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

by Niall Ferguson

  The present war is most emphatically only the beginning of a long historical development, at whose end will stand the defeat of England’s world position … [and] the revolution of the coloured races against the colonial imperialism of Europe.

  But these events came to pass long after the war had been lost; indeed, they did not happen until Germany had lost a second world war. In the short run, the efforts of the Central Powers to accelerate decolonization were as laughable as they were fruitless. The dissolute ethnographer Leo Frobenius sought in vain to win over Lij Yasu, the Emperor of Abyssinia, to the German side. Even more absurd was the German expedition to the Emir of Afghanistan, the fifteen members of which travelled via Constantinople equipped with copies of W. and A. K. Johnston’s general world atlas and disguised as a circus troupe. The British had so much more experience of the imperial Great Game that such ventures were unlikely to succeed. In Africa, it is true, German forces were able to keep fighting for a surprisingly long time and to inflict real casualties. Total British losses in East Africa were over 100,000 men, the vast majority black troops and porters. But what was the point? The German aim was to tie up colonial soldiers who might otherwise have been deployed in Europe, yet few of those engaged in the African campaigns would have been sent to Europe under any circumstances. In any case, most of the fighting took place in Germany’s colonies, particularly in German East Africa (Tanganyika). South-West Africa surrendered to the South Africans as early as July 1915. The others – Togoland and the Cameroons – were in Entente hands long before the end of the war.

  The third weakness of the German position was financial. Britain could borrow far more money to fund her war effort than Germany and at lower rates of interest, thanks to the breadth and depth of her financial institutions, and the international pre-eminence of London as a financial market. She could borrow at home, from the public and, if need be, from the Bank of England; she could borrow abroad, not only from her imperial dominions and other possessions, but also from the United States; she could also lend generously to her less creditworthy continental allies. Pre-war experts like Ivan Bloch and Norman Angell had assumed that the huge costs of a twentieth-century war would swiftly drive the combatant powers to bankruptcy. Yet the ratio of the British national debt to gross domestic product was not much higher in 1918 than it had been in 1818. ‘Success means credit,’ declared Lloyd George in 1916: ‘Financiers never hesitate to lend to a prosperous concern.’ This was true as far as it went, but it overlooked the fact that even when the war went badly for Britain the financiers – led by J. P. Morgan in New York – were unlikely to pull the plug. The Entente by that time really was too big to fail, in the sense of being too big a customer for American exports. By 1916 merchandise exports had risen to 12 per cent of US gross domestic product – double the pre-war figure and, indeed, the highest percentage in any year between 1869 and 2004. Around 70 per cent of those exports were bound for Europe, going overwhelmingly to Britain and her allies. Even if the German campaigns of unrestricted warfare had not brought the United States into the war in April 1917, Britain would surely have been bailed out financially, if not militarily. The alternative – as the American ambassador in London pointed out on March 5, 1917 – would have been to kill off transatlantic trade, which would be ‘almost as bad for the United States as for Europe’. Those American Senators like George Norris of Nebraska who accused President Woodrow Wilson of ‘putting a dollar sign on the American flag’ were not wholly wide of the mark, though it is clear that American intervention in April 1917 was intended mainly to give the United States a seat at the peace conference; like many other people in Washington Wilson erroneously thought the Allies were close to victory and did not anticipate that substantial numbers of American troops would have to fight.

  As a world war, then, the war of 1914–18 was not one Germany could ever have won. Yet as a European war its outcome was far less certain – and it was in Europe, despite all that happened on the high seas or on the colonial periphery, that the war was decided. To give just one example, 92 per cent of all British casualties were suffered in France. From that point of view, it was a world war only in the sense that men came to fight in Europe from all around the world. In 1914 Britain’s army in India was bigger than its army in Europe, so soldiers from the Punjab soon found themselves knee deep in the mud of Flanders. They were joined by volunteers from all over the British Empire – from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The French too deployed colonial troops, from North and West Africa.

  By the end of the war these forces had been joined by more than four million men from the United States. Likewise, the Russian army drew men from all over the Tsarist Empire. Indeed, it was partly the ability of all sides to reach out beyond their national heartlands that allowed the European war to be waged for so long and on such a large scale.

  There were in fact multiple European wars: one in Belgium and Northern France; another that raged from the Baltic through Galicia to Bukovina; a third that was fought in the Alps between Austria and Italy; a fourth that was waged in the Balkans and the Black Sea Straits. It might be said that the Central Powers won the second, third and fourth of these wars, defeating Russia, Romania and Serbia, shattering the Italian army at Caporetto (October–November 1917) and repulsing the British invasion of Gallipoli. But they could not win the first; or, rather, it was only when they began to lose in the West that their positions in the other theatres crumbled. The Western Front, then, was the key. From late 1914 until early 1918 the war there looked like a stalemate. In essence it was one vast siege, in which French and British forces sought with minimal success to shift the Germans from the trenches they had dug after their initial offensives were halted. Siege warfare was nothing new. This, however, was the first truly industrialized siege. Trains transported men to and from the front lines as if they were shift-workers. There, they generally spent more of their time building and maintaining trenches, saps and dugouts than fighting; this was construction work, but ultimately for the sake of destruction. For the sappers tunnelling towards enemy positions, trench warfare was a species of mining. But the essence of industrialized warfare was the work of the artillery. Advances in the size, mobility and accuracy of artillery and in the destructive power of explosives meant that vast numbers of men could be killed from afar by other men whose sole activity was to service and fire giant guns. It was the shells they fired that accounted for the overwhelming majority of casualties on the Western Front, yet without conferring decisive advantage on either side. Thus did the war become, as many contemporaries said, like a colossal machine, chewing up men and munitions like so much raw material. The strategy of attrition, of ‘wearing down’ the other side, seemed the only way of ending this mechanized slaughter, since until 1918 nearly all breakthroughs proved unsustainable beyond a fairly short distance.

  COMRADES

  The soldiers who faced one another along the Western Front were drawn from remarkably similar societies. On both sides there were industrial workers and farm labourers. On both sides there were aristocratic senior officers and middle-class junior officers. On both sides there were Catholics, Protestants and Jews. Anyone seeking fundamental differences of national character will look in vain in the records of the trenches. There could be no better illustration of this point than four of the finest novels written about the war by former soldiers – Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Frederic Manning’s Middle Parts of Fortune and Emilio Lussu’s Sardinian Brigade – which depict the experience of service in the ranks in almost interchangeable ways. All the authors, for example, make much more of the differences within their respective armies than the differences between the opposing armies themselves. ‘What race are we?’ asks Barbusse of his fellow poilus. ‘All races. We’ve come from everywhere.’ One man in his company is from Calonne, another from Cette, a third from Brittany, a fourth from Normandy, a fifth from Poitou, and so on. Manning (himself
an Australian) several times remarks on the unintelligibility of the ‘Scotch bastards’ who are supposed to be his comrades in arms. In Remarque’s novel a key character – the ever-ingenious Kat – is evidently of Polish extraction (his full name is Katczinsky), while Tjaden hails from North Germany.

  Likewise, the men on all sides detest ‘slackers’ at home. ‘There’s not just one country, it’s not true,’ declares Barbusse’s Volpatte after an unhappy visit to Paris. ‘There’s two. I’m telling you, we’re divided into two foreign countries: the front, over there… and the rear, here.’ ‘They don’t care a fuck ’ow us’ns live,’ says Manning’s Martlow bitterly. ‘We’re just ’umped an’ bumped an’ buggered about all over fuckin’ France, while them as made the war sit at ’ome waggin’ their bloody chins, an’ sayin’ what they’d ’ave done if they was twenty years younger.’ Paul Bäumer in All Quiet feels much the same way when he encounters one of his former schoolmasters when home on leave. All concerned share the impatience of Lussu’s narrator with romanticized press accounts of life at the Front. ‘It appeared… that we attacked to the sound of music, and that war was, for us, one long delirium of song and victory… We alone knew the truth about the war, for it was there before our eyes.’

  Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians were equally irreverent about what they were supposedly fighting for. Here are Barbusse’s poilus on the subject:

  ‘It’s a bore,’ says Volpatte.

  ‘But we hang on,’ Barque grumbles.

  ‘You’ve got to,’ says Paradis.

  ‘And why?’ Marthereau asks, without real feeling.

  ‘For no reason, since we’ve got to.’

  ‘There isn’t any reason,’ Lamuse agrees.

  ‘Yes, there is,’ says Cocon. ‘It’s that… Well, there’s lots, in fact.’

  ‘Belt up! It’s better to have no reasons, since we’ve got to hang on.’

  ‘Even so,’ says Blaire, in a hollow voice… ‘Even so, they wanna kill us.’

  ‘To begin with,’ says Tirette, ‘I thought about loads of stuff, turning it over, working it out. Now, I don’t think any more.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  ‘I’ve never tried.’…

  ‘You only need to know one thing and that one thing is that the Boche are over here, and that they’re dug in, and that they mustn’t get through and that one day they’re even going to have to bugger off – the sooner the better,’ says Corporal Bertrand.

  Manning’s soldiers strike a similar note. The officers may talk about ‘liberty, an’ fightin’ for your country, an’ posterity, an’ so on; but [one asks] what I want to know is what all us’ns are fightin’ for…’:

  ‘We’re fightin’ for all we’ve bloody got,’ said Madeley, bluntly.

  ‘An’ that’s sweet fuck all,’ said Weeper Smart…

  ‘I’m not fightin’ for a lot o’ bloody civvies,’ said Madeley, reasonably. ‘I’m fightin’ for myself an’ me own folk. ’Twere Germany made the war.’

  ‘A tell thee,’ said Weeper, positively, ‘there are thousands o’ poor buggers, over there in the German lines, as don’ know, no more’n we do ourselves, what it’s all about.’

  ‘Then what did the silly fuckers come an’ fight for?’ asked Madeley, indignantly. ‘Why didn’ they stay ’t ’ome?…’

  ‘What a say is, that it weren’t none o’ our business. We’d no call to mix ourselves up wi’ other folks’ quarrels,’ replied Weeper.

  One man suggests that it ‘would be a bloody good thing for us’ns, if the ’un did land a few troops in England. Show ’em what war’s like.’ Another adds that he is ‘not fightin’ for any fuckin’ Beljums, see. One o’ them buggers wanted to charge me five frong for a loaf o’ bread.’ The debate on the war’s origins in All Quiet is not very different. ‘It’s funny when you think about it,’ says Kropp, one of Bäumer’s friends. ‘We’re out defending our homeland. And yet the French are there defending their homeland as well. Which of us is right?’ Tjaden asks how wars begin and is told ‘Usually when one country insults another one badly.’ ‘A country?’ he replies. ‘I don’t get it. A German mountain can’t insult a French mountain, or a river, or a forest, or a cornfield.’

  What most united the combatants was the conditions in which – and against which – they had to fight: the cold of winter; the heat of summer; the damp of dugouts; the stench of corpses; above all, the fear of death. The life of the ordinary soldier was nicely summed up by Manning: ‘Out of one bloody misery into another, until we break.’ The morale of the ordinary soldier was prevented from breaking by a variety of means, some officially sanctioned, some not. Military training and discipline were, of course, crucial, though the use of the death penalty was a good deal less frequent than is commonly supposed; in all, 269 British soldiers were shot for desertion, while the Germans executed only eighteen. Just as important in sustaining morale was the elementary point that soldiers spent only a small fraction of their time in the front line, and only occasionally were required to attack – an experience represented universally as almost cathartic compared with cowering impotently under an artillery barrage. In between there was transportation, drill, rest, training, fatigues, leave. Such was the reality of ‘soldiering’: at once tedious and anaesthetically mindless – ‘not really worse’, as Lussu remarks, ‘than the kind of everyday life which, in normal times, is lived by millions of miners’. Men on all sides were kept going by the prospect, if not always the reality, of sleep, warmth, food, nicotine, alcohol and sex. In The Middle Parts of Fortune, almost the first thing Manning’s hero Bourne does as he stumbles back from the initial Somme offensive – despite being parched with thirst – is to smoke. Later, tormented by his friend Shem’s nightmare, he lights ‘the inevitable cigarette’. The badly wounded are offered cigarettes; they inhale only to expire. Even more important is alcohol: the second thing the returning combatant does after smoking is to gulp down some whisky. Indeed, Bourne’s life is punctuated by drinking bouts and ‘skinfuls’. He and his comrades covet whisky. They toss back ‘plonk’ (vin blanc). They despise French beer even as they swig it. They treat themselves to cheap ‘champagne’. All these drinks are judged according to their potency. The British soldier’s principal desideratum, it becomes clear, is drunkenness. Their French counterparts, by contrast, crave wine more for its taste than its intoxicating effects, but they crave it no less. They smoke pipes more than cigarettes, but they smoke with the same addicted relish. Remarque’s soldiers yearn for rum, beer and chewing tobacco. As Lussu’s Italian colonel explains, alcohol is ‘the moving spirit of this war… And that’s why the men, in their infinite wisdom, refer to it as “petrol”… It is a war of canteen against canteen, cask against cask, bottle against bottle.’ Almost as important is the matter of food. From the poilus’ impatient wait for their lunch (which opens Under Fire) to the Germans’ puerile delight in their thunderboxes (which opens All Quiet), life in the trenches revolved around the digestion. Happiness in the German trenches is four purloined cans of lobster or a stolen goose; indeed, Paul Bäumer and his pals spend more time scrounging for supplementary provisions than fighting the enemy. Tellingly, Remarque signals the demise of the German war effort in the declining quality of the rations his characters are given.

  Sex is inevitably the least easily attainable pleasure of the flesh. One of Barbusse’s characters is haunted by a pretty peasant girl, but is able to lay hands on her only when he stumbles across her corpse. On the other side the men fantasize with the same vain relish about bedding a ‘big bouncy kitchen wench with plenty to get your hands round’.Yet in all four novels, real emotional fulfilment takes the form of what would now be called male bonding. It has often been argued that this is the real key to military cohesion: not patriotism, not even ‘cap-badge’ loyalty to regiment (‘They can say what they bloody well like… but we’re a fuckin’ fine mob’), but ‘mateship’ – loyalty to one’s friends within the smallest fightin
g unit. ‘Good comradeship takes the place of friendship,’ Bourne declares. ‘It is different: it has its own loyalties and affections; and I am not so sure that it does not rise on occasion to an intensity of feeling which friendship never touches.’ As Manning shows, the reality seldom lived up to this billing. Relationships struck up in front-line units were necessarily vulnerable, not only to sudden death but also to promotion or transfer. ‘That’s the worst o’ the bloody army,’ observes Martlow, ‘as soon as you get a bit pally with a chap summat ’appens.’ Even Bourne’s temporary absence doing secretarial work in the orderly room undermines his friendships with Martlow and Shem. Still, mateship almost certainly contributed more to maintaining morale than the hierarchy of command. None of Manning’s characters feels sympathy for Miller the deserter, because he has committed the cardinal sin of letting his mates down:

  ‘What will you do if he tries to do a bunk again?’ Bourne asked.

  ‘Shoot the bugger,’ said Marshall, whitening to the lips.

  As their morose mate Weeper puts it: ‘We’re ’ere, there’s no gettin’ away from that, Corporal. ‘Ere we are, an since we’re ’ere, we’re just fightin’ for ourselves; we’re just fightin’ for ourselves, an’ for each other.’ More or less exactly the same sentiments are expressed by Barbusse’s poilus and Remarque’s Frontschweine. Hearing his friends’ voices, Paul Bäumer feels a ‘surprising warmth’:

  Those voices… tear me with a jolt away from the terrible feeling of isolation that goes with the fear of death, to which I nearly succumbed… Those voices mean more than my life, more than smothering a fear, they are the strongest and most protective thing that there is: they are the voices of my pals… I belong to them and they to me, we all share the same fear and the same life, and we are bound to each other in a strong and simple way. I want to press my face into them, those voices, those few words that saved me, and which will be my support.