by Peter Hart
The French Army had been of paramount importance to the Allies, particularly in the first two years of the war. They had stood up to the brunt of the German assault in 1914, paying a phenomenal price in blood that should never be forgotten. In 1915, time and time again, they had smashed against the German lines on the Western Front, testing them to the utmost and exploring the strange new language of modern warfare. In 1916 they withstood the ultimate German challenge at Verdun, a battle that truly plumbed the depths of human misery. The French fought on, playing a significant part in the Battle of the Somme, before the failure of the Nivelle offensive in April 1917 triggered the widespread mutinies. Yet even this debacle did not mark the end: they made a solid contribution during the Third Battle of Ypres later in 1917 and helped prop up the British line during the German Spring offensives of 1918. Then they rebuffed the final German summer assaults before launching the first of the counter-attacks that ultimately would win the war. In 1918 they may not have taken the foremost lead, but were fighting hard, still crucial to Allied success – and after all in Foch they provided the Supreme Commander. Without a knowledge of what the French were doing – and suffering – the British role and actions are quite simply incomprehensible. The two armies were linked by a common front, a common enemy and had the same terrible challenges to be overcome. This was coalition warfare.
The Russian role is also sometime downplayed, masked by their ultimate defeat and the sullen acrimony of the post-war years. But from 1914 to 1917 the Russians had fought hard, rebounding time and time again from shocking defeats, along the way bludgeoning the Austro-Hungarians almost to the point of defeat and forcing the Germans to deploy ever more troops to the Eastern Front. The resilience of the Russians made the two front war an unshakeable reality for the Germans. The ultimate Russian collapse and defeat was a result of the inherent contradictions of the Russian state, but it came too late for the Germans to really capitalise on the opportunity.
The Italians had taken a gamble and joined the war with an eye to the possible territorial gains that victory would bring. Their motives may have been questionable, but they fought hard and, in the end, completed the demolition of the Austrians begun by Russia.
The Americans arrived late in the war but had an enormous impact. It left the Germans with little or no realistic hopes of victory, forcing the last gamble of the Spring offensives. Like the British the Americans were totally unprepared for a continental war and were unconscionably slow in deploying troops in significant numbers. But, by the summer of 1918, they were in situ, slowly learning the brutal art of modern war. After initial problems they proved adept pupils and the AEF would have been the dominant force had the war stretched into 1919.
We are left with the British role which was surely crucial: indeed Britain’s very involvement in the war had been a sickening blow to German hopes of victory. At a stroke, the oceans of the globe became an Allied domain. For the first two years of the war the British military involvement on land was at largely symbolic, before the gradual mobilisation of the Empire brought millions of troops to the battlefield. By 1918 the BEF had attained a more pivotal role: still large enough to have a real impact, but also polished in the deadly tactics of the ‘All Arms Battle’ and driven on to act as the spear point of the Allied armies on the Western Front. Their time had come, but the victory nevertheless was a collective one, based on the struggle and sacrifice of all the Allies during more than four years of unremitting war.
It is has often been contended that Germany was not really defeated in the Great War, but that her heroic armed services were somehow stabbed in the back by revolutionary factors or other mysterious forces. This is utter nonsense. Rarely has a nation been so comprehensively defeated in the field as Germany was in 1918. Her armies were reeling back and were totally unable to defend the German frontier. Crossing the Rhine might have been a problem for the Allies, but their bombardment techniques coupled with the mass use of new and ever more deadly gases would have been the decisive factors, not appeals to national pride. Once across there would have been no way of holding them. And every month would have meant more American divisions arriving on the Western Front. At sea the Germans had been bottled up, their submarines overwhelmed by the convoy system and the High Seas Fleet had mutinied. In the air the German pilots were fighting bravely, but were severely outnumbered and fast running out of aviation fuel. Her allies, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria, had all been brought to their knees. There was no hope anywhere for Germany: this was a total defeat writ large.
After the Armistice the German state fell apart. Nominally a republic, its Army had almost ceased to exist, the units fragmenting once they had crossed the German border as the men simply went home. This left a dangerous power vacuum. The political factions of the left soon fragmented and when the Communists took to the streets during the Spartacist Uprising of January 1919, they were countered with devastating brutality by unofficial Freikorps made up of ex-servicemen, bound together by their military past and an unswerving adherence to right-wing politics. Germany was in a desperate state, still ravaged by hunger, plagued by revolution, threatened by armed gangs and suffering the demoralising after-effects of the loss of some 2 million young men killed during the war. To survive, the fledgling government headed by Friedrich Ebert had had to compromise itself to gain the support of the Freikorps and the remnants of the regular Army. Against this background the economy, strained beyond reason by the war, continued to freefall, with most of the stringent provisions of the Allied blockade still in place. When the protracted Paris peace negotiations finally came to the crunch decisions, the Germans realised that they would be shown no leniency by the Allies intent on exacting their pound of flesh. The war reparations, the loss of Polish territory and Alsace-Lorraine, the humiliating occupation forces – all would be enforced when the Treaty of Versailles was finally signed on 28 June 1919. By the time the German Weimar Republic was formally founded in August 1919, it was already in dire trouble. Racked by raging inflation and economic turmoil, the Weimar Republic would spend the 1920s torn apart by competing visions of left and right-wing ideologues, all peddling their different visions of the future designed to have mass appeal. In the end it would be the right that won, with the advent of Hitler and the Nazi Party. And so the wheel of history turned again.
The Russians, too, had been set on a new and challenging course by the Great War. The tyranny of the Tsars had been usurped by the Bolsheviks and the advent of the Communist state. After the war several of the Allies intervened to assist the counter-revolutionary forces. The Soviets felt themselves attacked from all sides and became afflicted by a defensive and harshly repressive outlook which corrupted any lingering hopes of a more democratic future for the Russian people. The damage done would endure for the best part of the twentieth century. With Soviet Russia separated on ideological grounds from Britain and France, the Great War Allies were unable to act in collaboration to thwart the re-emergence of Germany as a great European power under the Nazi regime in the 1930s – a failure that would have terrible consequences.
The combined effect of the Treaties of Saint-Germain (10 September 1919), Neuilly (27 November 1919) and Trianon (4 June 1920) was the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, this and the partial loss of territory by the Soviet Union did not resolve the complex nationalistic tensions festering in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The emerging countries, such as Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia; the defeated countries, such as Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria; and the newly triumphant Italy, Rumania and Greece – all found themselves in a state of flux surrounded by powerful enemies and often still containing aggrieved nationalistic minorities within their borders. The Balkans certainly remained a powder keg, but now Eastern Europe became equally unstable. The Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip, who fired the fatal first shots at Archduke Ferdinand, never lived to see this brave new world he had helped trigger. Too young to be executed, he was sente
nced to twenty years in prison, where he contracted tuberculosis and died on 28 April 1918.
The prostrate remnants of the Ottoman Empire witnessed a feeding frenzy from the colonial empires. During the war the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement had been signed on 16 May 1916 between Britain, France and Russia, which envisioned dividing the spoils three ways: the British would get protectorates or control of parts of Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq (Mesopotamia); the French would get Lebanon, Syria, south-east Turkey and northern Iraq; while Russia was promised – at last – Constantinople and control of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles Straits, in addition to parts of western Armenia. It was a treaty that defined the ambitious war aims of the three powers, but it also oversimplified the political agreements being made with various other parties in the Middle East. In particular promises had been made to establish both an Arab state and a Zionist independent Jewish state in Palestine. The rise of the Soviets had resulted in the unilateral publication of the full clauses of the treaty in November 1917, which caused a substantial amount of suspicion between the various Arab and Jewish factions. With the advent of the more high-toned American influence, there was some back-tracking with the Anglo-French Agreement on 7 November 1918 promising the establishment of indigenous governments in Syria and Mesopotamia. This would prove to have been mainly for public consumption. After the war the web of conflicting agreements led to almost everyone being disappointed and many bitter – and vengeful – accusations of bad faith. In essence, the British and French cynically continued to pursue their own long-term colonial aims, freed from competition from Russia. The result was the birth of many of the Middle East problems that exist to this very day, not just over the question of Jewish or Arab control of Palestine/Israel, but also over the arbitrary nature of the borders drawn for Iraq, Syria and Turkey. This is all part of the grim legacy of the Great War.
The British and French finished the war in a seemingly impregnable position, whereby they appeared to have it all. Their main enemy, Germany, had been stamped down, while the old enemy, Russia, was in a state of turbulent flux.
So the old pirate state, England, has again succeeded in letting Europe tear herself to pieces, and by throwing in her own power and applying the most brutal methods, she has secured a victory which accords with her material interests. The liberty and independence of the people of the European continent has now vanished and the bloom of their civilization is perhaps destroyed forever. But England’s day of judgment will have its birth in this very success.2
Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz
It is true that the British and the French – both nakedly imperialist powers, now set free to expand their horizons by the removal of both the German and Russian threats – made considerable colonial gains in Africa, the Pacific and the Middle East.
Yet the war would prove the high tide for both the old empires. At first nothing much seemed to have changed: both were still energetic in pushing forward their imperial and colonial claims, and were aggressive in their dealings with smaller powers who got in their way. Yet behind the facade the imperial structures were crumbling away. Ground down by their losses, and suffering dire economic problems in consequence of the unbelievable sums expended during the war, they were soon losing their grip. And an old enemy would rise again under a new guise. Survival had been the Soviets’ initial priority, but later the promulgation of Communist revolution around the world would prove an entirely different threat to the stumbling colonial empires. The Second World War confirmed and accelerated this process of decline.
And what of the performance of the generals in the Great War? They had tried their best, many of them quickly making complex tactical changes, incorporating huge technical developments into their plans and all the while training, deploying and maintaining the morale of millions of men in this most dreadful of wars. Some generals failed utterly, their reputations shattered by their own innate conservatism, personal flaws or sheer stupidity. But these were in the minority; most generals coped as well as could be expected. After all, the exercise of command in battle was a terrify-ingly complex business, with the origins of victory – and defeat – buried in a myriad of factors all of which had knock-on effects, which made it almost impossible accurately to attribute cause and effect. Haig put it neatly: ‘To direct attention to any single phase of that stupendous and incessant struggle and seek in it the explanation of our success, to the exclusion or neglect of other phases possibly less striking in their immediate or obvious consequences, is in my opinion to risk the formation of unsound doctrines regarding the character and requirements of modern war.’3
War was not a straightforward progression towards success for the British or anyone else. In truth, the Allies eventually won on the battlefields because of a massive superiority in numbers and resources. It cannot be denied that the performance of the German Army was incredible; indeed, its soldiers fought with a sustained heroism and a high degree of military skill right to the end. Some of the German generalship was also outstanding: ingenious and intuitive, aggressive and brutally simple, boldly heroic and sensibly cautious – there were many different ways to win a battle. Certainly Falkenhayn Ludendorff, Mackensen and many others all had sustained periods of brilliance in the field. In fact, all the Central Powers countries had competent and sometimes inspirational generals. But the British, French and Russians had great generals, too: the indomitable Haig, with his undying faith in the proper application of modern weapons yoked to his driving role in establishing the ‘All Arms’ battle; Joffre, the victor of the Marne; Brusilov, the outstanding innovator; and, of course, Foch – the man there at the beginning and the man still standing as Supreme Commander at the end.
In the miserable aftermath of the Great War there was a desperate search for scapegoats for all the suffering that had been endured. In Britain, the more devious politicians and their fawning commentators managed to transfer most of the responsibility on to the backs of their generals, culminating in the deeply offensive ‘lions led by donkeys’ construct. But such post-war shenanigans should not distract attention from the fact that in the end Britain and her Allies had emerged triumphant on the battlefields of the Great War: it was a painful victory, but a victory all the same. Whether it should be celebrated or mourned is for philosophers to decide. Unfortunately it was not – it never was – a war to end wars and the Great War proved an efficient catalyst in sowing the seeds for the numerous conflicts which have disfigured human history ever since. Within twenty-one short years the world would be at war again.
In many ways the Second World War set terrible new benchmarks for horror. Yet somehow a more potent folk memory of the Great War lingers still – even now all the last active participants have died. The sense of tragedy, of futility, of a slaughter of the innocents: these sentiments still pervade our popular culture. There is the widespread vision of humanity dragged down from the sunny uplands into the morass. But the war did have its causes and the Great Powers certainly had their deadly grievances that they felt unable to settle without recourse to arms. It was in truth a violent world – the prevalence of a rapacious colonialism, the brutal repression of minorities, the placid acceptance of inequalities and the overall belief that might was right – all these global traits tended towards the continued acceptance of war as a legitimate means of pursuing policy. When war came, it was truly devastating as the impact of new weapons systems created a Gordian knot of static trench lines, while the development of logistics allied to new methods of transport allowed armies of millions to be kept in the field almost indefinitely. Whatever happened it was always likely to be a long and terrible war – an unwaking nightmare for far too many.
And yet, and yet, and yet. Whatever the logical arguments, pointing to German culpability and the near-inevitability of this Armageddon, the fact that the Great War still has an enormous emotional impact cannot be denied. None of the warrior states may have been innocent, but the deaths and suffering imposed on their massed soldiery and
citizenry cannot but evoke a human response. The carefully tended war memorials, the continuing acts of remembrance and commemoration, the growing interest in visiting the battlefields; these all illustrate the way the Great War still resonates deeply even today. The decimation of a generation is not forgotten; while the problems left unsolved or created by that terrible conflagration persist to threaten the peace of the world to this very day.
NOTES
1. The Road to War
1. O. von Bismarck, Speech, 1879, quoted in The Riverside Dictionary of Biography (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 87.
2. O. von Bismarck, quoted in E. Ludwig, Wilhelm Hohenzollern: The Last of the Kaisers (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927), p. 73.
3. H. von Moltke, quoted in R. Foley, German Strategy and the Path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the Development of Attrition, 1870–1916 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 23.
4. B. Jevtic quoted in R. Fox, We Were There: An Eyewitness History of the Twentieth Century (New York, Overlook, 2010), pp. 40–41.
