The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  Aeroplanes reached maturity over the four years of the war In August 1914 their principal function was reconnaissance, but they were already being used as fighters and bombers by the year’s end

  On 6 September the allies’ retreat ended as they turned to attack. Kluck remained focused on his battle with the 6th Army, and so in Bulow’s mind the threat from the BEF was primarily to his right flank, not Kluck’s left. On 8 September he pulled back his exposed right wing, reorientating his army more on a north-south line - and thus widened the gap. None of Kluck, Bülow or Moltke knew what the others were doing or intended to do. On the morning of 8 September Moltke sent Hentsch to establish what the situation was. He was authorised to order a retreat on the part of the right wing only if this was the only way to close the gap between the 1st and 2nd Armies. Hentsch visited the 5th, 4th and 3rd Armies first, travelling along roads clogged with troops and transport, and did not reach the 2nd Army until 7.45 p.m. Bülow had already decided that the 1st and 2nd Armies should retreat on converging lines. Whereas he was preoccupied with the dangers presented by an enemy breakthrough, Kluck was focused on the opportunities for victory presented by envelopment : the one was the obverse of the other, since Kluck’s pursuit of envelopment was what opened the opportunities for an allied breakthrough. When Hentsch at last arrived at Kluck’s headquarters after a five-hour drive on crowded roads on the morning of the 9th, Kluck himself was out of contact, pushing the attack on the French 6th Army. Hentsch and Kluck’s chief of staff therefore took the responsibility for ordering the 1st Army’s retreat. Kluck liked to maintain that he was on the verge of defeating the 6th army, but such an argument leaves out of account any effects that the BEF’s advance would have had as it hit his army on its left and rear. The Germans fell back to the heights overlooking the Aisne valley, where they entrenched.

  After the First World War was over the German army claimed that it had been ‘stabbed in the back’ - that the war had been lost because of the collapse of the home front. According to this argument, the army itself had been undefeated in the field. But such assertions ignored the events of 1914. France had been saved. In its eyes, the Marne was a miracle and Joffre a new Napoleon. The battle was seen in traditional terms, confirming the expectation that manoeuvre would bring operational success. Pre-war staff exercises seemed still to be relevant. They were not: the efforts that had enabled that manoeuvre, the lines of trenches and the dogged defensive battle to the east of Paris, were. Opinion among neutrals and waverers, including Germany’s nominal ally, Italy, hardened against the Central Powers. Germany had failed to secure a quick victory in the west, and was now committed to a long war on two fronts - a war it could not win. The Marne was a decisive battle, and its consequences were strategic. But German press releases between 6 and 16 September presented the withdrawal as tactical. The full truth was not divulged and a false prospect of continued military success generated - one which fed German domestic reporting right up until August 1918. In its own internal post-mortems the German army blamed individuals - Moltke, Hentsch, Bülow, and Kluck - rather than reviewing its own approach to strategy or its own institutional weaknesses.

  Germany had, however, made two significant gains, even if both were incidental. First, it had overrun almost all Belgium as well as the industrial heartlands of north-eastern France, including 74 per cent of its coal production and 81 per cent of its pig iron. Second, it held so much French territory, and did so along positions which in many cases were so extraordinarily well adapted for fighting defensively, that it retained the advantages of an offensive strategy. The allies would have to attack across the fire-swept battlefield just to regain what was rightfully theirs. And it would seem that they had little choice in the matter: their own strategy had been forced into a straitjacket.

  THE IDEAS OF 1914

  The comparatively static nature of the front line in the west for much of the war meant that, after the first three months, most of France and Belgium was not directly in the fighting zone. But for those trapped in the areas of German occupation the war took on another meaning. Some were interned in concentration camps and others held as hostages. For the remainder, the pattern of the day was set by German time; they required passes in order to go about their daily business; family life was disrupted as women were deported as labourers; class was reversed as bourgeois families found themselves short of food and humiliated by the invaders. Many of these indignities were little different from those suffered as the result of wartime necessities in the rest of France, but those who were suffering them did not know that. Nor did those from whom they were divided. In 1916 Henri Barbusse published one of the most famous novels of the war, Le Feu (Under Fire). It won the Prix Goncourt and became a bestseller. The book focuses on the life of a squad. One of its members manages to get behind enemy lines to his home in Lens. He arrives at night and stands outside his home, looking into the lighted house. There is his wife: ‘She was smiling. She was contented. She had a look of being well-off, by the side of the Boche non-com ... I could see my baby as well, stretching her hands out to a great striped simpleton and trying to climb on his knee.’18

  France and Belgium had been invaded, and their soldiers were fighting either to protect their homes and hearths or to liberate them. The purpose of the war was clear: it was not a war of dubious morality but a struggle for basic freedoms. In the minds of some it was even more. Jean-Richard Bloch, a socialist, wrote to a friend, the pacifist Romain Rolland, on 2 August 1914, as he went off to enlist: ‘The war of the Revolution against feudalism is reopening. Will the armies of the Republic assure the triumph of democracy in Europe and perfect the work of [17]93? That will be more than the unavoidable war for home and hearth, that will be the awakening of liberty.’19

  Germany, too, was invaded, even in the west, for all that it was the aggressor there. French troops entered Mulhouse in Alsace and posed a danger to Freiburg. In southern Bavaria the wives of some reservists, left at home without their men, killed themselves rather than confront vengeful French soldiers. To the east, in August the Russians threatened to overrun East Prussia up to the line of the Vistula. The image of the Cossack, ruthless, unprincipled, and above all uncivilised, had a pedigree which stretched back to the Russian army’s occupation of Paris at the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars. Germany was not just defending itself against invasion but defending Europe against barbarism. Bloch’s correspondent, Rolland, saw the German point of view. In October he declared that Prussian imperialism was ‘the worst enemy of liberty’ and a ’barbaric despotism‘. But he acknowledged the glories of German culture and appreciated that tsarism could be construed as a threat to it. Recognising his own desire for an Entente victory, he retired to Switzerland rather than compromise his objectivity.20

  Polishing boots in the Place Rogier in Brussels may have been how this Belgian woman made her living in 1914, but her actions symbolise her nation’s subordination to German militarism

  Thus, as men adjusted to the idea of war, their nations became vehicles for broader ideologies. Britain, alone of the original belligerents, was not invaded. In a speech at the Guildhall in London on 9 November 1914, the prime minister, Asquith, explained his country’s involvement in the war not in terms of its own strategic and imperial interests, but through the German invasion of Belgium and the protection of France from aggression. Britain was fighting to uphold international law and the rights of small nations; its enemy was Prussian militarism, embodied in the Kaiser himself. The French government used the vocabulary of the French Revolution and the Terror to mobilise the nation: it was fighting for the legacy of the revolution in terms of democracy and political rights. But, in doing so, it incorporated the right and the Catholic Church. Joan of Arc became an icon for all France. God would protect France as He had guided Joan. Before the war the socialist Jean Jaurès had been criticised by the radical right for his internationalism and his advocacy of a pure citizen army. But when he was assassinated by a solitary maverick
on 31 July 1914, his death became symbolic for the right as well as the left. This was a Jaurèsian war: a war of national self-defence.

  Both Britain and France were defenders of the status quo. Germany said it stood for progress and change. On 16 October 1914 over 4,000 German academics signed a manifesto identifying German culture with Prussian militarism. The outbreak of the war in 1914 marked the end of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, which had begun with the French Revolution in 1789. In its stead would be erected a set of values which elevated the heroic spirit over the materialism of capitalism and the mediocrity of political liberalism. A German Jew, Nachum Goldmann, in Die Geist der Militarismus (1915), described the military spirit as the means to human progress because it combined equality of opportunity with the advantages of a meritocracy. On 9 August 1914 another Jew, Walther Rathenau, of the German electronics firm AEG, was put in charge of organising raw materials for the purposes of war production by Falkenhayn, the minister of war - an extraordinary step for a Prussian officer to take. Rathenau postulated a new form of economic organisation which would combine the best features of capitalism with those of collectivism in a managed economy. ’The German eagle‘, Paul Natorp wrote in 1915, ’is not like the bird of Minerva, which, according to Hegel, first begins its flight at dusk. We signify the morning chorus of a new day not only for Germany, but also for mankind.‘21 The sociologist Werner Sombart wrote a book called Händler und Helden (Traders and Heroes) in 1915 in which he interpreted man as living two lives - one superficial and the other spiritual - and described life as a continuing struggle to pass from one to the other: his heroes, the Germans, were those who freely responded to the call of duty and willingly sacrificed self.

  This was a great war because it was a war fought over big ideas. What had begun in the Balkans and had been originally driven by issues of ethnicity and nationalism was now clothed with principles whose force lay precisely in their claims to universality. In due course these ideologies became the basis of propaganda, but that could only happen because they expressed convictions with which the belligerent populations could identify. They were deemed to be so fundamental that they sustained the war despite both its length and its intensity. The peoples of Europe fought the First World War because they believed in - or at least accepted - the causes for which their nations stood. It was emphatically not a war without purpose.

  The photographs of August 1914 suggest a party mood. But those were brave faces put on for the cameras. Most reservists called up on mobilisation in August 1914 left their families and jobs with reluctance. They went because it was their duty. They consoled themselves that they would be back home soon: before the leaves fell as winter set in, and certainly in time for Christmas. It is here - in the fantasies of peasants and clerks, shoe-horned into uniform once more - that the idea that the First World War would be short took hold.

  The war confirmed the Lutheran church as the religious bedrock of the German state and the army as defender of both In Potsdam on 9 August 1914, the Kaiser and his family join the 1st Garde-Reserve-Regiment in a field service before it departs for the front

  It was a fantasy which helped sustain the front-line soldier for far longer than rationality suggested was likely. On Thursday, 1 January 1915, New Year’s Day, Heinrich Woebcken - who was not a conscript but a twenty-eight-year-‘ old schoolmaster who had volunteered for military service - wrote home to his family from Champagne: ’This year the decision will certainly come. It is taking a long time, but it’s getting there.‘22 In other words the ’short war’ illusion was being recycled: the war would end within a recognisable time-span, but - because no one could see how - the victory had to be located at a point which was in the middle distance rather than immediate. On the same day but a bit further south and on the French side of the line, Alexis Callies, a regular artillery officer in his mid-forties, wrote: ‘We don’t doubt that this war - already five months long - will end in the coming year. But how will it end?’23

  Trenches were built from the outset of the war but by the winter of 1914-15 they were its dominating feature. Mud and rain meant that they required constant maintenance, especially in Flanders. The 2nd Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers takes a rest from its labours

  3

  GLOBAL WAR

  WAR FOR THE WORLD

  Think of lying on the ground where the hot sun is beating directly on your backs; think of yourself buried in a hole with only your head and hands outside, holding a gun. Imagine yourself facing this situation for several days, no food, no water, yet you don’t feel hungry; only death smelling all over the place. Listen to the sound of exploding bombs and machine guns, smoke all over and the vegetation burnt and of course deforested. Look at your relatives getting killed, crying and finally dead.1

  This was how Fololiyani Longwe of the King’s African Rifles recalled his First World War service. His memories were not very different from those of veterans of the war in Flanders and France. And yet one title used for the war as it was being waged was the Great European War. Some subsequent interpretations of the war have been similarly negligent. According to this view, the war was an unnecessary conflict waged between states whose similarities were more marked than their differences - a sort of European civil war. As a result of its self-destructive folly Europe forfeited its collective position as the leader of the Western world, a status assumed - eventually - by the United States of America. Moreover, if the Great European War was truly a global war, it became so only after the United States entered it in April 1917. Fololiyani Longwe’s testimony corrects such arrogant uses of hindsight. He was one of over 2 million Africans who served in the war as soldiers and labourers: 10 per cent of them died, and among the labourers the rate may have reached 20 per cent. These were casualty rates comparable with those on the western front.

  Longwe served because Malawi, then Nyasaland, was part of the British Empire. In 1914 the entire continent of Africa with the exception of Liberia and Ethiopia was under the rule of European powers, principally Britain, France, Belgium and Germany. Of the other colonial powers in Africa, Spain, Italy and Portugal, only Spain remained neutral throughout the war, and Por-tugal entered the conflict in 1916 principally in order to secure international support for its shaky authority in Africa. On this reading Portuguese soldiers took the first shock of the second German spring offensive in Flanders in April 1918 because of Portugal’s anxieties about its holdings in Angola and Mozambique. That was not typical. In the same month and year German and British black troops were campaigning across Portuguese East Africa in order to further their conduct of the war in Europe. That was more typical. In 1914 conflict spread from the European centre to the periphery, and it did so because the states of Europe were imperial powers. War for Europe meant war for the world.

  The British and the French invaded the German Cameroons from all four points of the compass. In September 1914. the so-called Cross River Column, from Nigena to the north, hit strong German defences and was repulsed

  Some colonial administrators in 1914 hoped that would not be the case. The local units they commanded were designed not to fight each other but to maintain internal order. To many whites it seemed self-evident that the use of colonial troops to topple other European powers could only be self-destructive in the long term. War would rekindle the very warrior traditions that colonialism had been designed to extirpate, and ultimately the black trained to use a rifle against a white enemy might turn his weapon on his own white ruler. For such men the civilising and progressive, if paternalist and culturally supremacist, attributes of colonialism were the conditioning factors in 1914. They hoped that they might be exempt from developments in Europe. In Africa they pinned their hopes on the Congo Act. In 1884-5 Bismarck, acting in his capacity as the reassuring broker of Europe, had hosted a conference in Berlin to orchestrate the partition of Africa. The Berlin Congress had settled that all nations would have complete freedom to trade in the basin of the River Congo, and permitted any one of them t
o declare itself neutral in the event of war. In 1914 Belgium controlled not only the eastern bank of the river but also its estuary, and was also - given its situation in Europe - keen to uphold the principle of neutrality. The implications for one German central African colony, the Cameroons, were direct: French forces could not approach it from the south if France adhered to the Congo Act. The protection the Act gave to the others, Togoland and German East Africa (modern Tanzania), could only be indirect. But after the war the Germans cited the Congo Act both to support their claim to the restitution of their colonies and to argue that they were not the only power that breached international law in 1914.

  The idea that war in Europe - or at least one involving Britain and Germany - would not spread beyond Europe was a later construct. In 1906, F. H. Grautoff, a newspaper editor and naval writer, published, under the pseudonym ‘Seestern’, Der Zusammenbruch der alten Welt (the Collapse of the Old World), a fictional account of a future war, translated into English as Armageddon 190-. It contained a real warning: ‘They [Britain and Germany] had not stayed to consider that a war in Europe, with its manifold intricate relations with the new countries over the seas, the millions of whose populations obeyed a handful of white men, but grudgingly, must necessarily set the whole world ablaze’.2 Grautoff’s account of the war’s origins began in Samoa, one of a clutch of German possessions in the south Pacific, and the name Grautoff gave its governor, Dr Solf, was the same as that of Germany’s colonial secretary when the real war did break out. Grautoff’s fictional war was naval and imperial in its origins. It was a corollary of ‘Weltpolitik’, the basis of German foreign policy at least until 1911.