A Companion to World War I

John Horne, John Horne

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118275801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

A Companion to the First World War brings together an international team of distinguished historians who provide a series of original and thought-provoking essays on one of the most devastating events in modern history.

• Comprises 38 essays by leading scholars who analyze the current state of historical scholarship on the First World War
• Provides extensive coverage spanning the pre-war period, the military conflict, social, economic, political, and cultural developments, and the war's legacy
• Offers original perspectives on themes as diverse as strategy and tactics, war crimes, science and technology, and the arts
• Selected as a 2011 Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE

PART I

Origins

CHAPTER ONE

The War Imagined: 1890–1914

GERD KRUMEICH

(translated by Mark Jones)

The years between 1900 and the outbreak of World War I are generally described as the “prewar” period. However, there is no consensus about what the term “prewar” really means or about the period it covers. Some scholars have begun with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1, but it is more common to see the years of the “scramble for Africa” and the “imperialist delirium” as the true prewar period.¹ Even here, the precise starting point depends on national perspectives. For Germany, it might be taken as Kaiser Wilhelm’s policy of expansion on to the world stage (Weltpolitik) in the later 1890s, or the subsequent naval rivalry with Britain. For the French, the military alliance with Russia in 1893, or the First and Second Moroccan Crises of 1905 and 1911, make equally credible starting points. For Russia it is perhaps the recovery from the catastrophe of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 and the 1905 revolution.

I propose to divide the prewar period into a longer phase when enmities were created and a more immediate phase of acute tensions leading to the outbreak of hostilities. The first phase was defined by the gradual increase in international antagonism and the polarization of the European alliance system into two antagonistic blocks. The second phase was marked by an increasingly nervous disposition toward what was seen as the inevitability – and for some the desirability – of a war that would reshape the course of world development. Viewed as a whole, the pattern of events and decisions leading up to July 1914 make World War I seem a logical, and even inevitable, outcome.

Yet what made it so requires an understanding of how contemporaries perceived events and came to decisions. For the murder at Sarajevo, on 28 June 1914, of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was an event of relatively minor importance by comparison with its consequences. Various heads of state had been assassinated in the previous 30 years. This outrage only unleashed war because of accumulated preconditions, not the least important of which were the mental dispositions or attitudes of contemporary decision-makers – the “unspoken assumptions,” and also the thoroughly pronounced presumptions, that had accumulated in the critical years from around 1900.²

Map 1 Europe at the outbreak of World War I

National Enmities

Notable among these attitudes were deep animosities on the part of the political and military elites of Europe, their readiness to reckon in terms of absolute enmity and their reluctance to set a higher price on resolving conflict than on going to war. This readiness to create and indulge enmities encompassed both hard decisions and the mentalities that helped shape these. Although the phenomenon still requires more investigation, it is worth noting that the great early nineteenth-century Prussian theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz, wrote in his classic analysis (in which he sought to distil the lessons of the Napoleonic conflicts) that “Even the most civilized of peoples … can be fired with passionate hatred for each other.”³

In the introduction to his highly perceptive analysis of the origins and decline of the ideological illusion of communism, François Furet acknowledged that World War I was a decisive turning point in contemporary history. Paradoxically, he insisted that there was no clear causal explanation for the outbreak of the war and that it had not really been necessary. In the end, war had become unavoidable simply because all the key decision-makers had accepted it. But Furet went on to accuse the statesmen of the period of tremendous folly and thoughtlessness when their actions are measured by the enormity of the catastrophe that followed.⁴

In reality the accusation is highly anachronistic, since it presumes a foreknowledge of the consequences of decisions that contemporaries could not possibly have had. To the extent that such a misapprehension results from the involvement of scholars in the events they describe, it is easily forgiven. But today, almost a hundred years after the summer of 1914, we should avoid such anachronism and seek to establish what contemporaries meant by war and how they understood the cumulative events that we know, as they could not, were to produce a devastating European conflict.

Military Misperceptions of Future War

One of the most important elements of the puzzle is why military commanders, those whose function it was to anticipate the next war, so signally failed to predict the reality of warfare in 1914–18. That failure does not mean that no one saw that a future war might be a catastrophe for the societies that waged it. There was a certain vein of pessimistic thinking in this regard even where one might least expect it. Count Helmuth von Moltke the Elder was the victorious German Commander-in-Chief in the Franco-Prussian War and subsequently Chief of the German General Staff, and in one of the best-known examples of such pessimism, he warned the Reichstag in 1899 that:

If war … breaks out, its length and end are unforeseeable. The greatest European powers, armed like never before, will go to war against each other. None of these powers can be so completely subjected in one or two campaigns, that they declare themselves defeated …; it could be a seven year war, it could be a thirty years war – and woe betide him who sets Europe on fire, who first throws the fuse in the powder keg!⁵

Even earlier, in the mid-1880s, Friedrich Engels warned of the mass sacrifice entailed by the warfare of the future, a view repeated in the often-quoted speech of the elder statesman of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), August Bebel, in 1911:

Both sides are producing arms and will continue to do so … until the point, at which one or the other one day says: better a horrible end than a horror without end …. Then the catastrophe will happen. Then in Europe the great mobilization plans will be unleashed, by which sixteen to eighteen million men, the male blood of the different nations, armed with the best instruments of murder, will go to the battlefield against each other …. The damnation of the bourgeois world is approaching.⁶

Yet although these eschatological warnings predicted a long war with enormous casualties, they had nothing to say about the nature of military technology and the form the destruction would take.

The focus upon massive numbers of casualties should come as no surprise. Since the 1880s, new recruiting laws in both France and Germany had made it possible at least in theory to mobilize for the first time the entire male population capable of military service for a future war. The creation of a new kind of army numbering millions of soldiers logically produced a new scale of potential casualties. But few, if any, intellectually mastered the real consequences of such massive armies. Even Engels went in for traditional war games (socialists affectionately nicknamed him “the General”), while Bebel let slip that he would like to fight in a war against the “bloody Tsar.”⁷ Indeed, despite his description of the destructive power of future wars, Moltke the Elder, along with his successor, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, continued to plan for the next campaign in an entirely conventional manner.

The observations of Colmar von der Goltz, Germany’s most popular military writer before the war, are a good example of the persistence of traditional military thinking. In The Nation in Arms (1883), which became a kind of Bible for officers and the educated public, Goltz investigated the problem caused by mass conscript armies.⁸ He was convinced that no single decisive battle would decide the course of a war. Rather, future wars would consist of numerous battles and might last a long time. Goltz was also one of the first to draw attention to the logistical difficulties of supplying both weapons and food to such massive armies but he was convinced that a well-managed military, such as that of Germany, could overcome such problems and systematically exhaust its enemy during a long war.

The views of the Chief of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1905, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, however, were premised on a short war, and revealed even more clearly than Goltz’s writings the ambivalent and limited understanding of the real nature of a future war. Schlieffen’s famous war plan (known by his name even after subsequent modifications) was completed in 1904–5. It dealt with the diplomatic situation faced by Germany since the Franco-Russian military agreement of 1893, which exposed Germany to the risk of a war on two fronts. Schlieffen dealt with this by planning to concentrate German forces initially against France, which would mobilize more rapidly than Russia. After a swift invasion, resulting in the encirclement and annihilation of the French armies, the Germans would turn with their Austro-Hungarian ally to eliminate Russia, which it was assumed would mobilize much more slowly. The thinking behind the plan showed a very limited understanding of the dynamics of a war between entire peoples fought with industrialized weaponry. For to reach Paris in six weeks and crush the French assumed that the Belgians would offer no resistance and that the French would behave in the same paralyzed and panic-stricken manner as the armies of Napoleon III had done in the summer and autumn of 1870. How the German armies were meant to handle real resistance when they would be marching over 20 km a day and requiring vast amounts of fodder and munitions from dwindling supply-lines was simply not addressed.

Such intellectual arrogance arose from the belief that Republican France and its army were morally inferior to Germany. It was this that enabled German military and political leaders to discount the “friction” of unforeseeable events that Clausewitz had warned would slow down any military operation.⁹ Schlieffen’s writings after his retirement betrayed the same fundamental illusions as his Plan. In “War Today,” an essay published in the popular Deutsche Revue in 1909, he argued that high levels of armaments and general conscription would not make wars longer, as suggested by Moltke the Elder, but would shorten them:

All the doubts about the horrible cost, the possible high casualties … have emerged from the background. Universal conscription … has dampened the lust for battle. The supposedly impregnable fortresses, behind which one feels warm and safe, appear to have reduced the incentive … to bare one’s breasts to combat. The arms factories, the cannon foundries, the steam hammers that harden the steel used in fortresses have produced more friendly faces and more amiable obligingness than all the peace congresses could.¹⁰

Schlieffen’s argument became a commonplace of military thought in the years before the war.¹¹ As the German army’s service regulations of 1 January 1910 stated:

Today the character of war is defined by the longing for a quick and major decision. The call up of all those capable of military service, the strength of the armies, the difficulty of feeding the army, the cost of the state of war, the disruption of trade and transport, industry and agriculture, as well as the responsiveness of military organization and the ease with which the army can be assembled on a war footing – all mean that war would finish quickly.¹²

Military theory and war planning in France showed many similarities to those in Germany, but also some differences. Like the publications of Goltz, those of Colonel Ardant du Picq shaped opinion in France, although they dated from the 1860s.¹³ An authentic hero who had died in the Franco-Prussian War, Ardant du Picq believed that large armies were not suited to long wars. He argued that strategy should focus upon obtaining victory through a small number of major battles determined by the fighting qualities of each nation’s soldiers. Over time Ardant du Picq’s observations gained such wide acceptance in the French General Staff that they became dogma. This was especially the case in reaction to the 1905 conscription law, which called up every Frenchman who was capable of military service. The resulting specter of the officer corps and military cadres being swamped by citizen ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Maps
• Notes on Contributors
• Editor’s Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Origins
• PART II: The Military Conflict
• PART III: Faces of War
• PART IV: States, Nations, and Empires
• PART V: Legacies
• Select Primary Sources
• Extended Bibliography
• Index