I’ve spent the afternoon in the library reading Edgar Wallace’s 1925:The Story of a Fatal Peace (1915). This belongs to the dire warnings genre of fiction.

It is set in a possible 1925, ten years after the war has ended. A politician explains:

“We were sick of the war,” he said; “we thought things were going well and then we found they were going rotten -dash it! We had to make peace!”

“On terms,” said Grant drily.

Grant Macrae is the journalist hero, one of the few men in Britain who sees what is really going on.

Mind you, the terms that the Germans offered were not bad for Britain. Germany gave Alsace-Lorraine back to France, and all her colonies to the British. But she kept her fleet and the Hohenzollerns stayed on the throne, free to continue their frightfulness.

Any doubts that there might have been in Britain about these terms were crushed by the sudden appearance of advocates for Peace, from both the government and opposition benches. There’s a strong implication that these were a fifth column, of the type that Pemberton-Billing would feverishly fantasise about later in the war.

After the War, Britain struggles to maintain her economic strength, while Germany grows rich under a Hohenzollern dictatorship that forces its citizens to work a 75-hour week. Now there are sinister hints (pooh-poohed by the Establishment) that Germany is preparing for war again. With an eye on his transatlantic readership, Wallace claims that the Huns have an undying urge to crush America as well as Britain.

To underline this theme, there’s a plucky little American heroine, who gets bombed, and kidnapped, and shanghaied by the German heavies. It all becomes a race against time, as the German plan unfolds. They are going to attack under the cover of a giant Peace Festival. In fact, they’ve invited all the British soldiers who fought in the War to come for a special holiday in Germany, all expenses found. With the intention, as only Grant Macrae can see, of kidnapping them, to make the invasion easy.

You read in horror, and as you get closer to the end you wonder how on earth Wallace can bring all this to a happy ending. But he doesn’t! The Germans are coming, and the British are easy prey. A warning indeed.

Of course, some people would argue that this book is not bad at foretelling what would happen after Versailles. An unsatisfactory peace, appeasement, German rearmament and the finishing-off of the war.

Wallace’simagination is rather more lurid than actualhistory, though.