MAINTAINING THE LIGHT OF TRUTH? THE MOBILIZATION OF UNIVERSITY ACADEMICS, 1914–1915
Introduction
The Great War was understood as a cultural conflict almost from its outbreak. It was a battle of ideas that saw intellectuals in belligerent countries speak up to advance their respective nation’s case, to create consensus for the war at home, to win over neutral international opinion or to counter claims made by the enemy. The cultural war emerged in August 1914 and was one of the ways in which the First World War was seen as marking a distinct break with the conflicts that preceded it.1 University academics were particularly prominent in the cultural war and their interventions often set the parameters for intellectual engagement in the war.2
This chapter will explore the mobilization of university scholars in 1914 and 1915, focusing primarily on British academics but placing them in a wider context of the international community of scholars. It will trace the contours of the academic world on the eve of the war, highlight the main ways in which scholars engaged with the war and the consequences of this for scholarly identities and academic internationalism. While the widespread mobilization of intellectuals was not anticipated by national governments in August 1914, by the middle of 1915, states had developed mechanisms to manage this process. While the focus of this chapter will not explicitly be on biblical scholars, its subject matter forms an important context for understanding the ways in which they engaged in the war, as well as the key points at which they influenced the broader modes of intellectual engagement in the conflict.
Context
The engagement of university academics in the issues of the Great War was an international phenomenon that owed much to the development of institutions, disciplines and scholarly practices over the previous half-century or so. In a national context, universities – and the societies in which they existed – had changed. The growth of industrial society changed the demands made upon education. In Britain, the nineteenth century saw the establishment of the so-called civic universities, which often responded to local initiative in the rapidly growing industrial cities and provided a utilitarian, and frequently non-denominational, education for students who did not have the means to attend the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge.3 The network of British universities of 1914 also encompassed a distinct Scottish system of ancient universities, a recently founded (1893) federal University of Wales, and a newly established (1908) National University of Ireland which sat alongside the sixteenth-century Trinity College Dublin.
For their part, Oxford and Cambridge had traditionally catered to a middle- and upper-class elite, with their emphasis on a liberal education training ‘all-rounders’ rather than specialists. Until the mid-nineteenth century, both Oxford and Cambridge had religious tests for students, fellows, professors and chair-holders, but these began being dropped with the consequence that curricula began to broaden, with the natural sciences, in particular, becoming better established.4 However, universities were, in the late nineteenth century, far from the modern research-oriented institutions that they would become in the twentieth century. While there was a growing desire among British scholars to undertake higher research degrees, they – like their colleagues in the United States – frequently travelled to Germany to do so. Germany was home of the PhD degree and was generally recognized as having the best research universities in the world.5 This meant that, by 1914, a significant number of leading British scholars, from historians to philosophers to theologians, had close ties to the German university system and many leading scholars there.6
By 1914, universities in Britain did not yet constitute a coherent national system, and in this manner they differed in significant ways from their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. For example, the state managed higher education closely in both France and Germany, where universities received significant funds from national (and, in the German case, local) governments and where professors were state employees.7 This, in turn, was important in understanding why – and how – academics engaged in war issues following the outbreak of the Great War.
Aside from changes in national systems of education, the half-century prior to the outbreak of war was also important as it saw the emergence of the modern academic world. This was built on ideas such as universalism, mobility and exchange that were present in earlier intellectual communities such as the Republic of Letters, but it differed in certain ways. Rapid advances in technology and communications brought about by the development of the telegraph, the steamship and the railway allowed for scholars, books and ideas to circumnavigate the globe as they never had before, in turn transforming universities and scholarship.8 The result was that academia became international in the decades prior to 1914, though while scholarly networks had global reach, they generally remained Eurocentric. The decades before the outbreak of war saw the emergence of many scholarly disciplines in their modern forms, and this process of codification was reinforced through the establishment of university departments, learned societies and associations, academic journals and the regular holding of international conferences.9 The increasing interconnectedness of the globe transformed academic practices in both national and international contexts. The movement of people and ideas through scholarly networks was a key feature of the academic world, meaning that scholars working in the same discipline but at different institutions and in different countries could read and review one another’s work, correspond on a regular basis and meet occasionally at international conferences for their discipline. For example, international historians gathered regularly, hosting meetings at Paris, Berlin, Rome and London in the decade and a half before 1914.10 Of the 1908 meeting of historians in Berlin, Adolf von Harnack, the historian and biblical scholar, wrote:
Scholarship is international and has no secrets, even if it does have its own ‘mysteries’ within each great nation. It is a common good, a world fugue, whose first movements were composed thousands of years ago . . . Scholarship has long been international at a time when economics still stood behind countless walls and barriers.11
Scholars also met at international gatherings such as international exhibitions, for instance, the Paris World’s Fair of 1900 or the St. Louis exhibition of 1904, or at the increasingly lavish international ceremonies to celebrate university anniversaries.12 Moreover, students from middle- and upper-class backgrounds increasingly travelled to undertake their education at elite universities in Europe and North America, a modern and more amplified manifestation of a long-standing trend in education.13
Cumulatively, scholarship was interconnected as never before by 1914. However, international connectedness did not equate to international harmony. Internationalist academics wore a number of hats in this period, sometimes struggling to reconcile often competing identities as internationally connected scholars, proud representatives of their nation, practitioners of a given discipline, friends and colleagues. For example, while the institution of international prizes, such as the Nobel Prizes in science that were first bestowed in 1901, epitomized friendly cross-border cooperation, they also engendered national rivalry. Indeed, Germany was the most frequent recipient of awards in the natural sciences in the years before the outbreak of war, and this in turn confirmed its position as the world’s leading scientific nation by 1914.14 Similarly, while international congresses and exhibitions brought scholars together from across the world, they were also competitive and were often used by the host nation, city or institution to demonstrate their superiority in a given field or endeavour.15 Thus, by 1914, while the academic world was internationally connected in myriad ways, from the academic to the personal, it also featured many rivalries and some antipathies.
Rupture
The outbreak of war in 1914 was marked by two related phenomena. First, academics in most belligerent countries quickly engaged with the war and war-related issues by speaking and publishing in public forums about the conflict. This constituted a new departure for many academics who were not traditionally accustomed to speaking publicly on matters of a general public interest. Consequently, many reflected upon their roles as academics, questioning whether it was appropriate or not to speak publicly based upon their expertise in a given field. Second, the public pronouncements of academics in the early months of the First World War were composed for both national and international audiences. As the issues relating to the outbreak and early conduct of the war were clouded in controversy, academic interventions – especially when viewed in an international context – also became contentious. This ultimately led to a split in the international community of scholars as erstwhile colleagues found themselves on opposite sides in the conflict. This split would last, in some instances, well into the 1920s.16
The outbreak of the war took place during the academic summer vacation and came as a surprise to universities and academics alike. Just three days after Britain’s entry into the conflict, the vice-chancellor of Sheffield University, the historian H. A. L. Fisher, wrote to a colleague that ‘there has never been a great war with so little antecedent preparation of public opinion’.17 Indeed, the war came as a surprise to those connected to universities as it did to the wider public. Unlike most other European nations, Britain was not invaded and instead chose to go to war on 4 August 1914 following the German violation of Belgian neutrality. As Britain was a guarantor of Belgian neutrality, the government decided to go to war to uphold its diplomatic obligations, whereas for its counterparts in continental Europe, the war was frequently understood, justified and presented as one of national self-defence.18
The way in which Britain entered the war informed academic responses to it. While Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Russia, Germany and France all went to war between 28 July and 3 August 1914, the British government – and British scholars – were still establishing their positions with respect to the burgeoning conflict. Until 4 August, there was a strong desire for non-intervention among political liberals and this was mirrored among sections of the academic community. For scholars, non-intervention was justified not only in terms of the specific diplomatic issues at play as the July Crisis resolved itself but also the composition and structure of the academic world, where mobility and interconnectedness were such important features. At the beginning of August 1914, British scholars published a number of manifestos in which they articulated their opposition to intervention in the escalating European conflict. On 1 August 1914, scholars affiliated to Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen and Harvard universities published an anti-intervention manifesto in The Times. In it, they argued that ‘we regard Germany as a nation leading the way in the Arts and Sciences and we have all learned, and are learning, from German scholars’. As such, they claimed that war against Germany (‘a nation so near akin to our own’) would constitute ‘a sin against civilization’.19 A similar document was published on 3 August 1914 and signed by sixty-one Cambridge scholars who argued that Britain was not – at that juncture – justified in going to war as no ‘vital interest’ of the country was then endangered.20
At the same time, intellectual debt was not sufficient reason for Britain to avert war with Germany. This was the argument of H. Stuart Jones, fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, who in a letter to The Times of 2 August (published on 4 August), argued that ‘France, too, has rendered similar services to scholarship’ and that ‘Germany is not governed by scholars, but by statesmen, who solemnly believe that might confers not only the right but also the duty of attacking the weaker’.21 However, scholarly opposition to British involvement in the war, like that of many liberals, dissipated with the German invasion of Belgium on 4 August, which was justified as a vital interest – as well as a moral obligation – for Britain.22
While there had been some debate among British scholars about the righteousness of intervention, there was no such equivocation in France. On 8 August 1914, the French philosopher Henri Bergson declared to a meeting of the Académie des Sciences Morales that ‘the struggle against Germany is the struggle of civilization against barbarism’.23 France, of course, had been invaded by Germany in 1870 and again in August 1914, meaning that scholarly responses to the war had both historical precedent and the immediate imperative of national self-defence. While the general idea of a war being fought between Western civilization (Britain and France) and barbarism (the Central Powers) would pervade for much of the war, the rhetoric of French scholars in the early months of the war was more hostile towards Germany than was the case in Britain.24
British scholars were galvanized to speak out about the causes of the outbreak of the war and did so within weeks of the war’s outbreak. The most famous endeavour of this nature was a volume called Why We Are at War: Great Britain’s Case (1914), which was compiled by six members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History. The volume explored the causes of the war and served as a justification of the righteousness of British involvement. The authors, led by historians H. W. C. Davis and Ernest Barker, acknowledged in the preface that they were not politicians but belonged to ‘different schools of political thought’. They were writing to ‘set forth the causes of the present war, and the principles which we believe to be at stake’. While making no claims to expertise, they asserted that their ‘experience in the handling of historic evidence’ would help them ‘treat this subject historically’.25 The book sold well and became a key text in articulating the British case for going to war for domestic and international audiences, eventually being distributed by the government’s propaganda agency Wellington House.26 However, the preface of the Oxford volume illustrated the difficulty that some scholars felt about publicly addressing topics in which they were not expert.
A key moment in the process of scholarly self-mobilization took place between 25 and 28 August 1914, when, while making its way through Belgium, the German army destroyed the library at the (Catholic) University of Louvain, along with its valuable collections. They also summarily executed hundreds of Belgian civilians.27 These events seemed to confirm the earlier utterances of Bergson and others like him, namely, that this really was a war where civilized values opposed those of barbarism. After all, a university was a site of cultural and educational, rather than military, value. The Cambridge historian G. M. Trevelyan wrote on 31 August that ‘the destruction of Louvain greatly increases my intense desire to prevent the Germans becoming overlords of Western Europe; this would I think lower civilization’.28 Moreover, at the beginning of September 1914, the cathedral at Rheims in northern France was shelled by the advancing German army, serving to consolidate this idea of a war on culture and, in this instance, a war on Christian culture. The events of the first five weeks of the war transformed it from a military and political conflict into a cultural conflict in which scholars found themselves playing a significant role.
The War of Manifestos
The cultural war found its first coherent expression in a series of manifestos which were drawn up in different countries, claiming to speak on behalf of a certain discipline or expert group, in turn giving validity and collective expression to a set of ideals for which different respective nations claimed to be fighting. The trading of manifestos both solidified the set of ideals that scholars claimed to embody their national cause but also attacked the values for which the enemy claimed to be fighting, and, in many cases, they were written as responses to manifestos issued in other countries.
The act of issuing manifestos on behalf of nations – or certain strands of learning within nations – constituted a form of public engagement which is typical of public intellectuals. Stefan Collini has argued that in order to understand the role of the intellectual, four distinguishing criteria are crucial. First, intellectual activity requires the person speaking out to have attained some sort of achievement in a field valued by society. Second, they need to be furnished with the media through which they can speak out. Third, they need to address matters of interest to the public and, finally, they need to have interesting things to say on the topic in question.29 In the early months of the First World War, university academics found themselves in a position whereby their position within different fields ‘qualified’ them to speak out on matters of importance to different publics and were furnished with the media to do so. The issuing of manifestos was a practice typical of the decade and a half prior to the First World War and was made famous in 1898 during the Dreyfus Affair in France, when a number of petitions were signed by academics, writers and artists in defence of the wrongly convicted Alfred Dreyfus.30 The responses to the Dreyfus Affair were significant in that they saw the popularization of the idea of ‘the intellectual’ for the first time and also saw figures claim an authority on political issues based on their learning and institutional standing.31 Thereafter, manifestos became a common form of intellectual engagement in France while, at the same time, the term ‘intellectual’ – and this form of intellectual engagement – slowly made its way into use in Britain.32
The beginning of September 1914 saw an explosion in the publication of manifestos that made claims to authority based upon the qualifications of their signatories, and theologians played an important role in this process. In the middle of September 1914, twenty-nine German church leaders issued a manifesto called ‘To the Evangelical Christians Abroad’. Among the signatories were biblical scholars Adolf von Harnack (a leading Lutheran theologian and general director of the Royal Library at Berlin) and Wilhelm Herrmann, the sociologist Ernst Troeltsch and other scholars of international repute.33 They argued that ‘a systematic network of lies’ had been perpetuated about Germany’s role in the outbreak of the war and stated that the war was being fought against ‘Asiatic barbarism’, concluding that ‘we know full well that through his sanguinary judgment God is also calling our nation to repentance, and we rejoice that she is hearing His holy voice and turning to Him’.34
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, organized a response which was signed by forty-two British theologians and church leaders. All of these signed their name to the petition, listing their position and institutional affiliation, in the process revealing that fifteen had university posts. It was published in The Times on 30 September (although the document was dated 23 September), and the newspaper noted that the signatories were ‘famous alike for their scholarship and their piety’.35 It was billed as a ‘reasoned reply to [the] German appeal’ and the newspaper reproduced the German document as if to demonstrate this. The British theologians’ document stated ‘amazement’ that their German counterparts had seen fit to ‘commit themselves to a statement of the political causes of the war’. In other words, it took issue with the fact that the German theologians had addressed issues beyond their immediate area of qualification or expertise. However, because this discourse had been initiated by the German theologians, their British counterparts replied to the issues raised regarding the outbreak of the war. The British document argued that ‘we have taken our stand for international good faith, for the safeguarding of smaller nationalities, and for the upholding of the essential conditions of brotherhood among the nations of the world’. The British document also noted that it had been the ‘privilege’ of these scholars to work with German theologians in the past and expressed the desire that this may be possible again in the future.36 Written as a reply to the German document but printed in a British newspaper, the theologians’ document simultaneously addressed a national and international audience.
The controversy between the theologians was played out on a larger scale at the beginning of October 1914 following the publication of the ‘Appeal to the Civilized World’, a manifesto signed by ninety-three German writers, scientists, artists and scholars. The document was signed by seven Nobel Prize winners in science, such as Philipp Lenard, Wilhelm Roentgen and Emil Fischer, and twelve theologians or religious scholars, again including Adolf von Harnack.37 As such, rather than being representative of a certain branch of learning, it spoke for German intellectual, literary and creative output more generally. While the earlier ‘Appeal to Evangelical Christians Abroad’ limited itself to the issues surrounding the outbreak of the war and the righteousness of Germany’s cause, the ‘Appeal to the Civilized World’ made a different argument. It consisted of a series of denials; it denied that Germany had been responsible for the outbreak of the war and that the German army had committed atrocities in Belgium (such as at Louvain), among other things.38 Furthermore, the document argued that German Kultur and militarism went hand in hand, thus undercutting the ‘two Germanys’ thesis – often heard in Britain – which posited that the Prussian military elite and the Germany of scientific and intellectual achievement were separate.39 More than any document, the ‘Appeal to the Civilized World’ gained international notoriety and split the academic world in two, further consolidating the idea that the war was a battle of ideas as well as armies.40
The German appeal prompted scholars in different countries to issue new petitions, refuting the arguments of the Germans and stating their respective national cases. The British response was published in The Times of 21 October and was signed by ‘scholars and men of science representing different sides of British learning’. The petition argued that Britain strove for peace at every opportunity in the run up to the outbreak of war and added that sympathy for German scholarship had disappeared in British universities.
We grieve profoundly that, under the baleful influence of a military system and its lawless dreams of conquest, she whom we once honoured now stands revealed as a common enemy of Europe and of all peoples which respect the law of nations.41
French scholars also issued a response to the German document, addressed to universities in neutral countries in the name of all French universities, on 3 November 1914.42 It argued that Germany’s actions could not be defended by its intellectual heritage: ‘German thought has just declared itself at one with, dependent on, and subject of Prussian militarism’.43 Condemnatory petitions were issued by scholars in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Romania, Russia, Portugal, Brazil, Switzerland and elsewhere.44 In each case, scholars sought to define the values which they stood for and distinguish them from those propounded by the authors of the German document. While scholars wrote in solidarity with their colleagues in allied countries, these responses were frequently condemnatory of Germany.
As the academic world became polarized in the autumn of 1914, a lot of formal international exchanges, which had been so prominent before the outbreak of war, ceased. Following on from the publication of the manifesto, the French Académie des Sciences voted to exclude their German corresponding members, while, in London, some members of the Royal Society made similar (but ultimately unsuccessful) demands.45 The committees responsible for awarding the Nobel Prizes in science, already grappling with the dilemma of how to continue making awards during the war without compromising their impartiality (as well as Sweden’s neutrality in the conflict), found that in the aftermath of the ‘Appeal to the Civilized World’ this could no longer even be contemplated. Consequently, the Nobel Prizes in science were not awarded again until 1918.46 At the same time, the Sorbonne decided to cease sending theses to universities in Germany and Austria-Hungary.47 International conferences largely ceased, while the subscription to international journals also came to a halt.48 These hallmarks of the pre-war scholarly world were victims of the outbreak of the war and its deeply contested and contentious opening months.
The fracturing of the academic world was also religious. Many scholars, especially those in Britain, were clergymen. This was a remnant of the requirement that academics at Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin be in holy orders that had been phased out from the mid-nineteenth century. The conflict’s definition as a moral and cultural conflict gave it a significant religious element. With the exception of the Ottoman Empire, the European powers that went to war in 1914 were all Christian, with Protestants often invoking biblical doctrines of national chosen-ness to support their cause.49 Condemnations of Germany as barbaric frequently overlapped with allegations that German culture was anti-Christian or even demonic. The war was sometimes described as a moral crusade, invoking medieval imagery in the claim that Christian civilization was threatened by militaristic paganism.50 Thus, the breach of 1914 was also religious, and this was given added impetus by the fact that a number of eminent biblical scholars and theologians, such as Harnack, had signed the ‘Appeal to the Civilized World’. Randall Davidson wrote to Henry Montagu Butler (the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and a Doctor of Divinity) that it appeared that men like Harnack, ‘whom we had trusted . . . are now, it would seem, fomenting the wrath against us . . . It is all inexpressibly perplexing to me and the sorrow is even greater than the bewilderment’.51 The split in the academic world of late 1914 featured myriad international components, and religion was often a significant element.
For the Irish polymath John Pentland Mahaffy, religion was central to understanding the outbreak of the war and the decline of Germany’s scholarly reputation. Mahaffy was typical of many scholars of the fin-de-siècle as he was published in a wide range of scholarly fields such as classics, ancient history, history and papyrology. He was also a Doctor of Divinity, although this was not unusual for a scholar of his generation. Mahaffy, who spent his career at Trinity College Dublin, was a cosmopolitan, who was connected to the intellectual elites of Britain, France, Germany and North America. He also counted a number of European royals among his friends. Of this group, the Kaiser was the most eminent, but it also included the queen of Spain, the king of Greece and King Edward VII, who had invited him to preach to him at Sandringham in 1904.52 Mahaffy experienced the rupture of 1914 on a personal level, with the connections that he had forged in the preceding decades ruptured in a matter of weeks.
Mahaffy’s public interventions on the outbreak of the war demonstrated a preoccupation not only with the fracturing of the wider world of scholarship but also with the role of religion in precipitating this. In a letter to The Times in early September, Mahaffy conducted an ad hominem attack on Kaiser Wilhelm II, contrasting him unfavourably to his father. He argued:
The German of 1870 had some religion left. The appeals of William I. to God had some ring of religion about them, and appealed to people with some respect for God; the appeals of William II. are mere stage ranting, not only ridiculous, but profane.53
Mahaffy claimed that the tendency towards specialization in German education had removed moral and religious qualities from its students.
For Mahaffy, the issue of religion was interconnected to wider debates about the outbreak of the war, its cultural gestation and the role of German scholars and the German state in fostering this and, later, defending it. He was responsible for the issuing of a manifesto on behalf of Irish intellectuals who protested against the events at Louvain which they described as ‘an injury to learning, science, and education, to history and art, to religion and citizenship’.54 However, unlike his colleagues in France and his more belligerent peers in Britain, Mahaffy feared the breakdown of the connected allied world and tried to defend it where possible, using religious language in so doing. In April 1916, he wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement about the German historian Eduard Meyer. Meyer had signed the ‘Appeal to the Civilized World’ in 1914 and, in 1915, authored a book that placed most of the blame for the outbreak of war on England. This book was translated into English in 1916.55 In his letter, Mahaffy condemned the book and made a plea for continued international exchanges among scholars. He argued that the sudden raised passions and ‘moral degradation’ which typified the public utterances of many scholars – such as Meyer – were ‘but a passing epidemic’ and, using a biblical reference, argued that ‘the day will soon come when these people will be ashamed of their conduct, and will seek to come again and sit among us, “fully clothed and in their right mind”’.56
Religion pervaded many of the scholarly debates at the beginning of the Great War. In some cases, scholars, whose training and background was explicitly in theology or biblical studies, spoke out as representatives of that branch of knowledge. In other cases, Christian scholars spoke out to criticize the way in which religion had developed in enemy states and the way in which it had been invoked at the beginning of the war. Moreover, the destruction of the university library at Louvain was an attack on a Catholic institution, and this in turn demonstrated the overlap between the worlds of learning and religion, scholars invoked Christian ideals as well as biblical language when discussing the war in public forums.
The Development of the Cultural War
By the middle of 1915, states had begun to create structures through which cultural mobilization for war was organized and managed. In Britain and France, centralized agencies were set up which commissioned, produced and disseminated scholarly writing on the war. This sort of work was intended to both maintain national support for the war as well as influencing opinion in neutral states.
In Britain, Wellington House became the government’s centre for the production of propaganda, which, under the leadership of the Liberal MP Charles Masterman, commissioned many works by academics, building on the activities such as the Oxford historians’ initiative at the beginning of the war.57 In France, scholars were asked by government members to begin writing pamphlets, and the resulting publications became known as Études et documents sur la guerre series, which boasted the Parisian academic hierarchy, most notably the sociologist Emile Durkheim and the historian Ernest Lavisse, as its publishing committee.58 By the middle of 1915, then, it was expected that scholars would speak out on the war and war issues in a variety of ways: in public lectures, pamphlets, letters to newspapers, manifestos or books. However, speaking out did not come easily to many scholars, who felt uneasy at venturing beyond their specific area of expertise.
At its most extreme, scholarly cultural mobilization for war was condemnatory not only of the German government and army but also of German scholarly practices. At the beginning of 1915, The Times claimed that Germany was now a ‘fallen idol’, its reputation as a land of learning and research undermined by the actions of its army and its intellectuals.
The conduct of war has discredited the German standard of civilization, and the defence of that conduct put forward by German intellectuals has identified them with it and has provoked a more critical estimate of their own worth.59
The discourse of the ‘fallen idol’ would become especially widespread – and vitriolic – when it came to discussions of German science, and this forms a useful point of comparison for the debates in which theologians partook.
The assault on Germany’s scientific heritage – which was pursued by both British and French scholars – was linked, on the one hand, to revulsion at the role that eminent scientists had signed the ‘Appeal to the Civilized World’ and, on the other, to the way in which the Germans were seen to have debased warfare by applying science to it. The latter peaked after April 1915 following the German army’s use of chemical weapons (the first such usage in open warfare) in the second battle of Ypres. This discourse was highly selective – both the British and French had been developing chemical weapons before the Germans used them at Ypres60 – but the attacks on German scholarship gathered pace in 1915. Consequently, many scientists in allied countries began to question Germany’s claim to scientific pre-eminence, so well established before 1914.
Assaults on German science tended to make two major claims. First, it was alleged that Germany’s eminence in that field was overstated. Second, it was argued that the German state had deviated from the universalist claims of science by prioritizing the nation above all.61 The most prominent critic of Germany was Sir William Ramsey, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, who wrote a number of belligerent articles in the scientific periodical Nature. In May 1915, he argued that the essential characteristic of the German was that they were ‘content to form a cog in a system of wheels directed from above. Nor are the brains of this human machine original; they have learned how to appropriate and render commercial the ideas of inventors, chiefly those of the non-Germanic nations’.62 In France, Pierre Duhem was one of the most virulent critics of German scientific achievement, writing in 1915 that ‘in France, we claim that science has no fatherland. In Germany, they steadfastly uphold the opposite thesis’, adding that in Germany, researchers saw science as serving the fatherland only.63 In France, there was little opposition to the anti-German discourse, whereas in Britain, the assault on Germany’s scientific heritage often led to defences of Germany’s intellectual achievement. In general, British debates about the war had more scope for contrary opinions than those in France.64 It is notable, too, that the arguments about German science were much more vitriolic than those animating theologians.
Academic engagement in the war caused much introspection among British scholars, many of whom feared that speaking out about war issues was beyond their immediate area of expertise. This did not necessarily mean that they were anti-war; rather, it demonstrated that the passions of wartime were challenging their academic identities in new and uncomfortable ways. Henry Montagu Butler, for example, felt the split of the war acutely owing to his familial connections to the world of German learning. In December 1914 he wrote:
The present war is to me very horrible. I had been brought up from boyhood with almost a romantic regard for Germany, due, I suppose, to my Father’s visit to Schiller in 1797 and later.65
As scholars began speaking out about the war, responding to manifestos with counter-manifestos, there was more pressure on academics to contribute in turn. The Cambridge economist Alfred Marshall wrote to his colleague John Maynard Keynes that ‘I know so little about either war or politics that I am afraid of speaking publicly lest I do mischief’.66 The Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, Arthur Benson, also felt a deep discomfort about writing publicly about the war and felt that scholars did not possess the correct skills to do so authoritatively. In early 1915, he wrote in his diary:
More and more I feel that my mistake has been to philosophise about the war. I don’t see widely enough or know enough. It is as if a man gave up shoemaking to reflect about the war. Let him make the best shoes he can.67
Those who stayed silent about the war risked alienating themselves from their more zealously pro-war colleagues. This predicament was well described by the Cambridge classical scholar Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in his posthumously published autobiography. He claimed that ‘the worst kind of disillusionment was that connected with universities and historians. Hardly a voice was raised from those places and persons to maintain the light of truth’.68 Maintaining the light of truth proved difficult in wartime as truth itself – of the outbreak of the war, its conduct or the ideas that brought about the conflict – became contested. Moreover, universities themselves became divided in myriad ways. There was a literal division of people, caused by the mass mobilization of students and younger teaching staff, which meant that rooms, quads and lecture halls were empty for much of the conflict. In Britain, universities, as homes to social elites, suffered disproportionate casualty rates in the war, meaning that many of those mobilized never returned.69 Universities were also divided based on people’s attitudes towards the war, and this was especially pronounced – and bitter – at Cambridge University, where Bertrand Russell remained steadfastly opposed to the war from August 1914, resulting in him being deprived of his lectureship at Trinity College in 1916 in a contentious decision that split the fellows of the college.70 Speaking publicly on the war did not come easily to scholars, and there were consequences for both speaking out and remaining silent.
Conclusion
The First World War was a cultural war. This phenomenon became apparent to contemporaries from the outset and the process through which the war as a cultural conflict was driven by the actions of academics who spoke out about the origins and early conduct of the war. The engagement of scholars in public conversations about the origins and righteousness of their respective national war cause was initially a case of self-mobilization and emanated from individual scholars themselves. It was a phenomenon that can be observed in belligerent and non-belligerent states alike. Thereafter, by the middle of 1915, national governments had created structures through which scholarly commentary on the war and its issues could be commissioned, produced, translated and disseminated for national and international audiences alike.
This provides the context for the involvement of biblical scholars in the First World War. The German appeal ‘To the Evangelical Christians Abroad’, and the reply by British theologians, was an important precursor to the better-known trading of manifestos that followed the ‘Appeal to the Civilized World’ of 4 October 1914. Moreover, the debate among theologians mirrored that taking place between representatives of other disciplines such as historians and scientists. However, the interactions between theologians on opposed sides were also notable for their restraint, especially when compared to the often vitriolic assessments of German science put forth by scholars in Britain and France. Religion also informed scholarly mobilization in 1914 and 1915 in different, but related, ways. In Britain, many scholars were practicing Christians and some were clergymen. Moreover, the language of religion was often invoked in public pronouncements, and the role of religion in the outbreak of the war was critiqued. This was compounded by the split in the wider academic world where German biblical scholars such as Harnack and Herrmann were signatories to provocative statements on behalf of their nations, which had the effect of tarnishing the esteem in which German scholarship had formerly been held.
The consequences of all of this were damaging for the academic world. The events of 1914 and 1915 had long afterlives; normal academic internationalism did not simply resume following the signing of the peace on 28 June 1919. Indeed, the vexed issue of future relations with former enemies was raised by the Oxford theologian William Sanday in an address to the British Academy in May 1918.71 In many cases, particularly those involving international associations, it was not until the Locarno agreements of 1925, which paved the way for Germany’s entry into the League of Nations, that former enemies were allowed to join again. That said, personal relations often resumed on the war’s conclusion. The academic world, which was so complex in its composition, would prove equally complex in its reconstitution following the war.
1.Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–5.
2.See Tomás Irish, The University at War, 1914–25: Britain, France, and the United States (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 15–38; Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community 1890–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 180–91; Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 78–85; Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics 1914–1918 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 29–42.
3.Robert D. Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 199–200.
4.Anderson, European Universities, 195–98.
5.Wallace, War and the Image of Germany, 227–28; Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 76–89.
6.Wallace, War and the Image of Germany, 29–30; Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I became a Religious Crusade (New York: Harper Collins, 2014), 80.
7.Charles McClelland, State, Society, University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 289–99; George Weisz, The Emergence of Modern Universities in France, 1863–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 328–38.
8.Emily Rosenberg, ‘Transnational currents in a shrinking world’, in A World Connecting, 1870–1945, ed. Emily Rosenberg (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 815–996 (823–31).
9.For more on the emergence of disciplines in the nineteenth century, see Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge, Volume II: From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 167–73.
10.On the international historians’ meetings, see Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Toward a Global Community of Historians (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005).
11.Harnack, cited in Erdmann, Toward a Global Community of Historians, 42.
12.On international exhibitions, see Alexander C. T. Geppert, Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in fin-de-siècle Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). For one example of an international university anniversary, see Tomás Irish, Trinity in War and Revolution 1912–1923 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy Press, 2015), xiii–xix.
13.Paul Kramer, ‘Is the World Our Campus? International Students and U.S. Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century’, Diplomatic History 33 (2009): 783–89.
14.Robert Marc Friedman, The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prize in Science (New York: Times Books, 2001), 283.
15.Erdmann, Toward a Global Community of Historians, 6–61.
16.Irish, The University at War, 171–92.
17.H. A. L. Fisher to Gilbert Murray, 7 August 1914, MS Fisher 54/234–5, Fisher Papers, Bodleian Library Special Collections (BLSC).
18.William Mulligan, The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 232.
19.C. G. Browne et al., ‘Scholars Protest Against War with Germany’, The Times (1 August 1914): 6.
20.Leonard Alston et al., ‘Cambridge Support: Famous Professors’ Call for Peace’, in Prophecy and Dissent, 1914–16, ed. Richard Rempel et al., vol. 13 of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 481–82.
21.Stuart Jones, ‘A Scholar’s Protest’, The Times (4 August 1914): 5.
22.Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 24–25; Wallace, War and the Image of Germany, 24–27.
23.Henri Bergson, ‘A l’Institut’, Le Figaro (9 August 1914): 3.
24.Tomás Irish, ‘“The Aims of Science are the Antithesis to Those of War”: Academic Scientists at War in Britain and France 1914–18’, in Other Combatants, Other Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War, ed. James E. Kitchen et al. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 29–53 (29–37).
25.Ernest Barker et al., Why We Are at War: Great Britain’s Case (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), 5–6.
26.Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘The Role of British and German Historians in Mobilizing Public Opinion in 1914’, in British and German Historiography 1750–1950: Traditions, Perceptions and Transfers, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Peter Wende (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 337–47 (342–44).
27.Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, 6–30.
28.G. M. Trevelyan to Charles Trevelyan (31 August 1914), in Peter Raina, ed., George Macaulay Trevelyan: A Portrait in Letters (Edinburgh: Pentland, 2001), 89.
29.Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 52–59.
30.Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (London: Penguin, 2011), 135–36.
31.Collini, Absent Minds, 156.
32.Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises; manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 39–51; Collini, Absent Minds, 27–30.
33.Jenkins, The Great and Holy War, 90.
34.Anon., ‘Theologians and the War’, The Times (30 September 1914): 4.
35.F. B. Meyer to T. R. Glover, undated, A1/5/1/27, Glover Papers, St. John’s College Library Cambridge (SJCL); Anon., ‘Theologians and the War’, 4.
36.Anon., ‘Theologians and the War’, 4.
37.Irish, ‘The Aims of Science’, 33.
38.Wilhelm von Bode et al., ‘L’appel des Allemands aux “nations civilisées”’, Le Temps (13 October 1914): 2.
39.Wallace, War and the Image of Germany, 31.
40.Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect, 78–79.
41.Clifford Allbutt et al., ‘Reply to German Professors’, The Times (21 October 1914): 10.
42.The University of Lille, in an occupied city, was not included. Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect, 82–84.
43.‘Les universités françaises aux universités des pays neutres’, 3 November 1914, AN/AJ/16/2589/341–43, University of Paris Council minutebook, Archives Nationales, Paris.
44.Christophe Prochasson, 1914–1918, Retours d’expériences (Paris: Tallandier, 2008), 282–83. See further: Le Figaro (1 December 1914): 3.
45.Daniel Kevles, ‘“Into Hostile Political Camps”: The Reorganization of International Science in World War I’, Isis 62 (1971): 47–60 (48).
46.Friedman, The Politics of Excellence, 78–79.
47.Meeting of 1 October 1914, AJ/16/2589/330, University of Paris Council minutebook, Archives Nationales, Paris.
48.Roy MacLeod, ‘“Kriegsgeologen and Practical Men”: Military Geology and Modern Memory 1914–1918’, British Journal for the History of Science 28 (1995): 427–50 (427–28).
49.Jenkins, The Great and Holy War, 68.
50.Jenkins, The Great and Holy War, 72; Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (London: SPCK, 1978), 254.
51.Randall Davidson to H. M. Butler, 14 January 1915, JRMB/M3/1/539, Papers of J. R. M. Butler, Trinity College Library, Cambridge.
52.Walter Starkie, ‘John Pentland Mahaffy’, in Of One Company: Biographical Studies of Famous Trinity Men, ed. D. A. Webb (Dublin: Icarus, 1951), 89–100 (97).
53.Various, ‘Letters on the War: The Sack of Louvain’, The Times (1 September 1914): 12.
54.John Pentland Mahaffy et al., ‘Louvain: A Protest’, Irish Times (3 September 1914): 6.
55.Eduard Meyer, England, Its Political Organization and Development and the War Against Germany (Boston: Ritter, 1916).
56.John Pentland Mahaffy, ‘Dr. Eduard Meyer’, Times Literary Supplement (13 April 1916): 176.
57.Pogge von Strandmann, ‘The Role of British and German Historians’, 358–59.
58.The committee consisted of Ernest Lavisse, Charles Andler, Joseph Bédier, Henri Bergson, Émile Boutroux, Ernest Denis, Émile Durkheim, Jacques Hadamard, Gustave Lanson, Charles Seignobos and André Weiss. See Émile Durkheim and Ernest Denis, Who Wanted War? The Origin of the War According to Diplomatic Documents (Paris: A. Colin, 1915).
59.Anon., ‘The Fallen Idol’, The Times (5 January 1915): 9.
60.Olivier Lepick, La Grande Guerre Chimique, 1914–1918 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998), 54–60.
61.Irish, ‘The Aims of Science’, 33–37.
62.William Ramsey, ‘Science and the State’, Nature (20 May 1915): 309.
63.Pierre Duhem, La science allemande (Paris: A Hermann, 1915), 65.
64.Irish, ‘The Aims of Science’, 36–37.
65.Letter of H. M. Butler to Sir George Trevelyan (29 December 1914), cited in J. R. M. Butler, Henry Montagu Butler: Master of Trinity College Cambridge 1886–1918 (London: Longmans, Green, 1925), 197.
66.Alfred Marshall to J. M. Keynes (21 February 1915), in John K. Whitaker, ed., The Correspondence of Alfred Marshall, Economist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 320.
67.Entry for 5 February 1915, in Percy Lubbock, ed., The Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson (London: Longmans, Green, 1926), 280.
68.Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, The Autobiography of G. Lowes Dickinson (London: Duckworth, 1973), 195.
69.J. M. Winter, The Great War and the British People (London: Macmillan, 1985), 92–99.
70.Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), 465–66.
71.Wallace, War and the Image of Germany, 193.