The First World War

by John Keegan

  The ribbon of British cemeteries running from the North Sea to the Somme and beyond stands as an idealised memorial to all those whose extinction on the battlefields of the Great War is not commemorated. Their number is enormous. To the million dead of the British Empire and the 1,700,000 French dead, we must add 1,500,000 soldiers of the Habsburg Empire who did not return, two million Germans, 460,000 Italians, 1,700,000 Russians and many hundreds of thousands of Turks; their numbers were never counted.106 As a proportion of those who volunteered or were conscripted, the death toll can be made to seem tolerable. It represents, for Germany, about 3.5 per cent of all who served. Calculated as a percentage of the youngest and fittest, the figures exceed by far what was emotionally bearable. Male mortality exceeded normal expectation, between 1914 and 1918, seven to eightfold in Britain, and tenfold in France, in which 17 per cent of those who served were killed. Similar proportions were lost from the youngest age groups in Germany. “Between 1870 and 1899, about 16 million boys were born; all but a few served in the army and some 13 per cent were killed.”107 As in France and Britain, the figures, if calculated for the contingents most immediately liable for duty by reason of age, display an even heavier burden of loss. “Year groups 1892–1895, men who were between 19 and 22 when war broke out, were reduced by 35–37 per cent.”108

  One in three. Little wonder the post-war world spoke of a “lost generation,” that its parents were united by shared grief and that the survivors proceeded into the life that followed with a sense of inexplicable escape, often tinged by guilt, sometimes by rage and desire for revenge. Such thoughts were far from the minds of British and French veterans, who hoped only that the horrors of the trenches would not be repeated in their lifetime or that of their sons. They festered in the minds of many Germans, foremost in the mentality of the “front fighter” Adolf Hitler, who in Munich in September 1922 threw down the threat of vengeance that would sow the seeds of a second World War.

  The Second World War was the continuation of the First, and indeed it is inexplicable except in terms of the rancours and instabilities left by the earlier conflict. The Kaiser’s Germany, despite its enormous economic success, and the intellectual prestige achieved by its scholars throughout the world, had seethed with discontent, particularly over the disparity between its industrial and military power and its political standing among kingdoms and republics, Britain and France foremost, which enjoyed the reality rather than the empty title of empire. Its pre-war dissatisfactions paled beside those that overcame it in the aftermath of Versailles. Forced to disgorge the conquests of 1870–71 in Alsace and Lorraine and to surrender to an independent Poland the historic areas of German settlement in Silesia and West Prussia, humiliated by a compulsory disarmament that reduced its army to a tiny gendarmerie, dissolved its battlefleet altogether and abolished its air force, and blackmailed by the continuation of starvation through blockade into signing a humiliating peace treaty, republican Germany came to nurture grievances stronger by far than those that had distorted its international relations and domestic politics before 1914. The high-mindedness of the liberal democrat government of Weimar helped to palliate them not at all; its very political and diplomatic moderation, in the years when its economic mismanagement ruined the German middle class and its obeisance to French and British occupation and reparation policies narrowed national pride, fed the forces of extremism to which its principles stood in opposition. Throughout the 1920s, German liberal democracy floated above a turmoil of opposing currents, Marxist and National Socialist, that would eventually overwhelm it.

  The liberation of the peoples of Eastern Europe from the imperial rule of German-speaking dynasties, Hohenzollern or Habsburg, brought equally little tranquillity to the successor states they founded. None of them—Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes or, as it became known in 1929, Yugoslavia—emerged into independence with sufficient homogeneity to undertake a settled political life. Poland’s independence was almost fatally compromised from the outset by its efforts to stake out a border at the extreme eastern limit of what was historically justifiable. In the war with Soviet Russia that followed, its armies escaped defeat by the barest margin. Their eventual and unexpected success, though an apparent national triumph, was to burden the new country with a collection of minorities, largely Ukrainian, that reduced the Polish proportion of the population to only 60 per cent. Its incorporation, moreover, of historic German land in the west and its envelopment of East Prussia, cradle of the German warrior class, would provide Hitler in 1939 with the pretext for a reprise of the aggression of 1914. Czechoslovakia’s inheritance from the Habsburgs of another German minority in the Sudetenland equally robbed the new state of ethnic equilibrium, with fatal consequences for its integrity in 1938. Yugoslavia’s unequal racial composition might have been brought into balance with good will; as events turned out, the determination of the Orthodox Christian Serbs to dominate, particularly over the Catholic Croats, undermined its coherence from an early date. Internal antipathies were to rob it of the power to resist Italian and German attack in 1941.

  The two regional losers, Hungary and Bulgaria, were spared such disharmonies by loss of territory. Hungary’s losses were so large, however, that it entered the post-war world with fierce grievances against the neighbours who had gained by the change of boundaries. Romania, the principal winner, over-generously compensated for its militarily disastrous intervention on the side of the Allies in 1916, inherited thereby a permanent source of discord with Hungary—though also potentially with the Soviet Union—by acquiring minorities who amounted to more than a quarter of the population.

  Greece, too, gained population, but at the cost of a disastrously ill-judged imperial campaign against the apparently moribund Turks. Persuaded that the moment of the “Great Idea”—the reunion of the regions of historic Hellenic settlement, the guiding principle of Greek nationalism since the achievement of independence in 1832—had at last come, Greece invaded Asia Minor in June 1919. A successful advance carried its troops almost to Ankara, the future capital of the future Turkish republic, until Kemal, the victor of Gallipoli, succeeded in energising a counter-offensive that in September 1922 overwhelmed the overstretched Greek army. At the Treaty of Lausanne that concluded the war in 1923, beaten Greece and victorious Turkey agreed to exchange the minorities on each other’s soil, a process that extinguished the Greek presence in the coastal cities of the eastern Aegean, where Greeks had lived since the time of Homer and before, and brought over a million dispossessed refugees to join the four million Greeks of the mainland; many, so long separated had they been from the wellsprings of Greek culture, were Turkish-speaking. The poverty into which they entered and the griefs they brought with them were to fuel the class hatreds that burst into civil war in 1944–47.

  A Balkan problem that had made the First World War dissolved, therefore, into new Balkan problems in its aftermath, problems that continued to the outbreak of the Second, problems that persist, indeed, to this day. Any one of the characteristically world-weary officials of Habsburg imperialism, if reincarnated today, might well ask what had changed. Much, of course, has changed in Eastern Europe, which was the First World War’s breeding ground, though chiefly as a result of the ruthless territorial and ethnic reorganisation of the region by Stalin in the wake of the Red Army’s victories in 1945. The empires have at last gone, the Soviet Russian empire last of all, many of the minorities have gone, particularly from Poland and what are now the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Yet many of the minorities remain, above all in the countries where Stalin did not do his work, Romania, Hungary, and former Yugoslavia. Foreign authority demands of the Serbs authority to punish its political criminals, as the Habsburgs demanded of the Serbs in 1914. Foreign troops operate in the valleys of the Sava and the Drina rivers, just as they did in 1915. It is all very mysterious.

  But then the First World War is a mystery. Its origins are mysterious. So is its course. Why did a prosper
ous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict? Why, when the hope of bringing the conflict to a quick and decisive conclusion was everywhere dashed to the ground within months of its outbreak, did the combatants decide nevertheless to persist in their military effort, to mobilise for total war and eventually to commit the totality of their young manhood to mutual and existentially pointless slaughter? Principle perhaps was at stake; but the principle of the sanctity of international treaty, which brought Britain into the war, scarcely merited the price eventually paid for its protection. Defence of the national territory was at stake also, the principle for which France fought at almost unbearable damage to its national well-being. Defence of the principle of mutual security agreement, underlying the declarations of Germany and Russia, was pursued to a point where security lost all meaning in the dissolution of state structures. Simple state interest, Austria’s impulse and the oldest of all reasons for war-making, proved, as the pillars of imperialism collapsed about the Habsburgs, no interest at all.

  Consequences, of course, cannot be foreseen. Experience can, by contrast, all too easily be projected into the future. The experience of the early warriors of 1914–18—the probability of wounds or death, in circumstances of squalor and misery—swiftly acquired inevitability. There is mystery in that also. How did the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, undifferentially deprived of any scrap of the glories that by tradition made the life of the man-at-arms tolerable, find the resolution to sustain the struggle and to believe in its purpose? That they did is one of the undeniabilities of the Great War. Comradeship flourished in the earthwork cities of the Western and Eastern Fronts, bound strangers into the closest brotherhood, elevated the loyalties created within the ethos of temporary regimentality to the status of life-and-death blood ties. Men whom the trenches cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any of the friendships made in peace and better times. That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer understanding the mystery of human life.

  Notes

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. A. Bullock, Hitler, London, 1952, p. 79.

  2. M. Gilbert, The Holocaust, London, 1987, p. 17.

  3. Personal visits.

  4. J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 92–3.

  5. G. Ward and E. Gibson, Courage Remembered, London, 1989, pp. 89–90.

  6. R. Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, Ithaca, N.Y., 1984, p. 33.

  7. V. Ackermann, “La vision allemande du soldat inconnu,” in J.-J. Becker et al., Guerres et cultures, 1914–18, Paris, 1994, pp. 390–1.

  8. F. Thébaud, “La guerre et le deuil chez les femmes françaises,” in Becker, Guerres, pp. 114–15.

  9. Whalen, p. 41.

  10. B. Jelavich, History of the Balkans, 2, Cambridge, 1985, p. 121.

  11. M. Brock in R. Evans and H. P. von Strandmann, The Coming of the First World War, Oxford, 1988, p. 169.

  12. K. Baedeker, Austria, Leipzig, 1900, pp. 432–4.

  13. G. Best, Humanity in Warfare, London, 1980, p. 140.

  14. See M. Howard, “Men Against Fire,” in P. Paret, Makers of Modern Strategy, Princeton, N.J., 1986, pp. 510–26.

  15. See German, French and Russian military district maps, Times History of the War, I, London, 1914.

  16. J. Lucas, Fighting Troops of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, New York, 1987, p. 84.

  17. A. Gordon, The Rules of the Game, London, 1996, pp. 354–5.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. J. Keegan, The Mask of Command, London, 1987, pp. 40–2.

  2. See especially G. Parker, Chapter 5, in W. Murray, M. Knox and A. Bernstein, The Making of Strategy, Cambridge, 1994.

  3. P. Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1984, p. 26.

  4. J. Thompson, The Lifeblood of War, London, 1991, Chapter 2.

  5. M. Howard, The Franco-Prussian War, London, 1981, pp. 26–7.

  6. J. Hittle, The Military Staff, Harrisburg, Pa., 1961, Chapter 2.

  7. C. Hibbert, The Destruction of Lord Raglan, London, 1984, pp. 15–16.

  8. D. Porch, The March to the Marne, Cambridge, 1981, p. 331.

  9. H. Nicolson, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method, London, 1954, p. 75.

  10. S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, Cambridge, Mass., 1983, pp. 270–3.

  11. B. Sullivan, “The Strategy of the Decisive Weight: Italy, 1882–1922,” in Murray, Knox and Bernstein, p. 332.

  12. N. Stone, “Moltke and Conrad,” in P. Kennedy, The War Plans of the Great Powers, London, 1979, p. 234.

  13. J. McDermot, “The Revolution in British Military Thinking from the Boer War to the Moroccan Crisis,” in Kennedy, p. 105.

  14. L. Turner, “The Significance of the Schlieffen Plan,” in Kennedy, p. 200.

  15. A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, Oxford, 1954, p. 317.

  16. G. Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan, London, 1958, p. 71.

  17. Ritter, pp. 22–5, 27–48, Maps 1, 2, 3, 6.

  18. G. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, Princeton, N.J., 1955, pp. 278–9.

  19. H. Herwig, “Strategic Uncertainties of a Nation State: Prussia-Germany, 1871–1918,” in Murray, Knox and Bernstein, p. 259.

  20. Herwig in Murray, Knox and Bernstein, p. 260.

  21. Ritter, p. 173.

  22. Ritter, p. 180.

  23. Ritter, p. 139.

  24. Ritter, p. 141.

  25. Ritter, p. 142.

  26. Ritter, p. 174.

  27. Ritter, p. 144.

  28. Ritter, p. 145.

  29. Ritter, p. 143.

  30. J. Edmonds, Military Operations, France and Belgium, 1914, I, London, 1928, Appendix 31.

  31. Edmonds, 1914, I, Sketch 5.

  32. Ritter, pp. 141, 178.

  33. A. Bucholz, Moltke, Schlieffen and Prussian War Planning, New York, 1991, p. 267.

  34. A. Gat, The Development of Military Thought, 2, Oxford, 1992, pp. 153–7.

  35. Etat-major de L’armée, Les armées françaises dans la grande guerre, Paris, 1922, 1, i, annexes, p. 21.

  36. S. Williamson, “Joffre Reshapes French Strategy,” in Kennedy, p. 145.

  37. Gat, p. 155.

  38. Williamson in Kennedy, p. 147.

  39. Williamson in Kennedy, p. 147.

  40. Williamson in Kennedy, p. 135.

  41. L. Sayder, The Ideology of the Offensive, Ithaca, N.Y., 1984, p. 182.

  42. B. Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets: The Russian Imperial Army, 1861–1914, Bloomington, Ind., 1992, p. 245.

  43. Menning, pp. 247–8.

  44. Quoted N. Stone in Kennedy, p. 224.

  45. Stone in Kennedy, p. 228.

  46. Stone in Kennedy, p. 223.

  47. G. Tunstall, Planning For War Against Russia and Serbia: Austro-Hungarian and German Military Strategies, 1871–1914, New York, 1993, p. 138.

  48. D. Herrmann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War, Princeton, N.J., 1996, p. 156.

  49. J. Gooch, “Italy During the First World War,” in A. Millett and W. Murray, Military Effectiveness, I, Boston, 1988, p. 294.

  50. Herrmann, p. 176.

  51. Bucholz, p. 309.

  52. Bucholz, p. 285.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. C. Macartney, The Habsburg Empire 1790–1918, London, 1968, p. 806.

  2. V. Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo, New York, 1996, pp. 374–5.

  3. Macartney, p. 806.

  4. B. Jelavich, History of the Balkans, II, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 111–12.

  5. Macartney, p. 807.

  6. W. Jannon, The Lions of July, Novato, Calif., 1995, pp. 18–19.

  7. Jannon, p. 31.

&n
bsp; 8. The Annual Register, 1914, London, 1915, p. 312.

  9. B. Tuchman, August 1914, London, 1962, p. 115.

  10. L. Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, II, London, 1953, p. 456.

  11. G. Tunstall, Planning for War Against Russia and Serbia: Austro-Hungarian and German Military Strategies, 1871–1914, New York, 1993, p. 83.

  12. Tunstall, p. 122.

  13. Albertini, II, p. 308.

  14. Turner in Kennedy, pp. 263–4.

  15. Turner in Kennedy, p. 264.

  16. Albertini, II, p. 538.

  17. Turner in Kennedy, p. 264.

  18. Turner in Kennedy, p. 265.

  19. J. Edmonds, A Short History of World War One, Oxford, 1951, pp. 130–3.

  20. Albertini, II, p. 491.

  21. Albertini, II, p. 555.

  22. Albertini, II, p. 557.

  23. Jannon, p. 220.

  24. Albertini, II, p. 674.

  25. Jannon, p. 239.

  26. Albertini, II, p. 572.

  27. Albertini, III, p. 31.

  28. Albertini, III, p. 40.

  29. Albertini, III, pp. 73–4.

  30. Albertini, III, pp. 69–70.

  31. Albertini, III, p. 183.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. M. Paléologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs, I, London, 1923, p. 52.

  2. Bullock, Hitler, p. 45.

  3. L. Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours, London, 1995, pp. 72–3.

  4. A. Grasser, Vingt jours de guerre aux temps héroïques, Paris, 1918, pp. 35–6.

  5. R. Cobb, “France and the Coming of War,” in Evans and Strandmann, p. 133.

  6. F. Nagel, Fritz, Huntington, W.Va., 1981, pp. 15–19.

  7. Bucholz, p. 163.

  8. Bucholz, p. 278.

  9. Cobb in Evans and Strandmann, p. 136.

  10. P. Vansittart, Voices from the Great War, London, 1981, p. 25.

  11. L. Macdonald, 1914: The Days of Hope, London, 1987, p. 54.

  12. Macdonald, p. 55.

  13. E. Spears, Liaison 1914, London, 1968, p. 14.