The Great War

Western Front and Home Front

Hunt Tooley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781350307216
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

We have often heard about the brutal world of the trenches, the willingness of brave young soldiers and the apparent indifference of the generals, but reevaluations of the Great War in previous decades have shown us much more complexity, and in many cases some surprising reconstructions of very standard narratives of the war. The traditional isolation of the battle front from the home front, which historians have tended to observe, has given us an incomplete understanding of both fronts. In this study of Word War I, Hunt Tooley crosses the boundaries of national histories to examine the various connections between the 400-mile-long Western Front and the home fronts of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia and the United States. Tooley draws on recent research and the wealth of primary souce material available to provide a broad synthesis of a complex event, and to create a more holistic view of the war - as men stayed in touch with those at home, as governments responded to events on the battlefield, and as writers, poets and artists brought the cultural impulses of Europe to the deadly world of the Western Front. In his clearly-written, wide-ranging study, Tooley argues that the seeds of much of the 20th century may have been planted well before the First World War, but - as many social critics, politicians, soldiers, women's movement leaders, and others predicted - the cultivation of these seeds in war would have a powerful and formative effect on the social, political and cultural processes which shaped the 20th century.

1

Origins, Preconditions, Outbreak

World War I broke out during the late summer of 1914 as the result of a crisis in the diplomatic relations between two antagonistic states: the rambling, jaded, multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the young but proud country of Serbia, the most dynamic of successor states to the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. The antagonisms were both long-standing and real, and the interconnected nature of European power relations brought the two basic prewar camps into open hostilities in the first days of August 1914.

Historians and diplomats have argued about the origins of World War I intermittently, and frequently heatedly, since 1914. Even as late as the 1960s and 1970s, scholars carried on an acrimonious debate about who started the war and how it started. Since this book is about the war itself, we need to look at these historical discussions only enough to make sense of them and in particular to relate trends in the prewar period to the theme of this book, the relationship between the battle front and the home fronts among the Western Front powers. We shall indeed find some important background to wartime behavior and wartime events in the run-up to the war.

In the wake of World War I, scholars in Europe and North America fell into two different camps as to how the war had started, both of them influenced by contemporary events. On the one hand, Germany was seen as the brutal aggressor, a view related to wartime propaganda about “the evil Hun,” but moderated somewhat for calmer consumption. The Germans still came out as the side of evil, though increasingly Austria-Hungary shared the blame, in some cases even eclipsing Germany. Yet by the mid-1920s a number of Western historians began to “revise” the old wartime view by pointing out that all the belligerents had contributed in some way to the outbreak of the war.¹ By the 1930s, this revisionist view had for the most part won the field, and in a sense it comprised one of the bases of thinking about the appeasement of Hitler’s Germany: if the first war had not ended so harshly and unjustly for the Germans, this argument ran, and if they had not been forced to sign a treaty which condemned them alone, the Germans would not have followed so vile a person as Hitler.

Of course, World War II intervened. This time there was no doubt as to war guilt: the Germans, it was said – or rather, Hitler himself – had started the war in spite of enormous efforts by Britain and France to appease the Germans and rectify their just complaints. New histories about the First World War were relatively few in the wake of the Second World War, and they tended either to utilize new sources to condemn German foreign policy before 1914 and after,² or to approach the problem with interpretations that reflected current world problems, in particular those of alliance and international organization.³

Hence, one opinion which enjoyed currency among historians in the 1950s was that the war was caused by the alliance systems dating from the last third of the nineteenth century. In this view, alliances became so tightly knit that they eventually, and blindly, gave up their own decision-making powers and plunged into war. Other historians of the post–World War II period, perhaps in response to contemporary desires for an international order guaranteed by the new United Nations or some other structure, argued the reverse: that the years before World War I represented “international anarchy,” in which the brute interests of each state dominated their behavior to such an extent that all plunged into war together.

Neither of these structural interpretations held together very well after the Fischer Thesis came to dominate discussions about war origins in the 1960s. The German historian Fritz Fischer had in effect combined a structural view of origins with an analysis of the historical contingencies, or “real” events and records. Fischer drew tremendous fire from his fellow German historians by asserting not only that Germany started the war, but that German elites had consciously brought on the war as the solution to domestic problems (rising working-class dissatisfaction) and the attempt to become a “world power,” as opposed to merely a continental one.⁴

After a decade of scholarly strife and a second decade of calmer analysis, historians in Europe and North America tended to accept at least the idea that Germany had started the war, though many historians in the end thought that the Fischerites had stretched interpretations farther than the evidence warranted. Another principal criticism was that Fischer and his followers had generated their whole thesis with very little reference to the other powers. Fischer had adopted as a rule of thumb that domestic politics enjoyed “primacy” when national leaders made diplomatic decisions. But he and his followers seemed to recognize this principle only for Germany. Could the British, French, and Russians have had similarly aggressive designs in 1914? The reexaminations which criticized the Fischer school approach did a great deal, if not to rehabilitate Germany, at least to indicate that all the powers nursed aggressive ambitions.⁵ Scholars on both sides of the Atlantic used the opportunity of this kind of intellectual flux to examine anew many older views of war origins and many new issues, in particular the kind of “mentalities” which characterized the social and political cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, by the 1980s the return of the interest in the contingencies of events, and in narrative itself, led to new perspectives on the outbreak of the war and fresh work on many of the older, purely military or diplomatic issues involved. Indeed, as the hundredth anniversary of the Archduke’s assassination approached, new interpretations and new perspectives seemed to come in waves. Indeed, many of the new studies and recent doctoral dissertations demonstrate the extent to which there are still unread documents and unconsulted sources which can shape our view of the conflict in the future.⁶

What follows is an attempt to incorporate many of the newer, post-Fischer perspectives into a coherent framework for understanding the war’s outbreak. We will be very interested here in such recently emerging issues as the aggressive-mindedness which characterized military planning in the heyday of Social Darwinism. One would also expect that ideas about combat, community, and killing from before the war impacted the shape of the war once it started. We will also review the internal conflicts and financial disruptions (attendant upon modernization and the growth of the state) which made war appear as a viable solution to domestic crises, and not least the whole complex of technological changes which influenced not only the training and tactics of European armies, but their relationship to the policies of their governments as well.

The European system and war

We might begin by looking at the commonplace assertion that Europe experienced 100 years of relative peace after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815. Scholars have tended to explain the war as an aberration from a relatively long peace, the result of a “powder keg” waiting to explode, then exploding. More recently, some historians have pointed out that the century from 1815 (the settlement of the Napoleonic Wars) to 1914 was after all something of an aberration; since at least the fifteenth century, the “normal” mode of Europe during any given few decades was war at some fairly virulent level.

This view serves as a useful corrective to the exaggerated picture of a peaceful Atlantis sinking under the weight of war. A related and more “global” view likewise qualifies our ideas about “100 years of peace.” Organized violence in Europe had perhaps been alleviated during the period 1815–1914, but one could still count well over a dozen major wars in which one or more European powers participated, even if none of them turned out to be the benchmark “general” war, including most of the Great Powers. Hence, in this period, all European Great Powers experienced warfare, and not just in border skirmishes or colonial pacifications, but in real wars resulting in large numbers of casualties and great public expense. It is true that many of these wars were fought between European and non-European powers, but the bulk were not. It is less accurate to say – as is sometimes asserted – that after the war-intensive period from 1848 to 1871, no two European powers fought each other. This would only be true in the limited sense of the word “powers,” since European states fought each other in the Russo-Turkish War and in the two Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913. And Spain fought the United States in 1898. After 1871, large-scale European military forces were deployed in three major wars, not counting the Balkan wars or the Spanish-American War. Further, in this period of imperialism, minor wars and “pacifications” fought by European armies would number in the dozens. Still, qualified as the term “general peace” needs to be, it is clear that Europe experienced much less war in the 44 years after 1871 than in the 57 years before it.

Indeed, in the year 1871, Great Power relations reshaped themselves dramatically when the north German state of Prussia stepped into the leadership of the confederated German states and defeated France in a short but very violent war. Even as Paris was under siege, the architect of German unification, Otto von Bismarck, was able to convince the various German princes to swear allegiance to the Prussian king and to add to his titles that of German Emperor in a new, united Germany. Italy had followed a similar path of unification a decade before, creating from several disparate states a single Italy under the kingship of the ruling house of northern Italian Piedmont.

The club of large, powerful European states had changed significantly: before 1860, Britain, France, Russia, and Austria formed the membership (with a weak Prussia on the side); after 1871, the list was Britain, France (now weakened and humiliated), Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Germany. The expansion of the number of Great Powers complicated international relations considerably. The British Prime Minister was exaggerating only a little when he declared the balance of power “entirely destroyed” in 1871. The idea of the “balance of power” had never meant that all Great Powers should be equal, but that things should be arranged in such a way that no dominant combination would be likely. The new configuration could have been “balanced” along the lines of the old thinking, and Bismarck, the preeminent international statesman of his day, created something like a balance during the 1870s and 1880s by keeping France isolated, by keeping Britain unthreatened, and by keeping Russia friendly.⁷

The technical aspects of this system need explaining here only in outline. And one must start with the hatred that the French felt for the new Germany. The victory of 1870/71 had been a crushing, humiliating blow to a country accustomed to humiliating others during 400 years of war-making and aggression. During the war, France’s emperor was captured and imprisoned, the capital was sur-rounded and shelled, and government members had to escape Paris by balloon. The Germans declared their Empire in Louis XIV’s spectacular Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. In the peace settlement, the French lost the eastern province of Alsace and a part of Lorraine. On top of everything, France had to pay Germany five billion francs by way of indemnity. It is hardly surprising that the French were full of rancor toward the Germans in the wake of 1871. Bismarck predicted, “France will never forgive us,” and ordered Europe accordingly. The Iron Chancellor did attempt to help France toward an expanded colonial empire which would engage French energies and renew French pride. One might also point out that many of France’s home-grown social, demographic, and political problems might have provided distraction from the wounds of 1871. Yet a substantial school of French political and military leaders tended to nurse a smoldering sense of revanchisme, a systematic desire for revenge, during the next 40 years.⁸

Bismarck made much of Germany’s status as a “saturated” power, one with no territorial desires in Europe. France hoped fervently to regain lost territory. The centerpiece to Bismarck’s diplomacy was thus the diplomatic isolation of France. He achieved this isolation by entering into a series of alliances with France’s potential suitors.⁹ During the 1870s, Bismarck worked out a “three emperors’ alliance” designed to keep both Austria-Hungary and Russia friendly to the new Germany and on guard against France. Yet during a crisis which drew Germany and France close to war in 1875, the Russians proved unreliable, and indeed the British also demonstrated that another German attack on France would not be acceptable. Bismarck’s role, moreover, in scaling down Russian gains at the expense of the Ottoman Empire after the 1877/78 Russo-Turkish War led to bad feelings on the Russian side. Bismarck dealt with this problem at both ends. First, in 1879 he created a new bond with Austria-Hungary, the Dual Alliance, which would remain in effect through World War I. The goal of the Alliance was to arrange for aid from the other partner in case one was attacked by Russia, or benevolent neutrality in the event of an attack by any other country. This Dual Alliance was made Triple when it was expanded eight years later to include Italy.

Yet the great chancellor was always concerned about keeping the Russians on his side, from long-standing association with St. Petersburg (as ambassador years before), from his fear that a France backed by Russia would be able to carry out a war of revenge, and from his hope of keeping solidarity among the three authoritarian European empires: Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. Hence, after a number of desultory attempts to keep the Russians friendly, in 1887 Germany concluded with Russia the Reinsurance Treaty, whereby each side agreed to remain neutral should the other engage in war with another party (though this agreement was not to apply should Germany attack France or Russia attack Austria-Hungary). Secret clauses indicated that Germany would support Russia in gaining access to the straits which contained Russia in the Black Sea, a long-standing Russian goal. The treaty, potentially renewable of course, was to last for a period of three years.

Meanwhile, a new emperor came to power in 1888, 31-year-old Wilhelm II. Wilhelm’s personality turned out to be an important factor in European international politics, and the first major international episode he would influence was at hand. Having suffered through two years of Bismarck’s irritated and irritating tutelage, the young emperor – with extensive but haphazard knowledge and a vain and overbearing personality – accepted Bismarck’s resignation, hoping now to run his country from the throne. Disliking Bismarck’s Russian orientation, he favored shoring up flagging relations with the British, whose distrust of Russia bordered on mania. Advisors in the German Foreign Office likewise downplayed the importance of the Russians. Hence the Reinsurance Treaty lapsed.

Like much German policy during the reign of Wilhelm II, this decision reflected an unwillingness to contemplate the potential ramifications of a given measure. In this case, the lost link to Russia had an immediate impact. If Bismarck had managed to keep France in isolation, as a kind of diplomatic pariah, the Russians were in a sense preoccupied with the terrible prospect of becoming a diplomatic pariah themselves. This diplomatic problem was exacerbated by the economic problems of the country. Worried that their country was lagging far behind Western and Central Europe in industrial development, Russian leaders from the time of the Crimean War onward feared that Russia would not be able to hold its own as a great power. From the 1860s onward, they attempted to foster industry, but they needed capital accumulation (typical of the great middle classes of the Western European countries). Sergei Witte, a railway executive who became Minister of Finance in 1893, proposed a dramatic program of “industrialization from above”; and the commitment of the Russian state to this meant that at the same time the Russians were searching for a diplomatic partner, they were also in need of massive loans to fuel the ambitious industrialization program. Russia found both in France. For their part, the French could gain security by making friends on Germany’s east. The Russians could gain not only a diplomatic partner, but the French market of saving consumers, who in fact bought into Russian industrialization by purchasing the Russian loan issues floated in France. Almost incidentally, the French middle class, that class which formed the saving and investing public, came to have a close interest in the industrial development and general economic well-being of the Russian Empire.¹⁰

The Alliance was a fact by January 1894. Each partner would be obliged to join in the war should the other be attacked by Germany, and to mobilize should any member of the Triple Alliance marshal its military forces. Where the Dual Alliance had formed the first link that would become part of the belligerent coalitions in the Great War, the Franco-Russian Alliance formed the first link of the coalition that would become the Entente powers.

Though historians have frequently blamed the “alliance system” – these partly secret, partly open treaties and agreements arranged by Bismarck – for increasing the tensions which led to World War I, in fact this system worked quite well in keeping European powers out of wars with each other during two decades and even beyond. The problem with Bismarck’s “system” was that his successors cut Germany’s ties with Russia. Thus, where Bismarck had effectively kept France without close allies since the 1860s, the rebuff of the Russians sent them into the arms of France. This Franco-Russian connection now produced in reality the threat that had haunted Bismarck: should European powers go to war, Germany would find itself with formidable enemies on both the west and the east. Germany could probably defeat France or Russia singly, but together, the team of backward but well-endowed Russia and industrialized and bitter France produced nightmares for German strategic planners.

Finally, one might supplement this somewhat mechanical reading of the European system with new interpretations which emphasize the shifting of the world balance of forces, not just the European system itself. One would expect that the rise of the new powers, especially the United States and Japan, would impact upon European diplomacy, which was, after all, hardly a hermetically sealed world. Scholars utilizing a global approach to the history of the prewar period have shown that this rapid rise of non-European powers made for tremendous instability within the world subsystem of Europe, as did dramatic changes within the economic and demographic structure of Europe itself. Yet in a sense, Europe never held such a sway over the rest of the globe as i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• List of Maps, Photographs, and Cartoons
• 1.Origins, Preconditions, Outbreak
• 2.Mobility and Unity
• 3.Stalemate and Mobilization, 1915/1916
• 4.Innovation, Persuasion, Centralization
• 5.The Crucible of War: 1916
• 6.1917: New Strains, New War
• 7.Transformations: Politics, Culture, Warfare
• 8.Collapse, Armistice, Conclusions
• Notes
• Suggested Reading
• Index