The Lost History of 1914

by Jack Beatty

  11 For “invented,” see Lieber (quoting Zuber), “The New History of World War I,” 13. For “There never was,” see Zuber, “The Schlieffen Plan Reconsidered,” 305. On the other hand: “A recent bold claim by Terence Zuber, ‘There never was a “Schlieffen plan,” is interesting but utterly misleading. Not only Schlieffen’s contemporaries, but also the men who implemented the plan in August 1914, had no doubt about the existence and authenticity of a Schlieffen plan.” See Herwig, “Germany and the ‘Short-War’ Illusion,” 683.

  12 For Schlieffen’s daughters, see Terence Zuber, “There Never Was a ‘Schlieffen Plan’: A Reply to Gerhard Gross,” War in History 17, no. 2 (2010): 249.

  13 The discussion of France follows, Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive, 44–106. Also Snyder, “Civil-Military Relations,” 129–37, quotation is from 130.

  14 Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive, 52.

  15 For French military reformers, see Samuel R. Williamson Jr., The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War, 1904–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 114–17, 126.

  16 Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive, 74.

  17 For fraudulent document, see Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive, 53; for 1904, 81.

  18 “Joffre” is from van Evra, “The Cult of the Offensive,” 60. For French casualties, see Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books, 199), 340.

  19 For Knox, see Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive,” 60. “Real gentlemen,” see Gerard J. De Groot, Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War (New York: Longman, 1996), 23. For South African experience as inapplicable to Europe, see T. H. E. Travers, “Technology, Tactics, and Morale: Jean de Bloch, the Boer War, and British Military Theory, 1900–1914,” Journal of Modern History 51, no. 2 (June, 1979): 269

  20 See Stephen Van Evera, “Why Cooperation Failed in 1914,” World Politics 38, no. 1 (October 1985): 84.

  21 London Times, December 2, 1914.

  22 For “Falkenhayn,” see Holger Afflerbach, “Planning Total War? Falkenhayn and the Battle of Verdun, 1916,” in Chickering and Forster, Great War, Total War, 118. For an astringent appraisal of Falkenhayn’s generalship, see B. H. Liddell Hart, Reputations: Ten Years After (Boston: Little, Brown, 1928), 51–69.

  23 For Ninety-ninth Regiment, see Barry Cerf, Alsace-Lorraine Since 1870 (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 101–02. Details on the 380,000 soldiers are from Alan Kramer, “Wackes at War: Alsace-Lorraine and the Failure of German National Mobilization, 1914–1918,” in John Horne, ed., State, Society, and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 105–21.

  24 For “turning point,” see Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 300. Henri Isselin, The Battle of the Marne (New York: Doubleday, 1966); The Memoirs of Marshal Foch (New York: Doubleday, 1931), 178–79.

  25 The Memoirs of Marshal Foch, 178–79.

  26 For “contemporary” estimate of number of shells to kill one German in the section above, see Alex Watson, “Self-Deception and Survival: Coping Strategies on the Western Front, 1914–1918,” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 2 (2006): 264, n. 112.

  27 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France During the First World War (Providence: Berg, 1992), 37–40.

  28 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 101.

  29 For “le cafard,” see Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, viii. For “freezing,” see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 88.

  30 Ernst Jünger, The Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a German Storm-Troop Officer on the Western Front (New York: Fertig, 1996), 81.

  31 For background, see the articles collected in the Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (January 2000): 7–108; Jay Winter, “Shell Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War”; Paul Lerner, “Psychiatry and Casualties of War in Germany, 1914–18”; Marc Roudebush, “A Patient Fights Back: Neurology in the Court of Public Opinion in France during the First World War”; Catherine Merridale, “The Collective Mind: Trauma and Shell-shock in Twentieth-century Russia”; Joanna Bourke, “Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of ‘Shell-shocked’ Men in Great Britain and Ireland, 1914–39”; Annette Becker, “The Avant-garde, Madness, and the Great War”; Eric Leed, “Fateful Memories: Industrialized War and Traumatic Neuroses”; George L. Mosse, “Shell-shock as a Social Disease.”

  32 For American correspondent (James Gordon Bennett), see the New York Times, December 16, 1914. For “British soldier,” letter excerpted in the London Times, December 12, 1914. Jünger is from Joe Lunn, “Male Identity and Martial Codes of Honor: A Comparison of the War Memoirs of Robert Graves, Ernst Jünger, and Kande Kamara,” Journal of Military History 69, no. 3 (July 2005): 723.

  33 George Bertrand and Oscar N. Solbert, Tactics and Duties for Trench Fighting (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1918), 6, 228.

  34 Ulrich Trumpener, “The Road to Ypres: The Beginnings of Gas Warfare in World War I,” Journal of Modern History 47, no. 3 (September 1975): 460–80. For “strongest factor promoting stasis,” see 102. Also see Ludwig F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. 98, 103, 109, 258.

  35 “Turning point” and “tank fright” seen in Patrick Wright, Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (New York: Viking, 2002), 109. For Amiens, see Tim Travers, How the War Was Won: Factors That Led to Victory in World War One (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword, 2005), 118–19.

  36 Henri Barbusse, Under Fire (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 223. For German casualties, see Travers, How the War Was Won, 108.

  37 For comparison of German casualties in February and March 1918, see Richard Bessel, Germany After the Great War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6, n. 24.

  38 Tank details seen in Ian F. Beckett, The Great War 1914–1918 (New York: Pearson, 2001), 178. Also the point about tanks not being able to break through the German lines.

  39 See Stanley Weintraub, Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (New York: Plume Books, 2002). See also Alan Cleaver and Lesley Park, eds., Not a Shot Was Fired: Letters from the Christmas Truce of 1914 (London: Operation Plum Puddings, 2006).

  40 YOU NO FIGHT, Weintraub, Silent Night, 25. Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), esp. 118, 141, 186, 199, 209, 69. For “Blangy,” see Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (New York: Penguin, 1985), 213.

  41 See Alexander H. Montgomery, “Cooperation Under Fire: Institutional and Cultural Dynamics During War,” paper presented at the Forty-second Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, March 24–27, 2002. Available at ahm@stanford.edu.

  42 See Ashworth, Trench Warfare, 210; for grenades, 69.

  43 For “prisoner killing,” see Brian Dollery and Craig R. Parsons, “Prisoner Killing: A Comment on Ferguson’s Political Economy Approach,” War in History 14, no. 4 (2007): 499–512. The practice was widespread. A French soldier at the Dardanelles testified: “Our men respect neither white flags, nor raised hands, nor surrender; they take no prisoners but kill them out of hand, they finish off the wounded, in short they do what the Turks will not do to us.” Seen in Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 46. A German officer wrote home: “We reserve our greatest hatred, just like you at home, for the lying English … As an officer I protect every prisoner. But woe to any Englishman who falls into the hands of the men.” Seen in Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 64. For average deaths per day, see Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 22. For Hess, see David Stevens
on, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 464.

  44 For Clemenceau, see Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 14–18, 228. Also Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 172.

  45 H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees It Through (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 386.

  46 See Alistair Horne, To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (New York: Penguin, 1979), 647–48.

  NOTES FOR CHAPTER 8

  1 Details from Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918 (New York: Polity Press, 1988), 514–15.

  2 For “business as usual,” see Gerard J. De Groot, Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War (New York: Longman, 1996), 54. The Evening News quote seen in the London Times, September 3, 1914. For women who tried to volunteer, see De Groot, 67–69.

  3 For “khaki fever” and vicars in puttees, see Angela Woollacott, “ ‘Khaki Fever’ and Its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 2 (April 1994), 325–47.

  4 See Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London: Bodley Head, 1965), 89.

  5 London Times, December 8, 10, 5, 1, 1914. For “Tablets of Honor,” see Alice Goldfarb Marquis, “Words as Weapons: Propaganda in Britain and Germany during the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 13, no. 3 (July 1978): 477.

  6 Marquis, “Words as Weapons,” 477–78. For “Daily Prevaricator,” see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford, 2000), 65.

  7 For “leaving out the horrors,” see De Groot, Blighty, 186. For “Montague,” see Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 99. Writing in the 1920s, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus regretted that “My proposal to round up the war writers once peace was declared and have them flogged in front of the war invalids has not been realized.” See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918 (New York: Berg, 1985), 215.

  8 Knightley, The First Casualty, 110.

  9 Ibid., 98, 100.

  10 Marquis, “Words as Weapons,” 488. De Groot, Blighty, 186.

  11 For “Keegan,” see Fussell, The Great War, 339. “There is no more discreditable period in the history of journalism than the four years of the Great War,” a postwar commentator maintained. Conscious of the media’s role in abetting the 2003 invasion of Iraq, many Americans might disagree. Censorship today masquerades as good taste. In 2009 the Pentagon required photojournalists to obtain the permission of the family before printing a photograph of a dead soldier or marine. Philip Gibbs wrote under the same inhibition in 1915. Suppressing the “horrors … inevitable in such fighting,” Gibbs recognized, encourages a “moral cowardice which makes many people shut their eyes to the shambles, comforting their soul with fine phrases about the beauty of sacrifice.” For the Pentagon policy, see Katherine Q. Seeyle, “Gates Assails News Agency for Publishing Photo of Marine Killed in Afghanistan,” the New York Times, September 5, 2009.

  12 For “the image of war,” see John Turner, ed., Britain and the First World War (London: Unwin, 1988), Intro., 4. Fussell, The Great War, 21–22.

  13 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner, 1957), 191.

  14 Fussell, The Great War, 86.

  15 For “Frederick,” see Alistair Horne, To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (New York: Penguin, 1979), 172. For Magdeburg, see R. V. Jones, “Alfred Ewing and ‘Room 40,’ ” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 34, no. 1 (July 1979): 65–90.

  16 For Churchill, see Arthur J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904–1919, vol. 11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 138.

  17 Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, 135–42.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Ibid., 135, 137.

  20 See the London Times, December 17–21, 1914.

  21 Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, 147.

  22 Seen in Jones, “Alfred Ewing and ‘Room 40,’ ” 74.

  23 For “Massingham,” see George H. Cassar, Asquith as War Leader (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), 31.

  24 For “British phlegm,” see Fussell, The Great War, 181. For postwar critic, see Cameron Hazlehurst, “Asquith as Prime Minister, 1908–1916,” English Historical Review 85, no. 336 (July 1970), 516. For Asquith’s “day,” see Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 411. For “cistern,” see J. M. McEwen, “The Press and the Fall of Asquith,” Historical Journal 21, no. 4 (December 1978): 871.

  25 Martin Gilbert, ed., Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume III, part 1, July 1914–April 1915 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 76, n. 3.

  26 For Diary, see Raymond Poincaré, The Memoirs of Raymond Poincaré, 1914 (New York: Heinemann, 1928), 122. For “bridge game,” George H. Cassar, The Tragedy of Sir John French (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 134. For “postmidnight,” see Gilbert, Companion Volume III, 76. For “Churchill,” see Hazlehurst, “Asquith as Prime Minister,” 508. For Asquith’s speech, see Cassar, Asquith as War Leader, 48.

  27 Cassar, Asquith as War Leader.

  28 For “irredeemably associated,” see Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 200. For Asquith’s responsibility, see Cassar, Asquith as War Leader, 62.

  29 For Violet Asquith’s friend, Colin Clifford, The Asquiths (London: John Murray, 2002), 133. For Official Secrets Act, see Cassar, Asquith as War Leader, 35. For “homing pigeons,” see Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 153. For Audacious, see Gilbert, Companion Volume III, 222, 297. For “top secret,” see Gilbert, 332. Churchill’s Admiralty memorandum of February 3, 1915, seen in Gilbert, 481–82.

  30 For “I love you,” see Clifford, The Asquiths, 266. For numbers of letters written in August 1914, see Roy Jenkins, Asquith (London: Collins, 1964), 346. For “jealousy,” see Gilbert, Companion Volume III, 494. For “crockery,” see Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 110; for “Christmas Eve,” see Wilson, 110. For “barbed wire,” see Gilbert, 345.

  31 For “Grand Duke,” see Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1915 (London: Butterworth, 1923), 93. For “searching for Gallipoli,” see Gilbert, Companion Volume III, 558.

  32 For “Danube,” see Gilbert, Companion Volume III, 558.

  33 For “this city must be yours,” ibid., 622, n. 1. For Grey-Sazonov, see C. Jay Smith, “Great Britain and the 1914–1915 Straits Agreement with Russia: The British Promise of November 1914,” American Historical Review 70, no. 4 (July 1965), 1021–22, also 1033–34. For “refusing Greek help,” see David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (New York: Holt, 2009), 128.

  34 For “what do you think,” see Gilbert, Companion Volume III, 251. For “carcase of the Turk,” see Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 119.

  35 For Kitchener, see Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 108. For “historian,” see Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 37.

  36 Gilbert, Companion Volume III, 554–55.

  37 For “three million,” see De Groot, Blighty, 43. For Daily Mail, see De Groot, 186, 78. For “stock exchange,” see Marquis, Words as Weapons, 493.

  38 For “Admiralty study,” see Cassar, Asquith as War Leader, 62. For Nelson, see Richard Hough, The Great War at Sea, 1914–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 149. For “Churchill,” see Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York: Penguin, 2005), 116–17. For “35 forts,” see document in Gilbert, Companion Volume III, 511. For number of guns, see Edward J. Erickson, “Strength Against Weakness: Ottoman Military Effectiveness at Gallipoli, 1915,” Journal of Military History 65, no. 4 (October 2001): 992. For “the idea caught on,” see Martin Gilbert, The Challenge of War: Winston S. Churchill, 1914–1916 (London: Minerva, 1990), 252. For flair, see Winston S. Churchill, Great Contemporaries (New York: Putnam’s, 1937), 65.

  39 For details of battle and “before a gun had been fired,” see Hough, The Great War at Sea, 159; for De Robeck, see Gilbert, The Chal
lenge of War, 375. For Kitchener, see Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 113–15. While Kitchener’s quotation is from a War Council meeting of February 24, before the failure of the battleship attack of March 18, it gives his rationale for sending troops at the March 23 meeting of the council.

  40 For “Austria’s Skoda works,” see Hough, The Great War at Sea, 161. For “Liman von Sanders,” see Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 132, n. 1. For “the First World War’s,” see Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, 2001), 261. For “worthless fighting man” and “foundation myth,” see Wilson, 135. For Kemal and legend, see Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 187.

  41 For “Australian colonel,” see Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War, 138. For “How lucky,” see ibid., 130.

  42 For “We are now,” see Gilbert, Companion Volume III, 412.

  43 For the Morning Post, see Gilbert, Companion Volume III, 809.

  44 For “maximum of fun,” see Naomi B. Levine, Politics, Religion and Love: The Story of H. H. Asquith, Venetia Stanley and Edwin Montagu (New York: NYU Press, 1991), 201. For “crushing and frightening,” see Jenkins, Asquith, 366. For “I thought once or twice,” see Jenkins, 363. For “soul of my life,” see Gilbert, The Challenge of War, 447. For “O, how I pant,” see Levine, Politics, Religion and Love, 198, “8000 pounds,” 315.

  45 For “repugnant and repulsive,” see Levine, Politics, Religion and Love, 306. “Most Loved,” 295.

  46 For Lloyd George, see Gilbert, The Challenge of War, 446, and Peter Fraser, “Lord Beaverbrook’s Fabrications in Politicians and the War, 1914–1916,” Historical Journal 25, no. 1 (March 1982): 156.

  47 For Churchill on being “finished,” see Jenkins, Churchill. For his “torment,” see Gilbert, The Challenge of War, 447. In Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), Churchill wrote, “I was ruined for the time being in 1915 over the Dardanelles and a supreme enterprise cast away, through my trying to carry out a major and cardinal operation of war from a subordinate position. Men are ill advised to try such ventures.” Seen in Raymond Callahan, “What About the Dardanelles?” American Historical Review 78, no. 3 (June 1973): 647.