A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (85 page)

But slowly, finally, in ways that could anger minds that wanted not to be disturbed, new voices began to emerge. A poetry and a kind of painting were born that did not deny reality—new and “ugly” expressions of an ugly thing. The new work came from the only possible source: men who had been there. One such man was the German artist Otto Dix, who had volunteered in 1914 in the expectation that war would bring him “tremendous experiences.” Four years of service including fighting in Champagne, the Somme, and Russia changed him and his art profoundly and permanently. “Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: that is what war is,” he wrote. “It is the work of the devil.” He survived and spent the rest of his life putting his horror and disillusionment on canvas. Others—poets first, then writers of fiction—did the same in print. Some of them are still famous today. The Englishmen Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. The German Erich Maria Remarque. Henri Barbusse and Guillaume Apollinaire of France.

And Wilfred Owen, a young teacher who had never attended a university, enlisted in 1915 and was wounded three times before being diagnosed with shell shock and sent to a hospital in Scotland. There he met Sassoon, a captain from the landed gentry who had been decorated for heroism and later sent for treatment rather than being court-martialed for declaring his intention never to fight again. Owen showed his early efforts to write verse to Sassoon, who found them conventional and urged him to deal with what he had actually experienced and what he really felt. This is the most famous result:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Sweet and fitting it is, to die for one’s country. The poems of Lieutenant Wilfred Owen got almost no notice before the war ended. Afterward critics found in them a major voice. Owen never knew. He was killed exactly one week before the war ended, shot while leading his platoon across a canal in Belgium. The telegram reporting his death was delivered to his parents’ door as church bells rang in celebration of the armistice.

Chapter 29

Wars Without Guns

“It would be laughable to depart over fantasies.”

T
HEOBALD VON
B
ETHMANN
H
OLLWEG

I
n the aftermath of Russia’s March Revolution and the failed offensives at Arras and the Chemin des Dames, struggles for power erupted in Petrograd and London. And although for Germany these events had not been the disasters that they were for the Entente, a struggle of the same kind occurred in Berlin too at exactly the same time. Paris, meanwhile, slipped into a deepening gloom, its leadership demoralized and adrift.

The stakes were perhaps highest in Russia. With the tsar deposed, with the tsar’s ministers under arrest and hateful factions battling for control of the provisional government, the Russian nation was faced with the most elemental of political questions. It had to decide not only
who
would govern but
how.
It had to settle on a
form
of government, and on some way of organizing its disintegrating economy. It had to do so in the middle of a war that it was losing, and with few established mechanisms in place. Through the first half of 1917 support for continuing the war remained substantial. Kerensky was saying that the revolution had been in part an angry reaction to rumors that the Romanov government might enter into a separate peace. He and the general staff, though their efforts to mount the offensive promised at Chantilly late in 1916 had ended in chaos, were preparing a more modest campaign for the summer. Resistance, however, was growing, and it was strongest where loyalty was needed most: in the army and the industrial workforce. By late spring more than thirty-five thousand troops were deserting monthly. The home front too remained dangerously turbulent, almost, at times, to the point of anarchy. The recently formed soviets, representing soldiers and sailors and workers, were deeply skeptical of what Kerensky was doing. The Communist Party’s Bolshevik faction, with Lenin now in charge, was increasingly bold in stirring up opposition.

The question for Germany was simpler: who was going to be in control? The contest was singularly unequal. On one side were virtually all the dominant elements of German society, united in opposition to reform of any meaningful kind. Their only real opposition was a single man, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, with the kaiser floating uncertainly between the two camps. Though his own thinking often coincided with Bethmann’s (in 1917 he issued an Easter message endorsing the chancellor’s proposals for electoral reform), he knew himself to be disappearing into the shadows cast by Hindenburg and Ludendorff. The two generals blamed Bethmann for everything. His failure to maintain control of domestic politics, they complained, was eroding the loyalty of the Reichstag. His pursuit of peace negotiations was making Germany look weak and encouraging the Entente to fight on. When strikes broke out in Berlin, they too were Bethmann’s fault.

The result was a standoff that lasted for months. At an April 23 conference, when Hindenburg and Ludendorff demanded approval of a war aims memorandum that declared Germany’s intent to annex large portions of the Balkans as well as parts of Belgium and France, Bethmann did not resist. A week later, however, he placed in the files a note stating that he regarded the memorandum as meaningless because it implied Germany’s ability to dictate terms to the Entente—an outcome that seemed worse than improbable at the time. “I have co-signed the protocol,” he wrote, “because it would be laughable to depart over fantasies.” The ambiguity of his position became public when, in a May 15 speech to the Reichstag, he declared himself to be “in complete accord” with the generals on war aims but also willing to offer Russia a settlement “founded on mutually honorable understanding.” This statement was self-defeating. It deepened Ludendorff’s hostility while at the same time confusing and alienating the increasing number of Reichstag members who understood that the U-boat campaign was failing, wanted a negotiated settlement, and could have provided the chancellor with a base of public support.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff drew their strength from two sources. One was their record of success in the field—a record that reached back to Tannenberg and had raised them to the stature of demigods. The other was the support they received from the richest, most powerful, most conservative elements of German society—groups convinced that only victory could deflect the general population from demanding reform of the entire system at war’s end. This coalition was potent if not entirely stable. But when it pressed for Bethmann’s removal, Kaiser Wilhelm showed surprising strength in resisting. He foresaw that any new chancellor was likely to be Ludendorff’s tool, and that this would be the end of the Bismarckian system. But the pressure was tremendous. Even the kaiser’s wife and Crown Prince Wilhelm were badgering him for the appointment of a new chancellor. And the generals had not played their last card. In contrast to Bethmann and the kaiser, they had the advantage of knowing what they wanted and being willing to do practically anything to get it.

In Britain too the struggle was between the head of the government and the general staff, but beyond that there were few similarities to the situation in Germany. The British political system, being so much more mature than Germany’s, made a military challenge to the government’s control of policy virtually inconceivable—nothing of the kind arose in the course of the war. The struggle was over control of the BEF only, but was no less intense for being limited. The adversaries were Lloyd George, who had always had strong opinions about how the war should be conducted and now as prime minister was subordinate to no one, and Haig and General Sir William Robertson, based in London as chief of the imperial general staff. At issue, as the summer of 1917 began, was the question of what to do with the BEF, which in two and a half years had grown to be among the most powerful armies in history. Lloyd George, his government now enjoying solid public support after a shaky start, remained scornfully skeptical of the generals’ tactics and strategies. Arras and the Chemin des Dames had destroyed whatever inclination he once might have had to leave such matters in the hands of the professionals. He could see no reason to attempt further offensives before American troops were present in large numbers. He continued to push for an Italian offensive while the French and the Russians recovered their strength and the United States translated its potential into an army ready to fight. The generals, inevitably, disagreed.

The importance that Lloyd George attached to the arrival of an American army required, that May, a considerable act of faith. It had not been certain, in the immediate aftermath of Washington’s declaration of war, that the United States would be doing more than sending money, equipment, and ships to its new allies. When the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee declared that “Congress will not permit American soldiers to be sent to Europe,” Wilson quickly proved him wrong, but the president had stunningly little to work with. Until a gradual buildup was authorized in 1916, the U.S. regular army included one hundred and thirty thousand men, which barely put it among the twenty largest armies in the world. It had no tanks, almost no aircraft, and few machine guns in spite of the fact that the machine gun was an American invention. The nation’s distrust of military establishments was reflected in a law limiting the general staff to fifty-five officers, no more than twenty-nine of whom could be based in Washington.

The American army also had no divisions; its largest unit was the regiment. A First Division was hurriedly put together and dispatched to France as a demonstration of the seriousness of Washington’s intentions. Led by General John J. Pershing, a stern West Pointer who had started his career in the Indian wars, it would march through the streets of Paris on July 4 to an ecstatic reception. It was far too small to make a difference and was not trained for combat, however, and no other divisions were ready to follow it.

The difficulties of creating an army capable of making a difference on the Great War’s Western Front are almost impossible to exaggerate. The first draft since the Civil War was put in place, and by mid-1917 every American male between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one (later this would be raised to forty-five) was registered. Thirty-two training camps, each occupying eight to twelve thousand acres and containing fifteen hundred buildings capable of accommodating forty thousand men, were constructed in sixty days. Nearly every noncom in the old regular army was commissioned, and new schools in every specialty from gunnery to baking were brought into existence up and down the East Coast. The Entente was sending combat veterans across the Atlantic to show green American instructors how to teach even greener inductees the arts of modern war. The French tutors specialized in artillery, liaison, tactics, and fortifications, the British in machine guns, bayonets, mortars, sniping, and gas. Managing all this required expanding and restructuring the War Department and general staff even more rapidly than the new camps were thrown together.