by Max Hastings
Though such conversations came to nothing, they reflected the desperate mood prevailing in Berlin’s corridors of power, five months after the German government had enthusiastically embraced European war. If there was stalemate at the front, thereafter there was also stalemate among Germany’s leaders. Bethmann became a bitter critic of Falkenhayn – ‘a gambler … an execrable person’ – and an enthusiastic supporter of the Easterners’ demands for more troops, their insistence that in Poland they could win the war for Germany. More than that, the chancellor was personally responsible for quashing the proposal that the Central Powers should accept the unattainability of victory, and seek peace at least in the East. It was ironic that, while the allies supposed Germany in the grip of Prussian militarism, it was Bethmann the politician who rejected any negotiated compromise in the winter of 1914.
Meanwhile Falkenhayn’s personal authority, unbuttressed by any major victory such as Hindenburg and Ludendorff had won, was sufficiently weakened that he had the worst of all worlds. Clever enough to recognise that he bore responsibility for achieving the impossible, he nonetheless kept his post through 1915–16. The chief of staff was obliged to accede to Ludendorff’s demands for troop reinforcements at the expense of the Western Front, while enjoying the barren satisfaction of seeing his own judgement vindicated, that these forces would achieve nothing decisive. The Germans defeated the Russians again and again, securing huge swathes of territory and eventually a victory recognised at the February 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed by the Bolsheviks.
Russia suffered a total of 6.5 million casualties in the war – probably the highest total loss of any belligerent, though the statistics are unreliable. But Ludendorff proved mistaken in his belief that defeating the armies of the Tsar could determine the outcome of the entire global conflict. Falkenhayn was right, that Eastern victories were of illusory significance amidst the vastness of Russia. He himself was sacked late in 1916, after his failure to take Verdun. Hindenburg became chief of staff, with Ludendorff wielding real power as First Quartermaster-General. But the Bolshevik revolutionaries, rather than the Hohenzollern Empire, proved the beneficiaries of the disaster that befell Romanov arms.
As Christmas approached, Pope Benedict XV issued a public appeal for a suspension of hostilities over the sacred Christian holiday. Such an idea was quickly rejected by governments and commanders, but their soldiers proved more amenable. The spontaneous truces of 1914 – for there were many on all fronts save the Serb one – have seized the imagination of posterity, as symbolising the futility of a conflict in which there was no real animosity or purpose. Such a conclusion is quite unjustified, because they represented nothing unusual. Interludes of fraternisation have occurred in many wars over many centuries, without doing anything to deter soldiers from killing each other afterwards. The spasms of sentimentality and self-pity displayed in December 1914, almost all initiated by Germans, reflected only the fact that at Christmas almost every adherent of a Christian culture yearned to be at home with loved ones, while now instead millions found themselves huddled shivering in the snow and filth of alien killing fields. The emotionalism generated by such circumstances caused some men to make brief gestures of humanity before resuming the routines of barbarism willed by their national leaderships.
On 24 December a Bavarian soldier named Carl Mühlegg walked nine miles to Comines, where he purchased a small pine tree before returning to his unit in the line. He then played Father Christmas, inviting his company commander to light the tree candles and wish peace to comrades, to the German people and the world. After midnight in Mühlegg’s sector, German and French soldiers met in no man’s land. Belgians likewise clambered out of their positions near Dixmude and spoke across the Yser canal to Germans whom they persuaded to post cards to their families in occupied territory. Some German officers appeared, and asked to see a Belgian field chaplain. The invaders then offered him a communion vessel found by their men during the battle for Dixmude, which was placed in a burlap bag attached to a rope tossed across the waterway. The Belgians pulled it to their own bank with suitable expressions of gratitude.
On Christmas Day in Galicia, Austrian troops were ordered not to fire unless provoked, and the Russians displayed the same restraint. Some of the besiegers of Przemyśl deposited three Christmas trees in no man’s land with a polite accompanying note addressed to the enemy: ‘We wish you, the heroes of Przemyśl, a Merry Christmas and hope that we can come to a peaceful agreement as soon as possible.’ In no man’s land, soldiers met and exchanged Austrian tobacco and schnapps for Russian bread and meat. When the Tsar’s soldiers held their own seasonal festivities a few days later, Hapsburg troops reciprocated.
Along several sectors of the Western Front, a singing competition developed between rival trenches. The German 2nd Guards Division, for instance, sang ‘Stille Nacht’ and ‘O du Fröhliche’, and hoisted a Christmas tree on their parapet. When the French had made their own choral contribution, the Germans answered with ‘Vom Himmel hoch’. Then the contest became more nationalistic: the French bellowed the Marseillaise, the Germans ‘Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘Deutschland über alles’ before giving three cheers for the Kaiser.
Alexander Johnston wrote laconically: ‘my first and I hope my last Xmas on active service’. Near Ypres, Wilbert Spencer ‘saw about 9 or 10 lights along the German lines. These I said were Xmas trees and I happened to be right … On Xmas day we heard the words “Happy Xmas” being called out, whereupon we wrote up on a board “Glückliches Weihnachten” and stuck it up. There was no firing, so by degrees each side began gradually showing more of themselves and then two of them came half-way over and called out for an officer. I went and found out that they were willing to have an armistice for 4 hours and carry our dead men half-way for us to bury – a few days previous we had had an attack with many losses. This I arranged and then – well you could never imagine such a thing. Both sides came out and met in the middle, shook hands, wished each other the compliments of the season and had a chat.’
Men of the French 99th Infantry Regiment, which had similar experiences, were affronted to find the truce shattered by heavy German fire on New Year’s Day. The following morning a Bavarian lieutenant came over to explain apologetically that his superiors had taken fright about the malign impact of fraternisation on the serious business of winning the war. A German regimental report described another such incident near Biaches, in the Somme sector. Some French infantry waved to the opposing Bavarians, and a French colonel suggested that a German officer should advance to meet him. ‘Reserve Lieutenant Vogel, a company commander in the 15th Infantry, walked over. The officers met between the lines. The lieutenant-colonel proposed a truce because of the holiday. Lt. Vogel refused. The lieutenant-colonel then asked at least to bury the body of a fallen Frenchman who had been lying for a long time between the lines. Vogel agreed to this suggestion. The corpse was buried by two French and two German soldiers.’ The report regretted the failure of attempts to prevent fraternisation, but assured formation headquarters that several officers and men had been punished for this breach of discipline.
Twenty-year-old Gervais Morillon wrote to his parents: ‘The Boches waved a white flag and shouted “Kamarades, Kamarades, rendez-vous.” When we didn’t move they came towards us unarmed, led by an officer. Although we are not clean they are disgustingly filthy. I am telling you this but don’t speak of it to anyone. We must not mention it even to other soldiers.’ Morillon was killed in 1915. Elsewhere twenty-five-year-old Gustave Berthier wrote: ‘On Christmas day the Boches made a sign showing they wished to speak to us. They said they didn’t want to shoot … They were tired of making war, they were married like me, they didn’t have any differences with the French but with the English.’ Berthier perished in June 1917.
But goodwill was by no means universal. Yves Congar, the ten-year-old French boy living at Sedan who had welcomed the outbreak of war as a fine excitement, now experienced Christmas in German-occupied
territory. He wrote in his diary that night: ‘We hope that next year will be better than the one we’ve just had. It is very cold. Dad is being held hostage overnight. There is no midnight mass … Foreign feet trample the old road and everything is silent and gloomy … It is the rule of the strongest. It is invasion and ruin; it is the cry of the hungry who don’t even have a crust of bread; it is the resentment against the race that pilfers, burns and holds us prisoners; our country is no longer our home, when our cabbages, leeks and all other goods are in the hands of those thieves.’
The British 2nd Grenadiers lost three men killed, two missing and nineteen wounded on Christmas Day; one further man was hospitalised with frostbite, as were a further twenty-two next morning. On 28 December the battalion’s war diary recorded: ‘wet and mud awful. Terrible night. Thunder, hail and rain terrific, very high wind, some sniping.’ In François Mayer’s sector, the Germans in trenches eighty yards distant cried out ‘Français kaputt!’ and suchlike. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, they delivered a volley of fire, to which the French replied with a chorus of the Marseillaise. Mayer wrote: ‘It was moving to hear all those soldiers throwing their warlike voices back at the bullets which were whistling past. When we fell silent, they cried “Long live the Kaiser!”’ Rival commanders took care that the Christmas truces were never repeated on the same scale in later war years, but proved unable to prevent many informal local understandings – sustained periods of ‘live and let live’ by both sides – which became an enduring feature of the conflict on all fronts.
When the war was over, Austrian Lt. Constantin Schneider looked back on his experiences and remarked upon a phenomenon characteristic of most conflicts, but especially that one, after a man’s phase of initiation had passed: ‘Nothing new happened to me; everything seemed a repetition of sensations experienced before. The war had become a weary business.’ Similarly Seaman Richard Stumpf, serving with the German High Seas Fleet, wrote in his diary just after Christmas 1914: ‘Nothing happens that deserves notice. Shall I describe each day’s duties? Such a record would be identical, day after day.’
On Christmas Eve a French writer named J.J. Chastenet observed in Le Droit du peuple that France’s churches had been fuller since August than at any time since the middle of the previous century: ‘people pray out of fear. As more and more people become accustomed to this war … we shall see fewer people return and things will return to normal.’ Chastenet was right. While the first funerals of local war dead attracted attendance by entire village populations, once such events became familiar, congregations dwindled. Earlier in the year, many French rural communities accepted refugees from Belgium and north-west France. By Christmas there were three million such people – a huge burden upon those housing and feeding them. A growing number of towns and villages turned their backs on the outsiders, denouncing them as locusts – dirty or immoral, verminous or unfit for agricultural work.
Back in August local maires had solemnly donned their black coats, medals and sashes of office to visit families and announce tragic bereavements. Five months later, many such dignitaries delegated this task to the local teacher. One such, a woman named Marie Plissonier in the Isère village of Lavadens, assumed the former duties of the postman, departed to war, because she seemed the most sympathetic person to deliver ill tidings, such as so often came. She said: ‘People reacted differently, of course. Some received the news hysterically, but most reacted with a kind of numbed shock, as if they had expected it in some way.’ Thirty of Lavadens’ four hundred conscripted soldiers eventually perished, and over a hundred more were wounded. At the village hall Mme Plissonier also presided over regular teach-ins, at which she explained the progress of the war with the aid of maps and newspapers. Initially these sessions were well attended. Later, however, as the fronts congealed, audiences dwindled and even vanished. One day became much like the last, for civilians at home just as for such men as Constantin Schneider on the battlefield.
By the end of 1914, the war had ceased to seem interesting or rewarding to any but a tiny proportion of its participants; it represented instead a profoundly distasteful duty, borne with varying degrees of stoicism. On the Eastern Front, most Hapsburg and Russian soldiers would have been happy to embrace peace on any terms, though their rulers willed otherwise. Among soldiers in the West, however, for all their dismay about their personal circumstances, few were yet ready to despair of victory or to bow to their enemies’ demands. For a further forty-six months of struggle they displayed a remarkable willingness to suffer, to obey, and if necessary to perish. It seems a conceit on the part of later generations to assert that in doing so, they exhibited oxlike stupidity. To argue that the Western allies should have accepted German hegemony as a fair price for deliverance from the mudscape of Flanders seems as simplistic and questionable a proposition now as it did at the time to most of those who fought for Britain, France and Belgium. And that was what abandoning the war implied. Not until 1918, after suffering defeat on the battlefield, was Germany ready to abandon its brutal occupation of Belgium and eastern France, to forswear its claims to mastery.
Serbia paid a dreadful price for defying Austria in 1914: in the following year the country was overrun by the Central Powers, the remains of its army forced into exile. Yet much later, after losing possession of their country, adherence to the allied cause enabled the Serbs to achieve one of history’s most notable Pyrrhic victories when peace came: they secured their grand ambition, the creation of Yugoslavia, embracing much of the eastern Hapsburg Empire, a state which endured for more than seventy years. Romania too, though it suffered heavily for its 1916 entry into the war on the allied side, gained due rewards at the peace – more lands than it later proved capable of keeping. The Italians embarked on hostilities in 1915 explicitly in pursuit of territorial booty. In 1918 they too received their share of Hapsburg territory, including the port of Trieste, but these lands cost them 460,000 dead. Russian, Hapsburg and German Poles joined together to proclaim themselves an independent state on 7 October 1918, though they had to fight the Russian Bolsheviks until 1921 to hold their borders. On 28 October 1918 a Czechoslovak republic was declared in Prague, and on 1 November Hungary announced its independence from Austria. Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania also declared themselves independent states.
The United States gained immense economic benefits from selling weapons and goods to the Western allies, and to a lesser degree to Germany, in the first thirty-three months of the struggle. Its entry into the war in April 1917 exercised a critical moral and industrial though marginal military influence on the outcome. The allies were suitably heartened, the Central Powers appropriately dismayed. The American accession of strength more than compensated for the Russians’ retirement from the conflict in March 1918. Japan became the only belligerent to emerge from the struggle with exactly the prizes it sought on joining the allies in 1914, acquired at negligible cost in blood and cash. The Japanese thus had better reason than any other people to celebrate their participation. Among the vanquished, the war cost the Hapsburg Empire 1.5 million military dead, Germany two million, Turkey 770,000. The Wilhelmine Empire became a republic with the fall of the Hohenzollern dynasty, as did Austria with the passing of the Hapsburgs. The British Empire lost more than a million dead, over 800,000 of them from the United Kingdom; the Russian and French empires around 1.7 million apiece. The Bolshevik revolution extinguished the Romanovs, leaving Britain’s George V as the only major imperial ruler in Europe.
Posterity has puzzled endlessly over how the leaderships of the world’s greatest powers, mostly composed of men no more stupid or wicked than their modern counterparts, could first have allowed the war to happen, then continued it for four more years. It seems mistaken to brand the 1914 rulers of Europe, and especially those of Austria and Germany, as sleepwalkers, because that suggests unconsciousness of their own actions. It is more appropriate to call them deniers, who preferred to persist with supremely dangerous policies and strategie
s rather than accept the consequences of admitting the prospective implausibility, and retrospective failure, of these. The most important immediate cause of the First World War was that Germany chose to support an Austrian invasion of Serbia, believing that the Central Powers could win any wider conflict such action might unleash. The Tsar, his ministers and generals may justly be branded foolish, even reckless, for dooming their own precarious polity by going to war for Serbia, but they reacted to an Austrian initiative, for which moral opprobrium must rest in Vienna. A critical force in precipitating disaster was the institutional hubris of the German army, embodied in the inadequate person of Moltke. A yearning for a decisive outcome in place of successive inconclusive crises suffused the conduct of Vienna and Berlin – and in lesser degree, also that of St Petersburg and Paris.
Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the vast effort lavished upon wartime propaganda, within a decade of the armistice the British body politic which took the nation to war conspicuously lost the confidence of many of those who fought it. Soldiers, especially, recoiled from what they saw as the moral debility of the society to which they returned. Some extended this alienation to the cause for which the struggle had been conducted. The author’s grandfather, former gunner officer Rolfe Scott-James, reported an old comrade saying in 1923: ‘Some of us can’t help thinking that we fought the war for nothing.’ Scott-James added: ‘There was none of the rage of despair in the speaker’s voice. His slight shrug of the shoulder simply expressed his sense of disillusion.’ At that time, this was still a minority opinion, in comparison to the faith of Henry Mellersh and his kind, cited above. But in the decades that followed, ever more people embraced the view that the enemies against whom Britain and its allies took up arms had not been worth fighting, as were the Nazis a generation later. These contrasting views were surely powerfully influenced by the fact that the soldiers of 1918 returned from France to a dismayingly unreformed society, which offered them only the most barren fruits of victory, while those of 1945 came home to a Labour government committed to creating the Welfare State. In the twenty-first century, most British people remain extravagantly triumphalist about their nation’s role in the Second World War, while seeming extravagantly eager to dismiss the arguments for resisting German aggression in 1914.
