Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  The BEF now deployed 270,000 soldiers, organised as a cavalry corps under Allenby and two armies, one commanded by Haig, the other by Smith-Dorrien. Since August it had lost 16,200 officers and men killed, 47,707 wounded, 16,746 missing or taken prisoner. Forty-seven heirs to noble titles had perished, many of them among 150 dead Old Etonians, 15 per cent of the school’s final wartime loss. These casualty figures seemed terrible enough to the British people, but remained small by comparison with those of the other belligerents, reflecting the country’s relatively modest 1914 contribution to the war. Later, of course, everything changed: by the time of the armistice, and as a consequence of conscription, almost six million men – a quarter of Britain’s adult male population – had passed through the ranks of the army, and about one in eight had perished.

  On 20 December Sir John French paid a brief visit to Walmer, on the Kent coast, to meet Asquith and Kitchener. The prime minister and his cabinet colleagues found it irksome to be obliged so largely to entrust the courses of the government and the fortunes of the nation to its generals, alien beings, but who else was there with any understanding of military affairs? Asquith was also increasingly exasperated by the public indiscretions of senior officers, optimists and doomsayers alike. He wrote: ‘The authorities should … clap a padlock on the tongues of all fighting men – whether Generals or Admirals.’

  Kitchener was incorrigibly remote from his fellow men, and few found his company congenial: young Cyril Asquith contemplated the field-marshal’s ruddy, densely-veined features, and observed with disdain that ‘his cheeks resemble a map of the Polish railway system’. However, the victor of Omdurman, though a limited human being who had once proposed to dispatch the skull of the long-dead Dervish leader the Mahdi from Khartoum to London for public exhibition, was no fool – and a great deal more sensible than the BEF’s commander-in-chief. Cyril Asquith’s sister Violet, who was also staying at Walmer, told her friend Rupert Brooke that Sir John French was ‘amazingly optimistic about things, much more so than either Father or K[itchener]. [The C-in-C] detected great signs of “strain” in the Germans – says he has taken practically nothing but professors prisoners for the last 3 weeks! … He thought it quite on the cards a sudden collapse might take place & the whole thing might be over in April or May without anyone getting anywhere sensational – like Berlin!’

  Here was further evidence of French’s threadbare judgement, founded in a conviction that the spring offensives planned by the Western allies could yield a decisive outcome. It was astonishing that the BEF’s commander had not been sacked for his deplorable conduct since August, especially before and during the Marne battle. He wrote in November about France’s commanders in unpardonable terms for an allied C-in-C in the field: ‘au fond they are a low lot, and one always has to remember the class these French generals mostly come from’. But he kept his job because the government was confused about how to fight the war. Many of its members, including Churchill, still harboured delusions that Sir John was a competent commander, let down by pusillanimous allies. Even Kitchener had felt compelled to praise French to the House of Lords in September for displaying leadership, ‘calm courage’ and ‘consummate skill’, a travesty of the truth. Sir John’s egregious misconduct – for his tenure of command in 1914 amounted to nothing less – did not alter the course of history, because forces far larger than the BEF determined outcomes. But his continuance as C-in-C through 1915 was a misfortune for those whom he led. His successor Haig, unsympathetic human being though he appears to modern generations, and by no means one of history’s great commanders, was an abler manager of armies.

  Asquith himself inclined towards optimism, inspired more by events on the Eastern than the Western Front. He confided to Venetia Stanley after the Walmer weekend: ‘There seems to be some solid reason for thinking that Austria wd. like to make peace on her own account.’ His mind sometimes wandered strangely. He told Stanley that one winter night he dreamed he had been supplanted at Downing Street by Herbert Samuel, about whom he quoted Prince Hal: ‘A Jew, an ’Ebrew Jew!’ Lacking energy and instincts for warmaking, Asquith nonetheless clung to office until December 1916. An apologist might best say that the French, Russian, German, Austrian and Italian governments displayed no greater wisdom than Britain’s Liberal administration during the first years of the conflict.

  Elsewhere in the cabinet, Churchill displayed unflagging enthusiasm for the fray, but now feared a stalemate on the Western Front which would leave millions of fighting men ‘chewing barbed wire’. The prime minister wrote on 5 December: ‘[Winston’s] volatile mind is at present set on Turkey & Bulgaria, & he wants to organise a heroic adventure against Gallipoli and the Dardanelles: to wh[ich] I am altogether opposed.’ Churchill himself was increasingly bored and frustrated by his role at the Admiralty, and yearned for a military command. He argued after the war that it was a great mistake no Anglo-French strategy conference was held in the winter of 1914, and was probably right. Inter-allied cooperation was organised piecemeal, with initial emphasis more on how to fund the war than on how to fight it. Britain’s allies took the view that, since its manpower contribution was relatively small, it could at least pay a lion’s share of the bills – as indeed it did, especially through loans to France. Meanwhile, however, nothing was done to resolve the serious problems created by divided command in France. Only in the desperate circumstances of the March 1918 German offensive did the British do what they should have done forty-four months earlier, placing their armies under a French supreme commander, Foch.

  Britain’s most brilliant orator and most popular Liberal politician shared Churchill’s belief that the Western Front was stalemated. Lloyd George already harboured a private scepticism about allied generalship which would mature into contempt, writing to Asquith: ‘I am uneasy about the prospects of the War unless the Government takes some decisive measures to grip the situation. I can see no signs anywhere that our military leaders and guides are considering any plans for extricating us from our present unsatisfactory position. Had I not been a witness of their deplorable lack of prevision I should not have thought it possible that men so responsibly placed could have so little forethought.’

  The Chancellor favoured opening a Balkan front: contributing men and resources to support operations by the Serbs, Greeks and Romanians, and seeking to strike at the Turks through Syria. His view that a more imaginative military leadership could have found a way to avoid heavy casualties and achieve an early victory over the Central Powers was almost certainly mistaken, but he passionately adhered to it for the rest of his life. Churchill in lesser measure shared his opinion, writing after the war: ‘Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.’ He himself retained into the Second World War a delusion that if sufficiently ingenious military means were employed, victory might be secured at modest cost. But in twentieth-century conflicts between powerful industrial states, he was wrong.

  In The General, C.S. Forester’s brilliantly contemptuous 1936 portrait of a British wartime officer, the novelist likened the commanders of World War I to savages, striving to extract a screw from a piece of timber by main force, assisted by ever more fulcrums and levers. It was such a pity, wrote Forester, that they failed to grasp the fact that had they instead twisted the screw, it might have been withdrawn with a fraction of the effort. This view of wartime generalship, which was essentially also that of Churchill and Lloyd George, has commanded widespread favour ever since. But what if, as most scholars of the conflict today believe, it was impossible to ‘turn the screw’, to identify any credible means for breaking the stalemate?

  The attempt to defeat Turkey through an assault on the Dardanelles was probably a chimera, with little prospect of achieving its objectives even had the Gallipoli campaign been better conducted. Britain certainly had to engage the Turks to protect its vital imperial interests, for instance on the Suez Canal, but it is very q
uestionable that the 1915 allied operations could have contrived a Turkish surrender, even had they secured the gateway to the Black Sea. Russia would have benefited importantly from freedom to ship exports abroad, especially grain. But it remains implausible that the Tsarist regime could have been saved, the war won on the Eastern Front, by dispatching arms through the Straits. Russia’s institutional military incompetence represented a huge handicap. Moreover, in 1915–16 the Western allies were chronically short of munitions to supply their own armies, far less to re-equip Russia’s forces on a scale sufficient to alter history, though some powerful voices in London favoured allowing Russian soldiers to fight with British-made arms, as a cynical alternative to the enlargement of the British Army on the Western Front and consequent ‘butcher’s bill’. Anglo-French operations against Turkey, and the subsequent pillage of the defeated Ottoman Empire, exerted a profound influence on the destinies of the Middle East, but very little upon the outcome of the conflict.

  The Western Front was the cockpit of the war, and in such clashes as those of 1914–18, it was almost inevitable that a vast amount of dying had to be done before a decisive outcome became attainable. The same was true in 1939–45: much-diminished Western allied losses reflected not better leadership than that of the earlier conflict, but the fact that the second time around, the Russians bore the overwhelming burden of necessary sacrifice. On the only occasion that a large Anglo-American army went head to head with the Wehrmacht on a limited front, in Normandy in 1944, some infantry rates of loss were briefly comparable with those of 1916, until the German line was broken and Eisenhower’s armies could exploit their terrific mobile capability, such as did not exist in World War I.

  Among the commanders of 1914, Joffre, especially, merits extreme censure for his Plan XVII assaults. But had France’s C-in-C lacked his elephantine stubbornness – or strength of purpose, if you will – the subsequent successful Marne counter-offensive would not have taken place. In the winter of 1914, following his supremely important triumph in the battle of wills with Moltke outside Paris, Joffre’s standing as director of France’s war effort was unchallenged. Ypres, in October, showed that Falkenhayn had no more successful formula than his allied counterparts for conducting attacks. Germany’s army was institutionally superior to those of its enemies, but none of the Kaiser’s generals displayed genius: even Ludendorff, a master tactician, proved a dismal strategist.

  Allied commanders from September 1914 onwards laboured under the fundamental handicap that in order to regain occupied Belgium and eastern France they were obliged to attack, while the Germans could exercise at will their privilege of adopting the defensive, yielding ground when it seemed advantageous to do so. Winning Britain’s share of the war on the battlefield became in 1916–18 the responsibility of Sir Douglas Haig, who succeeded Sir John French as commander-in-chief. Haig’s thinking was powerfully influenced by his experience at Ypres in October 1914. Recalling how close the Germans had come to breaking through, he deduced that determination and persistence – superiority of will – could yield decisive results to an attacker who displayed such qualities. But at no time before 1918 does it today seem plausible that any of the rival successive offensives on the Western Front could have proved a war-winner. Only with the exhaustion of Germany, American entry into the war and a remarkable improvement in the operational methods of the British Army – for which Haig can claim significant credit – did victory become attainable.

  There was never a credible shortcut. As George Orwell wisely observed a generation later, the only way swiftly to end a war is to lose it. The Western Front’s generals’ reputations would stand higher today had they exercised greater economy with lives and less conspicuous callousness about the loss of them, but it is hard to see how they could have broken the stalemate. Until 1918, the fundamental options before the Western allies were those of acquiescing in German hegemony on the continent, or of continuing to bear the ghastly cost of resisting this. It was, and remains, a huge delusion to suppose that a third path existed.

  France would pay dearly for becoming the foremost theatre of war. The nation eventually mobilised the largest number of soldiers of any belligerent – eight million – and suffered the most grievous proportionate losses of all the great powers – 1.3 million dead from metropolitan France, or 16.5 per cent of those conscripted. By comparison, Germany lost 15.4 per cent, Britain 12.5 per cent, Austria-Hungary 12.2 per cent, Russia 11.5 per cent and Italy 10.3 per cent. French deaths amounted to 3.4 per cent of its entire population, a proportion exceeded only by Serbia and Turkey – the latter’s toll was inflated by the self-inflicted horror of more than a million Armenians massacred by their Turkish compatriots. A further three million French soldiers were wounded: 40 per cent of all conscripts became casualties of one kind or another, including one in five officers. But in December 1914, while Frenchmen acknowledged the misery of their predicament as readily as their counterparts in every other nation, they retained deep reserves of will and commitment, which revealed exhaustion only with the mutinies of 1917.

  In the Hapsburg Empire, many of Franz Joseph’s subjects recognised the war as a disaster; the Russians cherished hopes that Hungary might make a separate peace. By December the Austrians, having suffered a million casualties including 189,000 dead fighting the Russians, mustered only 303,000 combatants on the Galician front. Conrad urged Berlin that a great victory was still attainable if Germany contributed more troops, but also gave a dire warning that his nation’s war effort could collapse by spring if these were not forthcoming. The Russians, in their turn, believed that one more big heave in Galicia could complete Austria’s defeat, although there was rival support in the Stavka for a new offensive into East Prussia. While Russians were dismayed by their losses, and there was widespread despondency about the conflict throughout the Tsar’s empire, no articulate faction save that of the revolutionaries was yet pressing for peace at any price.

  That winter, by far the most serious dissension at the summit of any national leadership took place in Germany. The Kaiser complained that he was excluded from strategic decision-making. ‘The General Staff tells me nothing and doesn’t ask me anything either,’ he asserted petulantly on 6 November. ‘If they are under the impression in Germany that I am leading the army, then they are very much mistaken.’ But Wilhelm retained one important power: that of appointing and dismissing the chief of staff who issued orders in his name, as commander-in-chief. This critically influenced strife between the Kaiser’s generals which persisted for the rest of the war.

  Germany’s officer corps would spend the next quarter of a century seeking scapegoats for the army’s historic failure to deliver victory in 1914. Moltke was obviously the foremost candidate, but Falkenhayn’s prestige was severely damaged by the losses incurred during his unsuccessful October offensive on the Belgian front. In the last four months of the year Germany suffered 800,000 casualties, including 18,000 officers; 116,000 of these men were killed. The chief of staff wrote of the Kaiser: ‘His Majesty is in a very depressed mood. Is of the opinion that the attack on Ypres has failed and come to grief, and with it the campaign … It is a moral defeat of the first class.’ Moreover, Falkenhayn’s own confidence in the Central Powers’ ability to prevail over the Entente was severely shaken.

  His drastic solution was to seek a separate peace with the Russians, imposing cash reparations but no territorial forfeits. He believed that if German forces in the East could be shifted to the Western Front, the French would soon crack. He saw Britain as Germany’s ‘arch-enemy’, sharing the view expressed by the Vossische Zeitung: ‘The driving force of the world war is England. That is today plainly proved and everywhere recognised. Millions of innocent people [suffer in the cause of] mercantilism – Krämergeist – the enrichment of London’s merchants and their disdainful lust for mammon. War is simply business for England, a commercial competition designed to destroy its rival, in this case Germany, by means of warfare.’

  On 1
8 November, Falkenhayn presented to Bethmann Hollweg his proposal for closing down the Eastern Front. The chancellor was appalled. In contradiction of the chief of staff, he himself had always regarded Russia as the irreconcilable menace to German interests. Rejecting any outcome of the struggle that left Russian power unbroken, he drew Falkenhayn’s attention to the allies’ September pact, whereby each renounced a separate peace. He was also alarmed by Conrad’s warnings that without fresh German aid, Austria-Hungary might collapse. Early in December, Bethmann paid a visit to Hindenburg’s headquarters, where he discussed all these matters with Ludendorff. The bleak, driven, highly-strung general was obsessed with the belief that with more forces he could defeat Russia, thus making possible victory in the West. He despised Falkenhayn, and did not even consult or inform him when lending several German divisions to Conrad in January 1915. Ludendorff was hereafter committed to securing the chief of staff’s dismissal.

  Bethmann returned to Berlin bursting with confidence in the ‘Easterners’. Major Hans von Haeften, Ludendorff’s liaison officer at the Chancellery, lobbied energetically for Falkenhayn’s sacking and replacement by the victor of Tannenberg. Bethmann concurred, but such a step was vetoed by the Kaiser, who asserted passionately that he would never appoint such ‘a dubious character’ as Ludendorff, ‘devoured by personal ambition’. To circumvent Wilhelm, former chancellor Prince Bülow and Grand-Admiral Tirpitz discussed the possibility that he might be declared insane and replaced by his son as regent, with Hindenburg as Reichsverweser – imperial administrator. Hindenburg and Ludendorff even for a time favoured recalling Moltke as chief of staff, and their puppet.