World War One: A Short History

by Norman Stone

  World War One

  NORMAN STONE

  World War One

  A Short History

  ALLEN LANE

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ALLEN LANE

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa)(Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2007

  1

  Copyright © Norman Stone, 2007

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

  or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by

  any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)

  without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner

  and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  EISBN: 978–0–141–04095–0

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Introduction

  One: Outbreak

  Two: 1914

  Three: 1915

  Four: 1916

  Five: 1917

  Six: 1918

  Seven: Aftermath

  Some Sources

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Photographic acknowledgements are given in parentheses

  Outbreak

  Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie lying in state (Hulton-Deutsch

  Collection/Corbis)

  1914

  Calling up of Turkish troops in Constantinople

  (Bettmann/Corbis)

  1915

  French 220 cannon on the Western Front

  (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

  1916

  British gasmasked machine-gun unit on the Somme

  (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

  1917

  Russian troops in eastern Galicia running past a church during unidentified battle

  (Bettmann/Corbis)

  1918

  British Mark IV tank

  (Corbis)

  Aftermath

  Returning German army marching through Berlin

  (Stapleton Collection/Corbis)

  List of Maps

  1. Europe in 1914

  2. The Western Front, 1914

  3. The Eastern Front, 1914–1918

  4. The Balkans and the Straits

  5. The Western Front, 1915–1917

  6. The Italian Front, 1915–1918

  7. The Western Front, 1918

  Introduction

  In 1900, the West, or, more accurately, the North-West, appeared to have all the trumps, to have discovered some end-of-history formula. It produced one technological marvel after another, and the generation of the 1850s – which accounted for most of the generals of the First World War – experienced the greatest ‘quantum leap’ in all history, starting out with horses and carts and ending, around 1900, with telephones, aircraft, motor-cars. Other civilizations had reached a dead end, and much of the world had been taken over by empires of the West. China, the most ancient of all, was disintegrating, and in British India, the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, not a stupid man, was proclaiming in 1904 that the British should govern as if they were going to be there ‘for ever’.

  The title of a famous German book is War of Illusions, and the imperial illusion was only one of them. Within ten years much of the British empire was turning into millions of acres of bankrupt real estate, partly ungovernable and partly not worth governing. Thirty years on, and both India and Palestine were abandoned.

  The governments that went to war all made out that they were acting for national defence. But it was empire that they had in mind. In 1914, the last of the great non-European empires was disintegrating – Ottoman Turkey, which, in (very theoretical) theory, stretched from Morocco on the Atlantic coast of Africa through Egypt and Arabia to the Caucasus. Even then, oil had become important: the British Navy went over to it, as against coal, in 1912. The Balkans mattered because they were quite literally in the way, on the road to Constantinople (as even the Ottomans called it at the time: Konstantiniye). As it happens, I have written this book partly in a room with a view over the entire Bosphorus, through which a huge volume of traffic, from oil-tankers to trawlers, flows every day and night. It is the windpipe of Eurasia, as it was in 1914.

  It is ironic that the only long-lasting creation of the post-war peace treaties, Ireland perhaps excepted, has been modern Turkey. In 1919, the Powers tried to partition her, partly using local allies, such as the Greeks or the Armenians. In a considerable epic, to the surprise of many, the Turks fought back and in 1923 re-established their independence. The process of modernization – ‘westernization’, it has to be called – has not been straightforward, but it has been remarkable just the same. Chance – a conference on the Balkans – brought me there in 1995, and I stayed. I should like to acknowledge the support that I have had from Professor Ali Dogramaci, Rector of Bilkent University. It has been the first private university in what might be called ‘the European space’, and the success of its example is shown in the widespread imitation that has followed. I have encountered a great deal of kindness in Turkey, and can easily see what old von der Goltz Pasha, the senior German officer involved in the First World War, was driving at when he wrote, of his two-decade-long experiences, that ‘I have found a new horizon, and every day I learn something new.’ Through Professor Dogramaci, an expression of collective gratitude.

  Some friends and colleagues deserve separate mention just the same. Professors Ali Karaosmanoglu and Duygu Sezer were very helpful from the first day, and I should also like to acknowledge the help I have had especially from Ayse Artun, Hasan Ali Karasar, Sean McMeekin, Sergey Podbolotov in matters Turco-Russian, and Evgenia and Hasan Ünal, who introduced me to the history of the Levant. Rupert Stone, my target reader, read the manuscript and made suitable comments. My assistants, Cagri Kaya and Baran Turkmen, also a target readership, have kept the administrative show on the road, learned their Russian, and taught me how to manage writing machines.

  A NOTE ON PROPER NAMES

  Author and reader alike have more important concerns, in the First World War, than strict consistency over place names that have frequently changed. I have tended to use the historic ones, where they are not fossils: ‘Caporetto’ makes more sense than the modern (Slovene)‘Kobarid’, whereas ‘Constantinople’ is now obsolete. I have generally shortened ‘Austria-Hungary’ to ‘Austria’. It is impossible to get these things right; may conve
nience rule.

  World War One

  ONE • OUTBREAK

  preceding pages: Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie lying in state

  The first diplomatic treaty ever to be filmed was signed in the White Russian city of Brest-Litovsk in the early hours of 9 February 1918. The negotiations leading up to it had been surreal. On the one side, in the hall of a grand house that had once been a Russian officers’ club, sat the representatives of Germany and her allies – Prince Leopold of Bavaria, son-in-law of the Austrian emperor, in field marshal’s uniform, Central European aristocrats, leaning back patronizingly in black tie, a Turkish Pasha, a Bulgarian colonel. On the other were representatives of a new state, soon to be called the Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics – some Jewish intellectuals, but various others, including a Madame Bitsenko who had recently been released from a Siberian prison for assassinating a governor-general, a ‘delegate of the peasantry’ who had been picked up from the street in the Russian capital at the last minute as useful furniture (he, understandably, drank), and various Russians of the old order, an admiral and some staff officers, who had been brought along because they knew about the technicalities of ending a war and evacuating a front line (one was an expert in black humour, and kept a diary). There they are, all striking poses for the cameras. It was peace at last. The First World War had been proceeding for nearly four years, causing millions of casualties and destroying a European civilization that had, before war broke out in 1914, been the proudest creation of the world. The war had destroyed Tsarist Russia; the Bolsheviks had staged their revolutionary take-over in November 1917; they had promised peace; and now at Brest-Litovsk they got it – at German dictation.

  The terms of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk were quite clever. The Germans did not take much territory. What they did was to say that the peoples of western Russia and the Caucasus were now free to declare independence. The result was borders strikingly similar to those of today. The Baltic states (including Finland) came into shadowy existence, and so did the Caucasus states. The greatest such case, stretching from Central Europe almost to the Volga, was the Ukraine, with a population of 40 million and three quarters of the coal and iron of the Russian empire, and it was with her representatives (graduate students in shapeless suits, plus an opportunistic banker or two, who did not speak Ukrainian and who, as Flaubert remarked of the type, would have paid to be bought) that the Germans signed the filmed treaty on 9 February (the treaty with the Bolsheviks followed, on 3 March). With the Ukraine, Russia is a USA; without, she is a Canada – mostly snow. These various Brest-Litovsk states would re-emerge when the Soviet Union collapsed. In 1918, they were German satellites – a Duke of Urach becoming ‘Grand Prince Mindaugas II’ of Lithuania, a Prince of Hesse being groomed for Finland. Nowadays, Germany has the most important role in them all, but there is a vast difference: back then, she was aiming at a world empire, but now, in alliance with the West, she offers no such aims – quite the contrary: the difficulty is to get her to take her part confidently in world affairs. The common language is now English, and not the German that, in 1918, everyone had to speak as a matter of course. Modern Europe is Brest-Litovsk with a human face, though it took a Second World War and an Anglo-American occupation of Germany for us to get there.

  There is much to be said for a German Europe. She had emerged as the strongest Power in 1871, when, under Chancellor Bismarck, she had defeated France, and she had gone far ahead. In 1914, Berlin was the Athens of the world, a place where you went to learn anything important – physics, philosophy, music, engineering (the terms ‘hertz’, ‘roentgen’, ‘mach’, ‘diesel’ all commemorate that era, and the discoveries on which the modern world is built). Three of the members of the British cabinet that went to war in 1914 had studied at German universities – the Secretary of State for War had translated Schopenhauer – and so too had many of the Russian-Jewish Bolsheviks whom the Germans encountered at and after Brest-Litovsk. There was no end to the ingenuity of German chemists and engineers, and the Central Powers came close to victory on the mountainous ways of the Italian front because Ferdinand Porsche invented the four-wheel drive to deal with them (and then went on to the Volkswagen and much else). 1 In 1914 the great smokestacks of the Ruhr or industrial Saxony predominated, as once those of Britain and Manchester had done. Certainly, as Churchill acknowledged, Germany produced a spectacular war effort, with victories such as the battle of Caporetto against the Italians in 1917, or the March offensive of 1918 against the British, displays of panache of which the plodders on the Allied side were utterly incapable.

  The idea of a German Europe also made sense on the ground, and, again, there is a ghostly resemblance to the present. A European economic space, protected from British or American competition, including the ore of Sweden and France, the coal and steel industries of Germany, and with outrunners into North Africa and even Baghdad, where oil had already become important: why not? In 1915 one of the most enlightened Germans, Friedrich Naumann, wrote a bestseller called Mitteleuropa in which he called, not so much for a German empire, as for a sort of Germanic commonwealth, Berlin showing the way for the various smaller peoples to the south-east, of whom there were many. These peoples – Poles the largest group – had been swallowed up in the historic empires of Austria, Russia, Turkey; there were millions of Poles in Germany. Nationalist movements arose among most of them, and threatened the very existence of Austria and Turkey. Overall, seen from Berlin, these non-German peoples were being allowed to get away with too much. The Austrians spent so much money in a futile effort to buy off the nationalists that there was not enough left for the sinews of power – the army especially, which had a smaller budget than the British army, one tenth its size. If Austria were properly managed, with a dose of Prussian efficiency, such problems would go away. In a Germanic Mitteleuropa, ran the thinking, these lesser peoples, whose culture anyway owed much to Germany, would come to heel. Since 1879 there had been an Austro-German alliance. Naumann meant to give it economic teeth. Other Germans had in mind a more forceful approach.

  The confidence of these Germans grew as the country’s industry boomed, and success went to their heads. Bismarck had been cautious: he could see that a strong Germany, in the centre, might unite her neighbours against her. But a new generation was coming up, and it was full of itself. The symbolic figure at its head was a new young emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who came to the throne in 1889. His model was England. She was vastly rich and had an enormous overseas empire. England was conservative as regards institutions, which had long historical roots, but she was also go-ahead, and her industries accounted for a large part of the world’s trade. Her overall position was guaranteed by an enormous navy. Why should not Germany acquire an overseas empire to match? Under Wilhelm II, German power and the blundering expression of it became a – the – European problem.

  Already, on the Continent, there was rivalry with France, the outcome in the short term of Bismarck’s great victory of 1871, when the new Germany had annexed the eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, and in the longer term of a history that went back to the seventeenth century, when France had dominated Europe and perpetuated the division of Germany into quarrelling states and statelets. To Franco-German rivalry was added a further relationship of tension. Bismarck had been careful not to estrange Russia, and there was a close understanding between Berlin and St Petersburg, in part because of monarchical solidarity in general and in part because each had taken its share of a Poland that was not easily digestible. But a new factor came up in the later nineteenth century, as the Turkish empire in Europe weakened. Austria, Germany’s ally, had powerful interests in the Balkans, and so too did Russia: there were Austro-Russian clashes, and Bismarck’s balancing act became strained. Frustrated in their search for German support, the Russians looked to France, which anyway had money to spare for investments abroad, whereas German money stayed at home.2 By 1894, France and Russia were formally in alliance. Matter
s then became much more complicated when Germany bid for world power and constructed a great navy.

  In 1900 the non-European world appeared to be disintegrating. India and Africa had passed into European control; China and Turkey looked increasingly likely to collapse, and Germans wished for their share. They then proceeded in quite the wrong way, and the generation that emerged into maturity around 1890 has much to answer for. The last thing that Germany needed was a problem with Great Britain, and the greatest mistake of the twentieth century was made when Germany built a navy designed to attack her. That cause somehow united what was best in Germany. Max Weber is one of the most respected sociologists, and his gifts were enormous: languages, law, history, philosophy, even the statistics of Polish peasants buying up Prussian land. In 1895 he gave a well-publicized inaugural lecture when he was appointed to a chair at Freiburg University. He was remarkably young for such a position – not much more than thirty. The professor (who had resigned from the Pan-German League on the grounds that it was not nationalist enough) talked what now appears to be gibberish, making less sense than Hitler: England has no social problems because she is rich; she is rich because of empire; she exports undesirables – Irish, proletarians, etc. – because she has assorted Australias where they can be dumped; from these she can get cheap raw materials and a captured market; so she has cheap food, and there is no unemployment; England has her empire because she has a great navy. Germany also has undesirables – Poles, proletarians, etc. – therefore she too must dump the undesirables in colonies; a navy is therefore a good idea; England would accept a German imperial role if in a battle the German navy were large enough to do serious damage to the British navy before being itself sunk; that would mean that, come the next British naval battle, the British would not have enough ships and would therefore be sunk, by French or Russians. This was received with rapture by the audience. It is one of the stupidest documents ever put together by a clever man, and hardly worth even parodying. Every step in the argument was wrong, beginning with the assumption that the British had few social problems: these might even have been rather less without the sheer costs of empire. At the end of European imperialism, in the 1970s, the poorest country in the continent was Portugal, which ran a huge African empire, and the richest were Sweden, which abandoned its only colony – in the Caribbean – long before, and Switzerland, which never had an empire at all.