The Making of the First World War

by Ian F W Beckett

  There can be few more decisive battles than Tannenberg on the Eastern Front in August 1914. Yet it had no wider strategic meaning for the war as a whole other than in establishing the military reputation of the German commanders, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. Their influence on the German conduct of the war was certainly to become pernicious. Equally, the battle of Sarikamish in the Caucasus in December 1914 not only proved a decisive Russian victory over the Turks, but also ended any prospect of the Turkish leadership fulfilling its pan-Islamic aims. It confirmed the image of Ottoman decline throughout Central Asia.8

  The first battle of the Marne in September 1914 and the first battle of Ypres in October and November 1914 clearly ended Germany's expectation of a short victorious war. First Ypres certainly marked the moment of transition for the British from war as it had been to war as it would become. But an improvised defence had no relevance for the future conduct of the offensive from a fixed trench system. There was a more poisonous legacy in the British conviction that ground held at such cost should not be surrendered lightly, and in Sir Douglas Haig's belief that the Germans had failed at Ypres by ending their operations prematurely.9 Thus, in closing the last gap in what was to become a continuous trench line from Switzerland to the sea, it was the Belgian opening of the sluices in October 1914 that really shaped the next four years of conflict.

  So why was Germany defeated? In military terms, the 1918 German spring offensives in the west and the subsequent allied counter-attack have given rise to contrasting claims. Fritz von Lossberg, the chief of staff of the German Fourth Army, identified the slowing of one German advance during the Second Battle of the Marne on 18 July 1918 as ‘the precise turning point in the conduct of the war’. It was a judgement echoed by officers of the German Seventh Army.10 Lossberg saw it as such through the failure of the German High Command, and especially Ludendorff, to understand the state of the army by this time. Others have taken their cue from Ludendorff himself and interpret the British offensive at Amiens on 8 August 1918 – characterised by Ludendorff as the ‘Black Day of the German Army’ – as the crucial moment. Whatever the arguments concerning the sheer weight of materiel available to the Entente by the summer of 1918, Ludendorff's strategic and tactical decisions were the key to Germany's fortunes. One historian has identified Ludendorff's switching of the German operational objective towards Arras on 28 March 1918 as ‘one of the decisive days of the Great War’.11 But it was the decision to commit the German army to the second of the series of offensives – that on the Lys on 9 April 1918 – that best illustrated Ludendorff's strategic shortcomings, and condemned Germany to defeat.

  The introduction of a new weapon may mark a potential turning point in war. While that may be so over the longer term, it does not necessarily mean that such a weapon had any significant impact on the war in which it was first introduced. Clearly, the introduction of gas warfare had a significant initial impact at least at Second Ypres on the Western Front in April–May 1915, if not upon its first appearance, at Bolimov on the Eastern Front in January 1915. In the longer term, gas was a military dead end. At most a ‘force multiplier’, it was a weapon against which troops were better protected than any other by 1918.12 The introduction of the tank tells a similar story, albeit the tank was to prove considerably more decisive than gas in the future conduct of war. After its first use on the Somme in September 1916, the tank was deployed in large numbers at both Cambrai in November–December 1917 and at Amiens in August 1918. Whatever the initial impact on 20 November 1917 or 8 August 1918, the tank's chronic technological unreliability limited its utility beyond the first few days of any offensive.13 In the longer term, the tank was a weapon with only a limited window of success between 1939 and 1941, before anti-tank guns, anti-tank mines, rocket-firing aircraft and defence in depth neutralised it.

  Two other weapons first given extensive trials in the First World War – the submarine and the bomber – had limited impact at that time. Unrestricted submarine warfare certainly posed a very significant challenge to British shipping in both world wars, but the U-boats were defeated in both conflicts through a combination of an old solution for protecting commerce – convoys – and technological advances. Equally, strategic bombing failed to destroy civilian morale not only in both world wars, but also in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973, though continuing technological advances have rendered ‘stand-off’ aerial bombardment more militarily effective in more recent conflicts.14 Yet the German return to unrestricted warfare in February 1917 was assuredly a turning point in contributing significantly to American entry into the war, with all that it implied for Germany's prospects of victory. Similarly, the greatest impact deriving from the first German use of heavy bombers – as opposed to airships – against London in June 1917 heralded the beginnings of the psychological fear of the bomber that marked the interwar years, with detrimental effects upon policymakers.

  Decisions made by military or political leaderships not only raise the impact of personality and contingency,15 but also suggest the significance of political and diplomatic events. Like those of military commanders, politicians’ decisions can have far-reaching implications. A distinguished biographer of President Woodrow Wilson has suggested that the period from 1 May 1916 to 1 February 1917 is ‘one of the fateful turning points of modern history, because the decisions that the leaders of the great powers made during this brief period determined the future of mankind for generations to come’.16 By this, he meant not just the German decision to conduct unrestricted submarine warfare, but also the collective failure to find agreement on a negotiated settlement, and the adoption of far-reaching war aims. Only Romania (August 1916) was a new entrant to the war during that particular period. But while decisions to enter the war might be seemingly of relatively short-term moment, others had the potential to shape events over the longer term. Arguably Romanian entry or that of Italy in May 1915, while turning points for Romania and Italy, were of little real consequence beyond opening new fronts and further complicating the tangled web of conflicting war aims and promises. If American entry to the war in April 1917 ensured victory for the Entente, that of Japan in August 1914 carried significant consequences in the longer term. The entry of Ottoman Turkey in November 1914 not only widened and arguably prolonged the war, but had the most profound consequences for the future. It ensured the ultimate collapse of the Ottoman Empire with lasting legacies still evident to this day in terms of the Armenian genocide of 1915, the division of the Middle East between Britain and France, and the immediate post-war conflict between Greece and Turkey.

  What added materially to the troubled legacy of the war in the Middle East was another political decision, namely the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 that gave recognition to aspirations for a Jewish national home in Palestine in contradiction to separate promises made to the Arabs within the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, an overtly political act – Woodrow Wilson's outlining of his ‘Fourteen Points’ for a peace settlement in January 1918 – had special significance. This was not only for the post-war deliberations at the Paris peace conferences, but also in terms of Wilson's unrealistic utopian vision of a new world order, and the subsequent bitter legacy of unfulfilled expectations.

  Purely domestic political events might have consequences only for the particular state in which they were taken and, therefore, they might rank as a turning point only for that state. Britain's adoption of military conscription in January 1916 was a turning point only in terms of its own prosecution of the war, and of the previously long tradition of eschewing such continental practices. There was a reversion to voluntary enlistment after the war. Following the adoption of conscription in 1939 and its extension as national service, voluntary enlistment was adopted once more in 1963. The same could be said for the introduction of British Summer Time in May 1916 albeit that it is still with us. A turning point for Britain may well not reflect those in and for France, Russia or Poland. The German despatch back to Russia of Lenin in the �
��sealed train’ in April 1917 was a turning point in the history of Russia, of the Soviet Union, and even of history itself. However, it was not a turning point of the First World War, because the collapse of the Tsarist government and the abdication of the Tsar in March 1917 had already changed the whole course of the war.

  On the other hand, domestic political events might prove of great consequence. The fall of the Tsar is one example, as is the coming to supreme political power of Hindenburg and Ludendorff in Germany in August 1916. The death of the aged Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary in November 1916 equally proved symbolic of the wider collapse of his empire under the challenges of war. The ascent to political authority of David Lloyd George in Britain in December 1916, or Georges Clemenceau in France in November 1917, was less significant. While it ensured the greater and more effective mobilisation of their respective states’ war effort, it did not materially alter the outcome of the war or leave any particular legacy. Aspects of such mobilisation, however, were potentially much more significant both in establishing an effective war machine but also in demonstrating the long-term growth of the state. The creation of the British Ministry of Munitions in May 1915 was certainly a turning point in this regard, pre-dating similar creations elsewhere.

  The mobilisation of all of a state's resources also implied socio-economic and cultural turning points. Clearly, the First World War had a lasting impact on the position of organised labour and of women, as well as the relationship between the individual and the state, though it is difficult to isolate one particular turning point in this regard. Generic turning points may be part of a general cycle of development, but may occur at different times depending on the particular state. It is tempting to describe as turning points the extension of the franchise to women in Britain in 1918, or in the United States by the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution that same year, though the latter was not ratified until 1920. But advances in the working conditions of women during wartime were invariably set back after the war despite the fact, for example, that women had attained the vote in Scandinavia and Australasia before the war.

  The Anzac experience of Gallipoli is an example of a cultural turning point that had a significant bearing on the formulation of national identity. The First World War also had a lasting impact on the ways in which war was memorialised. It illustrated the cultural discontinuity between older traditional values and the ‘modern’, though the origins of modernism and similar artistic movements lay in the pre-war decades. Cinema, too, had made its appearance before the war, but the ability to manipulate the medium for propaganda purposes was newly realised. The premiere of the first real documentary, The Battle of the Somme, in July 1916 was a contemporary sensation. It also created a powerful and unforgettable vision of the war on the Western Front that has stamped an indelible image on public consciousness ever since.

  In many ways the First World War was a transitional conflict. It saw the emergence of much that was dramatically new in military, political, socio-economic and cultural terms, but also witnessed much that was traditional. The sheer scale meant that it was likely to produce more potential turning points than would more limited conflicts. Those other long-term evolutionary forces that had helped to create the modern world also ensured that the turning points of the First World War would have a far greater impact than those of earlier conflicts. The way in which the First World War then shaped the modern world equally ensured that even a second global conflict would represent merely a continuation of those developments already set in train. The seeds of the Second World War were categorically in the First.

  The moments here chosen do not represent a counter-factor exercise for it is not my purpose to suggest how events may have developed differently. It is what actually occurred that matters. As the poet John Dryden phrased it in one of his translations from Horace's Odes, ‘what has been, has been’. Each moment, indicated by the chapter subtitles, represents a major event within the broad spectrum suggested by the main titles. Each illustrates the interplay of both long-term factors and the element of chance. How such pivotal moments came about has its own intrinsic interest. I have consciously chosen episodes that mix the familiar with lesser-known events in order to demonstrate the complexity of war's impact. We have, then, a war that changed the course of history as whole, but also some events within it that determined its course, and others that shaped particular histories for states, societies, institutions and individuals. After almost a century, the influence of the First World War is with us still.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE SILENT CONQUEROR

  The Flooding of the Yser, 21 October 1914

  THE DEFINING characteristic of the First World War in the popular imagination is the deadlock on the Western Front, that continuous line of trenches from Switzerland to the sea that was never broken from its establishment in the autumn of 1914 until the armistice in November 1918. Mention of the Somme, Verdun or Passchendaele instantly conjures up a featureless moonscape of villages and farms reduced to ruins, woods reduced to mere stumps, men struggling up to their waists in mud, in a theatre of unrelieved terror and disillusionment. Since the 1960s this mythic version of the Western Front has persisted despite the best efforts of historians. It should not be surprising, then, that the origins of the deadlock in the autumn of 1914 should be equally misunderstood.

  The war's military turning points are sometimes interpreted in terms of the introduction of new weapons systems such as gas, first used on the Western Front in April 1915, or the tank, which made its debut in September 1916. Alternatively, it is tempting to emphasise the opening (but invariably not the closing) of great offensives such as Verdun in February 1916, the Somme in July 1916, and Third Ypres or Passchendaele in July 1917. Dramatic battles and extraordinary loss of life will occur to many as the most significant episodes of the war. Clearly, while related to pre-war military developments, the battles of 1914 ensured that the war would not be ‘over by Christmas’. Inevitably, the story of the campaigns in the west in 1914 unfolds differently depending upon the particular national perspective, though it begins with a uniform narrative of the failure of the German ‘Schlieffen Plan’. As suggested in the introduction, the familiar story of 1914 in Britain differs from that in France and Germany. The Marne most certainly ended the initial German hopes for a swift victory in the west irrespective of whether Paris was or was not an operational objective. It forced the Germans to retreat towards the Aisne but it did not end the German expectation of further offensive operations in the west, nor of victory. That was to be ended by the events in Flanders.

  Missing from the usually accepted narrative is the fourth army that was engaged in Flanders in 1914, namely the Belgians. Perhaps the neglect of the Belgians stems partly from the idea that, at the time, British soldiers found them less welcoming than might have been expected given that the defence of Belgian neutrality had brought Britain into the war in the first place. Similarly, the initial sympathy for Belgian refugees soon palled in Britain itself. The young King Albert I of the Belgians – only 39 in 1914 – was a prickly ally of the British and French. Technically, he was not an ally at all for, throughout the war, Albert maintained the fiction that Belgium remained a neutral country defending its territory as an ‘associated’ rather than an allied power. Thus, the Belgians officially referred to the British and French forces as armies of the ‘guaranteeing powers’ as they were guarantors of Belgian neutrality under the 1839 Treaty of London. To give him his due, Albert did not hesitate for a moment in rejecting the German demand on the evening of 2 August 1914 that they be allowed free passage through Belgium. Tall and reserved yet autocratic by nature and jealous of his extensive political prerogatives, Albert tended to equate his own rigid ideas with Belgium's national interest, frequently taking a different line from his ministers, who were inclined to be Francophiles. By contrast, Albert was always deeply suspicious of French motives and increasingly grew equally disillusioned with the British. Not unnaturally, once
deadlock was apparent, Albert took exception to the idea that major offensives should be conducted on Belgian soil, and he wished both to achieve liberation by diplomacy and to preserve his army to ensure a voice at the post-war peace conference.

  In the wake of the criticism of the French diplomatic position following the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001, indeed, one Flemish journalist, Paul Belien, pointedly cast Albert and the Belgians as the real ‘surrender monkeys’ of the Great War in an article in the Spectator on 31 July 2004. While owing much to the acute divisions between the Flemish and Walloon inhabitants of Belgium, evident in the clandestine organisation established by Flemish separatists in the Belgian army during the war itself, there is an element of truth. Albert was prepared to contemplate separate negotiations with the Germans in 1915, 1916 and early 1918, seeking territorial compensation from them in exchange for the abandonment of the neutrality he still claimed. Yet, the Belgian flooding of the countryside between Nieuport on the Flanders coast and the railway embankment running from Nieuport to Dixmude between 21 and 31 October 1914 was one of the major turning points of the war. In a conflict usually characterised as one of enormous casualties resulting from the massive application of modern technology, the impact of a ‘silent conqueror’ resulting from the opening of weir gates and sluices seems unlikely. As suggested in the introduction, the Germans had already seized the port of Antwerp and were poised to break through to the Channel coast. This heralded the possibility of a German invasion of Britain. It should be remembered that two regular divisions were initially kept back in Britain to guard against such a possibility in August 1914, and that many of the Territorial and even New Army formations were initially stationed in East Anglia. Preparations were begun on 7 October to remove livestock, vehicles and petrol supplies from eastern counties, and an invasion attempt was anticipated around 20 November 1914 when tide and winds were favourable. It is true that the Germans had ruled out any such attempt before the war, but the symbolic capture of Calais and Dunkirk would still have posed significant political problems for the British government. It might be argued that the speed of infantry advance in 1914 was relatively slow and that the German troops had already been exhausted by their earlier endeavours to maintain an unrealistic marching timetable to victory beyond the effective range of available (and mostly horsed) supply transport. In October 1914, however, the BEF had reconnoitred last-ditch positions should the Germans break through at Ypres, and I Corps came very close to ordering such a withdrawal on 31 October 1914. No one had any doubt that such a breakthrough would have been disastrous.