The Germans were close to despair. They realized that Austrian diplomacy worked far too slowly to pre-empt Russian mobilization and effect a fait accompli against the despised Serb regime in Belgrade. But there was still hope, or so Bethmann Hollweg believed, that the Tsar might withdraw, that France would advise peace and that, as a consequence, the Entente would fall apart. Britain could have had a key role but, almost paralyzed at home by the prospect of civil war in Ireland, the Cabinet failed to act while there was still time. Ultimately, the war that followed was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because all the powers believed, more or less, that the Great War was inevitable sooner or later, their efforts were directed much more at finding the right moment to strike and at preserving their alliances than at securing the peace. Thus the alliances, instead of preventing war, made it almost inevitable. Every single country had, ultimately, defensive motives masquerading behind offensive ones. Charles de Gaulle, at the time a young army officer, soon to be thrown into the bloody chaos of Verdun, thirty years later summed up what began. He called it “La guerre de trente ans de notre siècle,” the twentieth century’s Thirty Years War.
7
DANCE OF DEATH
Helmuth von Moltke had always warned his officers that no strategic plan would outlast the first encounter with the enemy. The truth of this was visited upon the German troops in August 1914, advancing in massive columns in the west, breaking through the fortifications of Liège on the Meuse river, to the north of Verdun, and heading, in a huge scythe movement, for Paris. By ignoring Belgium’s neutrality—a “scrap of paper,” Bethmann Hollweg remarked dismissively—Germany ensured the deployment of the British Expeditionary Force, for which the Schlieffen Plan did not allow. Neither did it allow for Liège holding out for ten rather than two days, for the Belgians immobilizing their railways, or for reservists in uncomfortable new boots not achieving the marching rates of the regulars. The Germans were also eight divisions short of the numbers posited by the Plan. The advancing troops got in each other’s way, inexperienced field commanders made serious blunders, intelligence was muddled, the offensive was lacking in depth and the forward-deployed French divisions were defeated but not destroyed. When the first German mounted patrols arrived at the Marne river, taxis were ferrying the last reserves from Paris to the front. What the French soon celebrated as the miracle de la Marne, the Germans experienced as the failure of their grand strategy. The strategic initiative was lost forever; defense triumphed over attack. Artillery forced attackers and defenders alike into the trenches. There the enemy was not only the one on the other side of no man’s land; it was also the rain, mud, vermin, cold, darkness, loneliness and despair.
In Im Westen nichts Neues—All Quiet on the We tern Front— by Erich Maria Remarque, the protagonist is shot by an enemy sniper, on a quiet and otherwise unremarkable day. At the other end of the literary post-war spectrum, Ernst Jünger, a career infantry officer decorated with the Pour le Mérite, Prussia’s highest award for gallantry under enemy fire, wrote In Stahlgewittern—Storm of Steel—trying to make sense of chaos and find heroism in the blood-soaked mud. From Ypres to the Chemin des Dames, from Verdun to the mountains of the Vosges, two winding systems of trenches were juxtaposed, the opposing troops often within earshot, the distance between the trenches not much more than a well-thrown hand grenade, snipers putting a deadly premium on every careless move.
In the west, the German grand strategy failed, as it did not yield the planned victory within six weeks, but in the east, the strategic defense worked better than expected. The Russian armies had to bypass the fortifications of Poznan, massively improved only during the last few years, to attack East Prussia. There they met units composed of local men fighting among vast marshes, lakes and waterways not so much for king and country as for farm and family. The Germans made use of their treacherous terrain to block, encircle and defeat the advancing Russians, who were vastly superior in numbers but inferior in technology and intelligence. Hundreds of thousands of Russians were taken prisoner, and Hindenburg and Ludendorff, his chief of staff, became national heroes. Farther south, the Russian armies were more successful, advancing in Galicia against the forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The battle of Groddeck devoured tens of thousands from both sides. After a few months, war in the east also became static. Austrian regiments had to be bolstered by German reinforcements before they were able to withstand pressure or take back the initiative. The horrible losses in the east, the destructive impact of the war on a multinational empire and the fact that Germans and Austrians were forever unable to coordinate their grand strategy caused second thoughts in Vienna, leading to mutual distrust and a mood of impending doom.
In spite of all the blood and fortune spent, or more likely because of them, neither the Entente powers nor the central powers tried to limit the war, let alone sued for peace. Instead, every effort was made to widen the scope of weaponry used. Concentrated artillery and greatly increased numbers of machine guns, trench mortars, flame-throwers, poison gas and ultimately tanks were designed to break through enemy trenches, mostly in vain. Strategic widening of the war took place at sea. The German battle fleet, once the centerpiece of Germany’s global aspirations, was reduced to lingering in port except for a few valiant singlehanded actions and the battle of Jutland. The Royal Navy was outgunned and left with a bloody nose, but the German fleet remained in harbor thereafter. Effort was transferred to submarine war. German U-boats attacked Allied shipping plying the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean very effectively until Lloyd George forced the Admiralty to adopt the convoy system.
The British naval blockade, way out in the Atlantic, cut off German supplies. But submarines firing their torpedoes from under water had difficulty identifying targets through their periscopes. When a German commander sank the British liner Lusitania with hundreds of Americans on board in 1915, it brought the United States closer to intervention on the Entente side. The German High Command was forced into a strategic gamble as unrestricted U-boat warfare would sooner or later bring the United States into the war. But in the spring of 1917 the German Admiralty, ignorant of North American industrial power and political resolve, promised victory and carried on regardless.
Most moving of guns and ammunition was still done by horses, but there was no more role for cavalry except in eastern Europe. Aircraft were used first to direct artillery fire against enemy positions, then to drop bombs. Inevitably, dogfights began, and young cavalry officers like Manfred von Richthofen—later the legendary “Red Baron” at the head of his “circus”—found a new and irresistible challenge in the air. But air power was never really integrated with ground action until August 1918.
A few months into the war, German industry had run out of its stocks of saltpeter. Without the Haber-Bosch process for producing nitrogen from the air, the production of ordnance would have ceased some time in 1915, and with it the war. The Allies were in no better shape, with British artillery on the Western Front reduced to an allowance of ten rounds a day in 1915 because of a shortage of shells from the factories. Walther Rathenau, formerly a vocal critic of the Kaiser’s strategy, became the chief organizer of Germany’s war industries.
Under the impact of war, Germany changed from a constitutional monarchy into a thinly disguised military dictatorship, with the Kaiser reduced to protocol functions and the Reichstag to rubber-stamping one bill after another for the issuing of war loans. The loans could only be redeemed if and when Germany finally won the war. On the western side, taxes were raised, but much of the financing of the war came from the United States. So the Allies, too, were caught in a debt trap. There were many reasons why the war went on as long as it did: the way it was financed on both sides played a large part. The Great War devoured all material resources, ruined civilian life, gave power to the military as never before, stifled public discourse, inflated the currency, expanded the public debt beyond any reasonable chance of repayment, mortgaged foreign holdings, killed small enterprises
and effected an unprecedented economic dictatorship in the countries involved.
In Germany, politics fell silent, diplomacy was paralyzed and total mobilization produced its own momentum. Four hundred German university professors, most of them luminaries in their respective fields, launched a passionate indictment of the western powers for siding with Russian barbarism, and having no religion but materialism. Germany was seen as fighting a defensive war, having been encircled, and was now entitled to safeguard its interests throughout Europe by proclaiming strategic war aims. These had not driven the countries into war; rather war produced the war aims, giving itself a meaning that had been absent before, and by implication fueling the furore indefinitely, to the bitter end.
While the German war aims comprised placing eastern-central Europe under German domination and, in the west, annexation of the port of Antwerp and the iron ore deposits of Lorraine and Belgium, the western allies were no less ambitious in reserving for themselves large pieces of Germany. The nations making up the Danube monarchy were seen as potential allies, hence the propaganda that Austria-Hungary had to be destroyed. Russia, as well as seeking the final dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, wanted to secure the Dardanelles and demanded a stake in the Baltic approaches and much of Germany’s Baltic coast. For all the nations engaged, this was to be the war to end all wars. But the means to achieve this noble end were mutually exclusive, and instead of ending the war they prolonged it until the final and complete exhaustion of one side. Instead of embarking on secret peace feelers and confidential negotiations, as had been diplomatic practice in earlier wars, both sides sent out their diplomats and bankers to help widen the theaters of war.
At first, the central powers scored a success when Turkey joined their side, fearing a Russian attack against the Dardanelles. Without German advice—in fact, massive German logistical support—the Turkish war effort would have ended before it really began, in breakdown and defeat. Instead, the Germans advised the Turkish commanders to fortify as quickly as possible the weakest spot in their defenses, the Gallipoli peninsula south of Istanbul, and at the same time to send a detachment across the Sinai to cut off the Suez Canal. This failed dismally, but at Gallipoli the Turkish troops, reinforced by German engineers, withstood the Allied invasion from the sea for more than ten months, throughout 1915, finally forcing the Allies to give up and evacuate the strategic peninsula.
The Entente, after having lost at Gallipoli, won in Rome, and in Tokyo—persuading the Japanese government that to win the German inheritance in the Far East was worth a declaration of war against Germany. But this was unimportant compared to Italy’s entry into the war on the western side, which tipped the balance of forces. The Triple Alliance of Germany and Austria with Italy had always been an unlikely proposition in case of war against the Mediterranean sea power of Britain and France, who could also promise Adriatic islands and the southern provinces of Imperial Austria as a reward. On top of all this, a number of palms were greased and no questions asked. When Italy entered the war, the Austrians had to defend on two fronts, enabled to do so only by massive German help. Brusilov’s offensive against the Austrians in June 1916, in which the Russians captured a quarter of a million men, finally persuaded Romania to join the Entente.
After three terrible winters, in early 1917 the war hung in the balance. Russia’s February revolution brought a new elite to power who, however, made the fatal mistake of continuing the war. The German High Command, when approached by Lenin from his exile in Zurich, not only promised him and his entire entourage a safe passage through Germany; the generals also furnished the enemy’s enemy with plenty of gold to carry out his nefarious designs and overthrow the Provisional Government, which had succeeded the Tsarist regime. Little did Germany’s cunning soldiers know that they had entered into a pact with the Devil and that they, after the German workers’ uprising that the Bolshevik leader was sure to foment, were next on Lenin’s list.
Lenin’s Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg finally took Russia out of the war, after the Russian armies had fallen apart and the German troops had gone as far as they could without overstretching their supply lines. Lenin’s logic was that, whatever the Germans might gain at the conference table at Brest-Litovsk, they would lose once the revolution cut the ground from under their feet. So on paper Germany was, once the peace treaty was signed, the master of eastern-central Europe, from the German border to Russia, with nothing but a chessboard of weak states to be overseen and directed from Berlin. Most important, the breakdown of Russia in the east allowed the German High Command to transport over one million soldiers to Flanders to secure victory in the west.
Things would not have looked bad for the central powers, had it not been for the looming American intervention. But the German High Command, like the Wilhelmstrasse, was inclined to underrate its impact. They still believed the Admiralty’s bragging that most American troop ships would be sunk before they ever reached European waters. The High Command was confident of securing final victory through one last overpowering thrust before the Americans were able to deploy in any numbers. Instead of translating victory in the east into a realistic and timely peace offer to the western allies, the German leaders carried on regardless, victims of their own war aims, the war’s finances and war propaganda.
Almost as potent as the fresh, well-fed and well-equipped American troops were the combined germs of nationalism and socialism broadcast by the Russian Revolution to the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and into German industrial cities. Moreover, President Woodrow Wilson, a political science professor from Princeton University, knew that nothing less than a crusade and a world vision would do if he were to send American soldiers to die in Europe. That was the birth of the “Fourteen Points,” also meant to be a democratic challenge to Lenin’s communist vision and to limit the Allies’ war aims in Europe, while at the same time holding out hope to the Germans that after the war there would be a future. Only to the overstretched empires of the Ottomans and the Habsburgs were the Fourteen Points a death sentence, since their constituent parts would become nation-states, following the principle of self-determination. Without the Germans—or, for that matter, the Entente powers—realizing, Lenin’s battle cry and Wilson’s vision had changed the overall nature of the war. The Great War of Europe had turned into world war, and the war of the nations into the war of ideologies.
Daily life in Germany had been transformed beyond recognition by the trials and tribulations of war. No one could remember so much cold, hunger and misery, and the great influenza epidemic of 1918 was to take away hundreds of thousands weakened through years of deprivation. Although prices were frozen, the currency was inflated and incomes lagged far behind in spite of nominal increases. Money had lost about two-thirds of its value and the public debt had risen to menacing proportions, while the middle classes had signed up for government bonds that, in the case of defeat, were unlikely ever to be redeemed. There was nothing to purchase anyway beyond the daily rations. Hunger drove the urban population to trade for food whatever could be traded—although sanctions were severe. Farmers hoarded whatever they could hide from the authorities. Exploitation and misery fueled social unrest, which from time to time flared up in strikes and demonstrations, in spite of the official ban. Class structures were crumbling in the cities much as in the countryside and women had been drafted to do men’s work, the war inadvertently giving a cruel push to the cause of female emancipation. The standards of right and wrong were crumbling. The state was claiming treasure and blood in quantities that no tyrant of the past would ever have dared to extract.
In the early days of the war, Burgfrieden, harmony on the Home Front, had been pronounced in an effort to unite the German people behind their leaders and silence all doubt and criticism. Censorship of news and the self-censorship of parliament added to the leaden atmosphere. The hope was to utilize military victory as a surrogate for constitutional reform, and glory as a tonic for the nation. In 1916, when the
military authorities tightened their control over production and consumption, a bargain was struck between the generals and the trade unions called Vaterländisches Hilfsdienstgesetz (Patriotic Support Bill). The military could from now on draft everybody, men and women, into production. Private ownership even of major companies became subject to military orders. The trade unions, in turn, were offered a massive say in the running of companies. Workers’ councils (Betriebsräte) were set up, which as well as supervising matters of management had to be consulted on working conditions.
After the first Russian revolution in February 1917, the Kaiser announced the German equivalent of “a land fit for heroes,” promising that once the war was won, there would be far-reaching constitutional reform and a revision of the three-class franchise in Prussia that ever since the constitution of 1849 made sure that voting power was organized according to the amount of direct tax paid. In mid-July 1917 the Reichstag seriously debated the worsening situation at the fronts for the first time, and even dared, though in closed session, to criticize the Admiralty’s great gamble of unrestricted U-boat warfare, which risked American intervention. The issuing of new war bonds was made conditional on the government’s accepting a “peace resolution” for a settlement “without annexations and reparations.” Bethmann Hollweg, having lasted as Chancellor since 1909, was ousted, but the center-left majority now finding its voice was unable to produce from its own ranks a convincing leader, thus leaving the powers that be, the Military High Command, unchallenged.
It was the Western Front, however, not the Home Front, that collapsed first. Ludendorff ’s spring 1918 offensive drove the Allies back 40 miles and reached the Marne for the first time since 1914, but there were insufficient reserves of troops, supplies and means of transportation to consolidate and exploit the gains. Even with the advent, in early summer 1918, of many German divisions from the east at the Western Front, the overall correlation of forces was moving inexorably against the central powers. The massive offensives of the summer and autumn of 1918 threw more troops into the battle than ever before and at one stage they got within 40 miles of Paris. But the soldiers were worn out, hungry, badly equipped and shaken in their morale, and there was a sharp increase in the numbers of them surrendering.
The German Empire Page 10