The National Interest
Summer 2001

The Great War

by Sir Michael Howard

 

It is almost a century since the countdown to the First World War began, ominously enough, with a series of linked crises in the Balkans. Ten years hence publishers will start planning their first centennial histories. But apart from a gap in the 1940s and 1950s when the Second World War took priority, the flow of studies has barely ceased since 1918. Understandably: for Europeans, the war was uniquely horrifying both in its course and its consequences. In spite of the global title later bestowed on it, this was essentially a European war, and for two generations of Europeans it was simply the "Great War", tout court. Like earlier European wars it involved battles on and beyond the seas, but it was fought out on European territory and-apart from the brief but substantial American intervention in its final weeks-by European armies.

Above all it was for European peoples that the consequences were most devastating. Some thirteen million people died, nine million of them young men, most of them in conditions of almost unimaginable horror; the British in the mud of the Somme and Passchendaele, the French and Germans pounding each other to smithereens at Verdun, the Austrians and Hungarians freezing to death in the Carpathians, the Russians driven forward like cattle on the plains of Poland, the Italians slaughtered in their vain and repeated attacks on the rocky slopes of the Carso.

And for what? The victorious Allies exhausted themselves to no evident benefit, their sacrifices heartrendingly commemorated by monuments in every village throughout their lands. The empires that had kept Eastern and Central Europe in some kind of equilibrium for the previous two centuries-Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman-disintegrated, leaving in their place nationalist and aggressive successor states whose quarrels still provide the seedbeds of further wars. The liberal capitalism of the Enlightenment, which in 1914 seemed to be inexorably expanding its benefits throughout the world, collapsed, and with it all the moral certainties it had seemed to embody. Peoples turned in despair to the comforting promises held out by communism and fascism. What had all those people died for? What had been the point?

Two leading British historians who have recently published major works on the First World War have recoiled, baffled by the question. Sir John Keegan, the doyen of military historians, can only conclude that the war was "a mystery." For Niall Ferguson, the most promising of a younger generation of historians, it was simply "the greatest error in modern history." Such judgments are hardly adequate. The war may have been tragic and disastrous, but there was nothing mysterious or inexplicable about it. It was certainly the result of cumulative "errors", that is, of bad judgments, but there were too many of them-the German decision to support the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, the premature Russian order for general mobilization, above all the Schlieffen Plan, which extended the war willy-nilly to France and, through the invasion of Belgium, to Britain and the British Empire-to be considered a single "error." But for Ferguson the greatest "error" of all was the British decision to intervene in the war, rather than stand back and allow the Germans to win and establish a benevolent hegemony over Europe. It was this decision, he believes, that transformed a European war, which might well have been over within a year, into a prolonged confrontation that weakened where it did not destroy the whole fabric of European society.

Ferguson's revisionist judgment is provocative and interesting, and will be dealt with in a moment. It is certainly a refreshing variant on an otherwise sterile debate. In that debate there is, on the one hand, the traditional liberal thesis, popular between the wars both in Britain and the United States, and the German "war guilt" thesis, established by the victorious Allies at Versailles and revised by Fritz Fischer a generation later. The first maintained that the war was a ghastly "accident" resulting from the nature of capitalism, the prevalence of militarism, the "arms race", or the inflexibility of mobilization timetables (Barbara Tuchman's interpretation in The Guns of August, which, however mistaken, was to be of considerable value during the Cuban Missile Crisis). The second, however justifiable, was to have the disastrous consequence of outraging the entire German people and mobilizing them behind a revanchist policy in the interwar years.

Neither of these theses is to be completely discounted, though historians, not least German historians, now give greater weight to the latter than to the former. But there is also a greater tendency to emphasize the European mentalité before 1914; a sense that a war was coming and that it would be no bad thing if it did. The roots of this sentiment can be traced to the general sense of insecurity resulting from the headlong social and economic transformation of Europe during the previous fifty years, from an agrarian economy that had changed little over five hundred years to one urbanized, industrial and global. This involved the growth of cities and a popular press, and the development of a hectic nationalism cultivated, at least in part, to combat the threat of socialist internationalism among the newly enfranchised working classes. War, when it came, was welcomed almost as a relief from tensions both internal and international. The relief was so ecstatic that not only did the English poet Rupert Brooke thank God for matching him with His hour, but the German minister for war, Erich von Falkenhayn, famously declared that, "Even if everything now goes smash, it will have been worth it." Certainly dread of hostile public reaction did not inhibit governmental decisions for war, as it did so disastrously in Britain and France in 1938 and 1939.

It may now appear "mysterious" that anyone should have welcomed war in 1914, but it would not have seemed so to anyone living before the twentieth century. Wars had always been taken very much for granted. In any event very few people-the professionals-had any idea what the war would be like. They had studied the American Civil War and, even more important, the Russo-Japanese War. They knew all about the defensive power provided by new weapons, even if they did not yet know how to overcome it. Most of them knew of Ivan Bloch's remarkable study, La Guerre future, even if they had not read it, but they did not need Bloch to tell them that no economy could stand a prolonged war involving, as General von Schlieffen himself warned in 1909, "millions of marks and millions of men." They knew, therefore, that the war would have to be short, because nobody (except the British, with their fortunate experience of maritime warfare) believed that it would be possible to win a long one.

The only way to keep a war short was to win it quickly; and that could be done only by taking the offensive, which all European armies planned to do. For the Germans it was particularly necessary to get their attack in first if they were not to be squeezed between the greater manpower of the French and the Russians and subjected to blockade by the Royal Navy. If the Schlieffen Plan had worked, and the Germans had successfully defeated first the French and then the Russian armies in the fine style of Frederick the Great, they would have won. But it did not work. Nor did the offensive plans of the French, the Russians or the Austrians. By the end of 1914 the war for which everyone had been preparing for the previous ten years was over, and nobody had won it.

The sensible thing to do at this point would have been to make peace. The original protagonists in the war, Russia and the Dual Monarchy, whose losses were already crippling, would have been only too glad to do so, but the blood of their allies was up. The British had barely begun to fight; the French had lost a fifth of their territory and were determined to regain it. As for the Germans, despite their inability to win quickly, their armies had been everywhere spectacularly victorious and were deep inside the territory of their enemies. There could be no question of accepting even the minimum terms that the Allies were likely to offer: a complete withdrawal of German forces from all occupied territories, especially Belgium, with an indemnity for the damage they had done, and the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to France.

On the contrary: the Germans had already formulated their peace terms in Bethmann-Hollweg's "September Program", and these were not to vary until the very end of the war. They differed little from those that Hitler was to impose on Europe in 1940. In the west a protectorate would be imposed over Belgium; the French coast would be occupied to the mouth of the Somme, and the occupation of Lorraine would be extended to the adjacent ore fields around Briey. In the east, Poland and the territories reaching northeast to the Gulf of Riga would be occupied and "Germanized"; while Mitteleuropa-that is, effectively, the lands of Germany's Austrian ally-would become a domain of German economic hegemony. Finally, Germany's African colonies would be consolidated at the expense of Belgium and Portugal to give it a real "place in the sun." It was the refusal of the British even to consider such an outcome that Niall Ferguson regards as the greatest "error" of the war.

So if peace was impossible, the war had to go on, and it was Falkenhayn, now German chief of staff, who first formulated a strategy for its conduct. The experience of 1914-15, especially on the Eastern Front, proved that victories on the battlefield, however spectacular, could not in themselves prove decisive. What mattered now was not the skill of the rival generals or the courage of their armies, but the will and capacity of the enemy governments and peoples to continue the war. Their capitulation could be effected, not by "defeating" their armies, but by bleeding them to death, which could best be done by massive use of artillery. That, hopefully, would inflict heavy losses on enemy forces while being economical with one's own. Unfortunately, the Allies had come to very much the same conclusion. The result was two years of nightmare on the Western Front, when generals calculated advantage not in terms of ground held or gained, but of "body bags" counted in scores of thousands; while the industrial resources of the belligerents were mobilized to produce the millions of shells needed to bring about what was intended to be a decisive result.

Both Keegan and Ferguson wonder how it was that the troops stuck it out for as long as they did. But for that generation hardship and deprivation were commonplace; social deference re-inforced military discipline; and if romantic patriotism did not long survive the first experience of shell fire, it was replaced by the far more enduring bonds of "comradeship" that made the experience of war not only tolerable but, for some, almost rewarding. To understand what kept the British Army fighting we should read Guy Chapman and Robert Graves, rather than such highly strung witnesses as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; for the Germans, Ernst Jünger rather than Erich Maria Remarque. It is more difficult to understand what kept the civilian populations going as, under the combined pressures of military demand and enemy blockade, clothing and household goods disappeared from the shops, health deteriorated, and foodstuffs dwindled to famine proportions. Indeed, the greatest fear among pre-war soldiers and statesmen had been that prolonged war would shatter civilian morale, and sooner or later this would result in revolution. Sooner or later it certainly did; but it took three years even in a Russia barely recovered from one revolution, and over four in Germany and the Habsburg Empire. There is, as Adam Smith grimly remarked, a great deal of ruin in a nation.

But Falkenhayn, unfortunately, was probably right. It is true that by the last year of the war both sides had developed operational strategies that broke the deadlock of trench warfare, employing weapons and techniques that had not been available in 1914, and battlefield skills that could be learned only through the grueling experiences of the mid-war years. But it is doubtful whether those techniques would have been effective against armies that had not already been fatally weakened by the long years of trench warfare, and whose morale had not been eroded by the sufferings of their families at home. The military leadership on both sides squandered countless lives as they felt their way to an operational solution for their problems, but it has yet to be shown that there was any short cut that would have provided that solution any sooner. Even the much reviled British generals, brought up in a tradition that ignored Continental warfare, did little worse than their Continental colleagues in an environment that was equally strange for all of them.

The military cannot be absolved of all responsibility for the often unnecessary sufferings they imposed on their troops, but ultimate responsibility must lie with a political leadership that not only started the war in the first place, but failed to make peace when the full costs of the war had become clear; and the political leaders who both started and prolonged the war were the Germans.

As we have seen, a whole accumulation of circumstances made war likely in 1914. It might have come sooner if any one of a series of crises during the previous decade had been less skillfully managed. Even if the crisis provoked by the Sarajevo assassinations had been successfully surmounted, the chances of Europe remaining at peace for much longer were very slight indeed. But the Germans should have known better than anyone what war would entail. As early as 1890 their great hero, the elder Helmuth von Moltke, had warned the Reichstag that the next European war might well last for thirty years: "Woe to the man who sets Europe ablaze", he declared, "who first throws a match into the powder barrel!" Von Moltke may indeed have realized that the man who would ultimately do so had just succeeded to the throne of the German Empire: Kaiser Wilhelm II.

This does not mean that Wilhelm II, although he personally embodied all of the least attractive characteristics of the German ruling classes, was, as Allied propaganda suggested, personally responsible for the outbreak of the war. But in his role as head of the German state and its highest war lord he bore ultimate responsibility for the decisions of his government. Nor did those decisions necessarily imply, as Fritz Fischer has argued, that the German government had deliberately planned aggressive war. The evidence is equally strong, as Ferguson rightly points out, that their immediate motivation was defensive. The High Command considered war to be inevitable once Russia had completed her massive French-financed mobilization program in three years' time, and they believed that Germany's only hope of survival lay in the kind of pre-emptive blow that Frederick the Great had so successfully struck at the gathering forces of his enemies at the beginning of the Seven Years' War.

What is incontestable is that the German political leadership took a series of gambles involving a high probability of war that did not come off. The first was the "blank check" issued to Austria- Hungary on July 5, 1914 encouraging them to go ahead with their ultimatum to Serbia and so to risk war with Russia. The second was a grand strategy that guaranteed that wherever and whatever the casus belli, the war would begin with a massive invasion of France. The third was an operational plan involving not only an infringement of Belgian neutrality, but a complete occupation of that country that guaranteed war with Britain-and an occupation whose brutality, however exaggerated it may have been by Allied propaganda, was sufficient to destroy such sympathy for the German cause as existed in neutral nations. A fourth, most fatal of all, was the decision for unrestricted submarine warfare two years later, which, predictably, guaranteed war with the United States.

In all these cases there was certainly an outside chance that the gamble would pay off; that Russia would be deterred from intervention, that France would be quickly crushed, that the British would abstain from Continental involvement, that the war would be won before the United States could intervene. One such gamble might be dismissed as injudicious; four look very much like madness.

A regime capable of making such decisions can at best be described as very peculiar indeed; certainly not one whose hegemony over Europe was likely to coexist peacefully for very long with such liberal democracies as Britain and the United States. The Napoleonic hegemony had been bad enough, but the doctrines on which it was based-the destruction of archaic privileges, the creation of legal and political structures based on the values of the Enlightenment-won it genuine support among the middle classes throughout Europe. But a German hegemony offered nothing except a rule based upon military power, exercised by a caste concerned only to preserve and extend its own dominance; and, in Eastern Europe at least, based on an explicit doctrine not only of territorial conquest but of racial superiority. This creed was to be labeled by Allied propagandists "Prussianism", which was in fact a libel on a country whose traditions of hard work and self-denial were in many ways admirable. But it remained a creed that despised the liberal democracy of the West, elevated service to the state as the highest virtue, and glorified military values above all others. Such sentiments could certainly be found elsewhere in Europe, not least in Britain, but nowhere else did they exist in so ferocious a concentration. There can be little doubt that military victory would have strengthened rather than eroded them.

That there were other and finer traditions in Germany than the militarism embraced by the ruling classes is beyond doubt. Indeed, as Fergusonrightly points out, German journalists and politicians were the first to identify "militarism" and were ferociously effective in their attacks on it. If the militarized upper classes and their imitators among the bourgeoisie welcomed the war, with all the opportunities it offered for the expansion of German power, the Social Democrats, the majority party in the Reichstag, only fell in line when Russia was maneuvered into taking the first step by ordering mobilization. The war could then be depicted to the Reichstag as being purely defensive. The September Program certainly embodied the aspirations of all the interest groups who wanted to increase German power, as well as those of the military who wanted permanently to guarantee German security, but a substantial minority in the Reichstag courageously continued to demand peace without annexations or indemnities.

Once the war began, party differences were dissolved, as they were throughout Europe, in a common patriotism that embraced all classes. But after a year of apparently uninterrupted victories, it was hard to believe that German territory was any longer under threat. In the east the Russians had been driven out of Poland and Courland (Lithuania), back to their ethnic frontiers. In the west German armies were deep inside France, and their defensive lines had barely been dented. Civilians were already seriously short of food and clothing. So why no peace? The next year, 1916, was to see the terrible losses of Verdun and the Somme, and ever increasing hardship at home. The High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff took control of the Home Front, and imposed ever tighter controls over civilian consumption. The question was now more insistently being asked-why no peace?

It was largely the fear that the German people would not stand another year of war that precipitated, at the end of 1916, the fatal decision for unrestricted submarine warfare. But peace would have been available if their government had wanted it. The Allied terms were still not harsh-German withdrawal to her pre-war frontiers in the west; the abandonment of Alsace-Lorraine; indemnity for Belgium; the creation of an independent Poland; self-determination for the subject nationalities of the Habsburg Empire-even these might have been negotiable. But the German government would not budge from the demands of the September Program. The huge sacrifices of blood and treasure already made by the German people, they claimed, demanded the establishment of a Germany so strong, and with frontiers so inviolable, that she would never again be under threat from her enemies.

Eventually, in July 1917, a majority of the Reichstag passed a resolution demanding peace without annexations or indemnities. This only stiffened the resolve of the High Command, which organized a popular party of theRight, the Fatherland Party, to support their annexationist war aims. With the United States now committed to the war, the German leadership was fighting for objectives that could be obtained only by total victory, which, as was increasingly clear, they had no hope of achieving. But for the High Command the war was no longer simply against the Allies: it was against the Reichsfeinde, the internal enemies of the Reich, the socialists and the liberals. A victory by these elements would mean the end of all of the leadership's aspirations to Weltmacht, the end of its warrior culture, the end of everything that, in its eyes, Germany stood for in the world. For Ludendorff and those around him, the pre-war slogan, Weltmacht oder Niedergang, "World Power or Downfall", was no more than a statement of fact: there was no middle way. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. When a year later Ludendorff's strategy did result in Niedergang, it was the Reichsfeinde who bore the blame and had to make the peace. It does not demand much effort of imagination to visualize what their fate would have been if that strategy had produced victory.

So if we are to count the cost of the Allied victory we also have to consider the possible consequences of defeat; the cost not only for Europe and indeed the world as a whole, but for Germany itself. The victories of 1866 and 1870 had not only united Germany, but militarized its culture. What would have been the effect of victory in 1918? How different would such a Germany have been from that which emerged twenty years later? And what likelihood is there that such a Germany could have long remained at peace with the British Empire? Those of the generation that won the war, at least in Britain, may have emerged weary and disillusioned, but they had no doubt that the war had to be fought, and that the victory was worthwhile. It is not for us to say that they were wrong.