The opening stages set the dreadful pattern for the next years: attacks were blunted time and again, as the defenders’ guns poured out their lethal fire. The generals tried repeatedly to break the deadlock with massive offensives which led to equally massive casualties; fronts, especially in the west, where the terrain was churned up by explosives, were pitted with shell holes and criss-crossed by barbed wire, and the lines scarcely moved. And as the war dragged on, it consumed lives on a scale we find hard to imagine. In 1916 alone Russia’s summer offensive produced 1.4 million casualties; 400,000 Italians were taken prisoner in Conrad’s offensive in the Dolomites against Italy; and there were 57,000 British casualties on 2 July, the first day of the Somme, and by the battle’s end in November 650,000 Allied dead, wounded or missing along with 400,000 Germans. At Verdun, the struggle between France and Germany for control of the fortress may have cost the French defenders over 500,000 casualties and the German attackers more than 400,000. By the time the war ended on 11 November 1918, sixty-five million men had fought and eight and a half million had been killed. Eight million were prisoners or simply missing. Twenty-one million had been wounded and that figure only included the wounds that could be measured; no one will ever know how many were damaged or destroyed psychologically. By comparison, 47,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam and 4,800 coalition troops in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The war, initially European, soon became global. From the start the empires had automatically been involved. No one stopped to ask the Canadians or the Australians, the Vietnamese or the Algerians whether they wanted to fight for the imperial powers. To be fair, many did. In the ‘white’ dominions, where many still had family ties to Britain, it was simply assumed that the mother country must be defended. More surprisingly, Indian nationalists, many of them, rallied to Britain’s support. The young radical lawyer Mahatma Gandhi helped the British authorities recruit Indians for the war effort. Other powers gradually chose sides. Japan declared war on Germany at the end of August 1914 and took the opportunity to seize German possessions in China and the Pacific. The Ottoman Empire threw in its lot with Germany and Austria-Hungary two months later and Bulgaria joined them in 1915. That was the last ally the Central Powers acquired. Rumania, Greece, Italy, several Latin American countries and China eventually joined the Allies.
In the United States there was initially no strong support for either side in a conflict which seemed to have little to do with American interests. ‘Again and ever I thank God for the Atlantic Ocean’, wrote Walter Page, the American ambassador in London. The elites, liberals and those on the eastern seaboard or with family ties to Britain inclined towards the Allies but a significant minority, perhaps as much as a quarter of Americans, were of German descent. And the large Irish Catholic minority had strong reason to hate Britain. As the war started Wilson tore himself from his wife’s deathbed to give a press conference at which he proclaimed the United States would remain neutral. ‘I want’, he said, ‘to have the pride of feeling that America, if nobody else, has her self-possession and stands ready with calmness of thought and steadiness of purpose to help the rest of the world.’ It took German policies, or more specifically those of the high command, to goad Americans out of their neutrality. In 1917 the United States, infuriated by German submarine attacks on its shipping and by the news, which the British obligingly passed on to Washington, that Germany was trying to persuade Mexico and Japan to attack the United States, entered the war on the Allied side.
By 1918, the combined forces of their enemies were too much for the Central Powers and one by one they sued for peace until Germany at last made its request for an armistice. When the guns fell silent on 11 November, it was in a very different world from that of 1914. Across Europe the old fissures in society which had been temporarily papered over at the start of the conflict had re-emerged as the war had dragged on, imposing its increasingly heavy burdens. As social and political unrest spread, old regimes floundered, unable to maintain the trust of their publics or meet their expectations. In February 1917 the tsarist regime finally collapsed and the weak provisional government which succeeded it was in turn ousted ten months later by a new type of revolutionary force, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks. To save his regime, which was under attack by his political rivals and the remnants of the old order, Lenin made peace with the Central Powers at the start of 1918, ceding them huge swathes of Russian territory in the west. While Russians fought Russians in a bitter civil war, the peoples subjugated to the Russian Empire took the opportunity to escape. Poles, Ukrainians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Finns, Estonians and Latvians, all enjoyed, some only briefly, their independence.
Austria-Hungary fell to pieces in the summer of 1918, its nationality problems finally too much for it. Its Poles joined with those who were suddenly freed from Russia and Germany to create, for the first time in over a century, a Polish state. Czechs and Slovaks came together in an uneasy marriage to form Czechoslovakia while the Dual Monarchy’s South Slavs in Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia joined with Serbia to form a new state that would be known as Yugoslavia. Hungary, much reduced by the loss of Croatia and by the peace settlements after the war, became an independent state while what was left of the Habsburg territories became the little state of Austria. Of the other Central Powers, Bulgaria too had its revolution and Ferdinand, foxy to the last, abdicated in favour of his son. The Ottoman Empire also collapsed; the victorious Allies stripped it of its Arab territories and most of what was left in Europe, leaving only the Turkish heartland. The last of the Ottoman sultans slipped quietly away into exile in 1922 and a new secular ruler, Kemal Ataturk, set about creating the modern state of Turkey.
As Germany’s armies met defeat in the summer of 1918, the German public, which had been kept in the dark by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who now dominated the civilian government, reacted angrily against the whole regime. For a time, as sailors and soldiers mutinied and workers’ councils seized control of local governments, it looked as though Germany might follow Russia’s path. A reluctant Kaiser was forced to abdicate at the start of November 1918 and a new republic was proclaimed by the socialists who, it turned out, managed to check the revolution.
Although the victorious powers had their share of upheavals – there were violent strikes and demonstrations in France, Italy, and Britain by 1918 – the old order held there, for the time being. But Europe collectively was no longer the centre of the world. It had spent down its great wealth and exhausted its power. The peoples of its empires who had largely acquiesced in rule from outside were stirring, their confidence that their foreign masters knew best shaken irremediably by the four years of savagery on Europe’s battlefields. New nationalist leaders, many of them soldiers who had witnessed for themselves what European civilisation could produce, demanded self-government now and not in some far-off future. Britain’s ‘white’ dominions were content to stay within the empire but only on the condition that they had increased autonomy. New players from outside Europe were taking a greater part in world affairs. In the Far East, Japan had grown in both power and confidence and dominated its neighbourhood. Across the Atlantic the United States was now a major world power, its industries and farms stimulated to even more growth by the war and with New York increasingly the centre of world finance. Americans saw Europe as old, decadent and finished – and many Europeans agreed with them.
The war had not just destroyed much of Europe’s heritage and millions of its people but it had brutalised many of those who survived. The nationalist passions which sustained Europeans during the war had also led to the wanton killing of civilians, whether by Germans in Belgium, the Russians in Galicia or the Austrians in Bosnia. Occupying armies had rounded up civilians for forced labour and driven out those of the ‘wrong’ ethnicity. After the war, in much of Europe politics were marked by violence, with frequent assassinations and pitched battles between opposing parties. And the new intolerant and totalitarian ideologies of fascism and Ru
ssian-style communism drew their organisation and discipline from the military and, in the case of fascists, their inspiration from war itself.
The Great War marked a break in Europe’s history. Before 1914, Europe for all its problems had hope that the world was becoming a better place and that human civilisation was advancing. After 1918 that faith was no longer possible for Europeans. As they looked back at their lost world before the war, they could feel only a sense of loss and waste. In the late summer of 1918, as the extent of Germany’s defeat was becoming clear, Count Harry Kessler returned to his old house in Weimar which he had not visited for many years. Although Kessler had been caught up in the nationalist fervour in 1914, he had long since come to regret that the war had ever started. His old coachman and his dog were waiting for him at the train station and greeted him as though he had only been away for a few days. His house, he recalled, like the Sleeping Beauty, was waiting unchanged for him:
The impressionist and neo-impressionist paintings, the rows of books in French, English, Italian, Greek, and German, the figures of Maillol, his somewhat too strong, lusty women, his beautiful naked youth after the little Colin, as if it were still 1913 and the many people who were here and are now dead, missing, scattered, or enemies could return and begin European life anew. It seemed to me like a little palace out of A Thousand and One Nights, full of all kinds of treasures and half-faded symbols and memories that someone thrust from another age could only sip. I found a dedication from d’Annunzio; Persian cigarettes from Isfahan brought by Claude Anet; the bonbonnière from the baptism of the youngest child of Maurice Denis; a program of the Russian Ballet from 1911 with pictures of Nijinsky; the secret book by Lord Lovelace, the grandchild of Byron, about his incest, sent to me by Julia Ward; books by Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas with a letter from Ross; and – still unpacked – Robert de Montesquiou’s comic-serious masterpiece from the years before the war on the beautiful Countess of Castiglione, whom he affected to love posthumously – her nightshirt lay in a jewel case or little glass coffin in one of his reception rooms. How monstrously did fate rear up from this European life – precisely from it – just like the second bloodiest tragedy of history arose from the playing at shepherds and the light spirit of Boucher and Voltaire. That the age was heading not toward a more solid peace but toward war we all actually knew, but didn’t know at the same time. It was a kind of a floating feeling that like a soap bubble suddenly burst and disappeared without a trace when the hellish forces that were bubbling up in its lap were ripe.7
Of those who had played their part in taking Europe down the path to the Great War some did not live to see its end. Moltke never returned from his sick leave to resume his duties as Germany’s chief of staff. He died of a stroke in 1916 as his successor Falkenhayn was throwing the German army into repeated, costly and futile attacks at Verdun. Princip, who had set the fatal train of events in motion when he assassinated Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, was found guilty in an Austrian-Hungarian court but could not be executed because he was under age. He died of tuberculosis in an Austrian prison in the spring of 1918, unrepentant to the last about what his act had unleashed.8 The emperor, Franz Joseph, died in 1916, leaving his tottering throne to a young, inexperienced great nephew, Karl, who held on to power only until 1918. István Tisza, who finally decided to approve Austria-Hungary’s decision to force a war on Serbia, was murdered in front of his wife by revolutionary Hungarian soldiers in 1918. Rasputin was assassinated in St Petersburg in 1916 by aristocratic conspirators who hoped in vain that his removal would save the regime. Nicholas abdicated the following year. He and Alexandra and their children were murdered in Ekaterinburg by the Bolsheviks in the spring of 1918. The bodies were buried in an unmarked grave but rediscovered after the fall of the Soviet Union. The remains were identified using DNA including a sample from the Duke of Edinburgh, Alexandra’s grand-nephew, and the Russian Orthodox Church has now made the parents and the children saints.
Some of Nicholas’s ministers were more fortunate. Izvolsky never returned from Paris to Russia and lived on in France with a small allowance from the French government. Sazonov, the Foreign Minister, was dismissed early in 1917. He joined the anti-Bolshevik forces of Admiral Kolchak in the civil war and ended in exile in France, dying in Nice in 1927. Sukhomlinov was blamed for Russia’s failures in the war and in 1916 the tsar abandoned his War Minister and allowed him to be tried on the charges of corruption, neglect of Russia’s armies, and spying for Germany and Austria-Hungary. The corruption was no doubt true but the government was able to produce only the feeblest evidence to support the other charges. The new provisional government which took power early in 1917 threw him and his beautiful wife, Ekaterina, into jail and resumed the trial in the late summer. Ekaterina was acquitted but Sukhomlinov was sentenced to life imprisonment, although in May 1918 the Bolsheviks, who were now in power, released him as part of a general amnesty. He escaped from Russia into Finland that autumn and made his way to Berlin, where he wrote the almost inevitable memoirs and tried to survive in extreme poverty. Ekaterina, who had by now found a new rich protector, stayed on; the Bolsheviks apparently shot her in 1921. One morning in February 1926 policemen in Berlin found the body of an old man on a park bench. Sukhomlinov, who was once one of the richest and most powerful men in Russia, had frozen to death overnight.9
At the war’s end Hoyos, the hawk who had helped to obtain Germany’s blank cheque for Austria-Hungary, briefly contemplated suicide as he contemplated his own responsibility for the war and the end of the Dual Monarchy but thought better of it and died peacefully in 1937. Berchtold, the Chancellor, resigned during the early stages of the war in protest against the short-sighted refusal of the emperor and his colleagues to give Italy pieces of the Austrian territory it desired in order to ensure its neutrality. He lived until 1942, on one of his estates in Hungary, and is buried at his castle at Buchlau, scene of the fateful meeting between his predecessor Aehrenthal and Izvolsky which set off the Bosnian crisis of 1908. Conrad, the chief of staff of Austria-Hungary who had finally got Franz Joseph’s permission to marry Gina von Rein-inghaus in 1915, was dismissed by the new emperor 1917. After the war he and Gina lived simply in the Austrian mountains and he passed the time by studying English – his ninth language – going for walks with ex-King Ferdinand of Bulgaria and writing a huge self-justifying memoir in five volumes. (There was to be a flood of such memoirs in the 1920s as the key players tried to exonerate themselves and cast the blame on others for the war.) Conrad died in 1925 and was given a state funeral by the government of the new republic of Austria. Gina lived to see Austria absorbed into the Third German Reich and the Nazis always treated her with great deference. She died in 1961.
Asquith came under increasing criticism for his lackadaisical handling of the war effort and was forced to resign at the end of 1916. His successor was Lloyd George, who, despite his antipathy to war, proved to be a strong wartime leader. The rivalry between the two men split the Liberal Party, which has never recovered its former strength. Grey, who was nearly blind, also went into opposition but agreed to be British ambassador to the United States at the end of the war. In his memoirs he continued to deny that he had ever made any commitments to France. Shortly before he died he published a book on the charm of birds. Sir Henry Wilson, who had done so much to build the relationship between Britain and France, ended the war as a field marshal. In 1922 he became security adviser to the government of Northern Ireland which had remained part of the United Kingdom when the South became independent. He was assassinated shortly afterwards by two Irish nationalists on the steps of his house in London.
Poincaré remained in office throughout the war to preside over France’s victory and the restoration to it of Alsace and Lorraine. His term as President ended in 1920 but he came back as Prime Minister twice in the 1920s. He retired because of ill health in the summer of 1929 but survived to see Hitler and the Nazis take power in 1933, dying the following year. Dreyfus volunteered
to fight in the army which had disgraced him when war broke out and served throughout; he died in 1935 and his funeral passed through the Place de la Concorde which was lined with troops.
In Germany, Bethmann was forced out of office in the summer of 1917 by the duo of Hindenburg and Ludendorff when he tried to oppose their resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping and their expansionist war aims. Bethmann retreated to his beloved estate at Hohenfinow and spent the few remaining years of his life trying to justify himself and his policies as well as denying German responsibility for the war. He died in 1920 aged sixty-four. His rival for the Kaiser’s ear, Tirpitz, dabbled in right-wing politics after the war and maintained to his death in 1930 that his naval policy had been right and blamed everyone else from the Kaiser to the army for Germany’s defeat.
Wilhelm survived for years, bombastic, bossy, and self-righteous to the last. During the war he had become ‘the Shadow Kaiser’; his generals did all in his name but paid him little attention in reality. Wilhelm set up his headquarters in the little Belgian town of Spa behind the lines on the Western Front and passed his days in a routine of early morning rides, a couple of hours’ work (which consisted largely of awarding decorations and sending telegrams of congratulation to his officers), visits to hospitals, sightseeing and walks in the afternoons, and then dinner with his generals and bed at eleven. He liked going close enough to the front to hear the gunfire and would proudly say back at Spa that he had been in the war. As Hitler would in a later war, he liked to dream about what he would do after the conflict had ended. Wilhelm was full of plans for encouraging motor racing and for reforming society in Berlin. There were to be no more parties in hotels; the aristocracy must all build their own palaces.10 As the war went on his staff noticed that he looked lined and was easily depressed. They took to keeping the increasingly bad news from him.11
The War that Ended Peace Page 76