37 The First World War

The First World War—“the Great War” as it was known at the time—was a cataclysm that tore the heart out of Europe, destroying a generation of young men and sowing the seeds of further conflict. For four years, the combatants fought a war of attrition, unable to break the stalemate, unwilling to negotiate a peace, but prepared to expend men on an industrial scale.

Quite why the war started has been a subject of debate among historians. Some point to imperial and industrial rivalries, some to the contradictions within the capitalist system, some to the system of polarized military alliances, some to a chapter of accidents and unintended consequences. It may well have been a combination of all these.

The road to war By 1914, the great powers of Europe had formed themselves into two armed camps. On the one hand there was Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy; on the other France and Russia, both of whom had also entered into informal “ententes” with Britain. Britain, the dominant world power through the 19th century, had increasingly come to regard Germany as its greatest industrial, imperial and military rival, and from 1903 the two were locked in a naval arms race.

In 1871 the newly unified Germany had, after defeating the French, annexed the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. What Germany feared above all else was encirclement by hostile powers. It now faced France in the west, anxious to recover the lost provinces, and France’s ally Russia in the east. Since the mid-19th century Russia had claimed leadership of all the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe, especially in the volatile Balkans. Here Russia came head to head with Germany’s ally Austria, which controlled Slovenia and Croatia, and which in 1908 annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. Russia was also alarmed by the material and military support Germany was giving to Turkey, its traditional enemy in the Balkans.

It was in the Balkans that the fuse was lit. On June 28, 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated by a Serb nationalist in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Austria blamed Serbia, Russia’s staunchest ally in the Balkans, and issued a threatening ultimatum. Serbia appealed to Russia, which, following Austria’s declaration of war against Serbia on July 28, began to mobilize its vast army. Russian mobilization was the trigger for Germany to activate its Schlieffen Plan, a strategy to avoid fighting a war on two fronts. The Plan involved delivering a quick knock-out blow to France by means of a surprise attack through neutral Belgium, before Russia could complete its mobilization. In accordance with the Schlieffen Plan, therefore, on August 1, Germany declared war on Russia, and on August 3, it declared war on France. The following day German troops entered Belgium, prompting Britain—which had guaranteed Belgian neutrality—to declare war on Germany.

“If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.”

Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany until 1890

Global conflict All the participants had expected the war to be over by Christmas. It was not to be. Fighting on the Western Front was initially relatively mobile—and on the Eastern Front was to remain so. But after the French and the British stopped the German advance on Paris at the Marne in September, the two sides began to dig in, and by October they faced each other from opposing lines of trenches extending from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier, with neither side able to make a decisive breakthrough. With the Russian army now fully mobilized, the Germans now faced their worst nightmare: a war on two fronts.

There were, of course, more than two fronts in the conflict, justifying its status as a “world war.” On the Western Front, the Germans were faced by the armies of Belgium, France, Britain and its empire, and, by the end, the USA. On the Eastern Front, the Russians fought the Germans in the north, and the Austrians in Galicia and the Carpathians. In the Balkans, Serbia (with limited support from France and Britain) fought Austria and, from 1915, Bulgaria. Italy, which had held back in 1914, joined the Allies (Britain, France, Russia, etc.) in 1915 on the secret promise of receiving territory in the north from Austria, thus opening another front. Turkey joined the Central Powers (Germany and Austria) in October 1914, and an Allied attempt to knock it out of the war by invading the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915 was a bloody failure. There was also fighting in the Middle East, the Caucasus and Africa. One of the most important theaters was the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea, where Britain used its naval superiority to blockade Germany; for its part, Germany waged a successful submarine campaign against Allied shipping.

Stalemate and slaughter

For four years the opposing sides faced each other on the Western Front. The generals dreamed of the great breakthrough, when their artillery would knock a hole in the enemy’s defenses through which the infantry—and even the cavalry—could charge en masse, carrying all before them. Attempts to make such a breakthrough, in offensives lasting weeks or months, nearly always ended in failure or at best an advance of a mile or two, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of casualties. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme alone, the British army lost 20,000 men killed outright.

Military technology at that time overwhelmingly favored the defenders, who could shelter from artillery bombardments in deep trenches and concrete blockhouses, and then with rapid-firing machine-guns mow down the attackers as they became mired in the mud and the barbed wire entanglements of no-man’s land. Toward the end of the war, new tactics and weapons—such as tanks and aircraft—began to end the stalemate. But the slaughter had been on an unimaginable scale: some 9.8 million men—perhaps as many as 12 million—were killed in the fighting, more battle deaths than in any conflict before or since.

The extension of the German submarine campaign to neutral shipping was instrumental in bringing the USA into the war in 1917. Americans had a traditional aversion to becoming involved in foreign entanglements, but once they joined the Allies their vast industrial capacity and reserves of manpower made Allied victory almost inevitable. This duly came on November 11, 1918, when an armistice was signed. Russia, following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, had made a separate peace with Germany. But by 1918 the latter—with its resources exhausted, its population nearing starvation, and with mutinies breaking out in the armed forces—was near collapse.

“It is easier to make war than to make peace.”

Georges Clemenceau, French prime minister, in a speech, July 1919

The victors were not magnanimous. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles forced on Germany in 1919 were punitive, and created resentments that were to foster the rise of Nazism. Far from being “the war to end all wars,” as many hoped, the First World War proved to be merely the first act in a global conflict that was to resume twenty years later, at the cost of even more lives.

the condensed idea

An unnecessary war, fought on an unprecedented scale