The Second World War

by John Keegan

  If the new population surplus yielded by better diet, drugs and drains increased the European armies’ recruiting pool, it was the nineteenth-century states’ enhanced powers of head-counting and tax-gathering which ensured that recruits could be found, fed, paid, housed, equipped and transported to war. The institution of regular census-taking – in France in 1801, Belgium in 1829, Germany in 1853, Austria-Hungary in 1857, Italy in 1861 – accorded recruiting authorities the data they needed to identify and docket potential recruits; with it died the traditional expedients of haphazard impressment, cajolery, bribery and press-ganging which had raised the ancien régime armies from those not fleet enough of thought or foot to escape the recruiting sergeant. Tax lists, electoral registers and school rolls documented the conscript’s whereabouts – the grant of the vote and the introduction of free education for all entailed a limitation as well as an enlargement of the individual’s liberties. By 1900 every German reservist, for example, was obliged to possess a discharge paper specifying the centre at which he was to report when mobilisation was decreed.

  The enormous enlargement of European economies was meanwhile creating the tax base by which the new armies of conscripted recruits were supported; the German economy, for example, expanded by a quarter between 1851 and 1855, by a half between 1855 and 1875 and by 70 per cent between 1875 and 1914. From this new wealth the state drew, via indirect and direct revenue, including the resented institution of income tax, an ever-increasing share of the gross domestic product. In Britain, for example, the government’s share of consumption rose from 4.8 per cent in 1860-79 to 7.4 per cent in 1900-14 and in Germany from 4 per cent to 7.1 per cent; rises were proportionate in France and Austria-Hungary.

  Most of this increased revenue went to buy military equipment – in the broadest sense. Guns and warships represented the costliest outlay; barracks the more significant. The ancien régime soldier had been lodged wherever the state could find room for him, in taverns, barns or private houses. The nineteenth-century conscript was housed in purpose-built accommodation. Walled barracks were an important instrument of social control; Engels denounced them as ‘bastions against the populace’. The sixteenth-century Florentines similarly regarded the building of the Fortezza de Basso inside the gates of their city as a symbol of the curtailment of their liberties. Barracks were certainly a principal means of guaranteeing that ready availability of force by which the Berlin revolt of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 were put down.fn1 However, barracks were not only the precinct-stations of the contemporary riot police. They were also the fraternity houses of a new military culture in which conscripts learnt habits of obedience and forged bonds of comradeship which would harden them against a battlefield ordeal more harrowing than any which soldiers had known before.

  The new-found wealth of the nineteenth-century state enabled the conscript not only to be housed and equipped but also to be transported to the battlefield and fed amply when he arrived. The soldier of the ancien régime had been scarcely better supplied than the Roman legionary; flour ground in the regimental hand-mills, supplemented by a little beef driven on the hoof, was his staple. The nineteenth-century conscript was fed in the field on preserved food; margarine and canning were both the products of a competition founded by Napoleon III to invent rations that would not rot in the soldier’s pack. However, the necessity for him to carry his own supply of rations was in any case sharply diminished by the subordination of the burgeoning railway system to military uses. Troops were transported by rail as early as 1839 in Germany. By 1859, when France fought Austria in northern Italy, deployment by rail seemed commonplace. In 1866 and 1870 it underlay Prussia’s victories against Austria and France. In the latter year the German rail network, only 469 kilometres in 1840, had increased to 17,215; by 1914 it would total 61,749 kilometres, the greater part of it (56,000 kilometres) under state management. The German government, heavily prompted by the Great General Staff, had early grasped the importance for defensive – and offensive – purposes of controlling the railway system; much of it, particularly in such sectors of low commercial use as Bavaria and East Prussia, had been financed by state-raised loans and laid out at the direction of the General Staff’s railway section.fn2

  Railways supplied and transported the soldier of the steam age (at least as far as the railhead; beyond, the old marching and portering imperatives persisted). The technology that built the railways also furnished the weapons with which the soldiers of the new mass armies would inflict mass casualties on each other. The development of such weapons was not deliberate, at least not at the outset; later it may have been. Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the first successful machine-gun, is alleged to have given up experiments in electrical engineering in 1883 on the advice of a fellow American, who said: ‘Hang your electricity! If you want to make your fortune, invent something which will allow those fool Europeans to kill each other more quickly.’ Initially, however, the reason for the appearance of the faster-firing, longer-range and more accurate weapons that equipped the conscript armies between 1850 and 1900 was the particular conjunction of human ingenuity and industrial capability which made their production feasible.

  Four factors were significant. The first was the spread of steam power, which supplied the energy to manufacture weapons by industrial process. The second was the development of the appropriate process itself, originally called ‘American’ by reason of its origin in the 1820s in the factories of the Connecticut Valley, which were chronically short of skilled labour. This industrial process resulted in ‘interchangeable parts’, machined by a refinement of the ancient pantographic principle, and achieved an enormous surge of output. The Prussian manufacturer, Dreyse, inventor of the revolutionary ‘needle-gun’ (in which a bolt-operated firing-pin struck a metal-jacketed cartridge), managed to turn out only 10,000 units a year by traditional methods in 1847, despite holding a firm contract from the Prussian government to re-equip its whole army. By 1863, in contrast, the British Enfield armoury, rejigged with automatic milling machines, turned out 100,370 rifles, and in 1866 the French government re-equipped the armoury at Puteaux with ‘interchangeable parts’ machinery capable of producing 300,000 of the new Chassepot rifles each year.

  Advances in metal engineering would have been pointless without improvements in the quality of the metal to be worked; that was assured by the development of processes for smelting steel in quantity – notably by the British engineer Bessemer after 1857 (he also was encouraged by a prize offered by Napoleon III). Bessemer’s ‘converter’ marked the third significant advance. With similar furnaces, the German cannon-founder, Alfred Krupp, began in the 1860s to cast steel billets from which perfect cannon-barrels could be machined. His breech-loading field-guns, equivalents on a larger scale of the rifles with which all contemporary infantrymen in advanced armies were now issued, proved the decisive weapons of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. The fourth ingredient of the firepower revolution was supplied shortly afterwards by European chemists, notably the Swede Alfred Nobel, who developed propellants and bursting-charges which drove projectiles to a greater distance and detonated them with more explosive effect than ever before. The effective range of infantry weapons, for example – a function equally of engineering and propellant developments – increased from a hundred to a thousand yards between 1850 and 1900. When the recuperation of chemical-energy discharges was applied to the mechanism of small arms and artillery in the period 1880-1900, it produced the machine-gun and the quick-firing artillery piece, the ultimate instruments of mass death-dealing at distance.

  Surplus and war-making capacity

  Long-range, rapid-fire weapons constituted the threat by which all the increments of offensive force assembled by the industrial and demographic revolutions of the nineteenth century were to be negated. There lay an irony. The material triumph of the nineteenth century had been to break out of the cycle of recurrent lean and plenty which had immemorially determined the condition of life even in the richest
states, and to create permanent surplus – of food, energy and raw materials (though not of capital, credit or cash). Market fluctuations perpetuated boom and recession in the peaceful life of states. Surplus transformed their war-making capacity. War at any level above the primitive ritual of raid and ambush had always required surplus for its waging. However, accumulated surpluses had rarely been large enough historically to fund wars that culminated in the decisive victory of one side over another; self-funding wars, in which the spoils of conquest sustained the impetus of a victorious campaign, had been rarer still. Extraneous factors – gross disparity in the opposed technologies of war-making or in the dynamism of opposed ideologies, or, as Professor William McNeill has suggested, susceptibility to unfamiliar germ strains transported by an aggressor – had usually explained one society’s triumph over another; and they certainly underlay such military sensations as the Spanish destruction of the Aztec and Inca empires, the Islamic conquests of the seventh century and the American extinction of Red Indian warriordom.

  In the warfare of Europe between the Reformation and the French Revolution, waged between states occupying a level plateau of war-making skills, will to war and resistance to common disease, such extraneous factors had played no decisive part; while the surpluses available for offence had been heavily offset by the diversion of funds into means of defence, particularly siege engineering. A great deal of such siege engineering had been dedicated to the destruction of the feudal strongholds from which local magnates had defied central authority once the fashion for castle-building seized the European landholding class in the eleventh century. It was extremely costly; and to the costs had been added those of replacing local with national fortifications in the frontier zones throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Investment in siegecraft, destructive and constructive, had the collateral effect of securing under-investment in civil infrastructures – roads, bridges and canals – which might otherwise have made the passage of armies on offensive campaigns swift and decisive. As late as 1826, for example, while the British road network – much of it in Scotland deliberately built for military purposes after the Jacobite revolt of 1745 – extended to over 21,000 miles, that of France (three times the size) was no greater, while Prussia, which occupied much of the most strategically significant terrain in northern Europe, had a road network of only 3,340 miles, most of it in her Rhineland provinces. Her eastern lands were virtually roadless, as Poland and Russia were to remain – to Napoleon’s and then Hitler’s cost – well into the twentieth century.

  The surplus created by the economic miracle in nineteenth-century Europe cancelled out the effects of under-investment in road-building and over-investment in frontier fortification. Mass armies, transported and supplied along the new infrastructure of railways, swamped strategically significant territory as if by tidal force in an era of changed sea levels. In 1866 and 1870 the armies of Prussia overflowed the frontier regions of Austrian Bohemia and French Alsace-Lorraine without hindrance by the costly fortifications that guarded them. Strategic movement in Europe achieved a fluidity equivalent almost to that which had characterised the western campaigns of the American Civil War, fought by mass armies in a landscape free from artificial obstructions of any sort. Regions disputed by Habsburg and Bourbon generals in two hundred years of toothpick campaigning for advantage in each cavity and crevice of each other’s borderlands went under the hammer of steam power in a few weeks of brutal resculpturing. It seemed that a second ‘military revolution’, equivalent to that brought about by gunpowder and mobile cannon at the dawn of the Renaissance and Reformation, stood at hand. Blood, iron and gold – available in quantities more copious than any of which the richest king had ever disposed – promised victories swifter and more total even than those which had been achieved by Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan.

  Such victories were promised but could not necessarily be delivered; for the greatest material riches do not avail if the human qualities necessary to animate them are lacking. But here too the nineteenth century had wrought a sea-change. The eighteenth-century soldier had been a poor creature, the liveried servant of his king, sometimes – in Russia and Prussia – an actual serf delivered into the state’s service by his feudal master. Uniform was, indeed, a livery, which reigning monarchs conspicuously did not wear. Those who did bore it as a mark of surrendered rights. It meant that they had succumbed to ‘want or hardship’, the most common impulse to enlistment; that they had changed sides (turncoat prisoners of war formed large contingents in most armies); that they had accepted mercenary service under foreign colours (as tens of thousands of Swiss, Scots, Irish, Slavs and other highlanders and backwoodsmen did throughout the ancien régime); that they had ‘plea-bargained’ out of imprisonment for petty crime or attachment for civic debt; or simply that they had failed to run fast enough from the press-gang. The volunteer was almost the rarest if the best of soldiers. Because so many of his comrades-in-arms were unwilling warriors, the penalties for desertion were draconian and the code of discipline ferocious. The eighteenth-century soldier was flogged for infractions of duty and hanged for indiscipline, both sorts of offence being loosely interpreted.

  The nineteenth-century soldier, by contrast, was a man who wanted to be what he was. A willing, often an enthusiastic, soldier, he was usually a conscript but one who accepted his term of (admittedly short) service as a just subtraction from his years of liberty, to be performed with cheerfulness as well as obedience. This was the case at least from mid-century onwards and in the armies of the most advanced states – Prussia first and foremost, but also France and Austria, with the smaller and more backward hurrying to follow suit. Such a change of attitude is difficult to document but real enough nevertheless. Perhaps its most tangible manifestation was the appearance of the regimental souvenir which began to be manufactured in tens of thousands towards the end of the nineteenth century. The souvenir, typically in Germany a china drinking mug, decorated with pictures of regimental life, usually bore the names of the conscript’s fellow platoon members, some couplets of doggerel verse, a salutation to the regiment – ‘Here’s to the 12th Grenadiers’ – and the universal superscription ‘In memory of my service time’. The young soldier who had been sent off garlanded with flowers by his neighbours – a strikingly different farewell from that given to the Russian serf conscript of the eighteenth century, for whom the village priest said a requiem mass – bore back his souvenir when his service time was over to stand in a place of honour in the family home.

  This remarkable change of attitude was literally revolutionary. The roots of the change were manifold, but the three most important led directly to the French Revolution and the principal slogans of its ideology: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

  Military service became popular in the nineteenth century first because it was an experience of equality. ‘Cook’s son – Duke’s son – son of a belted Earl,’ Rudyard Kipling wrote of the army Britain sent to fight the Boers in 1900, with some accuracy. Popular enthusiasm for the war did sweep all classes into the ranks as common soldiers; but they were, of course, volunteers. Universal conscription in the European armies took all classes willy-nilly – in Prussia from 1814, in Austria from 1867, in France from 1889 – and bound them to service for two or three years. There were variations in the proportion of annual classes enlisted and fluctuations in the length of service. There were alleviations of obligation for the better educated; typically, for example, high-school graduates served only one year and were then transferred to the reserve as potential officers. Yet the principle of universal obligation that generally held good was also accepted as persisting. Reservists during their early years of discharge returned annually to the colours for retraining; as they grew older they moved to a wartime reserve (Landwehr in Germany, Territorial Army in France); and their final years of able manhood were spent on the list of the Home Guard. Reserve training was borne with good humour, even regarded as a sort of all-male holiday. Freud,
a reserve medical officer in the Austrian army, writing to a friend from manoeuvres in 1886, observed that ‘it would be ungrateful not to admit that military life with its inescapable “must” is good for neurasthenia. It all disappeared in the first week.’

  Conscription was also relatively egalitarian in its outreach. Jews, like Freud, were as liable as Gentiles and in the Habsburg army automatically became officers if educationally qualified; in the German army, Jews could become reserve officers but were barred by regimental anti-Semitism from holding regular commissions, though Bismarck’s financier, Bleichroder, managed to get his son a regular commission in the household cavalry. The officer who recommended Hitler for his Iron Cross 1st Class was a Jewish reserve officer. This was ‘emancipation’ in its military aspect, and it applied not only to Jews. The universality of conscription swept up every nationality in the Habsburg lands, Poles and Alsace-Lorrainers in Germany, Basques, Bretons and Savoyards in France. All, by being soldiers, were also to be Austrians, Germans or Frenchmen.