World War One: A Short History Read online

  Weber had a moral sense,3 and when he saw his young students being mown down in 1914 he refused to join the crew of professors cheering on the national cause. But he and his like had led the younger generation down a deadly path. Germany produced a navy, and it took one third of the defence budget. The money, diverted from the army, made it unable to take on the two-front war that the Franco-Russian alliance portended. There was not enough to take in more than half of the young men who could have been trained: they could not be fed and clothed. They were exempted, and the German land army in 1914 was hardly larger than the French, although in 1914 the French population stood at under 40 million, to the Germans’ 65 million. The German battleships themselves were very well built, but there were too few of them, and they were hopelessly vulnerable. They spent almost the entire First World War in harbour, until, at the end, threatened with pointless sacrifice, the crews mutinied, bringing down the German empire itself. But the navy, designed only to sail across the North Sea and therefore not needing the weight of coal that worldwide British warships required, could lay on extra armour. This was such an obvious piece of blackmail that it pushed the British into a considerable effort – not only did they outbuild the Germans, almost two-to-one, in ships, but they also made defensive arrangements with France and Russia. These involved colonial bargains – Egypt for Morocco with the French (the Entente Cordiale) in 1904, and Persia with the Russians in 1907. There were informal understandings regarding naval cooperation if it came to trouble. To each of these steps, the German reaction was blundering and blustering – a demand for some slice of derelict Morocco in 1905, encouragement of frivolous Austrian aggressiveness in the Balkans in 1909 and a gunboat sent to Morocco in 1911. This ‘sabre-rattling’ went down well with a great part of opinion at home, but it created an air of international crisis, and by 1914 an emissary of the American President was talking of militarism gone mad.

  Around this time there emerged a matter with which the world has had to live ever since. President Eisenhower, in the 1960s, found the right phrase for it: ‘the military-industrial complex’. War industry became the most powerful element in the economy, employing thousands if not millions, taking a large part of the budget, and stimulating all sorts of industries on the side, including the writing of columns in newspapers. Besides, war industry was subject to bewildering change: what appeared to be an insane waste of money at one stage might turn out to be essential (aircraft being the obvious case), whereas what appeared to be common sense turned out to consist of white elephants (fortresses being, again, the obvious case). Technology was becoming expensive and unpredictable, and by 1911 there was an arms race. By then, any country’s armaments had become an excuse for any other country’s armaments to increase, and there were crises in the Mediterranean and the Balkans to make every country feel vulnerable. When Germany sent her gunboat to Morocco in the summer of 1911, she uncocked a gun. But the finger on the trigger was, peculiarly, Italy’s.

  If Turkish territory was to be parcelled out, then why should not Italy take her share? The British had taken Egypt, the French, North Africa. Italian empire-builders looked at the rest, and went to war. It is a strange fact of modern European history that Italy, weakest of the Powers, brings the problems to a head: no Cavour, no Bismarck; no Mussolini, no Hitler.4 Now, Italy opened the series of events leading to war in 1914. Knowing that, because of the Moroccan crisis, the British, French and Germans would do nothing to stop her, she attacked Ottoman Turkey and tried to seize Libya. The Turks were too weak, and in any event had no ships to defend even the islands off the Anatolian coast, which the Italians seized. The prospect of an Ottoman collapse caused the various Balkan states, in the first instance, to declare their interests. In alliance, in 1912, they attacked, winning in a few weeks, clearing the Ottoman army from the Balkans. Then, in a second Balkan war (1913) they fell apart among themselves, and fought again. The Turks staged a recovery, but the victors were Serbia, which cooperated closely with Russia, and Greece, which cooperated closely with Great Britain.

  When China had been disintegrating, ten years before, the Powers had also been rivals, but the rivalry was naval. If the Ottoman empire was disintegrating – and almost no one now expected it to last – then the rivalry would be nearer home and would involve land connections and armies. For Russia, the straits between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara or the Dardanelles between the Marmara and the Aegean were vital: the windpipe of the Russian economy. Ninety per cent of grain exports went through, and much else came in, to keep going the industries of southern Russia. During the Italian war, in 1911–12, the Turks had closed the Dardanelles; there had been an immediate economic stoppage in southern Russia. To get security at the Straits was a vital matter for Russia, and early in 1914 the Entente Powers forced the Turks to grant a status close to autonomy to the partly Armenian provinces of eastern Anatolia. This (and the parallel Anglo-French interest in the Arab provinces) might easily have spelled the end of the Ottoman empire, as the Christian Armenians might become Russian instruments. Before the treaty could be ratified, the Turks opened a line to Berlin.

  Germany was the Power that threatened them least – quite the contrary, the Kaiser paraded himself as protector of Islam and gave the Sultan a vast, Germanic railway station on the Asian shore of Istanbul as a sign of approval and support. At the end of 1913 a German general, Liman von Sanders (son of a converted Jew, and therefore considered in wooden Berlin thinking to be suitable for the Orient), became in effect commander of an Ottoman army corps, placed at the Straits between the Black Sea and the Aegean. The Russians reacted against this, but they could not stop the sending of a German military mission to Turkey – several dozen specialist officers – and in any case the chief figure in the new regime at Istanbul was very clearly the Germans’ man: Enver Pasha, who spoke German almost perfectly and had the kind of military energy that the Germans admired. He and other ‘Young Turks’ generally came from the Balkans and had learned at first hand how ‘nation-building’ was carried on there – a new language, militarism, expulsion of minorities. Germany was the magnet for them, whereas France or England were the models for their political opponents. For the moment, given the despair that followed upon the Balkan Wars, it was Enver and his friends who were in the ascendant, and they invited Liman von Sanders. A Russian nightmare was a Germany in charge of the Straits, and the arrival of that German military mission at Sirkeci station in December 1913 marked the beginning of the countdown to war, eight months later.

  Russia might dread German control of the Straits. But there was also a German dream of empire – or, more correctly, a Central European dream, because Austria-Hungary had also long sought commercial and political influence in the Near East, and Austro-Hungarian trade was not far behind Germany’s. One of the great international wrangles of the era had concerned a German-sponsored railway, linking Berlin and Baghdad – the Kaiser’s gift of a station was part of this – and by 1914 a new German embassy had been built in Istanbul (known as ‘the bird cage’ from the ostentatious eagles on the roof), glowering down over the Bosphorus at the Dolmabahce Palace, where skulked the resentful puppet Sultan, whom Enver and the Young Turks treated as furniture. Hitherto, Russo-German rivalry had been somewhat indirect, to do with tepid German support for Austria-Hungary. Now there was a direct clash, over Russia’s most vital interest.

  This coincided with heightened tension of a more general sort. The arms race had been speeding up after 1911: a new dimension in the air, a ‘super-Dreadnought’, more soldiers being conscripted, more strategic railways being built. Turkey was on Europe’s frontier, and if there were diplomatic crises, armies – Austrian, German, Russian – were affected. Before 1914, there was a great boom in trade, and governments had money to spend. A modest German increase in army spending (to train more men) in 1911 provoked a French response (again, more men in the peacetime army) in 1912, which provoked in turn another German (and Austrian) increase. In 1913 came the decisive one: a �
�great programme’ that was intended to turn Russia into a ‘super-power’. That programme would have given Russia more guns than Germany and, at last, would have allowed the Russian army to feed and clothe and transport more than the hitherto very limited proportion of men reaching the conscription age. Shortage of money had meant that the Russian army, though based on a population three times greater than Germany’s, was no larger than Germany’s, had considerably fewer guns and had considerably fewer strategic railways. That was about to change, and dramatically so. By 1914, Sir Arthur Nicolson, who had been the British ambassador in St Petersburg, was hugging himself with glee that the two countries were in alliance.

  In Berlin, there was panic. It was easy in those days to find out what potential enemies were doing. Troops would have to go by train, and the length of platforms gave the game away as regards enemy war plans; there were no restrictions on travel, or photography, and an Austro-Hungarian intelligence officer even moved around south-western Russia with a passport in which his profession was entered as ‘General Staff officer’. If a platform were suspiciously long, in some out-of-the-way place normally catering for farmers’ wives carrying chickens, then it meant that, at some point, infantry or cavalry would be unloaded there. Then again, all countries by now had a parliament, and its proceedings were a matter of public record, to be read even in the daily press. Berlin and Vienna could therefore very easily know, by the spring of 1914, that the Russians were flexing their new economic muscle in military matters. The German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, had seen for himself the growing strength of Russia, as the Gold Standard now supported its currency and as railways linked supply and demand at all levels. Technical journals showed the extraordinary advance of Russia – here, a lorry winning a European prize for a long journey to Riga, there a theoretical physicist (Cholkovsky) writing the equations that would eventually carry Sputnik (the first man-made space satellite) beyond Earth’s gravity. St Petersburg still is the European capital of the might-have-been. Bethmann Hollweg was easily intelligent enough to know that Germany should just have adapted to this. He was asked by his son whether long-maturing elms should be planted on his Brandenburg estate, Hohenfinow. The Chancellor said: no, only the Russians would profit. In that, he was right: thirty years later, they did indeed arrive in Brandenburg, and stayed for another fifty. But Bethmann Hollweg himself was a fatalist, and he gave in to other men who did not have his scepticism. The military were now banging on the table: Germany could win a war now, but if she waited a further two or three years, Russia would be too strong.

  The increase in the Russian army’s size and weight was bad enough. What caused panic was the growth of her railways. Russia after 1908 joined in the process of self-propelling industrialization that had already occurred most spectacularly in the USA and Germany. She had of course enormous resources, but they had been poorly exploited because transport was a problem and no one trusted the paper money. That changed as railways and gold grew, and in 1909 the Tsar’s chief minister, Pyotr Stolypin, told a French journalist, ‘Give the state twenty years of internal and external peace and you will not recognize Russia.’ The budget income had doubled by 1914, and some of the money went to build railways capable of delivering troops to the front much faster than before. Cologne commuters needed some 700 trains every day, and, as a standard of comparison, the Russian army in 1910 was to have been mobilized with 250. By 1914, that figure had risen to 360, and by 1917 it was to be 560, which would have allowed the Russians to be all present and correct on the border only three days after the completion of German mobilization. In 1917, in other words, the situation of 1945 would be foreseeable – the British in Hamburg, the Russians in Berlin, and goodbye to Bethmann Hollweg’s elms.

  The German generals had a preponderance in public affairs that had no equivalent elsewhere. They were now in a condition of panic. Faced with a Franco-Russian alliance, the German war plan had been obvious enough. Russia was still a backward country with far fewer railways than the western Powers – her army would only just have been mustered as the French collapsed. In such circumstances, said the Chief of the German General Staff in 1897, Count Schlieffen, the German army would have ample time to repeat the victory of 1870 against France. Then it would turn against Russia. German mobilization would be a gigantic labour – a million competent railwaymen on over 40,000 miles of double-track line with 30,000 locomotives, 65,000 passenger cars and 700,000 goods wagons were to shift, in seventeen days, 3 million soldiers, 86,000 horses and mountains of war goods, particularly guns and shell. A single army corps needed 6,000 wagons, a cavalry division 1,200. The German military had matters so organized that this force would be ready on the borders by the seventeenth day after mobilization had been declared, and for many years they could be sure that the Russians, with far fewer railways, and with much less technical capacity in the form of watering, telegraphs, coal depots, even properly sized platforms, would be much less efficient: indeed, a third of the 40,000 men in the railway battalions were illiterate. But these vital calculations were losing their very basis, and there was a further factor: Austria-Hungary, Germany’s only real ally, would soon disintegrate.

  The signs of that were all around. In an age of nationalism, this vast multi-national empire was an anachronism (there were fifteen versions of the imperial anthem, the Gott Erhalte, including a Yiddish one). Vienna had mismanaged the balancing act, and when Serbia, the leading South Slav nation, won such victories in the Balkan Wars, her example inspired much anti-Austrian political activity in the South Slav lands that Austria-Hungary ran. How was Vienna to respond? The sensible answer would have been a sort of Yugoslavia uniting all South Slavs under Vienna, which intelligent Serbs (themselves often trained in Austria-Hungary) would have supported. But the Hungarians who really ran the empire did not want another national unit, and Vienna in 1914 therefore had nothing to offer. In A. J. P. Taylor’s words, Vienna waited upon events or, rather, hoped that there would be none. But there was, and it precipitated the First World War. The Austro-Hungarian foreign minister at Brest-Litovsk, Count Czernin, put it another way: ‘We were bound to die. We were at liberty to choose the manner of our death and we chose the most terrible.’

  On 28 June 1914 the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, a heartland of the South Slavs. Philosophers refer to ‘the inevitable accident’, and this was a very accidental one. Some young Serb terrorists had planned to murder him as he paid a state visit. They had bungled the job, throwing a bomb that missed, and one of them had repaired to a café in a side street to sort himself out. The Archduke drove to the headquarters of the governor-general, Potiorek (where he was met by little girls performing folklore), and berated him (the two men were old enemies, as the Archduke had prevented the neurasthenic Potiorek from succeeding an elderly admirer as Chief of the General Staff). The Archduke went off in a rage, to visit in hospital an officer wounded by the earlier bomb. His automobile moved off again, a Count Harrach standing on the running board. Its driver turned left after crossing a bridge over Sarajevo’s river. It was the wrong street, and the driver was told to stop and reverse. In reverse gear such automobiles sometimes stalled, and this one did so – Count Harrach on the wrong side, away from the cafeá where one of the assassination team was calming his nerves. Now, slowly, his target drove up and stopped. The murderer, Gavrilo Princip, fired. He was seventeen, a romantic schooled in nationalism and terrorism, and part of a team that stretches from the Russian Nihilists of the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified especially in Dostoyevsky’s prophetic The Possessed and Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Austria did not execute adolescents and Princip was young enough to survive. He was imprisoned and died in May 1918. Before he died, a prison psychiatrist asked him if he had any regrets that his deed had caused a world war and the death of millions. He answered: if I had not done it, the Germans would have found another excuse.

  In this, he was righ
t. Berlin was waiting for ‘the inevitable accident’. The army had been saying for some time that it could win a European war then and there but that it would not be manageable once Russia had established herself –1917 being the expected date for this, when strategic railways would shuttle Russian troops back and forth at Germanic speed. Now, the potential prizes and liabilities appeared to be enormous – the disintegration of Germany’s only ally; the possibility of a German empire in the Near and Middle East; the arrival of a Russian super-power. Men could have gone on talking airily about all of this for ever. But now these questions were forced upon Berlin. The maker of Germany, Bismarck, had been brilliant at seizing upon accidents and making use of them to show his enemies in the wrong light. Bismarck’s statues dominated endless towns and his successors wondered how he had done it. Now, in 1914, came another accident, with the Archduke. The Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry had been wondering how Germany could be involved. A Count Hoyos was sent to Berlin, saying: what should we do? He ran into a world that was looking for an excuse.

  After the War had been lost, nearly all of the men involved destroyed their private papers – the German Chancellor, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, almost the whole of the German military. We really know what happened in Berlin in 1914 only from the contents of trunks, forgotten in attics, and an extraordinary document, the diary of Kurt Riezler, who was the (Jewish) secretary of Bethmann Hollweg.5 In the diary there is a devastating entry for 7 July 1914. In the evening the young man sits with the grey-bearded Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg. They commune, and Riezler knows, as he listens, that he is catching the hem of fate. The key line is: ‘Russia grows and grows. She has become a nightmare.’ The generals, says Bethmann Hollweg, all say that there must be a war before it is too late. Now, there is a good chance that it will all work out. By 1917, Germany has no hope. Therefore, now: if the Russians go to war, better 1914 than later. But the western Powers might let Russia down, in which case the Entente will split apart, and, either way, Germany will be the winner.