had been appended to the original Armistice terms that “the Allies and the United States contemplate the provisioning of Germany to such an extent as shall be found necessary”, the request was rejected. So a month later was a German proposal that in return for the surrender of her merchant marine, which the Allies were demanding, she should be permitted to purchase two and a half million tons of urgently needed foodstuffs to tide her over till the harvest.

Meanwhile the sufferings of the German people grew daily worse. Though more than a quarter of a year had elapsed since the Armistice, not only was the last remaining sea closed to her, but artificial divisions created by the new military frontiers were creating havoc with the ordinary economic life of her people. On March 1st, the Manchester Guardian — always to the fore in discovering and exposing suffering — published an article from a special correspondent in Düsseldorf where an appalling increase in infant mortality had occurred owing to the French stoppage of the city’s normal milk supply from the farmlands on the opposite bank of the Rhine. Three days later the same paper published a manifesto by the German Republican Government at Weimar: We cannot feed ourselves from our own supplies till next harvest. The blockade is eating away the vitals of our people. Thousands are perishing daily from malnutrition.

Similar voices, inspired by tales of suffering brought home by explorers, now began to be heard in the House of Commons. A Conservative back-bencher, Lord Henry Bentinck, declared that the whole of Europe east of the Rhine was in danger of starvation and that the terrible thing was that Britain, by maintaining its blockade, was chiefly responsible for it. “No attempt”, he said, “has been made by any English public man to justify this cruel and wicked proceeding, no doubt because no man felt equal to the task.” “The Secretary of State for War, Mr. Winston Churchill, plainly did not, for he expressed his opinion that the sooner we put an end to the blockade which was destroying women and children and sick people in Germany, the better it would be for ourselves and the world — an opinion

which was warmly endorsed by Mr Bonar Law, the Tory leader. A few days later the National Council of the Independent Labour Party passed a resolution calling for the immediate raising of the blockade so that the starving nations of Europe could be given a chance to feed themselves and begin the urgent work of economic reconstruction.

Yet all this made only a slow and gradual impression on a House of Commons largely composed of ‘‘hard-faced men who looked as if they had done very well out of the war ” and who had been returned to Parliament in support of the policy of squeezing the lemon till the pips squeaked. Nor did it rouse any echo in the bulk of the people, who were preoccupied in licking the wounds of four years’ warfare and returning as quickly as possible to their own long-neglected affairs. The ordinary Briton was not un-naturally fed up with the Continent and did not want to be reminded of it. His favourite newspapers were quick to note his mood. Anger against the Hun was succeeded by indifference. And the Prime Minister, though with his quick Welsh prescience well aware of what ailed Europe, was peculiarly sensitive to the atmosphere of those from whom he derived support. He did nothing.

It was the British fighting men on the Rhine who first drew the serious attention of the Government to the inhumanity of its policy. On March 10th a Reuter’s report appeared in the press that Mr. Lloyd George had received a strongly worded telegram from Lord Plumer, the British General commanding on the Rhine, urging that food should be immediately supplied to the suffering population on whom his troops were billeted. They were unable, he said, to endure the spectacle of starving children. Soon afterwards stories began to be published of British officers who had told correspondents that they had not fought for four years in order to watch German children dying of hunger six months after the war was over. Such stories were perhaps exaggerated, but there was no doubt that the feeling of the Army was too strong to be ignored. Unlike the civilians at home, the Tommies at Cologne did not need to rely on their imagination to picture the reality of hunger. They saw it with their own eyes and were compelled to live with those who suffered it.

It was this intervention of the British soldier that procured the first real mitigation of the blockade. On March 16th Germany, unable to resist any longer, agreed to hand over her merchant fleet. The second greatest exporting nation in Europe delivered to her conquerors thirty-two million tons of shipping including every vessel of more than 1600 tons. In return she was allowed to make monthly purchases up to a maximum of 300,000 tons of cereals and 70,000 tons of fat, including pork, vegetable oil and condensed milk. Even this fell short of the country’s minimum requirements. It was not till May that anything like substantial imports entered Germany. The blockade itself continued till the middle of July.

Looking back on it from a calmer and less war-racked age, all this may one day appear hard to justify. At the time it seemed not only explicable but inevitable. Only a year before the Germans had been on the point of victory, and the British Army, rallied by Haig’s famous order, was fighting with its back to the wall. The chief factor in the salutary and amazing transformation that had followed had been the withholding power of the British Navy. Now that the victors’ armies were melting away under the popular clamour for demobilisation, it seemed unwise to cautious minds to discard that one decisive weapon until the future peace of mankind had been secured by a strong peace. “We have all demobilised so quickly”, wrote an English diplomat in his diary in March 1919, “that we cannot enforce our terms except by the blockade which is hell.” (H, Nicolson, Peacemaking, p. 287.)

From all this followed tragic consequences of which we have still not reached the end. There can be very few over the age of 25 in Germany today who have not suffered the pangs of prolonged hunger and been taught to attribute those pangs to the inhumanity of other countries. For nine years, six of which were after the war, the bulk of the German people suffered profoundly — physically, morally and spiritually. Nearly a year after the Armistice a little German girl could ask her: mother if it were true that there were countries in the world where there was no war and where people could eat all they wanted. In 1920 the Mayor of Essen reported that of 75,000 school children at least 25,000 had not even the most necessary clothing. A member of the Hoover Mission to the schools of the Erzgebirge in the previous year described children of seven or eight years with tiny faces, huge, puffed, rickety foreheads and swollen, pointed stomachs hanging over crooked, match-like legs.

Few elements in the German nation except the very basest escaped that prolonged and useless martyrdom…

As for the poor — the vast bulk of the defeated German people — they were deprived for years of everything that could sweeten life. Whole families were crowded into a single room bare of all furniture save perhaps a couple of broken chairs and a bare table. Everything else had long ago gone to the pawnshop. In 1919, when the minimum weekly subsistence level was calculated at 330 marks, 77 per cent of the population of Berlin were receiving an average wage of 162 marks a week, of which 10 per cent had to be paid in indemnity tax to the victorious Allies. It was small wonder that fifteen years later when Communism had ceased to make an appeal to the German urban worker, the feeling of hatred against the victors of Versailles survived — a potent and terrible force in the hands of the new chauvinist.

Most hardly of all could the women-folk of Germany forgive the prolonged agony of their own and their children’s starvation which no principle could explain or justify to them. To them the continued blockade was unintelligible. Even during the war they had been unable to view it as anything but cruel and barbarous. They regarded it just as English folk did the drowning of their own defence-less non-combatants by submarines. They did so with even greater feeling, because the effects of the blockade injured not merely a few travellers but themselves and everyone around them. An American visitor to Berlin in 1916 was assailed by women asking why the United States Government did not intervene to prevent the British Navy’s breaches of international law and of the Hague and London Conventions. For years the blockade was the dominant obsession of the entire German people. It was in the hope of defeating it and saving the wastage of its civilian population that Germany resorted to the desperate and terrible expedient of unrestricted submarine warfare and so brought America into the alliance against her. It was despair of ending it in any other way that caused her, eighteen months later, to submit to the terms of the Armistice.

It was when the hated blockade still continued after these had been accepted that the indignation of the German people against Britain became something deeper and more permanent than wartime hysteria. Eighteen years after, a member of the Allies’ Military Mission of Control which took up residence in Germany at the beginning of 1920, recalled how painful it was, in view of the widespread evidence of real distress, to be asked, “Why did England go on starving our women and children long after the Armistice?”

However deplorable and terrible in their results present German methods, however evil to free minds their form of government, and loathsome their brutality towards the weak, it is necessary, if one would understand their psychology, to remember what Germans can never forget. It is because so few of our own people — even our statesmen — seem conscious of it that I have tried to retell the mournful story of it here. It explains why the German people found it so hard to understand the sincerity of even the most obviously honest British protestations of humanity and goodwill towards them. It explains more. For the long years of hunger left their impress not only on the memory of those who suffered, but on the nervous organism of millions of Germans. A whole generation grew up in an epoch of under-nourishment and misery such as we have never in this country experienced.

It was a return to a state which Germany had known once before in her tragic history, when more than two-thirds of her people perished from the privations of the Thirty Years War. It makes intelligible much that is otherwise unaccountable in Nazi Germany — the hysteria, the emotionalism and the lack of proportion. One cannot render a whole nation physically, mentally and morally prostrate for years without its producing a dangerous effect. “Starvation which brings to some lethargy and a helpless despair, drives other temperaments to the nervous instability of hysteria and to a mad despair.” (J.M. Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace, p.213.)

Blockade or siege culminating in starvation has always been held a legitimate exercise of war. It has been used against every besieged town since the trade of soldiering began… So long as ordeal by battle continues to be the ultimate method of resolving disputes between nations, starvation blockade will remain, as it has always been, a weapon of war. Like every other weapon its capacity to inflict destruction has increased out of all measure with the advance of the scientific and mechanical means of enabling man to magnify his activities. Where once it slew its thousands, it can now in its universal application take its toll of millions. It leaves behind it psychological reactions that endure long afterwards and sow in human hearts the seeds of other wars and other agonies for the suffering race of man.