Free Stranger Than We Can Imagine by John Higgs Page A

disposal, replacing him was considerably more difficult. A system that worked well for smaller groups became fundamentally flawed at larger scales.
    After kingdoms reached the scale where people were no longer able to remove their leader, the incentive to rule justly became less pressing. Rulers became attracted to doctrines such as the divine right of kings. This claimed that a king was not subject to the will of the people, because their right to rule came directly from God. When people believed in the divine right of kings, all notions of egalitarian leadership were over. Leaders were intrinsically superior to their people, at least in their own eyes and in the eyes of those who benefited financially from their power. It is noticeable that leading theologians had very little to say about the divine right of pig-farmers.
    This system continued into the twentieth century. It may have been tempered by the growth of representative parliaments, but it was emperors who led the world towards the First World War.
    The nineteenth century had been relatively peaceful, at least in Europe. The wars that did occur after the defeat of Napoleon, such as the Franco-Prussian War, the wars of Italian independence or the Crimean War, were brief. Most were over in a matter of months, if not weeks. The only major prolonged conflict was in North America, and that was an internal civil war rather than an expansionist imperial one. When the British Foreign Office announced in August 1914 that Britain was at war with Germany, and huge crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace to cheer the king in response, there was little reason to think this war would be any different. Although some politicians nursed private fears about a prolonged war, the words of a single British soldier, Joe Armstrong of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, summed up the thoughts of many enlisting Europeans: ‘Well, I thought the same as everybody else. Everybody said “It’ll be over by Christmas and you’ve got to get out soon, otherwise you won’t see anything.” ’
    The jubilant scenes at enlisting stations showed enormous popular enthusiasm for the fight. In Britain, the formation of ‘pals battalions’, where friends from factories, football teams or other organisations could sign up together and be placed in the same unit, added to the sense that the war would be a bit of an adventure. The schoolboy-like names of these pals brigades, such as the Liverpool Pals, the Grimsby Chums, the Football Battalion or Bristol’s Own, make the tragedy of their fate even more acute. The tone of recruitment posters (‘Surely you will fight for your King and country? Come along boys, before it’s too late’) seems horribly disconnected from the horrors that were to come, as does the practice by British women of handing white feathers to men not in uniform to mark them as cowards. Britain had traditionally relied on professional soldiers to fight its wars, so Parliament’s plea in August 1914 for a volunteer army of 100,000 men was unparalleled. By the end of September over 750,000 men had enlisted. Those soldiers had no concept of tanks, or aerial warfare or chemical weapons. They did not imagine that war could involve the entire globe. The events to come were unprecedented.
    This enthusiasm might now seem bizarre in light of the weakness of the justification for the war. The British were going to war to defend Belgium, which was threatened by Germany’s invasion of France and Russia, which was triggered by Russia declaring war on Austria, who were invading Serbia following the shooting of an Austrian by a Serbian in Bosnia. It was a complicated mess, and historians have spent the century since arguing about why it happened. Some have pointed the finger at German imperial expansionism, most notably the German historian Fritz Fischer, yet imperial expansionism was an area in which most of the other combatants were not entirely innocent. The Cambridge historian