The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Where the Kaiser erred most egregiously was in believing that the encirclement of Germany had been carefully planned by the Entente powers, above all by Great Britain. In reality, neither Edward VII nor his successor George V had remotely considered this possibility; nor had politicians in either the Liberal or the Conservative Party. On the contrary, the Liberal Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey had been prevented by his party colleagues from making any kind of binding commitment to France, much less to Russia. Next to no military preparations were made for the eventuality of a continental war in which Britain would be directly involved. Throughout the last week of July 1914, as far as most Britons were concerned, a continental conflict was unfolding which need not involve them. In the words of the editors of The Economist, the ‘quarrel’ in the Balkans was ‘no more of our making and no more our concern than would be a quarrel between Argentina and Brazil or between China and Japan’.

  Yet the fact that the Germans intended to march across Belgium on their way to France confronted the British government with a dilemma. The neutrality of Belgium was something guaranteed by international law – by a treaty that all the European powers, including Germany, had signed in 1839. Serbia might well be a rogue regime; Belgium, with its Saxe-Coburg monarch and strategically vital location, was a different matter. Its neutral status was an integral part of that web of agreements between the great powers that had more or less preserved the European peace for a century. Was His Majesty’s Government – least of all a Liberal Cabinet – going to stand idly by while international law was flouted? And, law or no law, were they prepared to see Germany defeat France, raising the prospect of German naval bases on the Channel coast? On the other hand, could Britain’s available ground troops – six divisions plus one of cavalry – really make a difference to a European war? Henry Wilson, the Director of Military Operations from 1910, candidly admitted that six divisions were ‘fifty too few’. Indeed, until as late as 1911 the assumption was that in the event of a European war any British Expeditionary Force would be deployed in Central Asia; in other words, it was still taken for granted that the foe in such a war would be Russia. It was patently obvious that a British intervention against German forces in Western Europe would require the mobilization of the entire naval, financial and manpower resources of Britain’s global empire to be decisive. That could only happen if the war was prolonged.

  As so often in the twentieth century, what was at stake rather eluded British politicians. When the Cabinet met over lunch on Sunday, August 2 (a time when most of its members would much rather have been away in the country) the discussion was strangely recondite. Some of those who favoured neutrality argued speciously (and incorrectly) that the Germans were going to pass through only a part of Belgium. The proponents of intervention – who were in a decided minority, but had the sympathy of the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith – argued that standing aside would be dishonourable. Perhaps more persuasively, they pointed out that not intervening would bring the government down and let in the Opposition, who would go to war anyway. The real dilemma Asquith and his colleagues had to address was not really articulated: would this be a continental war, one the Germans would probably win, or a world war, the outcome of which no one could foresee? They opted, after much humming and hawing, for the latter.

  To the bankers, war was a calamity that came as a bolt from the blue. To the diplomats, it was a last resort when the usual routine of correspondence, confabulations and conferences had failed. To the generals, it suddenly seemed a pressing necessity, since delay could only benefit the other side. The monarchs, who still dreamed that international relations were a family affair, were suddenly as powerless as if revolutions had already broken out. Yet those who overruled their rulers had only a shadowy conception of what they were embarking on.

  For the shifting tectonic plates in the Balkans had now triggered a global earthquake that would shake all the great European empires to their foundations. Suddenly, the vast resources of the European industrial economies were diverted from production to destruction. In the space of five days 1,800 special trains ran south to Southampton, one arriving every three minutes for sixteen hours a day. Fourteen French railways each carried fifty-six trains a day. One German train crossed the Rhine at Cologne every ten minutes. Between them, the French and Germans mobilized roughly four million men each. It took just a matter of days to get them to their designated railheads. Yet – contrary to the expectations of those who had hoped that a war would weaken the Left – the revolutionary forces already at work before the war were ultimately strengthened by the mobilization of the masses that was now under way. Even more disturbingly, the new forms of ethnic conflict that had been discernible in the Russian progroms of 1905 and the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 now came to be adopted as legitimate methods of warfare by the great powers themselves. The net effect of this geopolitical earthquake was to deal a heavy, if not fatal, blow to that dominance of the West which had seemed so reassuringly secure until the very last week of July 1914.

  4

  The Contagion of War

  ‘Für Menschenleben geht’s bei uns nicht an.’ (‘For us, human life isn’t a consideration.’)

  A German prisoner of war to Violet Asquith, October 1914

  We are not hurling our grenades against human beings.

  Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

  WORLD WAR

  The war that broke out in the summer of 1914 was always very likely to become a world war. Even before the conflict began, British experts like the Chief of the Admiralty War Staff, Sir Frederick Sturdee, saw clearly that ‘our next maritime war will be world-wide, more so even than former wars.’ It was precisely the prospect of British intervention that prompted Moltke to say to his adjutant on the night of July 30: ‘This war will grow into a world war.’ The Times’s military correspondent Charles à Court Repington is usually credited with coining the phrase ‘First World War’; his contribution was to recognize that there would very likely be more than one. The globalization of the conflict was an inevitable consequence of British involvement. An empire that controlled around a quarter of the planet’s land surface and an even higher proportion of its sea lanes, but had only a ‘contemptibly’ small European army, was bound by its very nature to wage a global war.

  Of course, it would not have become a world war if, as in 1870, the Germans had vanquished the French in a matter of weeks. But that was never very likely. The basic problem confronting German strategists was, of course, that they had to fight on (at least) two fronts. It has long been assumed that they had only one answer to this question: the plan for a high-speed envelopment of the French army devised by Moltke’s predecessor as Chief of the General Staff, Alfred von Schlieffen. According to the classic account by the German historian Gerhard Ritter, whose source was a private memorandum drafted by Schlieffen after his retirement, the plan was for the right wing of the German army to advance west and then south of Paris, coming at the French from behind and ‘annihilating’ them. In order to maximize the vulnerability of the enemy’s rear, Schlieffen’s plan envisaged that the Germans might withdraw from Lorraine, creating a kind of revolving door; as the French advanced to reclaim Lorraine, the Germans would swing into northern France behind them. However, the recently rediscovered records of the regular General Staff ‘Rides’ (Generalstabsreisen) and other pre-war exercises suggest that this was not what Schlieffen planned while he was in office. Given the limitations of German manpower, he aimed instead to ‘defeat the French army in battles along the frontier, and then to break the French fortress line’. Indeed, he may even have intended to let the French make the first move, then counter attack. In this scenario, the defeat of France would have come only after a protracted second campaign. Schlief-fen’s subsequent plan for the envelopment of Paris was thus merely an illustration, drawn up in his retirement, of what Germany might be able to do if she had a bigger army. Nevertheless, the dream of a modern Cannae (the battle at which Hannibal had
enveloped and annihilated the more numerous Romans) was an alluring one to Schlieffen’s successor precisely because the German army seemed to be too small to wage a prolonged war on two fronts against both France and Russia. The possibility that a small but proficient British Expeditionary Force might join the French seemed merely to strengthen the argument for sending the right wing of the German force through Belgium. The fatal flaw was that the troops concerned were being asked to march too far. General Alexander von Kluck’s 1st Army – which included 84,000 horses needing two million pounds of fodder a day – had to cover an average of 14.4 miles every day for three weeks.

  In one respect the Germans came remarkably close to their objective of annihilating the enemy. The total number of French dead by the end of December 1914 was 265,000; indeed their casualties of all types had already reached 385,000 by September 10. Not only that, but the French had lost a tenth of their field artillery and half a million rifles. Worst of all, a very substantial part of their heavy industrial capacity was now under enemy control. The puzzle is why these heavy losses did not lead to a complete collapse – as had happened in 1870 and would happen again in 1940. Some credit must certainly go to the imperturbable French Commander-in-Chief Joseph Joffre, and particularly to his ruthless purge of senescent or incompetent French commanders as the crisis unfolded. Fundamentally, however, time was against Moltke for the simple reason that the French could redeploy more swiftly than the Germans could advance once they had left their troop trains. On August 23 the three German armies on Moltke’s right wing constituted twenty-four divisions, facing just seventeen and a half Entente divisions; by September 6 they were up against forty-one. The chance of a decisive victory was gone, if it had ever existed. At the Marne, the failure of Moltke’s gamble was laid bare. He himself suffered a nervous breakdown.

  The Germans’ difficulties in the West were compounded by the unforeseen demands made on them in the East by their own ally. There had been a woeful lack of coordination between Berlin and Vienna: ‘It is high time’, declared the German military attaché in Vienna on August 1, 1914, ‘that the two general staffs consult now with absolute frankness with respect to mobilization, jump-off times, areas of assembly and precise troop strength.’ By then it was much too late. The Austrians wanted to fight the Serbs, but were forced to turn round and fight the Russians. They were duly smashed in Galicia, losing 350,000 men at a stroke. The Austrians, too, might have been expected to collapse, as they had in 1859 and 1866. But the Russians were unable to press home their advantages. Their railway network lacked lateral links between the two major theatres on the Eastern Front. They were also saddled with some lamentable generals (notably P. I. Postovskii, nicknamed the ‘Mad Mullah’). When the Germans confronted Russians at Tannenberg, they inflicted a Cannae-like defeat on them. What had failed in the West succeeded in the East.

  With these battles the scene was set for the ensuing stalemate: the Germans unable to break French morale on the Western Front before British reinforcements had arrived, while at the same time forced to prop up the Austrians in the East – unable, in short, to win – yet so much more effective tactically and operationally than their opponents that they could not easily be defeated.

  WHY THE GERMANS LOST

  War was waged all over the world after July 1914. All sides, beginning with the Germans, sought to resolve the strategic impasse in Europe by winning victories in extra-European theatres. The Kaiser himself had set the tone as early as July 30, when he called on ‘our consuls in Turkey, in India, agents etc., [to]… fire the whole Mohammedan world to fierce rebellion against this hated, lying, conscienceless nation of shop-keepers; for if we are to be bled to death, England shall at least lose India.’ This was more than mere royal ranting. Three and a half months later, in the presence of Germany’s new ally the Ottoman Sultan, the Sheikh-ul-Islam issued a fatwa that declared an Islamic holy war on Britain and her allies. Swiftly translated into Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tatar, it was addressed to both Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims. Given that roughly 120 million of the world’s 270 Muslims were under British, French or Russian rule, this was a potentially revolutionary call to jihad.

  However, the Germans laboured under three insuperable disadvantages when it came to global warfare. At sea, they were simply outnumbered. True, they had achieved technical superiority over the Royal Navy in a number of respects. The Germans were ahead in wireless communications, while the British stuck to Nelson-era semaphore – impossible for the enemy to read at a distance, but not much more legible to a dispersed fleet in the fog of battle. On the whole, too, the German battleships fired more accurately and were better armoured than their British opponents. Their officers may also have been better trained; the British had too many incompetents like the disastrous Flag Lieutenant Ralph Seymour, who repeatedly garbled vital signals at Jutland, or Captain Thomas Jackson, Director of the Operations Division of the Admiralty, who specialized in misreading or ignoring crucial intelligence. At the start of the war, the Germans also made more of the element of surprise. The Russian commander whose ship was torpedoed by SMS Emden off Penang on October 28, 1914, was certainly unprepared for the new age of global conflict. Only twelve rounds of ammunition were ready on deck; but there were sixty Chinese prostitutes below.

  Yet the odds were overwhelmingly against a German victory at sea. After their defeat at the Falklands, they were forced to concentrate their naval forces in Europe, preparing their surface fleet for the decisive battle they hoped to fight in the North Sea and deploying their submarines in the eastern Atlantic (often around the Irish coast). It remained true that, in Churchill’s famous phrase, the First Sea Lord, Admiral John Jellicoe, was ‘the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon’. Jellicoe was too good a commander to do that. He was, admittedly, not quite good enough to win it in an afternoon either; the Royal Navy’s attempt to bombard and capture the Gallipoli peninsula was a dismal failure. (‘No human power could withstand such an array of might and power,’ thought the British flotilla’s commander as he neared the Black Sea Straits. He was wrong: Turkish guns and mines did so easily.) Fortunately, not losing the war was enough, since time was on the side of Britain, her empire and her allies. They had the greater resources and were therefore better able to withstand that disruption of trade which became the secondary goal of the naval war after the primary goal of a decisive engagement proved unattainable. Significantly, the first Royal Navy action of the war – on August 5, the day after Britain’s entry – was the severing of all Germany’s international telegraph cables, which ran along the ocean floor to France, Spain, North Africa and the United States. The British understood better than German military planners how a world war could be won. They began by literally cutting the enemy off from the global economy. They also learned more quickly the importance of intelligence. The German navy began the war with three main codes. By the end of 1914 the British had cracked all three and were able to read German radio signals undetected throughout the war. Although MI5 was notably unsuccessful at disrupting its network of agents, the German Naval Intelligence Service (Nachrichtenabteilung im Admiralstab) achieved nothing of comparable value.

  Perhaps just as importantly, the British saw more clearly than the Germans the need to win the battle for what we would now call world opinion. Making the maritime blockade of Germany effective was only possible by ignoring international agreements, like the Declaration of London of 1908, which set out clear rules governing the treatment of neutral shipping in wartime but which the House of Lords had refused to ratify. This, and the ruthless way in which the Royal Navy harassed neutral ships believed to be trading with Germany, was not calculated to win friends abroad. Nevertheless, the British were adept at diverting attention to German misdemeanours at sea. For their part, the Germans failed to see that, when they shelled British ports or ordered their submarines to sink merchant vessels without warning, they were doing as much damage to themselves as to their enemies. The British and Ame
rican press liked nothing better than tales of women and children blown to pieces or drowned by German Schreck-lichkeit (frightfulness). As the former German Colonial Secretary Bernhard Dernburg put it shortly after the sinking of the liner Lusi-tania by a German submarine: ‘The American people cannot visualize the spectacle of a hundred thousand… German children starving by slow degrees as a result of the British blockade, but they can visualize the pitiful face of a little child drowning amidst the wreckage caused by a German torpedo.’ Quite why 128 Americans should have felt entitled to cross the Atlantic on a British ship during a world war with impunity was never entirely clear. But instead of emphasizing this, the Germans struck commemorative medals to celebrate the Lusitania’s fate, medals which were promptly seized upon and replicated in London as examples of German viciousness.

  In the absence of a truly colossal blunder by the Royal Navy, then, the war at sea was a foregone conclusion. Equally hopeless were German attempts to foment a world insurrection against Entente imperialism. The great strategist Colmar von der Goltz, who was to die a heroic if futile death in Mesopotamia, maintained that: