Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experience

By Hugh Cecil and Peter Liddle

Facing Armageddon is the first scholarly work on the 1914-18 War to explore, on a world-wide basis, the real nature of the participants experience. Sixty-four scholars from all over the globe deliver the fruits of recent research in what civilians and servicemen passed through, in the air, on the sea and on land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Apr 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9781473813977

Hugh Cecil

Dr Hugh Cecil taught Modern History at Leeds University. His acclaimed work on military history includes The Flower of Battle: How Britain Wrote the Great War. He has co-authored three outstanding biographies including most recently In Search of Rex Whistler: His Life and His Work.

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Introduction

Hugh Cecil, Peter Liddle

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It is over eighty years since the beginning of the great global conflict which in 1914 ushered in a new era of armed struggle and shaped this century. Among historians, the interpretation of this event remains as lively a battlefield as at any time. Their chief efforts have concentrated on the burning questions of why the 1914–18 war happened, what its effects were, how it was run, and according to what strategies. However, in this long and serious debate on the major issues, there would seem to be room for a more comprehensive scholarly treament of one area, namely, the subject of this book: the experience of men and women in a world war, leaders and led alike.

In every land where a war is within living memory, former participants will meet to remember it. They seek above all to recollect the companionship in days of youth and great danger and the memory of lost comrades to whom they feel forever bound; to recall times when they had been ready to put first, and before self, a cause in which they believed. Experience of total war is at the heart of the culture and societies of twentieth century Europe and America – as indeed it is for some parts of Asia and Africa. Quite as much as the First World War’s causes and impact on world politics, this field therefore merits academic investigation. What did people of most ages, in every class, in combatant and non-combatant roles, in command or under orders, really pass through? How did the war affect them?

This volume shows that there is ample research material available for examining these questions in the ever-accumulating personal archives and in the mass of imperfectly-explored official documents, such as censorship and intelligence reports. In tackling this subject, however, scholars find themselves frequently up against well-established popular myths, such as that of an universally disillusioned soldiery reluctantly engaged in futile destruction throughout Europe – myths which persist in the face of strong contrary evidence and dominate contemporary fiction and above all, television programmes, the greatest influence in moulding opinion today.¹

Historians cannot ignore popular misconceptions; their duty is to enlighten the public as well as one another. For the very reason that the subject of war experience is so emotionally charged, it needs cooler, more balanced examination. This book demonstrates that the truth is far from simple.

It is now possible and desirable to look at ‘the myriad faces of war’ from a broad perspective, on an international level, recognising that the experience of war for one country’s citizens is not necessarily true for those of all the other participating nations, as some British and American commentators have assumed. This is what H.G. Wells meant when he wrote in 1927 of his hope that in the future a publisher would put together what he called ‘a living, many-sided view of the immense multiplex occurrence.’² Only with such a sense of proportion can one realise, for example, that any despondency among British troops on the Western Front was a long way from the breakdown of morale in the Russian army in 1917 – a distinction a recent BBC film on the history of the twentieth century completely failed to make.³

Thanks to the efforts here of over sixty scholars from as far afield as Russia, Australia and the U.S.A., some from disciplines other than history, the varied nature of responses to the First World War becomes clear. This book sets out, first, to analyse the kind of war it was. Its technology, as explained by John Terraine, was the context in which soldiers, sailors and airmen fought; while Imanuel Geiss reminds us that women and children, non-combatants, old and young, had scant protection in war zones, throughout the European continent.

It was a war of machines against machines, as well as machines against men. In such an impersonal storm of destruction, the schoolboy’s dream of heroic single combat became impossible – save occasionally for airmen. But the human courage required was as great as ever before. It was a war of industries – the industries that produced the supplies to maintain the troops in the trenches and the shells to kill their enemies; the industries that on the battlefield created a more blighted scenery than any polluted factory landscape and a noise more ear-splitting than the loudest steam-hammers.

We should remind ourselves however, that the war did not take place only on the Western Front, the location for which it is best remembered and which was in truth, the decisive area of the fighting. It covered two-thirds of the globe, affecting populations from Tahiti to the Orkneys. It meant, as this volume tells us, vagabondage for countless Russian children, acute hunger in Germany and Austria, riots in Italy, hangings in Mesopotamia, ancient university buildings blazing in Belgium, merchant seamen drowning in the Atlantic and forced labour in East Africa.

It was a war which brought countless new opportunities of employment, particularly for women; a war in which political reputations were triumphantly won or disastrously lost, a war bringing stress, happiness and grief to love and marriage, a war in which unwanted ‘war babies’ were born and children orphaned.

Much of this volume is devoted to those who fought, looking first (Part ii) at their leaders – Ludendorff, Churchill, Foch, Pétain, Mangin, Pershing, Beatty, Lloyd George and Haig. Amid the critical attention devoted to these decision-makers, little is normally paid to the physical and psychological cost of their work. This section focuses on the burden of executive office and its impact on the office holder. At any given moment, the fate of literally a million men might be in one man’s hands – a responsibility which took a heavy toll on nerves and vitality.

Part iii of the book looks at naval activity, German, Italian and British, in the North Sea and English Channel, in amphibious operations off the Gallipoli peninsula, in the Adriatic and in the Atlantic convoys. While giving a view of overall strategy, it concentrates, too, on the pressures faced by ordinary seafarers, civilians and servicemen alike. In the last two chapters the experience of British and German airmen, pioneers of the most modern arm of warfare, is examined. While high strategy and technology affected these branches of the services, many of the wartime ordeals at sea could have occurred in earlier days. Tony Lane shows how merchant seamen reacted dutifully to their First World War trials much as they reacted to disaster at any time. Strikingly we can see how sailors were often called on to fight on land as well as sea or to take part in amphibious operations, and also how airmen, a great many of whom had started as soldiers (and rather fewer, as sailors) worked closely with ground forces, with whom they retained an affinity.

The most eloquent symbol of the conflict was of course the soldier – particularly the infantryman of the trenches – whether patriotic, disaffected, cheerful, enraged, glum, or stoical. Parts iv, v and vi analyse the morale and loyalties among soldiers of Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Italy, America, Turkey and Great Britain. Despite great differences in the levels of equipment and organisation, much of the fighting had an universal character. What emerges, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the importance of collective loyalty and purpose – both national and regimental. Where these were strong and where the officers and command were respected, the will to fight endured, even when there were serious shortages of equipment. For much of the time this was as true of the badly-fed, under-equipped but sometimes victorious Turkish army as it was of the efficient, well-armed land forces of Britain (where the new women’s army corps shared in the unit pride and individual honours for courage) and of Germany. The importance also of small group loyalty emerges in John Bourne’s examination of a working-class citizen army predisposed towards such solidarity by the nature of their pre-war existence and in Tom Nevin’s chapter on German Storm Troopers as chronicled by Ernst Jünger. The ésprit of strongly cohesive German, British and French units contrasted with that of many in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian armies. The Russian soldiers, despite a strong sense of national identity, felt that they had been betrayed by their leaders. Austro–Hungarians were riven by ethnic divisions intensified by a poor performance in the field. The Italian army, after two years of low morale, became more effective when a detested leadership was replaced, finding also a national purpose in the urgent drive to avert total defeat.

The efficiency of armies and their endurance in the field was directly related to the health of their men and the swift, effective treatment of casualties. Some of the grimmest but also inspiring chapters of the war’s history deal with medical care of the wounded. The next section of the book (Part vii) describes lessons learned by the medical profession in treating wounds and disease, particularly shell-shock and facial injury; and they tell much of the conduct of the army doctors at the front, who despite harsh things sometimes said of them in personal reminiscences, emerge on the whole with great credit.

Part viii, on peoples at war, elaborates the theme, emphasized in Professor Geiss’s introductory essay, that the war was not just a war of military organisations but of whole nations, whether their citizens took part as temporary service personnel, as non-combatant war workers, or simply as passive sufferers – and even beneficiaries. Two chapters highlight the differences between a unified Britain and Russia, where social fissures ran deep. The chapters on Germany and Italy present dissimilar societies under pressure of shortages, and the failures of their leaders to keep public opinion fully behind them on the home front. These failures, the social fractures exacerbated by shortages and the hardship on many who were children at the time, were among the causes of the rise of fascism in these two countries. This section concludes with an examination of an important and hitherto largely neglected area of study – the experience of the peoples of the undeveloped, chiefly colonial, countries.

There were many for whom war involved a struggle on home territory, either with an occupying power, or against an imperial power which they no longer recognised as legitimate. Some there were, too, who fell foul of a state machine forcing them into a war they regarded as immoral. Part ix describes the French and Belgian resistance to German occupation, the opportunist dissidence of Arab and Jugoslav nationalists against their Turkish and Austrian overlords and the conscientious objectors in France and Britain – whose path in some senses was the loneliest.

In Part x, we are reminded that war was not only something which happened, but which was being continually re-written for the benefit of those at home. Two chapters show how British and American propagandists idealised – and sometimes distorted – the nature of war service in industry and at the front. Moreover the people involved in dispensing propaganda, as, for instance, German schoolteachers or British war correspondents, had their own particular experience of war, marked by great dedication and sacrifice and, more than occasionally, mixed feelings about what they were doing. To be on the receiving end of all this, as were schoolchildren and cinema audiences, was to experience the war in yet another way. These contemporary efforts to influence public opinion have played a large part in the later misrepresentation of the First World War, either because they have perpetuated a misleading picture of how things were or because they have driven people into the opposite error of disbelieving what was in some cases, although propaganda, substantially true.

Finally, in Part xi, this book looks at ways in which the First World War has been perceived, sometimes after an interval, by some of the most imaginative and articulate individuals who experienced it – painters, novelists, poets and one eminent soldier of a reflective and literary outlook – Sir Ian Hamilton. To what extent is it ever possible to describe war? Can poetry, a formalised medium of expression, evoke the raw reality, however shortly after a battle it is written? Can a novel, finished after long pondering, tell a greater truth than contemporary letters and diaries, or is its message inevitably distorted by later events and by literary conventions? However honestly conceived, some of this creative effort may have failed because the artists’ perceptions had been altered by disappointments after the war or new hopes of better times leading them to reinterpret their experience. Much war art, produced by both soldiers and civilians, however, was not of course intended to be a literal interpretation but allegorical, the ‘vocabulary of mourning’ as J.M. Winter puts it, helping people in an age of mass bereavement to cope with the enormous catastrophe of war.

Inevitably, even in so large a volume, there are gaps of which the editors are all too aware – for example to do with day-to-day wartime political and diplomatic life, with espionage, with soldier priests, or with the Armenian massacres only touched on in Imanuel Geiss’s chapter. In another volume or edition of this book one may hope that this will be rectified. To address at least some of the lacunae, Ian Beckett’s concluding chapter, a bibliographical essay which looks back over the last ten years of historical writing on the experience of the Great War, directs readers towards such subjects as British Empire experience and feminist studies of the conflict.

In this bibliographical chapter, Dr. Beckett also makes a brief reference to the international historical conference in September 1994 held during the week organised by the University and City of Leeds to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the First World War. Over those eight days, from morning until night, there took place a series of events on the Great War theme: lectures, exhibitions, staged commemoration of former war poets, popular musical culture and film of the day and re-enactments of the wartime life of the city. At the end, on Sunday, 11 September, there was a service near Leeds City Art Gallery, beside Henry Charles Fehr’s powerful war memorial, attended by representatives from foreign embassies. It was a moment for contemplation of those days of struggle – and for acceptance and symbolic reconciliation, after eighty years. To some it seemed appropriate that the Winged Victory which had formerly topped the monument, had been replaced in 1992, after being shaken in high winds, by a new sculpture symbolising peace.

In a sense there was a finality about the whole week, for it was surely one of the last major commemorations of the Great War at which veterans could be present. Ten years before at another commemorative occasion at Sunderland, survivors from the Great War had taken an active part in conference debates and had sung their old songs with gusto in the evenings. In 1995, sadly, only one solitary frail figure, ninety-six year old Walter Hare, former Somme veteran, was able to represent, at any of the ceremonies, the millions of soldiers who had marched away to serve their countries between 1914 and 1918.

Yet this volume, which drew its inspiration from that week of commemoration, is not intended as a finishing post – rather, a fresh starting line in the historical scholarship about four years which changed the course of history. This book is guided by the desire to cross the ever-widening divide between that tragic conflict and the present, to deepen our understanding of what it was like to go through it and to prevent the actuality of the Great War from being swamped by the distortions of popular mythology.

Notes

1

See for example, Ben Elton & Richard Curtis’s ‘Blackadder Goes Forth’ (1992), Alan Bleasdale’s ‘The Monocled Mutineer’ (1986) and ‘The People’s Century’ (1995).

2

H.G. Wells: preface to A.D. Gristwood, The Somme, also including the Coward, London, Cape, 1927.

3

The People’s Century (1995).

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Part I

A World at War

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Chapter 1

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The Substance of the War

John Terraine

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During an academic lifetime of study and writing about the First World War, it was not until my tenth book on this subject, White Heat: The New Warfare 1914–18, 1982, that I ventured to say in the Introduction, that it dealt with ‘the very nature of the war’; that is to say, a factor shared in varying degrees by all the combatants, and with those variations of degree playing decisive parts in the conduct and outcome of the event. This, I wrote, ‘is a book about the sinews of the greatest First Industrial Revolution War.’ It had taken me about forty years to reach that perception.

To avoid confusion, I think I must now explain what I mean by ‘First Industrial Revolution’. I mean the enormous change brought about in human life and transactions by the introduction of steam-power – i.e. the transition from horses to horse-power, and the virtually simultaneous introduction of steel as a prime material. Steam was produced by heat from coal, steel was evolved from iron: the possession of these commodities in large supply was an economic and political asset of fundamental importance, both in peace and war. A second Industrial Revolution added the internal combustion engine, based on petroleum, as a further power source, along with electricity and light metals. A third Revolution contributed nuclear energy, plastics and electronics. A process of emergence, dominance, decline and fall is apparent. There are no fixed dates; elements of all three Revolutions operate today, and so do such pre-Industrial power-sources as oxen, horses and mules, and pre-Industrial materials like bronze and wood. But the ‘natural laws’ that govern us are the laws of Industrial society. They certainly govern war. They supply the sinews.

I wrote in White Heat that the transformation of war by industrialism had two aspects, which I called ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’: ‘The qualitative aspect embraces that continuing stream – or flood – of inventions and developments of techniques which characterises the entire period. The quantitative aspect goes far beyond the matter of productive capacities, though these are impressive and important: it has a profound social significance also.’²

I was referring to the unprecedented increases in population which (with one conspicuous and curious exception) accompanied the rising levels of industrialisation of the great world powers. But a few examples may be illuminating: Between 1880–1911, America’s population rose from 53 million to 94 million; an increase of 41 million. Between 1880–1913, Britain’s population rose by 12 million. In the same period Germany’s population rose by 22 million. The exception to the rule was France, where a population of just over 30 million in 1821 only reached 39 million in 1921 – a century later. I added: ‘These large population increases are central to the great wars of the First Industrial Revolution; the mass populations supplied the mass armies which are the particular feature of those wars.’³

There was never any doubt that the mass populations would turn into mass armies. Germany’s 67 million people entered the war with just under 4½ million trained and partially trained soldiers; France’s 39 million had 3½ million under arms on mobilization; Russia’s estimated 167 million mobilized just over 4 million in the army. Britain alone ignored the portents, resolutely refused to adopt conscription and clung to what Lord Esher called ‘the Principle of Unequal Sacrifice’ and what others had more cruelly called ‘conscription by hunger’. In August 1914 her army numbered 733, 514,\ including Territorials and Reserves. But she was never able to escape the hard realities: Lord Kitchener’s implementation of the much-admired Voluntary System produced 1,186,357 recruits by the end of 1914, a number which most public figures would have regarded as impossible, indeed ludicrous, five months earlier, but which was multiplied by nearly five before the War was over – a total of about one seventh of the population. It seemed a very high figure to us, but comparatively it was not; the German enlistment total was 11 million – about a sixth of the population; the French was 8 million – one in five. I would not like to even guess at the Russian figures – their proportion would almost certainly be considerably smaller, their total distressingly high. It was a war of unwieldy hordes.

They all had to be clothed in the distinctive fashions of their calling, equipped with all its accoutrements, accommodated, moved over land and sea, medicated, fed – and buried. The Industrial Revolution took care of all these matters in a manner never before possible. The picture is awesome – the production figures of the war; the astronomical mileage of telephone wire and barbed wire; the quantities of sandbags; of pit-props; the diversity and numbers of trench warfare supplies; acreage of cloth for uniforms; horseshoes; tonnages of lint for bandages; the unimaginable totals of weapons: rifles, machine guns, small arms ammunition, artillery of all calibres, shells … shells … shells. Winston Churchill became Minister of Munitions in July 1917 – it is arguable that it was, next to becoming Prime Minister in 1940, his most successful post, the man and his task fitting like a hand in a tailored glove; as he described it, ‘We were in the presence of requirements at once imperative and apparently insatiable.’⁴ But thanks to the unending progress of industrial technology, by 1918 the insatiable greed of battle was propitiated almost effortlessly. As Churchill said, ‘The whole island was an arsenal.’⁵

By 1918, he tells us, describing this great Ministry over which he presided, ‘Nearly all the mines and workshops of Britain were in our hands. We controlled and were actually managing all the greatest industries. We regulated the supply of all their raw materials. We organized the whole distribution of their finished products. Nearly five million persons were directly under our orders, and we were interwoven on every side with every other sphere of the national economic life.’⁶

If that is not a description of a revolution, I don’t know what is. And referring to the sundry satrapies within his empire, he continues:

There was very little in the productive sphere they could not at this time actually do. A requisition, for instance, for half a million houses would not have seemed more difficult to comply with than those we were already in process of executing for a hundred thousand aeroplanes, or twenty thousand guns, or the medium artillery of the American army, or two million tons of projectiles.⁷

He is, of course, describing total war: war affecting the totality of the population, absorbing all its economic resources; the only limitation was its ultimate capacity. That was the substance of the war; in total war, the sinews are the sinews of the nation – everything, material and human.

The mass armies drawn from the world’s mass populations could only be equipped and maintained by mass production and mass logistics. Those who had practised these matters had the advantages of experience and apparatus – and this is a key word. The apparatus of the war made it an astonishingly different experience from all its forerunners. Contrary to much ill-informed supposition to the effect that it was a single, mindless repetition of sterile acts, it was in fact a novelty from the first, a novelty breeding novelties to the very end. It became a pendulum performance of invention, antidote, counter-invention, and new antidote.

The Royal Navy encountered undersea-warfare for the first time on the third day of the war, when the light cruiser Amphion struck two German mines and sank with the loss of 150 officers and men. Three days later HMS Birmingham rammed and sank U-15; the new warfare was under way and its most significant form appeared on 20 October when the British steamer Glitra was sunk by U-17 – the first merchant ship to be sunk by a submarine – so beginning the U-boat blockade. The Royal Navy now had to invent and master what was virtually a new profession – Anti-Submarine Warfare. This would ascend almost into the realm of magic during World War II, but it had to begin somewhere, and this was the time. From 1914 to 1944 it revolved around an unremitting process of experiment, trial and completion of weapons and systems; at the centre of them all was the problem of locating a submerged submarine, and a prime system for doing that was what was then called ASDIC and is now called SONAR. This was invented in 1917, and just as the war was ending it was possible to install it in naval vessels, with what were described as promising results. It had taken that long.

The conventional (surface) element of the Royal Navy also quickly found itself in the presence of alarming novelties: on 22 September three old cruisers were sunk in quick succession off the Dutch coast by a single U-boat, U-9. Just over a month later a modern battleship, Audacious (she was launched in 1912), was lost off the north coast of Ireland; the reason why she was there was that the Grand Fleet’s base at Scapa Flow was considered insecure, and Admiral Jellicoe adopted the expedient of taking the fleet round to the west of the British Isles to avoid attack by U-boats – only for Audacious to fall victim to the other underwater weapon, the mine. As the Naval Official History remarks of these events. ‘Nothing that had yet occurred had so emphatically proclaimed the change that had come over naval warfare.’⁸

Yet the most remarkable, unforeseen novelty of naval warfare resided from the first, and continued to do so, on the other side of the North Sea. Nothing had done more to promote Anglo-German hostility than the building of the German High Seas Fleet, a powerful instrument pointed directly at British sea supremacy, the very foundation of the British Empire. When war broke out a decisive trial of strength, a modern Trafalgar, was confidently expected and awaited. For nearly two years nothing of the kind occurred; when it did (at Jutland in 1916) it was a messy, inconclusive-looking affair – but decisive all the same, because it never happened again. And within the messiness lay one of the new wonders of technology: thanks to Wireless Telegraphy and ability to intercept it, Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet was already at sea on its way to meet the Germans before they had left port.

Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, a perceptive and sympathetic observer of techniques, even if he was rather more dubiously gifted in the fields of strategy and politics, identified two of the 20th Century’s novelties as the most fateful: the internal combustion engine and wireless telegraphy – W/T. The former, says Fuller, by solving the problem of flight, lifted warfare into a third dimension; he continues: ‘The latter virtually raised it into the fourth dimension; for all intents and purposes the wireless transmission of energy annihilated time as well as space. Thus two new battlefields were created – the sky and the ether.’⁹

Thanks to W/T, the Royal Navy, between 1914–18, enjoyed an enviable advantage: by the end of 1914 all three of the German Navy’s operational codes were in the hands of the Admiralty. This was a defeat from which, says Patrick Beesly, ‘The Imperial German Navy was never to recover.’¹⁰

It has been said that the German Navy, in that war, could not move a picket-boat in its harbours without the Admiralty in London immediately knowing about it. Not only that, but the art of Direction-Finding by plotting wireless signals advanced so rapidly that by May 1915 a U-boat’s movement could be followed across the North Sea. By 1917 the practice was commonplace – and by 1941 D/F was tracking them right across the Atlantic; later it would be a prime instrument of their swift destruction. The implication of this great stride forward in communication and naval Intelligence procedures was that the Admiralty itself now became a commander-in-chief, a rôle admirably performed in 1982.

On land also, for a time, W/T offered the promise of valuable Intelligence gathering – it was probably General Joffre’s most important source during the calamitous early days and the retreat to the Marne. But this potential was so obvious that wireless soon ceased to be a main means of communication (though it never ceased to be used). After all, in the Western theatre there was no lack of land lines; the telephone was the prime instrument of command. But it was in conjunction with the internal combustion engine, in the form of air power, that W/T achieved its highest significance.

All aviation was in its early infancy; the Wright brothers made their breakthrough towards the moon and the stars in December 1903; military aviation could be said to have had its beginning in 1908, when the French Army showed a marked interest in the exhibits at the Le Mans meeting. Aircraft featured strongly in the French Army manoeuvres of 1911, especially in the matter of co-operation with artillery.

In Britain an Air Committee was set up to advise on the creation of an Aeronautical Service, and Colonel J.E.B. Seely (later Secretary of State for War) was chairman of its technical sub-committee. He told members: ‘At the present time in this country we have, as far as I know, of actual flying men in the Army about eleven, and of actual flying men in the Navy about eight, and France has about two hundred and sixty-three, so we are what you might call behind.’¹¹

The Committee got the message; three months later the Royal Flying Corps was formed, with a Military and a Naval Wing. It made its practical début at the Annual Army manoeuvres of 1912, in which the two sides were commanded by the two rising stars, Lieutenant-Generals Sir Douglas Haig and Sir James Grierson, both to be Corps Commanders in the BEF in August 1914. Each had a small squadron of aeroplanes and an airship; Haig’s airship broke down almost at once, but Grierson’s performed such service that he emerged from the manoeuvres as the clear winner; he said in his report: The airship, as long as she remained afloat, was of more use to me for strategical reconnaissance than the aeroplanes as, being fitted with wireless telegraphy, I received her messages in a continuous stream and immediately after the observation had been made.’¹²

It was what you might call a perfect laboratory result, and Grierson was deeply impressed by his air component; he added, The impression left on my mind is that their use had revolutionized the art of war.’¹³ In 1913 he went further: ‘Warfare will be impossible unless we have the mastery of the air.’¹⁴

It is one of the wonders of history that the French Air Force in 1914, with some 136 operational aircraft, completely missed the mass of about a million men forming the right wing of the German Army, advancing through Belgium in accordance with the Schlieffen Plan. The German Air Force equally failed to spot the landing of the BEF and its advance to Mons where its presence came as a great surprise, and they also overlooked the formation of a whole new French Army, threatening their advancing right wing. The Royal Flying Corps missed very little; it reported the German outflanking movement against the BEF and monitored their advance, and together with belatedly awakened French airmen it reported the fatal swing to the south-east which wrecked the Schlieffen Plan and made possible the Battle of the Marne.

Reconnaissance in this style has always been a classic function in war; it has been well named ‘the eye in the sky’, and from time immemorial has emphasized the value of high points – hills, tall buildings, and it now looks down on the whole earth from circling satellites. In 1914 the eye was lodged in very frail vehicles, but effective none the less. When the war of movement stopped on the Western Front there were few opportunities of observing manoeuvre, but the war lost no time in signalling what was to be its predominant characteristic: it was going to be an ‘artillery war’.

In 1914, no sooner was the Battle of the Marne decided by the wide retreat of the German right flank to the River Aisne and the heights overlooking it than the quite unexpected phenomenon of trench warfare made its appearance, and this was to be the mode – indeed, the substance – of the war for the next three years. It spelt tactical deadlock: the deadlock of two unbroken lines of trenches, fronted by aprons of barbed wire and defended by the whole apparatus of fire power, rifles, machine guns and artillery. And artillery, as well as being part of the deadlock was also the only means of overcoming it. Artillery – and the ammunition which gives it life – was of the very essence of trench warfare which, from 1915 to November 1917 was the war.

Until the second half of 1916 this fact was entirely to the German advantage. The French entered the war with some 4,000 pieces of artillery, but virtually all of them were 75mm field guns, the famous soixante-quinze Quick-Firing gun which was sometimes referred to at the Ecole de Guerre as ‘God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost’. It was pretty certainly the best field gun of that war, with excellent qualities, but it did not have divine powers; above all, it was not very effective against entrenchments or fortifications of any kind. The French had no field howitzer and only about 100 howitzers of any description with their armies. Their prime task became the rapid expansion of their heavy gun and howitzer production – and ammunition production too – and pulling heavy ordnance out of their fortresses. These tasks were tackled with such vigour that for the great autumn battles in Artois and Champagne in 1915 they were able to back their 3,000 field pieces with 2,000 heavies.

Their allies were in even worse plights. The Russian fortress systems swallowed up huge numbers of heavy guns and mountains of ammunition. From beginning to end a marked characteristic of the Eastern Front would be the thin provision of Russian battlefield artillery – in marked contrast with World War II.

Britain’s Expeditionary Force took to France precisely 410 pieces of artillery in August 1914 – a ridiculous number for the warfare of the continental masses. But there were encouraging features: schooled by the Boers in South Africa, the British took a very good heavy gun into the field – the 60-pdr, but there were only 4 guns (one battery) per division, which means just 16 for the original BEF. More satisfactory was the allocation of the 4.5-inch field howitzer, authoritatively called ‘the best field howitzer in the world’; each division had 3 batteries of these, which gave the BEF 72. The fact remains that the British were painfully weak in artillery as well as in numbers generally, and that this weakness was perilously compounded by that of the munitions industry, which had to be built up virtually from scratch.

The Germans had no more anticipated trench warfare than anyone else, but they had expected to besiege fortresses, and went to war with large siege warfare supplies, including great numbers of heavy guns, and they were able to put substantial numbers of 210mm (8-inch) and 280mm (11-inch) howitzers in the field. The German 150mm (5.9-inch), often referred to as the ‘best gun of the war’, was always plentiful.

For a long time artillery preparations of attacks on enemy trenches took the form of what I have called ‘blazing away at a landscape’, drenching it with hot metal, the chief effect of which was to create cratered swamps which became virtually impassable in bad weather. The long bombardments made surprise impossible; movement was deadly slow in the fire zone; casualties mounted appallingly; progress seemed negligible. But help was on its way, in technology’s good time.

As early as September 1914, on the Aisne, the special value of the ‘eye in the sky’ became apparent. Thanks to two ex-Royal Engineer subalterns, Lieutenants James and Lewis, the Royal Artillery very soon made long strides towards effective Air co-operation by W/T. By 1915 it was clear that in modern battle a bad day for flying was a bad day for the guns, and a bad day for the guns was a very bad day indeed for the infantry. But it also became clear that air co-operation went far beyond marking targets and fall of shot.

It was in that year that the Royal Flying Corps undertook, by aerial photography with infinite labour and much peril, in conjunction with the new Royal Engineer Field Survey Companies, the making of a new map of the Western Front to replace the existing very inaccurate French maps (which the Germans continued to use). This co-operation bore fruit in November 1917 at Cambrai, when the onset of some 350 fighting tanks was simultaneously accompanied by the crash of 1003 guns, firing unregistered by this map by what was called predicted shooting. This was the saviour; by this means,

Surprise was restored to battle; there were no warning shots;

Precision was conferred by calibration of guns, an art well understood by the Royal Garrison Artillery, but unfamiliar to Field Gunners until now;

Protection was given to the infantry by the lavish use of smoke-shell.

The war of movement had returned, after three years’ absence.

After Cambrai the continuous trench-lines faded away. They became, for most of the time, places where the armies waited in varying degrees of danger and discomfort for battle to begin. When it did, the bombardment would be short, violent and highly destructive and the attack would follow immediately upon it. Linear defences were considered shell-traps; the defence would be conducted by mutually supportive posts, with the attackers attempting to infiltrate between them. Dramatic results were achieved in this way by the Germans in March 1918, and decisively repeated by the Allies in the Final Offensive from July to November. Movement became virtually continuous; when it was held up in front it spread to the flanks, and when they halted it returned to the original thrust-line. It was never very fast movement, because the internal combustion engine was not yet able to produce sufficient horse-power for speed. The Medium Mark ‘A’ tank (generally known as the ‘Whippet’), which made its battle début at Amiens on 8 August 1918, had a road speed of 8.3 m.p.h., but across-country it was lucky to exceed 2 m.p.h. As I have said before, this makes any resemblance to dogs of the greyhound breed very tenuous.

So the great advance was a slow business. The motor transport of the period performed prodigies, particularly when the weather broke, but the factor which kept the battle moving was always the guns, and they were also a prime factor in slowing it down. The BEF reached its highest level of shell expenditure between noon on 28 September and noon 29 September 1918: 943,847 rounds; just under a million shells in 24 hours, for the breaking of the ‘Hindenburg Line’. The logistical implications are appalling. Nevertheless, this was victory; as Lloyd George himself expressed it, ‘the conclusion is inescapable that Germany and her allies were in fact defeated in the field.’¹⁵

There can be no escaping the argument that the possession, or lack, of the sinews of war was, for all who had to wage it in the Industrial Age, its very substance. I don’t think one can begin to make sense of the war, or make many sensible observations about it, without grasping the effect of shortages of war matériel. Think of the Russian soldiers entering battle without rifles, having to wait to take them from fallen comrades; think of facing poisonous gas without masks; think of standing beside cold guns in the heat of battle, with no shells to fire; think of the French gunners trying to engage long-range heavy artillery with field guns; think of infantry trying to defend a trench against attack by showers of hand-grenades, having nothing similar to reply with; of flying an outclassed aircraft in the face of a skilful enemy, and so on, and much else besides. Think of trying to command such a battle. And then think of the relief, the anticipation, the great expectations when, at last, the necessities appear. This is what I mean by the war’s ‘inner nature’.

At first the penury pressed hardest on the Allies, who then became overexcited when their needs began to be satisfied and riches smiled upon them. Over-confidence set in – the French were always very prone to this; from their first blind faith in the all-out offensive to the seeming wisdom of the 1916 dictum, ‘It is artillery that captures places and infantry only helps it to do so.’¹⁶

In 1917 General Nivelle promised that he had a key to victory which would perform it in 48 hours. 1,185,000 dead Frenchmen bore witness to the error of these beliefs. Yet in the last two years it was the Central Powers who came to understand penury, facing what they called the ‘Materialschlacht’ (the war of matériel) – the absolute Allied supremacy in munitions of all descriptions. It reached the point where, in the words of Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, the British Armies ‘… were now employing such massive quantities of artillery in so co-ordinated and skilful a manner that it is not certain that any defensive positions could have withstood them’;¹⁷ or, as Prior and Wilson also write: ‘the enemy was fundamentally outmatched by the British weapons system.’¹⁸

What a transformation! I began to appreciate the extent of it in 1962, when an ex-officer of the Royal Artillery wrote to me, referring to the Second Battle of Ypres in early 1915, ‘I remember the period when it was almost reasons in writing for firing away a shell.’¹⁹ That definitely helped me to understand what General Haig meant when he wrote in his diary, ‘It is impossible to fight battles on a scale of ammunition like that.’²⁰ He meant successful battles, of course. How right he was.

The impression of those evil times, when the BEF lacked everything it needed except amazing courage, was hard to efface. I can see a direct line from ‘impossible to fight battles’ in the first part of the year, to the quite inadequate 153 heavy guns and 788 field guns which were all the BEF had for its biggest battle in 1915, Loos, in September; then to November, the war being 15 months old, and General Robertson (soon to be CIGS) only then being able to say, ‘For the first time since the commencement of the War the supply of munitions on an adequate scale is assured.’²¹

And so we arrive at 1 July, 1916, when General Rawlinson found himself the proud possessor of 1,437 guns for his attack on the Somme, no fewer than 427 of them being heavies. This seemed to be a very great number, and now there were mountains of ammunition beyond the dreams of earlier years, allowing the firing of 150,000 rounds a day and 50,000 per night. The infantry was assured that ‘nothing could exist at the conclusion of the bombardment in the area covered by it.’²²

It was a delusion; at least twice as many guns and twice as much ammunition were required to produce such a result, as the battles of 1917 showed. But in 1916 the delusion led to horrible disaster. In 1917 the infantry did indeed make a virtually unopposed capture of the enemy position – at Messines; in 1918 the Germans had the same gratifying experience, for the same reason at the Chemin des Dames on 27 May, when they made the deepest one-day advance of the War – about 12 miles.

I stress these dates. It has long been my belief that chronology is the spinal column of history, and that every step away from chronological sequence is highly dangerous. This seems to me to be unmistakably the case with the First World War. As I have stated, the industrial process turned the war into a ‘pendulum performance’, a concept devoid of meaning without a chronological base. Each phase of the war, each year, each novelty requires to be separately examined; the air war – outstandingly – is only intelligible in the context of incessant change. Much of this is closely linked to the name of Anthony Fokker, which came to the fore in 1915. Air reconnaissance and artillery co-operation called for countermeasures, and these led directly to air combat to achieve that ‘mastery of the air’ that General Grierson had prophesied in 1912. In 1915 Fokker produced his Eindecker – the monoplane with a machine gun firing forward through the propellor by means of synchronization. This was the first pure fighter aircraft; its coming produced the ‘Air Aces’. New Allied aircraft countered the Eindecker; the ‘Aces’ were countered by formation flying. It was a sequence of developments; the War was a sequence of developments.

It was also certain other things; it was from first to last a Coalition war – a highly significant matter for the Allies, but also applying to the Central Powers. Not for nothing did German staff officers speak of the Austrian alliance as being ‘fettered to a corpse’. It became fashionable in influential quarters in Britain to refer to Germany’s allies as her ‘props’; this was a complete and very serious misreading of the strategic fundamentals.

The same influential people – conspicuously Winston Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty until late May 1915), Lloyd George (Prime Minister from December 1916) and the ubiquitous, indefatigable Colonel Hankey (Secretary of the War Cabinet), dangerously misjudged Britain’s own alliance situation. It irked Lloyd George from the start. He could not rid himself of the belief that Britain still possessed freedom of action, as she had done in past wars. During the great strategic debate in early 1915 he asked his friend Churchill, ‘Are we really bound to hand over the ordering of our troops to France as if we were her vassal?’²³ Churchill’s reply – if any – is not recorded; both he and Lloyd George were actively promoting alternative strategies to the Western Front, both were finding the French alliance an insuperable and detestable obstacle.

To the French, the strategic problem was simple and so was its solution. General Joffre, the French C-in-C, expresses both quite clearly: The best and largest portion of the German army was on our soil, with its line of battle jutting out a mere five days’ march from the heart of France. This situation made it clear to every Frenchman that our task consisted in defeating this enemy, and driving him out of our country.²⁴

I am bound to say that I find this proposition entirely reasonable, and so did a substantial number of people at the time. In the BEF there were few who doubted it; General Haig summed up a majority view succinctly in March 1915: ‘We cannot hope to win until we have defeated the German Army.’²⁵

And General Robertson retrospectively dotted the ‘i’s and ‘t’s of defeating the Germany Army: where was this to be done? He had little doubt: ‘In the Great War the decisive front was fixed for us by the deployment of the enemy’s main masses in France and Belgium.’²⁶

In much British writing about the war there are two conspicuous absentees: the enemy and the Allies. During the war itself, the enemy and our Allies spoke with one voice: France and a tiny portion of Belgium were to them, and remained, the main front of the War. The Russians fought a hard war on a big front, and when it collapsed in 1917 it was sorely missed; but unlike 1941–45 it was not the main front. Nor did the German General Staff ever consider it being allowed to become that.

The underlying strategic reality of the War, which makes so much feverish discussion quite sterile, is that although the Schlieffen Plan failed in its main purpose in 1914, it bequeathed to Germany a strategic initiative which continued until July 1918. The effect of this bitterly simple fact, as I have often said, was that for virtually four years, ‘the French had to dance to the German tune and the British danced at their coat-tails – an activity neither dignified nor rewarding.’²⁷

I have also remarked that for this reason, ‘One may even say that the First World War was structured by the Schlieffen Plan.’²⁸

When I say that obedience to the discipline of the Coalition was not rewarding, I am, of course, thinking of the British war cemeteries. Once seen, never forgotten. I preside over an Association dedicated to ‘Remembering’. But there is so much to remember. The Western Front averaged about 450 miles in length. The British portion of it never rose above 123 miles. We need to remember that. We need to remember, when we recall the terrible cost of the Western Front to all who fought there, that French casualties by the end of 1914 – just 5 months of war – were 955,000 and Britain’s were just over 90,000; that by the end of 1915 the French had lost about 2 million, and the British about half a million. The war’s French total of 1,385,000 dead represented 3.5% of their whole population; Britain’s three-quarters of a million represented 1.5%. Again, 17.7% of French enlistments were killed, 11.8% of British. We need to remember that for two years France bore by far the heavier burden of the war, waiting for Britain to make up for lost time.

To those who became aware of its effect, this disproportion was heavy with meaning: how long could France stay in the war? In August 1915 Lord Kitchener told Haig, ‘We must act with all our energy, and do our utmost to help the French, even though, by so doing, we suffered very heavy losses indeed.’²⁹ And that is precisely what took place – at Loos. But Kitchener’s words (and his own observations) remained in Haig’s mind; on New Year’s Day 1916, just a fortnight after being appointed C-in-C, Haig sent for the Head of the French Mission at GHQ, and showed him his orders from the Government: ‘I pointed out that I am not under General Joffre’s orders, but that would make no difference, as my intention was to do my utmost to carry out General Joffre’s wishes on strategical matters as if they were orders.’³⁰

This became Haig’s guiding principle, under Joffre and his successors, and if he had done nothing else (foolish thought!) in a Coalition war this perception earned his pay. But it was Kitchener who put the whole terrible reality into words: ‘We cannot make war as we ought, we can only make it as we can.’³¹ That was the heart of the matter; you could call it the epitaph of the war.

Notes

1

John Terraine: White Heat: The New Warfare 1914–18 p. 6

2

Ibid p. 7

3

Ibid

4

Churchill: The World Crisis ii (Odhams edition) p. 1171

5

Ibid

6

Churchill: The World Crisis: The Aftermath p. 32

7

Ibid p. 33

8

Corbett: Naval Operations i p. 177

9

Fuller: The Decisive Battles of the Western World iii p. 184

10

Beesly: Room 40 p. 70

11

Walter Raleigh The War in the Air i p. 202

12

Ibid p. 227

13

Ibid p. 226

14

Lieut.-Gen. Sir J. Grierson, lecture at the Royal Artillery Institution, Nov. 6 1913

15

Lloyd George War Memoirs ii (Odhams edition) p. 1946

16

Official History (Military Operations France and Belgium 1916 ii f.n. 1)

17

Prior & Wilson Command on the Western Front p. 350

18

Ibid p. 339

19

Correspondence with Lieutenant-Colonel Neate RA, Oct. 1962

20

Haig Diary Nov. 15 1914

21

Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson: Soldiers and Statesmen i p. 199

22

Official History (op. cit. i p. 288)

23

Martin Gilbert Winston S. Churchill iii Companion Volume i p. 472

24

The Memoirs of Marshall Joffre ii p. 327

25

Haig Diary March 28 1915

26

Robertson op. cit. p. 75

27

Royal United Services Institute Journal Sept. 1981 p. 4

28

Army Quarterly & Defence Journal July 1985 p. 279

29

Haig Diary Aug. 19 1915

30

Haig Diary Jan. 1 1916

31

Churchill: The World Crisis: The Eastern Front p. 271

Chapter 2

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The Civilian Dimension of the War

Imanuel Geiss

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The eruption of the American Civil War as the first really modern industrial mass war, in particular its end with Sherman’s devastating march through the South, foreshadowed a future where war would distinguish less and less the soldier from the civilian. However America was far away from Europe, and the implications of the U.S. Civil War were soon forgotten or simply ignored. The American message for the future was overshadowed by the shock caused by the Prusso-German artillery bombardment of besieged Paris in early 1871, when the Second German Empire was founded amidst the thunder of German Krupp cannons, as it was phrased in naïve, but unwittingly revealing terms, in German history textbooks. More far-reaching was the franc-tireur war – men, without military uniform, sniping at regular troops of the invading enemy.

The Great Oriental Crisis of 1875–78, culminating in the 8th Russo-Turkish War, settled by the Congress of Berlin in 1878, was accompanied by mutual massacres of Christian and Muslim Balkan peoples. Here Europe, in particular Liberal England, only saw the ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ committed by the ‘unspeakable Turk’ of Gladstone’s rhetoric, not the corresponding crimes committed against Muslims. They took place beyond the periphery of civilised Europe. Europe’s own efforts in institutionalising civilised warfare led to the founding of the Red Cross in 1864 and several Geneva Conventions, sanctified by International Law through the Hague conventions for land warfare in 1907. On paper, it completed the separation of regular armies and civilian populations. Occupation forces had to spare civilian populations and even political structures in war-time, while irregular forces had to wear at least visible badges and had to have responsible command structures. Everything else was considered a war crime.

Against that background the war of the future was optimistically considered. Self-destructive complacency prevailed, with trust in the strength of civilisation and international law to shield non-combatants from the rigours of war. In fact, the collective weight of industrial weapons and of sheer masses in uniformed national armies was so terrific as simply to sweep aside many formal international obligations on ‘scraps of paper’, as if they were spiders’ webs. For this became the general message of the First World War. The concept that the military and civilian spheres were separate was smashed by demands of the first total industrial war, both on military fronts, by land and on seas, and on home fronts. A few realistic pessimists from opposite ends of the political spectrum, like the Conservative Swiss-German historian Jacob Burckhardt and the affluent revolutionary Friedrich Engels in his comfortable English exile, warned in vain about the destructive character of modern industrial warfare.

War atrocities committed by Serbs and Montenegrins against Muslim Albanians in Kosovo and in Northern Albania during the Second Balkan War in 1912/13,¹ were seen by Germany as a first precedent for ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘völkische Flurbereinigung’, later to be picked up by the Pan-Germans as precedents for the ethnic cleansing they proposed for their ‘Greater Germany’. All such considerations were at best ‘cura posterior’ for many Europeans when the world war broke out in early August 1914.

In their blissful ignorance of what the warlike future had in store for them, capitals and provincial towns – as well as many individuals – were seized with enthusiasm. Even if jubilant masses were not the majority, their patriotic noises had the greatest impact, politically and historically. They gave the solid basis of jingo chauvinism of all national shades and to clamours for expansive war aims as a punishment for aggressors.

War had suddenly become immensely popular in Europe. The famous or notorious ‘Augusterlebnis’ in Germany, the ‘Union Sacrée’ in France, are expressions of quasi-religious sentiments that bordered on blasphemy. God, of course, was invoked from all sides and the nation-state was raised to the heights of a secular religion. This side of the coin with its high emotions deserves attention, if only in contrast to the suffering which civilian populations would endure.

The grim warnings of those who could imagine what the Great War might mean, were hushed by the hurrahs on all sides, but their reaction may best be summed up by one short word which the commander of Napoleon’s Old Guard uttered when ordered to surrender to the British at Waterloo. In legend his reply was: ‘The Old Guard will die, but will not surrender’. In reality he is reported to have said: ‘Merde’. Just as prophetically but in a more gentlemanly fashion, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, on 4 August 1914 expressed his verdict. ‘The lights have gone out over Europe. They will not be lit again in our time.’ The realism of such pessimists had political effect only towards the end of the war – on the losers’ side, in a desperate attempt to end the war by Revolution, and on the winning side in pleading for moderation in a war à l’outrance.

The first to bear the shock of real warfare were civilian populations of countries invaded by foreign armies. Even here, we have to distinguish between harsh realities and national legends. The shock must have been rudest for the Belgians, apparently safe in their neutrality, guaranteed by International Law, but breached by Germany for strategic reasons. The German invading armies fell immediately below the level of the civilised warfare of the previous two centuries by exacting war contributions from occupied Belgian and French cities. Anxious memories of the franc-tireur warfare in 1870–71 made German soldiers trigger-happy, in particular at night. Real or imagined incidents of civilian sniping, often enough turning out to be German soldiers shooting each other, in the belief that they had been attacked by snipers, led to the terrible burning of Louvain with its famous University Library by German troops, as a reprisal for alleged sniping.² The burning was repeated in May 1940, in the Second World War.

The East suffered comparably, but this is less well-known. The Polish counterpart, all but ignored because of Louvain, was Kalisch, a Polish provincial town next to the Silesian border. After the withdrawal of Russian troops, German units moved in on 6 August. After real or alleged sniping over eight days, they pulled out and shelled Kalisch systematically from surrounding hills.³ Later, Germans wondered why Poles did not greet German armies as liberators. On their first retreat in Poland from Warsaw in late autumn 1914, German troops systematically destroyed bridges, railways and roads in order to slow up the advance of Russian troops, including the flooding of coal mines⁴ – something which German troops did on their retreat from the Western Front in the final months of the war. In contrast, alleged atrocities of Russian troops in East Prussia in August 1914 did not take place. They were German propaganda myths. One Prussian Landrat who stayed behind the Russian lines with his civilian population, made some sobering remarks in his official report after the return of the German Army: Russian troops behaved with exemplary discipline. The few incidents of unjustified harshness were immediately and severely punished by Russian officers. Houses were only destroyed when German troops were firing from them. There were no rapes, and no plundering, and the few thefts were the work of Germans staying after the Russian invasion. The honest Landrat ends on a bitter note on the morality of the German civilian population. His report⁵ is the more remarkable, as the behaviour of Russian troops in August 1914 contrasts favourably