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Authors: Norman Stone
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was blamed for this. But the price-control system had more to do with it: grain was controlled, and meat was not, so farmers fed grain to their beasts. In fact grain, directly eaten, gives four times more energy than if eaten indirectly through meat (the two-pound Victorian loaf was enough for a working man’s day). Then in Germany meat prices were controlled, such that the beasts were slaughtered (9 million pigs in the spring of 1915), rather than sold. There was less manure and thence a smaller harvest. Matters were made worse by the failure of the potato crop, and the winter of 1916–17 was known as ‘the turnip winter’, but the heart of the problem lay inblundering price-controls. The Prussian ministry of agriculture seems to have regarded the blockade as just a heightened form of the agricultural tariff which the Right had always advocated. At any rate, peasants did quite well, while the towns ate turnips and endlessly boiled sugar beet to produce a sweet syrup, which is still eaten with potato-cakes – Reibekuchen mit Rübenkraut – at Christmas markets in Cologne.
There was another somewhat perverse effect of the blockade, this time one that had been foreseen but misunderstood. As German exports went down, British ones were expected to take their place: the Latin American market could be recaptured, or so it was supposed. Profits from such exports could be recycled, via war loans or taxation, to the Treasury, and that in turn would mean lending money to allies, such as Italy or Russia, who would do the land fighting. There was, again, some precedent for this: in the Seven Years War of 1756–63, British money had kept Frederick the Great’s Prussia going against France, Russia and Austria, while the British liquidated almost all of the French empire. Now, exports did rise – in 1916–17 to a value of £527,000,000, as against an average of £474,000,000 in the five years before the war. That figure was not equalled until 1951, and it is a curious fact that 1916 was the only year in the whole of statistically recorded time when the British sold more goods overseas than they bought. However, exports took skilled labour, diverting it (and machinery) from war work, and the whole business was bedevilled by another phenomenon characteristic of the time, that vast numbers of the skilled men volunteered for the army, so exporters faced labour-shortage and bid against each other with ever-higher wages. This problem was solved, only partially, when conscription was imposed in 1916: under conscription, exemptions could be made for essential crafts (to the extent that conscription in the end netted fewer men than the earlier volunteering had done). In 1915 these confusions affected the British war economy, and therewas a serious lack of munitions in the spring and summer, whereas the Germans had been forced into a more appropriate approach. Blockade therefore turned into a set of elliptical billiard balls, and was not really properly used until 1918, when the various neutrals, mainly because of American intervention, could be coerced into limiting their trade with Germany.
But there was a further precedent (and this was an age when men were very taken with historical precedents): ‘the soft under-belly’ – in Napoleon’s time, Spain; now, Turkey?
Turkey’s intervention had turned out very badly. The Germans had had high hopes that all Islam would rise against the British, once ‘holy war’ was declared by the Sultan-Caliph. In most places, the appeal went into waste-paper baskets, both Russian Tatars and Indian Muslims making no trouble at all; in any case, ‘holy war’ made very little sense if it meant taking one set of Christians as allies against another set of Christians (and, true to form for the Young Turks, their own religious leader was anyway a Freemason from a grand Istanbul family). The Ottoman army had lost heavily in the Caucasus, and there were already signs of a revolt in the Arab provinces. A
There was another somewhat perverse effect of the blockade, this time one that had been foreseen but misunderstood. As German exports went down, British ones were expected to take their place: the Latin American market could be recaptured, or so it was supposed. Profits from such exports could be recycled, via war loans or taxation, to the Treasury, and that in turn would mean lending money to allies, such as Italy or Russia, who would do the land fighting. There was, again, some precedent for this: in the Seven Years War of 1756–63, British money had kept Frederick the Great’s Prussia going against France, Russia and Austria, while the British liquidated almost all of the French empire. Now, exports did rise – in 1916–17 to a value of £527,000,000, as against an average of £474,000,000 in the five years before the war. That figure was not equalled until 1951, and it is a curious fact that 1916 was the only year in the whole of statistically recorded time when the British sold more goods overseas than they bought. However, exports took skilled labour, diverting it (and machinery) from war work, and the whole business was bedevilled by another phenomenon characteristic of the time, that vast numbers of the skilled men volunteered for the army, so exporters faced labour-shortage and bid against each other with ever-higher wages. This problem was solved, only partially, when conscription was imposed in 1916: under conscription, exemptions could be made for essential crafts (to the extent that conscription in the end netted fewer men than the earlier volunteering had done). In 1915 these confusions affected the British war economy, and therewas a serious lack of munitions in the spring and summer, whereas the Germans had been forced into a more appropriate approach. Blockade therefore turned into a set of elliptical billiard balls, and was not really properly used until 1918, when the various neutrals, mainly because of American intervention, could be coerced into limiting their trade with Germany.
But there was a further precedent (and this was an age when men were very taken with historical precedents): ‘the soft under-belly’ – in Napoleon’s time, Spain; now, Turkey?
Turkey’s intervention had turned out very badly. The Germans had had high hopes that all Islam would rise against the British, once ‘holy war’ was declared by the Sultan-Caliph. In most places, the appeal went into waste-paper baskets, both Russian Tatars and Indian Muslims making no trouble at all; in any case, ‘holy war’ made very little sense if it meant taking one set of Christians as allies against another set of Christians (and, true to form for the Young Turks, their own religious leader was anyway a Freemason from a grand Istanbul family). The Ottoman army had lost heavily in the Caucasus, and there were already signs of a revolt in the Arab provinces. A
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