9 feb

Finished reading about WWI, having to submit a review tomorrow. I’ve written earlier about Catastrophe, a magnificent book by Max Hastings. Was reading the last days in ‘Saving the City’, a book about the financial crisis that also occurred in the summer of 1914.
A forgotten crisis,according to the author Richard Roberts. To be honest, there is a good reason for this crisis to be forgotten. Hastings, writing a good 600 pages about the year 1914 by itself, only wastes 8 lines on this particular crisis. There was trouble on the financial markets for a few days, and then it was solved, he writes. That’s a good summary.
Roberts is able to stretch this summary into a supposed to be drama of 250 pages. But, having read about the hundreds of thousands of deaths, occurring at about the same time, having read about the horrific blundering of countless generals, whose grave strategic mistakes are not fully exposed, only because of opposing generals making similar or even more severe horrific misjudgments, it all falls a bit flat.
It is difficult to think that raising the discount rate a little bit too fast, as the Bank of England seems to have done in those days, was terrible, also because this supposedly mistake was rectified within days. And it is rather funny to be able to see the cold-bloodedness of Asquith, Britains prime minister at the time, being described as a virtue by Roberts, while Hastings is merciless and oh so much superior in his verdict about Asquith: ‘A measured man responding in measured terms to the unfolding of a measureless European catastrophe’. (the only time I think he uses the title of his book)
There was a good reason this financial crisis was a forgettable event. This particular financial crisis wasn’t even followed by an economic crisis. The extravagant government spending of the coming warfare years prevented that. The price that was being paid was much greater of course. Even Roberts understands that.
And I suppose that it is worthwhile to write a book about it. But it is not the right book to read after Catastrophe. Firstly because there are not many books that are written that well, but mostly because everything becomes a little futile after the horrors of the battlefields of World War One.
One of the maps gave me an idea though of a trip that I would want to make in 2018, hundred years after La Grande Guerre has ended. Starting in Nieuwpoort at the Belgian coast, I will follow the battlefields of the time between november 1914 and august 1918 – a period when millions of soldiers died, without the armies making any progress – ending up in the area of Mulhouse. And I will go and visit every war cemetery on my way, with the same zeal that we have been following the Romanesq churches in the past few months.
And, while I think it is kind of fun to compare the financial crisis of the last years to the Christianity crisis of the 12th century, I will realize then how blessed we are with having to deal with the after effects of a financial crisis, instead of dealing with the horrors of war.