Dreadnought
Massie, Robert K.
planned four years of trench warfare. Beaverbrook, Lloyd George, and Northcliffe expected the English-speaking world to swallow some fairly spectacular propaganda, but the idea of a German death...
...In fact, Fisher is the decisively modern figure in Massie's pages...
...Fisher's calls for ever more powerful battleships inspired fear among his subordinates, not on squeamish grounds, but because Fisher had the fatal unimaginativeness to gut his existing forces in favor of one new and untried development...
...Even Massie's protagonist Sir John ("Jacky") Fisher, obsessed as he was with matching and surpassing German naval might, jeered at all qualms about the German army's designs on England: "You might as well talk of embarking St...
...Beresford is easily Dreadnought's most attractive character, a wild Irish peer and a swimmer against the cruel tides of meritocracy...
...came close, on a later occasion, to hitting Edward VII...
...If the Edwardian age appears more glorious when set against the carnage that was to follow, World War I seems all the more horrible for the quiescence that preceded it, and Robert Massie's Dreadnought describes one very big aspect of the story: the then-unprecedented naval buildup of Britain, France, and Germany in the first decade of this century...
...danced a Hibernian jig atop a sleeping elephant...
...Sir Norman Angell argued in 1910 that major war—since it damaged the winner as much as the loser—was finished...
...Wilhelm I's extreme reluctance to accept the German imperial crown at all ("Ah, les braves gens," he involuntarily cried while watching French cavalry charges in 1870...
...The modern assumption, for instance, that any visitor to any country must fill out forms at a dozen bureaucratic offices would have outraged pre-1914 Europeans...
...7:1 The American Spectator September 1992 65...
...the almost ubiquitous German distaste for German unification...
...End of History buffs, take note...
...R. Stove writes for National Review, the Weekend Australian, and Quadrant...
...They were proved right: the speed and firepower of his ships encouraged complacency about their thin armor, with disastrous results at Jutland...
...The idea that Britain could finish a war both victorious and exhausted—in other words, that Britain could be what Britain actually was, both after 1918 and after 1945—did not penetrate Fisher's energetic but lessthan-capacious intelligence...
...In fairness to the optimists of the age, no German statesman or chief of staff was so self-destructive as to have actually Little, unexpected details evoke the atmosphere of the time...
...that he should have been able to begin his trip on the same day...
...In fact, all too many writings on the period imply an approval of the Old World's collapse—as if Lenin, Lloyd George, and the forcible rebaptizing of sauerkraut as "liberty cabbage" were indications of progress...
...and that he should have been able to go anywhere in Europe except Russia without needing to brandish an ID card...
...Massie reminds us of what seven decades have obscured: the tentative, bet-hedging nature of Prussia's initial rise...
...The hawks of the time were, by any post-1914 standard, doves...
...The complacency of the age was astounding: Balfour was pleased to remember 1914-18 as "that great period of administrative activity...
...Dreadnought can be compared to the better work of the late Barbara Tuchman in its narrative panache and abundance of illuminating anecdote, but it is blessedly free of Tuchman's shortcomings: sermonizing, dewy-eyed indulgence towards socialism, and an obsessive Teutonophobia that leaves readers of The Proud Tower with the impression that World War I should be blamed on Richard Strauss...
...No, gentlemen, you may go home and sleep quiet in your beds...
...Paul's Cathedral in a penny steamer...
...and the vociferous pluralism that existed even during Wilhelm ll's reign...
...took a more amiable elephant on board ship with him, soon teaching it to clew the mainsail by picking up a line with its trunk...
...and referred to his wife as "my little painted frigate...
...Any good account of the twilight days of the Old World will convey—without its author necessarily realizing it--a nostalgia for the age's sheer douceur de vivre, and Massie's does just that...
...that he should have been paid enough for his poems to let him go overseas...
...His enemies, like Lord Charles Beresford, at least had the Edwardian virtue of not being afflicted with monomania...
...DREADNOUGHT: BRITAIN, GERMANY, AND THE COMING OF THE GREAT WAR Robert K. Massie Random House/1,007 pages/$35 reviewed by R. J. STOVE S it Osbert Sitwell summed up the appeal of the Edwardian era in his remark that in the living memory of most Edwardian Englishmen, nothing had ever happened...
...A telling illustration comes to mind: not long before Sarajevo, the passportless Richard Aldington embarked on a visit to Southern Europe, thanks to several gold sovereigns which he had received from one of London's leading poetry editors that morning...
...When not giving Fisher heartburn, he terrified the Dervish population of North-East Africa...
...invented the tuxedo by hacking off the tails of his servants' evening wear...
...Beaverbrook, Lloyd George, and Northcliffe expected the English-speaking world to swallow some fairly spectacular propaganda, but the idea of a German death wish was not part of it...
...Churchill himself publicly claimed in 1908 (as a Liberal Party front-bencher) that talk of German expansionist threats was mere Tory scare-mongering...
...What an incredible procession of events: that a poet should have been paid in gold, redeemable anywhere on the Continent...
Vol. 25 • September 1992 • No. 9
