'Poor Little Belgium' and Australian Popular Support for War 1914–1915

Abstract

In The Man of Destiny, written in 1896, George Bernard Shaw has Napoleon proclaim, in a memorable speech, that: No Englishman is too low to have scruples: no Englishman is high enough to be free from their tyranny ... He is never at a loss for an effective moral attitude ... There is nothing so bad or good that you will not find an Englishman doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles and cuts off his king's head on republican principles. His watchword is always puty; and he never forgets that the nation which lets its duty get on the opposite side to its interest is 10st.1 After war broke out in 1914, Shaw wrote rather more cursorily: 'Our national trick of virtuous indignation is tiresome enough in peaceful party strife at home. At war it is ungallant and unpardonable'.2 On 4 August 1914 Britain declared war on Germany in response to Berlin's refusal to heed Britain's ultimatum that, unless it withdrew its demands on Belgium by midnight German time, the British would take 'all steps in their power necessary to uphold the neutrality of Belgium'.3 The British government went to war in the name of a principle. It was a principle that served them well in the absence of any further declaration of war aims until January 1918 but it was also a principle that disguised other more compelling interests to do with the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe, judged now to be essential to the continued existence of the British Empire.4 As Zara Steiner writes of the debates in the British Cabinet after 29 July: It was only after most of the waverers had reluctantly concluded that Britain had to intervene that men began to look for a pretext ... The issue of Belgium was all-important because the radical conscience needed a raison d' etre. Their followers could not be told that Britain had entered the war to uphold the balance of power ... ministers now