The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  Berliners rally to protest against the terms of the Versailles peace treaty. The placard harks back to the armistice negotiations with Woodrow Wilson, calling for ‘only the 14 points’

  When Ulrich Brockdorff-Rantzau, the senior German delegate to the peace conference, was presented with the fat volume of Versailles demands on 7 May 1919, his shock was palpable. He summarised its contents: ‘Germany renounces its existence’.48 It was to lose 13 per cent of its territory and 10 per cent of its population. It was also required to pay reparations, which the allies themselves took turns to boost. The Americans refused to link them to the Entente’s settlement of its war debt, and the British and French, unable to quantify loss of life in other terms, added the pension bill that the casualties of the war had generated. In the event, the actual amounts proved irrelevant; Germany ended up paying less than France had paid after 1871. What mattered was the rhetoric that accompanied the settlement. Before the peace treaty was signed one member of the British delegation, John Maynard Keynes, resigned in protest at the harshness of the terms, and then published a hugely successful popular book in order to damn its economic clauses. The Economic Consequences of the Peace prepared the way for liberal doubters, who were further exploited by the Germans’ response to article 231 of the treaty. This asserted German war guilt, but for the sole purpose of justifying reparations. The Germans used it to attack the peace settlement as a whole. The allies’ failure at Versailles was a failure of resolve in implementing its terms. There was no inevitable link between it and the outbreak of a second war twenty years later. The reality was that, given the enormity of the task that confronted the victors, they drew up a settlement which promised far more than it proved able to deliver in practice.

  The only precedent the powers had when they convened in Paris in 1919 was the settlement whose ultimate failure caused them to be there in the first place. In 1815 the Congress of Vienna set about restoring order in Europe by looking back; in 1919 thirty-seven powers looked forward, and sought solutions which would regulate the affairs not just of Europe but of the whole world. They brought to that process vocabulary which still underpins notions of international relations: the rule of international law, the value of multilateral solutions, and the belief that liberal democracy should be the basis for progress. Their efforts were shaped by two key, if ill-defined, Wilsonian concepts. The first was national self-determination. Given that the United States was itself a community made up predominantly of immigrants, Wilson’s presumption against multi-ethnic empires was arrogant and naive. In Europe about 30 million found themselves on the wrong sides of frontiers. In so far as he recognised they would generate problems, he relied on his other over-arching idea, the League of Nations, to sort things out.

  The programme was ambitious, and in the long view of the twentieth century it failed. Clear ethnic divisions were particularly hard to draw in the Balkans. Italy felt aggrieved that the deal it had struck under the conditions of ‘old diplomacy’, as the price for its entry to the war in 1915, was not honoured by the spokesmen for ‘new diplomacy’ in 1919. Its frustration led it to flout the League in 1936. In Asia another power on the side of the victors, Japan, was incensed by the refusal to adopt its proposed clause on racial equality, that the members of the League would treat each other’s citizens without discrimination. It secured compensation in the recognition of its claim to Tsingtao and Shantung despite China’s membership of the Entente and despite the principle of national self-determination. In 1937 it, too, was to ignore the League as it used its gains as a platform to extend its claims to Asiatic hegemony. In the Middle East the Arabs did not get the nationhood they had been led to expect. The competition between France and Britain for influence in the region was further compounded by the latter’s recognition of the Zionist movement in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. But the series of settlements were not simply a charter for covert imperialism. The ’mandate’ system adopted outside Europe gave the powers to whose charge territories were allocated responsibilities as well as privileges, and made clear that their occupation was temporary not permanent.

  For many, allied victory meant not liberation but migration Clutching their possessions, German nationals leave Alsace and cross the Rhine.

  Britain’s handling of many issues, particularly those raised by Japan, was the product less of London’s wishes than of those of its dominions. Billy Hughes, Australia’s prime minister, reflecting his white population’s fear of the ‘yellow peril’, rejected Japan’s summons for racial equality. In trying to act as broker between two Pacific powers, the prime minister of a third, Canada, had to grapple with his own uncertainties. Canada, Robert Borden said, was ‘a nation that is not a nation’.49 For those who had been at Vimy Ridge such reticence seemed ill-placed; the war had made Canada a nation, as it had made Australia, New Zealand and South Africa nations. These were developments the peace settlements were being asked to confirm. Within Europe, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Finland and Lithuania had all achieved independence and a measure of definition before Woodrow Wilson even landed at Brest. The challenge he confronted was therefore a somewhat different one from that to which his speeches were directed. In Central and Eastern Europe war had effected change, and for those who sought such changes it continued to do so. Indeed, the United States’s own decision to intervene was confirmation of the same point. War could work.

  For that reason the First World War did not end as neatly on 11 November as the celebration of Armistice Day suggests. ‘One year and three days’ later, Henry Wilson wrote to Lord Esher, ’we have between 20 and 30 wars raging in different parts of the world‘.50 Russia was engaged in a civil war to define its revolution, a war in which the allies had intervened. It included war in and for Poland. To the south Turkey’s war hero, Mustafa Kemal, was exploiting the support of the Bolsheviks to enable him to take on the Greeks and British in order to re-found the Turkish nation. And the example set by Europe spread. On 27 February 1919 the French pacifist Romain Rolland wrote to the socialist Jean-Richard Bloch, to tell him of a young Japanese friend who had just returned home after two years observing the war in Europe and America. ’My greatest surprise‘, the Japanese had said, ’has been that there are among you men who, truly, believe in the idealism that they profess. We others, we Japanese, think: “Idealism is for the Europeans a political means”. And we do not blame them; we are now going to act like them.‘51

  The notion of war’s utility was not just transmitted across continents. It spanned generations. Children who had grown up in the thrall of war had seen it permeate their schooling, their reading and their games: they, too, expected to defend their nations as their parents had done. Anna Eisenmenger, a Viennese grandmother, had three sons and a daughter. One son was killed, one blinded, and the third lost his reason; he killed his sister’s husband. One day in March 1920, Anna found her grandson playing with a schoolfriend. Both ‘were wearing soldiers’ caps ... made for them out of newspaper. They had pokers in their hands and were sitting behind the backs of armchairs “in the trenches”. Wolfi was an “Austrian”, his friend a “Frenchman”. They were shooting at each other. Wolfi ... was playing at war.’52 Boys were told of an intensity of experience whose loss their fathers still regretted. From it came the adventures of Biggles, written by a pilot, W E. Johns, and of Bulldog Drummond. The latter’s creator, H. C. McNeile, wrote under a pseudonym, ‘Sapper’, which reflected what he had done in the war. ‘Cementing everything, crowning everything, the spirit of camaraderie, of good fellowship’, he wrote in the preface to the collected edition of his war stories: ‘No nightmare that, but a dream one would only willingly repeat today.’53

  The war memorials and the war literature that today can seem the war’s most pervasive legacy in Western Europe did not necessarily carry the messages of waste and futility that are now associated with them. The biggest memorial in Germany, erected at Tannenberg in 1927, trumpeted a victory. For many Entente veterans, Armistic
e Day was a focus for reunions and drinking, for celebration as well as commemoration. Wives and mothers were scandalised, unable to comprehend any response except overwhelming grief. About 10 million soldiers died in the war. Twice that number bore the scars of wounds _ some so mutilated in body or mind as to be unfit for further work and unable to lead fulfilled lives. Calculations of civilian dead remain inadequate, partly because so many deaths were indirect, the result of starvation or disease rather than of bullets or shells, and partly because they were forgotten in the war’s immediate aftermath. Globally up to 20 million succumbed in the influenza epidemic which swept from Asia through Europe and on to America in 1918-19. But the bereaved were not forgotten, because one of the purposes of mourning was to remember. ‘Every day one meets saddened women, with haggard faces and lethargic movements, and one dare not ask after husband or son’, Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary on 17 November 1918.54

  Those who mourned needed to find meaning in their loss. When the British struck their Victory Medal for issue to all those who had served, they provided one answer: ‘For Civilisation’, it said. It was a theme which linked the ideas of 1914 to the war’s outcome, and it was repeated throughout the British Empire and in France. In Germany the city of Hamburg commissioned Ernst Barlach to design a memorial to its 40,000 ‘sons’ killed in action. A stele, it has on one side another recurrent image in war memorials, the mother and child, equating the grieving mother with the Madonna. Five years later, in 1936, the 76th Infantry Regiment responded to Barlach’s memorial with one of its own: erected near that commemorating Hamburg’s dead of 1870, it linked the past to the future, declaring on its oblong block, ’Germany must live even if we must die.‘

  By then the allies’ memories of victory were fading. ‘Armistice Day ceased to exist as a restaurant orgy: the Two Minutes Silence took its place’, as Ian Hay noted with irony. The trophies that had stood by the memorials, the captured guns and trench mortars symbolic of triumph, were removed, and only the memorials remained. The idea that the war had purpose languished. In 1926 Lance-Corporal John Jackson, who had served on the western front between 1915 and 1918, wrote his memoirs. ‘Let it ever be remembered’, he prefaced his story, that, but for British intervention, ‘German “Kultur” would dominate us all, and only those who saw it in force, in parts of France and Belgium occupied by German forces, can understand the humiliation such a situation would have entailed.‘55 It was a plea which fell on increasingly deaf ears. A year later, in 1927, the dead of his regiment, the Cameron Highlanders, were commemorated with the opening of the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle, in itself evidence of another nation which used the war to shape its identity. In the memorial’s guide-book, Ian Hay noted with bemusement the change in attitudes over the years since the armistice. ’War has become a monstrous, unspeakable thing‘, he acknowledged. However, he insisted, there was more to its comprehension than that. ’Our reactions and emotions upon the subject of recent history are at present too fluid to have any lasting value. We must leave it to Time to crystallize them.‘56

  French soldiers who fell near Reims are identified before burial in July 1918. The process of tracing the dead still continues

  In 1929 Erich Maria Remarque published Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), a book which at a stroke revived the by-then flagging market for war literature. Within a year Remarque’s book was translated into twenty-eight languages, sold nearly 4 million copies, and became an academy-award winning film. And yet it was less about the war than about the problems of a generation unable to reintegrate itself with post-war society. Its message was one of shattered illusions, a theme often echoed in what Ian Hay called ‘the new style War novels’. In the 1920s there had been many interpretations of the war; thereafter one increasingly dominated over the others. It created a barrier between our understanding of the war and that of those who fought in it. Even those who survived came to see it in terms different from those which they embraced at the time. Hindsight bred arrogance, and _ worse _ misconception. Many of the ideologies which had given the war meaning became loaded, larded with later connotations.

  The Second World War irrevocably demonstrated that the First World War was not, after all, the war to end all wars. But it also enabled posterity to have it both ways. It venerated the writers who condemned the war of 1914-18 but at the same time condemned those who embraced appeasement, the logical corollary. War literature and appeasement both derived their appeal from the same basic liberalism which had underpinned the ideals of the peacemakers at Versailles. Liberalism’s comparative failure in the inter-war years was in large part due to its own fundamental decency. It lost the determination to enforce its own standards, a quality it possessed in 1914 and 1917, and it was reluctant to assert itself in the internal politics of states that deviated from democratic norms.

  The issues of course did not present themselves in such clear-cut fashion. One reason why Adolf Hitler could appeal to the German people in 1933 was precisely because many genuinely convinced themselves that they had been wronged in 1919. But that of itself does not explain the Second World War. Hitler was able to play back some of the themes of German popular mobilisation in the First World War - the ideas of the Burgfrieden in 1914, the Fatherland Party’s appeal to national unity over party loyalty, OberOst’s notion of Germany’s mission in the east, the expectation that a Second Punic War might be necessary to complete the agenda of the First. Above all, the Kaiser’s failure as supreme warlord generated a belief that a real leader would have delivered a German victory. But by 1918 Germans had also learnt what modern war entailed. They did not take to the streets to show their enthusiasm when war broke out in 1939. The Second World War is inexplicable without knowledge of the First, but there is no inevitability linking Versailles and the ambitions of the peacemakers to its outbreak.

  The First World War broke the empires of Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. It triggered the Russian Revolution and provided the bedrock for the Soviet Union; it forced a reluctant United States on to the world stage and revivified liberalism. On Europe’s edge, it provided a temporary but not a long-term solution to the ambitions of the Balkan nations. Outside Europe it laid the seeds for the conflict in the Middle East. In short it shaped not just Europe but the world in the twentieth century. It was emphatically not a war without meaning or purpose.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My first debt in writing this book is to a man whom I have never met, the father of Alan Clements. He had the good sense to give his son, on the occasion of his fortieth birthday, the first volume in my planned trilogy on the First World War. To Arms was published by Oxford University Press in 2001, and it prompted Alan to ask me whether I thought the First World War could be the subject of a new television documentary series. This is a book born in Glasgow: Alan’s production company, Wark Clements, is based in the city, and Alan himself is a history graduate of its university, whose professor of modern history I then had the privilege to be.

  Alan was not the first representative of a television production company to raise the idea with me, but he was the first to accept that it might be possible to do it as I felt it should be done. The problems that any documentary of the First World War confronts are uncertainty about the authenticity of footage and in particular the lack of sufficient surviving film from the first half of the war. The pioneering series made by the BBC in 1964, The Great War, often got round these two difficulties by ignoring them; forty years on we have more regard for the evidence. My solutions were threefold. First, we should not exaggerate the problem: there were fresh sources of film, particularly those in eastern Europe and Russia opened with the end of the Cold War, yet to be exploited. Secondly, we had to be ready to fill gaps by using the feature films made in the immediate aftermath of the war, provided we told the audience exactly what we were doing. In this way, the Gallipoli landings — for example — could be shown on screen. Thirdly, I argued that it was possible to go bac
k to the battlefields today and to inter-cut freshly-shot film of the landscape with stills of the events that took place there in 1914-18. This was not an original idea: Ken Burns did it to great effect in his series on the American Civil War. He conveyed movement and action through the sound-track - which combined music and the noise of battle with the words of participants.

  That final point carried a further consequence. As far as possible this series should convey the realities of war in phrases uttered at the time not in the memories of surviving veterans, however powerful. Mediated by the intervening events of the twentieth century, such testimony can create not an immediacy but a distance between us and the First World War. Those who fought in 1914-18 who still survived in 2001 no longer saw the world as they saw it as young men. Interviews of another sort too were banned. Television history has become addicted to a cult of the historian as personality: by contrast, this series would have no presenter and no debates between competing interpretations. It has a strong authorial line, but that is conveyed solely in its commentary.

  Alan asked me how a series of ten parts should be divided. My opinion was that its framework should be a narrative provided by the military and political, not the social and cultural, history of the war. Thus somebody who viewed the entire ten programmes would have some grasp of the war’s overall sweep and shape. There have been modifications, but in general terms the ten programmes reflect the ten topics that I suggested then. They have also been used as the basis of the ten chapters of this book. The titles of each are identical, the precise contents not so. In some cases ideas that worked well for one programme belonged in another chapter, and in others themes which could be explored in words made less sense visually — or vice versa.