Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (96 page)

Alois Löwenstein wrote home in November, reflecting on the fact that his unit had occupied the same positions for four weeks, then added presciently: ‘Curious. We thought we had come for four days. Will the whole war last for four years because we reckoned on four months?’ A sinking sense of the enormity and intractability of their predicament suffused millions of men of the rival armies, sunk into their unlovely earthen homes.

18

Silent Night, Holy Night

The approach of Christmas 1914 prompted profound reflection among the peoples of Europe, both at home and on foreign fields. If they had ever doubted the gravity of the course to which their governments had committed them, they did so no longer. In Vienna, Sigmund Freud, who in July had greeted the struggle with enthusiasm, now wrote with revulsion of ‘these wretched times, this war, which impoverishes as much in spirit as in material goods’. Richard Meinertzhagen, an officer serving with British forces in East Africa, was confused by an amiable truce meeting with the Germans at Tanga: ‘It seemed so odd that I should be having a meal today with people whom I was trying to kill yesterday. It seemed so wrong and made me wonder whether this really was war or whether we had all made a ghastly mistake.’ Helene Schweida wrote from Bremen to her boyfriend serving on the Western Front: ‘Everybody’s mood today is deeply depressed. Even the otherwise happy expectations of the children have been dampened a little.’ Each nation’s civilians dispatched vast quantities of seasonal gifts to its soldiers: the city of Frankfurt’s contributions alone filled fifty rail wagons.

Sobriety characterised year-end press comment. The
Daily Mail
’s editorialist wrote: ‘the Allies in the west have spent the latter half of 1914 in meeting and beating off the German onslaught upon the capital of France. Their task in 1915 is to clear the whole of France of the enemy and to regain Belgium … Their attainment by repeated and incessant attacks when all the military conditions favour the defence will in itself demand from us, as from the Belgians and the French, an enormous effort.’ If such assertions represented a tiptoe towards realism, they fell short of recognition of the view now privately adopted by some senior soldiers, Falkenhayn prominent among them, that forcing an outcome on the battlefield might take years, if it was achievable at all.

To sustain popular support for the war on the German home front, a parade of optimism was deemed essential. The Berlin newspaper
Vossische Zeitung
claimed that it was clear why the German people were bound to win: ‘Stronger nerves! … Stronger nerves in this unprecedented world war will guarantee victory, conferring an advantage in a situation in which the odds are otherwise even.’ Tsar Nicholas had predicted at the outset that it would be very hard to stop a conflict once it began, and this was emphasised by the progressive escalation of all the belligerents’ war aims. A new slogan became popular in Germany, ‘
Siegfrieden
’ – ‘Peace through victory’. This must be a peace dictated by the winners, rather than brokered by negotiation, and the same spirit was evident across much of Europe. Every national leadership wanted the killing – and the vast expenditures – to stop, but only when sufficient gains had been secured to justify the sacrifices of 1914.

Britain and France committed themselves to the destruction of ‘Prussian militarism’, which meant ensuring that post-war Germany would lack the industrial and military means to start another war. They rejected an early attempt at mediation by America’s President Woodrow Wilson, arguing not unreasonably that any outcome which failed to shackle or cripple the
Kaiserreich
merely promised a renewal of the conflict at German convenience. This seems entirely rational, but caused the allies more questionably to conclude that in order to be able to dictate appropriate terms to Berlin, total victory was necessary, followed by punitive economic measures, which were explicitly intended to secure their commercial advantage in the post-war world. President Poincaré favoured the creation of an occupied buffer zone between the Moselle and Rhine. On 21 December Théophile Delcassé, the foreign minister, telegraphed to the Russian government, emphasising France’s commitment: ‘The French army will not limit its effort even to the frontier of Alsace-Lorraine, but will keep marching … until a day when the allied governments can obtain for their nations all legitimate reparations, and institute a new dispensation in Europe which guarantees the peace of the world for many years.’

The converse of this was, of course, that Germans viewed the struggle in existential terms. The words ‘
sein oder nichtsein
’ – ‘to be or not to be’ – were constantly on people’s lips. They anticipated, correctly, that defeat must presage the abasement of their nation. If the war had not begun as a struggle between Western European democracy and Central European conservatism, it had at least partly assumed such a character. The Germans had no initial programme for world domination, but the fact of war caused their leaders both to recognise the dire consequences of defeat and to frame increasingly ambitious schemes to be implemented in the
event of victory. Bethmann Hollweg remained committed to securing political control of Europe by economic means, with only limited territor-ial acquisitions. But many of his foremost compatriots, especially industrialists and bankers, rejected his notions of a mere European customs union, and were insistently enthusiastic about annexations. Falkenhayn in particular, though he had no designs on the Russian Empire, became a ‘maximalist’ on Western issues, with far-reaching designs for permanent conquest.

By the September Declaration of London, the allies had committed themselves not only to forswear separate peace deals, but also to secure common consent for any specific peace condition one party might aspire to impose. Mutual Anglo-French suspicions persisted about rival aspirations for extending post-war empires. There was consternation in Paris when a rumour reached ministers that the British were negotiating for the Japanese to dispatch forces to the Western Front in return for being granted Indochina, jewel of the French colonial empire. It was true that the Western allies were eager to bring a Japanese army to Europe, and that Tokyo rejected this notion in the absence of large incentives; but neither a satisfactory bribe nor any Japanese troops were forthcoming. In November the allies began to consider the distribution of the spoils of the Ottoman Empire once its owners had been beaten on the battlefield, an issue that would precipitate increasingly tortuous Anglo–French negotiations in 1915–16. The French were bent on having Syria. Beyond Britain’s own shopping list, Asquith agreed to meet Russia’s principal demand, that the Tsar should take Constantinople and the Dardanelles.

All the belligerents wrestled for moral high ground. The
Daily Mail
in the last days of the year compared the barbarity of the German naval bombardment of Scarborough with the alleged decency of a British Christmas air attack on naval targets at Cuxhaven (though this had failed to hit anything at all): ‘There are some people who still pretend that, war being essentially inhuman, the more or less of ruthlessness and cruelty injected into its conduct does not matter. The contrast between Cuxhaven and Scarborough is the best answer to their trivial case. It is a contrast which shows that the inevitable miseries of war can, on the one hand, be restrained and limited, without any loss of military advantage, when it is waged by gentlemen and sportsmen, and on the other hand can be indefinitely extended, when it is waged by Germans.’

The atrocities in Belgium and northern France make this claim seem marginally less absurd than does the language in which it was advanced. Although the Western allies made moral compromises, and like all belligerents in every war were guilty of local lapses of conduct, they behaved significantly better than did the Central Powers. In the East the Russians’ persecution of Jews, in 1914 and especially during their 1915 long retreat, constitute a deep blot upon their record. But no major massacres of civilians were ever laid at the door of the British, French or Italians to match those repeatedly committed by the Germans, Austrians and Turks. The Germans later became responsible for recruiting large numbers of Belgian and French men in occupied regions as slave labour, under atrocious conditions. The Central Powers claimed that the allied economic blockade inflicted such privations on their peoples that this too constituted a war crime. It is certainly true that the legality of the blockade, especially as rigorously enforced from 1917 onwards, was disputable. Nevertheless, blockade seems to belong to a different moral order of conduct from the deliberate murder of civilians.

The dominant realities at the year’s end were the failure of either side to achieve a strategic breakthrough in East or West, and the commitments of both to renew offensives as soon as weather conditions and ammunition supplies permitted. While every military leadership was chastened by its experiences of 1914, none was ready to acknowledge outright failure, though Falkenhayn’s personal views will be discussed below. A modest number of ordinary citizens, almost all socialists of varied hues and nationalities, believed that no purpose, honourable or otherwise, could justify the cost. The peacemakers argued that it was preferable to abandon the struggle, whatever the political consequences of doing so, than to persist with the destruction of European manhood, wealth and culture. This view commands widespread popular support in the twenty-first century, but ignores huge practical and moral obstacles.

Machiavelli observed that ‘wars begin when you will, but do not end when you please’. Could any responsible allied government have negotiated with Germany and Austria such a peace as the Kaiser, together with his generals and ministers, sought and continued to seek? Nations which have paid the huge moral, political and financial price for entering a conflict are seldom interested in quitting it as long as they think they might win. Bethmann Hollweg in 1917 became a belated convert to a compromise peace, but was obliged to resign when Ludendorff’s alternative view prevailed, that Germany must continue to strive for victory. It is important to recognise that beyond territorial war aims at the expense of the allies, German leaders were acutely sensitive to their enemy within. A
key factor in Berlin’s original decision to fight had been a desire to crush the perceived domestic socialist menace, by achieving a conspicuous triumph over Germany’s foreign foes. Any outcome that threatened to concede political ascendancy to the socialists – which meant anything less than a clear victory – was unacceptable.

In France and Britain, while many people yearned with increasing fervour for peace, few would have supported a settlement that rewarded the Central Powers – and why should they have been expected to do so? The arguments for resisting German dominance of the continent were no less strong in December than in August, even if the cost had risen steeply. Hundreds of thousands of families had already lost loved ones. It is incontrovertible that the First World War was a catastrophe for Europe. It remains hard to see, however, by what means its statesmen could have extracted themselves from the struggle once it began, in advance of a decision on the battlefield.

It seems mistaken to suppose that, if Britain had unilaterally held aloof or withdrawn, almost certainly making possible the victory of the Central Powers, the consequences would have been benign, even for the narrow self-interest of the subjects of King George V. The ‘poets’ view’, that the alleged merits of the allied cause became meaningless amid the horrors of the struggle and the brutish incompetence of many commanders, has been allowed drastically to distort modern perceptions. Many British veterans in their lifetimes deplored the supposition that Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon spoke for their generation. One such revisionist was Henry Mellersh, who declared that he wholeheartedly rejected the notion ‘that the war was one vast, useless, futile tragedy, worthy to be remembered only as a pitiable mistake’. Instead, wrote the old soldier in 1978, ‘I and my like entered the war expecting an heroic adventure and believing implicitly in the rightness of our cause; we ended greatly disillusioned as to the nature of the adventure but still believing that our cause was right and we had not fought in vain.’

Whether or not a modern reader endorses Mellersh’s view, it was far more widely held by his contemporaries than the ‘futility’ vision of Owen, Sassoon and their kind, none of whom ever outlined a credible diplomatic process whereby the nightmare they so vividly depicted might be ended. Almost every sane combatant recoiled from the miseries of the battlefield, voicing the revulsion articulated by so many soldiers in these pages. But their sentiments should not be misread as indicating that such writers consequently wished to acquiesce in the triumph of their enemies.

How best to avert this? As winter deepened, each belligerent war leadership contemplated the future. A bitter debate raged within the British government about whether to tighten the absurdly loose blockade upon Germany. Lord Fisher and the Admiralty were eager to mine the North Sea, to stem the huge flow of commodities including coal, food and American cotton, which was a key component for explosives manufacture, But Grey and the Foreign Office stubbornly resisted a dispute with the USA, which claimed that sustaining its cotton exports – for instance – was essential to its own economy. The Foreign Secretary and several other ministers also rejected tough policies towards Holland, through which huge quantities of supplies reached Germany. It would be deeply embarrassing, they argued, to act harshly against one neutral nation, having gone to war in support of the sanctity of its neighbour.