by Hew Strachan
Thus, military history has assumed a priority in writing this book as insistent as every other historical sub-discipline. The project has consequently grown to embrace three volumes. They are to be divided as follows. This, the first, focuses on 1914 itself. The second, to be called No quarter, will cover 1915 and 1916. It will embrace the crisis for liberalism with which the war confronted the belligerent powers by summer of the latter year, and it will conclude with the failure of the peace moves (and the war aims associated with them) at the year’s end. The third volume, Fall out, will begin with the economic and strategic strains of the winter of 1916–17, which formed the background to revolution and pacifism in 1917. It will review the collapse of Russia and the entry of the United States, and the consequences of both for the events of 1918. The volume, and the trilogy, will close not just with the peace settlement but also with an assessment of the war’s cultural and social legacy.
The chronological structure is provided by a military historical narrative for the major theatres of war, including the Balkans, Italy, and the Ottoman empire. The western and eastern fronts are considered in turn and year by year. But connected to this spine are a series of themes, developed as independent chapters at the point where chronology makes their consideration most pressing, but analysed for a longer period and in some cases for the entire war. This first volume, for example, contains in Chapter 10 a discussion of war finance throughout the war. It is treated here because it was a pressing issue in August 1914 itself. It is treated as a whole for the sake of coherence. By contrast, the story of industrial mobilization is only taken to 1916, on the grounds that in that year a second ‘re-mobilization’ took place which must be set in the context of the battles of Verdun and the Somme. Blockade, although instituted by the British in 1914, will not be discussed in its own right until the third volume, the point at which it could be deemed significant to the war’s outcome and at which comparisons with U–boat war are instructive.
Of course such a structure imposes penalties. The decision to delay consideration of propaganda until later means that the issue of German atrocities in Belgium, a key feature of the 1914 debate, is only mentioned indirectly in this first volume. The soldiers’ experience of the war and the maintenance of morale feed into the mutinies of 1917; they will therefore be discussed at that point, although clearly they are crucial to any understanding of the fighting from the war’s outbreak.
The purpose of the thematic chapters is above all comparative. This, I would claim, is what is ‘new’ about ‘yet another history of the war’ (to answer the inevitable questions of friends and colleagues). The effect of such comparisons is to put what have been seen as peculiarly national events in context; for example, the shells crisis which brought down Britain’s last Liberal government was reflected in every other belligerent. Comparative history both highlights gaps in the state of our knowledge and helps to cover them. This is not just a plea for a new generation to maximize the opportunities presented by the opening of archives in Russia and the former German Democratic Republic, but also a recognition of how little has been done with some of the archives which have been open much longer. Shell production in Britain after the establishment of the Ministry of Munitions is a case in point; so too is the manufacture of arms in France. When I wrote the first version of this volume’s Chapter 2, that on war enthusiasm, the only careful and archivally based study of the subject was Jean-Jacques Becker’s for France; in the last decade we have found out much more about Germany, but we still know far too little about most of the other belligerents, including Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Britain.
I began the actual writing of this volume in 1988–9, when given a year’s sabbatical leave by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and I had virtually completed a first draft in 1993 when, as a consequence of my appointment to the chair of modern history at Glasgow in 1992, I became head of department. Since then I have been rewriting and incorporating fresh material, a process completed thanks to the generosity of the British Academy, which elected me its Thank Offering to Britain Fellow for 1998–9. In general I have taken the eightieth anniversary of the armistice, November 1998, as the cut-off point for bibliographical purposes.
Most of the research and writing for this book was therefore completed while I was in Cambridge, serving for over a decade first as Admissions Tutor and then as Senior Tutor of my college. I could not have sustained serious scholarship against the demands of teaching, but above all administration, without the support of Sally Braithwaite, a secretary without peer. Her ability to head off callers, deal with crises, and yet determine what was urgent and what not, was matched by her cheerfulness and her capacity to read not only my writing but also my mind. Most of the college came to realize what I knew from the outset: that tutorial business would function just the same whether I was there or not.
Cambridge was then a centre of First World War scholarship. But I developed a particular debt to two Fellows of Pembroke. Clive Trebilcock taught me about the relationship between economic history and military history: Chapter 11 is its reflection. Jay Winter, in getting me to take part in the teaching of ‘European society and the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920’, widened my horizons immeasurably, as did many of the undergraduates whom I taught as a result.
In Glasgow, those who have taken my special subject ‘Strategy and Society: Britain and Germany in the First World War’ have performed a similar function. Unfortunately secretarial support has been replaced by computers, an inadequate substitute in my case. Before that process got fully under way Patricia Ferguson typed Chapters 10 and 11, a penance which no doubt gave her retirement an even greater aura of relief. The in-built obsolescence of computers and their software has considerably increased the obstacles in completing a long-running project such as this. In under a decade Word Star, Word Perfect, Word, and Word for Windows have succeeded each other without being fully compatible. Patrik Andell put the entire book into a single system, an achievement which eluded the university’s computing system, but even he could not rescue much of the formatting.
All my debts to others cannot be fully conveyed here. Those who have suggested books, sent me material, exchanged ideas, or provided other support include: Holger Afflerbach, Ross Anderson, Christopher Andrew, Annette Becker, Geoffrey Best, Matthew Buck, Deborah Cohen, Wilhelm Deist, Simon Dixon, Michael Epkenhans, Martin Farr, Niall Ferguson, Robert Foley, Stig Förster, David French, Peter Gatrell, John Gooch, Dominick Graham, Keith Grieves, David Hermann, Holger Herwig, Gerhard Hirschfeld, Nicholas Hope, Sir Michael Howard, Gregory Martin, Evan Mawdsley, Michael Moss, Harold Nelson, Avner Offer, Maurice Pearton, Daniel Segesser, Dennis Showalter, David Stevenson, Norman Stone, and Tim Travers. I have benefited from the stimulus of several conferences, but should mention in particular the series of seminars organized by Brian Bond, which resulted in the volume which he edited, The First World War and British military history (1991). Alan and Sue Warner have put me up, and put up with me, on countless occasions in London, and Peter and Angelina Jenkins were as welcoming in Paris. To those I have failed to mention I apologize.
My family has of course had to bear the lot of all authors’ families—physical absence when away writing or researching, and mental absence when physically present. I am conscious of the opportunities lost, and even now cannot claim it is over. Claire Blunden said in 1981 of her husband, Edmund, author of Undertones of war, that until he died in 1976 no day passed in which he did not refer to the war.7 When I repeated that story in my own wife’s hearing, she remarked that she knew how Claire Blunden felt. Another writer of one of the best war memoirs, albeit one whose marital life was not quite as complex as that of Blunden, Guy Chapman, author of A passionate prodigality, likened the war to a mistress; I hope that my wife, however demanding she may feel the writing of this book to have been, will not see its history in the same light.
Hew Strachan
1
THE ORIGINS OF THE WAR
&
nbsp; GERMANY AS AWORLD POWER
To begin at the end.1 At Versailles, on 28 June 1919, the Germans, albeit reluctantly, acceded to the peace terms imposed upon them by the victorious powers. Although Britain, France, and the United States had made most of the running, twenty-five other states were signatory to the treaty. By it, in article 231, they asserted not only the responsibility of the defeated for the loss and damage incurred as a result of the war, but also that the war had been ‘imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies’.
The Germans had already made clear their rejection of the charge. On 27 May, in a fruitless endeavour to overcome the intransigence of the victors, four distinguished professors—two of them of seminal importance in the world of scholarship: Hans Delbrück, the effective founder of academic military history, and Max Weber, the political theorist—signed a memorandum claiming that Germany had fought a defensive war against Russian tsarism. Although beaten in the short-term debate, the German government fought back. A long-term project, examining not merely the immediate causes of the war but the entire range of international relations since 1871, was put in train. The Foreign Office assumed responsibility for the volumes, and ensured that the activities which it sponsored and the publications which it produced became the basis for all serious research working on the war’s causes. Access to the documents once they had been published was denied to subsequent and possibly more independent scholars; a separate Reichstag inquiry—designed originally by the left to put the blame on the right, and then by the right to blame the left—dragged on and was overtaken; and the tactic of placing the events of July 1914 in the context of the previous decades successfully muddied the precise issue of war guilt.2 Gradually the Germans’ rejection of article 231 gained ground, although more conspicuously in Britain and America than in France. The Versailles Treaty itself was not ratified by the United States Senate and it became abundantly clear that the peace settlement had not resolved the frontier problems of eastern and central Europe in a convincing manner. In particular, the injustices done to Germans residing in the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian empire came to be widely recognized.
In Britain in 1933 Lloyd George, who in July 1911—three years before the outbreak of the war—had as chancellor of the exchequer delivered a clear warning to Germany, and who in December 1918 had been returned to power as prime minister on a wave of anti-German sentiment, began his war memoirs by stating that nobody in July 1914 had wanted European war, that nobody had expected it, and that ‘the nations slithered over the brink’.3 In the United States Sidney B. Fay, professor of history at Harvard, wrote in The origins of the world war, first published in 1928, that ‘all the powers were more or less responsible’, and that ‘the War was caused by the system of international anarchy involved in alliances, armaments and secret diplomacy’.4 By shifting the blame to ‘–isms’ rather than individuals, to militarism, nationalism, and economic imperialism, Fay exculpated Germany. Only by re-emphasizing the immediate causes of the war, by stating that it was the resolve of Germany and Austria-Hungary during the crisis of July 1914 that enabled the war to occur, could the doyen of France’s war historians, Pierre Renouvin, put across a Germanophobe perspective.5 In the 1930s, for most of the English-speaking world, as indeed for Germany, the arguments of Fay and Lloyd George were the current orthodoxy.
The Second World War changed this perspective, albeit gradually rather than immediately. From the vantage-point of the second half of the century the two world wars could be seen as part of a whole, the years 1918 to 1939 representing a truce rather than a definitive break. Furthermore, given the relative lack of controversy about the origins of the second war, that it was caused by German aggression, and that Hitler—whether as leader of an enraptured German people or as embodiment of a deeply-rooted national will—was the prime culprit, it became possible to project back onto Germany before 1933 the insights and continuities derived from a study of Nazi Germany.
In particular, the causes of the First World War could be re-examined in the light of those of the Second. The debate was also set in a general context, that of the peculiarities of Germany history, of Germany’s Sonderweg (special path). Simply put, Germany was portrayed as a state where militarism and authoritarianism—partly owing to its Prussian origins, partly to its strategically vulnerable position—had been more easily exploited by leaders of a conservative and expansionist bent. The political thought of the Enlightenment and the bourgeois legacy of industrialization, which in west European states left a grounding of constitutionalism, in Germany was suborned by nationalism. The right used nationalism for its own conservative ends, and liberalism—in 1813, 1848, and 1919—did not take strong root. Hitler was presented as the climax of what went before.
It was against this background that the more specific controversy over the origins of the First World War was renewed. The key works, Griff nach der Weltmacht (Germany’s aims in the First World War) and Krieg der Illusionen (The war of illusions), both by Fritz Fischer and published in 1961 and 1969 respectively, placed the burden of war guilt once again at the feet of Germany. Much of the detail of Fischer’s case will be considered later in this book. Despite their opaque and dense presentation and despite the lack of a succinct argument, Fischer’s books rent German historians into deeply entrenched camps. For them, more than for historians of other nationalities, the issue was fraught, since the overall thesis—the arguments about Sonderweg and the ongoing preoccupation with the effect of Hitler—concerned continuity in German history, and therefore was as much about Germany’s current identity as about its past. The subtleties and differences of the interpretations put forward within the two camps were subsumed by the fundamental divide. Fischer’s opponents, who constituted the majority, had to accept combat on Fischer’s terms: in other words, they had to address the question of German expansionism before 1914, to ask whether Germany was prepared to go to war in fulfilment of its aims, to decide whether all the dominant groups in pre-war German society could be found culpable, and to consider whether their motivation was to use foreign policy to avert an internal social and political crisis. Fischer himself, in the foreword to Krieg der Illusionen, spelled out the primacy of domestic policy:
the aim was to consolidate the position of the ruling classes with a successful imperialist foreign policy, indeed it was hoped a war would resolve the growing social tensions By 1912 at any rate the domestic crisis was apparent. The decision to go to war in 1914 was, in addition to the domestic considerations, based above all on military reflections which in turn depended on economic and political objectives. All these factors—and as regards both the masses and the Emperor there were also the psychological elements—the Government was forced to consider. If one looks at all these forces it is possible to see a clear continuity of aim before and during the war.6
In 1967 Immanuel Geiss, a pupil of Fischer, put it more pithily:
The determination of the German Empire—the most powerful conservative force in the world after Tsarist Russia—to uphold the conservative and monarchic principles by any means against the rising flood of democracy, plus its Weltpolitik, made war inevitable.7
In practice, this sort of argument is very hard to substantiate in precise terms from the evidence now available. But the challenge that Fischer, Geiss, and others issued compels historians—in addition to undertaking a fundamental reconsideration of the role of Germany—to make two connections not so readily made in the 1930s. Both are connections which come more easily to a generation to whom nuclear weapons—by finding their role as deterrents rather than as weapons of war—link more closely the issues of war and peace, and at the same time obscure the divisions between purely military functions and those of civilian society. First, the Fischer controversy forces historians to dispense with their traditional division between the causes of a war, a long-standing interest of academics and exhaustively worked over in undergraduate essays, and its course, the task of military historians and all
too often neglected by those same undergraduates. Fischer’s revisionism began with the development of German war aims during the war itself, and worked backwards to the war’s origins, finding continuity between the two and using one to illuminate the other. In 1934, by contrast, C. R. M. F. Cruttwell’s history of the war, reprinted as recently as 1991, felt it unnecessary to discuss the war’s origins. Secondly, Fischer restated the interconnection between domestic policy and foreign policy. The point was well taken: recent studies of other nations and the origins of the war, and of their subsequent aims, have not been able to treat foreign policy as a discrete entity. Even more must this apply to the conduct of the war itself, frequently described as the first total war and entailing the mobilization of all the belligerents’ industrial and economic resources.
Therefore, the initial task must be—as it was for the peacemakers of 1919— to consider Germany and its role in the origins of the war.