Category Archives: Books and Music

The Birthday of Laughter

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On which date in 1881 the Master, i.e., Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, was born.

Some years ago a well-intentioned but hopelessly over-reaching person undertook to make films, movie shorts, of several of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels. I saw a few of them, and thought them uniformly unsuccessful. Can’t recall the name of the fellow who played Jeeves, but I very distinctly recall a scene in which he raises an eyebrow.

Wodehouse fanatics (and to know him is to be one) will easily recognize this as alarmingly over-acted. Jeeves would never indulge such a vulgarity as a raised eyebrow. Oh, he might flicker one by just a hair or two, but certainly not so blatantly, as did this actor, as well as to wink at the viewer. 

So what is it about Wodehouse that makes his best work so hard to stage? At least as to the Jeeves stories it’s not the first-person voice of the original. I can think of at least two other such narratives – Graves’s Claudius novels and Mortimer’s Rumpole stories – in which the filmed versions are every bit as effective as the underlying written texts. Nor is it the structure of the stories themselves; they do, after all, read almost as if written for the stage, in terms of dramatic entries and exits, each scene with its own internal dramatic development, crisis point, and resolution (which of course serves in the overall structure as a device to heighten the dramatic conflict of the main plot). In fact quite a few of his novels originally appeared serialized, and so you would think they’d be if anything even better suited to dramatization than would otherwise be the case. 

It’s got to be the language, by which I do not mean so much the dialogue as the narrative in which the dialogue occurs.  Although Wodehouse’s dialogue is priceless by any measure, and some of his settings of Clarence, Ninth Earl of Emsworth are as good as any vaudeville cross-talk act ever, for me what makes Wodehouse work is the attendant language. Just by way of example, in Chapter 3 of Heavy Weather occurs the following excerpt of conversation between Clarence and his sister, Lady Constance Keeble, concerning the imminent arrival of another sister, Lady Julia Fish. Let’s read it straight through, without input from the narrator: 

Constance: “While we are on the subject of Miss Brown, I forgot to tell you that I had a letter from Julia this morning.” 

Clarence: “Did you? Capital, capital. Who is Julia?” 

Now let’s see how it reads with Wodehouse’s setting: 

“‘While we are on the subject of Miss Brown,’ said Lady Constance, speaking the name as she always did with her teeth rather lightly clenched and a stony look in her eyes, ‘I forgot to tell you that I had a letter from Julia this morning.’ 

“‘Did you?’ said Lord Emsworth, giving the matter some two-fifty-sevenths of his attention. ‘Capital, capital. Who,’ he asked politely, ‘is Julia?'” 

What takes that brief exchange – an ordinary misunderstanding, such as might occur to anyone speaking to a wooly-minded peer with a large income and good digestion – and makes it into comic gold are the three words “he asked politely.” How do you capture that on film? 

And then of course there are Wodehouse’s descriptions, such as painting an extremely angry person as looking like “a tomato striving for self-expression,” or a heavily-mustachioed man with eyeglasses as looking “like a motorcar coming through a haystack.” Various of the female blisters who troop through the Wodehousian world have laughs like a squadron of cavalry crossing a tin bridge. “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes” is not something you’re going to capture with a camera. “The Metropolitan Touch,” in which Bingo Little decides to bring the West End to Twing village, just wouldn’t work without Bertie’s descriptions, such as an orange – “a dashed great hunk of pips and mildew” – hitting him in the face. Or try to imagine Gussie Fink-Nottle’s prize-giving at the grammar school as it might appear on film. 

For that matter, having recourse again to the Blandings Castle saga, we find Beach the butler giving Ashe Marson the gen. about the forthcoming house party at Blandings: 

“‘We are expecting,’ said Mr. Beach, ‘a Number of Guests. We shall in all probability sit down thirty or more to dinner.’ 

“‘A responsibility for you,’ said Ashe ingratiatingly, well pleased to be quit of the feet topic. 

“Mr. Beach nodded. 

“‘You are right, Mr. Marson. Few persons realize the responsibilities of a man in my position. Sometimes, I can assure you, it preys upon my mind, and I Suffer From Nervous Headaches.’ 

“Ashe began to feel like a man trying to put out a fire which, as fast as he checks it at one point, breaks out at another. 

“‘Sometimes, when I come off duty, everything gets Blurred. The outlines of objects grow misty. I have to sit down in a chair. The Pain is Excruciating.’ 

“‘But it helps you to forget the pain in your feet.’ 

“‘No. No. I Suffer From My Feet simultaneously.'” 

Beach goes on to observe that the Lining Of My Stomach is not what he might wish the Lining Of My Stomach to be. 

How do you stage that capitalization of Beach’s? On paper it works perfectly; on the screen, flat. 

Once I looked up a list of Wodehouse’s novels, and printed it off. There were eighty-odd titles listed, and I was proud to find that I had over seventy of them, ranging from his school stories, copyright beginning 1903 I think, to one whose copyright date was 1970 (again, if memory serves; I’ve slept since then). When we drove my first-born off the lot, so to speak, the very first thing he ever had read to him was “The Purity of the Turf.” He couldn’t have been three days old when I balanced him on my chest and read to him of Bertie and Jeeves, of Rupert Steggles, Claude, and Eustace, of little Prudence, egg-and-spoon defending champion, and of the difficulty of “estimating form.”  I’d like to think that early exposure had a tiny bit to do with his teaching himself to read by the time he was six.

In “Without the Option,” Bertie and Oliver Sipperly are pinched on Boat Race Night while unburdening a bobby of his helmet, and Sippy has the presence of mind to give the court a false name. “‘The case of the prisoner Leon Trotzky – which,’ he said, giving Sippy the eye again, ‘I am strongly inclined to think an assumed and fictitious name – is more serious.'” In homage to that line, whenever I am accosted at the check-out line to give an extra dollar to this-that-or-the-other, or importuned by some charitable beggar on the same errand (they usually catch you while you are standing in line, confident you will be unwilling to surrender your place in order to exterminate them), against the promise that my name shall appear on a shamrock, or stylized baby bootie, or little flag, or whatever – as I say, whenever so approached, I invariably give a name such as Leon Trotzky, or Vyacheslav Molotov, or Pavlik Morozov.  Or Galahad Threepwood or Roderick Spode.  I like to think that by so doing I am perhaps spreading a little sweetness and light into the day of some stranger who happens to discover that Bukharin has given a dollar to Toys for Cross-Eyed Dogs or whatever it was, much as Frederick of Ickenham might have done on a “pleasant and instructive afternoon.” 

I am also pleased to note that Wodehouse resonates in the culture beyond confessed misfits such as myself.  In 1999, if the reader will recall, we were inundated with lists of the 100 greatest thingummies of the 20th Century.  On a list of the so many greatest novels I was tickled to find Only a Factory Girl, by Rosie M. Banks.  Rosie of course is the novelist who marries Richard “Bingo” Little, the impresario of Twing, as above mentioned.  During John Roberts’s confirmation hearing for chief justice, he was asked who was his favorite writer.  He gave Wodehouse, an answer upon hearing of which I thought this fellow may not be all that bad after all.

Wodehouse remains my lifeline in many ways, my way back to sanity when nothing in the world makes sense any more, when the thought of picking up a history or a biography, with their litanies of crimes and follies, just seems unbearable, and fiction with its swarms of characters who want to do something, who want you to do something, is equally insupportable, and news of current events strongly suggests recourse to strong drink. A dive into Wodehouse is then a plunge into crystalline purity of human existence untainted by crisis or ill-will beyond a desire to nobble the neighbor’s pig. One thinks wistfully of Galahad Threepwood, who looked as if he’d never been to bed until age fifty, and still gave the impression of being just about to raise a foot in search of a brass rail. One looks for the Earl of Ickenham’s assistant Walkinshaw, who applies the anesthetic. One longs for the somnolent peacefulness of an English country parish, scented of Sunday best and farmer, and the gentle drone of the Reverend Mr. Heppenstall’s sermon on Certain Popular Superstitions. 

And one makes one’s way back to shore.

 

 

 

Don’t Worry Dad; That Won’t Happen to Me: Uninventing Government

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Which is the short version of the speech that pretty much every lead-footed teenager gives his parent when it is suggested that driving like a bat out of hell is a good way to end up on a slab.  I’m a better driver than those guys in the paper last week.

This is the same speech we’re getting from our political class, with its refusal to address the spending avalanche.  Right now the Fed is the purchaser for over 90% of new issues of long-term treasury debt.  Our left pocket is the only source of borrowed money for our right pocket, and our right pocket is shelling the stuff out as fast as the left pocket tops it off.  At that fund-raiser where dear ol’ Mittens was so crass as to suggest that having 47% of your adult population not paying any money into the game was not a good idea, he also observed out that when a government is buying over 90% of its own debt, “at that point you’re just making it up.”

Almost no one’s really picked up on that comment; certainly no one is making an issue of the fact that we’re just making up our economy.

We’re assured by all the Deep Thinkers that this is not really a problem.  The Fed will stop in time; the economy is just about really to take off.  We’re going to grow our way out of this mess.  No, really; we mean it, this time.  And again and again, the numbers keep coming back — unexpectedly!!, as Instapundit would drily note — short of anywhere near what they would need to be for that to occur.  And so we keep firing up the presses and printing off another run.

Math, of course, operates as it will, irrespective of person, party, or country.  That we’re the U.S., or that we’re so diverse a society, or that we have a flashy military, or lots of television shows, or whatever won’t insulate us.  That either party is in or out of power, or partly-in and partly-out won’t help.  All the Learned Cogitations of our judiciary won’t stop it.  The solemn assurances of our chattering classes (of which I am now to some degree a member, I suppose) that Everything Will Be OK can’t stave it off.  Two plus two will never equal anything other than four.

As long as the federal government continues to spend not only more money that it raises in tax revenue, but vastly more than it can ever raise in tax evenue, even by expropriating not just the “1%” but the next 49% as well, the avalanche will not pull up short.  It will reach the bottom of the hill, where we are standing, absorbed in the most recent doings of Big Bird, or the Kardashian sisters and their lady parts, or whatever “reality” show is currently up in the ratings.

This is what it looks like when the avalanche hits bottom.

Germany’s hyper-inflation destroyed its middle classes.  The poor were already poor and generally on some form of relief.  The wealthy either had their wealth in hard assets or abroad.  The middle class, the ones who got up in the morning, went to work, came home and played with the kids, or with the kids’ mommy, went to church, listened to concerts, and generally pursued that inward self-development that is summed up in the uniquely German concept of Bildung — they were wiped out.  For almost 150 years Germany had consciously, aggressively pursued the creation of a society based on Bildung, a notion that is quite a bit broader and deeper than what English-speakers would think of as “education,” or “learning,” or even “cultivation.”  It is, to be sure, all those, but it is also quite a bit more.  That segment of the society that Germany knew as the Bildungsbürgertum was its sea anchor.  It was what kept the ship pointing into the waves.

Within a matter of months the Bildungsbürgertum was largely wiped out, their inward Bildung unable to heat the apartment or even rent one.  The wealthy industrialists, merchant princes, bankers, and landed aristocracy took a lick, of course, but they survived.  The proletariat, the Pöbel, was not to be considered sortable.  And so the Bildungsbürgertum looked about them for a mode of existence, a form of organizing their world and their understanding of themselves in it, that would validate them, elevate them, show them a way forward.

Recently Peter Watson, an English author, published a book, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century, a social, cultural, and intellectual history of German from 1750 to right about now.  His point in doing so was to demonstrate that there was a German culture before1933, and that to view Germany and its history exclusively through the prism of the Nazi era was not only to do it a disservice but also to abandon a rich trove of human insight.  I am of course over-simplifying his argument, but Watson identifies the shattered Bildungsbürgertum of the 1920s as forming a large constituent of the fertile soil where sprouted the plants whose fruits were the mountains of corpses shown on the newsreels of the camps’ liberation.

There is only one sure way to keep a teenager from driving to his own death.  You take away the keys.  There is only one sure way to take away the ability of the political class to drive us over the cliff.  You take away their power.  Kicking out Set A of them and replacing them, temporarily, with Set B will not do the trick.  We must get over the notion of “reinventing government” as a deus ex machina.  What is wanted is not “reinventing”; it is uninventing government that will save us, if we are to be saved.

Happy Birthday Jenny Lind

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One of the things I like about old music is that it seems (I may be just imagining it, but then maybe not) to give a glimpse into worlds gone by.  It’s one of the reasons I enjoy Sweelinck’s music, especially played on the sorts of instruments it would have been played on back in the day, e.g. the virginals or a chest organ.  Ditto Buxtehude.  Music has always had the power to move people powerfully and for reasons that the hearer doesn’t even necessarily understand.  It just soaks in and makes us want to do.  Even music without words will do the trick.

We can read the books, the pamphlets, the sermons that were written in any particular period to see what got folks all in a twitter back then.  But those are all more-or-less intentionally didactic exercises, thought out, tried out, very frequently written for a specific occasion or in address to a specific audience.  And of course in a world in which huge chunks of the people were illiterate or nearly so, even of the middling orders, the written word as a statistically valid sample (to use a metaphor a bit out of place) has to be questioned.  So I humbly submit that if we want to place our hands as closely as possible — if unavoidably imperfectly, since we hear with different ears than they would, just as we read with different eyes — we need to listen to their music.  To borrow a phrase someone once used about Bach, “we must follow him to the organ.”

And so, from way back in the day when famous people had songs, marches, quick-steps, dances, etc. written in their honor, we reach out to touch the Jenny Lind Polka, written to honor the Swedish Nightingale, born on this day in 1820:

Once upon a time I had a cassette recording including this tune, done on mountain dulcimer, which really works excellently.  The mountain dulcimer is by the way one of the better-kept secrets of American music, I suggest.  You ought to hear “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” on it; I bet Luther himself would observe, “Ja, das ist das echte Zeug!”

Monty Python and Modern Memory

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In which one of history’s greatest comedy troupes is firmly anchored in the mud of the Western Front.

Today marks the anniversary of the first broadcast, in 1969, of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, an exercise in farce, irony, absurdity, word-play, and slap-stick which over forty years on remains a benchmark. The world divides neatly into two groups, those who get the Pythons and those whose lives are barren wastelands. Even now in certain circles all one need do is announce, “I wish to register a complaint!” and be perfectly understood. To describe someone as being a Mr. Creosote conjures up vivid pictures in the minds of millions all over the world (I’ve always wondered, however, how one would translate the Pythons into another language, so much of the humor being bound up in the play of English words, their pronunciations and meanings).

In the best traditions of English humor poking fun at religion and ecclesiastics forms a large element in the Python canon, e.g. “The Bishop,” or the interjections of the Spanish Inquisition – which no one expects – or the street preacher scene from Life of Brian. For an earlier illustration of the exercise one can do no better than Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice, in which character Jane Austen perfectly captured the unctuous insincerity of the used car dealer nearly a full century before his creation. But taking swings at preachers, howe’er so skillfully done, really comes more under the category of shooting fish in a barrel. 

What I’m after here is a fundamental structure, a pattern of organizing the canvas of Python-land that is so closely woven into its fabric that you really don’t notice it’s there, necessarily, unless you look for it. One refers to grotesque irony, all the way from the anarcho-syndicalists scraping about in the mud to the Queen Victoria Handicap to crowds worshipping a sandal to a waiter who kills himself over a poorly-washed piece of cutlery to an actual government bureau for exaggeratedly silly gaits. Depictions of the grotesque are nothing new, either in English, continental, or American popular entertainment. I mean, think of the circus freak-show, or the vaudeville act featuring the Amazing Man With No Skeleton, and so forth. Nor had the humorous possibilities of Things Not Being as They Are Presented escaped English-language writers, as witness Pudd’nhead Wilson and The Importance of Being Earnest. Nor is farce anything new to the landscape of modern humor; P. G. Wodehouse’s first Blandings novel, Something Fresh, was published in 1915 (in America, by the way, as witness the constant conversational references among English characters to U.S. monetary units). And of course sophisticated comedy goes back to Shakespeare and before. 

But irony, especially irony taken to a level of grotesque juxtaposition of What Is and What Ought to Be (“The Architect Sketch,” anyone?), understood as something specifically amusing, does strike me as something not widely encountered prior to a certain point. That certain point is World War I. Without repeating the argument in too great detail (besides, I’ve slept since last re-reading it), Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory could well be subtitled something along the lines of “; or, Irony Sweeps the Field.” A large portion of Fussell’s thesis is that British authors finding themselves tossed into the troglodyte world of the Western Front were confronted with contrasts, sickening beyond all former human points of reference, between farm, woodland, stream, wildlife, integration, stability, and sense on the one hand, and gore, fear, violence, uncertainty, randomness, wantonness, and degradation on the other. The authors, steeped as they were in pastoral traditions (there’s a reason that within recent times the largest group of members in the principal British garden club were retired senior army and navy officers), found themselves forced into irony as the principal framework and method of expressing the horror, the enormity of what was happening. And of course the more extreme the contrast, the greater the irony. 

Fussell lauds Isaac Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” as the best and in many ways the quintessential Great War Poem, precisely for its understated irony, and likewise Blunden’s Undertones of War for its recurring theme of the pastoral violated (in case you haven’t Got It by then, his final sentence describes himself as a simple shepherd-boy in a military greatcoat). By contrast Fussell “breaks on the wheel” the “butterfly” of McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” largely because of its entirely unironical treatment of the dead and their address to the living. [N.b. I have to say that I diverge from Fussell’s opinion, at least to the extent that he excoriates the poem as “stupid” and brutal. The author was a doctor serving with the front-line artillery, who wrote the poem to the sounds of the guns and while sitting in the back of an ambulance . He wrote the day after a dear friend of his had been killed; McCrae had performed his funeral. So implying that the poem’s imprecations from the dead to the living to take up the fight against Germany is somehow the cheap moral equivalent of the women who went around London shoving white feathers (the symbol of cowardice, then) on every male not in uniform is a bit unjust.] 

Where Fussell’s book takes the second half of its title is what he identifies as the enduring quality of the shift in vision, in understanding, that the authors brought home with them. Irony is now not just a way of highlighting a particular point to be made in the narrative; irony is now the principal mode of understanding and expression, whether in a serious vein or humorous. Laughter has long been recognized as a coping mechanism; Lincoln once answered the question why he told humorous stories during the war by observing that he laughed in order that he might not cry. Pointing out absurd contrasts between the Purported and the Actual, not so much to illuminate any characteristic about either element of the contrast but rather in order to make the larger point that Our World is Absurd, Makes, and Can Make no Sense, is according to Fussell very much a post-Great War phenomenon. Fussell points to the mockery that attended the Empire Exposition, at Wembley in the 1930s, citing specifically its appearance as a plot device in a P. G. Wodehouse novel (I won’t spoil the plot, but it involves Roderick and Honoria Glossop, Bertie Wooster, and of course Jeeves, and is well worth the read) and observing that treating The Empire in this fashion simply would not have occurred in public discourse before the War, or been widely understood to be either funny or even permissible. 

And the Pythons are thoroughly in that post-war tradition. Why is it that the “Dead Parrot Sketch” is so funny? It’s not just the cross-talk or the slippery pet shop-keeper. What makes it funny is the customer’s recitation of every greeting-card euphemism for death he can think of while returning a dead bird, itself of an ironic, non-existent species – a Norwegian parrot? really? – to a shop-keeper who insists that it’s just “pinin’ for the fjords.” The pseudo-elevated yet blandly commercialized language grafted onto an ordinary consumer fraud transaction is the engine that makes the sketch work. The sketch isn’t “about” pet shops, or crooked merchants, or the vicissitudes of consumer relations. The sketch is “about,” if anything, the absurdity of the world in which it takes place, a world whose essential absurdity has been a central theme of English language and literature since the days of Sassoon’s “Suicide in the Trenches,” or Owens’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” And in fact what could be more viciously ironic than Owens’s parents receiving, quite literally while the village bells were pealing to celebrate the Armistice on November 11, 1918, the telegram informing them that their boy had been killed a week before, leading his men across some torpid, poisoned canal in France? 

Think this has no relevance to American literature and arts? The same technique is what makes Raising Arizona or O Brother! Where Art Thou? such hilarious movies. Ed’s insides “were a bare and rocky place where my seed could find no purchase,” as spoken by the multi-loser convenience market robber H. I. McDonough is a line that I will submit would not have been written before July 1, 1916.

 

Sea Power and the Influence of Mahan, 1890-2012

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27 September 1840: Alfred Thayer Mahan is born. Graduates from the Naval Academy and becomes a career officer, but never is truly enamored of the sea. Eventually gets orders for the U.S. Naval War College, in preparation for which duty station he begins to contemplate Sea Power. And a pattern emerges in his head, which he then begins to pursue in a systematic, academic fashion. He digs deeper and begins to write.

The pattern Mahan noticed is one that the British semi-intuitively, semi-institutionally understood, although in typical British fashion no one had ever actually sat down and demonstrated its truth. What the British understood and Mahan laid out on paper is the fact that throughout history, when nations have got cross-ways and one had control of the seas and the other not, the outcome always seemed to favor that power which controlled the seas. Why? 

In 1890 he begins to publish the results of his research, beginning with a book with a rather bulky but self-explanatory title: The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660 – 1783. A little over a century, a long, miserable century later, we might add to its title (in the style Mahan himself would have recognized), “; or, American Sea Captain Lays Powder Trail to Magazine and Blows up World”. But wait, the gentle reader murmurs, I’ve never heard of this sea dog or his book. Sort of like the newspaper reporter who couldn’t believe Nixon won in 1972 because, “No one I know voted for him.” But most people have never heard of the benzene ring, either. 

What made Mahan so influential was not what he wrote – the British, as mentioned, had been practicing his precepts as part of their military-cultural DNA for generations. What made Mahan influential was who read him. More to the point, which one specific person read him: a gentleman who, except for his garish moustache and withered left arm, would not have stood out in a crowd . . . well, apart from the Pickelhaube. Wilhelm II of Germany bit down hard on Mahan’s argument and in a case of confirmation bias if ever there was such, found in it a theoretical justification for what he admitted (to the shame of his ministers) he’d wanted ever since he was a child: a nice big shiny battle fleet, just like his grandmother Victoria’s. 

The problem was that Wilhelm was in a position to do something about it, and in a textbook illustration of what happens when the wrong two people get put in a room together, Wilhelm and Alfred Tirpitz (the “von” was added only later), who rose to the top of the Kaiserliche Marine in 1897, brought out the worst in each other and Mahan’s ideas were the glue that held them together. Wilhelm wanted a battle fleet to steam over to visit the relatives. Tirpitz wanted a battle fleet because . . . ummmm, because in building a battle fleet he will cement his position in the hierarchy of the German navy, and transform it from the bastard idiot step-sister of the Army into something that was . . . well, in point of fact, that was both a strategic and a tactical problem that Tirpitz never really successfully addressed. A recent biography of him paints a fairly unflattering picture of a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, maneuvering, back-biting, side-stepping, and intriguing his way around in the circular logic that is the species’s hallmark: I must be master of the Kaiserliche Marine because Germany needs a battle fleet (Mahan hath said) and I must build it; the battle fleet must be built and continually expanded because without building the battle fleet I will have no navy to master. 

Why, you ask, is all this relevant? It is relevant because of what it did to British foreign policy during the not-quite 25 years from 1890 to 1914. As late as 1895 and the start of the third and last Salisbury government, Britain still proudly pursued her Splendid Isolation. In a famous formulation, she had no friends or enemies, but only interests, which she pursued at her discretion. “Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off” read a much-quote headline in The Times. To the extent that Britain looked favorably on anyone, Germany would be it. Their ruling houses were closely connected, their commercial interests in friendly competition, their overseas merchants respectable. And the Germans had kicked the ever-loving snot out of England’s hereditary enemy, France, as recently as 1871. 

Wilhelm’s Kruger Telegram of 1896 was a belch in chapel that rattled the windows all the way up in the clerestory. Wilhelm sent congratulations to the Boers for having fended off the Jamison Raid by themselves, “without the assistance of friendly powers,” thus implying that Germany would have felt herself such a power. Although Britain was profoundly embarrassed by the raid, and in fact had no direct hand in its planning or execution – it was one of the last great and pure filibustering expeditions – it was launched from British territory, British citizens put it together, and it caused a ruckus in what was, after all, part of the British Empire. Wilhelm’s gratuitously intermeddling, and in a manner which strongly implied less than hearty goodwill towards Blighty, introduced an element into relations theretofore missing. 

Tirpitz’s Navy Law of 1898, providing for the construction of a German blue-water battle fleet, changed the direction of relations between the two countries. Even more importantly, the Second Navy Law of 1900, cobbled together by Tirpitz more or less in direct response to the frictions the Boer War generated, was pretty much a direct and explicit challenge to British naval supremacy. For quite a few years Britain had maintained an official policy that her fleet should be superior to the world’s next two most-powerful navies combined. Wilhelm and Tirpitz and their political allies changed all that. 

“All that” changed because naval supremacy was to the British not just a matter of keeping up with the Joneses (or the Hohenzollerns, or the Habsburgs, or the Romanovs, or the Meiji). It really, honestly, no kidding was an issue of life or death to their empire. You can ignore a puffing and strutting Kaiser, especially when doesn’t have a combat fleet to speak of. As was famously said of the fleet (I think it was in connection with the 1897 Diamond Jubilee naval review), all one need do was open the sea-cocks on those capital ships and within a few hours the British Empire would dissolve. Challenge her at sea, in other words, and all other bets were off. 

All bets were suddenly off. By 1904 Britain had squared matters with France, in Africa and in the Mediterranean. Later things went so far that Britain denuded her Mediterranean fleet of its most powerful units to bring them home, and France shifted her major naval power to the inland sea. In other words, each put vital sea lines of communication and supply in the effective guardianship of the other. To put some historical perspective on this, England and France had been at each other’s throats since at least the 1340s (the Crimean War was a brief and, as one looking back from 1895 would have thought, transitory exception). The Kaiserliche Marine was the proximate cause of an about-face in nearly seven centuries of mutual hostility. When HMS Dreadnought hit the water in 1906, the race was well and truly on. Britain and Germany just came right on out and admitted that each was building against the other. 

Britain and France sought out each other, each to assist in their respective protection against Germany. Britain even snuggled up with the Tsar, much to the outrage of the ruling Liberals’ constituents who wanted no truck with tyranny. The financial stresses of the naval arms race brought about the “People’s Budget” crisis of 1909 in Britain, and the following constitutional crisis of 1910-11, which resulted in the emasculation of the House of Lords as an active participant in British government. 

By 1910 Germany was encircled in fact and not just in the Kaiser’s periodic fulminations. 

In point of fact it was the building of the German battle fleet (which a few hours’ contemplation of a chart of the North Sea could – and did – reveal to the thoughtful examiner to be without strategic use or even function, Mahan’s “fleet in being” concept notwithstanding) which prompted the creation of one side of those alliances which ensured that a major blow-up in Eastern Europe would not be contained within the Balkans or wherever else; that it would spread to Western Europe; and, that – critically, from the perspective of the war’s duration and strategic development – it would involve Britain and her fleet. 

In September, 1914 the Germans were stopped at the Marne, and they were stopped, just barely, because the left flank of the French army was not in the air, but was tethered, however imperfectly, to the British Expeditionary Force and the remnants of its six decimated, dog-tired divisions of “Old Contemptibles” (itself an expression playing on what the Germans had intended a slur on Britain’s “contemptible” little army; the Germans just never did get what Americans of that generation knew as moxy).

 The war was not to be won on the six-week timetable envisioned by Count von Schlieffen. It was not, in fact, to be won by the Germans at all. Long wars produce results “fundamental and astounding” (to borrow Lincoln’s description from his Second Inaugural) that short wars do not. The Great War ushered in the most calamitous century of human history thus far. Our present century may yet make up the difference; we’re not even 14 years into it, after all. But the fact of strategic stalemate on the Western Front, a fact created by Britain’s belligerence, was the cauldron from which spilled revolution, fratricide, genocide, famines on untold scales, and glimpses into the wickedness of human nature which really I think we’d have been better off not being vouchsafed. Some things it’s better not to know are there, however much you may suspect them. 

Irony of ironies, it was the British fleet which starved Germany into submission in the end. Her armies were falling back, true, in part because of American manpower pouring into France at the rate of a quarter-million untrained Doughboys a month (that sealift itself a product of mastery of the oceans). But they were not broken by any means, and it was only the infection of defeatism permeating the army, as well as simple human hunger for something other than turnips (part of what stopped Ludendorff’s spring, 1918 offensives was the ordinary soldiers’ stopping to eat, just to get a damned bite of real food in the captured Allied positions after months of ersatz this-that-and-the-other, all with a good dollop of turnip and sawdust mixed in), that lead the generals to tell the Kaiser in early November, 1918 that they could no longer guarantee the army’s loyalty. In addition to their own suffering, lack of supplies, lack of food, that defeatism was in no small measure a function of the soldiers’ knowing what was going on at home. Their families were starving, literally starving to death by the tens of thousands a year. 

They starved because Britain had command of the seas. Just like Alfred Thayer Mahan, born on this date in 1840, would have predicted. 

All of which has to make Mahan one of the most influential single individuals in modern human history, easily on par with Marx, Einstein, or Darwin. Were it not for the turmoils unleashed by Mahan’s most unfortunate fan-boy, Marx’s ideas would likely never have got a trial run. Einstein’s insights into the nature of matter would have likely remained the stuff of laboratory technicians (no Manhattan Project without a target for the bomb, eh wot?). Darwin’s insight into the biological aspects of the human species would compete with a commonly accepted understanding of human moral nature not forever poisoned by the knowledge of what we humans did to each other over the course of a century that by rights should have seen material and moral progress limited only by the 24 hours in each day. 

For a tremendously good read on Mahan’s legacy, I can’t recommend any better than Robert K. Massie’s Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War.