Perry de Havilland, David Carr, Christian Michel and I all attended a meeting last Friday night. David Carr has a car (naturally), and drove us all back home, and the first stop was Chateau Perry where we paused for coffee. We covered a lot of conversational ground most agreeably, part of which was about what if? … some particular bit of history had gone differently, and radically changed the next bit of history?
One of the most interesting books I read during the year 2001 was called exactly this, What If?, and was about exactly that. (What if?: Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, edited by Robert Cowley, first published by Putnam, New York, 1999; my paperback edition, Pan, London, 2001.)
For instance, did you know that in 1931, a New York taxicab injured and might easily have killed Winston Churchill? No, nor did I. It’s the kind of event that gets left out of the regular history books, because what might have happened didn’t.
Better know to specialists (such as Perry – he finished the story for me on Friday night) is that in 1241 a Mongol army was just about to trash Vienna and probably then move south and abort the Italian Renaissance. But then, the Mongol Supreme Boss of Bosses (one of Ghenghis Khan’s sons) died and his successor had to be picked. Since the Mongol army was always deeply involved in this particular decision (a wise procedure if you think about it), it had to go back to Mongolia at once. It never returned.
Or what of the Assyrian army that was just about to obliterate Jerusalem and strangle the Jewish religion at birth, in 701 BC? It caught a plague and died. The Jews, instead of ceasing to exist as a coherent people, regarded themselves from then on as chosen ones whose God had made a particular point of saving, unlike all the other gods in the area who had proved useless against the Assyrians. Take away that plague, and western civilisation turns out just a bit different, doesn’t it?
Theodore F. Cook Jr. begins his piece about Midway thus: “There is a story, no doubt apocryphal, that gamers at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, have many times replayed the 1942 Battle of Midway … but have never been able to produce an American victory.” Had Japan won Midway, America would still have beaten them in WW2, but it would have taken longer, and the consequences of that would have been …
Of all the history books I’ve ever read, this one brought the past most vividly to life for me, and connected me to it most strongly.
For us now, the next bit of history is fraught with alternatives. Is America about to attack Iraq, and if so how will that play out? What if a Muslim terrorist does manage to contrive a nuclear explosion in some American city? Or in a European city? (Which of those two would make quite a difference.) What will happen to China? Smooth ascent to superpower? Bloody break-up? Ditto India, much in the news now. A week or so ago I posted a speculation about the future of Japan, and let’s just say that not all the resulting e-mails were in agreement, with me or with each other. Speaking locally, will Britain subside into a mere EU province, or will it shake itself free of the EU and continue to make an independent difference to the world?
What If? showed me a past that was likewise fraught with portentous alternatives. To be alive in the past, just as now, was not to be looking at just the one next bit of history, the one that with hindsight we know actually happened. Then as now, they faced many futures, not just the one. Then as now, individual accidents, and also of course individual efforts could make a huge difference.
I love Grand Theories of history, and this is the grandest Grand Theory of them all: Things Could Have Turned Out Quite Differently.
