The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  Of all the fronts of the First World War the Italian was the most ill suited for offensive operations, or indeed for any form of war at all. The frontier with Austria-Hungary was 600 km long, and four-fifths of it was made up of mountains. Several peaks rose above 3,000m; in the winter they were covered with ice and snow, and explosions could set off avalanches. In the summer the rock made entrenching impossible and sent off jagged splinters when hit by shellfire. Its northern sector was dominated by the Austro-Hungarian salient of Tyrol and the Trentino. Here Italy’s task was to hold the passes to prevent the Austrians from debouching onto the Venetian plain. As the frontier moved east it formed a fresh, Italian salient, bounded to the north by the Dolomites and the Carinthian Alps. It then swung due south following the line of the River Isonzo as it made its way to the Adriatic. Even here the Italians were going uphill, in the face of good fields of fire, but this was the logical sector on which to attack. It was the shortest route to Trieste and Ljubljana. Cadorna deployed fourteen of his thirty-five divisions along its 100 km.

  Italy’s entry to the war caused less panic in Austria-Hungary than it ought to have done. The addition of a third front to an empire which a year before had embarked on a short war on one could only stretch its resources to breaking point. But in the pre-war years Conrad von Hötzendorff had suggested a pre-emptive strike against Italy almost as often as against Serbia. Its treachery in not honouring its alliance obligations confirmed that - in Conrad’s words - it was ‘a snake whose head has not been crushed in time’.28 The prospect of war with Italy revitalised the Dual Monarchy. Slovenes, Croats and Serbs could rally against a common enemy, and the success at Gorlice-Tarnow was well timed in relieving the most obvious pressure on the empire. Under pressure from Falkenhayn to give priority to the east and not to divert forces to the Italian front, the Austrians fought defensively - and did so successfully and with determination. ‘Will you tell me’, Enzo Valentino, an eighteen-year-old volunteer from Perugia, asked his mother from the front on 3 September, ‘why you persist in imagining and believing a lot of things which I do not write to you? ... To be always going forward, and soon to be about to make a great advance? I have never heard anything of all this. As to advancing, it is now a month and a half that I have been up here and always in the same place.’ In the same letter he reported the first fall of the snow. Seven weeks later he was killed by shrapnel fire, an edelweiss in his cap, as he ran forward, shouting ‘Savoia, Savoia, Italia’.29 Or at least that was what Captain Carlo Mayo told his mother. In four battles on the Isonzo in 1915 alone the Italians made no appreciable progress, suffering 235,000 casualties, of whom 54,000 were dead.

  Italy’s mountain troops, the Alpini, reflected the growing pre-war enthusiasm in Europe for winter sports They proved very effective in the Tyrol, but the opportunities for ski attacks and even for downhill skiing proved limited

  SERBIA DEFEATED

  Italy was no nearer achieving its objectives, but in the lapse of time between Enzo Valentino’s mother receiving her son’s report of the first snow and the news of his death, Bulgaria had gained all that it wanted from the war. Its heart’s desire was Serbian Macedonia. The Entente could not offer that, but the Central Powers could - and did. What held the Bulgarians back was the threats on their other frontiers - the possibility of Romania and Greece joining the Entente, and the dangers of a British and French victory at Gallipoli. By the autumn the success of the Turks and the defeat of the Russians not only removed these dangers but also made it unlikely that Romania or Greece would be persuaded to opt for the Entente. The lamentable Austro-Hungarian record against Serbia was still a consideration. So the Bulgarians made it a condition of their belligerence that the Central Powers attack Serbia from the north first, and that they do so under German, not Austrian, command; they would follow from the east within five days. A military convention to this effect was signed on 6 September.

  Falkenhayn thus returned to his original strategy for the east. Neither Austria-Hungary nor Turkey wished to make Serbia a priority, arguing that victory against Russia would settle the Balkans. Falkenhayn reversed their logic: if Serbia was overrun, Russia’s foothold in the Balkans would be removed. That would be reason enough for Russia to seek peace, but there would be another. The overland route from Berlin to Constantinople would be opened. Germany could then re-equip the Ottoman armies, enabling them not only to finish off the Gallipoli campaign but also to serve Arthur Zimmermann’s schemes for taking the war to the British Empire. Russia’s hopes that it might be resupplied through the warm-water ports of the Black Sea would be finished.

  Falkenhayn’s arguments were also operational. The approach of winter made continued progress in Russia impossible; further south there might just be time for a quick campaign. The rain was already heavy, and the Danube was in spate and in places a thousand yards wide. The Austro-Hungarian attacks of 1914 had been directed across the rivers Sava and Drina, from Bosnia and the west, with diversions from the north. Mackensen, who was given ten German divisions and the overall command, reversed the process, so shortening his lines of communications. Minor attacks along the Drina and a feint to the east at Orsova covered the main thrust from the north. Mackensen’s men, supported by heavy artillery and Austro-Hungarian monitors on the river itself, and using the river’s islands as staging posts, crossed the Danube between 7 and 9 October. On the 9th Belgrade fell to the Austrians once more, and to the east the German 11th Army began its advance up the valley of the River Morava. The Serbs planned to counterattack, but on i4 October were taken in their eastern flank by Bulgaria. The railway line from Niş to the south and Salonika was cut two days later.

  To escape envelopment the Serb army had to retreat either south towards Greece or south-west to Albania. The Bulgarians were in the process of closing off the first route and mountains barred the second. Thomas Troubridge, who had been in command of the British navy’s vessels on the Danube, met Radomir Putnik, the Serb commander-in-chief, on 30 October: ‘I did not see any disposition to finally despair or any indication of immediately throwing up the sponge’. But the organisational skills of Putnik’s staff did not match its chief’s resolve. The roads were clogged not just with troops but also with their families and household goods. ‘At the Headquarters Mess’, a week later, ‘at de jeuner there were 30 women & 20 children at least & wherever they move they have all the motors & take with them their servants & furniture & batteries de cuisine & everything.’30 The worsening weather added to the problems of the retreat, but at least delayed Mackensen’s forces, so giving the Serbs time to escape the jaws of the envelopment. By 25 November the Serb army was hemmed in on the plain of Kosovo. The path to the south was blocked by the Bulgarians, who were across the River Vardar. Putnik decided that Serbia’s future lay not in a climactic battle on this emotive site but in the survival of its army. He ordered a retreat across the mountains to the Albanian coast. ‘We slowly creep towards the sheer cliffs of Mount akor, step by step on the compacted snow’, Josip Jeras wrote in his diary. ‘On either side of the road refugees are resting. Immobilized by the snow their heads are glued to their breasts. The white snowflakes dance around them while the alpine winds whistle their songs of death. The heads of horses and oxen which have fallen off the path protrude from the snow.‘31 Following narrow tracks, rising to 3,000 feet, and with the temperature dropping to -20°, the Serbs struggled through snowdrifts and across ice to reach the Adriatic. A hundred and forty thousand got there and were taken off by Entente vessels to Corfu, and thence to Salonika. Of an original strength of 420,000 men in September, some 94,000 had been killed or wounded in action and a further 174,000 were captured or missing. Civilian deaths have not been calculated. The Serbs suffered the greatest losses in relation to population size of any participant in the war.

  Images of defeat: exhausted Serb soldiers in Belgrade in October 1915

  Serb field artillery battles through the snow to the Albanian frontier, November 1915. The French had sold
Serbia 75mm quick-firing guns before the war.

  The Central Powers had now united the two halves of their alliance, creating a direct link from Berlin to Constantinople and enabling in particular the resupply of the troops in the Dardanelles. By contrast, the Entente’s stock in the Balkans was at its nadir. In Britain David Lloyd George, now minister of munitions, had favoured sending forces to Salonika not Gallipoli at the start of the year. But Gallipoli shelved such ideas. Belatedly, on 5 October, the French and British agreed that they would each contribute 75,000 troops for an expedition to Salonika. The French were keen to find employment for the most obviously republican of their generals, Maurice Sarrail, and so saw the scheme as a means both to moderate the power of Joffre and the army within France and to help the Serbs. But the expedition had three obvious defects. First, its demands would conflict with the operations at Gallipoli, which were still ongoing even if bogged down. Second, such a large force could not reach Salonika until January, by which time the Serbs would probably be defeated. Third, Greece was still neutral. Lloyd George disingenuously argued that ‘there was no comparison between going through Greece and the German passage through Belgium’. 32

  Kitchener, the British secretary of state for war, was inclined to agree: for him the purpose of the Salonika expedition was less to help the Serbs than to provoke the Greeks to do so. Those in Greece who favoured intervention, like the prime minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, could hardly mount a convincing case, given the dire position of the Entente at the end of 1915. Greece had refused to honour its obligation to support Serbia when it was attacked by Bulgaria, and King Constantine’s espousal of continued neutrality was entirely pragmatic and realistic. The British cabinet was told that ‘His Majesty’s decided opinion was that Germany was winning on all points, and that there were only two possible endings to European war, either that Germany would be entirely victorious or that the war would end in a stalemate largely in favour of Germany33.’

  British and French forces landed at Salonika too late to aid the Serbs and too weak to advance against the Bulgarians. However, Falkenhayn did not attack them. Later he rationalised his actions by arguing that Salonika was an enormous internment camp, a front which tied down French, British and Serb troops, chipping away their strength through malaria, preventing their use in more promising theatres, and committing allied shipping to their supply. In reality his immediate decisions were dictated by the weather and the length of his supply lines. The longer-term considerations concerned Balkan politics. Serbia was crushed. Bulgaria had therefore achieved its principal objective in the war, and there was a danger that it would now seek a settlement. On the other hand, if Falkenhayn encouraged it to advance on Salonika, Greece would be compelled to throw in its lot with the Entente. A passive front in Macedonia allowed him to leave the Balkans to Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary. It seemed that at last he would be able to focus Germany’s efforts on what for him was the principal front, that in the west.

  Once again German calculations reckoned without Austria-Hungary. The defeat of Serbia had not resolved Vienna’s Balkan problems. Conrad was furious that it had been achieved principally by German forces, not Austrian. Even when Falkenhayn pulled eight of eleven German divisions out of the Balkan theatre, a German, Mackensen, was left in command. Falkenhayn wanted a joint allied command, but Conrad knew that would mean Austria-Hungary’s subordination to the ‘secret enemy’. He feared that Serbia would become a German or Bulgar fiefdom, and he nicknamed Falkenhayn ‘Ferdinand II’ after the Bulgarian King. Relations between Conrad and Falkenhayn became so bad that for almost a full month, between 22 December 1915 and 19 January 1916, there was no direct communication. In that time strategies for 1916 were set. Conrad planned to mop up Montenegro during the winter and then turn against Italy. In 1915 the two allies had managed to coordinate their actions; in 1916 they diverged. Austria-Hungary’s initial defeat in its war with Serbia had been offset by its share in the wider victory in the east; that wider victory was itself in turn forfeit to the even greater scale of the war as a whole. In shaping its strategy, Germany had identified its enemies’ alliance as a source of weakness, not strength: it was to prove a fatal miscalculation but it was an accurate reflection of Germany’s own experience of coalition warfare.

  6

  BREAKING THE DEADLOCK

  TRENCH WARFARE

  “ There are five families of rats in the roof of my dug-out,‘ Captain Bill Murray reported back to his family on 14 May 1915, ’which is two feet above my head in bed, and the little rats practise back somersaults continuously through the night, for they have discovered that my face is a soft landing when they fall.‘1 Rats did more than disturb sleep; they carried disease and they spoilt food. Trench warfare provided ideal conditions for their multiplication. They thrived on its detritus, including the bodies of the unburied dead. For those who yet lived, even more irksome was the blood-sucking louse. Ninety-five per cent of British soldiers coming out of the line were infested. Lice spread from man to man, living in the seams of his clothing and irritating his skin. They were known to cause typhus, but by 1918 it was established that they were also responsible for trench fever, one of a host of new conditions which the positional warfare of the western front generated. The intensely cultivated soil of Belgium and northern France, well tilled and manured, meant that wounds were rapidly infected with gas gangrene: 21 per cent of French soldiers wounded in the legs or thighs died as a result. And standing in the cold, wet mud of the trenches promoted trench foot and frostbite. But these were the first armies to benefit from the use of antiseptics, from mass inoculation programmes, and from an understanding of bacteriology. In wars before that of 1914-18 disease, not battle, was the major killer. On the western front it was not - a product of major advances in preventive military medicine as well as of the fact that it was wounds which introduced many of the more life-threatening infections. Disease was still a principal cause of death in every other theatre of war.

  Trenches created health problems but they saved lives. To speak of the horror of the trenches is to substitute hyperbole for common sense: the war would have been far more horrific if there had been no trenches. They protected flesh and blood from the worst effects of the firepower revolution of the late nineteenth century. ‘They bent their heads and went on,’ Jean Bernier wrote of his and his comrades’ experience of entering the trenches, ‘curiously calmed and strengthened by this regained contact with the earth, their habitation and their element.’2 The dangers rose when men left the embrace of the trenches to go over the top, and when war was fluid and mobile. German deaths per month were highest in 1914 on the western front, in 1915 on the eastern front, and in 1918 again in the west - in other words when and where they were on the attack. French monthly losses peaked at 238,000 in September 1914, the month of the Marne. Their next worst month was October 1915, when an offensive in Champagne (which formed the centrepiece of Bernier’s autobiographical novel) pushed the tally up to 180,000. Thereafter they rose above 100,000 on only three occasions in the war, never in 1916 - despite the battle of Verdun - and twice in 1918, when the war became mobile again. The big ‘pushes’ of positional war caused death rates to rise, but, provided those offensives were carefully prepared and well supported with artillery, the attackers’ casualties were frequently comparable with the defenders’. Broadly speaking this was true for both the major battles of 1916, Verdun and the Somme, and the Germans lost more men defending on the Somme than they had attacking at Verdun earlier in the year. In August 1917, at the height of the third battle of Ypres, the epitome of trench warfare’s waste and futility for many commentators, British casualties on the western front totalled 81,080. Exactly a year later, when the British army inflicted a major defeat on the Germans at Amiens and began its advance to victory, they soared to 122,272.

  Germans delousing their clothing The solidity and depth of the trench, as well as the apparently good weather, reinforce the impression that the sector is a quiet one
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  Trench warfare redefined what a battle was. ‘Of course I’ve been in all the usual shows,’ wrote Alexandre Arnoux, who served at the front from May 1915 until the war’s end, ‘night assaults, reconnoitrings, raiding parties, and all that. I copped a machine-gun bullet in the thigh and a splinter of shell in the head and I’ve had mustard gas, but I’ve never been in what I call a real battle. A pukka show with the whole line moving forward and the reserves coming up all the time, I’ve never been in that.’3 In the past battles had been affairs of single days, and losses of perhaps 30 per cent had rendered armies unable to fight again until the following campaigning season. Few, if any, individual days of the First World War were as bloody, relatively speaking, as the battles of Frederick the Great or Napoleon. In 1914-18 casualties mounted because the fighting was continuous. What were called battles sometimes lasted months, and previous generations would have described them as campaigns. Longer hours of daylight in the summer gave more opportunity to kill, although even these major offensives had to close down by November. But the soldiers of the First World War did not then go into winter quarters. War was stopped neither by the seasons nor by the divisions of night and day. The advent of the aircraft meant that, weather permitting, all activity outside the hours of darkness could be observed from the air. Reliefs and resupply became nocturnal activities. So, too, was the endless business of trench repair, making good the depredations of shellfire or the erosion of continuous rain. ‘When dusk fell,’ Charles Carrington recalled, ‘... troglodytes emerged from their burrows in the sunken road to relieve platoons in the posts, to bring up rations from the village, to dig and wire in pitchy darkness. Heavy labour at a score of trades in awkward places must be relentlessly performed without showing a light or making a sound.‘4 Men were continuously exhausted: they dozed by day, and, paradoxically, as the nights became shorter the opportunities for sleep became greater.