The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (104 page)

The German advance slowed and then stopped in the face of Allied resistance. By the start of September the balance was tilting against Germany and the Allies were far from defeat. On 9 September Moltke ordered the German armies in France to withdraw to the north and regroup and two days later he gave a general order for a retreat all along the line. This, although he could not know it at the time, was the end of the Schlieffen Plan and Germany’s chance to defeat France quickly. On 14 September the Kaiser relieved him of his duties on the grounds of health.

The Germans and the Allies each made desperate last attempts to outmanoeuvre the other that autumn. The losses mounted but victory remained elusive. By the end of 1914 265,000 French soldiers were dead and the British had lost 90,000 men. Some German regiments had taken 60 per cent casualties; the German army had lost 80,000 men in the fighting around the Flemish town of Ypres in October alone.
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As winter approached, the armies on each side dug in expecting to resume their attacks in the spring. Little did they know that the temporary trenches they dug from the Swiss border across the eastern and
northern frontiers of France and into Belgium would grow deeper, stronger, and more elaborate and would last until the summer of 1918.

On the Eastern Front, because the distances were so much greater, the network of trenches never developed to the same extent or grew as impermeable, but again the power of the defence to blunt attacks was all too clearly apparent in the opening months of the war. Austria-Hungary suffered major reverses but Russia proved unable to win a decisive victory. In the first four months of the war Austria-Hungary had suffered a total of nearly a million casualties. Although Germany, contrary to what Schlieffen and his successors had expected, had gone on the attack to defeat two Russian armies in the Battle of Tannenberg, victory on the battlefield did not bring the end of the war. Both Russia and its enemies had the resources and the determination to fight on.

There is a story, which may even be true. Ernest Shackleton, the great polar explorer, set off for the Antarctic in the autumn of 1914. When he finally made his way back to the whaling station on South Georgia Island in spring of 1916 he reportedly asked who had won the European war and was amazed to be told that it was still going on. Industries, national wealth, labour, science, technology, even the arts had all been harnessed to the war effort. Europe’s progress, which it had celebrated so proudly at the Paris Exposition of 1900, had enabled it to perfect the means to mobilise its great resources in order to destroy itself.

The opening stages set the dreadful pattern for the next years: attacks were blunted time and again, as the defenders’ guns poured out their lethal fire. The generals tried repeatedly to break the deadlock with massive offensives which led to equally massive casualties; fronts, especially in the west, where the terrain was churned up by explosives, were pitted with shell holes and criss-crossed by barbed wire, and the lines scarcely moved. And as the war dragged on, it consumed lives on a scale we find hard to imagine. In 1916 alone Russia’s summer offensive produced 1.4 million casualties; 400,000 Italians were taken prisoner in Conrad’s offensive in the Dolomites against Italy; and there were 57,000 British casualties on 2 July, the first day of the Somme, and by the battle’s end in November 650,000 Allied dead, wounded or missing along with 400,000 Germans. At Verdun, the struggle between France and Germany for control of the fortress may have cost the French
defenders over 500,000 casualties and the German attackers more than 400,000. By the time the war ended on 11 November 1918, sixty-five million men had fought and eight and a half million had been killed. Eight million were prisoners or simply missing. Twenty-one million had been wounded and that figure only included the wounds that could be measured; no one will ever know how many were damaged or destroyed psychologically. By comparison, 47,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam and 4,800 coalition troops in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The war, initially European, soon became global. From the start the empires had automatically been involved. No one stopped to ask the Canadians or the Australians, the Vietnamese or the Algerians whether they wanted to fight for the imperial powers. To be fair, many did. In the ‘white’ dominions, where many still had family ties to Britain, it was simply assumed that the mother country must be defended. More surprisingly, Indian nationalists, many of them, rallied to Britain’s support. The young radical lawyer Mahatma Gandhi helped the British authorities recruit Indians for the war effort. Other powers gradually chose sides. Japan declared war on Germany at the end of August 1914 and took the opportunity to seize German possessions in China and the Pacific. The Ottoman Empire threw in its lot with Germany and Austria-Hungary two months later and Bulgaria joined them in 1915. That was the last ally the Central Powers acquired. Rumania, Greece, Italy, several Latin American countries and China eventually joined the Allies.

In the United States there was initially no strong support for either side in a conflict which seemed to have little to do with American interests. ‘Again and ever I thank God for the Atlantic Ocean’, wrote Walter Page, the American ambassador in London. The elites, liberals and those on the eastern seaboard or with family ties to Britain inclined towards the Allies but a significant minority, perhaps as much as a quarter of Americans, were of German descent. And the large Irish Catholic minority had strong reason to hate Britain. As the war started Wilson tore himself from his wife’s deathbed to give a press conference at which he proclaimed the United States would remain neutral. ‘I want’, he said, ‘to have the pride of feeling that America, if nobody else, has her self-possession and stands ready with calmness of thought and
steadiness of purpose to help the rest of the world.’ It took German policies, or more specifically those of the high command, to goad Americans out of their neutrality. In 1917 the United States, infuriated by German submarine attacks on its shipping and by the news, which the British obligingly passed on to Washington, that Germany was trying to persuade Mexico and Japan to attack the United States, entered the war on the Allied side.

By 1918, the combined forces of their enemies were too much for the Central Powers and one by one they sued for peace until Germany at last made its request for an armistice. When the guns fell silent on 11 November, it was in a very different world from that of 1914. Across Europe the old fissures in society which had been temporarily papered over at the start of the conflict had re-emerged as the war had dragged on, imposing its increasingly heavy burdens. As social and political unrest spread, old regimes floundered, unable to maintain the trust of their publics or meet their expectations. In February 1917 the tsarist regime finally collapsed and the weak provisional government which succeeded it was in turn ousted ten months later by a new type of revolutionary force, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks. To save his regime, which was under attack by his political rivals and the remnants of the old order, Lenin made peace with the Central Powers at the start of 1918, ceding them huge swathes of Russian territory in the west. While Russians fought Russians in a bitter civil war, the peoples subjugated to the Russian Empire took the opportunity to escape. Poles, Ukrainians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Finns, Estonians and Latvians, all enjoyed, some only briefly, their independence.

Austria-Hungary fell to pieces in the summer of 1918, its nationality problems finally too much for it. Its Poles joined with those who were suddenly freed from Russia and Germany to create, for the first time in over a century, a Polish state. Czechs and Slovaks came together in an uneasy marriage to form Czechoslovakia while the Dual Monarchy’s South Slavs in Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia joined with Serbia to form a new state that would be known as Yugoslavia. Hungary, much reduced by the loss of Croatia and by the peace settlements after the war, became an independent state while what was left of the Habsburg territories became the little state of Austria. Of the other Central Powers, Bulgaria too had its revolution and Ferdinand, foxy to the last, abdicated in
favour of his son. The Ottoman Empire also collapsed; the victorious Allies stripped it of its Arab territories and most of what was left in Europe, leaving only the Turkish heartland. The last of the Ottoman sultans slipped quietly away into exile in 1922 and a new secular ruler, Kemal Ataturk, set about creating the modern state of Turkey.

As Germany’s armies met defeat in the summer of 1918, the German public, which had been kept in the dark by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who now dominated the civilian government, reacted angrily against the whole regime. For a time, as sailors and soldiers mutinied and workers’ councils seized control of local governments, it looked as though Germany might follow Russia’s path. A reluctant Kaiser was forced to abdicate at the start of November 1918 and a new republic was proclaimed by the socialists who, it turned out, managed to check the revolution.

Although the victorious powers had their share of upheavals – there were violent strikes and demonstrations in France, Italy, and Britain by 1918 – the old order held there, for the time being. But Europe collectively was no longer the centre of the world. It had spent down its great wealth and exhausted its power. The peoples of its empires who had largely acquiesced in rule from outside were stirring, their confidence that their foreign masters knew best shaken irremediably by the four years of savagery on Europe’s battlefields. New nationalist leaders, many of them soldiers who had witnessed for themselves what European civilisation could produce, demanded self-government now and not in some far-off future. Britain’s ‘white’ dominions were content to stay within the empire but only on the condition that they had increased autonomy. New players from outside Europe were taking a greater part in world affairs. In the Far East, Japan had grown in both power and confidence and dominated its neighbourhood. Across the Atlantic the United States was now a major world power, its industries and farms stimulated to even more growth by the war and with New York increasingly the centre of world finance. Americans saw Europe as old, decadent and finished – and many Europeans agreed with them.

The war had not just destroyed much of Europe’s heritage and millions of its people but it had brutalised many of those who survived. The nationalist passions which sustained Europeans during the war had also led to the wanton killing of civilians, whether by Germans in Belgium,
the Russians in Galicia or the Austrians in Bosnia. Occupying armies had rounded up civilians for forced labour and driven out those of the ‘wrong’ ethnicity. After the war, in much of Europe politics were marked by violence, with frequent assassinations and pitched battles between opposing parties. And the new intolerant and totalitarian ideologies of fascism and Russian-style communism drew their organisation and discipline from the military and, in the case of fascists, their inspiration from war itself.

The Great War marked a break in Europe’s history. Before 1914, Europe for all its problems had hope that the world was becoming a better place and that human civilisation was advancing. After 1918 that faith was no longer possible for Europeans. As they looked back at their lost world before the war, they could feel only a sense of loss and waste. In the late summer of 1918, as the extent of Germany’s defeat was becoming clear, Count Harry Kessler returned to his old house in Weimar which he had not visited for many years. Although Kessler had been caught up in the nationalist fervour in 1914, he had long since come to regret that the war had ever started. His old coachman and his dog were waiting for him at the train station and greeted him as though he had only been away for a few days. His house, he recalled, like the Sleeping Beauty, was waiting unchanged for him:

The impressionist and neo-impressionist paintings, the rows of books in French, English, Italian, Greek, and German, the figures of Maillol, his somewhat too strong, lusty women, his beautiful naked youth after the little Colin, as if it were still 1913 and the many people who were here and are now dead, missing, scattered, or enemies could return and begin European life anew. It seemed to me like a little palace out of
A Thousand and One Nights
, full of all kinds of treasures and half-faded symbols and memories that someone thrust from another age could only sip. I found a dedication from d’Annunzio; Persian cigarettes from Isfahan brought by Claude Anet; the bonbonnière from the baptism of the youngest child of Maurice Denis; a program of the Russian Ballet from 1911 with pictures of Nijinsky; the secret book by Lord Lovelace, the grandchild of Byron, about his incest, sent to me by Julia Ward; books by Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas with a letter from Ross;
and – still unpacked – Robert de Montesquiou’s comic-serious masterpiece from the years before the war on the beautiful Countess of Castiglione, whom he affected to love posthumously – her nightshirt lay in a jewel case or little glass coffin in one of his reception rooms. How monstrously did fate rear up from this European life – precisely from it – just like the second bloodiest tragedy of history arose from the playing at shepherds and the light spirit of Boucher and Voltaire. That the age was heading not toward a more solid peace but toward war we all actually knew, but didn’t know at the same time. It was a kind of a floating feeling that like a soap bubble suddenly burst and disappeared without a trace when the hellish forces that were bubbling up in its lap were ripe.
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Of those who had played their part in taking Europe down the path to the Great War some did not live to see its end. Moltke never returned from his sick leave to resume his duties as Germany’s chief of staff. He died of a stroke in 1916 as his successor Falkenhayn was throwing the German army into repeated, costly and futile attacks at Verdun. Princip, who had set the fatal train of events in motion when he assassinated Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, was found guilty in an Austrian-Hungarian court but could not be executed because he was under age. He died of tuberculosis in an Austrian prison in the spring of 1918, unrepentant to the last about what his act had unleashed.
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The emperor, Franz Joseph, died in 1916, leaving his tottering throne to a young, inexperienced great nephew, Karl, who held on to power only until 1918. István Tisza, who finally decided to approve Austria-Hungary’s decision to force a war on Serbia, was murdered in front of his wife by revolutionary Hungarian soldiers in 1918. Rasputin was assassinated in St Petersburg in 1916 by aristocratic conspirators who hoped in vain that his removal would save the regime. Nicholas abdicated the following year. He and Alexandra and their children were murdered in Ekaterinburg by the Bolsheviks in the spring of 1918. The bodies were buried in an unmarked grave but rediscovered after the fall of the Soviet Union. The remains were identified using DNA including a sample from the Duke of Edinburgh, Alexandra’s grand-nephew, and the Russian Orthodox Church has now made the parents and the children saints.