by John Keegan
The manifesto came too late. On 6 October his Serb, Croat and Slovene subjects had already formed a provisional government of the South Slavs or “Yugoslavia.” On 7 October the Habsburg Poles joined with their former German- and Russian-ruled brothers to proclaim a free and independent Poland, on 28 October a Czecho-Slovak republic was proclaimed in Prague, while on 30 October the Emperor Karl’s German subjects, the ultimate prop of his rule, claimed, in a constituent assembly, their freedom to determine foreign policy for a new German-Austrian state. Hungary, constitutionally an independent kingdom, declared itself so on 1 November. The other imperial nationalities, Ruthenes and Romanians, were making their own arrangements for their future. The uniformed representatives of all of them had already begun to abandon resistance and, in some cases, to cast away their arms and set off for home across the territories of the new states into which the empire had dissolved.94 It was in these circumstances that Diaz, the Italian commander, launched an offensive, to be known as the battle of Vittorio Veneto, on 24 October. With extensive British and French help, the Italians succeeded in recrossing the River Piave, initiating an advance that culminated a week later on Austrian territory. The Austrians, with difficulty, opened armistice negotiations in the field on 1 November and instituted a ceasefire on 3 November. It was not recognised by the Italians until the following day. In the interval 300,000 prisoners fell into their hands.95
By the first week of November, therefore, the German empire stood alone as a combatant among the war’s Central Powers. Under pressure from the French, British, Americans and Belgians, the army’s resistance stiffened as it fell back across the battlefields of 1914 towards Belgium and the German frontier. There was hard fighting at the rivers and canals, casualties rose—among the penultimate fatalities was the British poet, Wilfred Owen, killed at the crossing of the River Sambre on 4 November—and the war, to the Allied soldiers battling at the front, seemed to threaten to prolong. Behind the lines, in Germany, however, resistance was crumbling. On 30 October the crews of the High Seas Fleet, ordered to sea for a final sortie to save its honour, broke into mutiny and refused to raise steam. Efforts to put down indiscipline resulted in the mutineers breaking into the armouries, seizing weapons and taking to the streets.96 By 3 November, the day on which Austria accepted the armistice, the seaport of Kiel was in the hands of mutineers calling for revolution and next day the port admiral, Prince Henry of Prussia, the Kaiser’s brother, had to flee the city in disguise.
The Kaiser had already left Berlin, on 29 October, for headquarters at Spa, in Belgium, to be closer to the army, on whose loyalty he still believed himself able to count, and to avoid the mounting pressure to abdicate. There was an apparent wisdom in his departure, for, at the beginning of the second week of November, power in the capital shifted irrevocably from the old imperial apparatus to the forces of revolution. The last achievements of Prince Max, as Chancellor, were to secure the appointment of a moderate general, Wilhelm Groener, as Ludendorff’s successor and to insist that the delegation assembled to negotiate the armistice with the enemy would include civilian as well as military representatives. He thus assured that the conclusion of the armistice would be a joint military and political act, from which the soldiers could not subsequently extricate themselves by objecting to its political terms. This was his last contribution to Germany’s future. On 9 November, with Berlin in turmoil and the moderate politicians threatened by street crowds orchestrated by Germany’s Bolshevik leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, he transferred the office of chancellor to the Majority Socialist, Friedrich Ebert.97
On the same day the Kaiser, at Spa, confronted his own deposition from power. Unrealistic as ever, he had spent his ten days at headquarters fantasising about turning his army against his people, oblivious of the evidence that his soldiers now wanted only an end to the war and were, even at Spa itself, making common cause with the revolutionaries. Ebert, leader of the Majority Socialists, was anti-revolutionary, a patriot and even a monarchist. By 7 November, however, he knew that, unless he adopted the demands of the revolution growing in the streets, and they included abdication, his party would be discredited for good. That evening he warned Prince Max, “The Kaiser must abdicate, otherwise we shall have the revolution.” Over the telephone to Spa, Max repeated the warning to the Kaiser, speaking to him, he said as if to soften the blow, as a relative as well as Chancellor: “Your abdication has become necessary to save Germany from Civil War.”98 The Kaiser refused to listen, once again threatened to use the army against the nation and ended by rejecting any thought of Prince Max resigning as Chancellor, a step Max himself knew was now inevitable. “You sent out the armistice offer,” Wilhelm II said, “you will also have to accept the conditions,” and rang off.
The German armistice delegation had already crossed enemy lines to meet the French representatives at Rethondes, in the Forest of Compiègne, outside Paris. Until the issues of the abdication and the Chancellorship had been settled, however, the delegates could not proceed. The terms of the armistice had been presented to them by Foch, and stark they were. They required the evacuation of all occupied territory, including Alsace-Lorraine, German since 1871, the military evacuation of the western bank of the Rhine and of three bridgeheads on the eastern bank at Mainz, Coblenz and Cologne; the surrender of enormous quantities of military equipment, and the internment in Allied hands of all submarines and the capital units of the High Seas Fleet; the repudiation of the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest, under which the Germans occupied their conquered territories in the east; the payment of reparations for war damage; and, critically, acceptance of the continuation of the Allied blockade.99 The continuation, as events would determine, eventually ensured Germany’s compliance with peace terms even harsher than those of the Armistice to be imposed at the Versailles conference.
While the delegates at Rethondes waited to hear what power in Germany would permit them to put their signatures to the armistice document, two separate sets of events were unrolling in Berlin and at Spa. In Berlin on 9 November, Prince Max of Baden handed over the Chancellorship to Fritz Ebert. There was by then no alternative to the transfer of power. The streets were filled with revolutionary mobs, many of their members soldiers in uniform, while the leaders of the Majority Socialists’ political enemies, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were already proclaiming a “free Socialist republic,” by which they meant a Bolshevik State. The last meeting between Max and Ebert was brief. “Herr Ebert,” the Kaiser’s brother-in-law announced, “I commit the German Empire to your keeping.” The new Chancellor replied, “I have lost two sons for this Empire.”100 Many German parents could have said the same.
In Spa, on 9 November, the Emperor met the leaders of his army, the institution through which the Hohenzollern dynasty had risen to power, and to which it had always looked to sustain its dignity and authority. Wilhelm II still believed that, whatever disloyalties were being transacted by civilian politicians in Berlin, whatever affronts to order disturbed the streets, his subjects in field-grey remained true to their oath of military obedience. Even on 9 November he continued to delude himself that the army could be used against the people and the royal house preserved by turning German against German.101 His generals knew otherwise. Hindenburg, the wooden titan, heard him out in silence. Groener, the workaday railway transport officer, son of a sergeant, who had replaced Ludendorff, found the sense to speak. He knew, from soundings taken among fifty regimental commanders, that the soldiers now wanted “only one thing—an armistice at the earliest possible moment.” The price of that, to the House of Hohenzollern, was the Kaiser’s abdication. The Kaiser heard him with continuing incredulity. What about, he asked, the Fahneneide, the oath on the regimental colours which bound every German soldier to die rather than disobey? Groener uttered the unutterable. “Today,” he said, “the Fahneneide is only a form of words.”102
The fall of the House of Hohenzollern was swiftly concluded. Rejecting a suggestion
that he should seek death in the trenches, as incompatible with his position as head of the German Lutheran Church, Wilhelm II departed by train to Holland on 10 November. On his arrival at the castle of Doorn, where he would spend long years of exile, long enough for Hitler to provide a guard of honour at the gates during the German occupation of the Netherlands, he requested “a cup of good English tea.” On 28 November he signed the act of abdication. As his six sons had each sworn not to succeed him, the Hohenzollern dynasty thereby severed its connection with the headship of the German state and even with the crown of Prussia.
Germany was by then, in any case, effectively a republic, proclaimed on 9 November, though it would not acquire a president, in the person of Friedrich Ebert, until February 1919. Yet it was a republic without substance, lacking the essential constituent of any political entity, or an armed force to defend itself against its enemies. The last disciplined act of the old imperial army was to march back across the German frontiers with France and Belgium. Once on home territory, it demobilised itself. The soldiers discarded their uniforms and weapons and went home. That did not empty the German republic of armed men. As elsewhere in the changed political geography of central and eastern Europe—in the new republics of Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, in the nominal monarchy of Hungary, in German-Austria—bodies of soldiers, loyal to orthodoxies old and new or to revolutionary ideologies, abounded. Nationalist orthodoxies would prevail in ethnically disparate Yugoslavia, in Czechoslovakia and in Poland, though that infant republic would have to fight for its borders, against German irregulars in the west and desperately against the Bolsheviks in the east. In Finland, in the Baltic States, in Hungary and in Germany itself, armed men menaced Red Revolution. It was put down in the east at the cost of civil strife. In Germany it threatened for a while to win by default, since constitutional republicanism could at first find no armed force to oppose it. Out of the wreck of the old imperial army, however, enough extemporised units were got together from men with no trade but soldiering—they bore such names as the Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen Division, the Freiwillige Landesjägerkorps, the Landeschützenkorps, the Freikorps Hülsen—to prevail in the battle of the streets in Berlin, Gotha, Halle, Dresden, Munich and many other German cities, to repress German Bolshevism by brute force and to lay on the new republican government a permanent debt of gratitude to the improvised army’s generals. Its regiments would form the nucleus of the “hundred-thousand man army” that was all that was to be allowed to Germany by the peace conference of Versailles in 1919.103
While Germany’s political future was being settled by civil war in the capital and the provinces, the armies of the Allies were advancing to take possession of the western Rhineland provinces and of the three bridgeheads across the river, at Mainz, Coblenz and Cologne, surrendered under the terms of the armistice. The soldiers of the armies of occupation, the French excepted, were quick to fraternise with the population. Enmity was swiftly overlaid by friendships, all the more readily as army rations made their way from cookhouses to family kitchens to feed people still subsisting on the skimpy wartime diet that the Allies’ maintenance of blockade imposed. Hunger, even more than the threat of a full-scale invasion, was the measure that would eventually bring the German republic to sign the peace treaty on 23 June 1919. Two days earlier the High Seas Fleet, interned at the British anchorage at Scapa Flow, had been scuttled by its crews in final protest at the severity of the proffered terms.
There was historic irony in the Kaiser’s naval officers choosing a watery grave for his magnificent battleships in a British harbour. Had he not embarked on a strategically unnecessary attempt to match Britain’s maritime strength, fatal hostility between the two countries would have been avoided; so, too, in all possibility, might have been the neurotic climate of suspicion and insecurity from which the First World War was born. The unmarked graveyard of his squadrons inside the remotest islands of the British archipelago, guarding the exit from the narrow seas his fleet would have had to penetrate to achieve true oceanic status, remains as a memorial to selfish and ultimately pointless military ambition.
It is one of the many graveyards which are the Great War’s chief heritage. The chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest literature in military history; no brave trumpets sound in memory for the drab millions who plodded to death on the featureless plains of Picardy and Poland; no litanies are sung for the leaders who coaxed them to slaughter. The legacy of the war’s political outcome scarcely bears contemplation: Europe ruined as a centre of world civilisation, Christian kingdoms transformed through defeat into godless tyrannies, Bolshevik or Nazi, the superficial difference between their ideologies counting not at all in their cruelty to common and decent folk. All that was worst in the century which the First World War had opened, the deliberate starvation of peasant enemies of the people by provinces, the extermination of racial outcasts, the persecution of ideology’s intellectual and cultural hate-objects, the massacre of ethnic minorities, the extinction of small national sovereignties, the destruction of parliaments and the elevation of commissars, gauleiters and warlords to power over voiceless millions, had its origins in the chaos it left behind. Of that, at the end of the century, little thankfully is left. Europe is once again, as it was in 1900, prosperous, peaceful and a power for good in the world.
The graveyards remain. Many of those who died in battle could never be laid to rest. Their bodies had been blown to pieces by shellfire and the fragments scattered beyond recognition. Many other bodies could not be recovered during the fighting and were then lost to view, entombed in crumbled shell holes or collapsed trenches or decomposing into the broken soil battle left behind. Few Russian or Turkish soldiers were ever decently interred and many German and Austrian soldiers killed on the shifting battlefields of the Eastern Front simply returned to earth. On the fixed battlegrounds of the west, the combatants made a better effort to observe the decencies. War cemeteries were organised from the outset, graves registration officers marked the plots and, when time permitted, chaplains and the dead men’s comrades observed the solemnities. Even so, at the war’s end, the remains of nearly half of those lost remained lost in actuality. Of the British Empire’s million dead, most killed in France and Belgium, the bodies of over 500,000 were never to be found or, if found, not identified.104 A similar proportion of the 1,700,000 French war dead had also disappeared. France buried or reburied the dead in a variety of ways, sometimes in individual graves, sometimes in collective ossuaries, as at Verdun. The Germans, working on foreign soil, and obliged to construct compact and inconspicuous cemeteries, often excavated enormous mass graves; that at Vladslo in Belgium, where the bodies of most of the volunteers killed in 1914 in the Kindermord bei Ypern, centres on a slab that covers the remains of over 20,000 young men.105
The British chose an entirely different and absolutely standard method of honouring the fallen. Each body was given a separate grave, recording name, age, rank, regiment and date and place of death; if unidentifiable, the headstone bore the words, composed by Rudyard Kipling, himself a bereaved father, “A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God.” The names of those who had been lost altogether were inscribed on architectural monuments, the largest of which, at Thiepval, records the names of the 70,000 missing of the battle of the Somme. It was also decided that the cemeteries, large and small, should each be walled and planted as a classic English country garden, with mown grass between the headstones and roses and herbaceous plants at their feet. There was also to be a Cross of Sacrifice as a centrepoint of all but the smallest cemeteries and, in the larger, a symbolic altar, the Stone of Remembrance, bearing the inscription, also composed by Kipling, “Their Name Liveth For Evermore.” Over six hundred cemeteries were eventually constructed and given into the care of the Imperial War Graves Commission which, working under a law of the French government deeding the ground as sépultures perpétuelles, recruited a body of over a thousand gardeners to care for them in perpetuity. All s
urvive, still reverently tended by the Commission’s gardeners, much visited by the British, sometimes by the great-grandchildren of those buried within, as poignant remembrance cards testify, but also by the curious of many nationalities. None fail to be moved by their extraordinary beauty. Eighty years of mowing and pruning have achieved the original intention of creating “the appearance of a small park or garden,” while the passage of time itself has conferred an ageless maturity. In spring, when the flowers blossom, the cemeteries are places of renewal and almost of hope, in autumn, when the leaves fall, of reflection and remembrance.
