August is the month when wars start.” When the late rock writer Al Aronowitz
penned that line in his August Blues he spoke more truly than he knew. The
current hostilities between Russia and Georgia are only the latest in a
series of modern crises and conflicts that have all broken out in what the
novelist Edna O'Brien called the “wicked month” when ordinary people and
politicians alike should be at their most relaxed and sunning themselves on
Southwold sands, but have just as often been plotting wars and starting
rumours of wars.
The very name of the month has a martial ring. August is named after Augustus,
first of the Roman emperors, who was himself a successful general. His
adopted father, Julius Caesar, was one of the great commanders of history
and, after Caesar's assassination in 44BC, it fell to Augustus to hunt down
and defeat his uncle's murderers, Brutus and Cassius. He followed this up by
defeating his great rival Mark Antony at the sea battle of Actium, leaving
himself as the single unchallenged ruler of Rome.
Like most August wars, the Russia-Georgia conflict kicked off when the world's
back was turned. In this case, global attention was focused on the
spectacular opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing. The Russian strongman
Vladimir Putin was himself at the Olympics when Georgian forces moved into
South Ossetia, sparking the current conflict.
Most famously, both the First and Second World Wars erupted in August.
Arguably, the First World War started because key leaders were away from
their desks and on holiday, and the long fuse leading to the war spluttered
to its explosive and deadly destination because no one was around to snuff
it out. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, for example, refused to let the threat
of the gathering war clouds disrupt his annual summer ritual of a cruise
along the fjords of the Norwegian coast.
Having approved the text of the lethal ultimatum dispatched by his Austrian
ally to Serbia demanding the virtual surrender of Serbia's independence as
retribution for the assassination
of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a Bosnian Serb nationalist
at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Wilhelm blithely sailed off across the North
Sea and was practically incommunicado as Europe drifted into war.
By the time he returned to Berlin at the end of July, refreshed by the bracing
Scandinavian sea air, mobilisation had started, Germany's well-oiled
military machine was in motion, troop trains were rolling to the frontiers,
and the stone had begun to roll downhill that would carry his throne, his
country and the whole Continent into the abyss.
Across the North Sea, the overlord of the British fleet, Winston Churchill,
then First Lord of the Admiralty, was, like Gordon Brown last week,
holidaying on the East Anglian coast as the war approached. He and his wife
Clemmie, pregnant with their daughter Sarah, had rented a house at
Overstrand in Norfolk. Like Mr Brown at Southwold, they were supposed to be
free from the affairs of state, but the insatiably proactive Churchill
constantly commuted to his desk in Whitehall as he readied the Navy for the
coming conflict.
Churchill's political chief, the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, was less
enthused than his bellicose subordinate at the prospect of world war.
Indeed, his big regret was that the impending hostilities had forced him to
cancel a planned trip to stay with his confidante and possible lover,
Venetia Stanley, at her family home at Penrhos on Anglesey.
The pacific Asquith's wish to bury himself in Venetia's charms and forget the
war - in which his brilliant eldest son, Raymond, would die on the Somme,
and he himself would be overthrown by the dynamic David Lloyd George - was
echoed by his more austere successor as Prime Minister 25 years later when
the Second World War broke out: Neville Chamberlain. Rather than seeking
sympathetic feminine company in August 1939 as his policy of appeasing
Hitler collapsed in ruins, Chamberlain packed his rod and headed north for a
Scottish fly-fishing holiday.
Winston Churchill, by contrast, destined to replace Chamberlain in less than a
year, was hyperactive. Rather than the peace of a Scottish salmon river, his
summer destination in August 1939 was a tour of inspection of the Maginot
Line in France - the chain of forts and bunkers erected along its eastern
frontier to stop a German invasion. (In the event, the Germans would skirt
round it).
But while Britain's democratic leaders were casting flies over waters, or
peering into underground fortifications, the leaders of Europe's two leading
totalitarian powers - Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union - were spending
their August cooking up the Nazi-Soviet pact, a cynical secret deal between
ideological arch foes to conquer and divvy up Poland between them. When the
pact, swiftly followed by the German
invasion of Poland, burst upon a startled world in late August, the
Second World War began. Six bloody years later it ended, in August 1945,
with the dropping of the world's first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
But the Cold War, too, had its share of dangerous August crises that, if they
didn't quite result in world war - could easily have done so. On August
13, 1961, East Germany's Communist regime built the Berlin Wall,
separating the city's eastern and western sectors and preventing East
Germans from crossing the frontier. In the three decades that followed 133
people died trying to cross it and achieve freedom. On August 20, 1968,
tanks invaded and crushed Czechoslovakia, putting an abrupt end to the
liberal “Prague Spring” - Alexander Dubcek's doomed attempt to construct
“socialism with a human face”.
As liberalisation finally and belatedly reached the Soviet Union itself, on
August 19, 1991, a clique of eight Communist hardliners overthrew the
reformist President Gorbachev in a coup designed to shore up the sagging
Soviet state. Needless to say, the coup took place when Gorbachev was away
from Moscow at his holiday dacha in the Crimea. Boris Yeltsin led a
counter-coup, and within three days the hardline coup - along with Communist
rule itself - had collapsed, its leaders were arrested and the
disintegration of the Soviet Union into independent republics, including
Georgia, accelerated.
So if there is a moral in all this, it is surely that if this holiday month
is, as W.H. Auden had it, “for the people and their favourite islands”, it
is also for our rulers, and therefore for all of us too, easily the most
dangerous month in the calendar. The month when wars start - and regimes
crumble. Gordon Brown: you have been warned.
Nigel Jones's The War Walk: A Journey along the Western Front is re-issued by
Phoenix in October
