London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
History time, indeed. Serious history.
And on that note,
Good morning London.
And good morning, London Walkers, wherever you are.
Close your eyes for a moment.
Come with me.
A warm August evening.
The air is still.
The light is beginning to soften.
Down below, a lamplighter is making his way along Horse Guards Road. Every few yards he stops, raises his taper and brings another gas lamp to life.
Up above, in the Foreign Office, a man is standing at an open window.
Beyond him lie Horse Guards Parade and the darkening trees of St James’s Park.
He’s Britain’s Foreign Secretary.
His name is Sir Edward Grey.
Now I’ll tell you when we are.
August 4th, 1914.
The clock is ticking.
Britain has delivered its final message to Berlin.
German armies have marched into neutral Belgium.
The demand is stark.
Withdraw.
Leave Belgium.
If you do not, then by eleven o’clock tonight you will be at war with the British Empire.
Grey watches the lamplighter for another few moments.
Then, quietly, almost as if he’s thinking aloud, he says:
“The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
History has remembered those words because history proved them true.
Grey thought he was watching the end of a peaceful European order.
He was.
But he was also witnessing the beginning of something scarcely imaginable.
The bloodiest catastrophe the world had ever known.
Today we remember August 4th because it marks Britain’s entry into what we now call the First World War.
Though, of course, nobody called it that.
How could they?
You only call something “the First” when there’s been a second.
There’s something almost unbearably poignant about that.
The people strolling home through London that evening thought they were witnessing the beginning of a war.
They had absolutely no idea they were witnessing the end of a world.
The Canadian writer Wade Davis begins his remarkable essay about the Great War with one of the most arresting sentences I’ve ever read.
“Everything you know of your life,” he writes, “every sense you have of being modern… was born of the mud and blood of Flanders.” Davis says, “The Great War was the fulcrum of modernity. Jazz, Joyce, Dali, Cocteau, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin were all offspring of the carnage. Darwin, Freud, and Einstein were men of the nineteenth century, their deeply unorthodox ideas – that species are mutable, that you do not control the sanctity of your own thoughts, that an apple does not fall from the tree as simply as Newton described – came to fruition and achieved general acceptance in the wake of the conflict, as if sown in soil fertilized by the dead.” And then further on, “The chance that any British male aged thirteen to twenty four would survive the war in 1914 was one in three.”
Think about that for a moment.
It’s an astonishing set of observations. And claim.
Wade Davis is saying that the modern world wasn’t born in a laboratory.
Or a parliament.
Or a factory.
It was born in the trenches.
Born in the shellfire.
Born in the mud.
At first sight that sounds extravagant.
Then you start thinking about it.
The Great War transformed medicine.
It transformed politics.
It transformed poetry.
Painting.
Engineering.
The place of women in society.
The relationship between governments and their people.
It swept away ancient empires.
It gave birth to revolutions.
It changed the way we thought about courage.
About duty.
About patriotism.
About authority.
About death itself.
The Germans have a phrase for it.
They call it die Urkatastrophe.
“The original catastrophe.”
Or, perhaps better, “the mother of all catastrophes.”
The catastrophe that gave birth to all the others.
And here’s the extraordinary thing.
Almost nobody saw it coming.
Oh, they knew Europe was tense.
They knew there were rival alliances.
They knew the newspapers were full of sabre-rattling.
But they didn’t foresee this.
They expected another European war.
They did not expect the defining catastrophe of the twentieth century.
Europe had enjoyed almost a century without a continent-wide conflict.
Trade was flourishing.
Science seemed unstoppable.
Industry promised prosperity.
People talked confidently about progress.
Many educated men and women genuinely believed that civilisation had become too sophisticated, too interconnected, too sensible to permit a great war.
How modern that sounds.
And how painfully mistaken it turned out to be.
The spark had come six weeks earlier.
June 28th.
Sarajevo.
A nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip fires two shots.
Just two.
History sometimes turns on mighty armies.
Sometimes it turns on the pressure of a single finger.
Within weeks Europe is on the move.
Railways are carrying troops in every direction.
Reservists are reporting for duty.
Governments are issuing proclamations.
Telegrams are flying across the continent.
And in Britain, recruiting offices begin to fill.
Young men queue to enlist.
Many are smiling.
Look at those photographs if you ever get the chance.
They’re almost impossible to look at.
Those faces.
Those smiles.
Those shining boots.
Those impossible hopes.
Many think they’ll be home by Christmas.
They have no idea where they’re really going.
Towards Mons.
Towards Ypres.
Towards Gallipoli.
Towards Loos.
Towards the Somme.
Towards Passchendaele.
Names that, in August 1914, meant very little to most Britons.
Within a few years they would become sacred ground.
The English poet Lawrence Binyon caught the mood of those first days in a poem he called The Fourth of August.
Listen to these lines.
“The cares we hugged drop out of vision,
Our hearts with deeper thoughts dilate.
We step from days of sour division
Into the grandeur of our fate.”
“The grandeur of our fate.”
It’s impossible to read those words today without catching your breath.
Because we know what fate awaited them.
Binyon didn’t.
The figures are almost beyond comprehension.
Nearly a million soldiers from Britain and the Empire would never come home.
The War Graves Commission in 1931 put it unforgettably. In an attempt to give people an idea of the scale of the loss, the War Graves Commission said “were the dead of the Empire to form up in Trafalgar Square and march four abreast down Whitehall, past the Cenotaph, to Parliament Square, it would take that ghostly three and a half days of continuous marching to get there.
So nearly a million never came home.
Millions more did come home.
But they never truly came home.
They came back without limbs.
Without sight.
Without peace of mind.
A generation learned a new phrase.
“Shell shock.”
No one had ever seen anything like it.
Four great empires collapsed.
The German.
The Austro-Hungarian.
The Russian.
The Ottoman.
Kings disappeared.
Dynasties vanished.
Maps had to be redrawn.
And Europe itself was changed beyond recognition.
Many historians now look at the years between 1914 and 1945 as one long European catastrophe with a twenty-year interval.
Two acts of the same tragedy.
After all, an armistice isn’t peace.
It’s a temporary cessation of hostilities.
The guns fell silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918.
But the bitterness remained.
The grievances remained.
The humiliation remained.
The economic chaos remained.
The seeds had already been sown.
Twenty-one years later Europe was at war once more.
Edward Grey thought the lamps would not be lit again in his lifetime.
He died in 1933.
He never saw the Second World War.
But neither did he live to see the peace he had hoped for.
Perhaps his prophecy reached further than even he imagined.
There’s something else about August 4th, 1914, that I find deeply moving.
Nobody living through that day knew they were living through one of history’s great hinge moments.
For almost everyone it was simply Tuesday.
People worried about paying the rent.
Children played in the streets.
Shops opened as usual.
Horse buses rattled through London.
Clerks hurried to catch trains.
Lovers arranged to meet.
People complained about the weather.
Life looked utterly ordinary.
History usually does.
It very rarely announces itself.
It doesn’t arrive with trumpets.
It slips quietly into our lives.
Only afterwards do we realise that we were standing at one of those moments when the world changed direction.
Today you can stand where Edward Grey stood.
The Foreign Office is still there.
Horse Guards Parade is still there.
St James’s Park is still there.
You can look out across the trees exactly as he did.
The view is remarkably unchanged.
That old gas lamp is still there.
And when you know the story, it’s impossible to stand there without hearing those words.
“The lamps are going out all over Europe.”
They’re among the most famous words ever spoken by a British politician.
Not because they were clever.
Not because they were stirring.
Because they were true.
Grey understood, instinctively, that civilisation is a fragile thing.
We tend to think history moves slowly.
Sometimes it does.
And then, every now and again, everything changes in a single evening.
A deadline expires.
A decision is taken.
A telegram is sent.
And the world that existed at breakfast no longer exists by bedtime.
That’s what happened on August 4th, 1914.
An ordinary summer evening.
A man at a window.
A lamplighter making his rounds.
A few quiet words.
And, as the darkness gathered over London, the lamps began to go out all over Europe.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
See you tomorrow.