• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 978 0

depended upon their relation with Great Britain. The British themselves were far less certain about this. British policy had traditionally been directed toward maintaining the balance of power on the Continent, and this had led her, from about 1689 on, into a series of anti-French coalitions. After 1870, it was no longer the French who threatened to achieve a hegemony over Europe, and therefore the British had gravitated, almost unknowingly, into the anti-German coalition that fought the First World War. Yet old ideas died hard. In terms of national stereotypes, even though the British and French fought World War I together, they did not really like each other. The alliance always had divergent ends, and ideas of means to achieve them; it was Marshal Foch in 1918 who remarked that after his experience with coalitions, he had less respect for Napoleon than he used to have.

The British had also resented the kind of war they had had to fight. Their policy was always to use their navy to great advantage, and to employ a small army, beefed up by subsidized allies whom they bought among the continental powers. In 1914, they found that that would no longer work; they had been forced to field a large army, and had watched for four years while it slowly sank into the Flanders mud. Several times at crisis points the Anglo-French alliance threatened to come apart at the seams.

At the end of the war the French and British views parted company. France wanted to ruin Germany permanently; Britain was not so sure. Germany was a threat, but she was also Britain’s largest prewar customer. The British backed off from any long-term commitment to France, glad of the excuse given them by the Americans, and they preferred to put their hopes on the League of Nations. Somewhat paradoxically, the British became the major backer of the League, a backing that was always ineffective because they were conscious of lacking the support of the United States.

In addition to casting a disapproving eye on French policies toward the Germans, the British had their own difficulties. The war had created enormous social dislocation; there was unemployment, unrest, and a wave of strikes through the twenties. New York had replaced London as the world’s financial capital. Though some historians say the war was good for Britain, as unleashing hitherto dormant or unproductive energies, most regard it as an unmitigated disaster. There were major problems with the empire as well: Ireland finally broke away, there were riots in South Africa, there was a massacre in India, Gandhi began his campaigns of nonviolent resistance, the white dominions loosened the ties of empire even further, to the point of invisibility. The new territories gained by Britain after the war, mandated to her by the League of Nations, proved to be no bargain. Her conflicting wartime deals with assorted factions in the Middle East came home to roost, and though stout-hearted colonels might take comfort from the large splotches of the map still colored British, the color was fading fast.

With the Channel between them and the Continent, and secure in the knowledge that the Royal Navy was still supreme, the British were able to take a more benevolent view of their late enemies than the French were. As the twenties rolled on, Britain came to the view that the Germans had indeed been harshly treated at Versailles. The punitive peace was predicated on conditions that did not develop, or turned out not to apply. Therefore, Britain became at least mildly revisionist in her views about Germany. Even before the term “appeasement” was coined, the British were conceding that Germany might be better treated than was the case. It was this view that led them, in 1935, into signing the Anglo-German Naval Agreement.

The agreement was a major setback for the Western Powers, though it did not look like it at the time. Britain agreed that Germany might build up her naval strength to a point where it was one third that of the Royal Navy. They further agreed to Anglo-German parity in submarine tonnage. That might