Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  French and Russian they matter not,

  A blow for a blow and a shot for a shot . . .

  We have but one and only hate,

  We love as one, we hate as one,

  We have one foe and one alone:

  England!104

  Even at the time, much of this was recognized as deeply silly. The British satirical magazine Punch ridiculed it with a cartoon of a scowling family, complete with bad-tempered dachshund, at the breakfast table entitled ‘Study of a Prussian Household Having its Morning Hate’. There were occasions, however, on which the opprobrium turned genuinely nasty. When prisoners of war, and especially British captives, were unloaded at German railway stations in the autumn of 1914, they were often confronted with agitated and angry civilians who taunted, spat, and even threw water or urine over them. A few were assaulted. How far these incidents reflected societal hatred against the enemy is debatable. Crowds at railway stations in the conflict’s first months were likely to be particularly emotional; they had often just bid goodbye to mobilized family members or were there to meet injured sons, husbands and fathers returning from the front. The presence of heavily wounded German soldiers on the trains along with prisoners may also have spurred civilians’ aggression.105 Nonetheless, underlying the hostility was a desire, widespread in German society in 1914–15, to find some way of retaliating against an enemy that was ruthlessly laying siege to the Reich yet was itself removed from any of the horrors of war. As Berlin’s Chief of Police reported at the beginning of October 1914, there was ‘a general demand for a German attack against the English on England’s soil’.106

  The Reich’s armed forces did partially satisfy this popular wish. In the last months of 1914 the navy bombarded Great Yarmouth, Hartlepool and Scarborough, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians. The attacks had the strategic objective of luring the British fleet out into newly laid minefields, but for some Germans at home it was their retributive function that was important. ‘I’d have loved to have seen the horror and rage of the English!’ gloated the auxiliary nurse Elisabeth Stempfle when news of the Yarmouth raid was circulated.107 In the New Year, the first Zeppelin attacks on the east coast of England were also applauded, although not by everyone. The clear-thinking editor of the Left Liberal Berliner Tageblatt, Theodor Wolff, rightly recognized that the killing of children and other civilians could only reinforce Germany’s international reputation for barbarity. The raids were, he thought, ‘senseless’.108 For those who yearned for the fight to be taken to British shores, however, it was the U-boat that offered the most exciting prospects. This was a new weapon in 1914 – the first submarine had been launched only at the turn of the century – yet within two months of the outbreak of war, U9 had sunk three British cruisers in little over an hour, and suddenly the public was fixated. The army had failed to deliver on expectations of a quick victory, but no matter; Germans had discovered a wonder weapon.109

  The German public’s exaggerated hopes about what U-boats could achieve were matched by the navy’s hubris, and the issue of how to deploy the submarines soon became a source of acrimony that undermined both the government and Burgfrieden. The debate began when Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the State Secretary of the Imperial Navy Office and, against stiff competition, probably the most divisive figure in Imperial Germany’s history, mused about the possibility of a U-boat campaign against commerce in an interview with an American journalist at the end of 1914. ‘England wants to starve us,’ he told the representative of United Press International. ‘We can play the same game, bottle her up and destroy any ship trying to run the blockade.’110 He had no authorization to bring up the topic. The Chancellor was horrified, the navy’s operational commanders were livid that strategy had been betrayed to the Entente, but the public, especially on the political right, greeted the suggestion with elation. Conservative, National Liberal and Centre Party politicians quickly became vocal in demanding the unrestricted use of the U-boats against British trade. This wish was ill-considered for two reasons. First, the Reich simply did not have the strength to break Britain’s sea lifelines. A German naval study undertaken in the spring of 1914 had concluded that 222 U-boats would be necessary for an effective campaign against British commerce. When the first submarine offensive began in February 1915, Germany possessed just thirty-seven U-boats, and many of these were in repair, completing trials, or needed for training. Naval commanders swung over to advocating a U-boat campaign largely because the inability of the High Seas Fleet to wrest maritime control from the British had been demonstrated in the course of 1914. Their recommendations were based not on any clear analysis of the probability of naval success, political risk and national interest, but, as repeatedly and disastrously throughout the war, merely to justify their service’s existence.111

  The second reason why a U-boat offensive against commerce was a bad idea in early 1915 was that it would inevitably strain relations with neutral powers. With no movement on the Western Front, part of East Prussia as well as much of Galicia still under occupation, growing economic difficulties, and an increasing likelihood of hostilities with the erstwhile ally, Italy, this was not the time to make new enemies. Bethmann Hollweg had recognized the diplomatic and strategic dangers immediately and, in the coming years, it was these rather than humanitarian or legal scruples that motivated his resistance to the introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare. When, at the start of February 1915, the new Commander of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Hugo von Pohl, prevailed upon the Kaiser to declare the seas around Great Britain a war zone in which neutral ships were at risk of being attacked, the Chancellor was quickly proven correct. The United States reacted to the declaration by warning the German government that it would be held to ‘a strict accountability’ for the actions of its submarines. Once the campaign began, there were clashes with neutral ships already in the spring, but ironically the major diplomatic crisis was triggered by the sinking of a British vessel, the passenger liner Lusitania, on 7 May 1915. The Lusitania was an enemy ship, it was certainly carrying a cargo of small-arms munitions and possibly also high explosives, but 1,198 civilians, including 128 American citizens, drowned when it went down, causing a public outcry across the Atlantic. The United States’ government protested and a diplomatic break appeared to be a real possibility. The Germans sought at first to avoid halting submarine warfare, but when another British passenger ship, the Arabic, was torpedoed on 27 August with the loss of more American lives among the forty-four drowned, Bethmann, with the army’s backing, insisted that U-boats be forbidden from further attacks on liners without warning. On 18 September the newly appointed Chief of Admiralty Staff, Henning von Holtzendorff, effectively suspended the campaign, ending U-boat action against merchant shipping in the English Channel and west of the British Isles, and he ordered that in the North Sea stop-and-search ‘prize law’ procedures rather than indiscriminate surprise attacks should be adopted against all vessels.112

  However, once whetted, it was difficult to set to rest the public’s appetite for a method of warfare widely understood to be capable of punishing the English and bringing hostilities rapidly to a victorious end. The Chancellor, supported by the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, rightly feared provoking the United States into hostilities with what he termed a ‘game of va banque whose stakes will be our existence as a Great Power and our entire national future’.113 Yet he could not publicly admit to the submarine force’s actual weakness. Nor were arguments about the need to respect neutral rights likely to be well received. Germans were fully aware that factories in the United States were manufacturing huge quantities of weaponry for the Entente. Their newspapers reported on the artillery pieces, small arms and explosive being produced in this neutral land, ready to be shipped to Europe where they would kill and maim the fathers, sons and brothers of their readers.114 The fragmented nature of the official publicity machine and, above all, the Wilhelmine elite’s inability to agree on and pursue one policy, also prevented the dissemi
nation of any clear message advocating caution in U-boat warfare. Tirpitz, who until March 1916 controlled the propaganda apparatus of the Imperial Navy Office, agitated with the support of naval officers, right-wing politicians and pressure groups for the resumption of a ruthless U-boat offensive. Fantastical claims circulated: it was even rumoured that just six weeks of unrestricted submarine action would suffice to bring England to her knees.

  The result was that the campaign of hatred towards England, initially an effective tool of mobilization particularly for the middle class, was disastrously refracted inwards. The increasingly acrimonious public debate about how to deploy the U-boats shifted focus away from the enemy against whom they were to fight, Britain, and instead led to the vilification of those identified by Tirpitz and his allies as obstacles to the most ruthless prosecution of the war – above all the Chancellor. Public confidence in the government was seriously shaken. By March 1916 police were characterizing the mood in the Reich’s capital as ‘extremely ugly’. Above all the educated classes, but also even some workers, held ‘the view that England remains our most dangerous enemy and that it can only be defeated through the ruthless deployment of all the means of war at our disposal, especially the U-boats and the Zeppelins’. Those so minded, it was reported, ‘do not shy away from voicing the most vigorous criticism of the Reich leadership’.115

  AUSTRIA-HUNGARY’S LOCAL WARS

  The Habsburg Empire never achieved Germany’s unity of purpose or single-minded hatred of one enemy. The Empire’s peoples were too diverse, their histories too different, and their homes too distant to share a single understanding of the war. The nationalist politicians and clergy so crucial in endorsing the Habsburg cause to their peoples during the ‘double mobilization’ of August 1914 and shaping public opinion afterwards all promoted their own conflicting war aims. Hopes that a strong, centralized German-run Empire would emerge from the trial by fire were dominant among the Austro-German intelligentsia. Their Magyar counterparts, by contrast, saw themselves in a war to preserve their privileged position within the Dual Monarchy, the integrity of their lands and access to the sea. Croatian and Polish nationalist politicians and clergy had other, totally incompatible visions. For them, the war derived much of its meaning as a quest to establish a new Trialist state, in which the united South Slav lands or Galicia joined to Congress Poland would be raised to a third entity on an equal footing with Austria and Hungary.116 The Habsburg official narrative of how the small war in the Balkans had avalanched into a European conflict, in which Austria-Hungary faced not only Serbia but also Montenegro, Russia, France and Britain, remained underdeveloped. As a consequence, Franz Joseph’s subjects fought many local conflicts, not one great imperial war.

  The Habsburg government’s own disunity was much to blame for the absence of a clear imperial war narrative. The great autonomy possessed by the two halves of the Empire, Austria and Hungary, excluded any possibility of a unified press policy. Further complicating coordination was the fact that many parts of the administration – including the War Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the offices of the Hungarian and Austrian Minister Presidents, and regional and district governments – managed their own press sections. Yet neither Austria-Hungary’s civilian leadership nor its military leaders evinced much interest anyway in courting public support in 1914. Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of the General Staff, in striking contrast to Moltke, was oblivious of the need to preserve unity. ‘Public opinion, the idea of the people, all immaterial problems of modern politics are unknown to him’, criticized one astute contemporary.117 Austria’s public relations strategy, far more than Germany’s, was centred on suppression rather than management of information and debate at the opening of hostilities. The War Surveillance Office (Kriegsüberwachungsamt) oversaw censorship in the parts of Austria designated as the ‘hinterland’, including Vienna. A parallel organization, the Hadifelügyeleti Bizottság, performed the same function in Hungary. Habsburg military censors, unlike the German army with its regular press conferences, initially displayed little willingness to discuss events with newspapers. Complaint about overly stringent or capricious censorship met in 1914 with the arrogant response that ‘the people’s job in wartime is to shut up and obey’.118 In the front zone, the Kriegspressequartier, a ‘War Press Office’, managed war correspondents. While later in hostilities this office would be heavily involved in efforts to raise troop and civilian morale, at this early stage its main duty was to control, rather than assist, journalists seeking war news. The office was consequently located at a distance from the High Command and, as there was little good to report from the front during the first year of fighting, the military preferred to restrict access rather than gamble that knowledge of the defeats would strengthen and not undermine the Habsburg peoples’ resolve.119

  The Empire’s multinational subjects were not wholly disparate. The Habsburg dynasty had ruled most of its territories for centuries, acquiring much legitimacy through longevity. Especially in rural areas, people were united by affection for the venerable Franz Joseph. The Catholic Church also provided a further important point of imperial unity, for almost four-fifths of the population belonged to it.120 The bishops were fervent supporters of the Monarchy, and were at the peak of their influence after war broke out, preaching to packed pews on the righteousness of its struggle. As Vienna’s Cardinal Pfiffl proudly proclaimed to his flock in October 1914, ‘We fight for truth and justice, we fight for God and our sacred faith, we fight for our Emperor and our home soil. In this struggle for what is most holy to us, God is with us!’121 Yet while clergy across Austria-Hungary echoed these sentiments, the message varied slightly but significantly in every region. Priests and bishops had regional and often national identities alongside their imperial and confessional allegiances, and they tailored their message to the loyalties of their congregations. Like elected politicians, they thus contributed to the Monarchy’s national and imperial dual mobilization. The Polish Bishop of Przemyśl, for example, reminded his clergy in February 1915 that at stake in the war was ‘not only the integrity and honour of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy but also the future of Poland and Catholic interests, threatened by the Orthodox Church and Freemasonry’.122

  In the absence of much government guidance, the Habsburg peoples directed their enmity towards different foes, their choice being determined by war experience, national priorities and, very often, historical animosities. At the Empire’s centre, the Viennese intelligentsia and bourgeois press were initially obsessed by the ‘punishment expedition’ against Serbia and the battles with Russia. Yet already in October 1914, the capital’s newspapers followed the Reich’s German media in refocusing their ire on the western Entente.123 This had some parochial logic. Vienna was far from any battle front and, as the fighting was not going well in any theatre, censorship was tight. Food shortages were growing, and thus were likely to attract a readership in the capital. Moreover, providing that an officially approved angle was taken on the story, the censor was content to approve articles on the shortages, limiting the number of disconcerting white spaces left where copy had been removed at short notice. As in Germany, the shortages were initially the result of the disruption to trade and transport from mobilization, and also of irresponsibly large military food purchases undertaken with no thought to civilian needs. The shortages were worsened by the Habsburg army’s woeful performance in Galicia, which resulted in the loss of Austria’s bread-basket region to the Russians. Hungarian obstinacy was also partly to blame for Vienna’s especially dire situation. The Empire did not lift customs duties on food in the first months of war, consequently missing a crucial opportunity to attract large imports, because the Hungarian government feared for the profits of its gentry supporters and blocked the measure. Adding to the Austrian capital’s plight, from January 1915 the Magyars limited their own exports to Austria.124 Naturally none of this could be stated in print. More open to attack was Austrian bureaucracy’s lackadaisical and unimaginative reac
tion to the shortages. Only in April 1915 were ration cards issued in Vienna, and then solely for flour and bread. Sugar, milk, coffee and lard were rationed from 1916, potatoes and jam in 1917 and meat only in 1918. Nonetheless, the favoured explanation of the shortages for most newspapers in 1915, as well as for the Austrian government, was the British blockade. This useful scapegoat offered a compelling story of enemy inhumanity while avoiding the broadcasting of military defeat in the east, internal disunity and administrative incompetence. Newspaper headlines screamed ‘Starvation War!’125

  For peoples further east, the arch-enemy was Russia. The attitudes of Hungarian and Polish intellectuals to the war was a strange combination of romanticism and grudge match. Both peoples nurtured a national mission as historic defenders of European civilization against tyranny. As the novelist Zsigmond Móricz proclaimed lyrically in December 1915, the ‘thousand-year-old task’ of the Magyars was to be ‘the first reef against all storms of the frightful East’.126 Much of the Magyar gentry was also itching to have a go at the Russians. One officer expressed the thoughts of many when he remarked that he would be ‘glad to pay back the Russians for ’48’, the year in which Tsarist forces had crushed Hungarian rebels fighting for independence. Yet as the 1848 uprising had been against the Habsburgs, this was not an unproblematic basis on which to mobilize: ‘the next war,’ the same officer insisted, ‘into which he would go with even greater enthusiasm, would be a war with the Austrians.’127 Polish loyalties were less complicated. The fiftieth anniversary of the ‘January Insurrection’, when Polish nobles in Russian-held Congress Poland had risen up and been brutally suppressed, had fallen in 1913 and had been enthusiastically and militantly celebrated across Galicia.128 The Russian suppression of Polish revolutionaries in 1905–6 was a fresh grievance. As if any further proof were needed, the occupation and attempted Russification of Galicia in 1914–15 had illustrated the threat posed by Russian ambitions to what Polish elites considered to be their lands. Yet fear alone did not drive Poles. Many of the educated were also inspired by liberationist ideals. Brigadier Jan Edward Romer, commander of an Austrian artillery regiment stationed in Lwów, was a typical example. He yearned that the war might lead to ‘the breaking of the Moscovite manacles pressing heavily on the major part of the [Polish] nation’.129 When the armies of the Central Powers advanced in the summer of 1915 and, on 5 August, captured Warsaw, tremendous excitement spread across Galicia. The Supreme National Committee immediately issued a proclamation, which strangely the censor allowed to pass, demanding that Congress Poland and Galicia be reunited and the Polish state resurrected. Ordinary Poles too rejoiced: ‘I am very happy,’ wrote Aleksandra Czechówna in Cracow. ‘I thank the Lord God as for a great favour.’130