The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  At Megiddo. Allenby enjoyed at least a two-to-one superiority. The transport of the British 5th Cavalry Division crosses the River Auja.

  By then the Serbs were ten miles into the Bulgarian positions and about to prove them wrong. Entente forces under the French general, Louis Franchet d‘Esperey, ’Desperate Frankie’ to the British, had attacked on 15 September. By 22 September the campaign was mobile enough for the continuing value of horses to become evident in another theatre, as well as Palestine. A brigade of 3,000 French cavalry, Spahis from North Africa, covered sixty miles over terrain which rose to 5,000 feet above sea level, entering Skopje, inside Serbia, on 29 September, the day that Bulgaria agreed terms. Its commander, General F. L. Jouinot-Gambetta, recorded the delirium of a liberated people: ‘The women kiss our hands while crying for joy’. But at the same time came retribution. He received reports that those who had been friendly with the Germans and Bulgarians were now seeking refuge in the Turkish quarter. His comment revealed the menace of shifting loyalties in the region: ‘we shall pick them up soon’.33

  Skopje was the southern railhead for the north-south Serbian railway. ‘I can with 200,000 men cross Hungary and Austria, mass in Bohemia covered by Czechs and march immediately on Dresden’, Franchet d‘Esperey wrote to a friend on 2 October.34 His orders were in fact to move on Romania and open contact with Russia from the south. On 1 November he reached the Danube, and the Serbs re-entered Belgrade. The victory had torn open the Central Powers’ southern front, and gone straight to the heart of the coalition’s communications network. The advantages they had so long enjoyed of operating on ’interior lines’ had been overthrown. Germany’s links to Constantinople were severed, Vienna’s route to the Ukraine was cut, and the back door to the army in the west stood ajar. Ludendorff’s alarm was none the less exaggerated; the advance through devastated Serbia had exceeded its logistic limits, and could not be renewed until 1919. What could not be saved was the alliance that had created the southern front in the first place.

  As the bulk of the Entente forces pushed north up the Balkan peninsula, the British component swung east into Thrace and advanced on the Dardanelles and Constantinople from the landward side. In October 1918, while the Ottoman army pursued its pan-Turkish dream in the Caucasus, its empire folded on its other three fronts. On 19 September Allenby renewed the Palestine campaign in a classic manoeuvre at Megiddo. He directed a feint up the Jordan valley but then used the mobility of his cavalry, screened by his aerial supremacy, to switch the weight of his breakthrough to the west and up the coast. Damascus fell on 1 October; Faisal claimed it for the Arabs, and the British let him have it, ready now to exclude the French. In Mesopotamia, the British began a dash to secure territory and oil before an armistice should bring their advance to a halt. The Turkish 6th Army mustered only 3,500 men in July, and could offer no effective opposition. On 4 November the British entered Mosul, which according to the Sykes-Picot agreement lay in the French sphere of influence. The Turks had surrendered six days before, on a British Dreadnought in Mudros on the Aegean island of Lemnos, essentially unconditionally and to all intents and purposes to the British alone.

  Franchet d‘Esperey was concerned less by Anglo-French rivalry in the Middle East than by the prospects of reciprocal action with the Italians against Austria-Hungary. On 2 October Tullio Marchetti, the most effective of the Italian army’s intelligence officers, had told his high command that the empire was ’like a pudding which has a crust of roasted almonds and is filled with cream. The crust which is the army in the front line is hard to break.‘35 But the cream was dissolving the crust. Karl had tried to implement his version of a revolution from above, announcing the adoption of a federal structure on 16 October. He exempted Hungary, and thereby abandoned the south Slavs under Magyar rule. Four days later Wilson said that the Fourteen Points were no longer relevant to the future of Austria-Hungary because of the commitments he had made to Czechoslovakia and now to Yugoslavia. He therefore rejected Karl’s efforts at federalism and made clear to the subject nationalities that he, not the Emperor, was likely to be the effective arbiter of their futures. But at the same time he declined to deal with Austria-Hungary as a sovereign state: Wilson negotiated with Germany alone. On the 23rd, the Italians, conscious, as the other belligerents were, that gains made in the last weeks of the war might shape post-war settlements on the ground, struck on the Piave, at Vittorio-Veneto. Even now the Austro-Hungarian army held for five days. But then it collapsed, and began to go home. Revolutions broke out in Vienna and Budapest on 31 October. Austria secured an armistice on 3 November but Hungary did not do so until the 13th.

  Kaiser Karl did not formally abdicate; Kaiser Wilhelm did. Max von Baden may have been both an aristocrat and the Kaiser’s choice as chancellor, but he was also a liberal. He had formed a government which represented the Reichstag majority and on 5 October had declared his acceptance of its programme. The allies, however, did not recognise this shift towards parliamentary government. Wilson’s responses to the German request for an armistice, and in particular his notes of 14 and 23 October, increasingly emphasised that they would only deal with a democratic Germany. They revealed, too, that Germany’s ploy of trying to separate a conciliatory Wilson from his vengeful European partners was not working. It was evident that he and they were united in seeing the armistice not as a pause in the fighting in order to thrash out peace terms but as a means to bring the war to a definite end. The German army would be emasculated both as a fighting force and as a factor in domestic politics. Ludendorff’s resolve returned. He said that Wilson’s note of 23 October should be rejected and the war resumed. But the prospect of the armistice had opened ‘enchanting celestial pictures’ which neither army nor people would agree to again abandoning. At the front, ’There was no going back psychologically‘, a Catholic chaplain recalled. ’No power in the world could have induced the average soldier at the front to take part in fighting that was to last still longer.‘36 At home there was resignation, not resistance: ’They are acting almost like criminals who have broken into a neighbor’s house, with no thought of defending themselves when caught red-handed.... The only fear they have is that peace might slip away at the last minute.‘37

  The Austro-Hungarian armistice, 3 November 1918: soldiers on the Trentino front go into captivity.

  On the western front fighting continued with no mitigation in its ferocity. Its mobility once again put civilians and their property more at risk than they had been when the front was static. Germans looted and pillaged as they retreated. At sea U-boats still torpedoed neutral shipping, and at the end of October the navy planned to take the fleet to sea to fight one last climactic battle. Word of the proposed ‘death ride’ got out. By 3 and 4 November disturbances gripped the fleet in Kiel, with the sailors’ demands focusing not on professional grievances but on issues like constitutional reform, peace, and the removal of the royal family. The mutiny spread to Wilhelmshaven, and then merged with spontaneous workers’ risings elsewhere. On 9 November a general strike broke out in Berlin. The Reichstag was in danger of forfeiting its authority to the sailors’, workers’ and — increasingly — soldiers’ councils that were being set up; the majority Socialists were fearful of losing control of the workers to the Independent Socialists; and the Spartacists wanted to ensure that the councils prepared for the next stage of the revolution that had now begun and which would establish a Soviet system in Germany. The army held the balance, and the Kaiser sought to use it to impose his authority in Berlin. At last it confronted the choice between the nation and the monarchy, which had been implicit in much of its behaviour throughout the war. But the man who had done most to marginalise the Kaiser did not see his actions through to their logical conclusion. Ludendorff had been forced to resign on 26 October. He had been replaced by Groener. On 8 November the new first quartermaster-general received thirty-nine reports on feeling in the army, only one of which said that the troops were ready to fight for Wilhelm. ‘The army�
��, Groener told its supreme commander, ‘will march home in peace and order under its leaders and commanding generals, but not under the command of Your Majesty; for it no longer stands behind Your Majesty.’38

  VICTORY WITHOUT PEACE

  The Germany that signed the armistice on 11 November 1918 was a republic, no longer an empire. Entente propaganda had vilified the Kaiser and castigated German militarism. It had distinguished between the rulers and the ruled. But the German people were not exempted from the humiliation of the defeat. For them the most direct consequence was the continuation of the blockade until the peace treaty was signed. Moreover, with no effective opposition and with unfettered access to the one sea that had remained a German enclave, the Baltic, the allies were able to apply it with a level of severity that had eluded them in the war. The winter of 1918-19, even more than the war years, determined the Germans’ and Austrians’ folk memories of hunger as an instrument of war.

  More important in the eyes of the allies was the use of the armistice to define military victory. If the triumph of the Entente was the fruit of attrition, through the exhaustion of the enemy’s resources as well as through the grinding down of armies, its implication was a compromise peace. In the autumn of 1918, the armies in the west were still reckoning on the wearing-out battle in which they were then engaged leading to breakthrough, as indeed happened so spectacularly on other fronts. The offer of an armistice before that point had been reached confronted them with a quandary. If the war ended while still in its attritional phase, the definite victory that the scale of the conflict and the issues which surrounded it demanded might elude them. Some French generals wanted to inflict on the Boche the hiding they felt he deserved, to re-divide Germany into separate states, and to make the German people conscious of invasion and defeat as the French had been in 1870 and 1914. Pétain had a scheme to regain Lorraine in 1919; ‘We must go right into the heart of Germany’, Charles Mangin, the victor of the second battle of the Marne, told all who would listen, or ‘The Germans will not admit they were beaten’.39

  Mangin’s British colleagues did not agree. Their advance in September and October was so rapid that it created logistic strains, particularly for an army which had geared its supply arrangements to a less fluid operational situation. It was now slowing as a result, and the deteriorating weather was turning the roads to mud. Haig reckoned that the German army was capable of retiring to its own frontier, and both he and Henry Wilson still regarded it as an effective opponent in the field. They feared that, if an immediate armistice were rejected, the war would go on until 1919. In Haig’s perhaps unduly harsh assessment, the French army was played out and the United States army, according even to Pershing, would still not be fully ready until autumn 1919. ‘The British alone might bring the enemy to his knees’, Haig commented. ‘But why expend more British lives - and for what?40

  Foch therefore made the armistice terms do duty for the success in battle that the Entente would have gained in 1919; they turned the compromise that was the logical outcome of attrition into victory. The German army had to withdraw to its frontiers, and to hand over 5,000 artillery pieces, 25,000 machine-guns, 3,000 trench mortars and 1,700 aeroplanes. He insisted on possession of the Rhine bridgeheads in case hostilities were renewed: the left bank of the Rhine was to be demilitarised, the right neutralised. Once in Germany, the allied army of occupation would have the right to requisition what it required. Admiral Beatty and the British were equally uncompromising over the naval terms. Germany was to hand over six battle cruisers, ten battleships, eight light cruisers, and fifty destroyers; all submarines were to be surrendered. The armistice stripped Germany of its ability to fight.

  Clemenceau, Wilson and Lloyd George acknowledge their fans after signing the Treaty of Versailles

  What most people celebrated on 11 November was peace. In the quiet that hushed the front at 11 a.m., some soldiers wondered how they would adjust; the war was their job, their routine; it gave them a feeling of purpose. But for others there was a real awareness of victory. As in Skopje, liberation was its most obvious incarnation. Belgium had been stripped of its industrial plant and raw materials; 120,000 workers had been forcibly deported to the Reich; and civil liberties had been forfeit to military occupation. The soldiers of the Belgian army who advanced into Belgium in October were freeing their own nation; they were also going home for the first time in four years: ‘Never has life been so dear to us as now, standing here facing home’, was how J. G. Gheuens described it in a later novel De Mis Kenden (The Unsung). ‘We can smell the stables; all we want ... is to eat, to sleep and rest, and then to charge again, until we are there.‘ On 22 November King Albert entered Brussels. His reception was delirious: ’Nobody will ever experience such a thing again! In the trees, on the fences, everywhere, people!‘41

  British troops enter Lille on 17 October 1918, ending four years of occupation.

  Belgians did not need to ask what the purpose of the war was. Nor did the population of occupied France. The entry to Lille was celebrated by an enormous crowd in the Place de la Concorde on 18 October, and in Charleville, used by Hindenburg as his headquarters, ‘what we wanted above all, was the victory of justice, liberty and civilisation’.42 The poilus were greeted with peals of bells, fireworks and songs. The entry to Alsace and Lorraine was the most emotive of all; their wait had been over forty years, not four. ‘We have just entered Château-Salins! What emotion, but also what joy, what bliss! Long before the town, the young girls adorned with ribbons in the colours of France came to meet us with flowers and much to our surprise we found the whole town bedecked with flags ... The former mayor with his great white beard cried tears of joy, veterans of [18]70 held out their hands to take ours. I was so moved that I could not speak. In the afternoon, our band gave a concert. The old mayor asked the bandmaster for his baton and conducted the “Marseillaise” with masterly skill and full of emotion.’43

  Belgium and France had suffered; they wanted revenge for past wrongs and they wanted security for the future. The peace settlement had to do two things. It had to draw a line under the First World War, and it had to meet the expectations that from it a new world order would emerge. Woodrow Wilson was the popular focus for the latter, but his idealism did not blind him to the legitimacy of the former. In his mind, as in the minds of many pacifists and radicals, the Germans had caused the war and had waged it in a manner which defied the customs and conventions that governed relations between states. A successful settlement had to incorporate that reality, because, if it did not, it would poison the efforts to create something better.

  Each of the Central Powers was subject to a separate peace treaty, and all had reason to feel aggrieved, given the expectations the Fourteen Points had generated. But that with Germany has carried the greatest weight because of its role in the causes of the Second World War. Despite its defeat, Germany manufactured its own feeling of victory out of the war. Ludendorff’s determination in 1917 to separate the demoralisation at home from the motivation of those at the front fed directly into the post-war argument that the German army had not been defeated in the field. It still stood deep in enemy territory on all fronts when it laid down its arms; its front had been neither broken through nor enveloped; thus, none of the features of an operational defeat on the battlefield was present. The British blockade, and the claim that it had reduced the civilian population to starvation, fitted in with the argument that the army had been stabbed in the back by the revolution at home. On 28 November 1918 Herbert Sulzbach’s division marched through the streets of Bonn, packed with civilians waving flags and throwing flowers: ‘our home country’, he wrote in his diary, ‘really seems to have understood that we are undefeated and unconquerable’.44 Two weeks later, on 11 December, the first troops marched down Unter den Linden in Berlin. ‘The men wore green laurel wreaths over their steel helmets, each rifle bore its little spray of flowers, the machine-guns were garlanded with green branches, and children waving gaily-coloured fl
ags sat by the side of them’.45 They were greeted by Germany’s new chancellor, the socialist Friedrich Ebert: ’I salute you who return unvanquished from the field of battle‘.46

  The German soldier with the best claim to be undefeated Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck (in the slouch hat), who had only surrendered because of the armistice in Europe, marches through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on 2 March 1919 The Pour le Mérite hangs round his neck

  Those who could not quite swallow this used another tack. In the desperate defensive battles of 1916 and 1917, the German soldier had been venerated for his courage and his determination. To fight a good fight carried its own reward ; to rise above the terrors of industrialised warfare and so to master the battlefield was itself a moral victory. Strains of this sort of thinking appeared in the war memorials and memoirs of soldiers other than in Germany. But in Germany it carried particular resonance precisely because this inner experience had to do duty for victory more conventionally defined. Ernst Jünger, a storm-troop officer awarded Germany’s highest decoration, the Pour le Mérite, concluded his fictionalised diary, Stahlgewittern (The Storm of Steel): ’Hardened as scarcely another generation ever was in fire and flame, we could go into life as though from the anvil‘. That conviction underpinned the writing of Germany’s history of the war. Georg Soldan, general editor of a popular but official series on battles, declared his aim was not to deny the horrors of the war, but to glorify them, in the hope that, like the Bible, the books would enter every home and help rebuild the fatherland. ’The nation was no longer for me an empty thought veiled in symbols‘, Jünger wrote, ’and how could it have been otherwise when I had seen so many die for its sake, and been schooled myself to stake my life for its credit every minute, day and night, without a thought? ‘47