8

REVOLUTION

LIBERALISM UNDER CHALLENGE

No one for a moment believes that we are going to lose this war,‘ Lord Lansdowne wrote in a memorandum for the British cabinet on 13 November 1916, ’but what is our chance of winning it in such a manner, and within such limits of time, as will enable us to beat our enemy to the ground and impose upon him the kind of terms which we so freely discuss?‘¹ Lansdowne’s colleagues were quick to condemn him as a tired old man. Sir William Robertson lumped him together with ’cranks, cowards and philosophers, some of whom are afraid of their own skins being hurt‘. ²

Lansdowne was none of those things: he had been secretary of state for war during the Boer War and had then moved to the Foreign Office. To speak as he did showed that he did not lack moral courage. Nor was he as isolated as his critics subsequently maintained. ‘I am very depressed about the war’, Lloyd George, himself now secretary of war, confided to Lord Riddell over dinner six days later. ‘Perhaps it is because I am tired. I have not felt so depressed before. I want to go away for a week alone, so that I may think quietly by myself. Things look bad.’³

Ironically, Lloyd George was, in one sense, Lansdowne’s target. On 27 September, in an interview with an American journalist, he had pre-empted any suggestion that the United States might mediate in the conflict: ‘there can be no outside interference at this stage. Britain asked no intervention when she was unprepared to fight. She will tolerate none now that she is prepared, until the Prussian military despotism is broken beyond repair.’⁴

Lansdowne rejected Lloyd George’s commitment to the ‘knock-out blow’. ‘Surely it cannot be our intention,’ his memorandum stated rather than asked, ‘no matter how long the War lasts, no matter what the strain on our resources, to maintain this attitude, or to declare as M. Briand declared about the same time, that for us too “the word peace is sacrilege”.’⁵ A Conservative, he saw the society and values with which he identified being destroyed by the very process designed to defend them. Across the Channel, on 27 December, Daniel Halévy, a middle-aged French intellectual who had dabbled in socialism and anarchism before the war, summarised his reactions to the subsequent failure of Wilson’s peace initiative: ‘Europe is at its last gasp; and that can only last a few months more’.

Halévy’s professional contacts had fed his unease. ‘Guy-Grand knows the socialist world. He is worried about the ascendancy of Alphonse Merrheim, an tipatriotic radical, who has again taken hold of the metal-workers’ union, that is to say the labour force which works for the war.... Gregh, who knows the political world, has doubts about even it: it is giving up, it is discouraged.’ As an official in the French Foreign Ministry’s propaganda department, the Maison de la Presse, Halévy appreciated as well as anybody the role of ideas in legitimating and explaining the sufferings of the previous two and half years. And by 6 February 1917 that realisation fortified him: ‘I think that the discouragement and lassitude of individuals are not of great importance when the cause from which they derive is not individual, when it is a cause which is either national or idealistic, a cause ultimately which dominates the individual and employs him for its own ends without any consideration of what he suffers or what he wants.’

For Halévy, and for the Entente as a whole, the entry of the United States to the war in April 1917 had two direct benefits. The first was economic: ‘America’s intervention brings the certainty of permanent material aid; of useful maritime aid; it reassures us against exhaustion, it distances it, it lengthens our time, and the lengthening can be the victory’. Halévy appreciated that, for those who had begun to doubt the rationale for the war itself, the certainty that the allies would prevail in a war of exhaustion was not so reassuring. For them America could be seen in negative terms, as prolonging the ordeal rather than terminating it. Thus in many ways the second American contribution was even more important than the first, and at the very least made sense of it: ‘The intervention of America brings an immense boost, not only moral but also ideological. It is wholly liberal. It wants disarmament by cooperation and negotiation.... Our war was in the process of becoming a struggle of nation alisms, and the most robust, the most genuine, was European nationalism. It has become, thanks to Wilson, a struggle of humanitarian cooperation against nationalist absolutism.’⁶

By the beginning of 1917, as both Lansdowne and Halévy recognised, the business of making war threatened the liberal values that France and Britain had espoused with such fervour in 1914. The power of the state trumped the rights of the individual. Although this was a matter of natural law, its most immediate and real effect was financial. The normal system of budgetary controls was forfeit as the belligerent governments became the principal purchasers of goods, which they paid for with money they had raised largely through borrowing and taxation, devices they regulated. The moral consequence was a denial of personal responsibility. ‘He signed cheques’, Georges Clemenceau said of Lucien Klotz, France’s last wartime finance minister, ‘as though he was signing autographs.⁷’

The workforce of the Britsh armaments manufacturer Vickers assemble for a group photograph to mark the armistice, 11 November 1918 War had prought full employment but many voug lose their jobs

In France the Law of Siege, invoked on 2 August 1914, gave the army the power to requisition goods, to control the press, and to apply military to civilians; it even subordinated the police to military control. Not until 1 September 1915 did the civilian administration in the interior regain control of policing, and not until April 1916 were strict limits set to the courts martial of civilians. In the military zone, close to the front, the army jealously guarded its prerogatives. Throughout 1915 efforts to inspect it by the Army Committee of the Chamber of Deputies were rebuffed. In October the appointment as minister of war of General Joseph-Simon Gallieni, seen as the saviour of Paris in September 1914 by many - and of all France by some - made approval for such visits easier, but only on a case-by-case basis. Gallieni, while anxious to curb the power of Joffre and his headquarters, was still a soldier: ‘As for the ministry’, he noted on 21 October, ‘I am more and more resolved to accept it only if I have complete freedom and am independent of parliament’.⁸ When Gallieni resigned as a result of ill health in March 1916, his successor, another general, Pierre-Auguste Roques, tried to claim a greater independence of general headquarters than was the case: ‘I do not want to be a sub-Joffre, but rather a ministerial friend of Joffre’s‘.⁹ Verdun discredited the French commander-in-chief and so aided the efforts to re-impose civilian control over the military. But the chronic instability of the governments of the Third Republic meant that for the time being their fortunes were still tied to the success or failure of their armies.

In Britain, the army never achieved that degree of autonomy, but the executive arrogated to itself powers which were contrary to any idea of parliamentary accountability and which affected the independence of the judiciary. The Defence of the Realm Act, passed on 8 August 1914, although primarily designed to safeguard Britain’s ports and railways from sabotage or espionage, permitted the trial of civilians by court martial. Its provisions were progressively extended to cover press censorship, requisitioning, control of the sale of alcohol (Britain’s licensing laws date from 1915), and food regulations. After March 1918 a woman with venereal disease could be arrested for having sex with her husband if he were a serviceman, even if he had first infected her. Piecemeal, the state acquired the right to intervene in the workings of the economy. Traditional Liberals complained that the import duties introduced in 1915 breached the party’s axiomatic commitment to free trade; capitalists saw the excess-profits duty introduced in the same budget as an affront to the principles of Adam Smith. Nor were the mechanisms designed to soak up the liquidity generated by wartime business confined to the obviously wealthy. In 1914 income tax was a burden on the rich minority; during the war 2.4 million workers became liable to pay income tax for the first time, and by 1918-19 they made up two-thirds of all taxpayers. As significantly, those who did not pay tax avoided it because they were exempted on the grounds of family circumstance: in other words, they were no worse off financially (and probably the reverse) but they had now come under the purview of the state. The most significant step in the extension of state authority in Britain was compulsory military service, adopted by the Asquith coalition in the first half of 1916. ‘The basis of our British Liberty’, Richard Lambert, a Liberal member of parliament opposed to conscription, averred, ‘lies in the free service of a free people ... Voluntary service lies at the root of Liberalism just as Conscription is the true weapon of Tyranny’.¹⁰

By the mid-point in the war Lambert was a comparatively isolated figure. This is the essential point with regard to the accretion of state power. The press and public grew angry more because not enough was done, than because the state had become the enemy of civil liberties. Asquith’s government followed public opinion rather than driving it. When it acted it did so with consent. ‘For the time, but it is to be hoped only for the time,’ William Scott, Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at Glasgow University, declared in a series of lectures given in London in early 1917, ‘the freedom of the individual must be absorbed in that of the national effort. His true and permanent interest is interwoven with that of his country.’¹¹ The erosion of the principles of liberalism and of constitutional government was never really interpreted in Lambert’s terms: in the short term people were prepared to become more like Prussia to defeat Prussianism. In France the debate on the extension of the state’s power was even less emotive: the legacy of the French Revolution meant that the use of totalitarianism in the name of national defence had a powerful pedigree. In both countries, the popular cry was for more government direction, not less.

It was on the back of this sentiment - the demand for a small war cabinet to direct the nation’s strategy - that Asquith fell from power at the beginning of December 1916. An election should have been held in 1915, and was therefore overdue; the principle of universal military service had been introduced without the adoption of universal adult male suffrage (indeed, Britain had the most restrictive franchise of any European state except Hungary); and the formation of the coalition in May 1915 meant that opposition within parliament was effectively silenced. Lloyd George’s arrival as prime minister in Asquith’s stead might have presaged a return to democratic norms. He came from the radical wing of the party, so popular consent validated his actions, as well as keeping the illusion of liberalism alive. But he made clear to the Liberal members of parliament that ‘the predominant task before the Government is the vigorous prosecution of the War to a triumphant conclusion’. As the Conservative and courtier Lord Esher wrote to Haig, ‘To achieve that, his only chance of success is to govern for a time as Cromwell governed. Otherwise Parliamentarianism (what a word!) will be the net in which his every effort will become entangled. It is of no use to make a coup d’état unless you are ready with the whiff of grapeshot.‘¹²

Esher and Haig were the sorts of men on whom the new prime minister relied. His was a ministry dominated by Conservatives. The constraints on his actions came less from the left than the right. Both the King and the Tory press supported the generals, despite the outcome of the Somme battle, and at the end of 1916 Haig’s position - although the British government had never delegated as much authority to one soldier as the French had done to Joffre - looked secure. Of the crown, the army and the Conservative party, none was temperamentally drawn to the garrulous, philandering Welshman, a Nonconformist and a supporter of the Boers in the South African war, but they recognised that the combination of energy, self-promotion and rhetorical skill made him a more convincing war minister than the consensual Asquith. Liberalism, however compromised, had honed a remarkably flexible ideological and economic base for the conduct of war.

REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA

Some British and French observers therefore convinced themselves that liberalism in Russia would tap the energies of the middle classes, promote the talented and permit the full flowering of that country’s latent potential. After the 1905 revolution, the Tsar agreed to the establishment of the Duma, an assembly elected on a broad suffrage and initially dominated by liberals. At the local level, the Zemstvo, a form of county council, became a vehicle for welfare activity and for the involvement of professionals in public service. In 1914 a Union of Zemstvos was created, with the backing of the Council of Ministers, to support the war effort, through helping wounded soldiers and displaced persons. At the economic level, too, the years before the First World War suggested that liberalisation would strengthen Russia. Between 1908 and 1914 the economy grew at an average of 8.8 per cent, soaring to 14 per cent in 1914 itself. The Association of Trade and Industry hoped to establish a wartime partnership between the private sector and the government comparable with those in Britain and France. In June 1915 it proposed the formation of the War Industries Committee to oversee full industrial mobilisation by liaising with the regions and with bodies like the Duma and the Union of Zemstvos. But by 1916 the committee had secured only 7.6 per cent of the orders placed within Russia by the government since its inception. Dominated by the heavy industries of Petrograd and Moscow, it was a casualty in part of industry’s own internal divisions, but also of rivalries with the Duma and the Union.

However, just as important as the opportunities the war gave Russian liberals were those it accorded for the revival of political conservatism. The Tsar had accepted the Duma with a bad grace, and his ministers resented the erosion of their competence that bodies like the Union of Zemstvos and the War Industries Committee represented. Neither war nor foreign policy lay within the competence of the Duma, and it rapidly became clear that if it had any purpose after July 1914 it was to discuss and not to legislate. In the summer of 1915, as the Russian armies fell back, the Tsar agreed to reconvene the Duma, which had so far been restricted to the briefest of wartime sessions. The moderate intellectuals, businessmen and professionals coalesced in a Progressive Bloc, and, under the umbrella of foreign policy and liberalism, demanded ‘the formation of a united government’ and ’decisive changes in the methods of administration‘. ¹³ Pavel Milyukov of the Kadet Party said, ’we don’t seek power now ... the time will come when it will simply fall into our hands, it’s only necessary at present to have a clever bureaucrat as head of the government‘.¹⁴

That was not the Tsar’s vision. He saw both the bloc and the Duma not as vehicles for national unity but as threats to his power. Dynastic duty impelled him to prorogue the Duma in September, just as it had already prompted him to transfer his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolay, to the Caucasus command and to take over the supreme command of the army himself. ‘God’s will be fulfilled’, he wrote to his wife as he arrived at headquarters. ‘I feel so calm. A sort of feeling after the Holy Communion!’¹⁵ His sense of responsibility made him deaf to contrary advice. The British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, was only too conscious of criticisms of Russia’s autocracy both in his own country and in France: they dented the Entente’s claim to be fighting for liberalism. In September 1915 he suggested to the Tsar that the Asquith coalition might be a model for united government, and in February 1916 urged him to concede to liberal pressures ‘as an act of grace for services rendered’. But the Tsar dismissed those of his ministers who took a similar tack and distanced himself from those he appointed in their stead by removing himself to the army’s headquarters at Mogilev. Here he retreated into a fantasy world where there was no war and no threat of revolution. He was not far enough forward to create a bond with the soldiers of his army, but too far from Petrograd and Moscow to be sensitive to the currents of political opinion. The second gap was mediated for him by his wife, who, despite her English birth, believed, Buchanan said, that ‘autocracy was the only regime that could hold the Empire together’.¹⁶

Writing after the war, Buchanan confessed that she might have been right. It was one thing for well-established liberal states to move in the direction of authoritarianism for the duration of the war; it was quite another for an authoritarian government to move towards liberalism which many hoped would last beyond the return to peace. Moreover, the strains the war had imposed on Russian society, and the expectations that those strains had generated, looked increasingly unlikely to be controlled by constitutional reform. Most members of the Duma were monarchists; they were fearful of the urban masses and their republicanism.

In Petrograd what loomed was not liberalisation for the better conduct of the war, but socialism to end the war. The population of the city had increased by one-third between 1914 and 1917 as the war industries expanded. Those employed in the metal-working industries rose by 136 per cent and in the chemical industry by 85 per cent. But output per worker fell, despite longer working hours. Skilled males were replaced by unskilled females, children and prisoners of war. Many under-performed because of weakness and hunger. Significantly, the workforce in food-processing fell by 30 per cent. Food was simply not getting into the capital in sufficient quantities. Peasants withdrew from the market in response to inflation, either hoarding or speculating, and what they sold went in the first instance to the army. Russia’s fragile railway network was creaking under the demands of supplying the troops at the front. Petrograd’s special council on food supply, set up at the beginning of September 1915 to get food into the urban areas of the province, calculated it needed 12,150 wagonloads per month; in 1916 that figure was exceeded only in September and October. In December 8,654 wagonloads arrived in Petrograd, and in January 1917 6,556. By then the average unskilled worker had to spend over 52 kopecks a day to feed himself, exactly twice the amount he had required in July 1914. Over the same period the average wages of a textile worker rose from 17.6 roubles to 28.3, which represented a fall of 22 per cent in real terms. Only those in war-related industries had experienced a rise in real wages, and even for those in the metal industries it was 21 per cent at best.¹⁷

One of the causes of the transport problem was insufficient fuel. Some locomotives were fired by wood or peat, reducing their carrying capacity. Because of labour shortages and falling output per worker, Russia’s coal output did not increase to meet rising demand. Moving coal by rail from the Donets basin and the Urals to factories in the north-west further depleted what was available to the end user. Blast furnaces fell idle for lack of fuel. By December 1916 many war industries had to cease production for a week or longer, and the workers, with nothing to do, returned along icy, unlit streets to slums they could not heat.

In January 1917, an agent of the secret police reported that ‘Children are starving in the most literal sense of the word. A revolution’, he concluded, ‘if it takes place will be spontaneous, quite likely a hunger riot.’ So far strikes had been driven largely by falling real wages, but on 22 January 150,000 workers marched through Petrograd, and tens of thousands did so in other Russian cities. Although most were doing so to protest their hunger, a significant minority bore banners which linked social distress to political calls: ‘Down with the war’, or ‘Down with the autocracy’.¹⁸ Revolutionary socialists wanted delay in order to coordinate these protests. But on 8 March women textile workers took to the streets to demand bread. By the afternoon they had been joined by metal-workers from the war industries, and now the targets were the government and the war. Within two days 200,000 workers were on strike. Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador, must have felt some ambivalence on hearing the strains of the Marseillaise. At Tsarskoye Seloye the Tsarina wrote one of her tender, loving letters to her ‘own priceless, beloved treasure’, fortifying him and blaming the Duma: ‘It’s a hooligan movement ... But this will all pass & quieten down.’¹⁹

The soldiers of the Petrograd garrison pose for their photograph On 14 March the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies issued its Order Number 1, instructing military units to obey only those orders that did not conflict with those of the Soviet

Her husband was relying on the Petrograd garrison to restore order. That, after all, was what it was there for. However, its Cossacks were already frater nising with the strikers. There were five regular regiments in the city, but compared with the rest of the Russian army they were disproportionately urban, and their off-duty socialising had alerted them to the grievances of the working-class population. On Sunday, 11 March soldiers in the Pavlovskiy barracks mutinied. By the following morning 20,000 of them were on the streets. The instrument of the Tsar’s authority had not exactly broken in his hand, as Nicholas himself was unable to get to Petrograd. Let down by the railways, he was stranded at the headquarters of General Nikolay Ruszkiy, commander of the northern front. Ruszkiy urged the Tsar to establish parliamentary government. General Mikhail Alekseyev, the chief of staff, on whose advice the Tsar had depended but who had been sick in the period immediately preceding the revolution, endorsed Ruszkiy’s view. But by now the situation was irrecoverable. The Duma had established a provisional committee, which called on the monarch to abdicate, advice which Ruszkiy seconded. Faced with the choice between loyalty to the crown and loyalty to the nation, the Russian army opted for the second. ‘Your Majesty must remember’, Buchanan had sagely advised the Tsar in their last interview two months earlier, ‘that the people and the army are but one.’²⁰ Not much had united the Tsar and the Duma in the past, and the former still misinterpreted the situation sufficiently to blame the latter for the revolution. However, both now rallied to the idea that by going the Tsar would enable Russia the better to wage the war. The Tsar, as ever, did his duty.

Russia’s Western allies may not have welcomed the revolution but they were hardly surprised by it. Representatives of all three powers, Britain, France and Italy, had conferred with the Russians in Petrograd at the end of January. At one level this was a high point of Entente collaboration: the meeting ranged over strategy, finance and production, and it gave coherence to the idea that simultaneous attacks on all fronts was the best policy. But both the British and French military representatives came away convinced that the Russian army would not be able to mount a major offensive in 1917. The hope that it would come good in 1918 was one which optimists clung to after the revolution: if, as a result, ‘efficient people’ took charge, Christopher Addison, the British minister of munitions, wrote in his diary on 16 March, ’it is the biggest blow to the Germans since the beginning of the War.‘²¹ Others who knew Russia better, and recognised the challenges faced by its Provisional Government, appointed by the Provisional Committee of the Duma pending the election of a Constituent Assembly, found their faith that the war could be won through liberalism wavering.

THE NIVELLE OFFENSIVE

‘Don’t forget’, Paléologue had communicated in a message to the Provisional Government on 13 March, ‘that the French army is making preparations for a great offensive and that the Russian army is bound in honour to do its share.’²² But even before the revolution, at the Petrograd conference, the Russians had made it clear that they could not support the offensive in the west. The Anglo-French plan for the spring of 1917 was therefore unravelling at two levels. First, the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg line had upset its operational assumptions: the left wing of the French offensive on the Aisne now had no opponent. Second, it would not be part of a coordinated assault on Germany’s central position.

The logical conclusion was to call the whole thing off. But the Tsar’s abdication in Russia coincided with a succession of governmental crises in France, the result in part of the reassertion of civilian controls over the army. Meeting in secret session, the Chamber of Deputies had blamed Joffre not only for France’s military ills at Verdun but also for the overrunning of Romania and the neglect of the Salonika front. In December he was replaced by the bumptious Nivelle, who was convinced that he could scale up the tactics he had used in the Verdun counterattacks to achieve a breakthrough on the western front in forty-eight hours. After that, he asserted, ‘the ground will be open to go where one wants, to the Belgian coast or to the capital, on the Meuse or on the Rhine’.²³But with Joffre’s departure power had flowed from general headquarters to a ministerial war committee, and its principal strategic adviser was not the commander-in-chief but the minister of war. The conqueror of Morocco, the royalist Louis Lyautey, whom Briand appointed to the post in the December reshuffle, loved neither Nivelle nor parliamentary accountability. His distaste for democracy, expressed publicly once too often, brought Briand down.

On 18 March a former finance minister, seventy-five-hear-old Alexandre Ribot, reshuffled the ministerial pack and appointed a civilian and a socialist, Paul Painlevé, minister of war. Painlevé’s military thinking was shaped by the defensively minded Pétain, who in turn was unconvinced by Nivelle. In a series of meetings in late March, Nivelle argued that his principal worry after the Germans’ withdrawal to the Hindenburg line was that they would do the same again before he had a chance to attack. By carrying on, he would save Russia. The strategic logic was now the reverse of that adopted in December: the Italians were also not ready to attack, so that now the western front offensive was justified precisely because there were not going to be attacks on the other fronts. So fraught had the situation become, with Painlevé caught in a crossfire of competing professional advice, that a meeting was convened at Compiègne under the chairmanship of the president of the republic, Poincaré. Nivelle threatened to resign if the offensive did not go ahead. The Ribot government was caught. It felt that it had to attack somewhere, if only in response to the German declaration of unrestricted U-boat warfare. It was too weak to survive Nivelle’s departure, especially when he had not yet lost a battle: the military still had that much leverage over the civilians. And it was boxed in by its alliance obligations. Lloyd George, himself only just in office and not yet fully established, had taken to the English-speaking Nivelle with so much enthusiasm that he had attempted to have the British army subordinated to French command. He had been stopped, but for this operation Haig was answerable to Nivelle and was loyally cooperating with his plan.

Three days after the meeting at Compiègne, on 9 April the British launched their attack round Arras, at the northern extremity of what would have been the German salient. Its role was strictly limited: to pull German reserves away from the River Aisne. Well planned and well executed, it revealed that the learning curve on which the army had embarked in 1915 was now bearing fruit. Restricted to a front of 24 km, the battle was fought as a series of limited and staged attacks, leap-frogging each other, and with pauses to consolidate after each. The artillery now had both the equipment and the expertise to fight the sort of battle to which it had aspired on the Somme and which was to shape the nature of allied successes for the rest of the war. Nearly 2.7 million shells were fired, over a million more than on the Somme, and 99 per cent of them detonated. Fast-acting graze fuses meant that shells did not bury themselves in the ground, breaking it up and losing their force, but exploded on impact, and in particular cut barbed wire. This firepower was used more discriminatingly: bombardments elsewhere along the line deceived the enemy as to the true point of attack, and intelligence focused the guns on the key sectors. Of nearly 1,000 heavy guns, 377 were concentrated on a 6-km front facing Vimy Ridge, a high point commanding the plain to Douai and the east. Its capture was the task of the Canadian corps, which spent the winter training at platoon and section level for the assault, familiarising itself with models of the ground, and learning to advance in close conjunction with the creeping barrage of the artillery. ‘All you have to do’, one sergeant instructor explained, ‘is to hang on to the back wheel of the barrage, just as if you were biking down the Strand behind a motor ’bus; carefully like, and not in too much of a hurry.‘²⁴ Above the ground, aerial reconnaissance provided the photographic images on which the planning could be based, and later reported progress as the attack went in; beneath it engineers tunnelled into the chalk to lay charges beneath the German front line.

Directing indirect fire British observers, equipped with binoculars and a periscope, spot the fall of shot and relay corrections by telephone

The Canadians breasted the crest at 1.18 p.m., having penetrated 4,000 yards of German defences. The capture of Vimy Ridge was a national triumph for Canada, a more auspicious coming of age than the mismanaged landings at Gallipoli had been for Australia. It was also proof that combined arms tactics and careful preparation could successfully link fire and movement to break into the enemy’s position. As well as the integration of artillery support, each Canadian brigade had eighty machine-guns, including a Lewis-gun section for every platoon. Donald Fraser was in the last phase of the attack but still found that as a result of the rehearsal ‘I had absolutely no difficulty in making for my objective without the least deviation’. As the day developed, ‘sleety snow driven by gusts and squalls soon melted making the ground extremely muddy and slippery’. ²⁵The deterioration in the weather slowed the attack in subsequent days, but so did the impossibility of progressing beyond the range of effective artillery support: in the case of field artillery cutting wire, this was about 2,000 yards. However, the battle of Arras achieved its principal strategic objective: the Germans doubled their strength in the sector within a week.

It proved of no assistance to Nivelle on 16 April. As a result of the German evacuation of Artois, his front had moved to his right, and he was now attacking out of a cul-de-sac, going from south to north, towards the River Oise. Few roads and railways ran in that direction. The towns on the south bank of the Aisne were small for the infrastructure now required of them. On the north bank the intersected slopes rose steeply to the ridge, along which ran the Chemin des Dames. The Germans had been here since September 1914, and their positions were both strong and deep, the main line hidden on the reverse slope, and behind that and out of artillery range a fourth line was under construction. Nivelle had collected enough guns on his 40-km front to allocate one field gun and one trench mortar for every 23 metres and one heavy gun for every 21 metres. But the depth of the German positions meant that the number of guns per metre of enemy trench was half that. The Germans had ample intelligence of French intentions, and they had 100 machine-guns for every 1,000 yards of front.

Despite the enemy fire, the gradient and the atrocious weather, the infantry had been set a rate of advance of up to 2 kph, with only the briefest of pauses. Nivelle intended to be on positions 8-9 km deep by the end of the first day. In anticipation of a major breakthrough, the infantry carried rations for three days, and were so encumbered that those with light machine-guns frequently ended up dumping their weapons. At Berry-au-Bac and Juvincourt, tanks, used in numbers for the first time by the French, carried so much petrol that some caught fire, and the remainder outstripped the exhausted infantry meant to accompany them. By the end of the first day, of 132 tanks 57 had been destroyed and 64 had become bogged. None the less, the Nivelle offensive was not as big a disaster as its aftermath suggested. By 20 April, the French had advanced up to 7 km on the west of the front; they had taken 20,000 prisoners and only sixteen of the fifty-two German divisions available had not been through the battle. But in relation to Nivelle’s own declared objectives, trumpeted throughout the army as well as in allied councils, the effects were disastrous. On the rest of the front the gains were negligible, and within a week the hospitals, told to expect 10,000 wounded, were coping with 96,000. Across the army as a whole casualties by 10 May had reached 20 per cent, and in those units directly engaged they were at least double that: one Senegalese division, its soldiers already suffering from frostbite, lost 60 per cent of its strength.

Rest and recuperation In March 1917 Nivelle cut leave, releasing 5 per cent of the French army at any one time On 29 July Pétain responded to the mutinies by establishing a norm of 13 per cent or ten days’ leave every four months.

‘We decided not to make another attack. We expressed our extreme exhaustion, our miseries, our suffering. The high command will doubtless conclude something else.’²⁶ Mutinies began in late April, grew in May, and peaked in June. In all, sixty-eight divisions were affected, and about 40,000 troops. Concentrated in the sector from Soissons to Reims, many of them involved units which refused to return to the line, having had too little opportunity to recover and rebuild. They can be characterised as soldiers’ strikes, reactions to bad command, inadequate officers and poor conditions of service. The French army, it seemed, was still ready to defend France, but on its own terms.

The mutinies seemed to be a very precise episode, linked to the fiasco on the Chemin des Dames. However, they need to be set in a context which is both chronologically longer and socially broader. Verdun had taken its toll. Desertion rates were already rising in the first three months of 1917. And the after-shocks continued into 1918. On the military side of the equation, therefore, the consequences of Nivelle’s offensive represented the culmination of a process begun in 1914. Moreover, France’s generals, while ready to address the problems with military palliatives, were quick to blame them on the mood of pacifism and political uncertainty at home. In doing so, they were of course side-stepping their own responsibilities, but they were also reflecting the fundamental social truth of a mass army in a major war - the truth that the Tsar had been slow to grasp. Citizens who had become soldiers for the duration of the war had not thereby lost their civilian identities. They would become conscious of the degree to which that had happened only when they got home (if they got home) after it was over.

French civilian morale also drooped in the first half of 1917. Strikes in January and May 1917 spread from textile workers to munitions factories. For all Halévy’s concerns about the influence of the radical socialist, Alphonse Merrheim, most of the protests were reflections of the cost of living rather than of revolutionary sentiment. By January 1917 food prices in Paris had risen 40 per cent since July 1914, and by July 92 per cent: real wages had fallen 10 per cent. A survey conducted in June 1917 on the orders of the ministry of the interior found morale good in three departments, fairly good in thirty, indifferent in twenty-nine, and bad in eight.²⁷ Significantly in those regions with low morale, the behaviour of soldiers on leave was cited as a factor. The Gares du Nord and de l‘Est, the railway stations in Paris through which most troops going to and from the front passed, became a focus for pacifist agitators, and symbolised this link between feeling at the front and in the civilian population. The general mood may not have been pacifist, but it was certainly defensive rather than aggressive. Joseph Caillaux, prime minister in the 1911 Moroccan crisis, who had condemned the war in 1914 and was rumoured to have German contacts, was canvassed as a possible prime minister. Caught between socialist demands for a negotiated settlement and the publication of an extensive war aims package agreed with tsarist Russia, Ribot’s government collapsed at the end of August. He was replaced by Painlevé, a compromise candidate, but a compromise to which the socialists refused to subscribe; the union sacrée of 1914 was broken.

On 31 May 1917 Bandsman Poitou wrote home to his wife that he had seen a train bringing soldiers back from leave in Paris to Château Thierry: ‘the poilus were singing the Internationale, crying down with the war, long live the revolution[.] I believe it is the portent of an imminent revolt.’²⁸ It was not, but that was not evident at the time, and it worried more significant players than Poitou. On 8 May Pétain was appointed to succeed Nivelle as commander-in-chief. He responded to the complaints about leave and rest. He handled the mutinies with restraint: of 629 soldiers condemned to death between May and October 1917, only 43 were executed.²⁹ But he also embarked on a programme of political education for the troops, emphasising the wider strategy of the war and the contribution to its purpose that the United States’s entry would make. His solutions, in other words, were both military and political. His closeness to Painlevé reunited the strategic outlooks of general headquarters and the government, and confirmed that France would adopt the defensive for the time being.

THE ENTENTE UNDER STRAIN

Pétain planned to wait for the Americans. He put no pressure on the British to take up the gauntlet, and the fact that the British did so was not due to the travails of the French troops: indeed, until very late in their planning the British assumed that they would have more support from the French than they received. Douglas Haig, Pétain’s British counterpart, was not prepared to forgo the offensive. And he was right, both politically and strategically. In May 1917 the French policy of inactivity on the western front implied that the Central Powers would have an unimpeded run against Russia and Italy until at least 1918 and possibly 1919. Lloyd George had wanted to lend artillery to the Italians so that they could take the initiative, but Cadorna feared that an offensive launched in isolation from efforts on other fronts would bring the German army as well as the Austro-Hungarian down on Italy. By then supporting Nivelle, the prime minister had revealed his hand: he was ready to accept an offensive on the western front, provided it was not under Haig’s command. The fact that he had backed the wrong horse undermined his authority in British strategic counsels. Here an unlikely alliance had grown up between Robertson and Admiral Jellicoe, who had moved from the Grand Fleet to be First Sea Lord in December. Jellicoe was anxious to take out the German naval bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge. His caution at sea had turned to pessimism in Whitehall. His worries were not simply focused on the threat of the U-boat; they also concerned torpedo boat activity in the Channel and even a cross-Channel attack. On 27 April he wrote a memorandum which was placed before the war cabinet: ‘We are carrying on this war ... as if we had the absolute command of the sea. We have not... Disaster is certain to follow, and our present policy is heading straight for disaster.’³⁰

The execution of a soldier of the French 72nd infantry division, secretly photographed on the Somme in 1916 The size of the parade and particularly the march past the dead man demonstrate the exemplary purpose of such sentences.

Robertson was suitably impressed, and he told Haig. For Haig, it confirmed the need for an offensive in Flanders, the British Expeditionary Force’s most logical area of independent operations given its lines of communication. He had twice - at the beginning of 1916 and of 1917 - been compelled to subordinate his own preference for operations here to the need to cooperate with the French, and the sensitivity of the sector had been exploited by the Germans in a deception operation mounted to cover their withdrawal to the Hindenburg line. The battle that followed, the third battle of Ypres, which culminated in a muddy morass at the village of Passchendaele in November, has become for the British the embodiment of the First World War’s waste and futility. But it had a clear strategic purpose. If the army could advance to Roulers, it would command the key German railway junction in the northern half of the western front. At that stage a daring amphibious operation would outflank the German positions from the sea and secure Ostend and Zeebrugge.

Its very ambition appealed to Haig: it might win the war in 1917. It also worked on the imagination of the prime minister, his most obvious protago nist. A victory on that scale would work political wonders, both domestically and internationally. Lloyd George’s position, as a Liberal prime minister dependent on Conservative backing, would be secured; in alliance terms, Britain would not have to defer to American wishes at the peace talks. But after 1916 Lloyd George’s cabinet colleagues were wary of Haig’s ambition: they did not want another Somme, and when they finally gave the battle their blessing (on 20 July, long after they were committed to it) they specified that it was to be a step-by-step battle, which could therefore be broken off as and when it ceased to deliver results commensurate with its losses.

The Germans too suffered at Ypres Morale slumped in the autumn, and not just among those photographed, wounded and captured, at a dressing station near Zillebeke on 20 September 1917 The steel helmet began to replace the leather Pickelhaube early in 1916

That was an endorsement not for breakthrough but for attrition. ‘The best plan’, Robertson wrote to Haig on 20 April, when Nivelle’s failure to achieve a breakthrough was evident, ‘is to go back to one of the old principles, that of defeating the enemy’s army. In other words instead of aiming at breaking through the enemy’s front, aim at breaking down the enemy’s army, and that means inflicting heavier losses upon him than one suffers oneself.’³¹ That indeed was how Robertson packaged and sold the offensive in May, both in London and to his allied colleagues. They met in Paris on 4-5 May. The rate at which the Germans were relieving divisions, when compared with 1916, led to the conclusion that the enemy had lost 350,000 men between 9 April and 27 May 1917, and that by 9 July the figure would have risen to over 450,000.³² Allied calculations about a crisis in German morale, even if not on the scale of that of the French army, were not without foundation. Robertson reported that it was agreed that: ‘It is no longer a question of aiming at breaking through the enemy’s front and aiming at distant objectives. It is now a question of wearing down and exhausting the enemy’s resistance, and if and when this is achieved to exploit it to the fullest extent possible.... We are all of opinion that our object can be obtained by relentlessly attacking with limited objectives, while making the fullest use of our artillery. By this means we hope to gain our ends with the minimum loss possible.’³³

Pétain was at the meeting and endorsed what Robertson had said. The operational conception of attrition, towards which both had been working since late 1915, was now fully developed. Haig was also present, and both in Paris and London was ready to pay lip-service to the ideas Robertson had articulated. But he did so for the sake of professional unity in the face of political inquisition. He did not believe in them. A rift now opened between the commander-in-chief and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Robertson, like Pétain, thought the war was not winnable in 1917. His intelligence picture, built up from a wider range of sources than that of Haig’s headquarters, offset any positives derived solely from the western front. Haig saw what was in front of him, and interpreted that in the best possible light: his devout Presbyterianism gave him an inner certainty which interpreted setbacks as challenges, a not undesirable quality in a commander. He believed he could achieve a breakthrough in 1917, and would rationalise his battle as attrition only if he failed. By attacking in a sector as vital to both sides as Ypres, where neither could afford to let the other break through, he seemed likely to win either way.

The offensive began well enough. On 7 June the British 2nd Army under Herbert Plumer, whose red face, rotund frame and white moustache were suggestive of David Low’s cartoon character Colonel Blimp, won a crushing victory at Messines. Like the attack at Vimy, it benefited from careful preparation, particularly by the artillery, which by dint of excellent intelligence was able to focus on counter-battery work. Nearly a million pounds of explosive had been placed in tunnels under the German positions, and at 3.10 a.m. ‘nineteen gigantic roses with carmine petals, or ... enormous mushrooms,... rose up slowly and majestically out of the ground and then split into pieces with a mighty roar, sending up multi-coloured columns of flame mixed with a mass of earth and splinters high in the sky’.³⁴ Thus a German observer caught an irony of industrialised war: the beauty in its destructive effects. His own side’s losses included 6,400 prisoners, too dazed to respond to the infantry assault.

The attack also succeeded because it was limited and staged. It gave the British a foothold on the end of the ridge that swept round to the east of Ypres, and it secured the right flank of the main thrust onto the Gheluvelt plateau, launched on 31 July. Here the commander was Hubert Gough, a cavalryman, attractive to Haig because he would aim for more distant objectives. In reality, there was little to choose between him and Plumer. When by the end of August Gough had made only minor gains, Plumer’s army was given the task of getting onto the plateau. Neither commander opposed Haig’s determination not to break off the battle, despite mounting casualties for minimal advantage. The ideal of the staged, leap-frogging battle, set by the artillery timetable, had fallen foul of appalling weather. The rain in August was almost continuous. Mist prevented aerial reconnaissance. The drainage system of the flat, well-tilled land was broken up by shellfire, and the mud meant shell supply had to be performed by mules. ‘If animals slipped off the planks into the quagmires alongside,’ E. C. Anstey recalled, ‘they often sank out of sight. On arrival, shells had to be cleaned of the slime coating before they could be used.’³⁵ Every time a gun was fired, its trail sank into the soft ground, thus wrecking its bearing and elevation: rapid, predicted fire was impossible.

By the time the battle petered out in mid-November, the British had suffered 275,000 casualties, of whom 70,000 were dead. ‘Reinforcements of the new armies’, Aubrey Wade reported, ‘shambled up past the guns with dragging steps and the expressions of men who knew they were going to certain death. No words of greeting passed as they slouched along; in sullen silence they filed past one by one to the sacrifice.‘³⁶ In December instances of drunkenness, desertion and psychological disorders among British troops were reported to be on the increase. In fact, the number of shell-shock cases was smaller than on the Somme, a rate of 1 per cent, partly owing to different diagnostic procedures. Nor did the total number of courts martial rise exponentially, particularly when set against the increasing size of the army. An end-of-year report based on 17,000 letters concluded that morale was sound. The traditional paternalism of a long-service army - rest and recreation, food and drink, good officer-men relations - acted as an effective disciplinary tool even for conscripts. The British army did not mutiny - at least, not on a scale which bears comparison with the French.

The village of Passchendaele was the furthest point of the British advance in the battle of Ypres, captured by the Canadian Corps on 6 November 1917.

The grouses the censors picked up were not those of professional servicemen but the anxieties of citizen soldiers: war-weariness, talk of peace, a desire for leave. More united than divided those at the front and at home. In 1917 5.5 million working days were lost in Britain, and as in France they peaked in May, with 200,000 workers out. Real wages were the prime complaint, but the possibility that the complaints might become politicised was reinforced in June, when the Independent Labour Party and the British Socialist Party met in Leeds and resolved to establish a Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. It did not happen, but it fed government anxieties. Indicative was John Buchan’s ‘shocker’ for the year. In 1916 Greenmantle had concerned a German plot to spread holy war in the empire; in 1917 Mr Standfast pivoted on German attempts to exploit pacifism and labour discontent to provoke revolution at home. Buchan himself was chosen to head the Department of Information, created in February 1917 under the aegis of the Foreign Office, a recognition of how important to Lloyd George was the battle for ideas. In June 1917 the National War Aims Committee embarked on a programme of political education in factories and workplaces, and in January 1918 the Canadian Lord Beaverbrook was appointed to lead a fully fledged Ministry of Information.

The British army proved adept at entertaining itself. Its regulars, already accustomed to enlivening colonial service with amateur dramatics and team sports, responded warmly to the talents of its wartime soldiers. The Canadians rehearse Cinderella.

At the end of 1917, therefore, the British army and the British people were desperately tired. On 29 November Lansdowne voiced the reservations he had expressed privately a year previously in the Daily Telegraph, calling for a compromise peace. At the front, Haig, who had at first planned to resume the Ypres battle when the weather improved in the spring, realised on 15 November that it would not be possible. However, he couched his decision in terms not of the losses caused by his own operations, but of those inflicted by the government. Initially two - and ultimately five - divisions, together with Plumer and six French divisions, were sent to reinforce the Italians.

Of all the three Entente powers in the west, Italy was the shakiest in its hold on liberalism. First, the extension of the franchise in 1912 was undermined by the fact that 38 per cent of the electorate was illiterate. Second, socialist extremism was stronger than moderate reformism, and the only counter seemed to be the card of nationalism. Third, although entry to the war divided the country rather than united it, parliament was not consulted. Fourth, the economy was still predominantly rural, and it required the war to industrialise it. Moreover, with the war under way, Cadorna treated politicians with a contempt which blocked any alternatives to his own inept, if dogged, generalship. When in January 1916 Salandra suggested the formation of a council of war, combining the wisdom of generals and politicians, Cadorna declared that he was answerable only to the King. Criticised by the minister of war in the following month, he managed to force him to resign. He believed that the individualism of the Italians made them ‘morally unprepared for war’, and therefore saw the war as an opportunity to make peasants into Italians. His tool for doing this was harsh discipline. One in every seventeen Italian soldiers faced a disciplinary charge in the war, and 61 per cent were found guilty. About 750 were executed, the highest number of any army in the war, and Cadorna reintroduced the Roman practice of decimation - the killing of every tenth man - for units which failed to perform in battle.

The four battles on the River Isonzo in 1915 were followed by five more in 1916, and two in 1917. The Austrians on the Italian front had coined the phrase ‘the battle of material’ by September 1915, a full year before it was current in Germany. Normally outnumbered two to one, and unable to trade space for time, they possessed in the Croatian general Svetozar Boroevié a commander who never wavered in his determination to regain ground lost, an objective he generally achieved until the sixth battle of the Isonzo in August 1916. Thus they played into the hands of an enemy resolved on attrition as an operational method. And that is what Cadorna had resolved to do by the beginning of 1916. He knew that, with Austria-Hungary’s army divided over three fronts, he must eventually wear it down. But the result was that he failed to recognise opportunities for breakthrough when they presented themselves. On 10 August 1916 the Italians at last captured Gorizia, on the eastern bank of the Isonzo, and in the same month a year later, in the eleventh battle, Cadorna gained control of the Bainsizza plateau, but in both cases reckless disregard for casualties was accompanied by operational caution. In twenty-seven months’ fighting and eleven battles, the Italians had advanced less than seven miles, a third of the way to their stated preliminary objective, Trieste.³⁷

Cadorna addresses his troops in a style more suggestive of a political dictator than a general. He himself had never seen combat, and his pre-war tactical writings praised the effects of shock over firepower

Italian casualties in the eleventh battle of the Isonzo were 166,000, 25 per cent greater than those of Nivelle on the Aisne. In the month of the battle, August, 5,471 soldiers deserted, as opposed to 2,137 in April. The Ravenna Brigade had mutinied in March and the Catanzaro Brigade in July.³⁸ Even Cadorna recognised that his army needed time to rest and recuperate. But it did little to prepare its defences in depth, keeping its gun line well forward as though simply allowing the winter to pass before resuming the offensive. The Central Powers had no intention of waiting for what could be a devastating blow, and Germany transported seven divisions to reinforce the Austrians on the upper Isonzo. On 24 October, after a short but intense bombardment which targeted the Italian batteries, the German and Austrian infantry achieved a complete breakthrough. ‘The farther we penetrated into the hostile zone of defence’, wrote Lieutenant Erwin Rommel, ‘the less prepared were the garrisons for our arrival, and the easier the fighting. I did not worry about contact to right or left. Six companies of the Württemberg Mountain Battalion were able to protect their own flanks. The attack order stated: “Without limiting the day’s activities in space or time, continue the advance to the west, knowing that we have strong reserves near and behind us”.’³⁹

By mid-November the Germans and Austrians had driven the Italians back sixty miles to the River Piave. By following the valley floors, they had sustained the momentum of their advance until logistics and command confusion slowed it. Italian losses totalled almost 700,000, of whom only 40,000 were killed and wounded; 280,000 had been captured, many of them as intact units, and about 350,000 had deserted. Cadorna attributed his defeat not to tactical incompetence but to anti-militarism and defeatism in Italy as a whole. A year before, Senator Camporeale had reported after a visit to the south of the country that ‘more than half the land is uncultivated and with us poverty and rebellion and revolt are synonymous ... [The countryside] is swarming with thousands - 20 to 30 thousand - deserters’.⁴⁰ There were about 100,000 deserters at large before the disaster of Caporetto (as the Italians called the battle; it was Karfreit to the Germans); peasants were ready to give the stragglers protection and to use their labour. The possibility of military collapse leading to revolution seemed real enough.

Violent protest peaked in May 1917, especially in Milan. In August, outbursts over bread shortages in Turin developed into anti-war demonstrations, and the army killed 41 and wounded about 200 more in restoring order. Women were at the forefront of these riots. By the end of the war they formed 21 per cent of the workforce but in 1917 they were 64 per cent of those striking, evidence of the anxiety about food but also of working-class solidarity. They struck because the penalties for them were lighter than for men, who were more subject to military discipline, and they linked the old patterns of rural, peasant protest with the first generation of urban workers in new industries. Although the number of individual strikes fell in 1917 as against 1915 and 1916, those which occurred were bigger in scale.

But the revolutionary moment did not become revolution. Caporetto played its part: it turned an offensive war into a defensive one. Its nationalist imperative also consolidated liberalism. On 30 October Vittorio Orlando, a defender of civil liberties, formed a coalition government, but one which used its mandate to be firm in its suppression of defeatism. Cadorna, having refused to resign even at the behest of the King, was dismissed and replaced by Armando Diaz. Diaz was the Pétain of Italy: he cared for his men, extending leave, improving rations, rethinking tactics and eschewing reckless offensive action. On 15 December a war council was finally established. But even before Caporetto much was already in place. Italy had enough food to feed itself, and the ration card became (as it became in Britain) the symbol of equality of distribution and sacrifice. The Mobilitazione Industriale, the army-organised agency for the management of war industry, which controlled 903,250 workers and 1,976 firms by the war’s end, was elevated to a full ministry in July 1917. Its chief, General Alfredo Dallolio, believed that better real wages and improved conditions of employment would dampen radicalism, and used his power to curb the powers of employers as well as to regiment the employees.

The boundaries of the state were thereby extended, but as in Britain and France they were seen as temporary interventions designed to protect the liberal nation, not subvert it. Moreover, by the end of the year government in all three nations was firmly vested in the hands of civilian politicians, not of soldiers. In Britain Haig’s standing slumped in the aftermath of Passchendaele. Lloyd George now possessed the political authority to remove him, if he could find a credible alternative. He could not, but he was able to ensure the replacement of Haig’s directors of intelligence and of operations. In February 1918, the prime minister exploited the latent split between Haig and Robertson to oust the latter. The new Chief of the Imperial General Staff was General Sir Henry Wilson, an Irish unionist and a man whose love of intrigue was so great that the sight of a politician was said to induce in him a state of sexual excitement. Haig both distrusted and disliked him.

In November the division in Paris, between those ready to explore options for peace and those determined not to, destroyed Painlevé’s government. France stood poised between pacifism and guerre à outrance. Poincaré swallowed his personal dislike and asked the seventy-six-year-old Georges Clemenceau, radical and atheist, scourge of governments, to form a ministry. One of the new prime minister’s first acts was to have Caillaux, the pacifist contender for the premiership, arrested on charges of treason. France had one simple, single duty, he told the chamber in his first speech: ‘to cleave to the soldier, to live, to suffer, to fight with him’. Clemenceau’s government was the first in the war to coin the phrase ‘total war’, and it did so in reference to the need to mobilise all France’s resources for its prosecution. This was more totalitarian than democratic. Although the new prime minister was of the left, as were most of his ministers, he drew his parliamentary support from the right and he infuriated the socialists. He ruled less through his ministers than through two personal cabinets, one military and one civil. When challenged in the chamber on 8 March 1918, he explained that as the head of a republican government he was called on to defend two doctrines: ‘the first of these doctrines ... is the principle of liberty.... The second, in the current situation, is that we are at war, that it is necessary to wage war, to think only of war, that it is necessary to apply our minds to war and to sacrifice everything to the rules, which we shall put right in the future if we are able to succeed in securing the victory of France ... Today, our duty is to make war while maintaining the rights of the citizen, so safeguarding not one liberty but all liberties. So let us wage war.‘⁴¹

The aftermath of Caporetto Italian prisoners are collected at Udine

Clemenceau disagreed with Lansdowne: the war had first to be won before a lasting peace was possible. By the winter of 1917-18 most poilus seemed to share his views. ‘My war aims are these’, wrote a soldier of the 272nd Regiment of Infantry at the end of 1917. ‘I fight 1. because there is a war and I am a soldier, 2. because this war was inevitable, 3. because I do not want to become a Boche, 4. because they are in our country and we must make them leave or at least stop them getting any further, 5. because they must pay for the damage that they have done.’⁴²

THE BOLSHEVIKS SEIZE POWER

In neither France nor Italy had mutiny and desertion coalesced with protests and riots in the rear. Despite the fact that these were armies of citizens, made up of soldiers who yearned to go home and resume their peacetime pursuits, and despite the mechanisms of leave and mail that kept alive the links between front and rear, the consequences of grievances in one were kept separate from those in the other. That was not true for Russia.

‘One cannot but notice, that in letters from the army as well as, mainly, in letters to the army, discontent arising from [the] internal political situation of the country is beginning to grow.’⁴³ This report from the military censor in Petrograd was dated November 1916. In March 1917, the troops in the northern districts, including Petrograd, totalled 850,000. Under the influence of left Socialist Revolutionaries, they gave their primary loyalty not to the temporary commission set up by the Duma but to the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers. On 14 March, the Soviet’s Order Number 1 confirmed this arrangement, and required that all units form committees of elected representatives of the lower ranks. Order Number 1 did not of itself demand that officers be elected, but that was its outcome. Officers had to court popularity, and some of those who did not were lynched, while others were arrested. ‘Between us and them is an impassable gulf’, one officer wrote at the end of March. ‘No matter how well they get on with individual officers, in their eyes we are all barins. When we talk about the narod, we mean the nation; when they talk about it, they understand it as meaning only the democratic lower classes. In their eyes, what has occurred is not a political but a social revolution, which in their opinion they have won and we have lost.’⁴⁴

That revolution travelled along the railway lines to the front; it did not go from front to rear. It reached the combat zones furthest from Petrograd - Romania and the Caucasus - last. Although most Russian soldiers were fed up with the war, they were still committed to the defence of their country. Senior commanders recognised in March that the way to restore order was not to oppose the establishment of soldiers’ committees but to endorse them - just as they had endorsed the fall of the Tsar - in the hope of then reuniting the army and the nation in the prosecution of the war. Aleksandr Kerensky, first as minister of war and then as head of the Provisional Government, supported their endeavours. He launched an offensive in July, which failed, and then appointed the youthful and heroic Lavr Kornilov commander-in-chief, with a mandate to restore discipline. But he now feared the threat of counter-revolution more than that of revolution. The Germans took Riga at the beginning of September, and when Kornilov began to push troops towards Petrograd for its defence they were seen to be the outriders for a counter-revolutionary coup, not the agents of the Provisional Government. Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet and its militia, the Red Guard, under Leon Trotsky, to check Kornilov.

It was not only domestic events which separated the army’s officers from their men. Kerensky hoped the war would unite the nation and the revolution, as it had done in France in 1792. But the decision of the All-Russian Conference of Soviets on 11 April to support a peace without annexations or indemnities made those who supported the war’s continuation seem imperialist. Moreover, peace promised land reform and redistribution. Peasants wanted to be at home when that happened. The rise in desertions was not immediate, and its effects were more obvious on the lines of communication than in the trenches, but the process of disintegration, linking grievances at the front to concerns at home, was now under way.

German and Austro-Hungarian propaganda played on the worries about land redistribution. Thus the pressures on the Russian army came not just from the rear, but from the other side of the line as well. The spontaneous truce of Christmas 1914 on the western front had had its eastern-front counterpart, albeit at Easter and in every year up to and including 1917. OberOst now condoned such fraternisation. It was also supported by Russian revolutionaries, who hoped to spread the revolution westwards. German efforts to use revolution as a tool for the conduct of the war had not so far been particularly successful. The means they had used had been inadequate to the ends they had sought. Gun-running to Ireland had resulted in rebellion in 1916, and covert funding of pacifists and socialists had sown dissension in France in 1917. But in neither case had there been a popular response: the revolutionaries were themselves minor players. In Russia, too, the Bolsheviks were minor players, but in 1915 Alexander Helphand, code-named Parvus, a German agent whose business activities profited from the blockade-driven trade between Denmark and Germany, persuaded the German Foreign Ministry that they might engineer a mass strike in Russia. In March 1917, despite the obvious paradox and equally obvious dangers in Imperial Germany sponsoring Marxism, Arthur Zimmermann convinced the Kaiser and the army that the Bolsheviks’ leader, Lenin, who was living in exile in Switzerland, should be smuggled back into Russia. On 16 April 1917 Lenin arrived in Petrograd at the Finland station, having crossed Germany in a ‘sealed’ train. This was one revolutionary effort which reaped spectacular returns, albeit in a situation where spontaneous revolution had already occurred.

On 15 July 1917 the Provisional Government in Russia collapsed, and the Bolsheviks tried to seize power in Petrograd Street fighting peaks on 17 July Kerensky took charge and Lenin went into hiding -for the moment.

In November 1917 the Bolsheviks, under Trotsky’s direct leadership but orchestrated by Lenin, seized power in Petrograd, toppling the Provisional Government. The All-Russian Congress of Soviets embraced a programme which differed little from earlier ideas - including land to the peasants, bread to the cities, workers’ control of the factories, and complete democratisation of the army. But on the next day Lenin demanded an immediate armistice. Peace would provide the key to delivering bread and land.

The entire complexion of the war changed. A decade after the war had ended, Daniel Halévy’s brother Elie, the great French historian of modern Britain, delivered the Rhodes lectures in Oxford. His subject, ‘The World Crisis of 1914-18’, was, he said, ’not only a war - the war of 1914 - but a revolution - the revolution of 1917’.⁴⁵ The conflation of war and revolution had grave implications for the Entente at two levels. The first was military. Without an active eastern front, the basis of the alliance’s strategy became meaningless. For the first time since August 1914 the Central Powers were free to concentrate all their efforts in the west. The second was political. Here was a new vision of the world order to challenge liberalism. The Bolsheviks pub-lished the secret agreements on war aims reached between the Entente powers: Britain, France and Italy stood convicted, it seemed, of annexationist ambitions comparable with those of the monster which they were pledged to extirpate, German militarism. Those who could envisage the war ending in the coming year could do so only on the basis of a German victory.

The Germans believed that the Russian army’s collapse was due in large part to their fraternisation, as here in lithuania The Austro-Hungarians were not so successful when they tried the same with Italy.