Interrogating the Future: Imagining War in an Age of Change, 1870-1914
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Interrogating the Future: Imagining War in an Age of Change, 1870-1914 David Bangert This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Portsmouth. 29 September 2020 PhD Thesis Interrogating the Future David Bangert Abstract This thesis asks new questions of material dedicated to imagining the future of war, written between the Franco-German War of 1870 and the start of the First World War. It investigates what civilian and military writers meant by ‘the future’, and what methods they used to forecast the character and duration of a great war in Europe. With foundations in the rich historiography on the subject, the thesis has centred on a systematic evaluation of British periodicals in the period of interest, counterpointed by an assessment of key military journals, and literature identified as significant by previous historians. The thesis has advanced the historiography by identifying the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78), and the Battle of Plevna in particular, as the starting point of a recognition that new weapons would revolutionise warfare, leading to a widespread apprehension over the consequences of a European war in the 1890s. It has also provided strong evidence to support the view that the British military understood the lessons of the South African War (1899-1902) and developed rational tactics to meet the challenge of more effective rifles. It has also determined that the cavalry, which faced the same challenge, sought excuses as to why their arm performed poorly in recent wars, rather than accepting its slide towards obsolescence on the battlefield. Above all, however, the thesis has demonstrated the need to recognise the challenge commentators faced when they tried to forecast the future at a time of unprecedented technological change. Their means of predicting the future were immature, and the vast majority of civilian or military writers defined the future of war as something imminent; or focused on the effect of new weapons on the battlefield, rather than speculating on their strategic impact. The two main exceptions, Jean de Bloch and H. G. Wells, lie at the core of the thesis, because they are the exceptions which proves the rule. Their predictions were not necessarily altogether ‘right’, but they stand out as having developed new methods of interrogating the future. Military conservatism, however, including resistance to the adoption of scientific methods, prevented their approaches from gaining traction, leading to a widespread failure to foresee how the interaction of new technologies would lead to the deadlock of the First World War. ii PhD Thesis Interrogating the Future David Bangert Contents Abstract ii Contents iii Declaration iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter One Historiography 8 Chapter Two Facing Progress 52 Chapter Three The Dread of War 76 Chapter Four Sleepwalking to the Precipice 105 Chapter Five The Military Response 136 Chapter Six Stories of War 180 Chapter Seven The Wood and the Trees: Bloch and Wells 212 Conclusions 252 Appendix A Assessment of British Periodicals 258 Appendix B Research Ethics Review Checklist 267 Bibliography 269 iii PhD Thesis Interrogating the Future David Bangert Declaration While registered as a candidate for the above degree, I have not been registered for any other research award. The results and conclusions embodied in this thesis are the work of the named candidate and have not been submitted for any other academic award. Word count: 81,539 iv PhD Thesis Interrogating the Future David Bangert Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisory team, Professor Brad Beaven, Dr Robert James and Dr Mike Esbester, for all their support and guidance in shaping this thesis and driving it towards completion. Their patience, advice and occasional dry humour proved invaluable in helping me to navigate the labyrinth, face the (literally) long, dark nights of research and eventually conclude my endeavours. I would also like to thank the wider History Department at the University for inspiring me to set out on this road during my Master’s Degree, which preceded this research work. I would also like to thank, and dedicate this work to, my wife Tracie, for all her support and encouragement in undertaking this research. It cannot have been easy, and I extend my apologies to my children for sometimes looking distracted by the events of more than a hundred years ago, during the time it has taken to bring this work to a conclusion. v PhD Thesis Interrogating the Future David Bangert Introduction The causes of the First World War have intrigued historians for more than a century. It is hard not to see why, as Europe, at the apex of its global power and after nearly a hundred years of relative peace, plunged into a costly and destructive war. The extensive historiography on the causes of the war is testament to the rigour with which historians have dissected its origins. Margaret Macmillan, in her recent synthesis, The War That Ended Peace, assesses the causes suggested in the historiography, and concludes that one factor which contributed to the collapse of peace was a willingness, or even eagerness, to go to war.1 There were countervailing arguments, but there was a widespread belief that war was a legitimate tool to further national self-interest, which went hand in hand with a conviction that a European War would be controllable, swift and decisive. It was not the case, either, that imagining war in the future – and specifically a great war in Europe – was neglected by contemporaries. Quite the opposite was true, and yet, to quote Clarke, “the great paradox running through the whole of [the] imaginary wars between 1871 and 1914 was the total failure of army and navy writers to guess what would happen when the major industrial nations decided to fight it out.”2 This failure extended to the output of most civilian writers as well, and this thesis has developed a new understanding of why there was a general failure to envisage, and still less predict, the character and duration of a great war in Europe. This thesis has asked a new question of the sources: what did writers of the time mean by ‘the future’, and what methods did they use to forecast its character? This question is significant because this was the period of early ‘scientific’ – to use the contemporary term - scrutiny of the future. In the early twenty-first century, predictions of future technology and social trends are part of the intellectual furniture. Accurate or not, there is a deluge of material on the future, with an implicit recognition that it will be different 1 Margaret Macmillan, The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War (London: Profile Books, 2014), 605. While Macmillan does not regard the War as inevitable, she contends that the likelihood of conflict increased with each of the international crises that affected Europe in the early twentieth century, leading to widespread complacency that the July crisis would successfully be managed in 1914. 2 I.F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War 1763-3749 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 81. 1 PhD Thesis Interrogating the Future David Bangert to the present. Although change was already a fact of life by the mid-nineteenth century, the decades around the turn of the century saw the beginning of the discovery of the future, to borrow a phrase used by H. G. Wells in 1902, who explicitly called for a discipline to predict the future.3 This illustrates the point that the methods of engaging the future were embryonic at the time, against a background of accelerating technological and social change. Philipp Blom entitled his study of the period 1900-14 as The Vertigo Years, emphasising the headlong change that contemporaries appreciated, wondered at, and feared.4 The prediction of future war was therefore no longer just a case of political prophecy (such as which powers might be in conflict) but also technological forecasting (what weapons would be used in conflict, and with what effect).5 Faced with the novelty of rapid change, the art of predicting the future had itself to be invented. This thesis has therefore examined what futures were being discussed, and how they were being interrogated. Historical predictions of the future are often critiqued on what was ‘right’ and what was ‘wrong’, and while this is informative of the intellectual perspectives of the time (as well as being entertaining), it is important to understand that those engaged in looking at the future between 1870 and 1914 were pioneers in an age of unprecedented change, struggling towards a conception of what war would be like, without the benefit of either hindsight or recognised methods of forecasting the future. In fact, this thesis has demonstrated that specific aspects of future war were often examined with diligence and accuracy, but what was missing – with the exception of a few key works – was a synthesis of the parts into a whole. In short, the novelty of trying to peer into the future led most observers to focus on ‘the trees’ and not ‘the wood’. Wells was one of the few who attempted to build a coherent picture of the future, including war, as did Jean de Bloch, whose compendious work War of the Future in its 3 H.G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future: a Discourse delivered at the Royal Institution (New York: B.W. Huesch, 1913), accessed April 5, 2017, https://www.archive.org. 4 Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2008). 5 Clarke, “Voices Prophesying,” dedicates three chapters to the period 1870 to 1914. The first focuses on The Battle of Dorking, which is widely credited with starting the genre of ‘invasion literature’, which saw numerous writers imagining invasions of Britain by France, Germany, Russia and others over the decades to come (including Wells’ Martians in The War of the Worlds).