The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  No one for a moment believes that we are going to lose this war,‘ Lord Lansdowne wrote in a memorandum for the British cabinet on 13 November 1916, ’but what is our chance of winning it in such a manner, and within such limits of time, as will enable us to beat our enemy to the ground and impose upon him the kind of terms which we so freely discuss?‘1 Lansdowne’s colleagues were quick to condemn him as a tired old man. Sir William Robertson lumped him together with ’cranks, cowards and philosophers, some of whom are afraid of their own skins being hurt‘. 2

  Lansdowne was none of those things: he had been secretary of state for war during the Boer War and had then moved to the Foreign Office. To speak as he did showed that he did not lack moral courage. Nor was he as isolated as his critics subsequently maintained. ‘I am very depressed about the war’, Lloyd George, himself now secretary of war, confided to Lord Riddell over dinner six days later. ‘Perhaps it is because I am tired. I have not felt so depressed before. I want to go away for a week alone, so that I may think quietly by myself. Things look bad.’3

  Ironically, Lloyd George was, in one sense, Lansdowne’s target. On 27 September, in an interview with an American journalist, he had pre-empted any suggestion that the United States might mediate in the conflict: ‘there can be no outside interference at this stage. Britain asked no intervention when she was unprepared to fight. She will tolerate none now that she is prepared, until the Prussian military despotism is broken beyond repair.’4

  Lansdowne rejected Lloyd George’s commitment to the ‘knock-out blow’. ‘Surely it cannot be our intention,’ his memorandum stated rather than asked, ‘no matter how long the War lasts, no matter what the strain on our resources, to maintain this attitude, or to declare as M. Briand declared about the same time, that for us too “the word peace is sacrilege”.’5 A Conservative, he saw the society and values with which he identified being destroyed by the very process designed to defend them. Across the Channel, on 27 December, Daniel Halévy, a middle-aged French intellectual who had dabbled in socialism and anarchism before the war, summarised his reactions to the subsequent failure of Wilson’s peace initiative: ‘Europe is at its last gasp; and that can only last a few months more’.

  Halévy’s professional contacts had fed his unease. ‘Guy-Grand knows the socialist world. He is worried about the ascendancy of Alphonse Merrheim, an tipatriotic radical, who has again taken hold of the metal-workers’ union, that is to say the labour force which works for the war.... Gregh, who knows the political world, has doubts about even it: it is giving up, it is discouraged.’ As an official in the French Foreign Ministry’s propaganda department, the Maison de la Presse, Halévy appreciated as well as anybody the role of ideas in legitimating and explaining the sufferings of the previous two and half years. And by 6 February 1917 that realisation fortified him: ‘I think that the discouragement and lassitude of individuals are not of great importance when the cause from which they derive is not individual, when it is a cause which is either national or idealistic, a cause ultimately which dominates the individual and employs him for its own ends without any consideration of what he suffers or what he wants.’

  For Halévy, and for the Entente as a whole, the entry of the United States to the war in April 1917 had two direct benefits. The first was economic: ‘America’s intervention brings the certainty of permanent material aid; of useful maritime aid; it reassures us against exhaustion, it distances it, it lengthens our time, and the lengthening can be the victory’. Halévy appreciated that, for those who had begun to doubt the rationale for the war itself, the certainty that the allies would prevail in a war of exhaustion was not so reassuring. For them America could be seen in negative terms, as prolonging the ordeal rather than terminating it. Thus in many ways the second American contribution was even more important than the first, and at the very least made sense of it: ‘The intervention of America brings an immense boost, not only moral but also ideological. It is wholly liberal. It wants disarmament by cooperation and negotiation.... Our war was in the process of becoming a struggle of nation alisms, and the most robust, the most genuine, was European nationalism. It has become, thanks to Wilson, a struggle of humanitarian cooperation against nationalist absolutism.’6

  By the beginning of 1917, as both Lansdowne and Halévy recognised, the business of making war threatened the liberal values that France and Britain had espoused with such fervour in 1914. The power of the state trumped the rights of the individual. Although this was a matter of natural law, its most immediate and real effect was financial. The normal system of budgetary controls was forfeit as the belligerent governments became the principal purchasers of goods, which they paid for with money they had raised largely through borrowing and taxation, devices they regulated. The moral consequence was a denial of personal responsibility. ‘He signed cheques’, Georges Clemenceau said of Lucien Klotz, France’s last wartime finance minister, ‘as though he was signing autographs.7’

  The workforce of the Britsh armaments manufacturer Vickers assemble for a group photograph to mark the armistice, 11 November 1918 War had prought full employment but many voug lose their jobs

  In France the Law of Siege, invoked on 2 August 1914, gave the army the power to requisition goods, to control the press, and to apply military to civilians; it even subordinated the police to military control. Not until 1 September 1915 did the civilian administration in the interior regain control of policing, and not until April 1916 were strict limits set to the courts martial of civilians. In the military zone, close to the front, the army jealously guarded its prerogatives. Throughout 1915 efforts to inspect it by the Army Committee of the Chamber of Deputies were rebuffed. In October the appointment as minister of war of General Joseph-Simon Gallieni, seen as the saviour of Paris in September 1914 by many - and of all France by some - made approval for such visits easier, but only on a case-by-case basis. Gallieni, while anxious to curb the power of Joffre and his headquarters, was still a soldier: ‘As for the ministry’, he noted on 21 October, ‘I am more and more resolved to accept it only if I have complete freedom and am independent of parliament’.8 When Gallieni resigned as a result of ill health in March 1916, his successor, another general, Pierre-Auguste Roques, tried to claim a greater independence of general headquarters than was the case: ‘I do not want to be a sub-Joffre, but rather a ministerial friend of Joffre’s‘.9 Verdun discredited the French commander-in-chief and so aided the efforts to re-impose civilian control over the military. But the chronic instability of the governments of the Third Republic meant that for the time being their fortunes were still tied to the success or failure of their armies.

  In Britain, the army never achieved that degree of autonomy, but the executive arrogated to itself powers which were contrary to any idea of parliamentary accountability and which affected the independence of the judiciary. The Defence of the Realm Act, passed on 8 August 1914, although primarily designed to safeguard Britain’s ports and railways from sabotage or espionage, permitted the trial of civilians by court martial. Its provisions were progressively extended to cover press censorship, requisitioning, control of the sale of alcohol (Britain’s licensing laws date from 1915), and food regulations. After March 1918 a woman with venereal disease could be arrested for having sex with her husband if he were a serviceman, even if he had first infected her. Piecemeal, the state acquired the right to intervene in the workings of the economy. Traditional Liberals complained that the import duties introduced in 1915 breached the party’s axiomatic commitment to free trade; capitalists saw the excess-profits duty introduced in the same budget as an affront to the principles of Adam Smith. Nor were the mechanisms designed to soak up the liquidity generated by wartime business confined to the obviously wealthy. In 1914 income tax was a burden on the rich minority; during the war 2.4 million workers became liable to pay income tax for the first time, and by 1918-19 they made up two-thirds of all taxpayers. As significantly, those who did not pay tax avoided it because they were exem
pted on the grounds of family circumstance: in other words, they were no worse off financially (and probably the reverse) but they had now come under the purview of the state. The most significant step in the extension of state authority in Britain was compulsory military service, adopted by the Asquith coalition in the first half of 1916. ‘The basis of our British Liberty’, Richard Lambert, a Liberal member of parliament opposed to conscription, averred, ‘lies in the free service of a free people ... Voluntary service lies at the root of Liberalism just as Conscription is the true weapon of Tyranny’.10

  By the mid-point in the war Lambert was a comparatively isolated figure. This is the essential point with regard to the accretion of state power. The press and public grew angry more because not enough was done, than because the state had become the enemy of civil liberties. Asquith’s government followed public opinion rather than driving it. When it acted it did so with consent. ‘For the time, but it is to be hoped only for the time,’ William Scott, Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at Glasgow University, declared in a series of lectures given in London in early 1917, ‘the freedom of the individual must be absorbed in that of the national effort. His true and permanent interest is interwoven with that of his country.’11 The erosion of the principles of liberalism and of constitutional government was never really interpreted in Lambert’s terms: in the short term people were prepared to become more like Prussia to defeat Prussianism. In France the debate on the extension of the state’s power was even less emotive: the legacy of the French Revolution meant that the use of totalitarianism in the name of national defence had a powerful pedigree. In both countries, the popular cry was for more government direction, not less.

  It was on the back of this sentiment - the demand for a small war cabinet to direct the nation’s strategy - that Asquith fell from power at the beginning of December 1916. An election should have been held in 1915, and was therefore overdue; the principle of universal military service had been introduced without the adoption of universal adult male suffrage (indeed, Britain had the most restrictive franchise of any European state except Hungary); and the formation of the coalition in May 1915 meant that opposition within parliament was effectively silenced. Lloyd George’s arrival as prime minister in Asquith’s stead might have presaged a return to democratic norms. He came from the radical wing of the party, so popular consent validated his actions, as well as keeping the illusion of liberalism alive. But he made clear to the Liberal members of parliament that ‘the predominant task before the Government is the vigorous prosecution of the War to a triumphant conclusion’. As the Conservative and courtier Lord Esher wrote to Haig, ‘To achieve that, his only chance of success is to govern for a time as Cromwell governed. Otherwise Parliamentarianism (what a word!) will be the net in which his every effort will become entangled. It is of no use to make a coup d’état unless you are ready with the whiff of grapeshot.‘12

  Esher and Haig were the sorts of men on whom the new prime minister relied. His was a ministry dominated by Conservatives. The constraints on his actions came less from the left than the right. Both the King and the Tory press supported the generals, despite the outcome of the Somme battle, and at the end of 1916 Haig’s position - although the British government had never delegated as much authority to one soldier as the French had done to Joffre - looked secure. Of the crown, the army and the Conservative party, none was temperamentally drawn to the garrulous, philandering Welshman, a Nonconformist and a supporter of the Boers in the South African war, but they recognised that the combination of energy, self-promotion and rhetorical skill made him a more convincing war minister than the consensual Asquith. Liberalism, however compromised, had honed a remarkably flexible ideological and economic base for the conduct of war.

  REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA

  Some British and French observers therefore convinced themselves that liberalism in Russia would tap the energies of the middle classes, promote the talented and permit the full flowering of that country’s latent potential. After the 1905 revolution, the Tsar agreed to the establishment of the Duma, an assembly elected on a broad suffrage and initially dominated by liberals. At the local level, the Zemstvo, a form of county council, became a vehicle for welfare activity and for the involvement of professionals in public service. In 1914 a Union of Zemstvos was created, with the backing of the Council of Ministers, to support the war effort, through helping wounded soldiers and displaced persons. At the economic level, too, the years before the First World War suggested that liberalisation would strengthen Russia. Between 1908 and 1914 the economy grew at an average of 8.8 per cent, soaring to 14 per cent in 1914 itself. The Association of Trade and Industry hoped to establish a wartime partnership between the private sector and the government comparable with those in Britain and France. In June 1915 it proposed the formation of the War Industries Committee to oversee full industrial mobilisation by liaising with the regions and with bodies like the Duma and the Union of Zemstvos. But by 1916 the committee had secured only 7.6 per cent of the orders placed within Russia by the government since its inception. Dominated by the heavy industries of Petrograd and Moscow, it was a casualty in part of industry’s own internal divisions, but also of rivalries with the Duma and the Union.

  However, just as important as the opportunities the war gave Russian liberals were those it accorded for the revival of political conservatism. The Tsar had accepted the Duma with a bad grace, and his ministers resented the erosion of their competence that bodies like the Union of Zemstvos and the War Industries Committee represented. Neither war nor foreign policy lay within the competence of the Duma, and it rapidly became clear that if it had any purpose after July 1914 it was to discuss and not to legislate. In the summer of 1915, as the Russian armies fell back, the Tsar agreed to reconvene the Duma, which had so far been restricted to the briefest of wartime sessions. The moderate intellectuals, businessmen and professionals coalesced in a Progressive Bloc, and, under the umbrella of foreign policy and liberalism, demanded ‘the formation of a united government’ and ’decisive changes in the methods of administration‘. 13 Pavel Milyukov of the Kadet Party said, ’we don’t seek power now ... the time will come when it will simply fall into our hands, it’s only necessary at present to have a clever bureaucrat as head of the government‘.14

  That was not the Tsar’s vision. He saw both the bloc and the Duma not as vehicles for national unity but as threats to his power. Dynastic duty impelled him to prorogue the Duma in September, just as it had already prompted him to transfer his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolay, to the Caucasus command and to take over the supreme command of the army himself. ‘God’s will be fulfilled’, he wrote to his wife as he arrived at headquarters. ‘I feel so calm. A sort of feeling after the Holy Communion!’15 His sense of responsibility made him deaf to contrary advice. The British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, was only too conscious of criticisms of Russia’s autocracy both in his own country and in France: they dented the Entente’s claim to be fighting for liberalism. In September 1915 he suggested to the Tsar that the Asquith coalition might be a model for united government, and in February 1916 urged him to concede to liberal pressures ‘as an act of grace for services rendered’. But the Tsar dismissed those of his ministers who took a similar tack and distanced himself from those he appointed in their stead by removing himself to the army’s headquarters at Mogilev. Here he retreated into a fantasy world where there was no war and no threat of revolution. He was not far enough forward to create a bond with the soldiers of his army, but too far from Petrograd and Moscow to be sensitive to the currents of political opinion. The second gap was mediated for him by his wife, who, despite her English birth, believed, Buchanan said, that ‘autocracy was the only regime that could hold the Empire together’.16

  Writing after the war, Buchanan confessed that she might have been right. It was one thing for well-established liberal states to move in the direction of authoritarianism for the duration of the war; it was quite another for an au
thoritarian government to move towards liberalism which many hoped would last beyond the return to peace. Moreover, the strains the war had imposed on Russian society, and the expectations that those strains had generated, looked increasingly unlikely to be controlled by constitutional reform. Most members of the Duma were monarchists; they were fearful of the urban masses and their republicanism.

  In Petrograd what loomed was not liberalisation for the better conduct of the war, but socialism to end the war. The population of the city had increased by one-third between 1914 and 1917 as the war industries expanded. Those employed in the metal-working industries rose by 136 per cent and in the chemical industry by 85 per cent. But output per worker fell, despite longer working hours. Skilled males were replaced by unskilled females, children and prisoners of war. Many under-performed because of weakness and hunger. Significantly, the workforce in food-processing fell by 30 per cent. Food was simply not getting into the capital in sufficient quantities. Peasants withdrew from the market in response to inflation, either hoarding or speculating, and what they sold went in the first instance to the army. Russia’s fragile railway network was creaking under the demands of supplying the troops at the front. Petrograd’s special council on food supply, set up at the beginning of September 1915 to get food into the urban areas of the province, calculated it needed 12,150 wagonloads per month; in 1916 that figure was exceeded only in September and October. In December 8,654 wagonloads arrived in Petrograd, and in January 1917 6,556. By then the average unskilled worker had to spend over 52 kopecks a day to feed himself, exactly twice the amount he had required in July 1914. Over the same period the average wages of a textile worker rose from 17.6 roubles to 28.3, which represented a fall of 22 per cent in real terms. Only those in war-related industries had experienced a rise in real wages, and even for those in the metal industries it was 21 per cent at best.17