by Jack Beatty
Soon a looted ham thrilled us more than the fall of Bucharest.40
Soldiers returning from home with tales of privation undermined morale at the front. Confronted by their families’ piteous struggle, more and more men overstayed their leaves or deserted outright, “and the front lines became thinner,” General Ludendorff reported. Perhaps 10 percent of troops being transported from the eastern to the western front in late 1917 simply jumped off their trains. The army’s medical service, overwhelmed, was widely exploited. “In one transport of the wounded,” a 1918 army investigation found, “of 594 men only 217 could be described as ill.” In the ultimate comment on conditions at home, some soldiers on leave or recovering from wounds found themselves “anxious to return to the battlefield.”*41
“It will be long before this nation will be in any condition to be regarded again as a menace to the peace of Europe,” ventured the author of the 1920 Royal Statistical Society paper on hungry Germany. The Weekly Dispatch for September 8, 1918, imagined “the Huns of 1940” as a “physically inferior race.”42
Resentment over the “diktat” of the Versailles Treaty went far to confound that prediction. Even more embittering than the treaty, however, was the Allies’ post-Armistice decision not only to continue the blockade but also to extend it to the Baltic. Intended to pressure the German delegates to the Peace Conference to sign the treaty no matter how punishing its terms, this ploy in the politics of starvation succeeded all too well.
The damnable part was that Germany possessed the gold reserves to buy food from abroad. But Premier Georges Clemenceau, who with the other members of the Big Three, Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson, framed the treaty, would not hear of it. He claimed the gold for France as a down payment on German war reparations.
It was time for what John Maynard Keynes called “the only man who emerged from the ordeal of [Versailles] with an enhanced reputation … [a] complex personality with his habitual air of weary Titan (or, as others might put it, exhausted prizefighter)”—it was time for Herbert Hoover to act.
Bearing on his conscience reports of German children with “huge rickety foreheads, their small arms just skin and bones, and above the crooked legs with their dislocated joints, the swollen, pointed stomachs of hunger edema,” Hoover intervened with Lloyd George. At a meeting of the Supreme Council the prime minister shamed the French into yielding on the gold by waving a possibly inspired telegram from a British general in Germany complaining that his men were growing mutinous from seeing starving children in the streets. But the damage was done and it was incalculable. Nothing so tore the mask of righteousness off the face of the Allies as the months of suffering inflicted on the German people between the Armistice on November 11, 1918, and the signing of the treaty on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand—“suffering … greater under the continued blockade than prior to the Armistice.” And nothing so tainted German democracy in German hearts as their new government’s unavailing protests to the victors while hunger “intensified into famine.”43
This 1919 cartoon from Simplicissimus is a comment on the post-Armistice starvation blockade of Germany, a consequential blunder on the part of the Allies. Clemenceau (hands in pocket) is recognizable on the right.
The Allies would not have won the war without starving the German people—so British statesmen and navalists believed. Historians tend to agree. The metaphor adopted by one of them expresses a scholarly consensus: Germany was crushed between the “hammer” of the Allied armies in France and the “anvil” of the blockade at home. But victory through hunger, followed by peace through vengeance, came at a terrible price. The children on the anvil constituted the core of the Nazi Party. In the crucial 1932 elections, in a multiparty field, Germans aged eighteen to thirty gave the NSDP 42 percent of their vote. “National Socialism is the organized will of youth,” went a party slogan.44
Hunger drew the war generation to the Nazis rather than, say, to the Social Democrats, less than 8 percent of whose members were under twenty-five. In 1934, a Columbia University sociologist, Theodore Abel, offered cash prizes for “the best personal life history of an adherent of the Hitler movement.” The NSDP publicized the project in its local headquarters. Abel received nearly six hundred essays. Peter Loewenberg summarized the findings in a 1971 paper, “The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort”: “The most striking emotional affect expressed in the Abel autobiographies are the adult memories of intense hunger and privation from childhood.” As one man recalled, “We were hungry all the time; we had forgotten how it felt to have our stomachs full.”
“Their earliest memories are of their mother crying a great deal and of all the people wearing black,” Loewenberg writes of two sisters whose father was killed in 1915. People wore black for fathers killed at the front and children starved at home: Mortality among one- to five-year olds was 50 percent greater in 1917 than in 1913 and 75 percent greater for those five to fifteen. With fathers at the war, mothers in the field or factory, siblings dead or dying, “All family life was at an end,” an essayist lamented.45
Hitler was for many an idealized father figure—after the sisters mentioned above saw him speak at a Kassel rally in 1931 they “were so exhilarated that neither of them could sleep all night … and prayed for the protection of the Führer.” For others the Nazi Party was a substitute family. “It was wonderful to belong to the bond of comradeship of the SA,” wrote a man who lost his father during the war. The Depression reactivated the ravening insecurity of childhood on the anvil and its legacy of unacceptable feeling—anger at missing fathers, attraction to seductive mothers, shame over the antisocial makeshifts survival forced on families. Needing to project these emotions onto the “other,” the children of hunger attached themselves to a movement that invited the violent acting out of forbidden impulses while promising to restore the security and warmth torn from them during the war. Seeking release from childhood, Loewenberg concludes, “What they recreated was a repetition of … [it]. They gave to their children and to Europe in greater measure precisely the traumas they had suffered as children and adolescents a quarter of a century earlier.”46
“Germany’s Children Are Starving!” by Käthe Kollwitz
AN INJURY TO CIVILIZATION
The war against armed imperialism is over.
—Woodrow Wilson, November 11, 1918
The war had barely begun when Woodrow Wilson volunteered the good offices of the United States to end it.* Expecting France to lose the battle of the Marne, then raging, the American ambassador in Berlin, James W. Gerard, secretly proffered generous terms to the Germans: They could demand indemnities and colonies from France—so long as they agreed to restore the territorial status quo ante in Europe. Deputy Foreign Minister Zimmermann rejected the president’s mediation: “A treaty on the pattern offered here” was not acceptable. Germany wanted more than money and Morocco, as a document drawn up for the German chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, that same day, September 9, reveals.1
The so-called September Program, reflecting the appetites of the industrial interests identified with the names Thyssen, Hugenberg, and Krupp, laid down the war aims pursued by Germany until October 1918. “The general aim of the war [is] security for the German Reich in west and east for all imaginable time,” the document noted with the same pre-Marne megalomania in which the army struck a medal commemorating the entry of German troops into Paris. Belgium “must be reduced to a vassal state” and France’s “revival as a great power made impossible for all time.” France must also give up its ore fields, and pay an indemnity so crushing as to rule out an armaments buildup. Bethmann was being moderate, having rejected the kaiser’s “bizarre idea” to render areas of Belgium and France “free of human beings,” or at least Belgian and French ones; “deserving [German] NCO’s and men” would settle the vacated territory. A German-dictated peace would see the creation of a “central European economic association … under German leadership.”
“Mitteleuropa, politically and economically our world-historical task,” would encompass Europe “from the Pyrenees to Memel, from the Black Sea to the North Sea, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic … in a single customs unit [to match] the over-mighty productive resources” of the United States. In the east, Bethmann beat back Pan-German demands to annex St. Petersburg. It would be enough for Russia to surrender Poland, Lithuania, Courland, Livonia, Estonia, and the Ukraine.2
The prospect of victory on the Marne prompted Bethmann to formulate Germany’s war aims. Their victory on the Marne stirred the Allies to propound their own September Program. Meeting in Petersburg on September 13–14, the French agreed to support Russia’s annexation of the Straits and a chunk of eastern Poland in return for Russia’s support not only for the return of Alsace-Lorraine but for France’s annexation of “as much of Rhenish Prussia and the Palatinate as she wished.”3
“It is no lust of conquest that inspires us,” the kaiser promised the Reichstag on August 4 as the war began. Lust took a month. Death excused it. Germany required a peace, Bethmann wrote to the kaiser, “which is felt by the German people to recompense it in full for the enormous sacrifices which it has made.” The deaths of thousands justified the deaths of millions. The argument from “in vain” masked Germany’s designs on Lithuania, Russia’s on Constantinople, Britain’s on the Middle East, and France’s on the Rhineland.4
By November 1914, General von Falkenhayn had seen enough of trench warfare to conclude that Germany could not win a two-front war. “So long as Russia, France and Britain held together, it would be impossible to defeat our enemies decisively enough to get a decent peace,” he informed Bethmann. “Either Russia or France must be chiseled off.” Falkenhayn urged Russia. The tsar’s mother belonged to the Danish royal family, and in December, through Copenhagen, Bethmann sounded out the Russians. “The Tsar and Sazonov [are] confident of victory,” Bethmann’s Danish contacts reported.5
Still, Nicholas remained vulnerable to his manners: “He will not refuse to discuss a settlement through the king of Denmark.” Further soundings convinced Bethmann that a separate peace was not in the cards. The Russians were too afraid of revolution to risk bringing the army home from the front, where relief was anticipated in a supply crisis (predicted by Peter Durnovo) that saw living soldiers taking their rifles off dead ones and units without rifles fighting with clubs. “Ruling circles in Petersburg hope that the Straits will soon be opened and that they will receive all necessary material by this route,” he wrote to Falkenhayn. That deliverance depended on the British attack on the Dardanelles succeeding.6
Such illusory hopes sustained the war. Gas would bring victory. Submarines would. Tanks would. Nothing did. “Some way there must be out of this bloody entanglement that was yielding victory to neither side … Every day came the papers with the balanced story of battles, losses, destructions, ships sunk, towns smashed. And never a decision, never a sign of a decision,” H. G. Well’s Mr. Britling reflects. Writing on the war’s ninetieth anniversary, a contemporary historian echoes Wells in 1917: “A war that was supposed to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, had a middle and a middle, and then another middle, and then another year and another battle and another last push, and a middle that went on and on.”7
Duration mattered in this war, and not just because the longer it went on, the more men died. Consider if it had ended early in 1917. “There would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany,” Winston Churchill told an American journalist in 1936. But U.S. entry into the war renewed the lust for conquest (and revenge) on the Allied side, while Russia’s withdrawal from it after the Bolshevik revolution in October similarly inflamed the Germans.8
“Europe 1916” by Boardman Robinson
Nineteen seventeen brought the hard men to power—Lloyd George in Britain, Clemenceau in France, Hindenburg and Ludendorff in Germany, Alexander Kerenksy in Russia. The provisional government installed by the February revolution that toppled Nicholas II had since fallen under the sway of Kerensky, the charismatic war minister who imitated Napoleon to the point of tucking his right arm into his tunic; and in June, overruling his generals, Kerensky unleashed an abortive offensive against the German lines. Desertions exceed the nearly four hundred thousand casualties, “trench Bolshevism” spread among the soldiers who stayed with their units, and millions of square miles were lost to the counterattacking Germans.9
Before U.S. belligerency consigned peace to the lost history of 1917, there were two scenarios for ending the war. One was Lloyd George’s “fight to the finish” won by “a knockout.” In a January speech to Congress, Woodrow Wilson predicted that such a victor’s peace “would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.” Wilson’s alternative was “peace without victory.” Their armies deadlocked and their regimes shaking above the earthquake of war, the combatant nations, he believed, must soon turn to the still-neutral United States to broker a compromise peace.10
But peace without victory also would have rested upon quicksand—of power not resentment. With the German army unbroken and Germany still under authoritarian rule, the war’s roots remained intact. After the United States joined the Allies, the president himself recognized this, blaming the conflict on “Prussian militarism” and embracing as one of its goals the liberation of the German people from the “military clique in Berlin.” Under Wilson’s peace, a war to realize the territorial ambitions of the September Program and end Germany’s vulnerability to a starvation blockade might have broken out even sooner than in 1939. As it was, the armistice came before the war and the November 1918 revolution that brought the socialists briefly to power had completed the destruction of the old order in Germany. This was notably preserved in the civil service and the judiciary, which were not purged of personnel appointed under the monarchy; in the schools, which as before the war trained German youth to despise democracy; in the universities, where the professoriate remained “inveterate supporters of a dead past”; and, above all, in a Prussian officer corps that blamed the Diktat of Versailles on the civilian government, “barely tolerated” the republic, and hankered for a restoration of authoritarian rule.11
If in the fall of 1918 the Allies had spurned German peace overtures, continued their offensive, and occupied Germany, they might have achieved a victory on the 1945 model. But that would have taken harder men, a longer war, and many more casualties. The Allied publics would not have stood for a real “knockout” blow. So World War I ground on to its inconclusive end on November 11, 1918, in the railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne, having by then inflicted what Woodrow Wilson saw would be “an injury … to civilization … which can never be atoned for or repaired.”12
* “If I had been President,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote to the British ambassador to the United States, Cecil Spring-Rice, on October 3, 1914, “I should have acted on the thirtieth or thirty-first of July, as head of a signatory power of the Hague treaties, calling attention to the guaranty of Belgium’s neutrality and saying that I accepted the treaties as imposing a serious obligation which I expected not only the United States but all other neutral nations to join in enforcing.” Simeon Strunsky, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Prelude to 1914,” Foreign Affairs 4, no. 1 (October 1925): 151. “Some support for Roosevelt’s argument came from Russia, which replied to Wilson’s August 4 offer of good services that the offer came ‘too late’ and ‘should have been made earlier.’ ” Kendrick A. Clements, “Woodrow Wilson and World War I,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1 (March 2004): 71, n 36.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have first to thank four fine writers and an outstanding editor for improving, aggregately, nearly every page of this book.
My friends William Craig, author of Yankee Come Home: On the Road from San Juan
Hill to Guantánamo, to be published in 2012 by Bloomsbury; Douglas Bauer, an accomplished novelist and essayist, as well as a gifted editor; and Rachel Shteir, author most recently of The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting, identified lapses of style, organization, and thinking in several chapters. My son, Aaron, film critic for the Connecticut Valley Spectator from 2004 to 2009, rewrote much of the Russia chapter, showing me by example that long sentences can be broken into shorter ones without slowing the pace of paragraphs.
George Gibson, the publisher of Walker & Company and editor of The Lost History of 1914, suggested many changes in wording and refinements in logic to which I could only respond, “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?” Further, George persuaded me to make the separate chapters speak to one another, stitching up the book from the inside, to paraphrase E. M. Forster, with recurring images and parallel dilemmas and cameo appearances of characters met earlier. Thanks to my longtime and much-respected agent Rafe Sagalyn for putting my work in George’s hands. George’s assistant, Lea Beresford, not only secured permission for the illustrations (a time-consuming job), but suggested replacements when the ones desired were not available. I am very grateful to her. Also to Laura Phillips, the production editor who saw the manuscript into print with great care and much-appreciated tolerance for my incessant changes.
Two distinguished historians generously vetted the Russia and Germany chapters. Patricia Herlihy, author of a fascinating work of social history, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia, that I relied on in chapter 2, offered informed criticism mixed with selective but welcome endorsement of my general picture of Russia on the eve of war. James Sheehan, a professor of German history at Stanford, took the risk of saying just what he thought of the school of history that I had uncritically regurgitated in an early draft of chapter 1. Though it sacrificed months of work, I cut the discussion he prompted me to think through. The Dartmouth political scientist Richard Ned Lebow, a prodigious scholar in the field of security studies, shared his wisdom with me in conversation and in books and papers that I drew on throughout.
