The Second World War (3 page)

Long-range, rapid-fire weapons constituted the threat by which all the increments of offensive force assembled by the industrial and demographic revolutions of the nineteenth century were to be negated. There lay an irony. The material triumph of the nineteenth century had been to break out of the cycle of recurrent lean and plenty which had immemorially determined the condition of life even in the richest states, and to create permanent surplus – of food, energy and raw materials (though not of capital, credit or cash). Market fluctuations perpetuated boom and recession in the peaceful life of states. Surplus transformed their war-making capacity. War at any level above the primitive ritual of raid and ambush had always required surplus for its waging. However, accumulated surpluses had rarely been large enough historically to fund wars that culminated in the decisive victory of one side over another; self-funding wars, in which the spoils of conquest sustained the impetus of a victorious campaign, had been rarer still. Extraneous factors – gross disparity in the opposed technologies of war-making or in the dynamism of opposed ideologies, or, as Professor William McNeill has suggested, susceptibility to unfamiliar germ strains transported by an aggressor – had usually explained one society’s triumph over another; and they certainly underlay such military sensations as the Spanish destruction of the Aztec and Inca empires, the Islamic conquests of the seventh century and the American extinction of Red Indian warriordom.

In the warfare of Europe between the Reformation and the French Revolution, waged between states occupying a level plateau of war-making skills, will to war and resistance to common disease, such extraneous factors had played no decisive part; while the surpluses available for offence had been heavily offset by the diversion of funds into means of defence, particularly siege engineering. A great deal of such siege engineering had been dedicated to the destruction of the feudal strongholds from which local magnates had defied central authority once the fashion for castle-building seized the European landholding class in the eleventh century. It was extremely costly; and to the costs had been added those of replacing local with national fortifications in the frontier zones throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Investment in siegecraft, destructive and constructive, had the collateral effect of securing under-investment in civil infrastructures – roads, bridges and canals – which might otherwise have made the passage of armies on offensive campaigns swift and decisive. As late as 1826, for example, while the British road network – much of it in Scotland deliberately built for military purposes after the Jacobite revolt of 1745 – extended to over 21,000 miles, that of France (three times the size) was no greater, while Prussia, which occupied much of the most strategically significant terrain in northern Europe, had a road network of only 3,340 miles, most of it in her Rhineland provinces. Her eastern lands were virtually roadless, as Poland and Russia were to remain – to Napoleon’s and then Hitler’s cost – well into the twentieth century.

The surplus created by the economic miracle in nineteenth-century Europe cancelled out the effects of under-investment in road-building and over-investment in frontier fortification. Mass armies, transported and supplied along the new infrastructure of railways, swamped strategically significant territory as if by tidal force in an era of changed sea levels. In 1866 and 1870 the armies of Prussia overflowed the frontier regions of Austrian Bohemia and French Alsace-Lorraine without hindrance by the costly fortifications that guarded them. Strategic movement in Europe achieved a fluidity equivalent almost to that which had characterised the western campaigns of the American Civil War, fought by mass armies in a landscape free from artificial obstructions of any sort. Regions disputed by Habsburg and Bourbon generals in two hundred years of toothpick campaigning for advantage in each cavity and crevice of each other’s borderlands went under the hammer of steam power in a few weeks of brutal resculpturing. It seemed that a second ‘military revolution’, equivalent to that brought about by gunpowder and mobile cannon at the dawn of the Renaissance and Reformation, stood at hand. Blood, iron and gold – available in quantities more copious than any of which the richest king had ever disposed – promised victories swifter and more total even than those which had been achieved by Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan.

Such victories were promised but could not necessarily be delivered; for the greatest material riches do not avail if the human qualities necessary to animate them are lacking. But here too the nineteenth century had wrought a sea-change. The eighteenth-century soldier had been a poor creature, the liveried servant of his king, sometimes – in Russia and Prussia – an actual serf delivered into the state’s service by his feudal master. Uniform was, indeed, a livery, which reigning monarchs conspicuously did not wear. Those who did bore it as a mark of surrendered rights. It meant that they had succumbed to ‘want or hardship’, the most common impulse to enlistment; that they had changed sides (turncoat prisoners of war formed large contingents in most armies); that they had accepted mercenary service under foreign colours (as tens of thousands of Swiss, Scots, Irish, Slavs and other highlanders and backwoodsmen did throughout the
ancien régime
); that they had ‘plea-bargained’ out of imprisonment for petty crime or attachment for civic debt; or simply that they had failed to run fast enough from the press-gang. The volunteer was almost the rarest if the best of soldiers. Because so many of his comrades-in-arms were unwilling warriors, the penalties for desertion were draconian and the code of discipline ferocious. The eighteenth-century soldier was flogged for infractions of duty and hanged for indiscipline, both sorts of offence being loosely interpreted.

The nineteenth-century soldier, by contrast, was a man who wanted to be what he was. A willing, often an enthusiastic, soldier, he was usually a conscript but one who accepted his term of (admittedly short) service as a just subtraction from his years of liberty, to be performed with cheerfulness as well as obedience. This was the case at least from mid-century onwards and in the armies of the most advanced states – Prussia first and foremost, but also France and Austria, with the smaller and more backward hurrying to follow suit. Such a change of attitude is difficult to document but real enough nevertheless. Perhaps its most tangible manifestation was the appearance of the regimental souvenir which began to be manufactured in tens of thousands towards the end of the nineteenth century. The souvenir, typically in Germany a china drinking mug, decorated with pictures of regimental life, usually bore the names of the conscript’s fellow platoon members, some couplets of doggerel verse, a salutation to the regiment – ‘Here’s to the 12th Grenadiers’ – and the universal superscription ‘In memory of my service time’. The young soldier who had been sent off garlanded with flowers by his neighbours – a strikingly different farewell from that given to the Russian serf conscript of the eighteenth century, for whom the village priest said a requiem mass – bore back his souvenir when his service time was over to stand in a place of honour in the family home.

This remarkable change of attitude was literally revolutionary. The roots of the change were manifold, but the three most important led directly to the French Revolution and the principal slogans of its ideology: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

Military service became popular in the nineteenth century first because it was an experience of
equality
. ‘Cook’s son – Duke’s son – son of a belted Earl,’ Rudyard Kipling wrote of the army Britain sent to fight the Boers in 1900, with some accuracy. Popular enthusiasm for the war did sweep all classes into the ranks as common soldiers; but they were, of course, volunteers. Universal conscription in the European armies took all classes willy-nilly – in Prussia from 1814, in Austria from 1867, in France from 1889 – and bound them to service for two or three years. There were variations in the proportion of annual
classes
enlisted and fluctuations in the length of service. There were alleviations of obligation for the better educated; typically, for example, high-school graduates served only one year and were then transferred to the reserve as potential officers. Yet the principle of universal obligation that generally held good was also accepted as persisting. Reservists during their early years of discharge returned annually to the colours for retraining; as they grew older they moved to a wartime reserve (
Landwehr
in Germany, Territorial Army in France); and their final years of able manhood were spent on the list of the Home Guard. Reserve training was borne with good humour, even regarded as a sort of all-male holiday. Freud, a reserve medical officer in the Austrian army, writing to a friend from manoeuvres in 1886, observed that ‘it would be ungrateful not to admit that military life with its inescapable “must” is good for neurasthenia. It all disappeared in the first week.’

Conscription was also relatively egalitarian in its outreach. Jews, like Freud, were as liable as Gentiles and in the Habsburg army automatically became officers if educationally qualified; in the German army, Jews could become reserve officers but were barred by regimental anti-Semitism from holding regular commissions, though Bismarck’s financier, Bleichroder, managed to get his son a regular commission in the household cavalry. The officer who recommended Hitler for his Iron Cross 1st Class was a Jewish reserve officer. This was ‘emancipation’ in its military aspect, and it applied not only to Jews. The universality of conscription swept up every nationality in the Habsburg lands, Poles and Alsace-Lorrainers in Germany, Basques, Bretons and Savoyards in France. All, by being soldiers, were also to be Austrians, Germans or Frenchmen.

Conscription was an instrument not only of equality but also of
fraternity
. Because it applied to all at the same moment of their lives and in principle treated all in the same way, it forged bonds of brotherhood young Europeans had never before felt. Universal compulsory education, a simultaneous innovation, was currently taking children outside their families and plunging them into a common experience of learning. Conscription took young adults from their locality and plunged them into the experience of growing up – confronting them with the challenge of separation from home, making new friends, dealing with enemies, adjusting to authority, wearing strange clothes, eating unfamiliar food,
^fn3
shifting for themselves. It was a genuine
rite de passage
, intellectual, emotional and, not least of all, physical. Nineteenth-century armies, told that they were ‘schools of the nation’, took on many of the characteristics of contemporary schools, not only testing and heightening literacy and numeracy but also teaching swimming, athletics and cross-country sports as well as shooting and the martial arts. Turnvater Jahn, the pioneer of physical education in Germany, was a potent influence on Prussian military training; his ideas were propagated in France through the specialist athletics instructors of the Bataillon de Joinville, while in Italy Captain Caprilli founded a school of military horsemanship which was to transform the art of riding throughout the Western world. The healthy outdoorsmanship of military life, lived round the campfire and under canvas, would eventually develop into the ideals of the German youth movement and the code of the Boy Scouts and so make its way back into social and military life by a convergent route.

The
rite de passage
of universal conscription was not a liberating experience for all. As Professor William McNeill has pointed out, individuals drafted into the army from a society which was rapidly urbanising and industrialising, marching them away from the plough and the village pump,

found themselves in a simpler society than the one they knew in civil life. The private soldier lost almost all personal responsibility. Ritual and routine took care of nearly every working hour. Simple obedience to the orders that punctuated that routine from time to time, and set activity off in some new direction, offered release from the anxieties inherent in personal decision-making – anxieties that multiplied incontinently in urban society, where rival leaders, rival loyalties and practical alternatives as to how to spend at least part of one’s time competed insistently for attention. Paradoxical as it may sound, escape from freedom was often a real liberation, especially for young men living under very rapidly changing conditions, who had not yet been able to assume fully adult roles.

Even when allowance is made for the force of this percipient observation, however, the ultimate importance of universal conscription in changing attitudes to military service was that it ultimately connected with
liberty
, in its political if not its personal sense. The old armies had been instruments of oppression of the people by kings; the new armies were to be instruments of the people’s liberation from kings, even if that liberation was to be narrowly institutional in the states which retained monarchy. The two ideas were not mutually contradictory. The French National Convention had decreed in 1791 that ‘the battalion organised in each district shall be united under a banner bearing the inscription: “The French people united against tyranny”.’ That decree encapsulated the idea inherent in the United States Constitution that ‘the right to bear arms’, once made common, was a guarantee of direct freedoms. Two years earlier the revolutionary leader, Dubois-Crance, had articulated the congruent proposition: ‘Each citizen should be a soldier, and each soldier a citizen, or we shall never have a constitution.’

The tension between the principles of winning freedoms by revolutionary assault and extracting them in legal form by performance of military duty was to transfix European political life for much of the nineteenth century. The excess of freedom won by force of arms in France provoked the reaction of Thermidor and diverted the fervour of the extremist
sans-culottes
into conquest abroad. The victories of the ‘revolutionary’ armies (after 1795 firmly under the control of their officers, many of them, ironically, returned monarchists) then had the effect of provoking their enemies, particularly the Prussian and Austrian kings, into decreeing a variation of the
levée-en-masse
or general conscription, the original manifestation of the French Revolution in its military form. Such conscription produced popular forces –
Landwehr, Landsturm, Freischützen
– to oppose the French on their home territories.