Michael Howard

Peter Hennessy has chosen for the dust jacket of Never Again a picture that exactly captures the mood of 1945. A returning British serviceman is being welcomed home by his wife and small son. ‘Home’ is a pre-fab, decked for the occasion with Union Jacks. The wife is wearing a neat, knee-length utility-model dress. The little boy, in shorts, pullover and tie, looks healthy and well-fed. All three are ecstatic with the happiness of finding each other alive again after a war in which the family at home had been as likely to be killed as the soldier at the front. The war was over, the valleys would bloom again, and Johnny would go to sleep in his own little room again.

Although most people, however reluctantly, take some interest in war, precious few bother their heads about organising for war in peacetime. It is a subject, like dental care, both dull and mildly repellent. Until the beginning of this century, few English-men thought it necessary at all. The Navy, so it was hoped, would defend our shores (probably against the French) and the Army would police, and where necessary extend, the Empire. Both Services went their own ways to general public approval, so long as they made minimal demands on the taxpayer. Then the humiliations suffered by the Army in the Boer War, and the near-simultaneous naval threat from Germany, made it clear that in the 20th century national defence would require more sustained attention than during the 19th, and that it was now too serious a matter to be left to the generals. But how it should be handled, and who should handle it, has been a matter of bitter contention, both in war and in peace-time, from that day to this.

There have never been lacking prophets, from Isaiah onwards, to proclaim the end of war, though the more recent of these have not postulated the Second Coming as a necessary condition for achieving it. Some have suggested that the more terrible war becomes, the more quickly it will die out, and, like Alfred Nobel, have devised more destructive weapons in order to hasten the process. Others, from Kant onwards, have suggested that since war is conducted only by unrepresentative élites, it will gradually disappear as democracy extends its sway throughout the world. Yet others see the best hope of its extinction in the universal imposition of a benevolent hegemony by right-minded people calling itself a ‘New World Order’.

The German General Staff used to divide army officers into four categories: the clever and lazy, the clever and hard-working, the stupid and lazy and the stupid and hard-working. The clever and lazy made the best generals, the clever and hard-working the best staff-officers, the stupid and lazy could be fitted in as regimental officers; but the stupid and hard-working were a positive menace and had to be got rid of as quickly as possible. Douglas Haig belonged to the fourth group.

Casual tourists from the West, travelling in air-conditioned buses and staying in modern government-sponsored hotels, may be pleasantly surprised by their first sight of Central Europe. In what used to be East Germany the countryside looks as prosperous and cultivated as anywhere in the West. City centres have been tidied up and carefully rebuilt, while the apartment blocks on the outskirts are no worse than one would find in the United Kingdom – in some places rather better. In Poland agriculture is picturesquely archaic, and in the bustling small towns the people look as well clothed and fed as they would at home. In Czechoslovakia Prague sparkles like a jewel, its streets thronged with happy holiday-makers. As for Hungary, it is hard to realise one is no longer in the West: the huge plains being efficiently (to all appearances) harvested by echelons of combines; the signs of prosperous well-being in industrial centres like Miskolc; the weekenders crowding the shores of Lake Balaton; above all, Budapest, a city in its elegance still more comparable to Paris than Vienna – is there anything seriously wrong here? The region is certainly ‘backward’ compared with Western Europe and the United States, but it always was. The cars and roads are smaller, the trains shabbier, the shops fewer and selling a more limited range of goods. But so it was with Spain or Southern Italy a few decades ago, a ‘backwardness’ almost attractive to the overfed, over-urbanised Westerner, and anyhow, surely remediable by a judicious infusion of capital, technology and expertise?’