ABSTRACT
People began asking themselves what caused war to break out from the moment the first shots were fired in August 1914, and historians have continued to ask questions about it ever since. The earliest explanations were offered by the governments of the warring states: Austria-Hungary – the first to declare war, against Serbia, on 28 July – insisted that it was to bring to justice the state-sponsored terrorists who had assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo on 28 June. Germany – the next to declare war, against Russia, on 1 August – insisted that it was the mobilization of the Russian army, which began on 28 July, that had forced it to act in self-defence; and then that the terms of the Franco-Russian alliance left it with no choice but to declare war against France on 3 August, after the French government had refused to declare its neutrality in the Russo-German conflict. Britain – which declared war against Germany on 4 August – professed to do so because German troops had invaded Belgium and thus violated the neutrality agreements that had been in place since the creation of Belgium in 1830. By the end of August, the circle had widened, with each of the great powers declaring war on the allies of its enemy: France and Britain on Austria-Hungary, Austria-Hungary on Russia and Belgium. Smaller states soon joined the fray: Montenegro declared war on both Austria-Hungary and Germany, as did Japan. By the close of 1914, the only significant states not engaged in the war were Italy and the USA – and they too would enter, in 1915 and 1917, respectively. Thus the first explanations for the outbreak of war were loaded with
the baggage of national self-interest. Obviously, the enemy (whoever it was) was to blame; one need look no further than across the frontier to discover terrorists or militarists who left the blameless innocent with no choice but to defend themselves against the aggressors. In order to sustain this position, each of the great powers soon began to publish collections of official documents: Britain published a ‘blue book’; Germany a
‘white book’; France a ‘yellow book’; Austria-Hungary a ‘red book’; Belgium a ‘grey book’; Russia an ‘orange book’; and, when Italy finally entered the war in May 1915, it joined the throng with the publication of a ‘green book’.1 Thus the battles with which the war began were quickly followed by the Battle of the Coloured Books, as propagandists in each of the combatant states utilized carefully selected documents to justify the war to their people. In grappling with competing explanations of the cause(s) of war, this phenomenon was not insignificant: people – especially the educated and the politically active – on what came to be called ‘the home front’ perused these collections and contemplated the debates they precipitated. Most of the documents submitted to an eager public focused on the
July crisis. Each of the combatant states sought to demonstrate that it was not responsible for the outbreak of the war, that its own actions were defensive, and that it had had little choice but to go to war in order to save itself from the consequences of defeat on the battlefield. Thus the Austrians sought to show that their ultimatum to Serbia was a fair and measured response to the continuing threat of statesponsored terrorism; and the Germans that Russia intended to use the excuse of the Austro-Serb conflict to destroy the Austro-Hungarian empire, which would then enable Russia to dominate south-eastern Europe. The Russians maintained that it was Austria-Hungary that was determined to turn Serbia into its satellite, which they had to defend partly because their fellow-Orthodox Christians would suffer under a Catholic domination, partly because Serbia was the only barrier to Austro-German control of the Balkans. The French insisted that their only defence against a German hegemony in Europe was a strong Russian ally – thus their independence would be jeopardized if the Dual Alliance of Austria-Hungary and Germany were to defeat Russia. The British pointed to the invasion of Belgium to prove that Germany would stop at nothing – including the violation of longstanding international agreements – in its determination to reduce France to a second-rate power. These were the positions that were first debated at the beginning of
the war, with governments and their critics utilizing the published documents to demonstrate the legitimacy of their responses to the crisis that had been precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Questions of who said what to whom at which moment in the crisis, and of who gave the first orders to begin the mobilization of armed forces, were vital in determining whether actions were aggressive or defensive, which in turn would determine who was deemed to be responsible for the outbreak of war. And this occurred at a time when
it was still possible to believe that the war would be relatively brief, along the lines of European wars since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The interest and the arguments intensified as the war was prolonged and as the carnage mounted: between the July crisis of 1914 and the armistice of November 1918, over 600 books were published on the subject of responsibility for the war’s outbreak. Questions of causation would almost certainly have continued to be
asked once the war ended, but it was the Treaty of Versailles that was responsible for stimulating a new round of controversy, which proved to be no less emotional than the one conducted during the war itself. The famous ‘war guilt clause’ – article 231 of the treaty – charged Germany and its allies with ‘sole responsibility’ for the war, a charge that was immediately taken up by the German representatives at Paris.2
There the argument over responsibility became indissolubly linked with the reparations clauses, thus connecting forever in the minds of the German public the money that they were to be obliged to pay, and the arguments concerning the conduct of each of the governments concerned in the July crisis. Pamphlets and books refuting the charge of guilt quickly began to pour out of Germany: Deutschlands ‘Schuld’ und recht;3 Die Grosse Lüge;4 Wer ist schuldig?;5 Frankreichs Kriegsschuld;6 and Die Verantwortung der Entente am Weltkriege7 are titles typical of the genre. The controversy over war guilt became an international phenom-
enon almost immediately. Governments found it impossible to contain the debate as interested parties translated works that supported their views almost as quickly as they appeared. The German ‘Save the Honour’ League was particularly active in translating German works into English, and English works into German.8 The Germans were joined by those dissidents in the victorious states who had been suspicious of their own government’s complicity in the outbreak of the war, and were now horrified that such errors of judgement were to be compounded in the peace settlement. The Independent Labour Party (ILP) in Britain published E. D. Morel’s pamphlet Pre-War Diplomacy: Fresh Revelations (a sequel to his wartime Truth and the War);9 in the USA, Stewart E. Bruce published The War Guilt and Peace Crime of the Entente Allies,10 and Albert Jay Nock reproduced articles he had first published in The Freeman as The Myth of a Guilty Nation.11
Before long, those who had participated in the fateful decisions of July and August 1914 joined the controversialists and pamphleteers; by the end of the decade, presidents, prime ministers, foreign secretaries, diplomats and soldiers had joined the debate by publishing their recollections of the crisis or, in some cases, complete autobiographies.12
