Tumbling into war: 1914 and all that

Remember the butterfly flapping its wings in a jungle clearing? The unpredictability of chaos where overwhelmingly the turbulence caused by the flapping of the wings is damped out and the air settles back into being calm, except when one flap sets up a vortex that grows into a hurricane? That was the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife. The political stabilisers of the age – the doves among the diplomats, politicians and civil servants – should have damped out the shock waves. They didn't. They tried to, but they didn't: the hawks within the administrations eventually dominated and millions died. 

Revisiting 1914 for a short chapter needed because of the epoch changing nature of the First World War within the Quaker microverse as much as in broader society, I was struck by how vulnerable societies are to the effects of decisions made by tiny numbers of people in powerful positions. According to William Jannen (1996: The Lions of July. The prelude to War, 1914) fewer than 100 individuals across the entire continent of Europe, all confined within tiny, highly privileged and selective governing elites, were involved in the decision making processes that led to war. Barely anyone outside those circles was referenced at all, let alone consulted. A finding born out by other scholars:

Within the respective state executives, the changeability of power relations also meant that those entrusted with formulating policy did so under considerable domestic pressure, not so much from the press or public opinion or industrial or financial lobbies, as from adversaries within their own elites and governments. And this, too, heightened the sense of urgency besetting decision makes in the summer of 1914.    (Christopher Clark, 2013: The Sleepwalkers. How Europe went to war in 1914)

Perhaps one of the more disturbing things I discovered during my background reading, was the deal done between the British and German High Commands via Swiss intermediaries. As the war progressed Britain became short of optics for range-finding, and Germany became short of rubber for the tyres needed on its troop transports. Both shortages were impeding the 'pursuit' of the war. An exchange via Switzerland was organised so that the shortages were made good and the war could proceed. (See Adam Hochschild, 2011: To End All Wars. How the First World War Divided Britain.) Perhaps I am alone in finding this shocking, but it does speak to me of the detachment of the those who both started and ran the war from those embroiled in its guts.

Such was the enormity of the scale of death and destruction unleashed that attributing responsibility for starting and continuing the war has been an issue ever since. The blame had to be placed somewhere, but it was too toxic to be anywhere near: blame is best projected onto others. In the immediate aftermath it was on Germany and its militarism: the goose-stepping 'Hun'.

This justified the punishment of Germany inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles. Germany had to be reduced so that it could never again be a threat. There was no point in blaming The Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Ottoman Empire, nor for that matter the Russian Empire – they no longer existed, all destroyed by the war. It would have been far too painful to admit that either the governments of Britain or France had any part to play. Given the enormous sacrifice and suffering admitting such culpability would have made those in power seem perfidious in the extreme. Political donkeys may have been leading the lions, but no-one was about to say so.  

As time and distance from the mutual carnage increased the focus shifted to blaming the miliary, the war plans of Germany especially. The fact that the German secret war plans to attack France via Belgium failed because of the secret Anglo-French war plans for the rapid deployment of British Forces into Northern France was conveniently forgotten. Guilt still had to point firmly at Germany.

Now it is more popular to see it as a massive failure of government, particularly of diplomacy: a war by accident. The perception is that wars are created by governments, but fought and suffered by peoples; wars are indeed that "continuation of policy by other means" which Carl von Clausewitz suggested they were; and in 1914 there was massive amounts of hubris among the governing elites about how easily those policies would be realised.

As unclear as the causes of the war may be, what is clear, however, is that 1914 was the shock that seemed to changed everything:

When we look back on the time before 1914, we seem to be living in a different age. Things are happening today of which we hardly dreamed before the war. We were even beginning to regard war between civilised nations as a fable, for surely such an absurdity would become less and less possible in our rational, internationally organised world.      C G Jung, 1936: Wotan

There had been those who had sensed an underlying mood among populations that was receptive to war, no matter how much the state-change from peace may have shocked:

It is difficult for generations that have come to maturity since 1914 to realise fully the impact of horror and betrayal which the war made upon people's minds. A few here and there, it is true, had seen it coming, had realized that, as Rufus Jones wrote "Beneath all overt acts and decisions the immense subconscious forces, charged with emotions, have been slowly pushing towards this event."     Elizabeth Grey Vinning, 1958: Friend of Life, a biography of Rufus M Jones

But there were also Quaker voices that realised what the impact of war was on civilian populations and were not afraid to say so:

What is a truth of war: that the old die before their time; the sick die for lack care and sustenance when there was no need; the vulnerable die for the scantness of resources; children fail to survive and those that do, do not thrive; babies die for the lack of their half starved mother's milk; mothers fail to carry to full term, their babies undersize and struggling if they do not die; miscarriages abound;  women die more often from childbirths because they are not strong enough; populations are half starved and have no resistance to diseases; homes, if not destroyed, lack warmth in winter; clothes become scarce and are often too poor to offer protection against the weather. This is the lot of the civilian population. Whatever horrors the soldier faces, he is often better fed, better clothed and even better sheltered.      (Mea culpa! I have lost where this quote comes from, which is why I did not include it in the book. I would be grateful if anyone could identify what the source is.)

Then there were Quakers who pledged to have nothing to do with it, such as Henry Hodgkin, one of the founders of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. A very difficult stance in the face of the first total war where opting out – especially after the introduction of conscription – was simply not tolerated. To refuse to join the military, or to support them, was cast as deeply unpatriotic; and, after 1916, as not only unpatriotic  but unlawful and criminal as well. For some the idea that the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount were suspended for the duration of the war was simply not tenable, no matter what the personal consequences. 

Quakerism, which might have seemed faintly peculiar and eccentric in 1913, was by 1916, with the state-change of war, seen as subversive and dangerous and worthy of attention by Special Branch. 

Quakers were once more showing themselves to be members of a counter culture, resisting the dominant trends of the time, even at the risk of social ostracism or penal sanctions. According to M E Hirst (1923), only one third of the male members of the Society of military age volunteered or were conscripted. 

However, it was the women of the Society who, not being shackled by the expectations of military service in the way men were, led the way in living out the peace testimony by providing relief work, even among those now counted as 'enemies' – a remarkable story in its own right, as I was to discover. That is where my researches took me next.

Warp and Weft: an anthological approach to history

Adjective. anthological (not generally comparable, comparative more anthological, superlative most anthological): of or pertaining to anthology; consisting of extracts from different authors. (Wiktionary)

Writing a history based on an archive presents the question to the author of how best to tell the story of how and why the archive was created, how to showcase its contents, and how to convey its significance to the reader. 

History, unlike chronology, is never a passive activity: there is always a dialogue between the past and the present. In this case a dialogue with five threads: the social-theological*, the Jungian, the developing praxis of peace-work, the biographical, and the historial context in which the archive was created, particularly its political climate.

The social-theological thread (or sociotheological, as I have seen it termed) approaches people's lives through recognising the pervasiveness of their religion or spirituality to the whole of life: for many people it shapes their weltanschauung. Their faith is not simply an epiphenomena, or a private foible, but is fundamental. It involves "the recognition that politics has a religious side and religion can be an inherent part of public and political life" as Mona Kanwal Sheikh says in her Sociotheology: The Significance of Religious Worldviews (2015). This it certainly was in the case of the subjects of my study: Quakerism is often said to be a way of life, not a fixed set of beliefs. My subject's life experiences shaped their theology, and the evolutions in theology, from nineteenth century liberalism through Barth, Buber, Bonhoeffer, Tillich and Robinson to the non-realism of Don Cupitt, helped inform the inspiration and motivation they derived from their spiritual practice and experience.

The Jungian thread twines in with the social-theological thread; from my subject's first encounters with Jung's ideas, through their meeting with him at his home in Zürich, to their disseminating his ideas among the Quaker communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Echoes of their encounter with Jung still persist among Quaker communities today.

The thread of peace-work, starts with how and why Bertram and Irene Pickard were in Geneva and why they remained there for the majority of their working lives, and tells how they created a template for peace-work that is still used; a template that embodied both the social-theology of their Quakerism and their deepened understanding of the dynamics of humanity as illuminated by Jung's analytical-psychology. 

The biographical is of necessity part of account as Irene's achieve was principally created by the five key members of the Quaker-Jungian group which formed in Geneva in 1934. The group formed with the aim of exploring Jung's ideas in depth in order to understand their relevance, both to personal lives, and to the then current and fast deterioration political situation in Europe, with the hope that Jung's methods might aid in redressing the seemingly remorseless drift into another catastrophic pan-European war.

The historial context and its political climate are the background to the other four threads, a background that at times erupted into being a foreground, impacting massively on the lives of all of my subjects. 

How we see and understand an era of the past is very much subject to our current milieu, its fashions, and needs. How we see the past is far from set in stone, unlike its chronology. Viewing the sweep of twentieth century European history from the perspective of my subjects creates a very different vision compared to what might be called the 'standard received version' – the version taught in schools and subscribed to by much of the popular media. It certainly involved my re-assessing much of what I had taken as fixed truths about the twentieth century, revealing those truths to be more honoured by repetition than grounded in fact.

Those five themes – the sociotheological, the Jungian, the praxis of peace-work, the biographical, and the political and historical context – are the warp threads. The weft is provided by the archive and related texts. 

What the archive presented me with was an abundance of materials, much of it in the words of my subjects, or in the words of those who influenced them. Arranging those words into a narrative pattern was the authorial task – the weft woven across the warp of the five narrative threads.

The task of marshalling the disparate documents and texts of the archive into some sort of coherent order, and then selecting from them quotations which would advance the five narratives involved a great deal of editorial selection. A task that very much supported Alun Munslow's contention that:

My analysis of the historian as an author is predicated on the ontological assumption that history has the status of a narratological act. (Alun Munslow: The Historian as Author: 2020 – http://culturahistorica.org/)

The process certainly involved the development of discourse as story by creating a story space – or a number of them to frame different threads and texts – and considerable focalisation on what would advance the five narrative threads.  

Writing about an archive such as Irene's involves curating the content and then setting the selected 'exhibits' into an interpretative context; but it also involved much more, because Irene, Elined, P W and Marjory Martin disseminated Jungian ideas across the Quaker communities on both sides of the Atlantic, helping to initiate and sustain a lasting interest in the relevance of Jung to Quaker (and wider) spirituality. Tracing that influence involved searching for Jungian inspired articles in Quaker publications – especially in the Inward Light and the The Seeker – and selecting passages to incorporate into and advance the narrative. It turned out to be a trail of articles that largely petered out by the turn of the millennium.

My choice in writing about the archive was as far as possible to let the archive and related materials speak for themselves, hence the anthological approach. Each quotation being like a stepping stone in advancing the narratives. At times it felt like being a barrister, calling witness to the stand in order for them to testify in their own words, only interrupting them in order to highlight one point or another. 

In a way writing about an archive such as Irene's could be compared to being a jeweller: the gemstones are the selected quotations from the primary sources – the archive, the works referred to in the archive or, in the latter part of the book, the Jungian related published texts written by Quakers – the setting is the narrative and analysis that surrounds them and sets them off.

Far better to let my subjects and their influencers speak for themselves – a case of show not tell – than to try to re-express what they have said so clearly in their own words. It is a method that works well for the subject matter: a blend of psychology, theology, philosophy, politics, peace-work and history.

By far the biggest influencer whose thoughts are reflected in the archive was, of course, Carl Gustav Jung, but he was not the only influencer. T S Elliot, Kierkegaard, Isaac Penington, Chuang Tzu, Thomas Merton, Jeremiah (he of the Old Testament), Evelyn Underhill, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Lewis Mumford, H G Baynes, Thomas Traherne, Esther Harding, Meister Eckhart, Jakob Böhme, Julian and Aldous Huxley, and many others found a place. An eclectic mix of spiritual explorers, mystics, analysts and commentators, both ancient and modern.

In selecting what to quote, or refer to, in the narrative I applied a hierarchy. The documents of the archive had priority of focus. These are unique texts in which the authors were processing what they learned from Jung and the other influencers. The texts form a unique record of how a Quaker community was impacted by the intellectual climate and events of their times. Irene's library of books came next, as these clearly were crucial in informing the text of many of her archive's documents. Then both other texts that had been referred to in the archive – the influencer's texts – but also the other Quaker produced texts that were influenced by Jung's thoughts – the influenced texts. Finally, the texts of commentors on Jung. 

That hierarchy governed the focalisation – the allocation of attention –  in the book and profoundly shaped the story space, the narrative. The first seven chapters deal with developments in British Quakerism, the shattering of the world in 1914, how Irene and Bertram Pickard met, and the evolutions in Quaker peace-work which took them to Geneva; twenty-three chapters are directly based on the contents of the archive; the final six trace the impact of Jung on the wider Quaker world and issues arising from that.

If a film were made of a stone dropped into a pond and the ripples spreading out until they die away, that would be a good image of the historical impact of Jung on the Quakers. The dropping of the stone was the discovery of Jung by that small group of Quakers in Geneva. The spreading out and dying away of the ripples, in so far as we have a record, are the texts that resulted. Texts that were produced in the Quaker community all the way from 1934 to the end of the twentieth century, and on until now. There may not be much reference made to Jung in Quaker circles today, but there has been a lasting shift in Quaker understanding of what spirituality is because of the interaction; unlike dropping a stone into water, everything has not returned to how it was before – the Quaker waters themselves are different because of the influence of Jung. 

*Social Theology - The systematic study of and preoccupation with issues of human welfare from the perspective of divine revelation, a term that includes natural revelation in its widest Reformed sense.