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On the 28th of July 1914 His Imperial and Apostolic Majesty Kaiser Franz Joseph (the real German Kaiser, as opposed to the Prussian upstart in Berlin) declared war on the Serbian Nation. The rest is history. This came after the famous ultimatum delivered to the Serbs by the Austrians. Belloc's view, as expressed in The Cruise of the Nona, was that the document was formulated in Berlin as it possessed (as he saw it) the bellicose hallmarks of Prussian arrogance.
Belloc had a lot to say about the First World War, primarily through his own weekly journal Land and Water. It was a rather slanted view of the War and, I suspect, it was State funded. I further suspect that Winston Churchill had a hand in it. He was instrumental in whipping up anti-German hysteria in the run up to the War: notably with reference to the alleged German spy rings which were supposed to be operating in England at the time. Belloc and Churchill got on, for a while, and even bottled wine together! In fact, Churchill was about to put him on his personal staff at the Admiralty (early 1917) when he was dismissed from office.
Aside from that, Land and Water is a bloody good read. I hope to focus on his War writings, in more detail, over the coming weeks.
The propaganda dept of the FCO (British Foreign and Colonial Office) must have had every major English author on its anti-German payroll during Britain's decade-long runup to its declaration of war on Germany in 1914. Hilaire Bell-oc (like his mate GKC) were on the side of justice during the Empire's war against the Boer Republics (and theft of their gold and diamond mines), but they fell for the Empire's war against Germany (as an industrial competitor) and its theft of the Turkish Empire's Mesopotamian oil wells.
ReplyDeleteWell connected "insiders" like diplomat John Buchan wrote popular books about sinister German and Turkish spy rings in the runup to WW1.