The French were still in peril, and they hastily regrouped. Forces from Tunisia (part of France’s African empire) had arrived in Paris, and two thousand Paris taxicabs rushed these troops and other reinforcements to the nearby battlefront. A month from when the war began, the French and British counterpunched and drove the Germans back. Germany gave up the idea of quickly crushing France.
Each side tried to get around the other, to outflank it in northwestern France and Belgium. As a result, the front line stretched from northeast France to the North Sea. And there it froze. All along the muddy, bloody front, the infantry of both sides dug trenches to shelter them from their enemies’ big guns. This was not to be a war of movement on the western front, as Germany had thought. Not at all. From 1914 to the spring of 1918, the front between the Germans and the French and British would not move more than ten miles in either direction.
From time to time the armies on both sides sacrificed their soldiers by the many thousands to advance the front a mile or two. Typically they used these methods: artillery would pound the other side and try to blow up its machine guns. Then the infantry would climb up from their trenches. Bearing about sixty-five pounds of equipment they would lumber toward their enemies, crossing “no-man’s-lands” of barbed wire, corpses, shattered trees, and giant craters made by shells. Enemy machine guns that had survived the shelling would fire six hundred rounds a minute at them. Poison gas might sicken them and blind them. Their enemies would try to drive them back with rifles and bayonets. If all went well, they won some trenches and held them for a while.
Most generals on the Allied side were portly seniors who had never been in battle. They lived behind the lines and telephoned their orders to the front. Those orders might result in many deaths, but prudent generals didn’t ruminate on that. The French commanding general told his staff, after he had pinned a medal on a blinded soldier, “I mustn’t be shown such spectacles again…. I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack.”
On the eastern front the fighting went more the way the Germans had expected. The western Allies had hoped the huge Russian armies would be a “steamroller,” but it wasn’t so. Russian and German armies struggled back and forth across the plains below the Baltic Sea, but the Germans had the better of it since their troops were better trained and better led. Russian generals had the bad habit of radioing each other “in clear,” that is, not in code. German troops surrounded one whole Russian army and routed another. They captured 90,000 men and needed sixty trains to haul away the booty. The Russian general moaned to his chief of staff, “The tsar trusted me. How can I face him again after such a disaster?” In despair he shot himself.
Austria-Hungary had to punish Serbia; that had been the whole idea of going to war. In the summer of 1914 its forces crossed the Sava River. But the Serbs hit back, and after four months they forced the Austro-Hungarians to retreat. An Austrian spokesman explained it all: the invasion of Serbia had been only a “punitive expedition,” and at the moment the empire’s forces had to focus on the fight with Russia. The real drive against Serbia would take place on “a more favorable occasion.”
In the second year of war the Austro-Hungarians and Germans pressed deeply into Russia. But soon they learned, as many have before and since, how hard it is to conquer Russia. Victories only drew them deeper, and the Russians had their endless plains in which to back away. The invaders captured, wounded, or killed many Russians — 2 million in 1915 alone. But there were always more where those came from. In the following year the Russians hit the Austro-Hungarians so hard that their whole front collapsed, and the Russians captured a quarter of a million men. The Germans had to help their crumbling allies, so they hurried seven divisions to their aid. The Germans pushed the Russians back and killed or wounded a million of them.
Meanwhile, Italy had joined the Allied side, and it fought the Austro-Hungarians on their common border in the Alps. From the Allies’ point of view, this fighting had the merit of tying down many Austro-Hungarians. After two and a half years of hard but inconclusive fighting the Austro-Hungarians, with German help, suddenly drove the Italians back across much of the north Italian plain. Their retreat is the background of Ernest Hemingway’s famous novel, A Farewell to Arms.
Other countries fought on Europe’s southeastern edge. In part because it was an ancient foe of Russia, Turkey joined the war on the German/Austro-Hungarian side. For the Allies this was bad because the Turks tied down a Russian army and also closed the Dardanelles, the Turkish strait through which vessels going to Russia have to pass. And so in 1915 Allied ships dropped nearly half a million British soldiers at the Dardanelles. The British quickly found themselves pinned down along a rocky shore where Turkish troops above could fire on them. The loss of life for both the British and the Turks was heavy. After half a year Britain pulled out its forces in the dead of night, having accomplished nothing.
Britain also fought the Turks in farther eastern Turkish lands: Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and far-off Mesopotamia. In the meanwhile, on the other side of the earth, the energetic Japanese had seen their chance. They joined the war as Britain’s ally, and began to conquer northern China. The Chinese had recently deposed their Manchu rulers, but the country still was feeble and chaotic.
The outcome of the widespread war, however, would be settled on the front in France and Belgium, and in 1916 both sides tried to end the standoff. The Germans were the first to move. Early in that year they struck at the town of Verdun, where the French had built fortresses a hundred years before to guard a road from Germany to Paris. A victory at this famous place, the Germans thought, would break their enemies’ morale. But the Germans’ main goal was to pulverize as many French defenders as they could with cannon fire.
With all they had they shelled Verdun. Perhaps the French should simply have abandoned it; the forts were on an outward bulge in their line that they could have done without. But for patriotic reasons they chose to hold the place, and their general promised, “They shall not pass.” The Germans had been hoping they could slaughter Frenchmen from a distance using cannon fire alone, but soon both sides were pouring in their troops. Four months of horror ensued. A French officer called it “a battle of madmen in a volcano.” A third of a million Frenchmen were wounded or died and an equal number of Germans. This was not the kind of attrition that the Germans had wanted. Since they hadn’t “passed,” Verdun was called a victory for the French.
While the French were still repelling this attack, they and British forces launched their own strike farther west. They chose a site along the Somme River in northern France where French and British troops could battle side by side, something which was thought to be desirable. Since they were warned in ample time, the Germans were thoroughly prepared. They rolled out huge amounts of barbed wire and dug their bunkers fourteen yards in depth, safe from any shells the Allies’ guns could hurl. Before the battle started 2,000 cannons carried on a shelling that was heard in London, 300 miles away.
On the first day of the battle, the British suffered 19,000 dead. A British soldier later told what it was like: “I see men arising and walking forward; and I go forward with them, in a glassy delirium wherein some seem to pause, with bowed heads, and sink carefully to their knees, and roll slowly over, and lie still….
“And I go on with aching feet, up and down ground like a huge ruined honeycomb, and my wave melts away, and the second wave comes up, and also melts away, and then the third wave merges into the remnants of the first and second, and after a while the fourth blunders into the remains of the others, and we begin to run forward to catch up with the barrage, gasping and sweating, in bunches, anyhow, every bit of the months of drill and rehearsal forgotten, for who could have imagined that the ‘Big Push’ was going to be like this.”1
1Henry Williamson, The Wet Flanders Plain (1929), pp. 15–16, as quoted in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), pp. 29–30.
The battle of the Somme would prov
e a turning point, not only in World War I but in the art of war itself. What British generals, trained in other times, still dreamed of was a glorious, victory-clinching charge by cavalry — gallant swordsmen riding noble steeds. At the Somme, the climax for the cavalry came late one day in mid-July after British infantry had overrun the Germans. Cavalry divisions were supposed to follow and assure a victory, but because of mud and craters it took them hours to reach the fighting. At seven in the evening, they trotted into battle through the waving grain with bugles blowing, lances gleaming. And then: machine guns mowed them down like hay.
This battle also launched the weapon that would replace the archaic horsemen. The British recently had started to produce what battle planners long had dreamed of: armored vehicles with guns. However, while the British at the Somme used forty-seven of these newfangled “tanks,” they weren’t enough, and the British used them badly. Tanks would later prove their value, lunging over trenches, flattening barbed wire, shielding men on foot, and squashing gun emplacements.
In three months’ fighting at the Somme, the British and the French advanced a mere five miles. The four-month battle accomplished nothing for the Allies except to pull German forces from Verdun. The Allied killed and wounded numbered two-thirds of a million, and the Germans’ casualties were something under half a million.
On battlefields in Belgium, British troops attacked in mud so deep it swallowed tanks. In one battle, they lost 300,000 killed and wounded, and the Germans 200,000. Next day, the British chief of staff surveyed the scene of battle — for the first time. He wept and cried, “Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?”
After so much slaughter, and having long ago reached a stalemate, it was surely time to stop the war. Both sides claimed they fought to prevent future wars, but in fact they couldn’t finish this one. Among the French, at least, the troops’ morale became a problem. In 1917 the French began a drive that led to mutiny. While marching to the front a regiment bleated like sheep being led to slaughter. Fifty-four divisions refused to fight, and many thousands left the lines. The French commander had some soldiers shot, restoring order, but he promised France would wage no other big attacks.
Late in 1917, a shocking change appeared to favor Germany. As chapter 18 will relate, Russian revolutionaries overthrew the tsar and pulled their country from the war. Delightedly the Germans pulled their armies out of Russia and hauled them to the western front, where their generals prepared a killing blow. In early 1918 German forces shelled the French and British, poison-gassed them, and attacked. By the end of May they had pushed the French and British back to the point the Germans had reached at the start of the war, the Marne River, thirty-seven miles from Paris. It looked as if Germany and Austria-Hungary might win the war.
But now a partner joined the Allies who might make up in part for the loss of Russia. Until this point, America had sold supplies to France and Britain, but kept out of the fighting. But now the Germans made it easy for America to decide to join the Allies. To stop supplies from reaching Europe, German submarines began attacks on U.S. cargo ships. As a result, the U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, went to Congress and obtained a rousing vote for war. However, America had almost no armed forces. To raise and train an army and to send it overseas would take at least a year. So a race got under way. Could U.S. forces reach the lines in France in time to help prevent a German victory?
When Germany began its major push in France, no U.S. troops had yet arrived. The Germans’ hopes were high, and the British commanding general was anxious. He issued an alarming order of the day: “With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight to the end.” However, by the summer French and British troops had stopped the German drive and just begun to push the Germans back. Then nine American divisions reached the Allied line. It was still the Europeans’ war, and even after years of it, they still were fighting hard. But U.S. troops began to play a useful role.
At the end of summer and in early fall, the Allies opened an offensive of their own. By now a quarter of a million Americans were arriving every month. Among these men was Corporal Alvin York, a mountaineer from Tennessee. York had first refused to fight, on moral grounds, then changed his mind. An expert marksman, he was used to rifle matches back home in Tennessee, where he shot at turkeys’ bobbing heads. On one October day enemies surrounded his patrol. Single-handedly, York shot some 25, captured 132, and brought back 35 machine guns.
Early in 1918 it had looked as if the Austro-Hungarian/German side might win the war. As 1918 neared its end, however, that prospect had reversed, and the German High Command informed Berlin that Germany could not win the war. They didn’t say that Germany might lose, but they obviously feared this, and many German people wanted only that the war should end. Parts of the country were on the brink of revolution. So Germany transformed itself. Its generals had gladly run a war but were just as glad to let civilians handle a defeat. They stepped back in the shadows. The kaiser appointed a liberal-minded prince as chancellor, and he in turn let the country become a republic. The kaiser fled to Holland in a special train, never again to see his native land.
The new regime was far from keen to lay down its arms since German armies were intact on foreign soil, and willing to fight on. But the civilian leaders feared a revolution, born of anger and frustration, like the one in Russia. So they consented to a truce, and in a French railway carriage they signed an armistice document. The truce amounted to surrender.
The war was over.
Firing halted on the western front on November 11 at eleven A.M. — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. As the moment neared, a Scot recorded, “Officers had their watches in their hands, and the troops waited with the same grave composure with which they had fought. At two minutes to eleven, opposite the South African brigade, at the easternmost point reached by British armies, a German machine-gunner, after firing off a belt without pause, was seen to stand up beside his weapon, take off his helmet, bow, and then walk slowly to the rear.”
At eleven, “There came a moment of expectant silence, and then a curious rippling sound, which observers from the front likened to the noise of a light wind. It was the sound of men cheering from the Vosges [in eastern France] to the sea.”2 But a German general bitterly informed his troops, “Firing has ceased. Undefeated…you are terminating the war in enemy country.”
2John Buchan, The King’s Grace (1935), p. 203, as quoted in Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (1994), p. 501.
In the Allied countries work was halted for the day. Church bells rang, happy crowds filled streets and squares, many cheered and many wept. It’s said that total strangers copulated in the streets.
What a war it was, and how much woe it caused! The world had never seen such loss of life. Nine million men in arms had died, and more than twice as many had been wounded, many of them maimed for life. Of all the Frenchmen aged from twenty to thirty-two in 1914, the war had killed half. Perhaps 5 million noncombatants had died of hunger and disease. But nature had an irony in store. In 1918, as the war was ending, an influenza epidemic spread throughout the world. It took the lives of 20 million humans. In India alone, it killed more people than the war had slain on all the battlefields.
TWO MONTHS AFTER fighting stopped, the victors gathered to arrange a peace. The leaders at this conference were the American president and the French and British prime ministers. Most of the talks were held near Paris at the Palace of Versailles, the splendid former home of kings of France.
Wilson, from America, was a complicated man, at odds with his own past. As president, he had bullied nearby Latin nations as if their peoples had no sovereign rights. But when he led his country in the First World War, Wilson had turned high-minded. A year before the conference, he had proposed a list of “Fourteen Points” that should, he thought, provide the basis for a peace.
As the fourteenth of his Fourteen Points, Wilson had made
a great, imaginative proposal: the forming of “a general association of nations.” Its goal would be to guarantee the peace and independence of “great and small States alike.” So when he came to Paris Wilson pushed for such a body. The other leaders doubted that a league could keep the peace, but they finally agreed. The League was to rely on talks and treaties, not on force. Law-abiding countries, it was hoped, would rein in rogue ones with the threat of reprimand or sanctions.
Other countries duly formed the League, but the U.S. Senate then refused to let America join it. As we shall see below, in coming years the League would try to deal with great affairs. Among the things that hobbled it would be the absence of the very country whose president had pushed for its creation.
The victors’ biggest problems at Versailles concerned the losers. At the very least they wanted to punish them, but better yet they hoped to break them into pieces, along their ethnic fault lines.
In the case of Austria-Hungary, this was not so hard. The huge empire was already crumbling into little nations, and the peacemakers did not so much order the breakup as take note of it. In the empire’s north when the war ended, the Austro-Hungarian governor of Bohemia had simply telephoned the outlawed leaders of the Czech people’s separatist movement. When they arrived at his castle, he handed them the keys and left, and thus was born the future Czechoslovakia. In the empire’s south, where the war had started, Bosnians and others joined with Serbia to form Yugoslavia, “the land of southern Slavs.” This would have pleased the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, who had spent the war in prison, but he had died of tuberculosis just before it ended.
The Human Story Page 31