by John Keegan
Conscription was an instrument not only of equality but also of fraternity. Because it applied to all at the same moment of their lives and in principle treated all in the same way, it forged bonds of brotherhood young Europeans had never before felt. Universal compulsory education, a simultaneous innovation, was currently taking children outside their families and plunging them into a common experience of learning. Conscription took young adults from their locality and plunged them into the experience of growing up – confronting them with the challenge of separation from home, making new friends, dealing with enemies, adjusting to authority, wearing strange clothes, eating unfamiliar food,fn3 shifting for themselves. It was a genuine rite de passage, intellectual, emotional and, not least of all, physical. Nineteenth-century armies, told that they were ‘schools of the nation’, took on many of the characteristics of contemporary schools, not only testing and heightening literacy and numeracy but also teaching swimming, athletics and cross-country sports as well as shooting and the martial arts. Turnvater Jahn, the pioneer of physical education in Germany, was a potent influence on Prussian military training; his ideas were propagated in France through the specialist athletics instructors of the Bataillon de Joinville, while in Italy Captain Caprilli founded a school of military horsemanship which was to transform the art of riding throughout the Western world. The healthy outdoorsmanship of military life, lived round the campfire and under canvas, would eventually develop into the ideals of the German youth movement and the code of the Boy Scouts and so make its way back into social and military life by a convergent route.
The rite de passage of universal conscription was not a liberating experience for all. As Professor William McNeill has pointed out, individuals drafted into the army from a society which was rapidly urbanising and industrialising, marching them away from the plough and the village pump,
found themselves in a simpler society than the one they knew in civil life. The private soldier lost almost all personal responsibility. Ritual and routine took care of nearly every working hour. Simple obedience to the orders that punctuated that routine from time to time, and set activity off in some new direction, offered release from the anxieties inherent in personal decision-making – anxieties that multiplied incontinently in urban society, where rival leaders, rival loyalties and practical alternatives as to how to spend at least part of one’s time competed insistently for attention. Paradoxical as it may sound, escape from freedom was often a real liberation, especially for young men living under very rapidly changing conditions, who had not yet been able to assume fully adult roles.
Even when allowance is made for the force of this percipient observation, however, the ultimate importance of universal conscription in changing attitudes to military service was that it ultimately connected with liberty, in its political if not its personal sense. The old armies had been instruments of oppression of the people by kings; the new armies were to be instruments of the people’s liberation from kings, even if that liberation was to be narrowly institutional in the states which retained monarchy. The two ideas were not mutually contradictory. The French National Convention had decreed in 1791 that ‘the battalion organised in each district shall be united under a banner bearing the inscription: “The French people united against tyranny”.’ That decree encapsulated the idea inherent in the United States Constitution that ‘the right to bear arms’, once made common, was a guarantee of direct freedoms. Two years earlier the revolutionary leader, Dubois-Crance, had articulated the congruent proposition: ‘Each citizen should be a soldier, and each soldier a citizen, or we shall never have a constitution.’
The tension between the principles of winning freedoms by revolutionary assault and extracting them in legal form by performance of military duty was to transfix European political life for much of the nineteenth century. The excess of freedom won by force of arms in France provoked the reaction of Thermidor and diverted the fervour of the extremist sans-culottes into conquest abroad. The victories of the ‘revolutionary’ armies (after 1795 firmly under the control of their officers, many of them, ironically, returned monarchists) then had the effect of provoking their enemies, particularly the Prussian and Austrian kings, into decreeing a variation of the levée-en-masse or general conscription, the original manifestation of the French Revolution in its military form. Such conscription produced popular forces – Landwehr, Landsturm, Freischützen – to oppose the French on their home territories.
Landwehr and Freischützen became an embarrassment as soon as their work was done. With Napoleon safely on St Helena, Prussia and Austria consigned these popular forces, with their liberal-minded bourgeois officers, to the status of reserve contingents, and intended never to call on their services again. Nevertheless they survived until 1848, ‘year of revolutions’, when their members actively participated in the street battles for constitutional rights in Vienna and Berlin – where the uprising was put down by the Prussian Guard, the ultimate bastion of traditional authority. They had meanwhile been replicated in France, whose National Guard would keep alive the ‘liberal’ principle in military life under the Second Empire and, after the withdrawal of the Prussians from Paris in 1871, rise against the regular army of the conservative Third Republic in a bloody Commune which would cost the lives of 20,000 of its members.
‘No conscription without representation’
The struggle of these citizen forces with the armies of reaction, though ending in physical defeat, nevertheless indirectly exerted the pressure which extracted constitutional and electoral rights from the conservative European regimes. The demand for such rights was in the air; and the impôt du sang – ‘blood tax’, as conscription laws were called in France – could not be levied if constitutional rights continued to be refused, particularly when neighbour states were enlarging their armies and reserves through the process of conscription. Prussia, the military pace-setter, granted a constitution in 1849, as a direct result of the fright it was caused by armed revolutionaries the previous year. By 1880 both France and the German Empire had introduced universal male suffrage, and France would institute a common three-year term of service as a quid pro quo in 1882. Austria extended the vote to all males in 1907; even Russia, most autocratic of states and most exigent in its conscription laws, which imposed a term of four years, had created a representative assembly in 1905, following the defeat of its army by the Japanese in Manchuria and the subsequent revolution of that year.
‘No conscription without representation’ had, in short, become an unspoken slogan of European politics in the half-century before the First World War; since conscription is indeed a tax, on the individual’s time if not money, it exactly echoed the American colonists’ challenge to George III in 1776. Paradoxically, in the states where votes were granted to all, or most, free men but where military service was still restricted to those fettered by ‘want or hardship’ – the United States and Britain – a strange passion for volunteer soldiering seized their citizenry during the great era of military expansion through conscription in nineteenth-century Europe. The opening stages of the American Civil War could not have been fought without the prior existence of a network of entirely amateur regiments, with names like the Liberty Rifles of New Jersey, the Mechanic Phalanx of Massachusetts, the Republican Blues of Savannah, Georgia, and the Palmetto Guard of Charleston, South Carolina. In 1859 a nationwide war scare caused by French naval expansion had brought into being a similar though much larger network in Britain. Tennyson’s stirring verses, Form, Riflemen, Form, had helped to call 200,000 civilians into amateur military service. This was a serious embarrassment to the government, which could not stop them designing and buying their own uniforms but was reluctant to see or help them arm.
They did so none the less; and the government, which like all others in Europe since the establishment of public order at the beginning of the eighteenth century had energetically carried out the disarmament of its population, was eventually obliged to issue them with rifles fr
om the state arsenals. The issue of the modern rifle, rather than the obsolete musket, was crucially significant. The musket, like the uniform livery of the dynastic armies that used it, was a mark of servitude. So short was its range that its effect could be harnessed to battle-winning purposes only by massing the musketeers in dense rank, and keeping them ‘closed up’ at pike point. The rifle, by contrast, was a weapon of individual skill. It could kill a common soldier, without much discrimination by its user, at 500 yards; in the hands of a marksman it could kill a general at 1000 yards. Hence the Paris Communards were convinced, as Thomas Carlyle put it, that ‘the rifle made all men tall’. A rifleman was as good as any man. The British Rifle Volunteers, in token of the status their weapons gave them, chose to dress not in the tight scarlet of the soldiers of the line, enlisted from ‘want and hardship’, but in the loose tweed shooting-suits of country gentlemen; to that garb some added ‘Garibaldi’ shirts or the ‘wideawake’ hats of the 1848 revolutionaries. In different varieties of cut and colour – field-grey or khaki – this grousemoor or deerstalker garb would come to clothe all the armies of Europe (with the exception of the French) by 1914, just as the long-range, high-velocity rifle would arm them. No badge of military proficiency would be worn with more ostentation than the marksman’s; and those units which had carried the rifle earliest – designated as Schützen in Germany, Jäger in Austria, chasseurs in France, greenjackets in Britain – would arrogate to themselves a particular esprit de corps as soldiers of modernity.
In truth, however, all the soldiers who marched to war in 1914 formed a badge of the modernity of the states to which they belonged. They were fit, strong, faultlessly clothed and equipped, armed with weapons of unparalleled lethality, and inspired by the belief that they were free men who, in free activity on the battlefield, would win prompt and decisive victories. Above all they were numerous. No society on earth had ever proportionately put forth soldiers in such numbers as Europe did in August 1914. The intelligence section of the German Great General Staff had evolved a rule of thumb that every million of a nation’s population could support two divisions of soldiers, or some 30,000 men. The rule of thumb was narrowly borne out on mobilisation: France, with 40 million population, mobilised 75 infantry divisions (and 10 of cavalry); Germany, with 57 million, 87 divisions (and 11 of cavalry); Austria-Hungary, with 46 million, 49 divisions (and 11 of cavalry); and Russia, with 100 million, 114 divisions (and 36 of cavalry). Since each was formed from a particular locality – the German 9th and 10th Divisions, for example, from Lower Silesia, the French 19th and 20th from the Pas de Calais, the Austrian 3rd and 5th from the vicinity of Linz (Hitler’s home town), the Russian 1st, 2nd and 3rd from the Baltic states – their departure denuded their home districts of their young manhood overnight. In the first fortnight of August 1914 some 20 million Europeans, nearly 10 per cent of the populations of the combatant states, donned military drab and shouldered rifles to take the train to war. All had been told and most believed that they would be back ‘before the leaves fell’.
It would be four years and five autumns before the survivors returned, leaving on the battlefields some 10 million dead. The vast crop of fit and strong young men which formed the fruit of nineteenth-century Europe’s economic miracle had been consumed by the forces which gave them life and health. The original divisions which had mobilised in 1914 had ‘turned over’ their personnel at least twice and in some cases three times. War-raised divisions had suffered comparable losses, for the conscription machine drove on throughout the war’s course, not only consuming new classes as each came annually of military age but also spreading its jaws to swallow the older, younger and less fit whom it would have rejected in peacetime. Ten million Frenchmen passed through the military machine between 1914 and 1918; out of each nine enlisted, four became casualties. German fatal casualties exceeded 3 million, Austrian a million, British a million, those of Italy, which entered the war only in May 1915 and fought on the narrowest of fronts, over 600,000; the dead of the Russian army, whose collapse in 1917 permitted the Bolsheviks to seize power, have never accurately been counted. The graves of the Russian dead, and those of the Germans and Austrians who opposed them, were scattered from the Carpathians to the Baltic; those of the French, British, Belgians and Germans who fell on the Western Front were concentrated in a narrow belt of frontier territory forming cemeteries which have become major and permanent landmarks in that countryside. Those constructed by the British – for which Edwin Lutyens, the great neo-classicist, designed the architecture and Rudyard Kipling, himself a bereaved Great War parent, wrote the funerary inscriptions, ‘Their name liveth for evermore’ and, on the tombs of the unidentified dead, ‘A soldier of the Great War, known unto God’ – are places of heartrending beauty.
‘Cities of the dead’ they have been called, though ‘gardens of the dead’ is more apt; they are supreme achievements of that romantic landscape art which is one of England’s donations to world culture. But they were filled from zones which in their time were cities of the living, foci of activity, emotional and intellectual as well as physical, more intense than any Europe had known since the French Revolution. ‘The front cannot but attract us,’ the French Jesuit philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, had written, ‘because it is in one way the extreme boundary between what you are obviously aware of and what is still in the process of formation. Not only do you see these things that you experience nowhere else but you also see emerge from within yourself an underlying stream of clarity, energy and freedom that is to be found hardly anywhere else in ordinary life.’ Teilhard de Chardin’s rhetoric harks back directly to that of the barricades, those of 1871, 1848, ultimately of 1789; and with good reason. The trenches of the Western Front were indeed barricades. Alan Seeger, a poet and victim of the trenches, called them ‘disputed barricades’ – across which the emancipated youth of Europe levelled their rifles, symbols of their status as free citizens, in defence of the values of liberty, equality, fraternity. The nineteenth century had given these values to all, but nationalism had persuaded each citizen that they inhered meaningfully only in the state to which he belonged. Revolution, its fathers had quite genuinely believed, would be a gift freely given to all, a gift whose effect would be to foster a fraternity of nations as well as of people. It had, none the less, never been successfully internationalised. Even at its dawn it had manifested itself as the dynamic of a single nationality alone; when its values came to be more widely diffused, their transmission, by a bizarre perversion, succeeded only in reinforcing the amour-propre of each nation among which they rooted. The French Revolution persuaded the French – as it still does – that they were unique in their devotion to equality; its influence reinforced the Germans’ commitment to fraternity; its proclamation of liberty convinced the British that they already possessed it more fully than latecomer claimants to their freeborn rights ever could.
The fruits of victory
The states to which the First World War brought both victory and its fruits – France and Britain foremost – were able to adjust the sense of suffering they had undergone to their belief in the higher values that had animated their war-making without grave damage to their national psyches. For each of them, in a real but unexpressed material dimension, the First World War had been worth the sacrifice. Despite the human and, in the case of France, material cost, the war had re-energised and expanded their home economies, even if much overseas investment had been liquidated to purchase raw materials and finished goods in the process; more important, it had greatly expanded their overseas possessions. Britain and France, in that order, remained in 1914 the most important of the world’s imperial powers (a major factor in motivating Germany to attack them); by 1920, after the distribution of the defeated powers’ possessions under League of Nations mandate, their empires had become larger still. France, already dominant in North and West Africa, added Syria and Lebanon to its Mediterranean holdings. Britain, head of the largest imperial association the world had
ever seen, extended it by the addition to its East African colonies of German Tanganyika, thus making the dream of an Africa British ‘from Cairo to the Cape’ a reality; at the same time it acquired the mandates for Palestine and Iraq, ex-Turkish territories, and so established its power over a ‘fertile crescent’ running from Egypt to the head of the Persian Gulf.
Crumbs from the table of the German and Turkish empires fell elsewhere; South-West Africa and Papua to South Africa and Australia, Rhodes to Italy, Germany’s Pacific islands to Japan – a sop which only time would reveal as ill considered. Italy and Japan believed they deserved more, particularly since the greater allies picked up crumbs too. Their sense of being skimped would feed dangerous rancours in the years to come. But the rancour of these unfavoured victors was as nothing compared to that of the vanquished. Both Austria and Turkey, ancient contestants for mastery in Europe’s middle lands, would develop the resignation to adapt to reduced circumstances. Germany would not. Its sense of humiliation bit deep. Not only had it lost the trappings of an embryo colonial power as well as the marches of its historic advance into central Europe in West Prussia and Silesia. It had also lost command of a strategic zone so extensive and central that as late as July 1918 its possession had promised victory, and thereby control of a new empire in the European heartland.
On 13 July 1918, the eve of the Second Battle of the Marne, German armies occupied the whole of western Russia up to a line which touched the Baltic outside Petrograd and the Black Sea at Rostov-on-Don, enclosed Kiev, capital of the Ukraine and historic centre of Russian civilisation, and cut off from the rest of the country one-third of Russia’s population, one-third of its agricultural land and more than one-half of its industry. The line, moreover, was one not of conquest but of annexation, secured by an international treaty signed at Brest-Litovsk in March. German expeditionary forces operated as far east as Georgia in Transcaucasia and as far south as the Bulgarian frontier with Greece and the plain of the Po in Italy. Through her Austrian and Bulgarian satellites Germany controlled the whole of the Balkans and, by her alliance with Turkey, extended her power as far away as northern Arabia and northern Persia. In Scandinavia, Sweden remained a friendly neutral, while Germany was helping Finland to gain its independence from the Bolsheviks – as Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were also shortly to do. In distant south-east Africa a German colonial army kept in play an Allied army ten times its size. And in the west, on the war’s critical front, the German armies stood within fifty miles of Paris. In five great offensives, begun the previous March, the German high command had regained all the territory contested with France since the First Battle of the Marne fought four years earlier. A sixth offensive promised to carry its spearheads to the French capital and win the war.