Death of a Nation

by Stephen R A'Barrow

  This is only one example of the vast economic dislocation caused by the First World War and its aftermath. The war imploded a century of growth and the first ‘golden age of economic globalisation’. The overall cost was put at some $208 billion, but the true cost in terms of the effect it had on the post-war world economy (which did not fully recover until the 1960s) is virtually impossible to calculate.(13)

  A war that began with courteous civilities being observed towards the diplomats of enemy powers soon deteriorated into the shelling of civilians and the killing of prisoners.

  Over the course of the year 1915, a sea change in attitudes would take place. The informal Christmas truce in the trenches of the Western Front at Christmas 1914 was followed by a year of ever escalating horrors and terrible losses suffered on both sides. The French experimented with the use of gas in the autumn of 1914 but the Germans were the first to use deadly chlorine gas at Ypres in April 1915. This gas was developed by the German chemist Fritz Haber, the man simultaneously ‘credited’ with creating modern fertilizers via the formula for synthesising ammonia, without which half of humanity today could not be fed and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918, and also with the development and use of horrendous chemical warfare.

  In May 1915 the passenger liner RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland with the loss of 1198 civilian lives, 124 of them Americans. There can be little doubt she was carrying munitions, which led to the massive explosion that caused the liner to sink in less than twenty minutes. It took her sister ship, the Titanic, over two hours and forty minutes to sink after she had her guts ripped out by an iceberg. The Daily Mail reported on 1st May 2014: ‘Panicked civil servants wrote that the salvage could prove disastrous if there were explosives in the debris, N.H. Marshall in the Foreign Office’s North America department wrote in the 1980s, ‘There is a large amount of ammunition in the wreck, some of which is highly dangerous’.’ Whether one believes the conspiracy theories that she was put in harm’s way by the British Admiralty in the hope that American casualties would bring the USA into the war on Britain’s side or not, it was an act of supreme arrogance to sail a passenger liner into a war zone full of U-boats which were there to try and break the Royal Navy’s blockade against Germany, which ultimately caused the death through starvation of 750,000 German civilians, not least as the German government published a warning in February 1915 to all neutral countries that due to the British blockade, the waters around Great Britain, Ireland and the English Channel were a war zone. Irrespective, the callous and murderous act of sinking a passenger liner and the death of so many innocents hardened attitudes towards Germany in the UK, the Dominions and the USA in particular.

  The Loos offensive in the autumn of 1915 cost the British Army 60,000 dead and a further 300,000 injured. This was the first time in which the British employed the use of poison gas, something which all sides would do over the course of the war leading to the the death of nearly 100,000 men and the disabling of 500,000 more, many of whom suffered terribly and would go on to die prematurely, including my maternal great grandfather. Disaster at Gallipoli and a forced evacuation by December 1915 would add a further 50,000 British and Commonwealth deaths to an ever increasing list of suffering in a murderous conflict for which there seemed no end in sight.

  To stiffen public morale after a string of bloody military setbacks, the British government began to employ the use of ‘black propaganda’, harnessing the talents of authors such as Rudyard Kipling, who lost his 18-year-old son during the Battle of Loos, to help churn out ever-darker images of the ‘evil Hun’ and thus generate hatred towards the enemy both at home, and at the front. When the British War Propaganda Bureau published the Report on the Alleged German Outrages, one of its first publications, in May 1915, it accepted and published every story it received without any corroboration, including accounts of gang rape, mutilation and drunken soldiers bayoneting babies. Apparently there was no bestial torture or murderous act that German soldiers were not capable of, all of which were described as ‘commonplace’. The tragedy of all wars is that civilians are invariably caught in the crossfire and their casualties glossed over as ‘collateral damage’. There were nevertheless atrocities committed by all sides over the course of a conflict that inevitably brutalised a minority of its combatants. The darkest examples of German atrocities during the German advance occurred in Belgian town of Leuven (Louvain), one of the most ancient university towns in Europe, which was burned to the ground in an act of vicious reprisal at alleged partisan and sniper attacks on German forces. Further outrages occurred in Dinant, where artillery shelling and direct fire by German troops killed hundreds of civilians.(14) The use of artillery fire into cities occurred on a scale not previously seen, and this had repercussions not witnessed before; victims were literally blown to pieces and body parts were strewn across large areas; these were then often mistakenly described by witnesses and reporters as acts of dismemberment. There is however no small level of irony in the black propaganda war’s depiction of ‘plucky little Belgium’s’ suffering, which completely blotted out the genocidal atrocities she had perpetrated right up to the start of the First World War in a three-decade-long attempt to extract the maximum resources out of her African colony, which by some accounts killed more Africans in the Belgian Congo than soldiers died during the entire First World War. Estimates range from 10–15 million, a genocide that was conveniently buried with the onset of the First World War, when the ‘genius’ of Allied propaganda created the view that ‘the Hun’ was uniquely evil and that only Germans committed atrocities.

  Germanophobia by the end of 1915 was so widespread in Great Britain it even infected the elements of the Church of England. On Christmas Day 1915, the Bishop of Westminster gave the following sermon at Westminster Abbey:

  Christ our Lord said ‘Think not that I come to bring peace on Earth, I come not to bring peace but a sword.’ The Gospel according to Matthew.

  Well, bretheren, the sword of the Lord is in your hands, you are the very defenders of civilisation itself. The forces of good against the forces of evil. For this war is indeed a crusade. A holy war — to save the freedom of the world. In truth I tell you the Germans do not act like us, neither do they think like us, for they are not like us — the children of God.

  Are those who shell cities only populated by civilians the children of God? Are those who crucify babies on Christmas Day children of God? With God’s help you must kill the Germans, good or bad, young or old. Kill every one of them, so that it won’t have to be done again.

  The Lord be with you.

  Robert Graves, a young British officer at the front (whose work was so critical of the war and of the accompanying propaganda that it was rejected at numerous commemorations in Britain of the centenary of the start of the conflict) wrote in Goodbye to All That:

  Propaganda reports of atrocities were, it was agreed, ridiculous. We no longer believed the highly coloured accounts of German atrocities in Belgium. By atrocities we meant specifically rape, mutilation, and torture, not the shootings of suspected spies, harbourers of spies, or disobedient local officials. If the atrocity-list had to include the accidental-on-purpose bombing or machine-gunning of civilians from the air, the Allies were now committing as many atrocities as the Germans. French and Belgian civilians had often tried to win our sympathy by exhibiting mutilations of children — stumps of hands and feet, for instance — representing them as deliberate, fiendish atrocities when, as likely as not, they were merely the result of shell fire. We did not believe rape to be any more common on the German side of the line than on the Allied side.

  Graves lists weapons used by both sides, and then comes on to the more incendiary issue of the killing of prisoners, going on to write:

  Nearly every instructor in the mess could quote specific instances of prisoners having been murdered… The commonest motives were; revenge for the death of friends or relatives, jealousy of the prisoner’s trip t
o a comfortable prison camp in England, military enthusiasm, fear of being suddenly overpowered by the prisoners, or more simply, impatience with the escorting job… the conductors would report on arrival at headquarters that a German shell had killed the prisoners; and no questions would be asked. We had every reason to believe that the same thing happened on the German side, where prisoners, as useless mouths to feed in a country already short of rations, would be even less welcome.(15)

  Richard Van Emden’s Meeting the Enemy is a powerful and gripping account of the acts of humanity and barbarism that occurred between British and German troops facing each other along hundreds of miles of trenches amidst the horrors of war. He doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to addressing examples of POWs being murdered in cold blood. If and when accounts are recorded by historians, these invariably recount German soldiers committing crimes, but as Emden makes clear, it is naïve to think that in times of war only one side commits crimes whilst the other commits mere expediencies. Emden describes an account recalled by Guy Chapman, an officer with the Royal Fusiliers, after a German officer surrendered and then offered a British sergeant a pair of field glasses: the sergeant took them, thanked him and then shot him at point blank range through the head. Another account by private Percy Clare of the 7th East Surrey Regiment recalled an attack on German trenches with fixed bayonets:

  I found two stricken Huns very badly wounded from shellfire. One was about 48-50 years of age I guessed, the other a mere boy of possibly 20 years, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the other. I next noticed their hands were interlocked as though they had determined to die together. It was easy to see they were father and son and a deep compassion took possession of me… In spite of the C.O.’s entreaty to show no mercy, I felt as sorry for them as had they been my own friends… The faces of those two fellows so ghastly white, their features livid and quivering, their eyes so full of pain, horror and terror, perhaps each on account of the other. Their breasts were bare showing horrible gaping wounds which without doubt were mortal… Plenty of men could be found who never bayoneted any but wounded Germans, and I stood there for a few moments restraining any who in the lust of killing… might thrust them through. Poor fellows they were doomed. I had to go forward.

  They were bayoneted by another private in Clare’s regiment. An act the man boasted of afterwards, an act about which Clare went on to say, ‘I didn’t believe God would suffer so cowardly and cruel a deed to go unpunished’(16) and expressed satisfaction when the private in question was killed in action not long afterwards.

  German accounts, such as those of Ernst Jünger in his early versions of Storm of Steel, were no less nuanced between reason and the brutality and the blood lust of war. His is one of the great and very graphic accounts of life in the trenches and of trench warfare from the German side. He wrote: ‘Of all the troops who were opposed to the Germans on the battlefield, the English were not only the most formidable, but the manliest and the most chivalrous.’ But when he talks of his experience in the chapter on ‘The Great Offensive’, the tone changes dramatically:

  It (the trench) seethed with English. I fired off my cartridges so fiercely that I pressed the trigger ten times at least after the last shot… Only a few got away. An NCO was standing near me gaping at this spectacle with mouth agog. I snatched the rifle from his hand in an uncontrolled need to shoot. My first victim was an Englishman whom I shot between two Germans at 150 metres. He snapped shut like the blade of a knife and lay still.(17)

  For Jünger one of the greatest atrocities was the British general’s ceaseless and unremitting slaughter of their finest young men in endless frontal assaults on the German guns, saying they were sacrificing ‘Lions for Lambs’.

  Nevertheless, as Richard Milton made clear, there were no prizes for coming second in the propaganda war and the use of ‘black propaganda’ became so pervasive and universally believed that it drowned out more honest ‘on-the-ground’ accounts such as those of Robert Graves. Milton describes the tragic ironies that most would espouse, but could not see. He writes:

  British tanks were ingenious defensive weapons; German tanks barbaric instruments of Hun bestiality. British poison gas was an attempt to use science humanely to end the war; German poison gas was merely more proof of Hun frightfulness. The German ‘occupation’ of Alsace-Lorraine was a crime against democracy; the British occupation of India was an act of humanitarian charity, protecting the Indian people from savages like the Germans.(18)

  Black propaganda of the ‘evil Hun’ and the passions it inflamed have lasted to the present day. It is far easier to unleash this kind of ethnic hatred than it is to undo it.

  The deathtoll figures for the Great War still vary greatly, ranging from 9 to 20 million deaths, even some near 100 years after its end. The most up-to-date figures, based on a collection of sources, put the total figure at circa 17 million deaths and 20 million casualties. What is not included, and is a difficult figure to compile, is the number of combatants who died from injuries only a few months, or years after the war. It is also hard to estimate how many civilians died prematurely as a result of malnutrition and lack of adequate medical supplies. However, the latest figures listed below do take account of all those missing in action, as well as civilian deaths such as the Armenian genocide (which would not have occurred without the war) and the many millions of deaths caused by famine and disease during the war, which are often left out, (although the figures do not include the massive additional death toll caused by the Spanish influenza epidemic, which killed tens of millions more).

  The following table takes the highest cumulative figures for the major combatants:

  Military Deaths: Wounded: Civilian Deaths: Total Dead:

  Germany*: 1.800.000 4.200.000 750.000 2.550.000

  Austria-H: 1.500.000 3.620.000 470.000 1.970.000

  O. Turkey: 325.000 450.000 2.500.000** 3.275.000

  Bulgaria: 90.000 150.000 110.000 200.000

  Russia: 1.800.000 3.600.000 1.500.000 3.300.000

  France: 1.400.000 4.300.000 300.000 1.700.000

  Britain: 1.100.000 1.800.000 110.000 1.210.000***

  Italy: 650.000 950.000 600.000**** 1.250.000

  USA: 126.000 235.000 1000***** 127.000

  Other: - - - 1.665.000

  * German losses — a full one-third of the German male fighting age population was either killed, maimed, or incapacitated by injury.

  ** Includes figures of over 1.5 million for the Armenian genocide, killed by Turkish forces.

  *** British and British Empire losses have been combined.

  **** Italian civilian figures — a highly speculative figure. Some 4,000 killed in military action, the remainder accounted for as dying primarily as a result of food shortages.

  ***** US civilians killed mainly in German U-boat campaigns.(19)

  N.B. Another tragic figure is that half the military dead of the First World War have no known grave, as bodies were left in no mans land where the ground was churned up again and again by one artillery barage and attack after another.

  SHOCK AND REVOLUTION IN 1918

  In March 1918, Russia agreed terms with the Central Powers who had now, to all intents and purposes, won the war in the East. Troop formations moved swiftly from the East to the West. From March to June, the German General Staff launched a string of massive offensives, forcing the Western Allies to give up all the gains they had made since the grisly Somme offensives in 1916. This was an attempt to break open the Western Front before the Americans could arrive in force, and they almost succeeded. However, by the summer of 1918, American manpower and material was flooding into Western Europe. The Western Allies launched a successful counter-offensive in July and August 1918, pushing the Germans back beyond the initial starting lines of their March offensive. Nevertheless, the German army remained deeply entrenched in enemy territory and again successfully dug in. The Kaiser proclaimed to the German people in August 1918 that the ‘worst was over’. The public, kept in
the dark by mass censorship, were oblivious to the fact that there was no way Germany could now win the war and that time was on the Allies’ side. The ‘blackest day’ casualty figures were coming across Hindenberg’sclv desk thick and fast, and on 29th September his right-hand man, General Ludendorff, who was the architect of Germany’s remarkable feats of mobilisation for total war, had a nervous breakdown. Ludendorff subsequently pulled the rug out from under the German military by insisting on an immediate armistice, rather than holding out in the hope of being able to negotiate better terms. The Allies sensed blood. Field Marshal Haig still warned that the ‘German bear’ was not spent and that it would command a considerable amount of Allied lives and precious resources to bring Germany to her knees.

  In October, the German admirals wanted to send the fleet out for a final grand showdown, to relieve the pressure of the blockade. German sailors of the fleet at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven mutinied and set up a revolutionary council. They sensed that the war was at an end and refused to make a pointless final sacrifice. A new threat suddenly emerged: that a revolution, like the one now raging in Russia, might take hold in the industrial heartland of Europe. A mere four months later, the Bolsheviks invaded Poland with the aim of breaking through and aiding the revolution in Germany and beyond. Lenin later said, ‘If Poland had become Soviet, the Versailles treaty would have been shattered, and the entire international system built up by the victors would have been destroyed.’(1)