The New Penguin History of the World (167 page)

This was Germany’s doing. Irritated by the Anglo-French agreement, the German government decided to show France that it would have to have its say in Morocco’s affairs at an international conference. They got it, but bullying France solidified the
entente
; the British began to realize that they would have to concern themselves for the first time in decades with the continental balance of power. If they did not, Germany would dominate it. At the end of this road would be their acceptance of a role as a great military power on land, a change of the assumptions which British strategy had followed since the days of Louis XIV and Marlborough, the last age in which the country had put its major weight into prolonged effort on the Continent. Secret military talks with the French explored what might be done to help their army against a German invasion through Belgium. This was not going far, but Germany then threw away the chance to reassure British public opinion, by pressing forward with plans to build a great navy. It was inconceivable that such a step could be directed against any power except Great Britain. The result was a naval race which most British were determined to win (if they could not end it) and therefore the further inflammation of popular feeling. In 1911, when the gap between the two countries’ fleets was narrowest and most felt in Great Britain, German diplomacy provoked another crisis over Morocco. This time, a British minister said publicly something that sounded very much like an assertion that Great Britain would go to war to protect France.

Yet when war came, it was in the South Slav lands. Serbia did well in the ‘Balkan Wars’ of 1912–13, in which the young Balkan nations first despoiled the Ottoman empire of most that was left of its European territory and then fell out over the spoils. But Serbia might have got more had the Austrians not objected. Behind Serbia stood Russia, launched on the programme of rebuilding and expanding its forces. But that would take three or four years to bring to fruition. If South Slavs were to be shown that the Dual Monarchy could humiliate Serbia so that they could not hope for her support, then the sooner the better. Given that Germany was the Dual Monarch’s ally it, in turn, was unlikely to seek to avoid fighting Russia while there was still time to feel sure of winning.

The crisis came when an Austrian archduke was assassinated by a Bosnian terrorist at Sarajevo in June 1914. The Austrians believed that the Serbians were behind it. They decided that the moment had come to teach Serbia her lesson and kill for ever the pan-Slav agitation. The Germans supported them. The Austrians declared war on Serbia on 28 July. A week later all the great powers were at war (though, ironically, the Austro-Hungarians and Russians were then still at peace with one another; it was only on 6 August that the Dual Monarchy at last declared war on its old rival). German military planning had dictated the timetable of events. The key decision to dispose of France before Russia had been made years before; German planning required an attack on France to be made through Belgium, whose neutrality the British among others had guaranteed. Thereafter the sequence of events fell almost automatically into place. When Russia mobilized to bring pressure on Austria-Hungary for Serbia’s protection, the Germans declared war on Russia. Having done that, they had to attack the French and, finding a pretext, formally declared war on them. Thus, the Franco-Russian alliance never actually operated. By Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality, the British government, uneasy about a German attack on France, but not seeing clearly on what grounds they could justify intervention to prevent it, was given an issue to unite the country and take it into war against Germany on 4 August.

Just as the duration and intensity of the war were to outrun all expectations, so did its geographical spread. Japan and the Ottoman empire joined in soon after the outbreak; the former on the side of the Allies (as France, Great Britain and Russia were called) and Turkey on that of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). Italy joined the Allies in 1915, in return for promises of Austrian territory. Other efforts were made to pick up new supporters by offering cheques to be cashed after a victorious peace; Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in September 1915 and Romania the Allies in the following year. Greece became an Ally in 1917. Portugal’s government had tried to enter the war in 1914 but, though unable to do so because of internal troubles, was finally faced with a German declaration of war in 1916. Thus, by the end of that year, the original issues of Franco-German and Austro-Russian rivalry had been thoroughly confused by other struggles. The Balkan states were fighting a third Balkan war (the war of the Ottoman succession in its European theatre), the British a war against German naval and commercial power, the Italians the last war of the Risorgimento, while outside Europe the British, Russians and Arabs had begun a war of Ottoman partition in Asia, and the Japanese were pursuing another cheap and highly profitable episode in the assertion of their hegemony in the Far East.

One reason why there was a search for allies in 1915 and 1916 was that the war then showed every sign of getting bogged down in a stalemate no one had expected. The nature of the fighting had surprised almost everyone. It had opened with a German sweep into northern France. This did not achieve the lightning victory which was its aim but gave the Germans possession of all but a tiny scrap of Belgium and much French territory, too. In the east, Russian offensives had been stopped by the Germans and Austrians. Thereafter, though more noticeably in the west than the east, the battlefields settled down to siege warfare on an unprecedented scale. This was because of two things. One was the huge killing-power of modern weapons. Magazine rifles, machine-guns and barbed wire could stop any infantry attack not preceded by pulverizing bombardment. Demonstrations of this truth were provided by the huge casualty lists. By the end of 1915 the French army alone had lost 300,000 dead; that was bad enough, but in 1916 one seven-month battle before Verdun added another 315,000 to this total. In the same battle 280,000 Germans died. While it was going on, another struggle further north, on the Somme, cost the British 420,000 casualties and the Germans about the same. The first day of that battle, 1 July, remains the blackest in the history of the British army, when it suffered 60,000 casualties, of whom more than a third died.

Such figures made nonsense of the confident predictions that the cost of modern war would be bound to make the struggle a short one. This was a reflection of the second surprise, the revelation of the enormous war-making power of industrial societies. Plenty of people were weary by the end of 1916, but by then the warring states had already amply demonstrated a capacity greater than had been imagined to organize their peoples as never before in history to produce unprecedented quantities of material and furnish the recruits for new armies. Whole societies were engaged against one another; the international solidarity of the working class might never have been thought of for all the resistance it opposed to this, nor the international interests of ruling classes against subversion.

Inability to batter one another into submission on the battlefields accelerated the strategic and technical expansion of the struggle. This was why diplomats had sought new allies and generals new fronts. The Allies in 1915 mounted an attack on Turkey at the Dardanelles in the hope, not to be realized, of knocking her out of the war and opening up communication with Russia through the Black Sea. The same search for a way around the French deadlock later produced a new Balkan front at Salonika; it replaced the one which had collapsed when Serbia was overrun. Colonial possessions, too, had ensured from the first that there would be fighting all
around the globe, even if on a small scale. The German colonies could be picked up fairly easily, thanks to the British command of the seas, though the African ones provoked some lengthy campaigning. The most important and considerable extra-European operations, though, were in the eastern and southern parts of the Turkish empire. A British and Indian army entered Mesopotamia. Another force advanced from the Suez canal towards Palestine. In the Arabian desert, an Arab revolt against the Turks provided some of the few romantic episodes to relieve the brutal squalor of industrial war.

The technical expansion of the war was most noticeable in its industrial effects and in the degeneration of standards of behaviour. The American civil war a half-century before had prefigured the first of these, too, in revealing the economic demands of mass war in a democratic age. The mills, factories, mines and furnaces of Europe now worked as never before. So did those of the United States and Japan, both accessible to the Allies but not to the Central Powers because of the British naval supremacy. The maintenance of millions of men in the field required not only arms and ammunition, but food, clothing, medical equipment, and machines in huge quantities. Though a war in which millions of animals were needed, it was also the first war of the internal-combustion engine; trucks and tractors swallowed petrol as avidly as horses and mules ate their fodder. Many statistics illustrate the new scale of war but one must suffice: in 1914 the whole British empire had 18,000 hospital beds and four years later it had 630,000.

The repercussions of this vast increase in demand rolled outwards through society, leading in all countries in varying measure to the governments’ control of the economy, conscription of labour, the revolutionizing of women’s employment, the introduction of new health and welfare services. They also rolled overseas. The United States ceased to be a debtor nation; the Allies liquidated their investments there to pay for what they needed and became debtors in their turn. Indian industry received the fillip it had long required. Boom days came to the ranchers and farmers of the Argentine and the British white Dominions. The latter also shared the military burden, sending soldiers to Europe and fighting the Germans in their colonies.

Technical expansion also made the war more frightful. This was not only because machine-guns and high explosive made possible such terrible slaughter. It was not even because of new weapons such as poison gas, flame-throwers or tanks, all of which made their appearance as soldiers strove to find a way out of the deadlock of the battlefield. It was also because the fact that whole societies were engaged in warfare brought
with it the realization that whole societies could be targets for war-like operations. Attacks on the morale, health and efficiency of civilian workers and voters became desirable. When such attacks were denounced, the denunciations were themselves blows in another sort of campaign, that of propaganda. The possibilities of mass literacy and the recently created cinema industry supplemented and overtook such old standbys as pulpit and school in this kind of warfare. To British charges that the Germans, who carried out primitive bombing raids on London by airship, were ‘baby-killers’, Germans retorted that the same could be said of the sailors who sustained the British blockade. The rising figures of German infant mortality bore them out.

In part because of the slow but apparently irresistible success of the British blockade, and because of its unwillingness to risk the fleet whose building had done so much to poison pre-war feeling between the two countries, the German High Command devised a new use for a weapon whose power had been underrated in 1914, the submarine. It was launched at Allied shipping and the ships of neutrals who were supplying the Allies, attacks often being made without warning and on unarmed vessels. This was first done early in 1915, though few submarines were then available and they did not do much damage. There was an outcry when a great British liner was torpedoed that year, with the loss of 1200 lives, many of them Americans, and the unrestricted sinking of shipping was called off by the Germans. It was resumed at the beginning of 1917. By then it was clear that if Germany did not starve Great Britain first, it would itself be choked by British blockade. During that winter there was famine in Balkan countries and people were starving in the suburbs of Vienna. The French had by then suffered 3,350,000 casualties and the British over a million, the Germans had lost nearly two and a half million and were still fighting a war on two fronts. Food riots and strikes were becoming more frequent; infant mortality was rising towards a level 50 per cent higher than that of 1915. There was no reason to suppose that the German army, divided between east and west, would be any more likely to achieve a knockout than had been the British and French, and it was in any case more favourably placed to fight on the defensive. In these circumstances the German general staff chose to resume unrestricted submarine warfare, the decision which brought about the first great transformation of the war in 1917 – the entry into it of the United States. The Germans knew this would happen, but gambled on bringing Great Britain to its knees – and thus France – before American weight could be decisive.

American opinion, by no means favourable to one side or the other in 1914, had come a long way since then. Allied propaganda and purchases
had helped; so had the first German submarine campaign. When the Allied governments began to talk about war aims which included the reconstruction of Europe on the basis of safeguarding the interests of nationalities, it had an appeal to ‘hyphenated’ Americans. The resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare was decisive; it was a direct threat to American interests and the safety of her citizens. When it was also revealed to the American government that Germany hoped to negotiate an alliance with Mexico and Japan against the United States, the hostility aroused by the submarines was confirmed. Soon, an American ship was sunk without warning and the United States declared war shortly afterwards.

The impossibility of breaking the European deadlock by means short of total war had thus sucked the New World into the quarrels of the Old, almost against its will. The Allies were delighted; victory was now assured. Immediately, though, they faced a gloomy year. The year 1917 was even blacker for Great Britain and France than 1916. Not only did the submarine take months to master but a terrible series of battles in France (usually lumped under one name, Passchendaele) inflicted an ineffaceable scar upon the British national consciousness and cost another 400,000 men to gain five miles of mud. Worn out by heroic efforts in 1916, the French army underwent a series of mutinies. Worst of all for the Allies, the Russian empire collapsed and Russia ceased, by the end of the year, to be a great power for the foreseeable future.