World War One: History in an Hour (2 page)

The Eastern Front

War had begun on the Eastern Front. Two Russian armies bore down into East Prussia, while the German army was led by the formidable duo of Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. The Germans, in full possession of Russian plans, decimated the first Russian army. ‘The tsar trusted me,’ wailed the Russian commander, Alexander Samsonov. ‘How can I ever face him again?’ He didn’t – he walked into a nearby wood and shot himself. The second Russian army fared no better. The Battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes went down as terrible defeats for Russia. The Austrian–Hungarian empire, the instigators of this whole war, was faring no better.

Russian infantry, 1914

The Germans now found themselves in the very situation they had wanted to avoid – a war on two fronts. A system of over 1,000 miles of defensive trenches appeared on the Eastern Front. Although much longer – unlike the Western Front, the front lines were often as much as fifty miles apart – these fronts were not continuous, and were lightly defended. German sources of manpower and equipment were stretched even further when, throughout the war, they were obliged to send reinforcements to help the Austrian–Hungarians. They felt as if they were ‘shackled to a corpse’.

Global War

The British asked their dominions to seize nearby German colonies, requests that were gladly accepted. By October 1914, Samoa had fallen to New Zealand, and German New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago (modern-day Papua New Guinea) to Australia.

Japan declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914 and promptly seized all the German-held islands in the North Pacific. In September, Japanese forces landed in neutral China and laid siege to the German base at Tsingtao on the coast of China, capturing it on 7 November.

In Africa, the war was fought against the German colonies. In German East Africa, the maverick German commander, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, held out for the whole war, only surrendering on 23 November 1918. Elsewhere, Germany lost its colonies in West Africa with Togoland and Cameroon falling to the Allies, and in the south where South Africa conquered German South West Africa (Namibia) with relative ease.

On 23 May 1915, Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies. Having joined the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria–Hungary in 1882, Italy had kept its neutrality until lured into war on the Allies’ side by British promises of Habsburg territory.

The War in Britain

Britain had a problem with men – not enough of them. The BEF, the professional army, was too small but the British, unlike its European counterparts, were against conscription. The answer was to raise an army of volunteers. The Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Lord Horatio Kitchener, went on a recruitment drive. Throughout the country from 7 August 1914, posters adorned with his stern-looking face and pointing finger shouted out, ‘Your Country Needs You’.

Lord Kitchener’s recruitment poster, 1914

Kitchener and the government hoped for perhaps 100,000 volunteers within the first six months. Any more would cause logistical problems. In the event, they got two million by the end of 1915, such was the extent of British patriotism and British naivety. But these young men were not to blame for their ignorance – news reporting was severely censored and war reporters were barred from the front. Thus, speculation and rumour made up for where fact lacked. A million Russian troops had landed in Scotland and were marching through England – you could see the snow on their boots; the barbaric Germans had tied Belgium nuns to church bells and used them as clappers; and the corpses of German soldiers were being used by the Germans to make candles and boot polish.

Volunteers for Kitchener’s Army, Trafalgar Square, August 1914. IWM Collections, Q 53234

While men signed up, women took their jobs in factories, on farms, public transport, postal services, and businesses. The war, arguably, advanced the cause of women’s liberation far more than the pre-war suffragette movement. Recognizing the role women played during the war, the British government passed two laws in 1918 that, between them, gave women over thirty the right to vote, and allowed women to stand as Members of Parliament.

Women at work in a munitions factory, c. 1915

On 27 January 1916, the recruiting of volunteers in Britain came to an end, replaced by conscription. Initially affecting only single men, by May the draft was extended to include married men.

The replacement of the initial mood of optimism with a growing realization of the true horror of modern warfare, is perhaps best reflected in the works of the War Poets. At first, poems extolled the glory of war and the virtues of defending one’s country. Rupert Brooke epitomized the early enthusiasm for war in his sonnet ‘Now God be thanked who has matched us with His hour’. Julian Grenfell, a captain in the British army, wrote in a letter, ‘I adore war. It is like a big picnic but without the objectivelessness of a picnic’. His poem, ‘Into Battle’, in which he wrote of the ‘joy of battle’, was published in
The Times
on the day of his funeral in May 1915.

Bitterness soon crept in. Siegfried Sassoon, an early enthusiast for the war, had received the Military Cross and was nicknamed Mad Jack for his courageous feats. While recovering from shellshock in Craiglockhart hospital in Scotland, Sassoon wrote of the ‘rank stench of those bodies [that] haunts me still’. Sassoon befriended a fellow patient, Wilfred Owen, who summed up his generation’s disillusionment with war in his poem, ‘Dulce et Decorum est’: ‘You would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie:
Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori
’ (‘it is sweet and right to die for your country’). Owen was killed in action a week before the Armistice.

Spies, according to the fevered public imagination, were everywhere – you could spot German spies dressed as nuns by their hairy legs. Genuine Germans were interned on the Isle of Man. Anti-German sentiment ran deep – shops with Germanic-sounding names were attacked, dachshunds, according to popular legend, kicked in the street. Even the Royal Family was not immune, changing its name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a bit of a German giveaway, to Windsor.

In Belgium, English nurse Edith Cavell was caught smuggling wounded Allied soldiers into neutral Netherlands. Despite appeals for clemency, Cavell was executed on 12 October 1915 by firing squad. Cavell had freely admitted her guilt for a crime that carried the death penalty, but the British government seized on the propaganda advantage Cavell’s death provided – the heroic nurse murdered by the German barbarian. Another infamous execution was that of Gertrud Margarete Zelle, an exotic Dutch dancer and performer better known by her stage name, Mata Hari. Accused by the French of being a double agent, she was shot in October 1917.

Hatred of all things German intensified when, on 19 January 1915, German zeppelins bombed Great Yarmouth in East Anglia, killing four people. The first raid on London, on 31 May, killed seven. War had come to England. Compared with the next war, these attacks were few and infrequent, limiting the damage. In total, 557 British civilians lost their lives from bombing throughout the war.

More shocking perhaps was the sinking of the British Cunard cruise liner, the
Lusitania
off the coast of County Cork, Ireland. Hit by a German U-boat on 7 May 1915, the ship sunk in just eighteen minutes. 1,198 of its 1,959 passengers and crew were killed, of whom 128 were American. The attack on a civilian ship caused outrage but the ship had been carrying a large supply of ammunition and, therefore, in German eyes, made her a legitimate target.

The Western Front

The attrition on both Fronts continued with varying degrees of success and failure; any success being usually short-lived and ultimately inconsequential, yet still costly in terms of lives.

On 22 April 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres, the Germans introduced a new element to the Western Front – at 5 p.m. a yellowy vapour smelling of chlorine floated over the French lines. It was gas – 5,730 cylinders of it. French and Algerian soldiers, retching and panicked, ran off, leaving a four-mile gap for the Germans to attack unimpeded. However, the Germans, wary of stepping into the cloud protected only by their crude gasmasks, felt unable to exploit the opportunity. This new terrible weapon was inhumane, cried the Allied generals, only to be using it themselves within five months.

Gas attack, c. 1916
Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R05923

Gas had been used three months before on the Eastern Front but in the freezing temperatures the chemicals froze and failed to vaporize. Having experimented with chlorine, Fritz Haber, pioneer of gas warfare, developed a new, more effective gas, called phosgene, which omitted a smell akin to freshly cut hay. Its first use, again on the Eastern Front, in January 1916, proved successful. Haber and his associates celebrated. Haber’s wife, appalled by her husband’s barbarous innovation, took his service revolver and shot herself.

In 1917, the Germans introduced mustard gas, so named because of its odour, which could penetrate clothing and be absorbed through skin. Gas had become a common feature by the end of the war. Although it was effective at incapacitating troops and causing long-term illness, gas accounted for only 3 per cent of fatalities. Another German invention, the flamethrower, was introduced into battle against the French in February 1915. But it was the artillery that caused by far the most damage throughout the war.

Following Kitchener’s recruitment drive, the British army now had the men but lacked the crucial equipment: weapons, ammunition, clothing, and even accommodation were all lacking. Following British failure at the Battle of Aubers Bridge in May 1915, the British commander-in-chief, Sir John French, leaked the want of ammunition to
The Times
, which picked up the story, blaming the Liberal government of Lord Asquith. Politically, the ‘Shell Scandal’ proved fatal. The Liberal government was forced into a coalition with the Conservatives. Herbert Asquith remained prime minister, but weakened, he survived for only another nineteen months.

In September 1915, at the Battle of Loos, Britain first used gas – 140 tons. But the wind made a mockery of General Douglas Haig’s plans, and over 2,000 British suffered as the gas floated back towards British lines, although only seven died as a consequence. After a month of futile attack at the cost of some 50,000 British lives, the offensive was called off, finishing on 14 October. Haig may have been commander on the field, but it was Sir John French, as commander-in-chief, who fell. In December French was replaced by Haig.