A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  Never again, in the years of fighting that lay ahead, would the Austro-Hungarians be involved in a major offensive as anything more than adjuncts to the Germans. Never again would they win a major victory they could call their own. With the war scarcely begun, they were a spent force. With almost four years of war remaining, nearly two hundred thousand of Vienna’s best troops—including ruinous numbers of its experienced officers and noncoms—were dead. Almost half a million had been wounded, and some one hundred and eighty thousand were prisoners of the Russians.

  There was fighting elsewhere as the year drew to a close. Even after the last assault at Ypres, the Western Front was never entirely quiet. Joffre kept ordering attacks wherever he thought the enemy wall might be weak. “Nibbling,” he called it, but its cost in lives was high. By March it would add another hundred thousand casualties to the French total.

  People were becoming accustomed to the term world war. Since August there had been naval battles, some of them high in drama but none terribly important, all around the globe. There was bloodshed in Africa as the police and small military forces of the various European colonies jockeyed for advantage and the indigenous populations became involved, and in the Far East Japan helped itself to Germany’s scattered holdings.

  The Middle East was being drawn in as well. The newest member of the Central Powers, Turkey, sent troops based in Syria into Persia. After so many years of watching the Europeans feast on its crumbling empire, the government in Constantinople was eager to recover some of its losses at last.

  The British, in particular, were disturbed. When Russia suggested that a show of force near Istanbul might frighten the Turks and cause them to pull back from Persia, London found the idea attractive. A battleship was dispatched to the mouth of the Dardanelles, the narrow channel leading from the northeastern Mediterranean to Constantinople, the Black Sea, and Russia beyond.

  Upon arrival, the ship began shelling one of the outermost forts guarding the Dardanelles. Within half an hour the fort was totally wrecked, incapable of defending itself or the sea route to Constantinople.

  The battleship, never threatened while it did its work, steamed serenely away. The whole thing had been so easy. First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill began to wonder: might the entire passage up to Constantinople be that easily taken?

  In Flanders, where there had been so much horror, 1914 ended with a strange spontaneous eruption of fellow feeling. On Christmas morning, in their trenches opposite the British near Ypres, German troops began singing carols and displaying bits of evergreen decorated in observance of the occasion. The Tommies too began to sing. Cautiously, unarmed Germans began showing themselves atop their defenses. Some of the British did the same. Step by step this led to a gathering in no-man’s-land of soldiers from both sides, to exchanges of food and cigarettes, even to games of soccer.

  This was the Christmas Truce of 1914, and in places it continued for more than a day. The generals, indignant when they learned of it, made certain that nothing of the kind would happen again.

  The new face of war: a German Uhlan, or lancer, could seem a figure out of ancient legend except for the mask that protects him from poison gas.

  Chapter 13

  The Search for Elsewhere

  “I can only love and hate, and I hate General Falkenhayn.”

  —ERICH VON LUDENDORFF

  Nineteen-fifteen opened repetitiously and prophetically, which is to say that it opened with lethal violence on the grand scale. On New Year’s Day, in the English Channel, a German submarine fired a torpedo into the hull of the British battleship Formidable and sent 546 seamen to their deaths. On the continent the French were on the offensive, or trying to be, all along their long front: in Flanders, the Argonne, Alsace and, most bloodily of all, the Champagne region west of Verdun. In the east, under appalling winter conditions that were causing hundreds of men nightly to freeze to death in their sleep, the Russians were slowly forcing the armies of Austria-Hungary back into the Carpathian passes that separated the plains of Galicia from the Hapsburg homeland. Beyond Europe, on the ice-packed heights of the Caucasus Mountains, the Russians and the weather together were destroying a badly led and ill-equipped army of Turks. There was bloodshed in Africa, in Asia, in the South Pacific, and in the South Atlantic—in improbable places all around the world.

  All the belligerents were locked in a situation for which they were woefully unprepared. In the last five months of 1914 more than eight hundred thousand Germans had become casualties, and more than a hundred thousand of them were dead. French and Austro-Hungarian casualties were in the million-man range, Russia’s total approached twice that, hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen were listed as dead or missing, and more than half of the Tommies who had come over in August were dead or injured. In every country the shock was numbing. A monument in a single Parisian church, Notre Dame des Victoires, displays the names of eighty parishioners killed in battle between August and December.

  The worst of it was that this carnage had not come close to producing a decision. In every country shattered armies had to be rebuilt and expanded and sent out to do it all again. Some of the leaders—none more than Joffre of France and Britain’s Sir John French—continued to believe that victory lay just ahead and could be achieved with one or two more effusions of sacrificial blood. Others—Falkenhayn in Germany, Kitchener in Britain—were able to see that a long and terrible struggle lay ahead. For all of them, optimists and pessimists alike, one question had become paramount:

  What do we do now?

  All the camps but two, France and Austria-Hungary, were deeply divided over how to answer. In Paris the dominating fact was German occupation of a huge expanse of the French homeland: regions that included 14 percent of the nation’s industrial workforce, two-thirds of its steel production, 90 percent of its iron mines, and 40 percent of its sugar refineries, along with substantial parts of its coal, wool, and chemical output. This made it easy for the French to agree on one great goal: to drive the Germans out, blast them out, burn them out, break their defensive line by any means possible and throw them back across the Rhine. More than in any of the other warring nations, only one man’s opinion mattered. That man was “Papa” Joffre. Exclusive authority over questions of strategy had been in Joffre’s hands from the start. If some were skeptical about the wisdom of trusting Joffre to such an extent, if calls for his removal had erupted during the weeks when his armies were in seemingly endless retreat, the Marne had silenced the doubters even if it had not entirely removed their doubts. Ambiguous as the victory may have been in terms of who had actually made it possible and what it meant for the long term, the simple fact that Joffre had been in command elevated his prestige to a level at which it was, and would long remain, above challenge. As shocking as Joffre’s losses continued to be, his appetite for more of the same was undiminished. He remained certain that the war could still be a fairly short and glorious one, and he was determined to make it so.

  A similar absence of disagreement pervaded official Vienna, but not because of any such high expectations. Austria-Hungary was forced into near-unanimity by sheer desperation. Its losses were particularly serious because the dual monarchy had less than a third of Russia’s manpower to draw upon in trying to make whole its ravaged armies. Field Marshal Conrad’s offensives into Galicia and Serbia had literally wiped out some of his most elite units, demoralized many of the survivors, and multiplied the difficulties of maintaining the enthusiasm of the empire’s non-German majority. With Serbia unbeaten, with Russia continuing to advance, and with Italy’s possible entry into the war on the side of the Entente, Austria-Hungary had only one possible first priority: to somehow keep the Russians from getting through the Carpathians. Achieving this goal was almost certain to require help from the Germans. The Austrians were already incapable of accomplishing anything of consequence without Berlin’s assistance.

  Conrad, rarely reluctant to engage the enemy, announced plans for a winter campaign aim
ed at driving the Russians back from the Carpathians and relieving the besieged fortress of Przemysl. He hoped, through a persuasive show of force, to discourage Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria (all of which were eager for a share in the spoils of war but uncertain of which side could make the best offer) from joining the Entente. He asked the Germans to contribute four divisions—upward of sixty thousand troops—to this offensive. In doing so he put his allies on the spot. Nobody in the German high command supposed that Conrad was capable of moving effectively against the Russians without assistance, and nobody was confident that he could succeed even if his request was granted. On the other hand his plan was far from pointless; if he did nothing but wait for the Russians to attack, the results could be disastrous. Falkenhayn had at his disposal four new corps, more than a hundred thousand well-equipped recruits led by experienced officers and noncoms. A struggle immediately erupted over how and where to use them.

  What to do about Austria—the question that was, as Ludendorff told Falkenhayn, Germany’s “great incalculable”—was only one of the puzzles facing the Germans as the winter deepened. They had not only the entire Western Front to deal with, the relentlessly growing French and British armies, but also a Russian steamroller that despite its huge losses continued to outnumber the German and Austrian forces in the east by overwhelming margins and was obviously preparing to resume the offensive. The Germans had no simple or obviously right way to balance these dangers and distribute the available resources—no clear way to victory on either front, never mind both. Nor were the leaders of the government or army agreed on what should be done. Their differences were so fundamental that they threatened the entire German war effort with paralysis.

  Falkenhayn, the handsomely youthful-looking Junker who was now both chief of the general staff and war minister, appeared to have all the power needed to decide questions of strategy. And he knew what he wanted to do. Alarmed by the losses of 1914—he described his army as “a broken instrument”—he was convinced that Germany had no chance of defeating all the forces arrayed against it. A negotiated peace on one front or the other was therefore necessary. In the west, Falkenhayn believed, an acceptable peace could never be achieved without British acquiescence; the English Channel made Britain unconquerable, and the only way to bring it around was to take one of its allies out of the war. As for the east, the size of the front and of the Russian armies made victory improbable within a tolerable period of time. The answer, Falkenhayn thought, was to punish the Russians enough to make them receptive to an eventual settlement while focusing all possible force on the defeat of the French, whom he described as a sword in the hand of the British. “If we succeed in bringing Russia to terms,” he said, “we could then deal France and England so crushing a blow that we could dictate peace terms.”

  He was unwilling to send to the east any troops that might usefully be used in the west, and he was similarly unwilling to thin his forces in East Prussia for the benefit of Conrad. This put him at odds with Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Both men—Ludendorff most importantly, because he and Max Hoffmann were the brains of the team—saw opportunities to crush the Russians. Whether out of strategic conviction or jealousy or some mixture of the two, both were contemptuous of Falkenhayn. And though Falkenhayn’s two offices made him doubly the superior of Hindenburg and Ludendorff and every other member of the German high command, his credibility had been damaged by his failure to break through at Ypres even after expending so many lives. Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes had raised Hindenburg to heights of popular adulation comparable to those occupied by Joffre in France. He was not inclined to use his prestige to help or support Falkenhayn. Prodded by Ludendorff, he undercut Falkenhayn at every opportunity, spoke openly of Falkenhayn’s unfitness for the positions he occupied, and encouraged his admirers at court and in the government to do likewise. Falkenhayn, not surprisingly, responded in kind.

  Things should have been simpler for the Russians because they, like the French and British, had only one truly dangerous enemy to contend with. But they too were divided and uncertain. The chief of the Russian general staff, the tsar’s six-foot-six and stick-figure-thin cousin and namesake the Grand Duke Nicholas Romanov, was a competent commander. He was also aggressive and determined to use the massive forces at his disposal to invade Germany and win the war in the east. But his political position was not strong. He despised the monk Rasputin, once informing him that if he visited army headquarters he would be hanged on the spot, and partly for this reason he was distrusted and feared by the Tsarina Alexandra, who had convinced herself that the grand duke coveted the imperial throne. Though Russia could have only one prime objective in 1915—to throw the Germans into terminal disarray—the question of how to accomplish this was anything but settled. Powerful members of the general staff wanted to strike directly at central Germany. Another faction wanted to complete the penetration of the Carpathians and finish off Austria-Hungary as a prelude to Germany’s destruction. The grand duke, lacking clear guidance or firm support from Tsar Nicholas, was not well positioned to resolve such questions and lacked firm convictions. His inclination was to try to satisfy everyone.

  Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg

  Germany’s national idol—but increasingly a mere figurehead as the war continued.

  A new reality facing all the combatants was Turkey’s entry into the war—a strange and unnecessary development. Backward and corrupt, economically and militarily feeble, the Ottoman Empire of 1914 was in no position to compete effectively with the great powers of Europe or even to function as a true partner of any of them. And it had much to lose by going to war with any of them. But to the Young Turks who had seized control in Constantinople in 1908 and clung to power in spite of their country’s losses in the Balkan wars, Europe’s August crisis had the appearance of a heaven-sent opportunity. Suddenly the Europeans coveted the Turks as potential allies. This change was as surprising as it was abrupt.

  For years—for generations, actually—none of the great powers had wanted a formal connection with Constantinople. Turkey was “the sick man of Europe,” slowly disintegrating, relentlessly dying. Its demise had been averted only by jealous disagreements among the powers over who should reap the benefits when it finally collapsed. Russia was prevented from taking possession of Constantinople only by Britain’s and France’s insistence that such a conquest would not be tolerated—that they would fight rather than let it happen. But becoming Turkey’s actual ally was a different matter. To do that would be to incur obligations to an empire that had little to offer in return. And no ally of Turkey’s would be free, precisely because it was an ally, to snatch up fragments of the empire as opportunities arose. So Turkey remained alone as Greece and Serbia and Bulgaria and Romania all broke away, as Britain grabbed Egypt and Cyprus, France took Algeria, Greece took Crete, and Austria-Hungary absorbed Bosnia-Herzegovina. Turkey and its rulers lived in a state of apparently irreversible fear and humiliation.

  The two powers with which Turkey had the closest relationships were Britain, its chief protector against Russian expansion, and Germany, which had increasingly substantial economic interests in the Middle East, including a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. Prussia had been given responsibility for training the Turkish army as early as 1822. In 1913, when German General Otto Liman von Sanders arrived in Constantinople as head of his country’s military mission, he found himself also named inspector of the Turkish army—chief of staff, in effect. As a balancing measure, the Young Turks invited Britain to take charge of upgrading their navy. They placed an order for two new dreadnoughts to be built in England at the cost of £11 million—a colossal sum for an empire that had been financially ruined by the Balkan wars. This purchase was so popular with the people of Turkey that much of the necessary money was raised through public fund-raising drives.

  The outbreak of the war meant the end of Turkey’s long isolation—if Turkey chose to end it. What was not at all clear was which side it would embrace, or whether
it should embrace either. It came down, in the end, to a matter of ships, and of British blundering, and of German bullying. When the summer crisis of 1914 rose to its climax, a crew of Turkish seamen was in Britain, ready to take possession of the first of the new dreadnoughts. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill announced that his country was confiscating both ships. He did so on July 28, the day Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and his act was understandable as a way of assuring that two of the world’s newest and most potent warships would not fall into enemy hands. The matter could have been handled more delicately, however. It appears not to have occurred to the British government to negotiate with Turkey—to offer to release the ships in return for an alliance that at least some of the Young Turks would have welcomed. Churchill’s announcement provoked outrage in Constantinople. At the beginning of August, with the start of the war only hours away, the Turkish government proposed a formal alliance with Germany.