The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (28 page)

Although the heaviest fighting took place on the Western Front, the First World War ultimately changed remarkably little in Europe west of the Rhine. The biggest territorial change was that Alsace and Lorraine went back to France, but they had been French before 1871. In any case, such were the human and economic losses suffered by France that even this restoration seemed unlikely to endure. Britain and the United States had intervened decisively, but as soon as the German occupation of Belgium and northern France ended, they lost interest and went home. A relatively narrow strip of territory from the Channel to the Alps had suffered varying degrees of destruction, but the more profound consequences of the war in the west – which were demographic, economic and psychological – only slowly became apparent. At first, the balance of power seemed unchanged. By contrast, the much more mobile war that was fought on the Eastern Front seemed to change almost everything east of the River Elbe.

There is an unforgettable passage in Joseph Roth’s novel
The Radetzky March
which helps to explain why this was. The scene is a crowded hotel ballroom on the night of June 28, 1914, in a remote garrison town near the Russian border – a place where, as Roth puts
it, ‘the civilized Austrian was menaced… by bears and wolves and even more dreadful monsters, such as lice and bedbugs’. The assembled infantry officers are of virtually every nationality in the Dual Monarchy and each reacts in his own way to the garbled telegram bearing the news of the assassination of the heir to the throne. Major Zoglauer urges that the party be broken up at once; Rittmeister Zschoch disagrees. ‘Gentlemen,’ declares Reserve Rittmeister von Babenhausen, ‘Bosnia is far away. We don’t give a damn about rumours. As far as I am concerned, to hell with them!’ ‘Bravo!’ exclaims Baron Nagy Jenö, a Magyar nobleman impelled by the fact of having a Jewish grandfather in Bogumin to take on ‘all the defects of the Hungarian gentry’: ‘Herr von Babenhausen is right, absolutely right! If the heir to the throne has been assassinated, then there are other heirs left!’

Herr von Senny, more Magyar in blood than Herr von Nagy, was filled with a sudden dread that someone of a Jewish background might outdo him in Hungarian nationalism. Rising to his feet he said, ‘If the heir to the throne has been assassinated, well, first of all we know nothing for certain, and secondly, it doesn’t concern us in the least.’…

First Lieutenant Kinsky, who had grown up on the banks of the Moldau, claimed that in any case the heir to the throne had been a highly precarious choice for the monarchy… Count Battyanyi, who was drunk, hereupon began speaking Hungarian to his compatriots… [Rittmeister] Jelacich, a Slovene, hit the ceiling. He hated the Hungarians as much as he despised the Serbs. He loved the monarchy. He was a patriot… And he did feel a wee bit guilty [since]… both his teenage sons were already talking about independence for all southern Slavs.

Though he himself understands Magyar, Jelacich insists the Hungarians speak in German, whereupon one of them declares that he and his countrymen are ‘glad that the bastard is gone!’ Lieutenant Trotta, the grandson of a Slovene knighted at the Battle of Solferino, rises drunkenly in response to this scandalous utterance. Threatening to shoot anyone who says another word against the dead man, he shouts ‘Silence!’, despite the fact that the Hungarians outrank him. Count Benkyö orders the band to play Chopin’s funeral march, but the drunken guests keep dancing and the band involuntarily speeds
up. Outside a storm rages. The resulting
danse macabre
ends only when the footmen clear away the musicians’ instruments. Trotta resolves to resign his commission; his Ukrainian batman decides to desert and go home to Burdlaki. ‘There was no more Fatherland. It was crumbling, splintering.’

In Western Europe the stakes were strategic, not ethnic. The British had concluded that they could not allow Germany to defeat France and Russia, for fear of a threat to Britain’s security comparable with that posed a century before by Napoleon. When war came, Bretons did not turn on Gascons, nor did Walloons and Flemings fight one another. Scotsmen, Welshmen, Englishmen and many Irishmen fought alongside one another without serious ill-feeling. Only in Ireland did the First World War usher in a civil war and even that was not as bloody a conflict as is sometimes assumed. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, it was understood early on that war spelt the dissolution of the old order of multi-ethnic empires and ethnically mixed communities. On the Western Front, Belgian and French civilians were only briefly in the firing line, in the opening phase of the war. Once the battle lines hardened, however, the combat zone was effectively militarized; thereafter, as a rule, civilians became casualties only as a result of the enemy’s inaccurate artillery fire or their own incaution. The Eastern Front was very different. There, from the Baltic to the Balkans, the great advances and retreats that characterized the fighting repeatedly exposed large civilian populations to both accidental and deliberate violence.

Predictably, it was the Jewish communities of the Russian Pale of Settlement who had the most to fear. In the opening phase of the war, at least a hundred Jews were summarily executed by the Russian army on suspicion of espionage, the assumption being that Jews could not possibly be loyal to the Tsarist regime. There was also a policy of systematic plundering. On October 14, 1914, some 4,000 Jews were driven from their homes in Grozin (Warsaw province); they were denied any means to transport their possessions with them. In response to an enquiry about requisitioning, the Staff of the 4th Army of the South-Western Front issued the order, ‘From the kikes take everything.’ In the Kovno region fifteen localities witnessed pogroms in July 1915, while in the Vilna region nineteen
shtetls
were demolished in
August and September 1915. There were also attacks on Jews in Minsk, Volhynia and Grodno. In many villages, Jewish women were raped by soldiers.

Jews in Galicia were also systematically mistreated when the Russians marched into Austrian territory in the opening phase of the war. There were pogroms in Brody and in Lemberg immediately after their occupation by Russian forces. Nine Jews were killed in the former; seventeen in the latter. In the words of a Jewish doctor in the Russian army: ‘The methods were everywhere the same: after some provocative shot from a never disclosed person, came robbery, fire, and massacre.’ In December 1914 one general told the troops of his division:

Remember, brothers, that your first foe is the Germans. They have long sucked our blood, and now want to conquer our land. Don’t take them prisoner, bayonet them – I’ll answer for it. Your second foe are the kikes [
zhidy
]. They are spies and aid the Germans. If you meet a
zhid
in the field – bayonet him, I’ll answer for it.

The behaviour of Cossack units was notoriously bad. A Jewish soldier in the Russian army described one among many incidents:

When our brigade marched through one village, a soldier spotted a house on a hill, and told our commander that it was probably the home of Jews. The officer allowed him to go and have a look. He returned with the cheerful news that Jews
were
indeed living there. The officer ordered the brigade to approach the house. They opened the door and found some twenty Jews half dead with fear. The troops led them out, and the officer gave his order: ‘Slice them up! Chop them up!’

Another Russian unit ordered the Jews of a
shtetl
near Wolkowisk to strip naked, dance with one another, and then ride on pigs; they then proceeded to shoot every tenth person. Between April and October 1915, as the Russians retreated from Galicia, there were roughly one hundred separate pogroms or minor anti-Jewish incidents, nearly all instigated by soldiers. To deprive the Austrians of conscripts, the Russians also attempted to take with them all of the male population between the ages of eighteen and fifty; the Jews of the occupied area were also moved as an ‘unreliable element’ to the small area around Tarnopol that the Russians continued to occupy.

Violence towards Jews, as we have seen, had been a feature of life in Eastern Europe before the war began. Yet it would be a mistake to view pogroms in isolation. Throughout the East European theatre of war there were attacks on ethnic minorities, sometimes but not always perpetrated by occupying armies. Germans in Galicia were forced to flee their homes following the Austrian defeats at Lemberg and Przemyśl in 1914. As the Austrians retreated, numerous German villages – for example Mariahilf – were burned to the ground by Russian regulars and Cossacks. When German reinforcements under General August von Mackensen turned the tide, the Russians took hostages from these villages back with them to Russia. The Austrians, meanwhile, executed numerous Poles and Ukrainians accused of collaborating with the Russians during their occupation. Similar scenes were repeated in Bukovina, which was overrun by the Russians within a few weeks of the outbreak of war, and saw renewed fighting during the Russian Brusilov offensive in the summer of 1916. In the confusion of 1917 and 1918, when it seemed the Germans had won the war in the East, expectations of independence in Poland and the Ukraine precipitated bitter fighting between the various ethnic groups in Galicia. Germans further east also fell victim to the war, even though they lived many miles from the front lines. From the outset, the Russian Commander-in-Chief, the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich, and the Chief of the General Staff, General Nikolai Yanushkevich, viewed the non-Russian population of Russia’s Western frontier with the utmost suspicion. It was not only Jews but also Germans, Gypsies, Hungarians and Turks who were deported from the empire’s western provinces during the war; in all, around 250,000 people.

The war had the same disruptive effect in the Balkans, where it had, after all, begun. Serbian losses were among the highest of the entire war in relative terms. Not all violent deaths came about as a result of formal military engagements. In his novel
The Bridge on the Drina
, Ivo Andrić memorably described the impact of the outbreak of war in 1914 on the ethnically mixed Bosnian town of Višegrad:

The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal
was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief. A man who saw clearly and with open eyes and was then living could see how this miracle took place and how the whole of a society could, in a single day, be transformed… It is true that there had always been concealed enmities and jealousies and religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty, but there had also been courage and fellowship and a feeling for measure and order, which restrained all these instincts within the limits of the supportable and, in the end, calmed them down and submitted them to the general interest of life in common… Men… vanished overnight as if they had died suddenly, together with the habits, customs and institutions which they represented.

In this case it was the Serbian minority that was persecuted with the encouragement of the Austrian authorities, but both the Muslim and Jewish communities were, sometimes literally, caught in the crossfire. Andrić’s novel is superficially a chronicle of recurrent ethnic conflict, dating back to the sixteenth century, when the Ottoman authorities began to construct the bridge of the book’s title. Yet the bridge on the Drina is intended to symbolize the capacity for harmony of a multi-ethnic society like Višegrad’s; it is ‘the link between East and West’, where men and, later, women of the town’s different faiths and cultures meet to smoke, sip coffee and gossip. Despite occasional manifestations of violence upon it, the bridge withstands all the stresses and strains of Ottoman decline. It is only in 1914 that the conflict between Serbs, Muslim ‘Turks’ and German ‘Swabians’ becomes uncontainable and the bridge is literally blown apart.

Višegrad was only one of many multi-ethnic towns rent asunder by the Great War. In Andrić’s words, it merely ‘provided a small but eloquent example of the first symptoms of a contagion which would in time become European and then spread to the entire world’. The Western Front had revealed a new level of industrialization in warfare – had seen the introduction of machines of death comparable in their lethal effectiveness with those Wells had imagined in
The War of the Worlds
. But the Eastern Front had seen an equally important
transformation in warfare. There the death throes of the old Central and East European empires had dissolved the old boundaries between combatant and civilian. This kind of war proved much easier to start than to stop.

On the whole, great multinational empires are an institution of the past, of a time when material force was held high and the principle of nationality had not yet been recognized, because democracy had not been recognized.

Thomas Masaryk, 1918

Great was the year and terrible the year of Our Lord 1918, but the year 1919 was even more terrible.

Mikhail Bulgakov,
The White Guard

The peace that followed the First World War was the continuation of war by other means. The Bolsheviks proclaimed an end to hostilities, only to plunge the Russian Empire into a barbaric civil war. The Western statesmen drafted peace treaties – one for each of the defeated Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey) – each of which was a
casus belli
in its own right. Nor, as Keynes predicted in
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
, did ‘vengeance… limp’. As it turned out, Keynes was only half right. He expected that the financial burdens imposed under the Treaty of Versailles would be the principal bone of post-war contention; the European ‘civil war’ would come, he wrote, ‘if we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe… if we take the view that for at least a generation to come Germany cannot be trusted with even a modicum of prosperity… that year by year Germany must be kept
impoverished and her children starved and crippled’. The causes of the Second World War in Europe were not economic, however; at least, not in the sense Keynes had in mind. They were territorial – or, to be more precise, they arose from the conflict between territorial arrangements based on the principle of ‘self-determination’ and the realities of ethnically mixed patterns of settlement. Keynes also expected that the first reaction against the peace treaties would come from Germany. In fact it came from Turkey, though what happened there foreshadowed much that the Germans would later do.