The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Why did German soldiers, who had hitherto been so reluctant to give themselves up, suddenly begin to surrender in their tens of thousands in August 1918? The best explanation – again following Clause-witz – is that there was a collapse of morale. This was primarily due to the realization among both officers and men that the war could not be won. General Erich Ludendorff’s spring offensives had worked tactically but failed strategically, and in the process had cost the Germans dear, whereas the Allied offensive of August 7–8 outside Amiens was, as Ludendorff admitted, ‘the greatest defeat the German Army has suffered since the beginning of the war’. Unrestricted submarine warfare had failed to bring Britain to her knees; occupation of Russian territory after Brest-Litovsk was wasting scarce manpower; Germany’s allies were beginning to crumble; the Americans were massing in France, inexperienced but well fed and numerous; perhaps most importantly, the British Expeditionary Force had finally learned to combine infantry, artillery, armour and air operations. Simply in terms of numbers of tanks and trucks, the Germans were by now at a hopeless disadvantage in the war of movement they had initiated in the spring. A German victory was now impossible, and it was the rapid spread of this view down through the ranks that turned non-victory into defeat, rather than the draw Ludendorff appears to have had in mind. In this light, the mass surrenders described above were only part of a general crisis of morale, which also manifested itself in sickness, indiscipline and desertion.

  Yet no matter how hopeless their situation, German soldiers had to feel they could risk surrendering before the war could end. And that meant that Allied soldiers had to be ready to take prisoners, rather than kill those who surrendered. The testimony of Lt RNR Blaker of the 13th (S) Battalion, Rifle Brigade, illustrates how the process worked. On November 4, 1918, during a heavy barrage of German positions at Louvignies, Blaker went ahead of his men to scout for enemy machine-gun emplacements. Having surprised and shot two German sentries, he was able to persuade ‘five pretty scared looking Germans’ to emerge from their dugout. ‘I motioned them to go back through the barrage towards our lines,’ Blaker recalled, ‘and after a slight hesitation, they had to do so.’ He then repeated this process with a second machine-gun crew. At this point, with dawn breaking, Blaker was startled to see ‘all dotted about just round by the orchards and the open grass fields beyond, enemy heads occasionally peeping out’. Deciding that he had ‘better to try to get them out of their holes’, he went on. ‘They didn’t like coming out into the barrage and why they didn’t fire at me, goodness knows,’ but he succeeded in clearing out all he could see, disarming them and sending them back to the British lines. Knowing that his men were not far behind him, the intrepid Blaker pressed on. A decisive moment was when he came upon a solitary house:

  I came from the back of it and went round to the front, where there was no door, and peeped inside a room which opened into the road and saw there a crowd of Germans, some sitting down and some standing. I don’t know who was more surprised – they or I. Anyway I managed to pull myself together a bit quicker than they did and advanced just under the doorway holding a Mills bomb in my left hand and my revolver in my right, the only thing I could think of to say was ‘Kamerad’, and so I said it, at the same time menacing them with my revolver, they didn’t seem very willing to surrender, so I repeated ‘Kamerad’, and to my surprise and delight they ‘Kameraded’, 2 officers and 28 other ranks. My idea is that they were holding some sort of conference, as the barrage was not then reaching them in full force. Both officers and three of the other ranks had Iron Cross ribbons on!

  Having made them all drop their weapons, Blaker induced these men also to march towards the British lines, despite the continuing British barrage. After this point, he was able to round up twenty-five or thirty more Germans, including the crews of two machine-guns and a trench mortar.

  Five things about this account stand out. First, what began quite tentatively soon developed a momentum of its own. Clearly, the German units Blaker had stumbled upon had already been close to cracking; his appearance was the catalyst for a collapse, beginning with a few individuals and culminating in a large group. Secondly, at least some of those he captured were not raw recruits but seasoned troops, with five Iron Crosses between them. Thirdly, it is clear that for the Germans there was safety in numbers, because a single English officer simply could not gun down more than a handful. Fourthly, the role of the German officers was vital in legitimizing the decision to surrender and ensuring all complied. Once Blaker had them in the bag, the rest came quietly. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Blaker only shot Germans who reached for their guns; from the outset he spared those who reached for the sky. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he delegated prisoner killing to the artillery by forcing his captives to march through the barrage to the British lines. Not all of them survived.) Plainly, after a certain point Blaker lacked the means to kill those who surrendered to him. Had they wished to, the German officers could have ordered their men to kill or capture him; he could have shot only a few of them before being overwhelmed. But the Germans felt sufficiently confident that they would be well treated that they elected instead to surrender.

  Blaker’s experience was typical of the way the First World War ended on the Western Front. By the last weeks, the German army had reached a point of what natural scientists call ‘self-sustaining criticality’. Quite simply, the arguments against surrender outlined above had been overwhelmed by the arguments in favour of it. Defeated, German officers led their men into captivity – further evidence, if it were needed, that Germany was fatally stabbed in the front, not the back.

  THE WAR IN THE EAST

  Although the heaviest fighting took place on the Western Front, the First World War ultimately changed remarkably little in Europe west of the Rhine. The biggest territorial change was that Alsace and Lorraine went back to France, but they had been French before 1871. In any case, such were the human and economic losses suffered by France that even this restoration seemed unlikely to endure. Britain and the United States had intervened decisively, but as soon as the German occupation of Belgium and northern France ended, they lost interest and went home. A relatively narrow strip of territory from the Channel to the Alps had suffered varying degrees of destruction, but the more profound consequences of the war in the west – which were demographic, economic and psychological – only slowly became apparent. At first, the balance of power seemed unchanged. By contrast, the much more mobile war that was fought on the Eastern Front seemed to change almost everything east of the River Elbe.

  There is an unforgettable passage in Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March which helps to explain why this was. The scene is a crowded hotel ballroom on the night of June 28, 1914, in a remote garrison town near the Russian border – a place where, as Roth puts it, ‘the civilized Austrian was menaced… by bears and wolves and even more dreadful monsters, such as lice and bedbugs’. The assembled infantry officers are of virtually every nationality in the Dual Monarchy and each reacts in his own way to the garbled telegram bearing the news of the assassination of the heir to the throne. Major Zoglauer urges that the party be broken up at once; Rittmeister Zschoch disagrees. ‘Gentlemen,’ declares Reserve Rittmeister von Babenhausen, ‘Bosnia is far away. We don’t give a damn about rumours. As far as I am concerned, to hell with them!’ ‘Bravo!’ exclaims Baron Nagy Jenö, a Magyar nobleman impelled by the fact of having a Jewish grandfather in Bogumin to take on ‘all the defects of the Hungarian gentry’: ‘Herr von Babenhausen is right, absolutely right! If the heir to the throne has been assassinated, then there are other heirs left!’

  Herr von Senny, more Magyar in blood than Herr von Nagy, was filled with a sudden dread that someone of a Jewish background might outdo him in Hungarian nationalism. Rising to his feet he said, ‘If the heir to the throne has been assassinated, well, first of all we know nothing for certain, and secondly, it doesn’t concern us in the least.’…

  First L
ieutenant Kinsky, who had grown up on the banks of the Moldau, claimed that in any case the heir to the throne had been a highly precarious choice for the monarchy… Count Battyanyi, who was drunk, hereupon began speaking Hungarian to his compatriots… [Rittmeister] Jelacich, a Slovene, hit the ceiling. He hated the Hungarians as much as he despised the Serbs. He loved the monarchy. He was a patriot… And he did feel a wee bit guilty [since]… both his teenage sons were already talking about independence for all southern Slavs.

  Though he himself understands Magyar, Jelacich insists the Hungarians speak in German, whereupon one of them declares that he and his countrymen are ‘glad that the bastard is gone!’ Lieutenant Trotta, the grandson of a Slovene knighted at the Battle of Solferino, rises drunkenly in response to this scandalous utterance. Threatening to shoot anyone who says another word against the dead man, he shouts ‘Silence!’, despite the fact that the Hungarians outrank him. Count Benkyö orders the band to play Chopin’s funeral march, but the drunken guests keep dancing and the band involuntarily speeds up. Outside a storm rages. The resulting danse macabre ends only when the footmen clear away the musicians’ instruments. Trotta resolves to resign his commission; his Ukrainian batman decides to desert and go home to Burdlaki. ‘There was no more Fatherland. It was crumbling, splintering.’

  In Western Europe the stakes were strategic, not ethnic. The British had concluded that they could not allow Germany to defeat France and Russia, for fear of a threat to Britain’s security comparable with that posed a century before by Napoleon. When war came, Bretons did not turn on Gascons, nor did Walloons and Flemings fight one another. Scotsmen, Welshmen, Englishmen and many Irishmen fought alongside one another without serious ill-feeling. Only in Ireland did the First World War usher in a civil war and even that was not as bloody a conflict as is sometimes assumed. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, it was understood early on that war spelt the dissolution of the old order of multi-ethnic empires and ethnically mixed communities. On the Western Front, Belgian and French civilians were only briefly in the firing line, in the opening phase of the war. Once the battle lines hardened, however, the combat zone was effectively militarized; thereafter, as a rule, civilians became casualties only as a result of the enemy’s inaccurate artillery fire or their own incaution. The Eastern Front was very different. There, from the Baltic to the Balkans, the great advances and retreats that characterized the fighting repeatedly exposed large civilian populations to both accidental and deliberate violence.

  Predictably, it was the Jewish communities of the Russian Pale of Settlement who had the most to fear. In the opening phase of the war, at least a hundred Jews were summarily executed by the Russian army on suspicion of espionage, the assumption being that Jews could not possibly be loyal to the Tsarist regime. There was also a policy of systematic plundering. On October 14, 1914, some 4,000 Jews were driven from their homes in Grozin (Warsaw province); they were denied any means to transport their possessions with them. In response to an enquiry about requisitioning, the Staff of the 4th Army of the South-Western Front issued the order, ‘From the kikes take everything.’ In the Kovno region fifteen localities witnessed pogroms in July 1915, while in the Vilna region nineteen shtetls were demolished in August and September 1915. There were also attacks on Jews in Minsk, Volhynia and Grodno. In many villages, Jewish women were raped by soldiers.

  Jews in Galicia were also systematically mistreated when the Russians marched into Austrian territory in the opening phase of the war. There were pogroms in Brody and in Lemberg immediately after their occupation by Russian forces. Nine Jews were killed in the former; seventeen in the latter. In the words of a Jewish doctor in the Russian army: ‘The methods were everywhere the same: after some provocative shot from a never disclosed person, came robbery, fire, and massacre.’ In December 1914 one general told the troops of his division:

  Remember, brothers, that your first foe is the Germans. They have long sucked our blood, and now want to conquer our land. Don’t take them prisoner, bayonet them – I’ll answer for it. Your second foe are the kikes [zhidy]. They are spies and aid the Germans. If you meet a zhid in the field – bayonet him, I’ll answer for it.

  The behaviour of Cossack units was notoriously bad. A Jewish soldier in the Russian army described one among many incidents:

  When our brigade marched through one village, a soldier spotted a house on a hill, and told our commander that it was probably the home of Jews. The officer allowed him to go and have a look. He returned with the cheerful news that Jews were indeed living there. The officer ordered the brigade to approach the house. They opened the door and found some twenty Jews half dead with fear. The troops led them out, and the officer gave his order: ‘Slice them up! Chop them up!’

  Another Russian unit ordered the Jews of a shtetl near Wolkowisk to strip naked, dance with one another, and then ride on pigs; they then proceeded to shoot every tenth person. Between April and October 1915, as the Russians retreated from Galicia, there were roughly one hundred separate pogroms or minor anti-Jewish incidents, nearly all instigated by soldiers. To deprive the Austrians of conscripts, the Russians also attempted to take with them all of the male population between the ages of eighteen and fifty; the Jews of the occupied area were also moved as an ‘unreliable element’ to the small area around Tarnopol that the Russians continued to occupy.

  Violence towards Jews, as we have seen, had been a feature of life in Eastern Europe before the war began. Yet it would be a mistake to view pogroms in isolation. Throughout the East European theatre of war there were attacks on ethnic minorities, sometimes but not always perpetrated by occupying armies. Germans in Galicia were forced to flee their homes following the Austrian defeats at Lemberg and Przemyśl in 1914. As the Austrians retreated, numerous German villages – for example Mariahilf – were burned to the ground by Russian regulars and Cossacks. When German reinforcements under General August von Mackensen turned the tide, the Russians took hostages from these villages back with them to Russia. The Austrians, meanwhile, executed numerous Poles and Ukrainians accused of collaborating with the Russians during their occupation. Similar scenes were repeated in Bukovina, which was overrun by the Russians within a few weeks of the outbreak of war, and saw renewed fighting during the Russian Brusilov offensive in the summer of 1916. In the confusion of 1917 and 1918, when it seemed the Germans had won the war in the East, expectations of independence in Poland and the Ukraine precipitated bitter fighting between the various ethnic groups in Galicia. Germans further east also fell victim to the war, even though they lived many miles from the front lines. From the outset, the Russian Commander-in-Chief, the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich, and the Chief of the General Staff, General Nikolai Yanushkevich, viewed the non-Russian population of Russia’s Western frontier with the utmost suspicion. It was not only Jews but also Germans, Gypsies, Hungarians and Turks who were deported from the empire’s western provinces during the war; in all, around 250,000 people.

  The war had the same disruptive effect in the Balkans, where it had, after all, begun. Serbian losses were among the highest of the entire war in relative terms. Not all violent deaths came about as a result of formal military engagements. In his novel The Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andrić memorably described the impact of the outbreak of war in 1914 on the ethnically mixed Bosnian town of Višegrad:

  The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief. A man who saw clearly and with open eyes and was then living could see how this miracle took place and how the whole of a society could, in a single day, be tra
nsformed… It is true that there had always been concealed enmities and jealousies and religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty, but there had also been courage and fellowship and a feeling for measure and order, which restrained all these instincts within the limits of the supportable and, in the end, calmed them down and submitted them to the general interest of life in common… Men… vanished overnight as if they had died suddenly, together with the habits, customs and institutions which they represented.

  In this case it was the Serbian minority that was persecuted with the encouragement of the Austrian authorities, but both the Muslim and Jewish communities were, sometimes literally, caught in the crossfire. Andrić’s novel is superficially a chronicle of recurrent ethnic conflict, dating back to the sixteenth century, when the Ottoman authorities began to construct the bridge of the book’s title. Yet the bridge on the Drina is intended to symbolize the capacity for harmony of a multi-ethnic society like Višegrad’s; it is ‘the link between East and West’, where men and, later, women of the town’s different faiths and cultures meet to smoke, sip coffee and gossip. Despite occasional manifestations of violence upon it, the bridge withstands all the stresses and strains of Ottoman decline. It is only in 1914 that the conflict between Serbs, Muslim ‘Turks’ and German ‘Swabians’ becomes uncontainable and the bridge is literally blown apart.