Flukes and Accidents

Talking and walking, following a route, drawn across a mountain, squeezed into an app, read by a mate, who ties our chat and tramp to his lead. Captain Copsey! It’s a walk in Wales, and bardic resonances vibrate across the druidic field: we pass Taliesin; standing on a rock trying to translate modern Mancunian into dark-age Welsh. Ach-y-fi, he says, and dismisses us with a stanza. That’s the walk. And the talk? Random innit. Jon telling the Schloss about flukes. Why bomb Hiroshima not Kyoto...some bloke says it’s all about chance, what a tourist does on his holiday.

Where have I heard this before....

My mind’s machinery shuddering into motion; the chains of memory clang and clack over rusty cogs crunching rusty cogs. Give them oil! I screech. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!

I swap it for better technology: the buttons pressed, an ancient TV given a thump. Ah! A grey and white screen flickers through the memory fog; wavy lines straightening into some odd geezer talkin’ about timetables. What! Yes, the chap’s talking about a paper antique, those printed behemoths, the once ubiquitous train tables. They caused World War One.

A.J.P. Taylor. Has to be. His provocative theory that the train schedules forced the war; for once the Russians decided to mobilise, the Germans had to act before the troops reached the border; a quick knock-out of the French, then back to the East as those trains unloaded their soldiers. Fighting on two fronts the Prussian military machine designed to fit the timetables; success determined by the speed of steam and the geography of its tracks. (Ironies are grim when considered in retrospect.) Once the Tsar gave the mobilisation order war inevitable; the Germans couldn’t risk that huge Russian force at its border while diplomats negotiated Austro-Serbian-Russian relations. Having made the decision nothing to stop it. Some clerk in a railway office to blame.

A recent account stresses the Tsar’s mobilisation although giving it a twist.

On July 29, even as Tsar Nicholas II was hesitating, Hamlet-like, over whether to issue the final, irreversible order for general mobilisation (he actually did issue it around 9:00 p.m., only to change his mind and rescind the order less than an hour later)....1

What if the Tsar had stuck to that decision? The life of millions saved if Nicholas II’s see-saw mind hadn't tipped once more to the other side.2 Sean McMeekin doesn’t mention timetables.

Taylor’s theory hasn’t worn well; the diplomats, politicians and generals weren’t, it seems, ruled by the train drivers. Taylor’s theory due more to his gadfly cleverness and the period of his pomp - its fashion for an ‘end to ideology’ - when technocrats and technology preferred to politicos and concepts. Nevertheless, his view that we understand large-scale events by looking at tiny occurrences remains a key insight; the kernel of a truth of which many seem unaware: causes are individual and unique. To look at an historical event is to get the microscope out. Today we use different metaphors, as the engineer and laboratory assistant give way to the mathematician and statistician. It’s why Jon talks to the Schloss of flukes; tells me about the ubiquity of the random.

I have my doubts; which straggle along, trekkers lost in these trackless mountains, as a veil of rain blows in from the sea. Doubts turning into worries when...AJP emerges out of the mist to show...a gust of cloud vanishes him...and when - thank God! - it clears, a finger points...another fist of mist...to a huge book.3 Our man had a far more sophisticated understanding of historical causation than his timetable theory suggests. In his masterpiece, which I have snaffled into the footnotes, a model of historical explanation can be exhumed from its an Amazonian undergrowth of diplomatic detail. There are three elements:

Big ideas

Social-economic conditions

Accidents

Between 1815 and 1870 the big idea that monopolised diplomatic thinking was the containment of France, with a specific worry over revolution in Paris, with its tendency to spill across Europe. But ideas linger beyond their sell-by-date. During the 1860s this idea was hollowed out by the rapid industrialisation of Prussia, and the alliance of the North German states. No-one except Bismarck seemed to notice. France to pay the penalty for believing in a dead concept at Sedan. After the French defeat a new idea comes to dominate the scene. Between 1870 and 1914 the great powers sought to contain a rising but unstable Germany.

The social-economic realities are more dynamic than the ruling idea, which masks the industrial and technological changes; one reason why massive mistakes are made at the highest levels: concepts not facts guide political thinking. However, there is no simple, mechanical, transition from factory and science lab to military action and social revolution. Something has to happen to trigger a major event like the Great War.

In June 1914, military manoeuvres were to take place in Bosnia, where 15 and 16 army corps were being prepared for the eventual invasion of Serbia. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an army inspector, went to supervise these manoeuvres; it was natural enough for him to pay a courtesy visit to Sarajevo, although he had forebodings. He and his morganatic wife travelled there on Sunday, 28 June, which happened to be the Serbian national day, marking Kossovo. The security arrangements had been badly handled by Potiorek, a gloomy homosexual, who had a grievance against the archduke because Franz Ferdinand had promoted his rival, Conrad von Hötzendorf, to be chief of the General Staff. No doubt, in view of the strained finances of the military government, he did not want to face criticism from Vienna at over lavish security. There was a very thin military cordon as the archduke drove to the konak; and a bomb was thrown from the crowd. It bounced off the back of the car, and the archduke drove on, in a rage, to the governor’s residence. Shortly after midday, he drove off again to see an officer who had been wounded in the bomb explosion. His driver took a wrong turning, into a narrow street where he could not manoeuvre the car. Waiting there was another assassin, Gavrilo Prinčip, a Bosnian Serb who had obtained training and weaponry from the Serbian nationalists over the border. He had given up hope of reaching his target, because of the failure of the earlier attempt. Now his target drove up to him, very slowly, and stopped. Prinčip fired several times before he was overpowered; the archduke and his wife were dead.4

Accidents. Remove just one of the above, and the archduke would have survived, and millions may never have seen a trench. Nevertheless, accidents alone are not sufficient to bring down empires or smithereen a continent. Taylor describes hundreds of incidents, any one that could have started a war between the great powers; yet the late 19th-century was a time of peaceful coexistence. For here is a truth we often overlook; that politics is one crisis after another, each managed more or less successfully. Something exceptional has to occur to produce a complete collapse; the structure of international relations too sturdy, the constraints too strong, for most events to destroy, even disturb, it. Accidents alone are not enough. They must happen at an eerily precise moment, when the big idea, the social-economic conditions, together with the surrounding scene, its competing interests, the leading actors - plus the pressure of the event - weaken those constraints, to smash through habits and conventional assumptions.5 If the timing is right (or wrong; it depends on your point of view), an accident to set off a completely new causal chain, that cannot be managed under the previous conditions. The moment when diplomats are pushed aside by generals, who have their own methods and ways of thinking.

Accidents are crucial to major events; the reason why often enwreathed in conspiracies: Pearl Harbour; the Korean War, Tonkin, the April Glaspie ‘slip’. It is because the accident alone, though crucial, cannot satisfy us; for all accidents are awash with meanings. It is how we read this mishmash of cause and meaning, judge the balance between the three levels of Taylor’s model, that decides who the historian and who a conspiracist. The conspiracy theorist confuses causes with meanings and collapses all three of the model’s levels in a single action, believed consciously engineered, by some semi-secret cabal.6 It is rarely so.7 Rather, accidents trigger a set of pre-existing conditions which at that point in time are dynamic and unpredictable. No accident is ever ‘pure’ - entirely random -; the force of the surrounding scene producing both the accident and giving it a dangerous significance. Suddenly things become unstable. Meanings flood the political landscape; increasing the pressure to act. Even so, the conditions have to be exactly right for these meaning-mad moments to press the war button; and, when the button is pressed, for an entire social system to dissolve into nought.8 Two years earlier, according to Hugh Seton-Watson, a war in the Balkans between Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire seemed certain, but it would not have drawn in Germany and France.9 If only someone had made a decision then - Nicholas II a little heavier on the see-saw - Europe saved from disaster.

Most accidents don’t kill millions. The problem of looking at the random is that you give too much significance to what actually happened, and miss the thousands of other incidents that disappear without trace because they had no perceivable effect: they lacked the force to weaken the constraints that keep a social field in equilibrium. Imagine if Franz Ferdinand had decided not to visit that soldier. Just enough time to sort out a diplomatic démarche? But in killing a Habsburg the Serbs had gone too far...revenge rolled out across those timetables. Only a strong-minded Tsar to put the trains back into the stations; by backing royal honour against the populist clamour of Slavic pride.10 So why isolate one accident - that wrong turning - rather than others that never existed: a wife who didn't persuade her husband to stay at the governor’s house, until Potiorek upped the guard? A problem of the random: when you isolate it, it is no longer random, it is a fluke; a meaningful event. We have given it a significance way in excess of its actual value.

A Serb pops up and berates me at the top of this mountain. Extending his arms to the north-east - Manchester/Liverpool? - then pointing at Gellfechan, he says: why is a continent of fifty million dead more important than a Serbia of 100,000 dead? He makes me think. If all things are random, then all criteria become meaningless; everything the same as everything else. Cader Idris as insignificant as this stone I kick towards a curious sheep. It is the problem of mathematics, of science in general.11 My Serb laughs and heads down to Barmouth. ‘See you at Bernard Barnes’s place. He loves the philosophy gas.’ I wave, and think of that cosmos in a village hall.

Let me go back to the list of incidents leading up to the archduke’s death. I could isolate any one, and give it an overriding significance. Think of those odd adjectives - ‘morganatic wife’ or ‘gloomy homosexual’ - which seem to say more about the author than the history. Was the Great War due to the archduke’s fateful move to fall in love with someone outside the royal enclosure; this woman, because of her social background, unable to assert herself inside her husband’s private apartments? Did this cause the lights to go out all over Europe? We can never know for sure; but only a novelist is going to look at an aristocratic love affair for an historical explanation. A Flaubert widens the horizon of interest; the historian must close it down. Historians narrow down the field of causation, to enable both them and us to understand events. For history, we mustn't forget, is creation, albeit never a complete fiction. Meaning and cause. We supply the meanings and hope that the causes are equal to them; which is based on the reasonable assumption that there is something out there in the world that corresponds to what we are constructing in here, in our head; that there is an intelligible order, events not just random.12 In public affairs, as opposed to the Schloss’s imagination, the actual value of an accident is determined not by the accident itself but by more obvious and stable and rational factors: the governing idea; a peculiar history, the institutions of State and nation; the political and military situation; the fear of making fateful decisions.13

The accident is important. It throws a burning oil drum onto a stockpile of matériel. The archduke’s driver situated in an alliance system forged around the belief in an unstable power, desperate for elbow room in the centre of Europe. The Prussians add their own flaming flambeaux: that time is running out for expansion; a two-front war impossible. Everybody is waiting for that madman at the gates. The big idea was in place. The political-industrial-military conditions perfect. The timing spot on. It just needed the right accident: a fluke. A driver drives down the wrong street. Bang! Bang! Bang! Gavrilo Prinčip shoots himself into immortality.


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Notes

1 Sean McMeekin, The Ottoman Endgame, pp.97-98.

2 For the weakness of Nicholas II’s character: Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924.

3 The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918.

4 Norman Stone, Europe Transformed 1878-1919, pp.324-325.

5 What Karl Popper calls the logic of the situation. Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography.

6 For a discussion of the conspiracy theorist: my One Side of the Equation. A separate question: why a cabal not an individual...why is it so important that shady figures conspire together? Maybe the Schloss will write another piece....

7 The Gulf of Tonkin appears an exception. The First Gulf War is a typical case. The US changing its ideas when Saddam Hussein misread April Glaspie’s briefing on the Iraq-Kuwait dispute.

8 This problem is magnificently treated in Bruce Cuming’s The Origins of the Korean War; although I disagree with his conclusion: that what actually started the war is unimportant; because its origins lie in the history of the American occupation, and its effects on its Cold War thinking: from Containment to Rollback.

9 The Decline of Imperial Russia.

10 For the role of public opinion on the Tsar’s decision: A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, pp.248-9.

11 Jill Lepore shows how statistics empty out the human: If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future. Our individual qualities are removed by the statistical analysis, which then recreates its own patterns based on aggregate behaviours or even absolute fictions (as in the case of the psychological war work in Vietnam). What Lepore shows is that the very structure of our contemporary society emerges from the origins of this one data company - Simulmatics - which was dreamed up by an adman and given substance by a mathematical virtuoso. Chance?....

12 It is the old dispute between empiricism and rationalism. For a supernaturally clear exposition of their problems and their solution: Roger Scruton, Kant.

13 All these factors then congeal around the decision, which is why so difficult to get out of an action once committed to it. This problem brilliantly described by Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.