5
Encirclement
THE LONG WAR
By the turn of 1914–15, it had become clear to leaders and peoples alike that the war had entered a new phase. Major Artur Hausner, still serving on the Eastern Front in mid-December 1914, reflected with surprise on its unexpected duration. When he had left his wife at home at the end of July, nobody, he remembered, was ‘expecting so long a separation. The war was after all only against Serbia, and we hoped to make short work of that murderous riff-raff. Yet in the meantime, out of that small war in the Balkans has come a world war of incalculable duration.’ In the west, the German gamble on rapid victory had failed, and Erich von Falkenhayn’s autumn offensive in Flanders had been unable to renew the advance. From the Swiss border to the Belgian coast, a line 750 kilometres long, troops had dug in and deadlock prevailed. On other fronts, the first months of fighting had also brought no decision. Serbia remained unbeaten to the shame of Habsburg commanders. Yet in the east, Tsarist armies’ deep penetration into Galicia had failed to knock Austria-Hungary out of the hostilities, and defeats in the summer and early autumn at the hands of Paul von Hindenburg had thwarted the Russians’ best chance of invading the Reich. The Central Powers had also been strengthened by the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the war in November 1914. In this context of growing numbers of belligerents, huge armies and military indecision, Hausner was right to gaze with worry into the future. ‘It is actually not impossible,’ he realized, ‘that it will still be very long before we once again have peace.’1
The nature of the war had changed too, adversely for the Central Powers. It was Britain’s entry that made the difference. With an empire covering one-fifth of the earth’s surface, it brought immense financial and industrial resources to the Entente alliance. Britain not only made a long war possible by helping France to survive the loss of its industrial heartland to German occupation, but it provided the coalition with a huge advantage; the Triple Entente had at its disposal three times the output as well as five times the population of Austria-Hungary and Germany, enabling it to absorb even severe military setbacks and making victory highly probable in a long conflict.2 Moreover, Britain radicalized the war, for it fought differently from the continental belligerents. As the world’s premier naval power with control over sea lanes, coaling stations and underwater telegraph cables, it used economic warfare proactively, as a means to strangle its enemies. With Britain’s involvement, the conflict ceased to be a purely military affair. Instead, it became a grinding attritional contest that assailed whole communities and turned civilians into targets. Helmuth von Moltke had foreseen and greatly feared this new model of hostilities, even before his appointment as Chief of the Prussian General Staff. The next war, he wrote in 1905, will be ‘a long arduous struggle’. No state would capitulate ‘until its entire national strength is broken’ and the victor too ‘utterly exhausted’. This new nightmare conflict would be, he predicted, ‘a people’s war’.3
The Central Powers responded to the novel threat by gradually improvising siege economies. In cooperation with big business, measures were taken to control and direct economic resources towards war efforts. As early as 13 August 1914, at the urging of two industrialists from the electrics firm AEG, the Prussian War Ministry established the War Raw Materials Department (Kriegsrohstoffabteilung), which was given the task of registering essential raw materials. In Germany ‘War Raw Materials Corporations’ (Kriegsrohstoff-Gesellschaften) and in Austria so-called ‘Centrals’ (Zentralen) were also founded from the autumn of 1914, each of which was entrusted with the acquisition and efficient allocation of a particular commodity. Run by businessmen, they initially dealt only with metal, wool and chemicals in the Reich, and cotton, wool and metal in Austria, but others were set up during the war so that by its end ninety-one Centrals and nearly two hundred Corporations existed.4 From the autumn of 1914, the War Ministries in both countries were prompted by shell shortages to seek out new manufacturers for army contracts, and industry gradually switched to war production. Labour was also mobilized. The unemployment crisis precipitated by the outbreak of hostilities, whose potential to cause internal unrest had so worried military commanders, receded from the late autumn of 1914, and by the spring of 1915 both economies were suffering severe manpower shortages.5 The most significant mark of shifting priorities was the release of skilled workers drafted as soldiers; a quarter of Austria-Hungary’s miners had been conscripted in 1914, and some German firms crucial to the war effort, such as Bosch electrics and the Bayer chemicals company, had lost half of their workforce to the army. Henceforth, a new system of exemptions was introduced to take into account industry’s manpower needs, as well as those of the military.6
The war’s turn into an economic struggle against better-financed, more populous opponents both increased the importance of civilians to the Central Powers’ war efforts and exposed them to new and worsening hardships. The outbreak of hostilities had already caused severe strains at home. Beyond the splitting of families as men went to war, the closure of businesses and the sudden wave of unemployment, the cost of food and basic necessities had spiralled due to the disruption of supply by military purchases and troop movements, the collapse of imports from countries that were now enemies, and hoarding by civilians. Comfort-eating, one of the ways in which people coped with the upheaval, had also played a part.7 Even agricultural areas were affected. In rural Thorn, a district in the east of Germany, the cost of a pound of barley groats rose by more than a quarter, that of bacon by a fifth, and potatoes, the staple food, by an eighth between the end of August and December 1914.8 In urban and industrial regions, price inflation was still greater and the stocks of some basic foodstuffs ran low. Berlin and Vienna were both already suffering from bread shortages by the autumn of 1914, and potatoes became scarce in early 1915.9 The British naval embargo on food imports into Germany, announced just three weeks after the country entered the war, and, for Austria, the Russian invasion of its Galician agricultural heartland, ensured not only that the Central Powers never recovered but greatly exacerbated these supply difficulties. Civilian livelihoods were now under attack; non-combatants were subjected to ever worsening material hardship, hunger and exhaustion. This suffering was accompanied by prolonged anxiety about loved ones at the front and bereavement, as ever more soldiers were killed. Mourners were already numerous by the end of 1914, for by this point 189,000 Austro-Hungarian and 250,000 German soldiers had fallen.10
The German and Austro-Hungarian war efforts rested on the ability of their societies to adapt to and cope with the new conditions. The new mode of conflict was characterized by the ever greater needs of mass armies for weapons and supplies and by efforts to strangle economies of both food and industrial goods. It turned homelands into besieged ‘home fronts’, essential for supporting soldiers in the theatre of operations both materially and emotionally. This was not a ‘people’s war’ in the old sense, in which civilians rose up under arms, but in a new way, where whole societies contributed less violently yet indispensably to deciding the outcome. Public support and consent were crucial. Pre-war military plans had focused on shifting bodies, on concentrating soldiers at the front; now, however, it was hearts and minds at home that had to be moved. States gave some guidance, but societies proved to an extraordinary extent to be self-mobilizing. Intellectuals, journalists, clergy and politicians, with marginal prompting from governments, interpreted the long war for the public. Community organizations and Churches arranged voluntary actions to aid the war effort. The new conditions and hardships of war sparked a process of adaptation in the way people thought and acted. ‘War cultures’, formulated in the middle and lower levels of the community and placing a premium on sacrifice and unity, underpinned resilience in these societies under siege.
A WAR OF LOVE
On the home fronts, a mix of calculations and emotions motivated civilians’ readiness to strive for the war efforts of their state. Russia’s warmongering had promoted out
rage and indignation, and there was also a good deal of fearful self-interest; the dangers of invasion had, after all, been chillingly demonstrated by the devastation of East Prussia and Galicia. Hatred of the enemy too was felt, although it was far from universal and, especially in the Reich, proved a double-edged sword. Hatred is often assumed to be at the core of ‘war cultures’.11 Yet strange to say, in Austria-Hungary and Germany, far more central in mobilizing and sustaining people was love.12 Love dominated the rhetoric of war. Its purest expression was found in the horror of the battlefields. The soldier’s readiness to fight and die was understood idealistically as an act of higher love. As one priest told his flock in October 1914: ‘Love is the main thing in everything; without it one can do nothing. If our courageous brothers who fight for us in east and west were not fired with a higher love for our Fatherland, out of the war would come murder and flames.’13 The soldiers were seen to be offering a ‘sacrifice’, an instantly familiar and highly emotive ideal to these Christian societies. Those who fell were venerated as martyrs, who had ‘died the hero’s death for the Fatherland on the Field of Honour’. In the war’s early years some men, especially those with a middle-class upbringing, expressed their trials and suffering in similar elevated terms.14
Home communities reciprocated with acts that were also understood as expressions of love, but of a gentler, healing kind which contemporaries associated with ideals of nurturing womanhood. Germany’s Kaiserin set the tone in the war’s first days when she appealed to her female subjects to embrace the ‘holy work of love’ necessary to support husbands, fathers and sons in the army and aid the Fatherland in its ‘decisive struggle’.15 Her call was quickly echoed at lower levels of society. The mayor of the southern German town of Heilbronn, for example, neatly captured a highly gendered image of an entire community at war when he declared that ‘behind the army of weapons, the army of love must now array’.16 In Germany and Austria, voluntary work for the community at war became known as Liebestätigkeiten – ‘activities of love’ – while parcels sent by civilians to their soldiers at the front were christened Liebesgaben, literally ‘gifts of love’.17
The wide appeal of this rhetoric is easy to understand, for the message of love was one that resonated with anybody who had a relative at the front. Families were the basic building blocks of the community at war, and they went to great lengths to support their soldiers. The efforts of one Hamburg woman, Anna Kohnstern, assisted by her four daughters, to care for her son Albert who was serving in the locally raised Infantry Regiment 76, illustrate just how apt was the term ‘gifts of love’. Like hundreds of thousands of other families, they scrimped, saved, stood for hours in queues, begged and bartered in order to collect treats or the ingredients to bake a cake that they could send to him on the Western Front. When eggs and butter became too expensive, Anna instead experimented with a recipe for honey cake needing neither. Sometimes the family added newspaper cuttings to Albert’s parcels so he would know what was going on at home. Their letters, and the gifts that accompanied them, were material expressions of deep affection, constant worry and intense longing for Albert’s safe return home. Any delay in an answer, either because Albert was too tired or busy to write or because there were stoppages in the delivery of field post, caused intense anxiety; one of his sisters warned him to be punctual in replying to ‘save us the terrible waiting from one postal delivery to the next’. The fear was even worse at times when the family knew that Albert’s regiment was in action. After the unit had taken part in an attack along the Côtes de Meuse in April 1915, his mother’s relief on receiving news from him was palpable:
My dear Albert!
I have received both of your cards from 26/4 and 30/4. I can hardly tell you how happy we all were when your first card arrived, for I knew that you were in the attack and when the dispatch to the H[amburg] Senate arrived confirming that the Hamburg regiment had greatly distinguished itself, I had no peace until at last your card came. I prayed many times to the dear God, that he might protect you.
After reminding her son that she had sent him chocolate and another cake, Anna signed off with a final wish that ‘the dear God continue to watch over you, so that you come back healthy to us. Your mother – who is always with you.’18
War culture spread this love beyond the bounds of the biological family to promote solidarity within wider circles. Albert did not receive Liebesgaben solely from his family. At Christmas 1914 he was also sent a parcel by the management of the Comerz- und Disconto-Bank in Hamburg, where in peacetime he had worked as a clerk, ‘as a sign of our remembrance’.19 Such gestures were common in the war’s first years. Associations too, whether Socialist, religious or hobbyist, sent gifts and newsletters to their members in the army. Parishes, especially in rural areas, were central networks of care and support for soldiers and their families. Priests organized community prayers for troops and meetings in which the letters of local men at the front were read out. They informed their congregations of the latest war news and advertised appeals for money or presents for soldiers and the war wounded. Some intervened with authorities to request home leave for individuals. When men were reported missing, priests helped the families to seek information about their fates. Naturally, clergy were key figures in helping society to cope with mass bereavement.20 Less personally but influentially, care also took place at the level of the municipality and region. Local identities were strong in both Germany and Austria-Hungary, and towns made strenuous efforts to look after their own. In Hamburg, thirty-four cars carrying gifts departed the city’s main marketplace for the front in October 1914; Anna Kohnstern, ever mindful of her son’s welfare, wrote to check that Albert had received something. Municipal councillors, keen to express the gratitude of their communities, often accompanied such convoys and personally distributed the presents to their cities’ regiments.21
The German and Austro-Hungarian states sought both to guide and be a part of these networks of love. Centralized welfare bodies were established. The Habsburg War Ministry was home to a ‘War Welfare Office’ (Kriegsfürsorgeamt), while in Germany a similar ‘War Welfare’ (Kriegsfürsorge) organization assisted in the support of soldiers’ families. Semi-official charities also played a major welfare role. The Red Cross and Austria-Hungary’s Imperial Widow and Orphan Aid Fund were the most important. Other specific causes won royal patronage. In Germany, for example, a ‘War Committee for Warm Underwear’ was formed at the Kaiserin’s wish and based in the Reichstag.22 Still, despite the high connections and official oversight, all these organizations were dependent on networks of local activists and the support of regional or municipal elites. German and Austrian officials quickly recognized too that people were more willing to donate for local and regional rather than national or imperial causes: close identification with the wider polity was not so far advanced as in older and more ethnically homogeneous states. Consequently, in Austria, the state tried to extend and exploit the ‘double mobilization’ that had been so successful at the start of hostilities, and placed the running of its war welfare organizations in nationalists’ hands. In Bohemia, German and Czech welfare activists were given control as early as June 1915, and in the following year the policy was extended to nationalist organizations in other parts of the western half of the Empire. This had profound consequences for the Habsburg war effort. For fund-raising, it was undoubtedly a good move. Well-organized national activists were co-opted for the state. The female middle-class volunteers who did much of the work were happier, especially in Bohemia, offering their time and labour for national rather than imperial causes. However, from a longer-term perspective the delegation was problematical. Dividing war welfare between the nationalities was an implicit acknowledgement of the frailty of imperial solidarity. The state was encouraging its people not to support each other but rather to retreat into the protection of their own national groupings.23
All these initiatives were immensely successful in mobilizing female populations to support no
t only their own blood relatives but also local regiments and even the national and imperial efforts. The Chief of Police in Berlin noted with wonder in October 1914 that ‘almost all of womanhood is busy with the production of socks, wristlets, vests, waist-warmers and other woollen things for our troops’.24 The words were echoed a couple of months later and hundreds of kilometres to the south-west, in Austrian Salzburg, where the local War Assistance Bureau observed with pride that ‘in all the schools, nunneries, houses, farms and huts of the land, the needs of our warriors are being seen to industriously by the female part of our population’.25 Figures from Vienna give some indication of the extraordinary extent of the voluntary effort. By March 1917 the city’s War Welfare Office had sent 257,972 pairs of gloves, 636,388 woolly hats and 2,708,180 pairs of socks as Liebesgaben to the troops. The other more than thirty branches of the office scattered across Austria had undertaken similar work, as had the Red Cross and various women’s organizations.26
Nonetheless, so great was the debt civilians felt they owed the troops that even this huge material support appeared to some inadequate as recognition of their sacrifices. The German bourgeoisie in particular decided early in hostilities that they must also offer spiritual solidarity. Seriousness was their watchword; frivolity appeared morally reprehensible when men were dying at the front. Theatres consequently took light comedies off the stage and ran classics with martial themes, like Schiller’s Wallenstein’s Camp, or hurriedly written war plays. Some cities banned live music and dancing in pubs and coffee houses.27 New wartime forms of entertainment were devised. Popular in the first months were ‘Patriotic Evenings’ in which locally written war poetry was recited and songs fit for the ‘holy war’ were performed. The cultural, Church and women’s associations that organized them donated proceeds to war causes like the Red Cross.28 ‘War lectures’ by academics also attracted mass followings in this period: around 10,000 people attended a series run in the city of Münster between September 1914 and February 1915.29 A high-profile set of lectures in Berlin even made it into print, disseminating university professors’ views on Entente war guilt and German virtue to people far beyond the capital. At stake, readers were told, was ‘a question of our national existence, of our entire freedom and development’.30
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