Europe: A History (183 page)

Map 24.
Europe during the Great War, 1914–1918

On the moral front, one has to note the extreme contrast between the material advancement of European civilization and the terrible regression in political and intellectual values. Militarism, fascism, and communism found their adherents not only in the manipulated masses of the most afflicted nations but amongst Europe’s most educated élites and in its most democratic countries. Such was the distortion of worthy ideals that there was no shortage of intelligent men and women who felt compelled to fight ‘the War to end War’, to join the fascists’ genocidal crusade for rescuing ‘European civilization’, or to excuse the communists’ pursuit of peace and progress through mass murder. When the moment of truth arrived in 1941, Allied leaders fighting for freedom and democracy did not hesitate to enlist one criminal in order to defeat another.

On the historiographical front, one has to take account of the fact that the European horrors were committed within the span of living memory, and that subjective, political, and partisan opinions continue to dominate popular accounts. The history of all great conflicts always tends to be rewritten by the victors, who maximize the crimes and follies of the vanquished whilst minimizing their own. Such, after all, is human nature. In both World Wars, it so happened that victory was achieved by similar coalitions headed by the ‘Western powers’ and by their strategic ally in the East; and it is their version of the period which continues to dominate post-war education, media, and history books. This ‘Allied version’ was first given official credence after 1918, when representatives of the defeated nations were obliged to confess to their own exclusive war guilt. It was cemented after 1945, when an Allied tribunal applied itself exclusively to the war crimes of the enemy. Any public attempt to judge the Allied Powers by the same means or standards was politically impossible. Official war museums from Lambeth to Moscow and Washington continued to present a one-sided view of the evils and the heroism. The captured archives of the losers were fully accessible in all their gruesome detail; key archives on the winning side remained firmly
closed. Fifty years on, it was still too early for a fair and objective balance sheet to be drawn up.

On the interpretational front, many years passed before some historians began to ponder the unity of the ‘European civil war’. People who lived through the two World Wars were often impressed by the discontinuities. The ‘soldiers’ war’ of 1914–18 was thought to be very different from the ‘people’s war’ of 1939–45. Anyone involved in the feud between communism and fascism was encouraged to think of the two movements as simple opposites. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it is increasingly clear that the successive conflicts formed part of one dynamic process: the two World Wars were separate acts of the same drama. Above all, the main contestants of the Second World War were created by the unfinished business of the First. By entering into military conflict in 1914, the European states unleashed the mayhem from which were born not one but two revolutionary movements—one of which was crushed in 1945, the other left to crumble in the dramatic events of 1989–91 (see Chapter XII).

Faced by German expansionism, and then by the twin hydras of communism and fascism, the democratic Western Powers could only survive by calling in the USA—first in 1917–18 and then in 1941–5. After 1945 they relied very largely on American muscle to withstand the challenge of a bloated Soviet empire. Only in the 1990s, with Germany reunited and the Soviet empire in a state of collapse, could the people of Europe resume the natural course of their development so rudely interrupted in that beautiful summer of 1914.

In this scenario, therefore, the years between 1914 and 1945 appear as the time of Europe’s troubles, which filled the space between the long peace of the late nineteenth century and the still longer peace of the ‘Cold War’. They may be likened to the slipping of a continental plate, and to the resultant season of earthquakes. They encompass the initial military quakes of 1914–18, the collapse of four empires, the outbreak of communist revolution in Russia, the emergence of a dozen new sovereign states, the armed truce of the inter-war decades, the fascist take-overs in Italy, Germany, and Spain, and then the second, general military conflagration of 1939–45.

At the heart of the troubles lay Germany, Europe’s newest, most dynamic, and most disgruntled nation-state. The fault-line of the earthquake zone ran along Germany’s eastern border. Germany harboured few designs against Western Europe. But in Eastern Europe she faced both the temptation of relatively weak and poor neighbours and, in Russia, the challenge of the only European country large enough to contest German military strength. Hence, from the start, the major duel over Europe’s future lay between Germany and Russia. It was a duel which in the hands of totalitarian revolutionaries was destined to become a fight to the death. From the start, the Western democracies were cast in the role of spoilers, essentially uninterested in the fate of east Europeans, but determined to stop the growth of any overweening Continental power which might eventually turn against the West. This constellation of forces governed European politics for the rest of the twentieth century. It underlay the fighting of the two World Wars
and, but for the invention of nuclear weapons and the involvement of the Americans, would probably have produced a third.

In the event, the era of open and general conflict was somehow confined to those 30 blood-soaked years. It began and ended, quite appropriately, in the German capital, Berlin. It began on 1 August 1914, in the imperial Chancellery, with the Kaiser’s declaration of war on Russia. It ended on 8 May 1945, in the Soviet field HQ at Berlin-Karlshorst, where a third act of capitulation finally concluded Germany’s acts of unconditional surrender.

The First World War in Europe, 1914–1921

The Great War, which began in August 1914, was widely expected to last for three or four months. It was going to be over by Christmas. Conventional wisdom held that modern warfare would be more intense than in the past, but more decisive. Whichever side could gain the upper hand in the early stages would have the means for a swift victory. In the event, the fighting lasted not for four months but for more than four years. Even then it was not decisive: the ‘Great Triangle’ of military-political power blocs was not resolved until 1945, and in some respects not until 1991. (See Appendix III, p. 1312.)

In their initial configuration, the geopolitical structures of the Great Triangle were somewhat tentative. The Western Allies (Britain and France) were severely handicapped by the fact that France alone possessed a large standing army. They had to pass two precarious years before their full potential could be realized. They held on, first, by tempting Italy to join the Allied camp in May 1915; secondly, by the steady military build-up in Britain and the British Empire; and thirdly, by the entry of the USA in April 1917. Britain’s Asian associate, Japan, which declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914, did not play any part in the European conflict. The Allies’ main partner, imperial Russia, was thought to be handicapped by clumsy mobilization procedures, by a vast network of internal communication, by doubts over its industrial capacity, and by divided counsels over strategic aims. Yet Russia mounted an early offensive. She eventually collapsed, not through lack of shells or soldiers, but through political and moral decay.
²

The Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) could benefit from all the advantages of consolidated policy and interior lines of communication. They lost one associate through Italy’s desertion, but gained an unexpectedly resilient ally in the Ottoman Empire, which was obliged to take sides in November 1914 from fear of Russia. In 1914 they were terrified by the prospect of a war on two fronts. They need not have worried: they were to prove themselves capable of sustaining major campaigns in eight theatres of operations—on the Western Front, in Belgium and France; on the Eastern Front, against Russia; in the Balkans; in the Levant; in the Caucasus; in Italy; in the colonies; and at sea.

The war aims of the combatants had not been articulated by the outbreak. The
Central Powers started the war with defensive and deterrent purposes in mind. They aimed to prevent Austria being undermined, to break the encirclement of Germany, as they saw it, and to forestall French and Russian claims. Yet they were quick to formulate a catalogue of demands. They planned to transfer the eastern provinces of Belgium (Liège and Antwerp) to Germany, and parts of Serbia and Romania to Austria; to increase the German colonial collection, in order to undermine the British and the Russian Empires; and to establish political and economic hegemony over ‘Mitteleuropa’, including Poland. Only the Ottomans aimed merely to survive.

The
Entente
Powers took up arms because they were attacked, hence their incurable sense of moral superiority. Yet Serbia hoped to drive the Austrians from Bosnia, France aimed to recover Alsace-Lorraine, Britain was soon looking for colonial and financial compensation, and Russia harboured extensive plans for aggrandizement. In September 1914 the Russian General Staff published a ‘Map of the Future Europe’ which was remarkably similar to the one which was realized in 1945.
³
In addition Russia extracted a secret promise from its allies for post-war control of the Straits. Italy aimed to gain the
irredenta
.

Several countries contrived to stay neutral. Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the three Scandinavian countries maintained their neutrality throughout, and prospered from it. Bulgaria was pulled into the war in September 1915, Romania in August 1916, Greece in June 1917. China, despite Japan’s seizure of the Chinese enclaves leased to Germany, attacked by Japan, entered the war on the Allied side in 1917. Others were less reluctant to fight. Several hundred members of Piłsudski’s Polish Legion opened up the Eastern Front by marching across the Russian frontier near Cracow on 6 August 1914. They were carrying cavalry saddles in the hope of finding mounts. They aimed to demonstrate that Poland was still alive after a century and more of Partition. They wisely retreated when Cossacks approached, and were incorporated into the Austrian army.

Military strategy and tactics, as always, were based on the lessons of recent wars. The Franco-Prussian War and the Boer War had proved the vulnerability of infantry attack. The solution was thought to lie in three areas—in the use of massed artillery as the primary offensive arm against battlefield positions, in the use of railways for the rapid deployment of attacking forces, and in the use of cavalry for encirclement and pursuit. On the Eastern Front these assumptions did not prove ineffective. But in the West, where fortified trench-lines came into being, it took thousands of abortive operations before the superiority of the concrete blockhouse over the high-explosive shell was even suspected. Despite the manifest advantages of defence over attack, the generals were slow to revise their assumptions. Aircraft, whose engines were weak and unreliable, could only be used for reconnaissance, artillery guidance, and aerial combat. In the majority of locations, where there were few metalled roads, horsepower remained indispensable. At sea, submarine torpedoes proved more lethal than the 15-inch guns of the Dreadnoughts.

On the Western Front, the German army very nearly pulled off a shock assault
before the war of attrition set in. Whilst the central German thrust plunged into the heart of Champagne, the German right wing rode off on a huge wheeling arc through northern France. Aiming to repeat the triumph of 1870, they moved on Paris from three directions. They were briefly held by the Belgians at Liège, and by the British Expeditionary Force at Ypres. [
LANGEMARCK
] The central German forces were delayed by the cellars of Épernay. But by the first week of September 1914 the French capital was facing disaster. At the very last moment, General Joffre impressed 600 Renault taxis to ferry all available French reserves to the line of the Marne. The German centre had just too little momentum; the German right was just too far away. So the line fell back. In October and November the Front stabilized along the whole length of a double trench-line running from Switzerland to the Channel (see Map 24).