The age of total war was coming. At the start of 1917, it would embrace not only Britain but all the combatant nations—all, that is, that managed to survive the major trials ahead. As we will see, commitment to total war would forever change the nature of war and the relationship between government and society. Lloyd George and Britain would be officially the first to head down that road. Lloyd George knew what maximum effort was about. As minister of munitions at a time when the generals had wanted two or, at most, four machine guns per infantry battalion, he had forced them to take forty-three. When the War Office turned down the Stokes mortar, one of the most effective light artillery weapons of the war, with an eight-hundred-yard range and capable of firing twenty-five shells a minute, Lloyd George convinced an Indian maharaja to finance its production from his own bank account.13 As prime minister, though, Lloyd George sensed that even if he were able to mobilize all Britain’s manpower and resources, including those of the empire, for the war effort, they still wouldn’t be enough to defeat Germany unless one other entity joined in to tip the balance.
That entity was the United States. As the New Year dawned, a major priority for the prime minister was emerging: how to get President Wilson to commit his country fully on the side of the Allies. Financial and logistical support for the Allies was one thing; adding the full weight of American manpower as well as industrial power, not to mention the U.S. Navy, the third-largest in the world, would be another entirely.
What Bethmann-Hollweg feared most at the end of 1916 was what Lloyd George and Great Britain wanted more than anything else. The desire to get the United States to take the plunge and join the war in Europe was, if anything, even more prominent in the next Allied capital the German peace note reached—namely, Paris.
IT ARRIVED AT the Palais Élysée the same day that another momentous event was taking place. This was the removal of the man who had been France’s commander in chief since the war began, Gen. Joseph Joffre.
To many, even after almost thirty months of bloody conflict, Joffre was still a national hero. Big, bluff, with a hearty smile and a deceptively Santa Claus twinkle in his eye, “Papa” Joffre had prevented the collapse of the French armies during the initial German onslaught in August 1914, and then had saved Paris (and France) at the Battle of the Marne. His reputation as national savior had sustained him for two more years of bloodshed and stalemate, while Joffre himself had done nothing to change his strategy, which was attack, attack, attack, regardless of the losses or, incredibly, without any substantive sign of success. Instead, Joffre had watched impassively as the French casualties mounted. Fifty-five thousand casualties for five hundred yards’ gain on the Champagne front in February 1915; 60,000 lost again that spring at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel; 120,000 in May at Arras. The next year brought the slaughter at Verdun stretching from February to June, with 315,000 total French casualties. Then came the French support for the British offensive along the Somme from July to November, in which another 200,000 were killed or wounded—all for little significant gain.
At that point, the French politicians, including Prime Minister Aristide Briand, had had enough. Criticism of Joffre and his conduct of the war began to build in the Chamber of Deputies. Yet Briand realized that even now he could not dismiss France’s supposed savior outright. So, instead, he elevated him into insignificance, by making Joffre a marshal of France, the first since the days of Napoleon III. That took Joffre out of the role of commander in chief and most powerful man in France—even the prime minister had had to ask Joffre’s permission before visiting the front—and left him as the symbol, then and later, of Great War leadership at its most callous, brutal, and futile.14
Joffre’s successor, Gen. Robert Nivelle, cut a very different figure. Slim, youthful, and vigorous-looking, Nivelle brought with him the smell of success instead of futility. He had been theater commander around Verdun during the Somme offensive, when, taking advantage of momentary German weakness, he swept his divisions forward in September 1916 and with very few casualties recaptured almost all the ground France had lost there since February. Virtually overnight his exploit made him a national hero, a role he assumed with grace and style. Even before he was made commander in chief, he was telling politicians and other generals that he had discovered the secret to winning the war—a secret that, for now, he refused to divulge. But Nivelle’s promise, like his brisk, jaunty salute for the cameras, offered new optimism about the war’s future—not to mention France’s.
France had been devastated by the war, and not just by the loss of human life. Its richest industrial region, northeastern France, had been seized by the Germans at the start of the war, and systematically raked over to supply the German war machine. It was sorely missed by the French economy, and by the French army. In addition, the costs of war on this unprecedented scale had pushed France’s financial system to the brink of collapse. In 1914, Paris had been the second-largest center of international finance, after London. As 1916 ended, the only credit it could get to keep itself in the war came from Britain via London’s bounteous cornucopia of loans from Wall Street.15
For that reason alone, the French were even more eager to get the United States into the war on their side, and no one understood that more than the leader of the Radicals in the Chamber of Deputies, Georges Clemenceau. At age seventy-five, Clemenceau was a white-haired veteran of French politics going back to the very origins of the Third Republic, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Before that, however, he had lived in the United States for several years, working as a journalist; he had even had an American wife when he returned to France. Certainly, no other French politician understood America quite as well or realized how important it would be to play up the theme of Franco-American friendship reaching back to Lafayette and the American Revolution.
In addition to winning the war, nothing would prevent a future war, Clemenceau insisted, “like a close entente among America, Great Britain, and France.”16 Clemenceau’s willingness, even eagerness, to cooperate with the Americans would be important, even crucial, later on in his dealings with President Wilson. For now, however, his focus, like that of every other French politician, was on how to defeat Germany and break the German threat to France forever. Moreover, negotiating a treaty with Germany that left any French soil (or Belgian, for that matter) in German hands was not an option.
Prime Minister Briand shared Clemenceau’s view. Although, after the war, his name would be linked to pacifism thanks to the Kellogg-Briand Pact to ban war, at the end of 1916 he was firm on continuing the war to the point of defiance. Prime minister since October 1915, he had witnessed the worst of the carnage. Yet it was Briand, not General Joffre, who had made the commitment to stand firm at Verdun in the face of other officers arguing that abandoning the fortress would shorten the line as well as save lives.
“You may not think losing Verdun a defeat,” he had thundered, “but everyone else will. If you surrender Verdun you will be cowards, cowards, cowards and I will sack the lot of you.” So, it was Briand, the future pacifist, who had pushed France into its ultimate sacrifice that spring, and the French army to its Calvary.17
There was, therefore, no chance that Briand would greet Bethmann-Hollweg’s note with anything but a firm non (although Briand, like Lloyd George, took the precaution of not making the note’s contents public). Besides, by appointing Nivelle as France’s commander in chief, Briand had committed himself to a fresh offensive whatever the Americans did—even though other French generals were saying the army was in no condition to go on the attack again.
Under all these circumstances, rejection of the peace note by France and Britain might have seemed a foregone conclusion. But if Bethmann-Hollweg hoped for a conciliatory answer from any of the Entente powers, it was going to be from the third capital his note reached, St. Petersburg (or Petrograd, as it was now officially known) in Russia.
2
RUSSIA AND AMERICA CONFRONT A WORLD WAR
I
t may be that peace is nearer than we know.
—WOODROW WILSON, DECEMBER 18, 1916
PETROGRAD, DECEMBER 1916
BETHMANN-HOLLWEG’S HOPES WERE founded on the fact that the German peace note was reaching a Winter Palace (and a Russia) rapidly nearing the point of collapse.
For France and Britain (and Germany, for that matter), the coming of war and its rigors in August 1914 had meant an abrupt shift from the delights of peace. Not so for Russia. As a then-member of the Russian parliament, or Duma, Alexander Kerensky, noted years later, “On the day when war was declared, Russia was already in a revolutionary turmoil.”1 A series of punishing strikes had racked its largest cities, including St. Petersburg, through the first half of 1914. Almost half of Russia’s entire workforce was involved. Some observers, including Kerensky, and some historians (particularly Marxist historians) have highlighted this fact to suggest that the revolution that would descend on Russia three years later was somehow preordained. In short, the old regime in Russia was bound to topple, war or no war, and those politicians who foresaw its doom had simply been clever enough to take advantage of that fact—including Kerensky.
Yet that diagnosis is probably wrong. Labor disputes, even violent ones—and there were many such across Russia after 1905—are just as often triggered by workers’ rising expectations with an improving standard of living as by destitution or desperation. In fact, an economist looking from the outside might have seen the strikes as reasons to be optimistic about the Russian future, rather than pessimistic.
Russia’s industrial production had grown by 3.5 percent per year from 1900 to 1910; after 1910, the rate surged to 5 percent a year. If contemporary Russian observers wrung their hands over their country’s labor problems, it took a French economist, Edmond Théry, to predict in 1912 that if Russia were able to sustain the rate of growth it had achieved since 1900, by 1950 the land of the czars would rule Europe economically and financially as well as geopolitically.2
Physically, at least, Russia was poised to be the colossus of Europe. It was the largest empire in the world after the British Empire. It stretched over three continents, had a population of 166 million, and had abundant resources of coal, iron ore, gold, and oil, in addition to the rich agricultural lands of Ukraine and Poland—in short, everything a nation needed to sustain modern economic growth on an impressive scale. Yet, for centuries, Russia had always seemed to lag behind the rest of Europe, especially western Europe, in its cultural and economic development. Then, with the dawn of the new century, it began to catch up. Compared with where Russia had been fifty or even twenty years earlier, the numbers by 1914 were impressive.
Two things, however, boded ill for its future. First, the surge in economic growth also meant a rapid surge in Russia’s industrial labor force, with tens of thousands leaving their tiny rural villages for the slums and tenements of Russia’s already teeming cities. Between January 1910 and July 1914—that is, in the four and a half years before war began—the number of factory workers in Russia grew by one-third. As Russia mobilized for war, more than half the industrial workers living in St. Petersburg came from someplace else. They were largely fresh arrivals from the country, seeking a better life for themselves and their families, but also impatient to see results. They were the human fodder for the strikes in early 1914, and for the events of three years later.3
The second problem for Russia was how much of its economic growth depended on the public sector and the government in St. Petersburg. In 1914, the government owned two-thirds of the nation’s railways; it owned many of the coal mines, the gold mines, and thousands of factories. The Ministry of Trade had representatives on the boards of nearly all Russia’s major industrial corporations; it was also heavily involved in setting prices, regulating profits, and procuring raw materials. Russia’s official State Bank was not an independent body like the Bank of England, but a department of the Finance Ministry. It was deeply entangled in the country’s financial structure and served as chief regulator of the economy—the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission all rolled into one.
This unprecedented huge public-sector involvement in and supervision of Russia’s economic life impressed outside observers. It was one of the chief reasons Edmond Théry could make his confident prediction about Russia’s growth curve, and why Bethmann-Hollweg himself had once declared, with not a little foreboding, that “the future belongs to Russia.”4
But the Russian government was not like that of France or Germany. Administrative law was in its infancy. The government was chronically short of competent civil servants and able administrators; too many used their position as bureaucrats to enrich themselves rather than to make things work better or faster. Despite some cosmetic changes since the 1905 uprising, Russia was still an old-fashioned autocracy—rigid and unwieldy at the top, weak and slow moving at the bottom. If something happened to loosen or break the government’s less than firm hold on the helm, if a crisis in the capital suddenly brought paralysis at the top, then the disruption would be felt through every sector of Russian society, even down to the state-owned estates and the “state peasants” who toiled away in the new eastern territories.
As fate would have it, that something would be the war.
Like all the combatants that crucial August 1914, Russia counted on a short conflict, a few months at most. That was not to be. Russia’s initial advance into East Prussia was checked by a crushing German victory at Tannenberg in August, and then by the Austrian occupation of Russia’s western provinces in 1915. These setbacks guaranteed that the war on the Eastern Front was going to be a long slog. The fighting on the Eastern Front never reached the same level of intensity as that on the Western Front. The trenches were more temporary and lightly manned; cows grazed peacefully, and peasants sowed and harvested their crops, all in no-man’s-land. But the vast distances, and the seesaw nature of the fighting, guaranteed that the demand for manpower and resources was, if anything, more overwhelming—especially for an “emerging” economy such as Russia’s.
At first glance, Russia seemed well prepared for the long haul. Its standing army was the largest in the world, more than 1.4 million men. Fully mobilized, it could put more than 12 million soldiers in the field—three times Germany’s and Austria-Hungary’s armies put together. But it was an army chronically short of every modern weapon, from airplanes, heavy artillery, and machine guns to motorized transport and reliable logistical rail support. Its reservists were poorly trained and badly led; its generals viewed technologies such as the machine gun with suspicion, preferring the old-fashioned bayonet charge. When the Russian army went up against a well-led, well-equipped force such as the German army, no one was surprised that it suffered defeat after defeat, accompanied by horrendous casualties. By December 1914, Russia had lost more than 1.2 million men, almost its entire prewar strength; its commander in chief, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, warned London and Paris that Russia would not be capable of any further offensive actions. Nor would anyone have been surprised to learn, at the same time, that half of all Russian replacements reaching the front had no rifles.5
What was surprising, however, was that Russia was also running out of men. It was a measure of the incompetence of the czar’s government that it could not even properly mobilize its huge draft-age male population for war. Despite an elaborate conscription system (borrowed from the Germans, as a matter of fact), far too many men were able to get exemptions, and far too many reservists were being housed for training in barracks near Russia’s cities, including the capital, rather than being rushed to the front—a policy that would have disastrous political consequences later on. And in a country stretching thousands of miles with no adequate communication system, not even a telegraph in some areas, many young men simply never got the word to enlist or join up with their reserve units. By the end of 1916, after the rapid but fleeting success of the Brusilov Offensive, Rus
sia’s armed forces were starved for manpower. Yet the heaviest demands on its ability to fight were still to come.
By then, also, the wreckage had spread to the other sectors of Russian society. The loss of Poland to the Germans and Austrians meant the loss of Russia’s most advanced industries. Getting basic materials for the army became an epic battle by itself; getting such goods to the civilian economy proved impossible. Russian consumers found themselves starved of the basics. By the end of 1915, even food was becoming scarce in the capital city of Petrograd (St. Petersburg’s new name since the outbreak of war, when the government decided that “St. Petersburg” sounded Teutonic) and in Moscow. In the countryside, the situation was even worse. Feeding an army as large as Russia’s required 16,000 tons of foodstuffs, hauled in 1,095 wagonloads, a day. Feeding the horses to haul that food required another 32,000 tons of barley, oats, and hay a day, or 1,850 wagonloads.6 The only way to accomplish this Augean task was to seize from the peasants their food, livestock, wagons, tools—everything. Russia’s peasants responded by resorting to subterfuge, even violence. The sight of a government official or an army inspector was enough to send an entire village into panic: whatever prestige the czarist regime still had after the series of military disasters that cost Russia millions of men and seventeen provinces soon vanished in a blaze of rural uprisings and bloodshed.
Indeed, “by the end of 1915,” writes historian Nicolas Werth, “it was clear that the forces of law and order no longer existed” in Russia.7 Yet the attention of the government in St. Petersburg was entirely fixed on the war effort and the army. Overseeing that vast ramshackle war machine was a Russian High Command dominated by the minister of war, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, and overshadowed by its commander in chief, the single most powerful political figure in Russia, Czar Nicholas II.
1917 Page 5
