by Hew Strachan
Conrad called on the Germans four times to implement the Siedlitz operation over this period, but they were themselves desperately engaged in East Prussia. From 2 September he had to abandon his Polish schemes to save Galicia. But typically he now plotted a massive envelopment of the Russians from north and south with forces he did not have. He was unable to coordinate his movements in space and time. On 11 September Conrad ordered a retreat to the Dniester river and then to the San. The Austrians had lost 350,000 men; some divisions were at one-third of their strength; the transport collapsed, as 1,000 locomotives and 15,000 wagons were abandoned. The roads turned to mud and were crowded with refugees. Conrad acknowledged that if Franz Ferdinand had been alive he would have been shot.
Russia set about making its conquest permanent. Reactionaries saw Galicia as part of Russia, and persuaded the governor-general appointed to run it that it should be subject to Russification and racial cleansing. This meant that Russian was to be the only language in schools, that the churches should convert to Orthodoxy, and that the Russian army was licensed to loot. The ingrained anti-Semitism of the Russian army meant that Jews were driven from their homes, either forward towards Austria-Hungary or back to the Russian interior.
Przemysl became the rallying point for the Austrians. Its fortifications proved to have greater worth than pre-war critics had allowed. As Conrad’s headquarters it had been given seven new defensive belts, with trenches and barbed wire. On 16 September the garrison of 100,000 was ordered to hold out until the end. The siege began on 21 September. The 3rd Army fought forward to its relief, and for six days in mid-October kept open the railway line to enable supplies to be stockpiled. But provision had been made for a garrison of only 85,000, and by now it had swelled to 130,000. Furthermore, there were still 30,000 civilians within the city. When the 3rd Army fell back, the siege resumed, dragging on throughout the winter. Desperate fighting in the winter snows of the Carpathians failed to relieve it.
But the fortress bought Austria-Hungary time. It sucked in the Russians and slowed them, just at the point where they too were reaching the end of their logistical reach. The line of the Carpathians, running south-east to north-west, shouldered them towards Kraków and away from the Hungarian plain. By November the Russian 8th Army, which faced Przemysl, had — like the armies of other belligerents on other fronts — lost its pre-war cadres. Its commander, A. A. Brusilov, complained that it ‘was literally unclad. Their summer clothing was worn out; there were no boots; my men, up to their knees in snow and enduring the most severe frosts, had not yet received their winter kit.’20 The garrison of Przemysl held out until 22 March 1915.
In the open spaces of Galicia, Russia’s cavalry screened the gaps between formations and conducted aggressive reconnaissance to establish where the Austrians were weak. But in the snowy Carpathians the horses themselves were vulnerable
By the end of 1914 stalemate had therefore set in on both Austria-Hungary’s fronts. It had effectively lost the Third Balkan War that it — and Conrad in particular — had so ardently pursued. Within four months Austria-Hungary’s casualties totalled 957,000, more than twice the army’s pre-war strength. It sought scapegoats within, many of them ethnically similar to the enemies without, Bosnians or Ruthenes. But some, like the Czechs, were not.
It turned, too, on its ally. ‘The Germans’, Conrad complained in early September, ‘have won their victories at our expense; they have left us in the lurch’.21 But, thanks to Germany, Conrad had not yet lost the wider European war to which the empire was now committed. Logically Germany needed to direct all its attention to this wider war. But in practice Austria-Hungary could not on its own sustain the two fronts for which it was responsible, and therefore the Germans would have to provide help. The humiliation implicit in this dependence meant that Vienna could never show the gratitude to which Germany felt it was entitled. Germany, for its part, concluded that it was ‘shackled to a corpse’.
The Carpathian mountains, which in the east rose to 4,000 feet and more, were pierced by the Dukla pass. This wounded Austrian, being helped through the pass in February 1915, might yet escape the freezing death which confronted many of the 800,000 casualties.
2
UNDER THE EAGLE
GERMANY’S GUILT?
From the moment the First World War began, the belligerents began publishing their own accounts of how the conflict had been caused. They did so because the issue of responsibility was the key element in the propaganda battle. Neutral opinion had to be won over. Within Europe, neither Bulgaria nor Romania had yet committed itself, and the search for allies in the Balkans was to preoccupy the chancelleries of both sides well into 1916. Outside, the United States was the world’s premier industrial power, and, although nobody thought it likely that it would itself enter the war, access to its production might be vital to the war’s outcome. At this stage of the war, opinion at home could be largely taken for granted. The war was justified because it was interpreted as a war of national self-defence. Before the war socialists had threatened to oppose war and disrupt mobilisation. However, the war they had vilified was a tool of imperialism and conquest. In 1914 every belligerent on the continent of Europe portrayed itself as the subject of direct attack. The working-class populations of all the powers may not have welcomed the war but they did not reject the duties and obligations it imposed. Phrases were coined — the ‘union sacrée’ in France and the ‘Burgfrieden’ in Germany — to insti tutionalise this new-found domestic unity.
There was a paradox in the flood of government white books, black books and yellow books produced in 1914 — 15 to buttress these perceptions. Their focus was on the events of July 1914 itself, but their central debate concerned the issue of whether or not Germany was guilty of causing the war. The paradox was this: Austria-Hungary, not Germany, was the power that at the beginning of July 1914 planned to use war as an instrument of policy. Admittedly, the conflict it sought was designed to be short, localised and fought between single powers, whereas the war that resulted was none of those things. For this Germany was blamed, both then and since. Even Austria-Hungary cast aspersions on its ally, holding Germany responsible for getting it into a war which was bigger than it could handle. For the Entente, the foreign ministers of Russia and Britain, Sergey Sazonov and Sir Edward Grey, were convinced that Vienna would never have acted as it had done unless Berlin had pushed it. But if they were right, the causes of the war were not short-term but long-term. Sazonov and Grey brought to the events of July 1914 assumptions formed before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, and reckoned that their opposite numbers in Germany and Austria-Hungary had done so too.
Political maps graphically summarised the enmities and alliances of Europe in 1914 This German example, published by W. Trier, is typical of how instruction was fused with propaganda
They were right in one respect. Germany had played the key role in changing the tempo of international rivalries. When Germany was united in 1871, its chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, set out to reassure the powers of Europe about the ambitions of the powerful new political entity that had emerged in its centre. And those powers directed their competitiveness to fields beyond Europe. When Britain and France confronted each other in Africa they did not resort to war. Indeed, the original purpose of the Anglo-French Entente of 1904 was not to create a united front against Germany, but to settle the two powers’ long-standing imperial rivalries in North Africa. The deal left the French free to expand westwards from Algeria into Morocco. Germany, however, saw the Entente as creating a new diplomatic constellation in Europe itself. The independence of Morocco was guaranteed by an international convention of 1880. On 31 March 1905 the Kaiser landed in Tangiers and declared his support for the Sultan of Morocco. He had little interest in Morocco but he was anxious to disrupt the Anglo-French Entente. Germany’s heavy-handedness had precisely the opposite effect. The Entente hardened, and Britain as well as France began to see Germany as a potential enemy. This, the first of
two crises over Morocco, showed that regional rivalries could no longer be handled by diplomats in a self-contained fashion, but were liable to be both ‘Europeanised’ and ’militarised‘.
The Kaiser’s action made clear that Germany had cut loose from Bismarck’s inheritance. Germany was no longer posing as an upholder of the existing order; instead, it aspired to carve a fresh path. Bernhard von Bülow, foreign minister in 1897 — 1900 and chancellor from 1900 until 1909, promoted a ‘world policy’ or Weltpolitik. This rested on the premise that the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership was not a culminating point in the history of the nation, but a new departure — a beginning, not an end. The political theorist Max Weber declared in his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg in 1895: ’We must understand that the unification of Germany . . . would have been better if it had never taken place, since it would have been a costly extravagance, if it was the conclusion rather than the starting-point for German power politics on a global scale‘.1
Weltpolitik was not a policy to use war for the fulfilment of German objectives; it did not make Germany responsible for the outbreak of the First World War. But it did challenge the status quo in three ways: colonial, naval and economic.
Of these the colonial was the least significant, and it roused little tension with the world’s largest empire, Britain. By 1914, the German colonies attracted one in a thousand of Germany’s emigrants, absorbed 3.8 per cent of Germany’s overseas investment, and accounted for 0.5 per cent of its overseas trade. Territorial expansion was not a high priority for Germany, and it was not a cause of the First World War. Britain was more worried by the growth of the German navy, which began in 1897. From 1905 the German fleet replaced the French and Russian navies as the benchmark for British naval strength. But even here the rivalry proved containable. Agitation for increased naval spending on both sides of the North Sea aroused public awareness of the competition, but in their calmer moments both Tirpitz, the head of the German naval armaments office, and Jackie Fisher, the First Sea Lord between 1905 and 1910, recognised that their fleets were above all deterrents. Britain managed to maintain its naval supremacy in quantitative terms, and in the crisis of July 1914 both fleets were able to go onto alert without accelerating the plunge into war. The mobilisation of armies did not prove so politically neutral.
More important to Weltpolitik were its economic dimensions. Germany industrialised late but very rapidly. The value of its output increased well over six times between 1855 and 1913. In 1870 Britain, with 32 per cent of the world’s manufacturing capacity, was the largest industrial power in the world. By 1910 it had been overtaken by the United States, which had 35.3 per cent of the world’s manufacturing capacity, and Germany with 15.9 per cent: Britain now had 14.7 per cent. But Britain was still the dominant power in the world’s banking, insurance and shipping markets. Its invisible exports therefore compensated for its relative decline in the manufacturing sector. Moreover, Germany’s rapid industrialisation damped down its liquidity: it invested so heavily domestically that it could not use overseas investment to gain influence abroad. The key need of Weltpolitik, therefore, was to open world markets to German products. This was an aim which an open door in world trade would secure — an objective favoured by Britain’s own historical commitment to free trade. As those engaged in commerce in both Britain and Germany recognised, war would only disrupt this growth and limit it.
Despite its title Weltpolitik also carried a domestic and internal purpose. The chancellor of Germany held office because he was the Kaiser’s choice, not because he enjoyed a majority in the Reichstag. His success as chancellor largely depended on his ability to manage the Reichstag despite the lack of a party base. Weltpolitik was Bülow’s solution to this problem — an effort to use foreign policy to appeal to different constituencies within Germany. But the funding of the navy undermined the internal coalition on which Bülow relied. He planned to increase inheritance tax to pay for warships but this challenged the interests of conservative landowners. The conservatives and the Catholic Centre Party crushed the proposal in favour of a tax on mobile capital, which of course struck at business and urban interests. Confronted with domestic discord, Bethmann Hollweg, Bülow’s successor as chancellor, therefore abandoned Weltpolitik and attempted to curb naval spending. He aimed at detente with Britain, using the idea of an Anglo-German naval agreement to do so. This, too, was not without domestic problems, as both Tirpitz and the Kaiser were bound to oppose him. But it might appease the socialists, who became the largest single party in the Reichstag in the 1912 elections.
Foreign policy and domestic policy were therefore linked, as they were in Austria-Hungary, but in the German case the connections were not as immediate and, if they did contribute to the outbreak of war, they did so indirectly. The foreign policy that Bethmann Hollweg pursued up to, and including, the crisis of July 1914 stood in its own right. He wanted to disrupt the Entente, and so relieve Germany of the encirclement into which the alliance system had drawn it. This was the subtext of the proposed Anglo-German naval agreement: what the Germans wanted in exchange for a limit on warship construction was Britain’s neutrality in relation to Europe. Britain rejected the proposal not only because the trade-off was unequal but also because its strategic interests bound it to the Entente. It could not afford to reopen rivalries outside Europe. Its need to neutralise the Low Countries, in order to leave the main sea route from London to the wider world unfettered, bound it to maintain the balance of power within Europe: geography and economic necessity determined that it would back the weaker power against the stronger on the Continental seaboard.
German efforts in the same vein, to loosen the ties of the Entente by pursuing bilateral deals with the Russians and the French in relation to issues outside Europe, were designed to reawaken the old rivalries between Britain and its Entente partners. Bethmann Hollweg had some success with Russia in relation to the construction of the railway from Berlin through eastern Anatolia to Baghdad: tensions between Britain and Russia in Central Asia had resurfaced by 1914, especially in Persia. But the policy backfired when it came to France.
On 17 April 1911 the French pushed troops into Morocco, ostensibly to police Fez, where riots had been directed against the Sultan. Under the terms of the Algeçiras conference, hammered out in 1906 after the first Moroccan crisis, France should not have acted without consulting the other signatories, including Germany. The French prime minister was Joseph Caillaux, the man whose wife did so much to distract the French in the key days of the July crisis: he was sufficiently conscious of the weakness of the French position to encourage the German Foreign Ministry to believe that Germany might be recompensed with concessions elsewhere in Africa. On 1 July 1911 a German warship, the Panther, appeared in the Atlantic port of Agadir.
Three weeks later, on 21 July 1911, David Lloyd George delivered the customary annual speech of the chancellor of the exchequer to the City of London. Lloyd George was a radical influence within the Liberal government of Herbert Asquith, promoting old age pensions and national insurance. At the beginning of the century he had been a ‘pro-Boer’, opposing Britain’s policy in the South African war. But he did not use the opportunity of the Mansion House speech to counsel disengagement from the foreign relations of the powers of Continental Europe. Instead he sent a clear warning that war might be imminent. He went on: ‘I am also bound to say this — that I believe it is essential in the highest interests, not merely of this country, but of the world, that Britain should at all hazards maintain her place and her prestige amongst the Great Powers of the world. Her potent influence has many a time been in the past, and may yet be in the future, invaluable in the cause of human liberty. It has more than once in the past redeemed continental nations, who are sometimes too apt to forget that service, from overwhelming disaster, and even from national extinction . . . If a situation were to be forced upon us in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of the great and beneficent pos
ition Britain has won by centuries of heroism and achievement, by allowing Britain to be treated, where her interests were vitally affected, as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of nations, then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure.’2
What had been a Franco-German dispute about colonial ambitions, designed to be resolved by diplomacy, now became an issue of vital national interest to Britain. Germany had deployed sea power beyond the purlieus of its immediate geographical waters; this was a direct threat to the premier navy in the world. Moreover, by doing so Germany had challenged the strength of the Anglo-French Entente as an alliance. Lloyd George’s speech — for all that its words emphasised Britain’s sense of honour and its status as a great power — was not, therefore, simply about prestige. Britain saw both the defence of its maritime supremacy and its alliances as matters of vital national interest.
The first of these hardly surprised the Germans. The second did. As a Protestant nation, ruled by a monarch with blood ties to most of the royal families of Europe, including that of Germany, Britain seemed temperamentally a more natural ally of Germany than of France. But what this calculation left out of account was the British Empire. Between 1902 and 1907 Britain entered into three alliances, all of them designed to ease the burden of imperial defence. The first, with Japan, relieved it of naval responsibilities in the Pacific and gave it a counterweight to its principal Asiatic rival, Russia. The second, the 1904 entente with France, effectively allocated the eastern end of North Africa (including the Suez Canal, the all-important link to the Far East) to Britain. And the third, in 1907, promised to lessen the rivalry with its most persistent challenger in the Near East and Central Asia, Russia. In combination, these alliances both secured the heart of the empire, India, and protected the routes to it.
