World War One: A Short History

by Norman Stone

  NOTES

  1.W. Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918 (Vienna, 1918), p. 174 ff. notes the importance of oil.

  2.R. Atkinson, Trafalgar (London, 2004), pp. 40 ff. – an extraordinarily erudite disquisition on medicine at that time.

  3.In 1923 he led an attempt at a coup in Munich, together with Hitler, whom he made respectable. In the 1930s he was, however, the only public opponent of the Third Reich (he thought it was inadequately anti-Catholic) until someone noticed what he was writing. He had a state funeral in 1938, at which mourners wore weird helmets and made strange moan.

  SEVEN • AFTERMATH

  preceding pages: Returning German army marching through Berlin, December 1918

  President Wilson himself arrived in Europe (to tremendous enthusiasm) in mid December, and represented a sort of new world order, in which Progress and Freedom could resume the forward march that had stopped in 1914. Peace treaties were sorted out – more by haggling among the Allies than with the defeated states, which were just told to sign on the dotted line – in various palaces in the Paris region. The chief treaty was concluded at Versailles, with the Germans on 28 June 1919, others following. In the famous painting by Sir William Orpen, the peace-makers look extraordinarily pleased with themselves as they pose, in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors, for rather wooden immortalization: silkiness of moustache, acuteness of gaze, dignity of stance. A Maharajah and a Japanese baron look on, evidence of the peace-makers’ internationalism and benevolence. Clemenceau is said to have remarked that he was sitting between a would-be Napoleon (Lloyd George) and a would-be Jesus Christ (Wilson).

  Even at the time there was not much reason for these people’s self-confidence. A worldwide epidemic of influenza carried off ten million victims; civil war carried off more millions in Russia, until, in 1920, the Bolsheviks won. The Allies’ attempt to divide up the Middle East soon came to grief. Muslim Arab countries – and their oil supplies – were mainly taken over by the British, and their expert on the area, T. E. Lawrence, remarked with wonder that whereas the Turks had run Iraq with a locally raised army of 14,000 men, executing ninety people a year, the British, with 100,000 soldiers, tanks, aircraft and gas, faced a war with everybody. The Sultan, prisoner of the British and French occupying Istanbul, was forced in 1920 to sign a treaty at Sèvres that not only vastly truncated his realm, but subjected it to a process of forced re-civilization.1 Greeks and Armenians invaded Anatolia, with the blessing of the British and French. The Turks, uniquely among the defeated powers, recovered, under a leader of genius, and in 1922 re-took their country: at Lausanne in 1923 it was then recognized. Paradoxically, it is the only creation of the post-war period that has flourished ever since: the rest came to grief, in some cases quite quickly, and those beautifully tailored statesmen in the Orpen portrait were in most cases repudiated by their own voters. Their creations went sour. In 1919, the European empires were greatly extended. Within ten years, these empires were falling apart and within a generation were finished.

  The list of the failures of Versailles goes on and on. A ‘League of Nations’ was set up, to adjudicate international problems. It began quite well by organizing population-transfers in the Balkans. Then, confronted with major matters, it declined into irrelevance, greeting the outbreak of the Second World War with a debate about the standardization of level-crossings. The attempt to put the world’s economy together also came to grief. By 1920, the post-war boom had fizzled out, and by 1929 the greatest economic crisis in the history of the world had arrived, bringing with it political disasters all over. The would-be parliamentary nation-states established in 1918–19 generally ceased to be parliamentary, and Bolshevik Russia, which in the 1920s had something of a human face, acquired, under Stalin, a monstrous one.

  The worst problem by far concerned Germany. In February 1919, meeting in Weimar, the new republican politicians devised a democratic constitution, perhaps the most literalmindedly democratic constitution ever (so determined were its makers to show proper Wilsonian credentials that they provided for relentless elections and proportional voting). At Versailles, there were territorial losses, particularly to Poland, which were quite widely resented. But the real problem was money. ‘The Germans’ were formally blamed for the war, and were expected to pay ‘reparations’ for the damage they had caused. But the French really meant to use this device to prevent the German economy from recovering, and other former Allies expected to pay off their war-debts. In 1921, the sum of 132,000,000,000 gold Marks was arrived at, which meant that, annually, Germany would be handing over for generations a quarter of the money she earned from exports. Such sums might be extracted from an occupied country, as the Nazis displayed in France during the Second World War and as the European Economic Community did in Germany thereafter. The Allies had deliberately avoided occupying Germany, for fear of the upheavals that might result; they therefore expected democratic politicians to cooperate with them. It was asking too much. In the 1920s, American investment went into Germany, and was used to pay the annual reparations charge. Then the world economy broke down, and the American money ceased to flow. More or less all Germans blamed their economic plight on reparations, more generally on Versailles, and this was Hitler’s strongest card. In fact, Weimar democracy broke down in 1930, in the sense that there was no longer a parliamentary majority prepared to take responsibility; the largest political party, the Social Democrats, distinguished itself by ‘constructive abstention’ – meaning that it would vote neither for nor against – and the Reichstag kept dissolving itself: in 1932 there were more election-days than there were parliamentary sessions, and the aged president, Hindenburg, ruled by decree. In 1933, a majority of German voters were either Communist or Nazi, and Hitler was appointed chancellor. He appealed for full powers, in other words dictatorship, and needed a two thirds majority in the Reichstag for this. He got it, and the final surreal note to the post-war settlement was supplied by the guiding light of the Weimar Republic, the Democrats. By then they (under a different name) were down to five seats. When it came to Hitler’s vote, they divided. Two deputies voted for Hitler, two against, and the other abstained, protesting that the others were splitting the party. By then, reparations had been abolished, but the damage had been done, and Hitler embarked on an extreme-nationalist programme.

  The real disaster, in all of this, was that Germans did not think that they had been defeated. They had, as the legend was to have it, been ‘stabbed in the back’: Jews, the Left, soft-brained academics had prevented them from winning the war and setting up a Europe that had more sense, on the ground, than anything dreamed up by the naive Americans. Ludendorff was the main architect of this fantasy, but even then by accident: a British journalist asked him in English whether he felt that Germany had been ‘stabbed in the back’, and, upon translation, Ludendorff said yes.

  The disaster that followed had been sensed by Lloyd George, in the last days of the First World War, when armistice terms were being discussed. He made a prophetic remark: ‘if peace were made now, in twenty years’ time the Germans would say what Carthage had said about the First Punic War, namely that they had made this mistake and that mistake, and by better preparation and organization they would be able to bring about victory next time.’ 2 This was more or less what Hitler said in Mein Kampf – Germany deserved to have won, and would have done so if only it had not been for treachery, out-of-place humanitarian nonsense, and all the appeasement of traitors on the Left. On 10 November, he was convalescing from gassing, which had blinded him, and when he heard someone saying that a revolution had broken out, he reacted: ‘since the day when I had stood at my mother’s grave I had not wept… It had all been in vain… Did all this happen so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the fatherland? The more I tried to achieve clarity on the monstrous event in this hour, the more the shame of indignation and disgrace burned my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes compared to this misery?’ The conclusion that he drew was that ‘there
is no making pacts with Jews. There can only be the hard: either, or.’ The way was open for a Second World War even more terrible than the First.

  NOTES

  1. One clause of the treaty (never ratified) was that the sale of dirty postcards would be suppressed (Murat Bardakci, Sahbaba (Istanbul, 1998) p. 163).

  2. John Grigg, Lloyd George: War Leader (London, 2001) is a most sympathetic book, in both senses, and it is a great misfortune that the author did not live to complete the story, the unravelling of Lloyd George’s plans after victory.

  Some Sources

  This list partly reproduces my own sources, but is mainly designed to cite the literature produced in the last few years, of which there has been much. Older works will be found in their bibliographies, and only in rareg – very rare – cases do I mention them (sometimes with the most recent date of reprint). One of these is my own, The Eastern Front 1914–1917 (London 1975) – still, apparently, the main work on the matter:the Russians should have made it obsolete a long time ago. All other countries, including Turkey, are far ahead in publications.

  The three most recent large-scale accounts of the First World War are especially useful because they bring earlier ones up to date with the prodigious amount of work that has been done in recent times. David Stevenson, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War (Penguin, 2004) is extraordinarily informative on all matters, for instance the progress made by medicine or aircraft. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (Penguin, 1998) is equally far-ranging, though in a different way:it is particularly interesting on war finance, a vastly important subject, but has much of importance to say on other matters – for instance soldiers’ morale and why they fought as they did. Hew Strachan, The First World War, Vol. I: To Arms (Oxford, 2001) is the first of three proposed volumes, and the author knows the military inside-out:he also covers the first months of the Ottoman war effort. I have owed much to all three of these books.

  There are several other shorter accounts, each with its strong point. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The First World War (Cassell, 2001) is very useful on military technicalities, for instance the changes in artillery usage that occurred. They are not respectful of A. J. P. Taylor’s short The First World War (1966, but endlessly reprinted by Penguin). I am. For the eastern front, I am told in Moscow that an official history will at last appear in 2014. Italy is well covered – excellent photographs and a solid bibliographical discussion – in Mario Isnenghi and Giorgio Rochat, La Grande Guerra 1914–1918 (Milan, 2004), Austria-Hungary by Manfred Rauchensteiner, Der Tod des Doppeladlers (Graz, 1993); the most recent work on France is Anthony Clayton, Paths of Glory: The French Army 1914–1918 (London, 2005), though see also J.-B. Duroselle, La Grande Guerre des Français (Paris, 1994). The Turkish front is covered by Edward J.Erickson, Ordered to Die (Westport, Conn., 2000) but see also Michael Carver, The Turkish Front (London, 2001), though Commandant Larcher, La Guerre turque dans la guerre mondiale (Paris, 1926) still needs to be read. For Germany, G. Hirschfeld (ed.), Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg (Munich, 2003) is useful, and there are summaries of important matters, given that some of the documentation disappeared; see also Holger Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914–1918 (London, 1997).

  I have used these as the basis for my narrative. However, it is now easily possible to supplement the basic accounts with a vast amount of research on the internet. A Google search on any name or topic usually brings remarkable results, the more so as many museums have their own websites. The Imperial War Museum in London is representative, and remarkable (www.iwm.org.uk), but there are many private websites, such as www.worldwar1.com, www.grande-guerre.org, or www.firstworldwar.com, and I have traced many biographies through others, such as www.findagrave.com. There are equivalents in other countries, but the British – or at any rate the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ – are far in the lead.

  As further reading (and sources) in connection with my own chapters, the following (complementary to the works mentioned above) may be cited:

  Chapter 1: the most recent book is David Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the War in 1914? (New York, 2004), with a decent booklist. James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (Longman, 1992) still remains important, and, for the background, so does A. J. P. Taylor: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1954). It was written at a time when the crisis of July 1914 could still be seen as the outcome of a series of diplomatic crises, and these (Morocco etc.) are superbly covered, though Taylor was inclined to see July 1914 as a product of ‘the system’ rather than of plotting in Berlin. Imanuel Geiss, Die Juli-Krise 1914 (2 vols., Munich, 1964), with an abridged English edition, July 1914 (London, 1967) did document the outbreak of the war as a mise-en-scène, and further corroborative evidence, from papers that had escaped destruction, then began to emerge:see Angela Mombauer, Origins of the First World War (Harlow, 2002). Geiss subverted the important myth that Russian mobilization prompted German; see also V. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (Basingstoke, 1995):his advantage is that he understands the dimension of the navy.

  Chapter 2: on the opening round, L. Burchardt, Friedenswirtschaft und Kriegsvorsorge (Boppard, 1968) and L. J. Farrar, The Short-war Illusion (Santa Barbara, 1973) variously discuss this important matter. Winston Churchill’s World Crisis (6 vols., London 1923–31) is wonderfully dramatic on the Marne, and so is John Keegan, The First World War (London 1998). D. E. Showalter, Tannenberg (Hamden, Conn., 1991) deserves mention.

  Chapter 3: Tim Travers, The Killing Ground (Barnsley, 2003) is an important study of the British army’s ‘learning curve’. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London, 1960) is a classic disillusioned account of the ‘New Army’ as it started off in France, and compare Barry Webb, Edmund Blunden (London, 1990) for a more resigned view. Another classic British observer was E. L. Spears, liaison officer with the French (in both world wars), and his life is excellently recorded by Max Egremont, Under Two Flags (London, 1997). For Italian intervention, Indro Montanelli, L’Italia di Giolitti (Rizzoli, 1975) is wonderfully readable and given to the black humour that modern Italy sometimes brings out. On the Dardanelles campaign, Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, Defeat at Gallipoli (London, 2002) and Tim Travers, Gallipoli 1915 (London, 2001) are solid and very fair-minded. On the Armenian issue, Guenter Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey (Utah, 2005) replaces everything, but Franz Werfel’s Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh, originally written in 1932, woodenly translated into English, is a magnificent novel, taking some liberties with the history. Werfel wrote on his title page: nicht gegen Tuerken polemisieren, ‘do not use this against the Turks’. If only. On the blockade, G.-H. Soutou, L’Or et le sang (Paris, 1989) discusses (predatory) Allied economic war aims, and A. Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford, 1989) puts them in an interesting and original perspective. Gerd Hardach, The First World War (London, 1977) came as part of a series of books on economic history and is still the widest survey of a gigantic subject (on the financial aspects of which Niall Ferguson, op. cit., is the best introduction).

  Chapter 4: On Verdun there is a classic:Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory (London, 1978). Holger Afflerbach, Falkenhayn (Munich, 1996) corrects much of the legendry. On the Somme, the latest work is Peter Hart, The Somme (London, 2005). There is still much fighting over British strategy. John Terraine wrote a heroically unfashionable book in 1963, Haig, the Educated Soldier. It was the very moment when Oh ! What a Lovely War, as a sort of musical based on the soldiers’ songs, and then as a a film, appeared in London (and Paris) – the film, and even more the stage version, amounting to genius. Terraine’s defence has probably had the best of things, given the vast difficulties that Haig faced. Lyn Macdonald has done a wonderful job in collecting accounts of life in the trenches in each of the years of the First World War. Her Somme appeared in 1993. On Jutland, Arthur Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era (5 vols., London 1961–70) is the established labo
ur of love.

  Chapter 5: The background to the Central Powers’ peace offer is in Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht, translated (London, 1967)as Germany’s Aims in the First World War. On American intervention Barbara Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram (London, 1966) is a very good introduction (she was the daughter of ambassador Morgenthau in Istanbul). The French disasters of spring 1917 are laid out in G. Pedroncini, Les Mutineries de 1917 (Paris 1967). Prior and Wilson’s Passchendaele: The Untold Story (Yale, 1996) is a model account of a battle on the western front; but Leon Wolff, In Flanders Fields (London, 1958) is devastating; I read it (together with Robert Graves) one Christmas in my teens, and have never forgotten either. There is a large literature on the Italian disaster:two British mountaineers, John and Eileen Wilks, wrote Rommel and Caporetto (Leo Cooper, 2001) with remarkable insight into terrain and sources alike; Mario Isnenghi, I Vinti di Caporetto (Milan, 1967) asked questions about morale, and his Grande Guerra (op cit.) contains a very thorough bibliography. Heinz von Lichem, Krieg in den Alpen, vol. 3 (Augsburg, 1993) is episodic and romantic, but also knows about mountains. On Russia in 1917, we have two very different but immensely thorough books:Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (London, 1999) and Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy (London, 1997). How Lenin arrived at his intuitive judgements is well explained in Robert Service, Lenin (2 vols., Basingstoke, 1991). Russian historians are well represented by Oleg Airapetov, Poslednyaya Voyna Imperatorskoy Rossii (Moscow, 2002) and Generaly, Liberaly i Predprinimately (Moscow, 2003) which acutely examines the divisions at the top in Russia before the Revolution.