The White Warfare

"To

My Comrades

Who fell in the White Warfare 

Of the South and on the

Red fields of France

and Flanders"

Sir Ernest Shackleton, C.V.O

    While Western Civilization was facing the beginning of the end in the summer of 1914, another noteworthy event was also well on its way. Sir Ernest Shackleton, that seasoned Arctic explorer was, with fifty-six other men, about to head south to be the first people to cross the Antarctic Continent. 

    The turn of the 20th century was the Heroic Age, when man's drive to explore every inch of his world peaked, and men sought that last, almost forbidden frontier, the poles. Literally, the very ends of the earth. Many countries were involved in the race to see who would be the first to reach the north and south poles, much like America and the Soviet Union racing for the moon some 60 years later. America won the race to the North Pole in 1909, Britain, an empire in decline, lost the race South to Norway in 1911. 
   Shackleton, a qualified master mariner,  had an abiding love for the cold, extreme edges of our world and was a veteran of polar exploration. He had been a part of Robert Falcon Scott's 1901 to 1903 Antarctic expedition. From 1907 to 1909 he led his own expedition to reach the South Pole, known as the Nimrod Expedition.  Their ship , the Nimrod, made it to within 97 miles of the pole when it got stuck in pack ice and had to turn back.  At that time, it was the furthest south anyone had been and Shackleton was knighted for his efforts. 
   Having lost the race to the Norwegians, Shackleton then devised the last great explorer's quest, to traverse the continent of Antarctica in its entire. Charting, exploring, and crossing the whole continent on foot was indeed nothing anyone had ever tried before. Years in planning the expedition was to be in two parts. One part, in the ship Endurance was to disembark at the Weddell Sea* and head for the pole, taking magnetic and meteorological observations, geological survey, and samples of Antarctic flora and fauna. The other part was to bring another ship, the Aurora,  to the Ross Sea, on the opposite side of Antarctica.  Their party was to go about halfway to the pole from their side and wait for the Endurance party  to meet them, also taking scientific observations. 
  The Endurance set sail August 1, 1914, but she almost never left at all. Once she was fitted out and ready to go, she was to be inspected by His Majesty King George V on the Monday of Cowes Week before setting sail. Cowes week was and still is the conclusion of the Season.  Let me pause and explain the Season. The Season is the social calendar of the elite in England and was also for a time in America. It began in the 17th and 18th centuries and was at its peak in the 19th.  At this time the aristocrats and landed gentry would leave their country houses and come to London to socialize and engage in politics, as it coincided with the seating of Parliament every year. This was also when young ladies were presented to society (and often to the Royal Court) and expected to find a husband as soon as possible. Once the Season was over, everyone would return to their country houses at the beginning of hunting season to shoot birds in Autumn and hunt foxes in Winter. 
   When Jane Austen was writing about Mr. Fitzwiliam Darcy and Miss Marianne Dashwood, the season ran from sometime after Christmas until the end of June. By the late  Victorian Era, the Season was standardized as running from April to August. After the end of the Great War, the Season fell into decline because many great families had to give up their London mansions. The Season is still preserved to this day, but the venues such as the Proms, the Chelsea Flower Show, Wimbledon, and so on are now more public venues. However, most events have a dress code where men and women are often required to dress in a more traditional way that resembles their Edwardian predecessors. It is a desiccated mummy, a last relic of a time gone by. 
Where was I? Ah yes Cowes Week. Cowes week is one of the largest sailboat races in the world, takes place the first week of August, and is one of the last events of the Season.  Cowes week in 1914 was the last real Season before the world blew apart. The Friday before that Monday Shackleton received a message saying the King would not be able to go to Cowes. The date was July 31, Archduke Ferdinand had been assassinated a month prior, and Austria was at war with Serbia.  Germany was threatening to attack France,  and Britain had just warned Germany that if they declared war on France, Britain would declare war on Germany. This last summer, this last Season before the world was turned on its head, was about to see off the last explorers of their kind. 
      Endurance left London Saturday August 1, but stayed anchored off the coast through Sunday, anticipating to be called up for war. Shackleton sent a telegram to the Admiralty offering to cancel his expedition and put himself and his men at the service of the crown. The Admiralty replied simply "Proceed."  Two hours later, Mr. Winston Churchill sent a longer telegram to Shackleton, thanking him and his party for their offer and stating the authorities desired the expedition to continue as planned. Tuesday, August 4th, the King did arrive and gave Shackleton the Union Jack to carry on the expedition. War finally erupted at midnight on that same day. 
    Shackleton took a lot of criticism later on for leaving when he did, without consulting the donors of the expedition. But the Admiralty had told him to continue as planned, and no one expected the war to last more than a few months. Indeed most expected it to be over by Christmas. This tiny capsule of the preserved Edwardian world was about to leave the civilized world to its own un-civilizing, and undergo a conflict against the elements of nature that was no less dangerous or strenuous than men shooting bullets and driving tanks at each other back home. They made it to Buenos Aires, Argentina on October 26, and from there sailed to South Georgia, a small island south of the Falklands which was the southernmost outpost of the British Empire, and indeed the very edge of civilization itself. From there was the unknown. 


* The land and sea area from the Falkland Islands extending to the South Pole was considered British territory at this time. 

Technology Can Save (or Destroy) The World

"War on an industrial scale is inevitable. They'll do it themselves in a few years."

~Prof. James Moriarty Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

   As I said last time, while the royal cousins of Europe were smiling at each other, back home they were building up their armies and experimenting with new weapons. Symbolic relationships and family ties were not hard currency when it came to foreign affairs.  Since the fall of Rome, international policy had chiefly consisted of national security, that is, military superiority.  Do unto others first,  before they invade you, or if they do try to invade you, make sure you can make them sorry they tried. Exhibit A, the British defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
     For all the new societal organizations and business partnerships, nineteenth century Europe had no solid system of diplomatic mediation. The closest to such that existed was the first Geneva Convention, convened in 1864, and was more about humanitarianism in war than international negotiation. Tsar Nicholas II convened the Hague Conference in 1899, which brought the powers of Europe together to limit the buildup of armaments and also found an international court to settle disputes between nations. The International Court was indeed founded, but the problem was convening the court was to be voluntary.  There is no purpose in having a way to settle international disputes if participation is voluntary.  Any country can then do whatever they please to their neighbors and then politely decline to participate in the court if summoned.
    Britain and France ruled much of the world at this time, thus much international conflict arose over jealous competition between the two of them, and Germany, who had a few colonies that it wanted to keep from the rest. Germany was the worst at provoking the rivalry between these three when, in 1900, it determined to build a naval fleet capable of engaging the Royal Navy. By 1906, the race to out-build Germany was at the forefront of British public policy.  France, in turn, decided to match Germany in number of soldiers. No mean feat, because Germany had a population of 60 million souls, France only 40 million. They did this by enacting the "Three Year Law" in 1913, extending the service of conscripts to three years.
    Thus soldier making and armaments manufacture became yet another of the new industries of the turn of the 20th century.  Nearly all of Europe made it necessary for all their young men to go through military training and remain in reserve until late middle-age.  The exception to this was Britain which, surrounded by sea and defended by the most powerful navy in the world, saw no need for this. Therefore, in 1914 there were some two hundred military divisions ready at a moment's notice, with sufficient firepower to destroy each other in the first few minutes of the war.
      The only thing that kept the world from ending so quickly was communication.  Large armies can only be efficiently deployed with near instantaneous communication, and the world did not quite have that yet. Radio (wireless telegraphy as it was known then) was still in its infancy, and while well known in theory, was not practical in the field. Primitive radios were too large and used too much energy to be used anywhere outside ships.  The telephone and telegraph were the fastest way to send word, and those both depend on fragile wires, easily broken as soon as they were set up. When those failed, the fastest way to send and receive news and commands were the most ancient ways, word of mouth and the written word, which can only travel as fast as a man, or whatever he rides or drives. This is why it first took a while for the war to actually start when war was declared and also why front lines often came to a grinding halt as territory was won and lost by inches later on. Commanders were reduced to confusion and uncertainty, while soldiers waited days or weeks to receive orders.
    Certainly,  it is also this uncertainty in communications that brought the war into being. In that fateful summer, the diplomatic crisis that was ignited by an assassination was slave to the wheel, the written note, the telegraph schedule and the encipher routine. Events swelled and outpaced the ability of diplomats and statesmen to control them, and they overwhelmed the primitive ways of communication. Why no one bothered to use a telephone I cannot say, except that no one thought about it. Telephones were certainly available for use, they had been around for nearly thirty years at least.  Everyone was too used to the regular routine that had served for years. So, the chain reaction began, as if everyone had been wanting to do this for so long, and they felt the had no other choice.

The Interdependence of Nations

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. *
and when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

~T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

   Part of why the Great War came as such a surprise to everyone was because European Culture at the time was so cohesive and united.  Everything was so dependent on everything else that war seemed nearly impossible. In 1910, economic interdependence in Europe caused Norman Angell in The Great Illusion to say that the threat of disruption of international credit would either prevent a war entirely, or bring it to a quick end if war did break out. Almost all informed opinion agreed with this.
     The last two decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th were unlike any other that had been before, or quite possibly will be again. A twenty-year depression that began in the middle of the century was cushioned by a price decrease in raw and manufactured goods. The gasping economy was jolted to  life again  by new categories of manufactured goods, such as chemical dyes and internal combustion engines, to tempt consumers. Population increase in Europe, anywhere from 25% to 50% depending on the region, led to immigration to the Americas and Australasia. This, along with the expansion of empires, brought other inhabitants of the world into the international market.  Between 1875 and 1913 the unification of trademarks, artistic property, accountancy, maritime law, weights and measures, and copyright conventions all came into being.
   In addition to this came also two revolutions in transport, the steam ship, and the railway. People and products could now move around the world in a fraction of the amount of time they had before. South African gold and diamonds, Indian textiles, African and Malaysian rubber, Canadian wheat, Australian sheep, South American Cattle and everything that was being produced en masse in the United States (in 1913 the largest economy in the world) was moving around the world in record time, and most of it's capital passed through one place, London. The city of the world. London's international connections of its banks and insurance companies made it the standard medium for commerce for all civilized countries.
     Internationalism, however, had become as much cultural as it was commercial. Much of Europe was united under the Holy Catholic Church as it had been since Roman times. The rest, while not Catholic, were some other flavor of Christian: Lutheran, Anglican, Calvinists, Anabaptist, Greek or Russian Orthodox, Armenian Christians and Egyptian Coptic. Europe was intensely Christian and had been for centuries. Out of this saturation of Christianity rose the abolition of slavery, and organisations protecting worker's rights and sanctioning child labor. Christian Europe was so indignant at the Ottoman Empire's (i.e. Muslim) treatment of its minorities that international intervention was prompted in Greece and Lebanon several times.
    Religiously and Idealistically homogeneous, Europe was also culturally unified. The educated classes held all the same things at equal value. They all admired Italian Renaissance art and German Classical music. (Let me tell you, Germany has produced some of the best and most complex music humanity has ever seen.) Names like Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Honore de Balzac, Dickens, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe were familiar to every European high school child, and nearly all of them could speak French, German, or Italian, if not more than one of those. The classics, Homer, Plato and the like, were still studied by all as they had been since the Middle Ages. Although they were a small minority, university graduates of Europe held the same body of knowledge and philosophy among them that it could be identified as a single European culture. The unity of Europe at the time is now way better illustrated, however, than in its royal families, who were all, in one way or another related to each other. A thousand years of only being allowed to marry into one social class eventually leaves you with only relative to marry.
      Nineteenth century Europe was no exception. All European rulers were cousins, and most were children or grandchildren of Queen Victoria. George V of England, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and his wife Alexandra, were all first cousins. (Nicholas and Wilhelm were also third cousins, I'll stop before this gets even more weird. Suffice to say, West Virginia has nothing on European Royalty.)
   So, with all this unity and relative harmony and  homogeneity, where did it all go horribly, horribly wrong? What happened to this golden age of prosperity to end not with a whimper, but an apocalypse of blood and fire? Well, all was unity and cooperation on the surface, under the surface was a different story.  The arms race was picking up. The "Concert of Europe" which had been unintentionally established by Napoleon (an alliance of most of the countries of Europe against him), was beginning to wear thin.  While the royal cousins were smiling at each other, back home they were each massing armies, just waiting for someone to make the first move. I will examine this further in my next piece.



*I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, I am a real German.