The Second World War (2 page)

The extent of Europe’s militarisation in the nineteenth century is difficult to convey by any means that catch its psychological and technological dimensions as well as its scale. Scale itself is elusive enough. Something of its magnitude may be transmitted by contrasting the sight Friedrich Engels had of the military organisation of the independent North German city-states in which he served his commercial apprenticeship in the 1830s with the force which the same German military districts supplied to the Kaiser of the unified German Reich on the eve of the First World War. Engels’s testimony is significant. A father of Marxist theory, he never diverged from the view that the revolution would triumph only if the proletariat succeeded in defeating the armed forces of the state. As a young revolutionary he pinned his hopes of that victory on the proletariat winning the battle of the barricades; as an old and increasingly dispirited ideologue, he sought to persuade himself that the proletariat, by then the captive of Europe’s conscription laws, would liberate itself by subverting the states’ armies from within. His passage from the hopes of youth to the doubts of old age can best be charted by following the transformation of the Hanseatic towns’ troops during his lifetime. In August 1840 he rode for three hours from his office in Bremen to watch the combined manoeuvres of the armies of Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck free city and the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg. Together they formed a force a regiment – say, to err on the side of generosity, 3000 – men strong. In the year of his death in 1895 the same cities provided most of the 17th and part of the 19th Divisions of the German Army, together with a cavalry and artillery regiment – at least a fourfold increase. That accounts for only first-line troops, conscripts enrolled and under arms. Behind the active 17th and 19th Divisions stood the 17th and 19th Reserve Divisions to which the Hanseatic cities would contribute an equal number of reservists – trained former conscripts – on mobilisation. And behind the reserve divisions stood the
Landwehr
of older ex-conscripts who in 1914 would provide half of another division again. Taken together, these units represent a tenfold increase in strength between 1840 and 1895, far outstripping contemporary population growth.

This enormous multiplication of force was nevertheless in the first instance a function of demographic change. The population of most states destined to fight the First World War doubled and in some cases tripled during the nineteenth century. Thus the population of Germany, within the boundaries of 1871, increased from 24 million in 1800 to 57 million in 1900. The British population increased from 16 million in 1800 to 42 million in 1900; but for the Irish famine and emigration to the United States and the colonies, producing a net outflow of about 8 million, it would have tripled. The population of Austria-Hungary, allowing for frontier changes, increased from 24 million to 46 million; of Italy, within the 1870 frontiers, from 19 million to 29 million, despite a net outflow of perhaps 6 million emigrants to North and South America. Belgium’s population grew from 2.5 to 7 million; that of European Russia between the Urals and the western frontier of 1941 nearly tripled, from 36 to 100 million. Only two of the combatant states, France and the Ottoman empire, failed to show similar increases. The French population, once the largest in Europe, rose only from 30 to 40 million and chiefly through extended longevity; the birthrate remained almost static – the result, in Professor William McNeill’s view, of Napoleon’s returning warriors bringing home techniques of birth control learned on campaign. The population of Turkey within its present frontiers scarcely increased at all; it was 24 million in 1800 and 25 million in 1900.

The French and Turkish cases, though falling outside the demographic pattern, are nevertheless significant in explaining it. The increased longevity of the French was due to improved standards of living and public health, the outcome of the application of science to agriculture, medicine and hygiene. The failure of the Turkish population to increase had an exactly contrary explanation: the poor yields of traditional farming and incidence of disease in a society without doctors ensured that population, despite high birth-rates, remained at a static level. Whenever increased agricultural output (or input) combined with high birth-rates and improved hygiene, as they did almost everywhere in Europe in the nineteenth century, the effect on population size was dramatic. In England, the centre of the nineteenth-century economic miracle, it was spectacular. Despite a massive emigration of the population from the countryside to the towns, overcrowded and often jerry-built, the number of the English increased by 100 per cent in the first half and by 75 per cent in the second half of the century. Sewer-building, which ensured the elimination of cholera from 1866 and of most other water-borne diseases soon after, and vaccination, which when it was made compulsory in 1853 eliminated smallpox, sharply reduced infant mortality and lengthened the life expectancy of the adult population; death from infectious disease declined by nearly 60 per cent between 1872 and 1900. Improved agricultural yields from fertilised and fallowed fields, and, in particular, the import of North American grain and refrigerated Australasian meat, produced larger, stronger and healthier people. Their intake of calories was increased by the cheapening of luxuries such as tea, coffee and especially sugar, which made grain staples more palatable and diet more varied.

The combined effect of these medical and dietary advances on growing populations was not only to increase the size of the contingents of young men liable each year for conscription (
classes
, as the French labelled them) – by an average of 50 per cent, for example, in France between 1801 and 1900 – but to make them better suited, decade on decade, for military service. There is an apparently irreducible military need for a marching soldier to bear on his body about 50 lb of extraneous weight – pack, rifle and ammunition. The larger and stronger the soldier, the more readily can he carry such a load the desirable marching norm of twenty miles a day. In the eighteenth century the French army had typically found its source of such fit men among the town-dwelling artisan class rather than the peasantry. The peasant, physically undernourished and socially doltish, rarely made a suitable soldier; he was undisciplined, prone to disease and liable to pine to death when plucked from his native heath. It was these shortcomings which prompted Marx a hundred years later to dismiss the peasantry as ‘irredeemable’ for revolutionary purposes. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the peasant populations of Germany, France, Austria-Hungary and Russia had so much improved in physique that they were regularly supplying to their national armies a proportion of new conscripts or
classes
large enough to give Marx the lie. His analysis may have been skewed by his standpoint in England, where large-scale emigration to the towns left only the least enterprising under the thumb of squire and parson. In the continental lands, which were industrialising more slowly than England – the German rural population in 1900 was still 49 per cent of the total – it was the countryside which yielded the
classes
of large, strong young men out of which the great nineteenth-century armies were built.

If the new population surplus yielded by better diet, drugs and drains increased the European armies’ recruiting pool, it was the nineteenth-century states’ enhanced powers of head-counting and tax-gathering which ensured that recruits could be found, fed, paid, housed, equipped and transported to war. The institution of regular census-taking – in France in 1801, Belgium in 1829, Germany in 1853, Austria-Hungary in 1857, Italy in 1861 – accorded recruiting authorities the data they needed to identify and docket potential recruits; with it died the traditional expedients of haphazard impressment, cajolery, bribery and press-ganging which had raised the
ancien régime
armies from those not fleet enough of thought or foot to escape the recruiting sergeant. Tax lists, electoral registers and school rolls documented the conscript’s whereabouts – the grant of the vote and the introduction of free education for all entailed a limitation as well as an enlargement of the individual’s liberties. By 1900 every German reservist, for example, was obliged to possess a discharge paper specifying the centre at which he was to report when mobilisation was decreed.

The enormous enlargement of European economies was meanwhile creating the tax base by which the new armies of conscripted recruits were supported; the German economy, for example, expanded by a quarter between 1851 and 1855, by a half between 1855 and 1875 and by 70 per cent between 1875 and 1914. From this new wealth the state drew, via indirect and direct revenue, including the resented institution of income tax, an ever-increasing share of the gross domestic product. In Britain, for example, the government’s share of consumption rose from 4.8 per cent in 1860-79 to 7.4 per cent in 1900-14 and in Germany from 4 per cent to 7.1 per cent; rises were proportionate in France and Austria-Hungary.

Most of this increased revenue went to buy military equipment – in the broadest sense. Guns and warships represented the costliest outlay; barracks the more significant. The
ancien régime
soldier had been lodged wherever the state could find room for him, in taverns, barns or private houses. The nineteenth-century conscript was housed in purpose-built accommodation. Walled barracks were an important instrument of social control; Engels denounced them as ‘bastions against the populace’. The sixteenth-century Florentines similarly regarded the building of the Fortezza de Basso inside the gates of their city as a symbol of the curtailment of their liberties. Barracks were certainly a principal means of guaranteeing that ready availability of force by which the Berlin revolt of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 were put down.
^fn1
However, barracks were not only the precinct-stations of the contemporary riot police. They were also the fraternity houses of a new military culture in which conscripts learnt habits of obedience and forged bonds of comradeship which would harden them against a battlefield ordeal more harrowing than any which soldiers had known before.

The new-found wealth of the nineteenth-century state enabled the conscript not only to be housed and equipped but also to be transported to the battlefield and fed amply when he arrived. The soldier of the
ancien régime
had been scarcely better supplied than the Roman legionary; flour ground in the regimental hand-mills, supplemented by a little beef driven on the hoof, was his staple. The nineteenth-century conscript was fed in the field on preserved food; margarine and canning were both the products of a competition founded by Napoleon III to invent rations that would not rot in the soldier’s pack. However, the necessity for him to carry his own supply of rations was in any case sharply diminished by the subordination of the burgeoning railway system to military uses. Troops were transported by rail as early as 1839 in Germany. By 1859, when France fought Austria in northern Italy, deployment by rail seemed commonplace. In 1866 and 1870 it underlay Prussia’s victories against Austria and France. In the latter year the German rail network, only 469 kilometres in 1840, had increased to 17,215; by 1914 it would total 61,749 kilometres, the greater part of it (56,000 kilometres) under state management. The German government, heavily prompted by the Great General Staff, had early grasped the importance for defensive – and offensive – purposes of controlling the railway system; much of it, particularly in such sectors of low commercial use as Bavaria and East Prussia, had been financed by state-raised loans and laid out at the direction of the General Staff’s railway section.
^fn2

Railways supplied and transported the soldier of the steam age (at least as far as the railhead; beyond, the old marching and portering imperatives persisted). The technology that built the railways also furnished the weapons with which the soldiers of the new mass armies would inflict mass casualties on each other. The development of such weapons was not deliberate, at least not at the outset; later it may have been. Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the first successful machine-gun, is alleged to have given up experiments in electrical engineering in 1883 on the advice of a fellow American, who said: ‘Hang your electricity! If you want to make your fortune, invent something which will allow those fool Europeans to kill each other more quickly.’ Initially, however, the reason for the appearance of the faster-firing, longer-range and more accurate weapons that equipped the conscript armies between 1850 and 1900 was the particular conjunction of human ingenuity and industrial capability which made their production feasible.

Four factors were significant. The first was the spread of steam power, which supplied the energy to manufacture weapons by industrial process. The second was the development of the appropriate process itself, originally called ‘American’ by reason of its origin in the 1820s in the factories of the Connecticut Valley, which were chronically short of skilled labour. This industrial process resulted in ‘interchangeable parts’, machined by a refinement of the ancient pantographic principle, and achieved an enormous surge of output. The Prussian manufacturer, Dreyse, inventor of the revolutionary ‘needle-gun’ (in which a bolt-operated firing-pin struck a metal-jacketed cartridge), managed to turn out only 10,000 units a year by traditional methods in 1847, despite holding a firm contract from the Prussian government to re-equip its whole army. By 1863, in contrast, the British Enfield armoury, rejigged with automatic milling machines, turned out 100,370 rifles, and in 1866 the French government re-equipped the armoury at Puteaux with ‘interchangeable parts’ machinery capable of producing 300,000 of the new Chassepot rifles each year.

Advances in metal engineering would have been pointless without improvements in the quality of the metal to be worked; that was assured by the development of processes for smelting steel in quantity – notably by the British engineer Bessemer after 1857 (he also was encouraged by a prize offered by Napoleon III). Bessemer’s ‘converter’ marked the third significant advance. With similar furnaces, the German cannon-founder, Alfred Krupp, began in the 1860s to cast steel billets from which perfect cannon-barrels could be machined. His breech-loading field-guns, equivalents on a larger scale of the rifles with which all contemporary infantrymen in advanced armies were now issued, proved the decisive weapons of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. The fourth ingredient of the firepower revolution was supplied shortly afterwards by European chemists, notably the Swede Alfred Nobel, who developed propellants and bursting-charges which drove projectiles to a greater distance and detonated them with more explosive effect than ever before. The effective range of infantry weapons, for example – a function equally of engineering and propellant developments – increased from a hundred to a thousand yards between 1850 and 1900. When the recuperation of chemical-energy discharges was applied to the mechanism of small arms and artillery in the period 1880-1900, it produced the machine-gun and the quick-firing artillery piece, the ultimate instruments of mass death-dealing at distance.