To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  But their application caused division. By October 1915 the Ministry of Munitions was already looking forward to the day when it had a munitions surplus available for redistribution to its ally. The manner of its allocation could, in a resource-driven war, have an effect on the direction of operations. The War Office, however, could not so readily embrace the notion of abundance, particularly when the material needs of the British army were far from satiated.

  Even while he was chancellor of the exchequer Lloyd George had seen in the principle of inter-allied munitions co-operation a lever by which he could take a share in the direction of strategy. This was the subtext of the February 1915 allied conference on finance. However, the Anglo-French meeting at Boulogne in June was the first devoted specifically to munitions. It was followed by further deliberations in July and October. Both powers quickly agreed that any surplus to the requirements of one country would ‘be freely accessible to the other country without any question of a quid pro quo. Albert Thomas went on to declare: ‘I do not consider the Ministry of Munitions in London or my own office in Paris to be two separate institutions. I consider there is one Munitions Ministry for both countries.’396

  Two obstacles lay athwart the fulfilment of such high-minded objectives. First, Italy and—particularly—Russia were badgering their more industrialized allies for weaponry: consequently the two ministries had not only to regulate their own relationship but also to harmonize it with that of their poorer partners. Secondly, the question of who should get what from any big allied pot did not necessarily depend on equal shares for all but rather on the strategic priority accorded to each front. Such calculations could cut many ways. Not even the two ministers for munitions were in accord. In October Thomas considered that France was readier to act and so should have priority over Russia; Lloyd George thought that by arming Russia he would enable the latter to aid Serbia and so keep the Balkan front active. Thus, for all his overt solidarity, Thomas’s actual priorities were closer to those of the War Office than of the Ministry of Munitions.397

  When all four allies met in London at the end of November 1915 to discuss munitions the show of co-ordination proved much greater than the subsequent practice. A resolution, proposed by Thomas, that a central munitions office for the allies be established, was quickly approved. But it remained a dead letter. Part of the problem was over what the office would have done if it had been given life. G. M. Booth’s suggestion, for pooling all allied resources on an equal basis, was the only viable option in the circumstances of 1915–16, and it was therefore the only principle on which such an office could have functioned. The alternative, an agreement as to the differentials to be applied in the allocation of arms to different fronts, would have had to be predicated—as Lloyd George recognized—on a concerted allied plan of campaign. Lloyd George’s hope, that the centralization of munitions orders could force the centralization of strategic direction, foundered on its inversion of the natural order in which to proceed.398

  The western allies wanted centralization not for strategic but for economic reasons, to curb Russia’s independent purchasing and to protect their own exchange. The Russians did not want that, but they did like the idea of pooling resources, a process from which they were the power most likely to benefit. The trouble was that the British and the French had no intention of equipping the Russians on the same scale as themselves. Furthermore, even the most ardent of Russia’s supporters found themselves wrong-footed by the exorbitant nature of Russia’s demands. It came to the November conference with a request for 1,400 4.8-inch howitzers, 250 8-inch siege howitzers, ninety 6-inch howitzers, and fifty-four 12-inch howitzers. Furthermore, it soon became clear that the Russians hoped that the conference would also resolve its small-arms needs. Britain did not have heavy artillery to offer. It had put the larger calibres at the centre of gun programmes A, B, and C precisely because they were its own priority: what it anticipated releasing to the Russians by the spring of 1916 was the resulting surplus in field guns, specifically 18-pounders.399 Even if Britain had been able to release bigger pieces, they might well not have met the high standards set by Russia’s inspectors. The Russian army relied even more than the British on horse-drawn transport. Therefore the barrels of its guns were made of higher quality and thinner steel, in order to make them lighter than the comparable British piece.400

  Lloyd George offered Russia 300 4.5-inch field howitzers to be delivered in three consignments in February, March, and April 1916. Thomas said that France would contribute one out of every three 105 mm howitzers it produced, plus two 280 mm guns a month.401 Ultimately France delivered to Russia a total of 100 105 mms, 160 long 120 mms, fifty short 155 mms, and sixteen 220 mms.402

  Lloyd George’s promise, small though it was in relation to the original Russian request, still seemed massive to the new chief of the imperial general staff, Sir William Robertson. The British army had been promised 100 heavy howitzers for January 1916 but had got only fifty-one. His case against fulfilling Lloyd George’s undertaking was augmented by the problems of shipping the guns to Russia, and of railway communication at the ports once they were there.

  Thus, easing Russia’s shortage of heavy artillery became embroiled in two further issues. First, there was the question of allied shipping control: the Russians were reluctant to cede management of their tonnage to Britain, but without it Britain was not confident that the shipping made available to Russia would be used for the purposes of the war rather than for those of commerce more generally. Secondly, the difficulty of shifting the guns from the port area suggested that railways should take priority over guns—and indeed that the latter could not be properly exploited without more of the former. Therefore, Russia’s particular need for heavy artillery touched more general sensitivities. It was becoming clear to the Entente that the prosecution of the war might make it impossible to service Russia’s war effort in isolation: Britain and France were being called on to support Russia’s industrialization on a broader front.403

  Albert Thomas visited Russia in May 1916. He returned convinced, as he told Lloyd George, that the Russians had plenty of plant and should be left to sort themselves out. The implication was that Britain should devote any munitions surplus to France rather than to Russia.404

  Neither Lloyd George nor Kitchener was disposed to take this view. But both needed to have a clearer picture as to the true nature of Russia’s needs in order, on the one hand, to fend off the more outrageous Russian demands, and on the other to enable them to handle the French. On the outcome of this mission would also depend allied financial policy in the United States, so much of which was predicated on Russia’s arms orders.

  Both men were obvious candidates for such an embassy, but the Easter Rising in Dublin detained Lloyd George on other business, and Kitchener went alone. The cruiser on which he sailed, HMS Hampshire, struck a mine off the Orkney Islands at 7.45 p.m. on 5 June. Kitchener was drowned.

  The abrupt conclusion to Kitchener’s mission meant that the dilemmas of allied co-ordination in the face of Russia’s demand for arms remained unresolved. But it did at least end the bureaucratic confusion over the administration of orders in London. The War Office’s Russian purchasing committee was wound up, its personnel moving to a Russian supply committee within the Ministry of Munitions, and its purchasing functions being absorbed by the Commission Internationale de Ravitaillement. Furthermore, Lloyd George was appointed Kitchener’s successor at the War Office. Thus, strategic debate was focused where it belonged, and the Ministry of Munitions could concentrate its attention on the business of procurement.

  The political debates over industrial mobilization in the first phases of the war gave each nation’s experience a complexion peculiar to it alone. But the frustration which found a voice in the course of these discussions was very often a manifestation of problems that were common to most of them. All powers, including the United States, experienced delays in production caused by the conversion of industry; all the belligere
nts had to regulate their labour supply and had to harness their scientists in the development of new processes. What is striking is how nearly simultaneous the main troughs and peaks of enhanced munitions production were, regardless of the relative states of industrial development. Thus, beneath the rhetoric the actual achievement of increased output owed less to changing administrative structures and more to continued plugging away by ministries of war, very often operating in established grooves.

  Nevertheless, the political flashpoints mattered. At one level they were part of a debate about whether state collectivism or liberal capitalism was the most appropriate ideology with which to tackle the issue of industrial mobilization. Uniformly, at least at this stage of the war, the answer was compromise. This particular choice was stated most starkly in the autocracies. In Germany Rathenau and Moellendorff put the case for state control, even if the result of their efforts was somewhat different. In Russia the rallying of the Duma to the War Industries Committee testified to the continuing antagonism between liberalism and commerce on the one hand and Tsarism and state enterprise on the other.

  The other dimension was less socio-economic, and was more in evidence in the western democracies of the Entente. The parliamentary assault on Miller and, Lloyd George’s clash with Kitchener—these were symptoms of an effort to curb the powers of the army. The munitions issue was therefore the first phase of a struggle to control and direct strategy. In the second half of the war the tensions of civil-military relations would be played out in different forums—for the Entente in a strategic direction itself, and for the Central Powers in the army’s direction of the inner workings of the state. But no greater evidence could be afforded of the demands which the war was making on its participating societies than the fact that the practical issues of enhanced munitions productivity touched such fundamental political themes.

  Furthermore, by the summer of 1916, although this effort had ensured that the war percolated through to the bowels of the belligerents, it had still not resolved many of the armaments issues which the war had thrown up. Armies had, broadly speaking, either procured more of the same—more field guns and more rifles—or had opted for low-technology solutions, such as grenades and mortars, which were not dependent on the sophisticated plant of the major arms firms. Only Britain had begun to assimilate the massive increase in heavy artillery demanded by position war. This could not be improvised, but was a high-technology option, dependent on sophisticated machine tools of exact specifications and massive weight and size. Russia’s strident call for heavy guns was echoed in cries emanating from all armies in 1916.

  The battle of the Somme would, therefore, create a fresh munitions crisis and demand a further progression in industrial mobilization. Not until then would the Germans coin the word Materialschlacht, a battle of material. Not until then would machines really begin to substitute for men, and so permit a reduction in manpower as a trade-off for the enhancement of firepower. Perhaps it was the last argument of navalism that it was Britain, and not France or Germany, that led the way in this ultimate intensification of continental warfare.405

  12

  CONCLUSION: THE

  IDEAS OF 1914

  Within three months the third Balkan war had embroiled the bulk of the world’s three most populous continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia. It had, moreover, embraced two more, Australia and—via Canada—North America. ‘The war’, Alfred Baudrillart, wrote in his diary on 31 October 1914, ‘is extending to the whole universe.’1

  Baudrillart’s hyperbole reflected the global status of the European powers. Africans found themselves fighting because they were the subjects of Britain, France, Germany, or Belgium, not because they were Africans. Furthermore, London’s primacy as the world’s financial capital and Paris’s status as an international lender meant that even those nations that were formally independent could not remain untouched by the war’s outbreak in 1914. Neutrality in the political sense did not result in immunity from the war’s effects in every other sense. Neither the United States nor China became formal belligerents until 1917, but their domestic politics, their diplomacy, and their wealth were all contingent on the war from its very outset.

  To contend that the war was truly global throughout its duration is, of course, not the same as also saying that its purposes were commensurate with its scale. Indeed, it has been the presumption of hindsight that they were not. The Great War has often been portrayed not as a world war but as a European civil war, a squabble between brothers, united—if only they had realized it—by more than divided them, a struggle where the means were massively disproportionate given the ends.

  The now-considerable literature on war aims reinforces this approach, because it states the objectives of each power in geographical or economic terms. Being drawn up as agendas for peace settlements, war aims—however extensive—rested on the presumption that negotiation would become possible. Their implication is some form of limitation, even if those limits tended to be set far beyond the bounds of acceptability for the enemy and, often, for allies. War aims were a retrospective effort to give shape to something bigger. They did not cause the war. Even those of Germany were developed during the conflict, not before it. The powers of Europe entered the war without clearly defined geographical objectives; if they had, the First World War might indeed have been nearer to the ‘cabinet wars’ of Bismarck or even of the eighteenth century than it was. When the war broke out, it was not a fight for the control of Alsace-Lorraine or Poland or Galicia. It was, as Bethmann Hollweg melodramatically anticipated in 1913, ‘a battle for existence’.2

  Big ideas, however rhetorical, shaped the war’s purpose more immediately and completely than did more definable objectives. ‘The War of 1914 an Oxford classics don, Alfred Zimmern, told an audience from the Workers’ Educational Association at its summer school that year, ‘is not simply a war between the Dual Alliance and the Triple Entente: it is . . . a war of ideas—a conflict between two different and irreconcilable conceptions of government, society and progress.’3 Later that year H. G. Wells published The war that will end war. ‘We fight’, he declared, ‘not to destroy a nation, but to kill a nest of ideas . . . Our business is to kill ideas. The ultimate purpose of this war is propaganda, the destruction of certain beliefs and the creation of others.’4

  Wells was no more a militarist than Zimmern was a Germanophobe. For all Wells’s use of the word ‘propaganda’, his book was not propaganda in the narrowly defined sense: neither he nor Zimmern held the views they did because they were mouthpieces for the British government. In due course the ideas with which they were concerned did indeed become the meat of official propaganda; but their emotional charge derived precisely from the personal conviction that underpinned them. The issues were moral and, ultimately, religious.

  In a sectarian sense, the Thirty Years War was the last great European war of religion. Thereafter notions of just war atrophied, and vindications for the recourse to arms were couched in political and national terms. In the First World War neither alliance was shaped by a clearly defined creed. Muslim and Christian, Catholic and Protestant, were to be found on both sides of the line. Germany stressed its Lutheran credentials within Europe, but became—by virtue of its pact with Turkey—the spokesman for Catholicism in the Holy Land. The same alliance also made it the protector of the Jews. In this case, however, the function was replicated rather than reversed within Europe itself: France, the persecutor of Dreyfus, and Russia, the architect of anti-Semitic pogroms, were Germany’s enemies. Zionism, however, found its advocate in Britain. In confessional terms Britain and Germany should have been aligned. The fact that they were not shattered German theologians like Adolf von Harnack. Their disillusionment was deepened by Britain’s readiness to ally with Shinto Japan and to deploy Hindu troops in Europe. Ernst Troeltsch described the consequences for international Christianity, ‘the religion of the white race’, as ‘a downright catastrophe’.5

  Troeltsch’s despair went
further. The destruction and hatred which the war unleashed seemed to make Christianity itself ‘an alien message from an alien world’. This was not a new lament: its origins were both pre-war and domestic. Church-state relations in many of the belligerent countries were increasingly fraught. Societies had become sufficiently secularized in their pursuit of material progress for church leaders to be tempted to see the war’s advent as divine retribution. For them, the war could be welcomed as a necessary and God-given process of cleansing and rejuvenation.

  Paradoxically, therefore, optimism trod hard on the heels of pessimism. The response of many on mobilization was to turn to religion for guidance and comfort. In Hamburg church attendance rose 125 per cent in August. In Orcival, in France, 4,115 people received communion in 1913 but 14,480 did so in 1914.6 Much of what moved congregations was spiritual and mystical. In a sermon delivered in October 1914 Pastor L. Jacobsköller saw the war as a new Whitsun, the coming of the Holy Ghost ‘like a mighty, rushing wind’.7 God acquired a fresh immediacy, awesome and judging as well as loving and compassionate. Ernst Barlach’s lithograph for Kriegszeit, a weekly magazine, entitled Holy War, showed a robed figure, his identity obscured, with sword poised.8 Its message was ambiguous. Was this a vengeful God, purging the world of decadence and unbelief, or could it be a more partial God, punishing only His chosen people’s foes?

  Much of the rhetoric of holy war delivered from the pulpits of Europe in 1914 opted for the second interpretation. The Solingen Tageblatt on 5 August declared that this is ‘a holy war’: ‘Germany can and is not allowed to lose... if she loses so, too, does the world lose its light, its home of justice’.9 In Britain, the bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, was of the view that ‘the Church can best help the nation first of all by making it realise that it is engaged in a Holy War, and not be afraid of saying so’.10 The cellist Maurice Maréchal, then a 22–yearold music student, wrote to his mother on 2 August 1914 in terms that were more emotive and romantic. He had that day passed Rouen cathedral on his way back home: the building was saying, ‘I am the Glory, I am the Faith, I am France. I love my children, who have given me life, and I protect them.’11