A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (93 page)

Georg von Hertling
Aspired to be
“the reconciliation chancellor.”

Fresh good news came from the Eastern Front: by Christmas the Germans and Russians had agreed to a thirty-day armistice during which negotiations would proceed, and Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky arrived at Brest-Litovsk to take charge of the Russian delegation. But this development was balanced by trouble behind the lines. On January 14 cuts in bread and flour rations ignited strikes across Austria. Seven hundred and fifty thousand workers went out, including hundreds of thousands in Vienna, and they demanded not just food but peace. The disorder spread to warships in Austria-Hungary’s Adriatic ports and to Germany’s Kiel naval base, where authorities apprehended the protest leaders and inducted them into the army. The intensity of the discontent, and the extent to which the dissidents were organized, became clear when the executive committee of a Workers Council issued a January 27 call for a general strike and as many as a million German workers (exact numbers, in these matters, remain impossible to establish) went out the next day. Many of the strikers were munitions workers, which made the walkout intolerable to the military authorities. Equally intolerable—and deeply troubling—was the political content of the strikers’ rhetoric. The Workers Council, echoing its allies in the Reichstag, called for “the speedy conclusion of peace without annexations and indemnities, on the basis of self-determination of peoples.” After a week of street violence in which a number of people were killed, the strike was not settled but crushed by the army. Forty thousand strikers, supporters, and family members were arrested. Between thirty-five hundred and six thousand of the leaders were inducted into military service and told they were bound for the front. In the eyes of conservatives and even moderate elements of the German public, Ludendorff and the army had preserved law and order. The episode heightened Ludendorff’s sense that the home front was dangerously unstable, that the war had to be won before the urban rabble became absolutely unmanageable and the nation’s resolve was destroyed.

Leon Trotsky
Gave up on negotiations with Germany.

He found additional reason for concern when, on February 11, liberal members of the Reichstag issued a statement calling for a
political
offensive against Great Britain—emphatically not a
military
offensive—“including an unequivocal declaration of the sovereignty and integrity of Belgium.” This statement served as a highly unofficial (and officially repudiated) response to a January speech in which Lloyd George had suggested a willingness to accept a negotiated settlement. Lloyd George had not been looking for a response—the purpose of his speech was not to get negotiations started but to persuade the British labor unions that responsibility for the continuation of the war lay with Berlin—and Ludendorff was not wrong in regarding the whole affair as meaningless. He remained confident that Germany could come out of the war as master of Belgium and more
if
his domestic adversaries were not permitted to deflect him from the victories that lay ahead.

On January 21, after a tour of the Western Front, Ludendorff announced his decision. The attack would be at St. Quentin, in Picardy east of the old Somme battleground at the juncture of the British and French lines. This was not the attack he really wanted—that would have been farther north. But Flanders would have to wait until it was sure to be dry enough not to suck the Germans into another Passchendaele. St. Quentin presented no such danger. It would be code-named “St. Michael” after the sword-bearing archangel who was patron saint of the German Reich. By forcing Haig to shift his reserves southward it would, according to Ludendorff’s plan, set the British up for a later pair of Flanders offensives, St. George One and Two.

Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria was puzzled by the Michael plan (the “St.” prefix was soon abandoned). An intelligent and skillful army group commander, a descendant through his mother of the Stuart kings of England, he asked what its strategic objective was supposed to be. “We make a hole and the rest will take care of itself,” Ludendorff replied. “That’s how we did it in Russia.” It was not an answer that many strategists, thinking calmly, would have found satisfactory.

Wetzell had offered a word of caution before the question was closed. If Michael went ahead, he suggested, it should be kept within strict limits. If the troops succeeded in breaking through, the generals should be content to allow the resulting threat to draw the British reserves down from Flanders. The advance should
not
continue into the tangled wasteland that the Battle of the Somme had created and that the Germans had made worse with their scorched-earth withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line.

Ludendorff disregarded this advice.

Background

KAISER WILHELM II

ALTHOUGH WILHELM II HAD ACTUALLY
DONE
VERY LITTLE
to ignite the war (his biggest contribution was a careless failure to restrain the Austrians at the outset, and he tried to reverse course as soon as he understood the danger), the war might never have happened if not for what he was.

That was the story of his life. In the quarter of a century between his becoming emperor and the outbreak of hostilities, he had accomplished almost nothing. If Germany flourished in almost every sphere from economics to the arts, its success was not his doing. But his personality had cast an unsettling shadow across Europe all the same, alienating powerful neighbors, increasing Germany’s isolation, and worsening the tangle of ambition and fear that finally drew all the Great Powers into the abyss.

To take a word from Wilhelm II and the Germans, a penetrating psychoanalytic study by Professor Thomas A. Kohut of Williams College, the kaiser’s personality was “fractured.” It made him an immensely complicated, dangerously unstable, deeply damaged public figure, sometimes appealing but more often offensive, full of bluster and swagger but terribly insecure, intelligent but only in superficial and unreflective ways, made up of parts that never formed a coherent whole. He was “one of those strange figures in history whose personalities have had more effect on the course of affairs than their deeds.”

The kaiser’s complexities rose partly out of his ancestry. The grandson on the paternal side of modern Germany’s first emperor, on the maternal side of the majestic Victoria who was Queen of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India, he was heir to two awesome and radically different traditions. Britain at the time of his birth was not quite a democracy by today’s standards, but it was a distinctly liberal society in which most political power resided in Parliament and the monarch was well along the path to becoming a revered figurehead. Hohenzollern Prussia on the other hand, and the empire that Prussia created when Wilhelm was still a boy, were autocracies that concentrated nearly all power in the crown. England had long been the richest country on the planet and the center of the world’s greatest empire, and it possessed all the assurance that came from generations of dominance. Germany by contrast, after centuries of fragmentation and weakness, was a newcomer to the world stage. Like an overgrown adolescent it was both surprised by and overly proud of its new strength, unsure of itself, often unsure of how to behave. It had an inferiority complex that made it quick to respond resentfully to trivial, even imaginary, slights.

All this was made personal for the boy Wilhelm by his parents, the character of their marriage, and their unhappy destinies. Princess Victoria of Britain (Queen Victoria’s eldest child) and Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia and Germany were an attractive, intelligent, and well-intentioned couple who unquestionably loved each other and their many children. Despite the immense advantages with which they began, however, their lives and careers were tragic. Vicky, as she was known in the family, was a strong-willed and opinionated young woman who had been raised by her parents—especially by her adored father Prince Albert, who had begun life as a member of provincial German royalty—to regard English culture and England’s liberal political traditions as pinnacles of human achievement. When she went to Berlin as Fritz’s teenage bride, she did so with a self-imposed mission: to transform the backward Germans and their feudal politics into a mirror image of enlightened Britain. She made little effort to conceal her disdain for her new home, making herself an object of distrust not only to the Junker establishment but to her in-laws.

It was part of Fritz’s tragedy that, though he played a distinguished part in Prussia’s victories over Austria and France, he not only accepted his wife’s attitudes and aspirations but allowed himself to be so completely dominated by her as to become an object of contempt in official Berlin, a male-chauvinist society if ever there has been such a thing. He lost the confidence of his father, the king-emperor, and of Chancellor Bismarck, who came to see him as the mere instrument of his wife’s dangerous notions. The couple’s first son, Willy, was therefore from earliest childhood pulled in two directions. His mother wanted desperately for him to become another Prince Albert, an English gentleman of German origin, a progressive and reformist liberal. But the world in which he was raised—his grandfather the emperor most definitely included—was equally determined to ensure that he grew up to become a worthy heir to the long line of Prussian warrior-kings. The court looked to him to display a proper Hohenzollern hatred for anything tainted with such decadent abominations as liberalism or, even worse, an even quasi-democratic sharing of power.

The difficulties of the child’s situation were made worse by serious physical disabilities. He nearly died during a horrendously difficult breech birth from which he emerged with the muscles, tendons, and nerves of his left shoulder nearly destroyed. His arm and hand were paralyzed, and his upper torso and neck were affected to such an extent that in early childhood he could neither walk normally nor hold his head consistently upright. Throughout his life he would be incapable of dressing himself or cutting his food. It is possible though not provable that he suffered minor brain damage as a result of oxygen deprivation during the birth ordeal.

Little Willy’s deformities made him an object of concern for the Hohenzollern family and court. For his mother, they were a nightmare. The princess was laden with guilt over having produced so defective an heir. Still a teenager when her son was born, she was unable to conceal her horror from the child. “He would really be so pretty,” she wrote mournfully to her mother in England, “if not for [the birth damage].” Inevitably if unintentionally, she implanted in him the conviction that he was not what he should be. This message was reinforced by the Hohenzollern inner circle. A great-uncle declared sternly that “a one-armed man should never be king of Prussia.”

His mother hoped desperately to make the boy whole. He underwent years of treatment that, however well intentioned, was not far from torture. His limp left arm was regularly wrapped in the body of a freshly killed hare to warm it. Electric current was applied in an effort to stimulate muscle growth. For an hour each day he was locked into a brace that forced his head upright against the resistance of stiffening muscles and tendons. Ultimately, tendons on one side of his neck had to be severed to correct his distorted posture and facial expressions.

The child was unable to stay atop a horse—an inconceivable failing in a Hohenzollern heir. And so, weeping, he was forced to mount and fall and remount and fall again until finally, after weeks of agony and humiliation, he became the skilled and confident horseman that he would be throughout his reign. It was a splendid achievement for a small boy, but he does not appear to have received praise for it. The same iron discipline was applied in all his early training: his education had been entrusted to a taskmaster, the cold and distant Herr Hinzpeter, who not only demanded a round-the-clock Spartan regimen but believed that praise corrupted the soul. Thus Willy’s hunger for approval, for assurance that he was not a misfit, remained totally unsatisfied. Out of that hunger there grew a habit of covering his self-doubts with bravado and responding with wrath to even the appearance of rejection.