Conclusion and Epilogue: Militarism and the Left by 1914, the Great War, and the Coming of Conscription

Abstract

On 4 August 1914 Great Britain declared war on the German Reich. The formal casus belli was the German violation of Belgian neutrality, although the government's decision for war was ultimately determined by calculations about the need to preserve a European 'balance of power' (believed to be essential to the safety of Britain and her empire) against what the Foreign Office saw as a German attempt to achieve military and political hegemony in Europe. 1 Whatever the diplomatic and military considerations that had led to its outbreak many Britons, and particularly many on the political left, came to regard the war as a profound ideological struggle. It was seen, in the words of the radical MP Richard Lambert, as 'a fight for Liberty against Bureaucracy, for British ideals and for Liberalism in its widest sense against Prussian Militarism and Tyranny'. 2 As this book has shown, however, militarism was never simply a 'Prussian' phenomenon. By 1914 it had taken root within British politics and society too, albeit in a rather different form from that which supposedly characterized the German Empire. British militarism was in many ways a remarkably ambiguous-even a paradoxical-phenomenon. 'Militaristic' values were undoubtedly present in Edwardian British culture, although popular attitudes towards war and towards the professional soldiery were complex and contested. The prewar British army was small and politically subordinate to the civilian authorities, although military officers were certainly not excluded from positions of political power and influence-particularly in the wider reaches of the empire-and soldiers serving outside mainland Britain often appeared to enjoy considerable freedom of action which the civilian authorities at Westminster could not always easily constrain. Wider British society was not militarized by any bureaucratic system of universal military