The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  But the revolutionary moment did not become revolution. Caporetto played its part: it turned an offensive war into a defensive one. Its nationalist imperative also consolidated liberalism. On 30 October Vittorio Orlando, a defender of civil liberties, formed a coalition government, but one which used its mandate to be firm in its suppression of defeatism. Cadorna, having refused to resign even at the behest of the King, was dismissed and replaced by Armando Diaz. Diaz was the Pétain of Italy: he cared for his men, extending leave, improving rations, rethinking tactics and eschewing reckless offensive action. On 15 December a war council was finally established. But even before Caporetto much was already in place. Italy had enough food to feed itself, and the ration card became (as it became in Britain) the symbol of equality of distribution and sacrifice. The Mobilitazione Industriale, the army-organised agency for the management of war industry, which controlled 903,250 workers and 1,976 firms by the war’s end, was elevated to a full ministry in July 1917. Its chief, General Alfredo Dallolio, believed that better real wages and improved conditions of employment would dampen radicalism, and used his power to curb the powers of employers as well as to regiment the employees.

  The boundaries of the state were thereby extended, but as in Britain and France they were seen as temporary interventions designed to protect the liberal nation, not subvert it. Moreover, by the end of the year government in all three nations was firmly vested in the hands of civilian politicians, not of soldiers. In Britain Haig’s standing slumped in the aftermath of Passchendaele. Lloyd George now possessed the political authority to remove him, if he could find a credible alternative. He could not, but he was able to ensure the replacement of Haig’s directors of intelligence and of operations. In February 1918, the prime minister exploited the latent split between Haig and Robertson to oust the latter. The new Chief of the Imperial General Staff was General Sir Henry Wilson, an Irish unionist and a man whose love of intrigue was so great that the sight of a politician was said to induce in him a state of sexual excitement. Haig both distrusted and disliked him.

  In November the division in Paris, between those ready to explore options for peace and those determined not to, destroyed Painlevé’s government. France stood poised between pacifism and guerre à outrance. Poincaré swallowed his personal dislike and asked the seventy-six-year-old Georges Clemenceau, radical and atheist, scourge of governments, to form a ministry. One of the new prime minister’s first acts was to have Caillaux, the pacifist contender for the premiership, arrested on charges of treason. France had one simple, single duty, he told the chamber in his first speech: ‘to cleave to the soldier, to live, to suffer, to fight with him’. Clemenceau’s government was the first in the war to coin the phrase ‘total war’, and it did so in reference to the need to mobilise all France’s resources for its prosecution. This was more totalitarian than democratic. Although the new prime minister was of the left, as were most of his ministers, he drew his parliamentary support from the right and he infuriated the socialists. He ruled less through his ministers than through two personal cabinets, one military and one civil. When challenged in the chamber on 8 March 1918, he explained that as the head of a republican government he was called on to defend two doctrines: ‘the first of these doctrines ... is the principle of liberty.... The second, in the current situation, is that we are at war, that it is necessary to wage war, to think only of war, that it is necessary to apply our minds to war and to sacrifice everything to the rules, which we shall put right in the future if we are able to succeed in securing the victory of France ... Today, our duty is to make war while maintaining the rights of the citizen, so safeguarding not one liberty but all liberties. So let us wage war.‘41

  The aftermath of Caporetto Italian prisoners are collected at Udine

  Clemenceau disagreed with Lansdowne: the war had first to be won before a lasting peace was possible. By the winter of 1917-18 most poilus seemed to share his views. ‘My war aims are these’, wrote a soldier of the 272nd Regiment of Infantry at the end of 1917. ‘I fight 1. because there is a war and I am a soldier, 2. because this war was inevitable, 3. because I do not want to become a Boche, 4. because they are in our country and we must make them leave or at least stop them getting any further, 5. because they must pay for the damage that they have done.’42

  THE BOLSHEVIKS SEIZE POWER

  In neither France nor Italy had mutiny and desertion coalesced with protests and riots in the rear. Despite the fact that these were armies of citizens, made up of soldiers who yearned to go home and resume their peacetime pursuits, and despite the mechanisms of leave and mail that kept alive the links between front and rear, the consequences of grievances in one were kept separate from those in the other. That was not true for Russia.

  ‘One cannot but notice, that in letters from the army as well as, mainly, in letters to the army, discontent arising from [the] internal political situation of the country is beginning to grow.’43 This report from the military censor in Petrograd was dated November 1916. In March 1917, the troops in the northern districts, including Petrograd, totalled 850,000. Under the influence of left Socialist Revolutionaries, they gave their primary loyalty not to the temporary commission set up by the Duma but to the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers. On 14 March, the Soviet’s Order Number 1 confirmed this arrangement, and required that all units form committees of elected representatives of the lower ranks. Order Number 1 did not of itself demand that officers be elected, but that was its outcome. Officers had to court popularity, and some of those who did not were lynched, while others were arrested. ‘Between us and them is an impassable gulf’, one officer wrote at the end of March. ‘No matter how well they get on with individual officers, in their eyes we are all barins. When we talk about the narod, we mean the nation; when they talk about it, they understand it as meaning only the democratic lower classes. In their eyes, what has occurred is not a political but a social revolution, which in their opinion they have won and we have lost.’44

  That revolution travelled along the railway lines to the front; it did not go from front to rear. It reached the combat zones furthest from Petrograd - Romania and the Caucasus - last. Although most Russian soldiers were fed up with the war, they were still committed to the defence of their country. Senior commanders recognised in March that the way to restore order was not to oppose the establishment of soldiers’ committees but to endorse them - just as they had endorsed the fall of the Tsar - in the hope of then reuniting the army and the nation in the prosecution of the war. Aleksandr Kerensky, first as minister of war and then as head of the Provisional Government, supported their endeavours. He launched an offensive in July, which failed, and then appointed the youthful and heroic Lavr Kornilov commander-in-chief, with a mandate to restore discipline. But he now feared the threat of counter-revolution more than that of revolution. The Germans took Riga at the beginning of September, and when Kornilov began to push troops towards Petrograd for its defence they were seen to be the outriders for a counter-revolutionary coup, not the agents of the Provisional Government. Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet and its militia, the Red Guard, under Leon Trotsky, to check Kornilov.

  It was not only domestic events which separated the army’s officers from their men. Kerensky hoped the war would unite the nation and the revolution, as it had done in France in 1792. But the decision of the All-Russian Conference of Soviets on 11 April to support a peace without annexations or indemnities made those who supported the war’s continuation seem imperialist. Moreover, peace promised land reform and redistribution. Peasants wanted to be at home when that happened. The rise in desertions was not immediate, and its effects were more obvious on the lines of communication than in the trenches, but the process of disintegration, linking grievances at the front to concerns at home, was now under way.

  German and Austro-Hungarian propaganda played on the worries about land redistribution. Thus the pressures on the Russian army came not just from the rear, but from the o
ther side of the line as well. The spontaneous truce of Christmas 1914 on the western front had had its eastern-front counterpart, albeit at Easter and in every year up to and including 1917. OberOst now condoned such fraternisation. It was also supported by Russian revolutionaries, who hoped to spread the revolution westwards. German efforts to use revolution as a tool for the conduct of the war had not so far been particularly successful. The means they had used had been inadequate to the ends they had sought. Gun-running to Ireland had resulted in rebellion in 1916, and covert funding of pacifists and socialists had sown dissension in France in 1917. But in neither case had there been a popular response: the revolutionaries were themselves minor players. In Russia, too, the Bolsheviks were minor players, but in 1915 Alexander Helphand, code-named Parvus, a German agent whose business activities profited from the blockade-driven trade between Denmark and Germany, persuaded the German Foreign Ministry that they might engineer a mass strike in Russia. In March 1917, despite the obvious paradox and equally obvious dangers in Imperial Germany sponsoring Marxism, Arthur Zimmermann convinced the Kaiser and the army that the Bolsheviks’ leader, Lenin, who was living in exile in Switzerland, should be smuggled back into Russia. On 16 April 1917 Lenin arrived in Petrograd at the Finland station, having crossed Germany in a ‘sealed’ train. This was one revolutionary effort which reaped spectacular returns, albeit in a situation where spontaneous revolution had already occurred.

  On 15 July 1917 the Provisional Government in Russia collapsed, and the Bolsheviks tried to seize power in Petrograd Street fighting peaks on 17 July Kerensky took charge and Lenin went into hiding -for the moment.

  In November 1917 the Bolsheviks, under Trotsky’s direct leadership but orchestrated by Lenin, seized power in Petrograd, toppling the Provisional Government. The All-Russian Congress of Soviets embraced a programme which differed little from earlier ideas - including land to the peasants, bread to the cities, workers’ control of the factories, and complete democratisation of the army. But on the next day Lenin demanded an immediate armistice. Peace would provide the key to delivering bread and land.

  The entire complexion of the war changed. A decade after the war had ended, Daniel Halévy’s brother Elie, the great French historian of modern Britain, delivered the Rhodes lectures in Oxford. His subject, ‘The World Crisis of 1914-18’, was, he said, ’not only a war - the war of 1914 - but a revolution - the revolution of 1917’.45 The conflation of war and revolution had grave implications for the Entente at two levels. The first was military. Without an active eastern front, the basis of the alliance’s strategy became meaningless. For the first time since August 1914 the Central Powers were free to concentrate all their efforts in the west. The second was political. Here was a new vision of the world order to challenge liberalism. The Bolsheviks pub-lished the secret agreements on war aims reached between the Entente powers: Britain, France and Italy stood convicted, it seemed, of annexationist ambitions comparable with those of the monster which they were pledged to extirpate, German militarism. Those who could envisage the war ending in the coming year could do so only on the basis of a German victory.

  The Germans believed that the Russian army’s collapse was due in large part to their fraternisation, as here in lithuania The Austro-Hungarians were not so successful when they tried the same with Italy.

  9

  GERMANY’S LAST GAMBLE

  GERMANY BETWEEN MILITARISM AND LIBERALISM

  On 3 March 1918, in Brest-Litovsk, the Russians signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers. In the north-west they lost Poland, Lithuania, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Livonia and Courland. Finland took the opportunity of the Bolshevik revolution to cede from Russia. To the south Ukraine did the same. In the Caucasus the Turks regained their pre-1878 frontiers. In all Russia lost a million square miles of territory, together with almost all its coal and oil, three-quarters of its iron ore, and about half its industry. About a third of its population, 55 million people, and the same proportion of its agriculture were also forfeit. Lenin, who was not present for the final meeting with the representatives of the Central Powers, described the settlement as ‘that abyss of defeat, dismemberment, enslavement, and humiliation’. Three months of negotiation and renewed fighting had followed the Bolsheviks’ initial request for an armistice, and Lenin knew that further discussion was pointless. He had no army to speak of and he had a civil war to contend with: his leverage was minimal. He could do nothing but bank on the hope that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would be overthrown by the spread of revolution abroad. ‘You must sign this shameful peace’, he told the Congress of Soviets, ‘in order to save the world revolution, in order to hold fast to ... its only foothold - the Soviet Republic’.1

  Two months later, on 7 May 1918, it was Romania’s turn. Although largely overrun in the autumn and winter of 1916, Romania had stayed in the war in 1917, holding a territorial rump in Moldavia with the aid of Russian reinforcements. France had sent a military mission, and, while the Russian army disintegrated, the Romanian was rebuilt. In July and August 1917, it successfully held off Mackensen’s army on the River Sereth, but its position was fatally compromised by the collapse of its principal ally. On 9 December 1917 it sought an armistice. The terms of the peace treaty were delivered as an ultimatum on 27 February 1918. ‘It was a disaster’, the head of the French mission, Henri Berthelot, reported in his final despatch to Paris. ‘Since Romania was deprived of its frontiers, of Dobrudja, of the products of its soil, of its army, since it was going without doubt to undergo enemy occupation for an indefinite period, what difference was there between these conditions and those which Romania would have undergone after a last disastrous battle, where it would at least have salvaged honour?’2 Even the pro-German conservatives, including the prime minister who signed the treaty, Alexander Marghiloman, were staggered by the terms. The notion of a German-dominated customs union in Central Europe, adumbrated in 1915 in Friedrich Naumann’s idea of Mitteleuropa, had been militarised into a form of indirect annexation. Germany took no territory solely for itself. It gave Wallachia to Austria-Hungary and southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria; as it intended to dominate both its allies, the concession was notional. The direct evidence of Germany’s mastery was economic. It took a ninety-nine-year lease on Romania’s oil deposits; it assumed control of the railways and the navigation of the Danube; it shared Romania’s agricultural surplus with Austria-Hungary, but it established a monopoly over Romanian trade through a customs union.

  The bulk of Romania was overrun in a campaign of extraordinary speed, its northern thrust driving through the Transylvanian Alps, and both pincers having to cope with deteriorating weather. By July 1917 the German army has time to distribute cigarettes to gypsies working in the fields

  The treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest defined what a German victory meant. ‘For those who think Germany will be satisfied with a peace of conciliation’, wrote a French gunner, the Russians’ cowardice ‘will have made them see what defeat would mean on our front. German militarism must be beaten for ever and that is what must reinvigorate us.’3 Russia and Romania were not the only losers at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest. So, too, were advocates everywhere of a negotiated peace, and they included liberals in Germany.

  On 19 July 1917 the Reichstag had passed a resolution calling for a peace without annexations or indemnities. Its vocabulary deliberately invoked memories of the Kaiser’s speech of 4 August 1914, suggesting that this was a defensive war, sustained by a domestic truce; it spoke of freedom of the seas, of the establishment of an international legal body, and of mutual understanding and economic cooperation. The work of a centre-left coalition, made up of the Catholic Centre Party, the Progressives and the Socialists, the peace resolution seemed to confirm the waxing strength of German liberalism. In his Easter message, the Kaiser had promised constitutional reform at the end of the war: his terms had been vague, but he had at least accepted Bethmann Hollweg’s determination that the Prussian upper house should be
reformed and that the three-class suffrage which guaranteed a conservative majority in the Prussian Diet should go.

  The primary effect was to isolate the radical and revolutionary left. Germany, like other belligerents on both sides, experienced more strikes in 1917 than in the earlier years of the war - 561 as against 137 in 1915 and 240 in 1916. As elsewhere, too, falling real wages and food shortages, especially after the ‘turnip’ winter of 1916-17, were the principal explanations. But there were big variations in individual experiences. In all countries, both metal-workers and women proved vital to war production, and central to industrial unrest. In Germany female metal-workers’ wages rose 324 per cent between 1914 and 1918. On the other hand, those on fixed incomes, civil servants and white-collar workers, the so-called ’Mittelstand‘, found themselves losing status as well as earnings: in one association the average wage rose 18.2 per cent between the outbreak of the war and the end of 1917, while the cost of living soared 185 per cent.4 The lower middle class was therefore radicalised by the war as much as the skilled male or the unskilled female. In January and February 1917 strikers in the Ruhr and in Berlin, female metal-workers at their head, demanded food or more wages to buy food. ’Any other people on earth would rise against a Government that had reduced it to such misery‘, Ethel Cooper wrote on 11 February 1917.5 Two months later strikers in her home town of Leipzig did call for political change. But the demands were for reform, not revolution: equal and universal suffrage, the removal of military controls on political discourse, and a peace without annexations.