Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (99 page)

But goodwill was by no means universal. Yves Congar, the ten-year-old French boy living at Sedan who had welcomed the outbreak of war as a fine excitement, now experienced Christmas in German-occupied territory. He wrote in his diary that night: ‘We hope that next year will be better than the one we’ve just had. It is very cold. Dad is being held hostage overnight. There is no midnight mass … Foreign feet trample the old road and everything is silent and gloomy … It is the rule of the strongest. It is invasion and ruin; it is the cry of the hungry who don’t even have a crust of bread; it is the resentment against the race that pilfers, burns and holds us prisoners; our country is no longer our home, when our cabbages, leeks and all other goods are in the hands of those thieves.’

The British 2nd Grenadiers lost three men killed, two missing and nineteen wounded on Christmas Day; one further man was hospitalised with frostbite, as were a further twenty-two next morning. On 28 December the battalion’s war diary recorded: ‘wet and mud awful. Terrible night. Thunder, hail and rain terrific, very high wind, some sniping.’ In François Mayer’s sector, the Germans in trenches eighty yards distant cried out ‘
Français kaputt!
’ and suchlike. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, they delivered a volley of fire, to which the French replied with a chorus of the
Marseillaise
. Mayer wrote: ‘It was moving to hear all those soldiers throwing their warlike voices back at the bullets which were whistling past. When we fell silent, they cried “Long live the Kaiser!”’ Rival commanders took care that the Christmas truces were never repeated on the same scale in later war years, but proved unable to prevent many informal local understandings – sustained periods of ‘live and let live’ by both sides – which became an enduring feature of the conflict on all fronts.

When the war was over, Austrian Lt. Constantin Schneider looked back on his experiences and remarked upon a phenomenon characteristic of most conflicts, but especially that one, after a man’s phase of initiation had passed: ‘Nothing new happened to me; everything seemed a repetition of sensations experienced before. The war had become a weary business.’ Similarly Seaman Richard Stumpf, serving with the German High Seas Fleet, wrote in his diary just after Christmas 1914: ‘Nothing happens that deserves notice. Shall I describe each day’s duties? Such a record would be identical, day after day.’

On Christmas Eve a French writer named J.J. Chastenet observed in
Le Droit du peuple
that France’s churches had been fuller since August than at any time since the middle of the previous century: ‘people pray out of fear. As more and more people become accustomed to this war … we shall see fewer people return and things will return to normal.’ Chastenet was right. While the first funerals of local war dead attracted attendance by entire village populations, once such events became familiar, congregations dwindled. Earlier in the year, many French rural communities accepted refugees from Belgium and north-west France. By Christmas there were three million such people – a huge burden upon those housing and feeding them. A growing number of towns and villages turned their backs on the outsiders, denouncing them as locusts – dirty or immoral, verminous or unfit for agricultural work.

Back in August local
maires
had solemnly donned their black coats, medals and sashes of office to visit families and announce tragic bereavements. Five months later, many such dignitaries delegated this task to the local teacher. One such, a woman named Marie Plissonier in the Isère village of Lavadens, assumed the former duties of the postman, departed to war, because she seemed the most sympathetic person to deliver ill tidings, such as so often came. She said: ‘People reacted differently, of
course. Some received the news hysterically, but most reacted with a kind of numbed shock, as if they had expected it in some way.’ Thirty of Lavadens’ four hundred conscripted soldiers eventually perished, and over a hundred more were wounded. At the village hall Mme Plissonier also presided over regular teach-ins, at which she explained the progress of the war with the aid of maps and newspapers. Initially these sessions were well attended. Later, however, as the fronts congealed, audiences dwindled and even vanished. One day became much like the last, for civilians at home just as for such men as Constantin Schneider on the battlefield.

By the end of 1914, the war had ceased to seem interesting or rewarding to any but a tiny proportion of its participants; it represented instead a profoundly distasteful duty, borne with varying degrees of stoicism. On the Eastern Front, most Hapsburg and Russian soldiers would have been happy to embrace peace on any terms, though their rulers willed otherwise. Among soldiers in the West, however, for all their dismay about their personal circumstances, few were yet ready to despair of victory or to bow to their enemies’ demands. For a further forty-six months of struggle they displayed a remarkable willingness to suffer, to obey, and if necessary to perish. It seems a conceit on the part of later generations to assert that in doing so, they exhibited oxlike stupidity. To argue that the Western allies should have accepted German hegemony as a fair price for deliverance from the mudscape of Flanders seems as simplistic and questionable a proposition now as it did at the time to most of those who fought for Britain, France and Belgium. And that was what abandoning the war implied. Not until 1918, after suffering defeat on the battlefield, was Germany ready to abandon its brutal occupation of Belgium and eastern France, to forswear its claims to mastery.

Serbia paid a dreadful price for defying Austria in 1914: in the following year the country was overrun by the Central Powers, the remains of its army forced into exile. Yet much later, after losing possession of their country, adherence to the allied cause enabled the Serbs to achieve one of history’s most notable Pyrrhic victories when peace came: they secured their grand ambition, the creation of Yugoslavia, embracing much of the eastern Hapsburg Empire, a state which endured for more than seventy years. Romania too, though it suffered heavily for its 1916 entry into the war on the allied side, gained due rewards at the peace – more lands than it later proved capable of keeping. The Italians embarked on hostilities in 1915 explicitly in pursuit of territorial booty. In 1918 they too received
their share of Hapsburg territory, including the port of Trieste, but these lands cost them 460,000 dead. Russian, Hapsburg and German Poles joined together to proclaim themselves an independent state on 7 October 1918, though they had to fight the Russian Bolsheviks until 1921 to hold their borders. On 28 October 1918 a Czechoslovak republic was declared in Prague, and on 1 November Hungary announced its independence from Austria. Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania also declared themselves independent states.

The United States gained immense economic benefits from selling weapons and goods to the Western allies, and to a lesser degree to Germany, in the first thirty-three months of the struggle. Its entry into the war in April 1917 exercised a critical moral and industrial though marginal military influence on the outcome. The allies were suitably heartened, the Central Powers appropriately dismayed. The American accession of strength more than compensated for the Russians’ retirement from the conflict in March 1918. Japan became the only belligerent to emerge from the struggle with exactly the prizes it sought on joining the allies in 1914, acquired at negligible cost in blood and cash. The Japanese thus had better reason than any other people to celebrate their participation. Among the vanquished, the war cost the Hapsburg Empire 1.5 million military dead, Germany two million, Turkey 770,000. The Wilhelmine Empire became a republic with the fall of the Hohenzollern dynasty, as did Austria with the passing of the Hapsburgs. The British Empire lost more than a million dead, over 800,000 of them from the United Kingdom; the Russian and French empires around 1.7 million apiece. The Bolshevik revolution extinguished the Romanovs, leaving Britain’s George V as the only major imperial ruler in Europe.

Posterity has puzzled endlessly over how the leaderships of the world’s greatest powers, mostly composed of men no more stupid or wicked than their modern counterparts, could first have allowed the war to happen, then continued it for four more years. It seems mistaken to brand the 1914 rulers of Europe, and especially those of Austria and Germany, as sleepwalkers, because that suggests unconsciousness of their own actions. It is more appropriate to call them deniers, who preferred to persist with supremely dangerous policies and strategies rather than accept the consequences of admitting the prospective implausibility, and retrospective failure, of these. The most important immediate cause of the First World War was that Germany chose to support an Austrian invasion of Serbia,
believing that the Central Powers could win any wider conflict such action might unleash. The Tsar, his ministers and generals may justly be branded foolish, even reckless, for dooming their own precarious polity by going to war for Serbia, but they reacted to an Austrian initiative, for which moral opprobrium must rest in Vienna. A critical force in precipitating disaster was the institutional hubris of the German army, embodied in the inadequate person of Moltke. A yearning for a decisive outcome in place of successive inconclusive crises suffused the conduct of Vienna and Berlin – and in lesser degree, also that of St Petersburg and Paris.

Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the vast effort lavished upon wartime propaganda, within a decade of the armistice the British body politic which took the nation to war conspicuously lost the confidence of many of those who fought it. Soldiers, especially, recoiled from what they saw as the moral debility of the society to which they returned. Some extended this alienation to the cause for which the struggle had been conducted. The author’s grandfather, former gunner officer Rolfe Scott-James, reported an old comrade saying in 1923: ‘Some of us can’t help thinking that we fought the war for nothing.’ Scott-James added: ‘There was none of the rage of despair in the speaker’s voice. His slight shrug of the shoulder simply expressed his sense of disillusion.’ At that time, this was still a minority opinion, in comparison to the faith of Henry Mellersh and his kind, cited above. But in the decades that followed, ever more people embraced the view that the enemies against whom Britain and its allies took up arms had not been worth fighting, as were the Nazis a generation later. These contrasting views were surely powerfully influenced by the fact that the soldiers of 1918 returned from France to a dismayingly unreformed society, which offered them only the most barren fruits of victory, while those of 1945 came home to a Labour government committed to creating the Welfare State. In the twenty-first century, most British people remain extravagantly triumphalist about their nation’s role in the Second World War, while seeming extravagantly eager to dismiss the arguments for resisting German aggression in 1914.

The case still seems overwhelmingly strong that Germany bore principal blame. Even if it did not conspire to bring war about, it declined to exercise its power to prevent the outbreak by restraining Austria. Even if Berlin did not seek to contrive a general European conflagration, it was willing for one, because it believed that it could win. The greatest mistake of the German leaders was to view their grand ambitions through the prism of warriors, supposing that power could be secured and increased
only through battle, and grossly underrating their country’s economic and industrial might. The Kaiser, Bethmann Hollweg and Moltke attempted a stroke of Bismarckian ruthlessness and magnificence, such as Bismarck himself would never have made.

Once the struggle had begun, it would be entirely mistaken to suppose, as do so many people in the twenty-first century, that it did not matter which side won. The allies imposed a clumsy peace settlement at Versailles in 1919, but if the Germans had instead been dictating the terms as victors, European freedom, justice and democracy would have paid a dreadful forfeit. Germany adopted territorial war aims in the course of the First World War which were not much less ambitious than those favoured by its ruler in the Second. It thus seems quite wrong to describe the undoubted European tragedy of 1914–18 as also futile, a view overwhelmingly driven in the eyes of posterity by the human cost of the military experience. If the
Kaiserreich
did not deserve to triumph, those who fought and died in the ultimately successful struggle to prevent such an outcome did not perish for nothing, save insofar as all sacrifice in all wars is just cause for lamentation.

‘Dreadnoughts have no wheels!’: German and Austrian officers savour the Supreme Warlord’s wit.