World War One: A Short History

by Norman Stone

  Injured innocence was paraded as the plot went ahead – the Kaiser off on his yacht, the foreign minister on his honeymoon, the chief of the general staff taking the waters. It was Bethmann Hollweg, on his estate, who gave the lie to it all, and in the oddest way. There was one record that was not destroyed: his expenses. They have turned up. Bethmann Hollweg went several times to Berlin, during the ostensible holiday, and, being mean, wanted the State to pay. Back and forth he went, organizing the country’s finances (and maybe his own as well – he came from a banking family) for the likelihood of war, with debts to collect and bonds discreetly to sell or buy. The Warburgs in Hamburg were being told, by special courier, what to do. Berlin meant war.

  A fire-eating diplomat in the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry called the Archduke’s murder ‘a gift from Mars’ – a wonderful excuse to solve all problems. Austria would be great again, Russia would come to heel, even Turkey might be taken over. In six weeks, a Bismarckian victory. It was, the German emperor said, ‘Now or never’. War was to be provoked, and the murder of the Archduke provided a perfect occasion. The Austrians were told that they should use it to attack Serbia, Russia’s client, and the means chosen was an ultimatum, containing demands that could not be accepted without the loss of Serbian independence. As it happened, the Austrians were not at all enthusiastic for war with Russia – Serbia, yes, but Russia was too great. The worries translated into delays – the Hungarians to be placated, the harvest to be brought in, and so on. Discreet banging on the table came from Berlin, and on 23 July the ultimatum was sent off. On the 25th, it was accepted but with reservations, and the Austrians declared mobilization – still no declaration of war. There was more banging of the table in Berlin, and war was declared on the 28th.

  Now the challenge to Russia was clear: would she protect her Balkan position and, by extension, her future in the Ottoman empire and the Straits? At first the Tsar did not quite believe what was happening (and when the German ambassador eventually handed over his country’s declaration of war, he did so in tears). Perhaps just a part of the army could be mobilized, against Austria alone? The German emperor himself had second thoughts, and there were exchanges of imperial telegrams. Towards the very end of the crisis, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg too seems to have had doubts. But by now the German military were adamant, because they had an argument of unshakeable strength. It all depended upon railways. Railways won wars. If one power managed to get ahead with the call-up and movement – mobilization – of an army consisting of millions of men, it could reach the enemy borders before the other army was ready. That had happened in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, when the French had made a mess of their mobilization whereas the Germans had done their staff work efficiently. The French army was in effect surrounded and captured within six weeks. There had been another railway disaster in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5, when these two powers had collided over China: the Trans-Siberian railway could not cope with the problems of supply, and Russia had to make peace. Now, in 1914, every general staff was worried that the rival army would start first, and the Germans insisted on full Austro-Hungarian mobilization against Russia: the ‘iron dice’ were supposed to ‘roll’. The German military themselves clearly wanted a war, and had already decided to mobilize, but they were given a considerable present when, on 31 July, general mobilization was declared in St Petersburg just before the German announcement was made. This meant that mobilization could be presented as defensive, which, given potential opposition in the Reichstag, mattered. As things were, the Social Democrats made no problems, and voted credits for war. The German ambassador handed over a requirement for the end of Russian mobilization, and when it was refused, war was declared on 1 August. The German war plan meant an immediate attack on France, and the trains began to roll. An ultimatum was served in Paris, to the effect that the French should surrender three fortresses at the outset, as a guarantee. When this was refused, war followed there, too, on 3 August.

  There was a final twist. The German army could not really attack France directly, because the fortifications on the short Franco-German border were far too strong. It could only invade France through the plains of Belgium, and Belgium was a neutral country, her neutrality guaranteed by the Great Powers, including Great Britain and Germany. What were the British to do if Germany invaded Belgium? In terms of treaty obligations, the position was clear enough: war. Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty mobilized the Royal Navy at once. The situation of 1914, of war in the West emerging from some crisis in the East, had been foreseen, and study of the length of railway platforms in the Rhineland had even shown that there would be a German invasion of Belgium. But war between Germany and England was in many quarters unthinkable – Germany, the model country, with the largest Social Democrat party, the best local government, the best education in Europe. Why go to war with her, at the side of Tsarist Russia? But, as happened with redoubled force in 1939, reason was hardly counting. Germany had built an entirely unnecessary fleet, directed straight at British ports, and had gone on to aggressive behaviour against Russia, against France. Members of the British cabinet had quite a good idea of what it was all about, the central question of British foreign policy since 1850: Germany or Russia? What would have happened if, at the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the then British foreign secretary had appeared, indicating that he had no objection to a German-dominated Europe, provided that British interests, worldwide, were guaranteed? The trouble was that, by then, no one trusted the Germans, and the brightest figure in British politics, David Lloyd George, said that a Germany controlling the resources of Russia would be unbeatable. Without a German invasion of Belgium, the British navy would in any event have been engaged in defending the Atlantic coast of France. The invasion of Belgium gave a cast-iron excuse for intervention, which silenced many (though not all) of the doubters. On 4 August a British ultimatum demanding the evacuation of Belgium was issued: it remained without answer, and the European war became a world war.

  NOTES

  1. Heinz von Lichem, Krieg in den Alpen 1915–1918 (Augsburg, 1993), vol. 3, p. 179ff.

  2. The French had money to spare partly because, almost alone in Europe at the time, their population hardly rose between 1870 and 1914, and might-have-been parents saved with ferocity.

  3. It was of course true that imperialism enriched the imperialists and their professorial hangers-on, but the costs of it were prodigious, and Weber himself learned as much. After his inaugural lecture, he became a national hero, and attracted the attentions of a very clever woman, who led him into a world of which he had had no knowledge. He was, for much of the time, a nervous wreck, and seems thereby to have learned that professor-doctors do not really have a monopoly of wisdom. He grew up. In 1914, almost all of the thousand-plus great names in German cultural life signed a ‘petition of the Intellectuals’ that argued on Weber-inaugural lines. Weber became a medical assistant on the western front. See Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: Die Leidenschaft des Denkens (Munich, 2005), pp. 215–33 and p. 548ff.

  4. Hitler even took the idea of having a party uniform of special shirts from Mussolini, who had chosen black. He hit upon brown ones, by accident, when a job lot of jungle uniforms turned up on the market. They had been intended for the German army in East Africa and were stored in south-eastern Turkey, where they were acquired by an enterprising Austrian.

  5. Riezler’s biography is one of several Central European descants upon the history of the century. He married the daughter of the painter Max Liebermann, head (until Hitler) of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Riezler was a considerable philosopher (and wrote learnedly on Parmenides). He entered the German Foreign Office, in the press department, and became private secretary to Bethmann Hollweg, with whom he spent a great deal of time. When in 1917 Bethmann Hollweg fell from office, Riezler became a diplomat, arranging the arrival of Lenin in Stockholm. Then, after some rearrangement, he became associated with the Social Democrats who ran Germany in the twenties – pr
ivate secretary to the Social Democrat president, Ebert – but he moved left and became professor at the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School. In 1933, he moved to the USA, to the University of Chicago, where he used his influence to defeat the candidacy for professorship of Karl Popper, then an exile (from Austria) in New Zealand. In 1945, Alfred Einstein wrote to President Truman to say that they had come up with a terrible weapon, the atomic bomb, that might bring the whole of the world to an end. President Truman set up a commission to judge the morality of dropping it. Its president? Kurt Riezler. (He advised in favour.)

  TWO • 1914

  previous pages: Calling up of Turkish troops in Constantinople, October 1914

  In four years, the world went from 1870 to 1940. In 1914, cavalry cantered off to stirring music, the Austrian Prince Clary-Aldringen wore the uniform he had put on for a gala at Buckingham Palace, and early illustrations of the war show clumps of infantry charging with bayonets, as shrapnel explodes overhead. It is 1870. Fortresses were readied for prolonged sieges, medical services were still quite primitive, and severely wounded men were likely to die. By 1918, matters had become very different, and French generals had already devised a new method of warfare, in which tanks, infantry and aircraft collaborated, in the manner of the German Blitzkrieg (‘lightning war’) of 1940. Cavalry regiments became museum-pieces, and fortresses, relics. The war proved to be a great killer – 10 million died – but it was, as the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, himself a doctor, called it, ‘the vaccinated apocalypse’. Medicine made greater progress in these four years than at any time before or after: by 1918, only 1 per cent of wounded men died.

  However, to begin with, illusion reigned. In 1914, to crowds of cheering people, the troops moved off, generals on horseback dreaming that they would have a statue in some square named after them. No war has ever begun with such a fundamental misunderstanding of its nature. Perhaps the deepest misunderstanding was British. On 3 August 1914 the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, made a speech in the House of Commons that was very greatly admired and seems to have convinced many of the doubting MPs that war with Germany was right. He remarked that the country would suffer ‘terribly, in this war, whether we are in it or whether we stand aside’. In retrospect, a grotesque remark.

  Nearly half of the British economy, and over a third of the German, was taken up with foreign trade, much of it with the European Continent. Interruption of it was expected to bring unemployment and bankruptcy; another cabinet minister (who resigned) said that the social problems resulting from the interruption of trade would bring a variant of the revolutions of 1848, when the established order in old Europe had been swept away by upheavals in the cities. Because of the threat to trade, bankers – Sir Frederick Schuster of the Bank of England for one – assured everyone that the war would have to be stopped after six months. The generals themselves knew that they had the wherewithal to go on for a very long time – millions of men and the means to feed, clothe, arm and transport them. But the bankers had another argument. How could the war be paid for? British and French credit was very strong, but Germany’s public finances were surprisingly weak, as she was a federal country with many spending points. The Hungarian finance minister, a Baron Teleszky, when solemnly asked in cabinet how long he could pay for the war, replied, three weeks.1 The gold would by then have run out (in 1914 gold-backed coinage was common) and the only alternative would be to print paper money, and that would mean inflation – grubby and crumpled notes changing hands very fast, and quickly losing their value. That in turn would make the social problems following upon the cessation of trade quite ungovernable, the poor becoming much poorer, maybe even starving. This is in fact what happened when Russia exploded in Bolshevik revolution in 1917, and Italy almost followed, with inflation of 700 per cent. The bankers were not wrong in anything other than timing.

  The armies went to war, just the same, with an illusion that it would all be over very soon – ‘home by Christmas’. The Russian High Command, Stavka, asking for new typewriters, were told that the war would not last for long enough to justify the expenditure: the old ones would have to do. Generals promised to write to their wives every day, and soon ran out of things to say. The Austro-Hungarian commander (who wrote to another man’s wife) slept in an iron cot; the Russian high command ordained religious services every day and foreswore vodka, unless foreigners were present. By November, foreigners were much in demand, and the choir was singing Prince Igor. But to begin with the plans of every country reflected ‘the short war illusion’ – an immediate and vast attack, taking up resources that, with hindsight, should have been husbanded for what was to come. But other calculations, relating to fortresses, artillery and cavalry, also proved quite wrong-headed.

  Northern France and Belgium were studded with fortresses, strategically placed above rivers that an invading army would have to cross – especially the long, winding, Franco-German Meuse – and their names again and again come up in military history, as far back as the Middle Ages: Liège, Namur, Maubeuge, Dinant, Verdun, Toul, Antwerp. They were very expensive and contained thousands of guns. When they were modernized in the 1880s, the usual rule was to have a very strong citadel, with a ring of forts to keep enemy artillery beyond range of it. In the 1890s, artillery ranges became longer and the shell heavier. More forts and more elaborate fortifications, usually with concrete, had to be constructed if the fortresses were to be effective. But by 1914 the guns had won. Heavy howitzers were able to launch high explosive at a range of ten miles, and the fortresses were an obvious target – a trap for the defenders, who would have been better off if they had just dug unidentifiable holes in the ground outside the forts. Earth absorbed high explosive far more easily than concrete could, however pre-stressed, and all fortresses attacked in the campaign of 1914 fell quickly. Liège, on the German border with Belgium, lasted only two days.

  With cavalry, the illusion was also dispelled, but not as dramatically. In the Crimean War the Light Brigade had charged Russian guns, and had at least been able to reach them. In 1914, this was no longer possible. An infantryman with a rifle could hit a horse a mile off, and artillery was more devastating still, at a range of three miles. However, in empty territory, cavalry was still serviceable and could find out where the enemy was; and there was not much alternative to it, because the internal combustion engine was still in a relatively undeveloped stage – almost all of the fifty German lorries crossing the mountainous Ardennes broke down. But horses, eating ten kilograms of fodder every day, made huge demands on the supply-lines, and it was infantry supplies that suffered. The war in the West began with boots and saddles and bugles, with divisions of French dragoons and German Uhlans showing off. The Austro-Hungarians used a saddle that was designed to give the rider a perfect seat. In hot weather, and with horses requisitioned from civilians, it rubbed the skin on the poor beasts’ backs, and the dragoons returned from their first foray into Russian territory leading them on foot. Russian cavalry probed East Prussia and fell back at once for lack of fodder, while the elderly Khan of Nakhichevan, one of the Tsar’s prized Tatar cavalrymen (the Tatar cavalry had been officially thanked for putting down revolutionary troubles in Odessa in 1905), was unable to mount his horse because of piles.

  The wars that Europeans remembered had been short – especially the Franco-Prussian one of 1870 – and they did not pay much attention to the American Civil War, which had been long and very bloody. Every Power therefore attacked. The Germans were first off the mark. They followed the Schlieffen Plan, a grand offensive in the west, through Belgium. The German right wing was supposed to move north-west of Paris, while the French manned the heavily fortified eastern border, and perhaps tried to invade southern Germany. The French would be trapped, hoped Schlieffen, though he also warned (in 1905) that the plan would not work unless the army were much stronger than it was. In 1914, there were 1,700,000 men on the German side, 2,000,000 on the French, to which 100,000 British and Belgians were added. On the wh
ole, the Germans were better-prepared. If you had universal conscription, young men ate and wore most of the military budget, and there was not much left for intensive training of long-serving soldiers – non-commissioned officers (NCOs) – or even sophisticated equipment. The French used conscription as a tool to instil republican nationalism, almost half of their population being peasants who quite often did not even speak proper French. They took in everyone, including monks.

  The German army was able to concentrate more on training and equipment, as its general officers simply did not want to expand too far and have to use, as officers, men who would ‘water down’ the qualities of Prussia. They spent proportionately less on feeding conscripts; they had three times as many NCOs as the French, and far more than the Russians, where NCOs were hardly distinguished from ordinary soldiers. The French also lacked the heavy artillery of the Germans, their own having been stuffed into fortresses, and they lacked two other weapons that the Germans understood. The first was a light mortar, able to throw a shell on a high trajectory (45°) and thus place it behind fortifications, or among trees, whereas a flat-trajectory gun (16°) would not have touched the defenders. The other weapon was the spade, otherwise known as an entrenching tool. Soldiers in a hole in the ground were very difficult to spot, and were almost invulnerable except to heavy shelling. The Germans had spades, the French did not. Why, is a good question: the answer is probably that the Germans, training their fewer men more intensively, could rely upon them not to panic, whereas the French, training more men with fewer NCOs, meant to keep them moving forward in simple, even crude, large formations (similar to the columns of the Revolutionary Wars a century before, which had also been far more costly in lives than the eighteenth-century linear formations). That the men were clothed in red and blue made them very conspicuous as well, whereas all other armies had gone over to dull-coloured uniforms; even the Scottish regiments’ kilts were khaki.