In Europe (18 page)

In the eyes of Vera Brittain, the American soldiers looked like ‘Tommies in heaven … so godlike, so magnificent, so splendidly unimpaired in comparison with the tired, nerve-racked men of the British Army’. The military strategists were less euphoric. It would, they expected, take at least a year to mobilise the four million Americans promised and ship them to Europe.

At first, therefore, the German commanders were not too worried. They themselves had dragged America into the war with their ‘unlimited submarine war’, and they planned to apply those same submarines to make troop transports from the United States virtually impossible. In addition, the war on the Eastern Front was going swimmingly. From as early as autumn 1916, the Russian Army had been crippled by massive
mutinies, the czar had abdicated in March 1917, and the soldiers remained restless. In November the revolutionaries had seized power, the Russian Front collapsed and, on 3 March, 1918, a peace treaty was signed at Brest-Livotsk. The Germans had achieved half of their original objectives, albeit three years later than planned.

By then Germany held almost half of all the Russian territory west of Moscow. In the months that followed, the remaining divisions would push back the borders even further, all the way to the Caucasus. Never had Germany controlled territories to the East as extensive as those they held in summer 1918. Its troops freed, Austria had delivered the Italians a crushing defeat at Caporetto in October 1917, a traumatic event that left a profound scar on Italian history. Germany and Austria were confident of their success. On 20 March, 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Army opened a regular air connection between Vienna and Kiev, the first of its kind in Europe. In that same week, three giant cannons specially designed and manufactured by Krupp fired their first rounds on Paris, from more than a hundred kilometres distant. More than 250 Parisians were killed. The kaiser gave German schoolchildren a ‘victory day’ off.

Then began a race against the clock: the Germans had to move as many units as possible from east to west before the Americans finished building up their intervention force. During the first weeks of 1918, General Erich Ludendorff promised the kaiser that Paris would lie at his feet by early April. And indeed, the great German spring offensive of 1918 broke straight through the French lines. The battlefield was covered in a thick fog of chlorine gas, phosgene and tear gas. Flame-throwers were used. Of the men directly in the path of the flames, an English eyewitness wrote ‘nothing more was ever seen’.

‘We lived in great fear, like a miserable little bird waiting beneath a leaf for a huge thunderstorm to break loose,’ Barthas wrote of those days.

The Germans were finally halted less than sixty kilometres from Paris. On 2 June, a young fighter pilot by the name of Hermann Göring received a medal for having shot down eighteen Allied planes. The German aircraft industry was now producing 300 planes a month. On 8 July, Wilhelm II dismissed his minister of foreign affairs for having had the nerve to speak of a peace that would be achieved by means other than military alone.

Ludendorff launched his new offensive along the Marne on 14 July, using every division at his disposal. Berlin expected Paris to capitulate within days, and the Allies to sue for peace within months. But Ludendorff's attack was blocked by a French ruse: they had dug fake trenches, and lured the Germans into wasting munitions. What the Germans had failed to anticipate above all, however, was the fierceness of the newly arrived American troops. ‘Retreat?’ their legendary captain Lloyd Williams is reported to have said. ‘Hell, we just got here!’

Each month now, a quarter of a million fresh, healthy and well-trained Americans arrived at the front. After four days, the Germans retreated. On 15 July, Berlin was still dreaming of Paris. ‘By the 18th, even the greatest optimist among us knew that all was lost,’ Georg van Herling wrote in his diary. ‘The history of the world was played out in three days.’

After that began the Allied counteroffensive, aided with a new weapon that defied all trenches: the tank. German morale collapsed. The figures speak for themselves: until late July 1918, the monthly tally of German prisoners of war was less than 4,000, by August that had become 40,000, and by September 70,000.

In the Balkans, too, the tide had turned. As early as 1915, the dynamic British naval minister, Winston Churchill, had tried to open a new front along the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, a failure that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, including Irfan Orga's father. But in summer 1918 the Turkish and Bulgarian defences collapsed anyway. Central Europe was now open to the Allied armies from the south-east.

In short, the German generals simply could no longer fight on. The failure of the spring offensive, Spanish flu, fear of the dozens of new American divisions, the Balkans, the revolution that came sweeping in from the East: enough was enough. Supplies of food and munitions stagnated. Officers were increasingly forced to send their men into the fray at gunpoint. At railway stations, where it was more difficult to keep an eye on them, huge numbers of German soldiers regularly disappeared.

In the end, the war stopped as suddenly as it had started four years earlier. By late September 1918, Ludendorff realised that Germany was in dire straits. Within the space of a few days he ‘arranged’ a new, social-democrat government, thereby saving the army and his generals’ honour.
On 29 September he reported to Kaiser Wilhelm that the war had been lost. In late October, during the Austro-German conference in Vienna, the 500-year-old Austro-Hungarian monarchy was disbanded. The new emperor, Karel I, promised autonomy to his realm's major national minorities – the Hungarians, the Czechs and the peoples of the Balkans. Shortly afterwards, he abdicated. But it was already too late. The nationals had seized power. Czech, Polish, Croatian, German and Hungarian regiments deserted. On 3 November, Austria announced a ceasefire. Germany followed suit just over a week later.

Driving north today from Compiègne one sees countryside flat as a prairie, with hills along the distant horizon. Behind those hills lies the famous forest where the armistice was signed in a railway carriage in November 1918. These days the spot is good for a Sunday afternoon walk, and nothing more, and the historic site is now a park. Then it was a dense and rugged forest with two sets of tracks running through it for the transport of heavy artillery, an ideal place for two trains to meet undisturbed.

Germany arrived flying the white flag of truce. Its raw materials were depleted, the national industry had now also been struck hard by Spanish flu, its soldiers were deserting by the thousand. A few days earlier, in Munich, the Free Bavarian People's Republic had been established after the king of Bavaria had fled. In Berlin, demonstrations were a daily occur-rence. The red flag had been raised over Cologne after a group of sailors had seized power there. Kaiser Wilhelm stood shivering on a station platform at the border town of Eijsden, waiting to be admitted to the Netherlands.

Around the historic railway carriage – the same one in which Hitler, in turn, accepted France's capitulation on 20 June, 1940 – a museum has now been built. I see a half smoked, petrified cigar once puffed on by Marshal Foch. Visitors can peek through a window at the famous table where the gentlemen signed the agreement. Funny, though: this railway carriage looks awfully neat and new! Only then does it begin to dawn on me that this is all replicated history. Hitler took the original wagons-lit, number 2419D, to Berlin in June 1940, from where it was towed to the Black Forest at the end of the war. There, on the night of 2 April,
1945, that symbol of German humiliation was set ablaze by SS troops. There was not to be a third Compiègne.

Two trains, therefore, in a boring stand of trees on a drizzly November day. The German delegation requested the cessation of all military operations, because Germany was faced with a revolution. This was news to Foch, and it strengthened his resolve not to discuss any compromise whatsoever. The Germans had no choice but to accept the Allied conditions. When they heard those conditions they were deeply shocked and raised a futile plea for a joint European struggle against the revolution and Bolshevism, but Foch was having none of it:‘Your country is suffering from the malady of the vanquished; Western Europe can defend itself against the danger of which you speak.’ Halfway through the morning of 11 November, 1918, the armistice was announced.

Louis Barthas heard the news in the barracks at Vitré. ‘Not a single soldier remained in his room. They ran down the corridors like madmen, to the police post where a telegram had been hung up. In two laconic sentences, the telegram announced the liberation of millions of people, the end of their torment and their return to civilian life.’ Vera Brittain wrote: ‘When the sound of victorious guns burst over London at 11 a.m. on 11 November, 1918, the men and women who looked incredulously into each other's faces did not cry “We've won the war!” They only said “The war is over.”’

In Berlin, Harry Kessler wandered through the empty rooms of the plundered imperial palace. He was amazed by the tasteless knick-knacks on the floor and the nationalistic kitsch still on the walls. ‘So it was out of this ambience that the world war was born.’ He was not angry at the looters, but above all amazed at the mediocrity of the rulers who had collected this rubbish and believed in it.

After hearing the news, Robert Graves walked alone along a peaceful Embankment, ‘cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead’.

In a little more than four years the First World War, which had begun so airily in the summer of 1914, had put an end to at least half a dozen monarchies and two empires: the Habsburg and the Ottoman. The optimism of the Enlightenment, the silent hope that everything would gradually become
better, had been extinguished for good. The Western European democracies were put under heavy duress; totalitarian ideologies – communism, fascism and National Socialism – had free rein.

The First World War was the product of a disastrous chemical reaction: the combination of a young, unstable and ambitious German nation with the unheard-of power of modern weaponry. It was the first industrial war, a war of machine guns, grenades, mines and gas, a war that was no longer seen as a heroic struggle but as a machine that could be stopped by nothing and no one. It was also the first total war, a war involving not only armies, but entire societies. In this new century, the military system proved to be fully intertwined with industry and peoples. Armaments and supplies were refreshed on the production line, the wounded and dead replaced en masse by new troops. Winning battles had long ceased to be enough; the whole enemy society had to be brought to its knees by blockades, starvation and other means.

The enormous debts incurred in the war would sour international relations for decades. In France the war became a national obsession, a source of pessimism and insecurity. The British Empire, four years earlier the most secure and powerful realm in Western history, emerged from the war in financial ruins. As late as 1965, the British treasure was still reserving one per cent of tax revenues to repay the war loans it had received from America. Thanks to the war, however, a number of other countries saw their welfare and gold reserves significantly increase: America (by £278 million) and Japan (£183 million), in particular, but also Spain (£84 million), Argentina (£49 million) and the Netherlands (£41 million).

More than 70 million soldiers had fought on the Eastern and Western fronts, 9.4 million (or 13.5 per cent) of them were killed and 15.4 million were wounded. It was a truly world war: more Australians, and almost twice as many Canadians, fought in it than Belgians. About 3 million soldiers had been brought in from throughout the British Empire, and more than 4 million from the United States. The fighting in Africa had been bitter as well: all of the British, French, German and Belgian colonies, all over the continent, were involved. More than 2 million Africans took part in the conflict, mostly as bearers of weapons, food and the wounded.

In Europe, a whole generation was marked by the war: 13 million
young Germans fought in it (of whom 2 million – or 15.4 per cent – were killed), 7.8 million Frenchmen (1.3 million, 16.7 per cent), 5.7 million Britons (0.7 million, 12.3 per cent), 350,000 Belgians (38,000, 10.8 per cent), 15.7 million Russians (1.8 million, 11.5 per cent), 9 million Austro-Hungarians (1.1 million, 12.2 per cent) and 750,000 Serbs (280,000, 37.3 per cent). Of the 3 million Turks who followed the drum-beat to war, 800,000 – more than a quarter – never returned.

In many European families, decades went by with no return to normal family life. Germany alone had more than half a million war widows, most of whom never remarried. In the average French village, one out of every five young men was killed in the war. For years, street life was characterised by what was referred to in those days as ‘broken faces’. The homes themselves were ruled by ‘destroyed men’ and ‘wounded patriarchs’. Only one out of every three soldiers returned more or less unharmed.

I am reminded of the scene sketched by Joseph Roth of a mass demonstration of war invalids in Lviv, Galicia, shortly after the war:

Today there are Japanese tourists walking around in the Great Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where the final peace treaty was signed on 28 June, 1919. The carpets and furnishing spread a faint, elderly odour of piss. The mood at the time, the youthful British diplomat Harold Nicolson wrote,
was like that at a wedding: no applause, but no solemn silence either.