A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  The fight for Verdun—a prize that would have cost the French little if they had lost it and done the Germans little good if they had won it—was at an end. Falkenhayn diverted still more troops and guns to the east.

  For the French, at least where Verdun was concerned, the worst was over. But a nightmare of a different kind, the Battle of the Somme, had just begun.

  Background: The Jews of Germany

  THE JEWS OF GERMANY

  THE MIDPOINT OF THE WAR BROUGHT A GREAT TURNING point in the long history of Jews in Germany. Until 1916 that history had been largely a striving for acceptance, for integration, for official and popular recognition that a Jew could be as good a citizen as any Christian and deserved to be treated accordingly. After 1916 many Jews abandoned such hopes.

  What precipitated the change was less the war itself, during which more than a hundred thousand German Jews became soldiers (German cemeteries along the Western Front are studded with markers bearing the Star of David), than the government’s attitude toward its Jewish troops. Specifically, it was the Prussian minister of war’s October order of a census to determine how many Jews were in every army unit, how many had not yet been called up, and how many had been released from service or found to be unfit.

  News of this census came as a shock to the Jewish community. It gave rise everywhere to a painful question: Why? Jewish volunteers had rallied to the colors at the start of the war. Jews were putting millions of marks into war bonds, and Jewish industrialists and scientists were making important contributions to Germany’s ability to fight. Why were they being singled out for investigation? The answer, for many, was that their loyalty counted for nothing, and that it was folly to expect anything else.

  To say that Germany at the start of the war was a culture steeped in anti-Semitism is to say nothing that sets it apart from the other countries of Europe. The whole Western world was so anti-Semitic that its prejudice was taken for granted: it was simply assumed, at every level of society, that Jews were not only different but different in ways that made them a problem. Germany was not the worst in this regard. That distinction belongs to Russia, which barred almost all Jews from citizenship, regarded its Jewish population as a threat to security, and continued to single the Jews out for atrocious mistreatment after the start of the war. France was not nearly that bad, Britain was a paragon of tolerance by comparison, but in every country to be a Jew was to be an alien to a greater or lesser extent. In all of them there were outbreaks of violence against Jews during the course of the war.

  The German situation had always been particularly complicated and particularly marked with hypocrisy. As early as 1812, at the climax of the Napoleonic wars, the Kingdom of Prussia had issued an Emancipation Edict granting citizenship to Jews. In its way and for its time this edict was modestly progressive, but only within narrow limits. It excluded Jews from serving as military officers—that was the preserve of the Junkers—and from the government bureaucracy, including the judicial system. The rationale was that the Christian citizens of a Christian nation should not have to take orders from Jews.

  In 1869, with Germany midway through its wars of unification, another new law guaranteed that all government appointments would be made without regard to religion. Formally, this meant that every career, including the army, was open to every qualified candidate. In reality, it meant almost nothing. Whenever a Jew applied for a position, reasons were found for selecting someone else. It meant even less after the creation of the German Empire, when exclusion became unofficial policy.

  The intensity of the problem is explained by the peculiar nature of the Prussian state, and by the Junkers’ belief that the state belonged to them. Anyone who was not a Junker was an outsider, and in the last decades of the nineteenth century Berlin launched campaigns of persecution against the Catholics who made up a third of the Reich’s population, against Social Democrats with their demands for democracy, and against ethnic Poles. And of course, against the Jews. All these groups were systematically excluded. Even to have a Social Democratic relative was enough to close the doors of advancement to an able and ambitious young man.

  Jews, meanwhile, were distinguishing themselves in every field that was open to them: the professions, industry, banking, science, journalism, and the arts. With every generation their prosperity improved. In Prussia more than five hundred out of every ten thousand Jewish boys became university students; the corresponding numbers were fifty-eight for Protestants and thirty-three for Catholics. Some Jews became rich, others prominent. But their very success bred trouble. When the economy declined or things went badly for Berlin on the international stage, “the Jews” were commonly blamed.

  From 1885 to 1914 not one Jew was given a commission in the Prussian army. (The same was not true in Catholic Bavaria, which maintained a separate army.) Again the problem was the Junker mentality. The expansion of the military establishment during the prewar arms race made it impossible to fill the officer corps with sons of the landed aristocracy—there weren’t enough of them. Others had to be admitted. Increasingly if grudgingly, the offspring of the new urban middle class were deemed to be acceptable—assuming that their families were sufficiently respectable and unimpeachably Lutheran. Jews continued to be unacceptable. They applied for commissions, they were often superlatively well qualified in terms of education and other criteria, the law said that religion was not to be taken into account—and without exception, decade after decade, every candidate was turned away.

  This exclusion became a major symbolic issue for Germany’s Jews, especially for those most determined to win acceptance by the community at large. Abandoning the hope that the regular army might ever accept Jews, they focused on the reserves. And with good reason. Reserve commissions carried extraordinarily high prestige in Prussia. They provided access to the best society and could be essential for advancement in civilian careers. They, more than anything else, represented inclusion.

  Jewish leaders complained, petitioned, and tried to use their influence. They found support in liberal non-Jewish groups, and the question was debated repeatedly in the Reichstag. But one war minister after another refused to acknowledge that a problem existed. Whenever a particular case was offered as proof of flagrant discrimination, whoever was war minister at the time would order an investigation (which meant nothing more than asking local military officials to decide if they themselves had broken the law) and report that, regrettably, the candidate in question had proved to be unfit.

  August 1914 seemed to change everything. Kaiser Wilhelm, who before the war had called the Jews “the curse of my country,” proclaimed the dawn of Burgfrieden, a new era in which all Germans were accepted fully and all would join together to save Germany from her foes. There were six hundred thousand Jews in Germany at the time, about one percent of the population, and with no important exceptions they embraced the war. Even the small Zionist minority accepted it as a means of liberating the Jews of Poland and giving the Russians a lesson. This, Jewish leaders said, was the hour they had been waiting for. And there seemed to be reason for hope. Jews were made officers—though they were not to be promoted to any rank higher than captain.

  From the start, the conservatives were not happy with Burgfrieden. They had always sought national unity through the exclusion of anyone not regarded as a real German, and they warned that the changes brought by the war would lead to the end of Germany as a truly German state. But early in the war the people holding such views were often prevented from publishing or speaking in public—the first suppression of anti-Semitic propaganda in German history. Again the Jews were encouraged, but the new era proved to be a short one. As the war dragged on and life became difficult and the hope of victory faded, the inevitable search for scapegoats began. Capitalism was to blame for Germany’s predicament, and the capitalists were Jews. Or socialism was to blame, and the socialists were Jews. Jewish profiteers were draining the nation’s lifeblood, Jewish liberals were contaminating the young with
democratic ideas, Jews who cared more about Jews than about Germany were trying to turn the Fatherland into a refuge for undesirables from Poland.

  Disillusionment set in, affecting Jews at the front no less than those at home. They had gone to war filled with expectations that by sharing in the national sacrifice, they would dissolve the barriers that had so long kept them apart from other Germans. What they found, more often than not, was an unbridgeable cultural gulf between themselves and the Gentile soldiers. What they did not find, usually, was acceptance as German troops.

  This was the climate in which War Minister Adolf Wild von Hohenborn ordered his census. It was supposed to be secret, but it soon became known everywhere and aroused an angry Jewish reaction. Within the army it was widely misinterpreted; officers who received it sometimes reacted by sending all their Jewish soldiers immediately to the front. Hohenborn’s motives, ironically, appear not to have been malign. He was responding to a rising chorus of complaints that the Jews were shirking, using their notorious wiles to avoid doing their share. He could simply have joined the chorus—plenty of other officials, the kaiser included, were doing exactly that. Instead he decided to establish, in coldly objective terms, what the facts were. And the facts turned out to be very different from the complaints: the Jews were doing their share and more. By the time these findings were disclosed, Hohenborn was no longer war minister. His successor, trying to quiet the furor, stated rather obscurely that “the behavior of Jewish soldiers and fellow citizens during the war gave no cause for the order by my predecessor, and thus cannot be connected with it.”

  But there was no apology, nobody in a position of authority said anything about the Jews who were fighting and dying, and much damage had been done. The Jewish troops continued to do their duty—twelve thousand would be killed—but the dream of 1914 was dead. In its place was fear of what Germany would be like after the war was over.

  “A war after the war stands before us,” said the newspaper of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, long an optimistic voice for full Jewish integration into German life. “When the weapons are laid to rest, the war’s storm will not have ended for us.”

  Chapter 23

  The Somme

  “When we started to fire we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds.

  We didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.”

  —GERMAN MACHINE-GUNNER

  If it had been possible to win the war in the west by sheer force, by overpowering the enemy with manpower and firepower, the Battle of the Somme would have done the job. The British and French attacked a German army that they outnumbered by an enormous margin. They had an equal advantage in artillery and total control of the air. They were backed by all the resources that modern industrial economies could put at the disposal of their soldiers.

  First conceived in the closing days of 1915 as one part of a great combination of attacks by Britain and France and Russia and Italy on every one of Europe’s many fronts, the battle was long in the making. The whole first half of 1916 was devoted to building up great masses of armaments, to bringing forward the green new armies that Kitchener had recruited in 1914, to literally laying the groundwork (in the form of new roads and railways and lines of communication) for a success so complete that the enemy would be crushed and stalemate would be transformed into sudden, final, total victory.

  As originally planned, the offensive was to be a French show primarily, with forty of Joffre’s divisions providing most of its weight and the British in a secondary role. But the unexpected upheavals of the first half of 1916—Verdun first, then Lake Naroch, and finally Conrad’s offensive in Italy and Brusilov’s in Galicia—disrupted everything on all sides. As Verdun went on and on, most of the French army was run through Falkenhayn’s killing machine. As unit after unit was chewed up, Joffre gradually (and resentfully) found himself unable to assemble even half the number of troops he had originally wanted for the Somme. Lake Naroch meanwhile paralyzed the will of the men commanding Russia’s central and northern fronts; Conrad’s Trentino campaign rendered Italy incapable of a summer offensive; and the Brusilov offensive (undertaken, it should be remembered, in response to French appeals for help) had a similar impact on the Russians in the south.

  The British alone were untouched. Of all the Entente commanders, only Haig remained free to proceed almost as if no battles were happening anywhere. And Haig cannot be accused of failing to make use of his great gift of time. He devoted the first half of 1916 to two things: to preparing for a fresh offensive in Flanders, where he hoped to join with the Royal Navy in retaking Belgium’s Channel ports, and to getting ready (reluctantly at first) for the offensive that Joffre was determined to launch on the Somme. As the so-called “Kitchener’s armies” arrived on the continent, they were alternated between routine line duty on quiet sectors of the front and training that included mock assaults on simulated enemy trenches. By June Haig had half a million men on and behind the Somme front. New guns were arriving as well, along with mountains of the shells being bought from America and produced by Lloyd George’s ministry of munitions. Along with them came all the bewildering panoply of equipment and supplies required by a modern army readying itself for action. Seven thousand miles of telephone lines were buried to keep them from being cut by German artillery, and 120 miles of pipe were laid to get water to the assembling troops. Ten squadrons of aircraft—185 planes—were brought in to drive off the suddenly outclassed German Fokkers and serve as spotters for the gun crews as they registered on their assigned targets. Tunnelers were digging out cavities under the German lines and packing them with explosives. It was a massive undertaking, all done as efficiently as anyone could have expected, and ultimately Haig was responsible for every bit of it.

  The planning of the attack was his responsibility too, and there lay the rub. Haig had eighteen divisions on the Somme by early summer, and two-thirds of them were used to form a new Fourth Army under General Sir Henry Rawlinson, who had been with the BEF from the start of the war. Rawlinson was a career infantryman—the only British army commander on the Somme not, like Haig, from the cavalry—and his ideas about how to conduct the coming offensive differed sharply from those of his chief. Haig wanted a breakthrough. He was confident that his artillery could not merely weaken but annihilate the German front line, that the infantry would be able to push through almost unopposed, and that this would clear the way for tens of thousands of cavalry to reach open country, turn northward, and throw the whole German defensive system into terminal disorder.

  Rawlinson, by contrast, had drawn the same lessons as Falkenhayn from a year and a half of stalemate. He thought breakthrough impossible, and that trying to achieve it could only result in painful and unnecessary losses. He opted for a battle of attrition, one intended less to conquer territory (there being no important strategic targets anywhere near the Somme front, actually) than to kill as many Germans as possible. To this end he favored “bite and hold” tactics similar to those with which Falkenhayn had begun at Verdun. Such tactics involved settling for a limited objective with each attack, capturing just enough ground to spark a counterattack, and then using artillery to obliterate the enemy’s troops as they advanced. Rawlinson and Haig never resolved their differences; rather, they opened the battle without coming to an understanding on what they were trying to do or how it should be done.

  The men of the Fourth Army were as new to war as they were eager for it after eighteen months of training. Haig was untroubled by their lack of experience. In this regard it was he who was like Falkenhayn at the start of Verdun. He had fifteen hundred pieces of artillery, one for every seventeen yards of the eighteen miles of curving front along which the BEF would be attacking. Between them the British and French had 1,655 light, 933 medium, and 393 heavy guns. The corresponding numbers on the German side were 454, 372, and eighteen. Haig’s confidence that his batteries could paralyze the German defenses before his infantry climbed out o
f its trenches was communicated down the chain of command. “You will be able to go over the top with a walking stick, you will not need rifles,” one officer told his troops. “When you get to Thiepval [a village that was one of the first day’s objectives] you will find the Germans all dead. Not even a rat will have survived.”

  Every part of the attack was planned to the minute. Every unit was told what points it would reach in the first hour and exactly where it would be at the end of the day. And though in the end Haig did not have quite as many weeks to prepare as he wanted—the emergency at Verdun made that impossible—the tightening of the schedule still left him with time to do everything needed. It had no effect on the conduct of the campaign, or on his serene confidence that the machine gun, “a much-overrated weapon,” could be overcome by men on horseback. He was ready enough by June 24, when French Premier Briand came to implore him for help, to begin his artillery barrage.

  The French had one corps of Ferdinand Foch’s Army of the North positioned on the north bank of the Somme, immediately south of Rawlinson, and five others arrayed along an eight-mile line extending southward from the river. They were even better equipped than the British with artillery, especially heavy artillery, a weapon in which France had been deficient at the start of the war. Their assignment was a holding attack intended to make it impossible for the Germans opposite to shift their reserves (of which they had virtually none) northward to stop Rawlinson’s advance.