CHAPTER ONE
THE START OF THE WAR
It would be a grotesque understatement to say that the First World War represented a major turning point in history. Four great empires were brought down by it – the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires – while those that remained were battered beyond recognition. An array of awesome new weaponry, mass-produced on an industrial scale, killed over 10 million people within the space of four years, quite apart from what must have amounted to some 20 million maimed and injured, and doubtless even more. Nor could the damage be limited ‘merely’ to that, because the botched peace treaties of 1919 would lead on to a second and still worse world war just twenty years later, which would kill over 60 million.
At least the rights and wrongs of the Second World War would be relatively straightforward and easy to understand. With the First (or ‘Great’) War this is considerably less easy to say. It has a reputation as a ‘futile’ war which began for no particularly good reason, and continued with shifting and ambiguous objectives for each combatant nation. There were no great ideologies in conflict, such as Fascism versus Communism or Democracy versus Dictatorship, but only a set of squabbling old-fashioned imperialisms and nationalisms which to the modern outsider do not seem to have been worth the gigantic price that was paid to sustain them. To the modern eye it seems that the inefficient monarchies and incomplete democracies of 1914 marched off to war far too readily, blindly following long-ingrained habits whereby the impoverished and deferential masses would spring to arms enthusiastically, whenever the emperors and their general staffs chose to click their fingers.
However, if viewed in a different light we can see that the real issue at stake was whether or not Germany should be allowed to impose hegemony over the whole of continental Europe, and thereby emerge as the first true ‘superpower’ in the global arena. In 1914 Germany was already the strongest military power in the world, and stopping her would inevitably be a titanic undertaking. Not even the whole ‘Entente Cordiale’ of France, Russia, Britain and eventually Italy possessed adequate military power to have any realistic hope of a quick and easy victory, although unrealistic hopes of one were widespread. Quite apart from the revolution in weaponry that made life on the battlefields very different from what the generals had been expecting, the Germans could also counterbalance the Entente with allies of their own: initially the Austro-Hungarian empire, and later Turkey.
Within this gigantic conflict it soon became clear that the most advanced and concentrated form of warfare was mainly centred on the ‘Western’ front in Belgium and northern France. In strategic terms this was the key to the whole of western Europe, while in military terms it was always the decisive theatre. It was the scene of the main German assault in August 1914 and then, when the Germans reverted to the defensive in the West, it remained their centre of gravity. Their main army remained in place there, and was hard pressed to contain repeated large offensives by the two most technologically advanced members of the Entente. If the German gains could not be reversed here, they could not be reversed anywhere.
But why did the war break out at all? Some commentators like to make rather airy and intangible generalizations about the rigid stratification of social classes at the time, combined with a traditional view of war almost as ‘the sport of kings’. More credibly, we should recognize the importance of another and harder-edged type of logic, based on realpolitik and the iron necessities of national survival. In particular we can point to the system of opposing alliances by which the European ‘balance of power’ had been maintained for many decades, but with accelerating intensity since the establishment of the German empire in 1871. By 1907 Britain had joined the Entente Cordiale with France and Russia, as a power bloc facing the ‘Central Powers’ of Germany and Austro-Hungary. Several different arms races were run between the two sides; not only to build bigger armies and navies, but also in terms of metallurgical and chemical industries, in the building of fortifications and in the acquisition of colonies. Each of these separate arms races had its own pace and dynamic, and could lead to widely different results. For example, a colonial confrontation such as that between Britain and France at Fashoda in 1898, or between France and Germany at Agadir in 1911, could bring tensions to a head and so help to produce a local diplomatic settlement. On the other hand, sabre-rattling might easily have a distinctly destabilizing effect. Most notably, the French law of 7 August 1913 to increase the size of the army by extending the period of conscription to three years led the German General Staff to calculate that it would be advantageous for them to force a showdown with France sooner rather than later. According to this analysis the almost mathematical result was a war that started in August 1914.
Arms races and the confrontations between opposing alliances might often seem to proceed with a sense of inevitability, but we must always remember that at any moment the personal intervention of some imaginative individual might change the underlying logic and break what might appear to be a pre-ordained chain of events. In fact the whole concept of a ‘balance’ of power should demand that the system is always geared to veer away from a ‘total’ war whenever it threatens. Limited wars might sometimes be acceptable to achieve a necessary local correction within the overall balance, but these should never be allowed to escalate into a general conflagration. The problem with the start of the Great War was that this mechanism did not work at the critical moments, although we can readily acknowledge the possibility that a statesman of vision might have stepped in to keep the confrontation limited.1
In 1914 the particular war that ought to have been kept limited was the long-running dispute between Austro-Hungary and Serbia over Bosnia and Herzegovina, which both sides claimed. Serbia was a young country in full expansion, anxious to champion the Slav peoples against the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire. That empire, by contrast, regarded the Balkans as its own natural area of influence, and was confident in its military power, especially since it was strengthened by an alliance with Germany. The dispute came to a head following the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June. The Vienna government felt compelled to mobilize against Serbia and, secure in a promise of unconditional German support (‘the blank cheque’), declared war on 28 July. We might consider that this in itself was an overreaction. Yet the world had already seen a series of small Balkan wars in 1912-13, and many outsiders expected that this one would be no bigger. However, on this occasion Russia had already given plentiful warning that she would not stand idly by, but would mobilize in support of her Serbian friends: fellow Slavs whom the Tsar had not been able to help as much as he would have liked during the earlier conflicts. We might criticize this move as a second overreaction, although when seen from a different perspective it ought perhaps to have served as a salutary deterrent which could have persuaded Austria to stand down and not pursue any war at all. It did indeed shake the Germans out of their complacency, and they belatedly attempted to restrain their Austrian allies, but their intervention came too late. The die had already been cast.
Russia was certainly clumsy in the method of her mobilization, which began on 29 July as a partial measure to face Austria alone, then was extended to cover Germany as well, then was reduced back again. However, it was finally extended the next day to cover the whole of her western frontier, including the more northerly portion which faced Germany. This naturally set alarm bells ringing in Berlin, where the General Staff threw its influence behind a call for the maximum mobilization not merely of Austria, but also of Germany herself. The German chancellor Theobold von Bethmann-Hollweg, who wanted a more conciliatory approach, was overruled. Germany finally declared war on Russia on 1 August. Thus a limited war in Serbia was set to expand into a much less limited – albeit also rather less intended – war in western Russia. Even so, this still apparently amounted to considerably less than the prospect of a ‘world conflagration’.
It was unfortunately at this point that Helmuth von Moltke (the younger), chief of the German General Staff, disingenuously insisted that his forces were configured only for a war on two fronts, rather than just one. If only he had been more sympathetic to the diplomats, he might well have been able to find the means to limit German mobilization to the Russian front alone; but he did not. He believed not only that France would definitely give military help to her ally if Russia became involved in any fighting, but also that France posed a much more immediate threat to Germany than did Russia. The French centres of mobilization were closer to Berlin than the Russians', and the French army and defence industries were more modern. Therefore the famous ‘Schlieffen Plan’, which had moulded German doctrine for nearly two decades, laid it down that any campaign against the Entente had to begin with a pre-emptive strike to destroy the French army first.2 In fact seven out of the eight German armies were sent to attack in the west, while only one was left to defend against the Russians in the east.
This doctrine determined, in effect, that Germany was unable to contemplate a ‘limited’ war against Russia alone. France was seen as the major threat, which meant that the war would inevitably spread into western as well as eastern Europe. It would involve not only France herself, but also Belgium and Luxembourg – which the Germans saw as the least well-defended highway to Paris – and Britain which, although many of her citizens may not have known it at the time, was more or less inextricably committed to supporting the Entente. The Liberal prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, believed that a successful German invasion of France would represent a cataclysmic disaster for the British Empire, and he played a careful hand to win over his sceptical cabinet to the same point of view. The fact that Germany was violating Belgian neutrality gave him the moral argument that he needed, so his efforts were successful. The final diplomatic efforts to restore peace broke down during the first three days of August. Germany declared war on France on the 3rd, Belgium was entered by German troops during the night of the 3rd to 4th, and the British declared war later on the 4th. The Western Front had been opened, and already it was being seen as the most decisive front of all.
Thus it was that a war that need never have happened, or which might have been contained within the Balkans, or at least no further afield than western Russia, spread almost instantly to embrace a great part of Europe. From there, since Britain, France, Belgium and Germany were among the leading colonial powers at the time, it was but a short step to involving a great deal of the rest of the world, at least in a technical sense. Other colonial powers included Italy, Portugal, Japan and the USA, who all sooner or later joined the Entente; and Holland and Spain, who somehow managed to remain neutral. Japan was keen to pick off the German colonies in the Pacific and joined the war on 23 August, soon exploiting the international situation to occupy a part of China. In general, however, the fighting in non-European areas remained somewhat minor or marginal, with the possible exception of the campaigns in Palestine and Mesopotamia. Even the relatively large ‘Eastern’ campaign in the Dardanelles in 1915 was still fought technically just within the geographical boundaries of Europe. By contrast, the Second World War would turn out to be far more truly global in its scope, with its most advanced weapons being tested nowhere near Europe, but as far away as Nevada, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
THE OPENING OF THE WESTERN FRONT
The Western Front was a battlefield that had been carefully prepared in advance. Ever since the war of 1870–1 the Franco-German border had been heavily fortified by the two sides, who recognized that sooner or later a renewal of hostilities would be inevitable. Yet so thoroughly had the French built the defences on their side of the frontier that the Germans began to look for ways to avoid making a direct frontal attack. They selected a more open approach through Luxembourg and south-east Belgium, by which they could outflank their opponent from the north. The Belgians in turn built new fortifications, in Liége, Namur and Antwerp, though at first this did not worry the Germans. For a long time they believed that they could bully or bribe the cynical old Belgian king Leopold II into granting them free passage, although when he died in 1909 his successor Albert I turned out to be made of sterner stuff, and under his leadership the Belgians would resist energetically in 1914.
In the event the Germans were forced to fight their way through Belgium; but by 1914 they had strengthened their spearheads with a new generation of heavy howitzers, which were able to smash even the most modern concrete forts. Liége and Namur fell in short order, and then a second surprise was revealed. A new and wider German mobilization system had allowed them to put some 40 per cent more troops into Belgium than the French intelligence service had predicted.Der Millionenkrieg (‘the million-man war’) had arrived with a vengeance, and would continue to grow and grow in scale for the next four years. Given their unexpectedly great numbers, the Germans did not confine themselves merely to the Ardennes area to the south-east of the country, but swept much more widely to the west, occupying Brussels and even threatening Antwerp. Their main thrust therefore emerged in northern France almost 100 miles nearer to the Channel coast than had been calculated by the French planners.
On their side the French ‘Plan XVII’ had been based on an expectation that the Germans would always enjoy a numerical superiority, albeit a much smaller one than would actually be the case. They would attempt to encircle each French contingent from the flanks, to which the recommended French antidote was that their outnumbered forces should launch a rapid counter-attack against the enemy's centre or rear, designed to disrupt him and prevent the completion of his encirclement. While the more numerous Germans could afford to make outflanking attacks, therefore, the French would be compelled to make a risky frontal assault as their only alternative to retreat. Many historians have misunderstood the military logic behind this analysis, and have characterized it as merely a blind and even suicidal offensive à outrance. It was actually a great deal more subtle than that, and rested not only upon a traditional theme of French military thought that went back at least two centuries, but also upon some of the most modern scientific writing in the field of crowd psychology.3 The leading theorists of the offensive doctrine, such as de Maud'huy or de Grandmaison, were very far from being the spiritualist idiots they have too often been portrayed as.
Plan XVII called for two major offensives: one, with two armies, directly across the eastern frontier into the German-occupied parts of Alsace and Lorraine; and a second, with another two armies, into the Belgian Ardennes. The first of these attacks was largely a political gesture, since the public demanded pure and unsophisticated revenge for the loss of territory in 1871. But in military terms it was deeply foolhardy, since the Germans had enjoyed four decades in which to prepare the battlefields, and sure enough the attacks were defeated and driven back from Morhange and Sarrebourg on 20-22 August. This incident should not, however, be seen as a failure of tactics, but rather of the interaction between strategy, policy and press expectations at the highest level. It is more than unfortunate that the highly political imperatives behind the offensive into Alsace-Lorraine have been hidden in the general rush to shift the blame from the politicians to the generals.
The French theory of the vanguard. The theoretical French antidote to attempted German encirclements
The second offensive was planned on a much more military basis. It was designed to cut in behind the main German spearheads advancing into Belgium and, if it had worked, it would surely have disrupted the Schlieffen Plan very effectively. Unfortunately for the French, however, the fact that the Germans had mobilized many more troops than expected meant that they had a powerful second echelon marching into Belgium behind their leading troops, so the assault hit those rather than the soft logistic rear that they had hoped to find. Once again the attackers were dispersed with heavy losses. Meanwhile the German spearheads further to the west were appearing in great strength in front of the fifth French army, which held them up for three days at Charleroi, and a small British army (the British Expeditionary Force, or BEF) that delayed them for twelve hours at Mons. In both cases the final result was the same: the allies began a long retreat to the south in the hot August weather, while the Germans pushed onwards towards Paris at the quickstep.
Nothing that happened after that had been expected by anyone. At the very least the allies had expected an honourable draw in the ‘Battles of the Frontiers’, instead of which they now had to deal with the reality of a comprehensive defeat. It was only the reassuring imperturbability of the French commander, ‘Papa’ Joseph Joffre, that held them all together through the crisis. His only previous field command had been at the head of 1,000 troops in Timbuktu in 1894–5, yet now, incongruously, he found himself commanding an army of well over a million men on a frontage of over 400 miles, in the face of the most powerful and professional army in the world. Few in the upper reaches of the French high command had expected him to shine, but during August and September 1914 he did exactly what was necessary to save France, calmly moving reserves by rail from the eastern frontier to the threatened areas around Paris and the Marne river on its eastern flank. Not all of his army commanders did as well. For example, the previously high-flying General Charles Lanrezac, who had commanded at Charleroi, suffered something of a breakdown and was ‘sent to Limoges’ (Limogé), or in other words fired. The British Field Marshal Sir John French did scarcely better, and only a few days after his first battle was talking about retreating to the Loire and removing his army from France altogether. He had to be ‘stiffened up’ by a personal visit from the great Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, and it is remarkable that he survived in command after that. Thus a considerable proportion of the individuals who had been selected as key commanders before the war failed the test of modern battle.
On the German side exactly the same can be said of von Moltke himself. Soon after the spectacularly successful opening phase of his campaign, he sensed that control of events was gradually slipping away from him. His HQ was located too far behind the spearheads – which were marching at maximum speed away from him – and he discovered, too late, that too much personal initiative had been allowed to each of his seven army commanders. On the Alsace frontier Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, commanding the sixth army, had been told to retire before the French offensive, to lure them further away from Paris, but instead he counter-attacked, with a diametrically opposite result. Equally the army commanders on the vital western flank edged their line of march successively eastwards, in order to keep in touch with their neighbours, but in so doing they abandoned Schlieffen's essential idea that Paris should be encircled from the west. In the event the main German blow emerged to the east of the French capital, which meant that it could not achieve anything like the decisive victory that had been hoped. At that point it became clear not only that the French defence on the Marne had been consolidated and reinforced, but that the leading German troops had lost cohesion and were exhausted by their long march in the heat. On 9 September they were abruptly pulled back to more defensible lines some forty miles further north, while von Moltke himself suffered a breakdown and had to be replaced, by General Erich von Falkenhayn. Joffre thus enjoyed the satisfaction of victory in ‘the battle of the Marne’, although he was left with the deeply intractable problem that the Germans still occupied a deep and wide swathe of northern France and, even worse, had adopted a particularly well- organized defensive posture.
In the allied ‘pursuit’ northwards from the Marne the underlying strength of the defensive in modern warfare began to become apparent in a way that had not previously been understood. On the heights above the Aisne (the Chemin des Dames), for example, the Germans were able to beat off every attack. Then in the Ypres salient the British in turn, under General Sir Douglas Haig, were able to hold their positions against fierce counter-attacks, including the notorious ‘Kindermord’ in which regiments of inexpert young Germans rushed forward near Langemarck only to be mown down in their hundreds. Both sides attempted to stake claims and outflank their opponents, only to find that they soon ran out of flanks. At its extreme western end the line rested on the North Sea. South-east of Ypres the Germans held the Lille industrial area and Vimy Ridge, while the allies held Arras and Albert. The line continued to drive roughly south-southeast to Noyon, which formed the point of a salient in German hands, then it veered sharply eastwards along the Chemin des Dames. Reims was held by the French, as was the fortress complex around Verdun, although the Germans had cut in further south with a sharp salient around St Mihiel. From there the line regained roughly the pre-war frontier, west of the German fortress of Metz, and so down ‘the blue line of the Vosges’ to the Swiss border. By mid-November the front had solidified along its whole length, and four long and frustrating years of ‘trenchlock’ had begun. This would almost immediately become the most notoriously memorable feature of the Western Front, and the source of all the frustrations and heavy casualties that are associated with it.
There were three main elements in the new power of the defence. The first was the extensive use of fortifications such as barbed wire entanglements, multiple lines of trenches and bombproof dugouts. Secondly, there were the light weapons of the front-line troops; not only the rifles and machine guns that had been well known before the war, but a whole new generation of weapons that were designed during the winter of 1914–15 specifically to meet the novel requirements of trench combat. These included many different types of hand grenade, trench mortar and trench cannon, and flamethrowers would be added to the list by 1916. Last but far from least was the artillery that supported the front line, firing from relatively safe positions in the rear. It could bring down an unprecedentedly heavy volume of fire upon ‘no man's land’ and the enemy's trenches that lay beyond it, but during at least the first three years of the war it was itself very difficult to hit.
It is the machine gun that has captured the popular imagination as the great killing machine of this war, since it was not only a ‘machine’ but also an inhuman or ‘nerveless’ weapon when used on fixed lines with awesomely ‘automatic’ fire. It did not need to be aimed personally, like a rifle or grenade, but seemed to take on almost a life of its own. At certain moments it could dominate the battlefield for a mile around its firing point, allowing just a handful of its servants to mow down whole lines of soldiers in the space of a very few minutes. Such moments, however, were rare. For most of the rest of the war the great majority of casualties (estimated as about 60 per cent) were caused by artillery, especially with High Explosive (HE) ammunition. HE had been invented in the 1880s, when almost overnight it was found that the great explosive power that could be packed into each shell had made most existing fortifications obsolete. In future any trench or masonry wall would be very vulnerable, so the choice facing defenders was between excavating dugouts much deeper into the ground (say twenty feet), or screening themselves with thick layers of reinforced concrete. Then there was a second technical revolution in artillery around 1900, when efficient hydraulic systems were developed which absorbed the recoil of each shot without transmitting it to the trail or wheels, so that the gun did not move and have to be relaid every time. This in turn allowed a vastly increased rate of accurate fire to be delivered on any chosen target, with perhaps up to fifteen or, with the famous French 75mm field gun, even twenty-five shots per minute.
All this was widely known by the European armies at an intellectual level, but it was only in real large-scale combat that the various different innovations, and the way they interacted with each other, came to be understood at a deeper and more instinctive level. The learning process could often be slow. For one thing, many of the field gunners suddenly had to learn the scientific art of indirect fire at long range (that is, when the target was not visible to the gunners), and their pre-war training had become obsolete, concentrating almost exclusively on direct fire at relatively close range, and on horse care, without which the guns would have been immobile. Then again, both the optimum use of machine guns, and the counter-measures against them, took a surprisingly long time for the infantry to work out. It was only about halfway through the war that basic platoon tactics for the attack were properly mastered by the British – somewhat later than they were by the French, and somewhat earlier than by the Germans.