The Great War: 1914 - 1918

By John Terraine

It did not need a Fort Sumter cannonade to set the world in flames in 1914, only the pistol shots of an assassin.

The Great War 1914-1918, written by one of the leading military historians of his time, John Terrain, thoroughly examines the political, economical and social triggers which led to the eruption of WWI, as well as the progression of the war itself through various campaigns and battles which resulted in the final victory of the Entente Powers. The Great War 1914-1918, first published in 1965, is a brilliant and comprehensive narrative and stands as an authoritative record in its own right.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781448214105

John Terraine

John Terraine was born on the 15th January 1921 and is remembered as a leading British military historian. He is best known for his persistent defence of Douglas Haig and also as the lead screenwriter on the BBC's landmark 1960s documentary The Great War. Terraine was educated at Stamford School and at Keble College, Oxford. After leaving Oxford, in 1943, he joined BBC radio and continued to work for the BBC for 18 years, latterly as its Pacific and South African Programme Organiser. He was a member of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies and was awarded the Institute's Chesney Gold Medal in 1982. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1987.

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Preface

‘The German militarism, which is the crime of the last fifty years, has been working for this for twenty-five years. It is the logical result of their spirit and enterprise and doctrine. It had to come.’

‘It had to come’: this considered verdict of the United States Ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, in August 1914, has stood the test of time. The slowly woven unity of the German people was warlike from the first; it could scarcely fail to continue so, framed by three military empires, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and France under a second Bonaparte. Indeed, for Germany the problem of existence was always primarily strategic, whether it sought its solution through diplomatic arrangements or through war plans. Under Bismarck, war was very much an instrument of policy, and diplomacy remained vigorous and decisive. After Bismarck, diplomacy languished; war plans, down to their very details, became the deciding factor. Lord Haldane, the great British War Minister of 1906 to 1911, who understood Germany better than any other British statesman of his time, carried Walter Hines Page’s thought one step further when he wrote: ‘The reason why the war came appears to have been that at some period in the year 1913 the German Government finally laid the reins on the necks of men whom up to then it had held in restraint. The decision appears to have been allowed at this point to pass from civilians to soldiers.… It is not their business to have the last word in deciding between peace and war.’

A second German war within twenty-five years has supplied an illumination which was lacking to the writers of the ‘20s and ‘30s; it is now evident that 1939 was closely linked to 1918, that the interval was a breathing space in a continuous action, and that that action was the burgeoning of the German state and people, their striving toward world supremacy through their traditional instruments—the armed forces. Germany, then, is the starting point of the great European conflict of the first half of the twentieth century; Germany must be the starting point of understanding it.

The base of modern war is technology, disseminating itself through industry. Without technological advances, without industrial expansion, neither German diplomacy nor German war preparation could have carried the weight they did. In the period between 1871 and 1914 both made huge progress: ‘the country which had been poor became suddenly rich.’¹ A primarily agricultural, rural nation became an urban one. Coal production, which until the advent of atomic power was, with steel, the very foundation of a modern state, went up from 30 million tons in 1871 to 190 million tons in 1913. In the decade of the 1880s, the German Empire doubled its output of steel and almost doubled that of iron. Sweeping educational reforms, with particular stress upon higher and technical education, bore swift fruit in Germany’s quickly won leadership in the new chemical and electrical industries. Her shipping expanded, and with it her overseas trade. As with every other industrial revolution, the population itself also increased rapidly in numbers—by 11 millions between 1880 and 1900, and by rather more than that figure between 1900 and 1914.

All this added up in the minds of a professional military hierarchy, not only to a further-proof, if any were needed, that Germany was marching from strength to strength, but to the assurance of a solid material base from which operations of war could be launched. From the moment when, in 1890, the young Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed the Iron Chancellor, Bismarck, the military hierarchy, organised in the General Staff, steadily acquired greater and more dangerous influence. The Kaiser, mystically dedicated to the concepts of the supremacy of Germany and of the monarchy within Germany—industrious, intelligent, pious, ardent, but also vain and impulsive and at times hysterical—gradually ceased to be a presiding head of state, and turned himself instead into a war lord, identified with the military party. Only when it was too late did he realise to what an extent, in surrendering his arbitrating authority, he had become the prisoner of his own might. The army itself had become the prisoner of an idea.

The essence of the German military problem—the ‘German problem’—was simple and deadly: war on two fronts. A secret alliance with Austria signed in 1879 ruled out any likelihood of further danger from that quarter—and at the same time linked together the aspirations and policies of the two Germanic empires. There remained Russia and France. When these unlikely partners—the most autocratic imperialism in Europe and the young Third Republic—came together in 1888, the year of the Kaiser’s accession, war on two fronts became inevitable. All General Staff thinking would have to be based on this fact.

The famous Schlieffen Plan which, in a modified form, shaped German movement in 1914 contained two cardinal elements: a holding operation on the Russian front, in cooperation with Austria, and a lightning offensive against France with the mass of the German Army, aiming at a second Sedan. In the ebullient mood of pre-1914 Germany, this solution seemed well within her powers. That General Graf Alfred von Schlieffen,² whose name is associated with no personal victory in the field at any time, played as significant a part in shaping the nature of war as Napoleon, Lee, Grant, or von Moltke—to name four of the outstanding soldiers of his century—is astounding. It is also an indication of the special nature of the German Army, in which ‘the Staff Officer … possessed an authority probably unknown in other armies.’³ Single-minded, humourless, as mystical as the Kaiser in his attitude to the army, von Schlieffen displayed in the development of his plan on the one hand the immense intellectual and professional grasp which one might expect from a man of this stamp, and on the other hand the fatal limitation of this very professionalism when not restrained by a wider view.

For the plan contained two grave faults: first, it required from the German Army an effort beyond its strength, as von Schlieffen himself apprehended before he died; secondly, it presupposed infringements of neutrality which would forfeit all Germany’s moral rights and multiply her enemies. This, at least, could have been prevented by statesmanship—but the German statesmen had laid down the reins.

1

The Lamps Go Out

It did not need a Fort Sumter cannonade to set the world in flames in 1914, only the pistol shots of an assassin. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was visiting Sarajevo, capital of the recently annexed province of Bosnia. It was a state visit, planned to include a ceremonial drive through the town by the Archduke, accompanied by his morganatic wife, Sophie, and escorted by the civic dignitaries, with inspections of troops, and finally an official address of welcome at the town hall.

Matters quickly went awry: on the way to the town hall a bomb was thrown; it missed the Archduke, but wounded one of his aides in a following motorcar, as well as several bystanders. This effectively blighted the official welcome; ceremonies were cut short and soon the royal procession was making its way back to the railway station with, it would seem, an amazing lack of precaution, considering what had already occurred. Among those watching the departure was a Slav schoolboy, Gavrilo Princip, one of thousands who considered Austrian rule an intolerable affront to the upsurge of their own nationalism. He, too, was armed with a bomb. He threw it, but it did not explode. At once he pulled out a revolver, and fired three shots. They hit the Archduke and his wife, who threw herself in front of her husband to shield him; both died almost at once. Princip and his confederates were arrested immediately.

The Austrian Government’s reactions were prompt; it laid the blame at the door of the neighbouring Kingdom of Serbia, behind whose frontier, it alleged, killers like Princip and other dissidents found shelter and support. Austria determined upon drastic retribution; within five weeks her unappeasable anger had drawn the nations of Europe into a war which would spread across the world, and, before it ended, would sweep away the Habsburg Empire and much else besides.

At first, however, the event, although it shocked men everywhere, was not recognised as the portent that it was. In the stormy climate of Balkan politics, even the assassination of an heir apparent could be regarded as something of a commonplace. Franz Ferdinand was killed on June 28th; not until July 21st did so responsible a newspaper as the London Times bring the consequences into its main news page. By then, war was only fourteen days away from England. Summer holidays, the cricket season, boating, picnics, going to the seaside—these were the preoccupations of the people. For some of these holiday makers there was pageantry, too, to be marvelled at, though its significance was not fully appreciated: on July 18th, at Spithead, outside the great naval base of Portsmouth, King George V paid an ‘informal’ visit to the Royal Navy. Forty miles of ships, 260 vessels, including 24 of the new ‘Dreadnought’ battleships and 35 older battleships, were drawn up for the King’s inspection. To one spectator, they gave ‘the feeling of being in a vast town of iron castles, each standing alone and independent of each other.’ After the display, the fleet put to sea for tactical exercises lasting several days. The sailors did not know it, but in effect they were already at war. These squadrons were not dispersed; they passed straight to their war stations.

The days that followed the Spithead Review saw a frightening acceleration of the tempo of events. Austria’s threatening posture towards Serbia aroused instant reactions in Russia; sentiment on behalf of fellow Slavs and political apprehensions over the possibility of Austrian aggrandisement in the Balkans, a well-recognised Russian sphere of influence, made it unthinkable that the Czar’s empire could stand aside from this quarrel. In turn, faced with Russian support for Serbia, Austria invoked her ally, Germany; more than any other factor, it was German assurances of full backing for whatever action Austria might feel impelled to take that brought about a world conflagration. For Russia, meeting the menace of war with the two German empires, looked instantly to her own ally, France, whose President, Raymond Poincaré, and Prime Minister, René Viviani, were actually visiting St. Petersburg. The French response had been foreseen in Germany; it formed the very basis of the war plan. Had the French been far more reluctant than they were to join their Russian allies, the Germans would have been obliged to force France into the war in order to put their plan into effect and re-insure themselves by her overthrow. There were only two doubtful factors. Could the Central Powers, Germany and Austria, depend upon their third partner, Italy? Could France depend upon her latest, recent, and decidedly reticent ally, England?

It was in England that recognition of the serious turn of affairs came last and most haltingly, for reasons which were not all connected with the summer sunshine. British politicians in July 1914 had their own preoccupations, quite apart from those of the man in the street. Not for almost a hundred years had England been nearer to civil war than she came between March and July 1914. The cause of the danger was Ireland: the insistent demand of the Catholic southern Irish for Home Rule, and the bitter refusal of the Protestant North to allow itself to be governed from Dublin. Already, at the mere possibility of having to coerce the Ulster Protestants, there had been a mutiny of British Army officers. The army had been split from top to bottom; the Secretary of State for War and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff had resigned, and the King himself had called a conference at Buckingham Palace to try to find a solution. It was upon the deliberations of statesmen engaged with the details of partition, tracing Irish parish boundaries on large-scale maps, that the European crisis intruded itself abruptly.

On July 30th King George V wrote in his diary: ‘Foreign telegrams coming in all day, we are doing all we can for peace and to prevent a European War but things look very black.… The debate in the House of Commons on Irish question today has been postponed on account of gravity of European situation.’ Where would England stand? This was the question that was being asked in all the European capitals, but in none more anxiously than in Paris; during the next few days the urgings and remonstrances of the French Ambassador in London became increasingly heated. The sense of being taken by surprise was acute in Britain; its effect continued long after the opening stages of the war.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth than to say that Britain was unprepared for war in 1914. Despite the powerful pacifist feeling that fan through the ruling Liberal Party, no period in British history can match the first fourteen years of the twentieth century for reappraisal and drastic reorganisation of military resources. At that time Britain was the world’s leading naval power, her Empire, spaced across the globe, held together and supported by the Royal Navy. Alarmed and provoked by the Kaiser’s fleet building, the British Admiralty, inspired by the demonic energy of Admiral Sir John (Jacky) Fisher and the vigour of Winston Churchill, had embarked upon a vast programme of re-equipment and construction. The Spithead Review provided a glimpse of its results. Under Lord Haldane, at the War Office, a General Staff had come into being for the first time. The army’s functions had been re-examined and redefined; the result was an organised Expeditionary Force. The expansion of the army in wartime had been considered; the result was a second-line Territorial Army. The heterogeneous forces of the Empire were modernised and reshaped; new weapons and new drill were created and adopted. At the discussions of the Committee of Imperial Defence the large questions of strategy were gone into; they received attention from the best brains in the country. If the results were not what they might have been, it was not for want of thought; it was because neither in Britain nor anywhere else was the full nature of the twentieth century revolution of warfare yet understood.

The final expression of British preparation was the famous War Book, which laid down, stage by stage, the entire process of entry into war for every department of public life. The man most responsible for the remarkable work was Lord Hankey, Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, at that time a relatively junior and unknown officer of Marines. Summing it up, he has written: ‘Every detail had been thought out and every possible safeguard provided for ensuring that, once decided on, these arrangements should be put in operation rapidly and without a hitch.… From the King to the printer, everyone knew what he had to do.’ The War Book was completed and approved on July 14th; only fourteen days later, when Austria declared war on Serbia, the precautionary stage laid down in it was already being put into effect.

Nevertheless, the question remained whether Britain would go beyond precautionary stages. If she did not, the possibility of a short war, albeit disastrous to her allies and her interests, would remain strong; if she did, if she entered the struggle, nothing could prevent it from spreading across the world, and for those with eyes to see there arose the extreme likelihood of a long-drawn-out conflict. The decision was fateful, and for Mr. Asquith’s Liberal Ministry it proved particularly hard to make. Despite all the activities of the Committee of Imperial Defence, despite the work of Haldane and Churchill—presided over, it must be added, by Asquith himself—neither the nature of the crisis nor the extent of Britain’s involvement in it were recognised. Something more would be needed to draw Britain out of an isolationism as real if not as total as that of the United States. Germany, now entirely the slave of the General Staff’s plan, was not slow in providing the extra something.

Declarations and ultimatums were flying thick and fast by now. On July 28th Austria declared war on Serbia; the British First Fleet moved to its North Sea bases facing Germany. On the 29th Germany asked for a guarantee of British neutrality in the event of a European war; this was rejected by the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, on the following day. On that day, too, Russia ordered partial mobilisation, whereupon Germany threatened to mobilise unless the Russians ceased; a stream of German propaganda about ‘frontier incidents’, later admitted to be false, so alarmed the French government that it ordered all its forces to retire to a line about six miles inside the common frontier. Belgrade was bombarded. Austria and Russia mobilised fully on the 31st. Turkey, an unknown factor so far, did the same. Britain asked both France and Germany for assurances that they would respect Belgian neutrality; France agreed at once, but Germany could give only an evasive answer for reasons that would quickly become apparent.

On August 1st France, Germany, and Belgium mobilised; Germany declared war on Russia. On the 2nd the British Government still felt unable to offer more to France than a promise to prevent the German fleet from passing through the North Sea to attack French ports. But it was on this day that Germany demanded unrestricted passage of her armies through Belgium; German troops entered Poland, Luxembourg, and France. France and Germany declared war on each other on the 3rd; Sir Edward Grey addressed the House of Commons; no formal vote was taken, but the mood of the House was perceptibly favourable to the government’s policy. On August 4th Germany declared war on Belgium and immediately crossed her frontier; Britain ordered mobilisation—three days after her French ally—and issued an ultimatum to Germany that unless guarantees of Belgian neutrality were given within twelve hours the two powers would be at war. German Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg commented bitterly to the British Ambassador in Berlin: ‘Just for a scrap of paper Great Britain is going to make war on a kindred nation.’ And so it was; the ultimatum expired at midnight. Standing in a Foreign Office window with a friend, watching the lamps being lit around St. James’s Park, Sir Edward Grey commented with prescient sadness: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’

But the crowds along the Mall and outside Buckingham Palace were singing God Save the King with cheerful vigour. Now tension was released; all were keyed up to a great endeavour. There were few who understood what it might cost.

Germany, Austria, Russia, Serbia, France, Belgium, and now Britain—all were at war. Yet the European roll call was still incomplete; there would be others to follow. Italy had declared neutrality, but how long would it last? Already a sardonic Frenchman had defined Italian policy as it would be shaped in two wars: ‘…awaiting an opportunity to rush to the aid of the victors.’ Turkey’s posture pointed to the dilemma of the Balkan States; each would sooner or later have to choose sides, an unenviable decision which neither idealism nor materialism seemed able to assist. For all Europe, the tragic hour had come.

2

Balance of Power

If war could be fought and won on paper, as simply as a mathematical calculation, obvious and massive advantages lay with the Entente Powers in 1914, as they had lain with the North against the Confederacy in 1861. Yet in each case a four-year struggle, ferocious, costly, and frequently uncertain, would be needed to bring the thing to an issue. The reasons for this were of the same nature in each case: the American Civil War provides the first example of a great modern war, based upon the products and mechanics of the Industrial Revolution, which created situations and problems hitherto undreamed of, above all in the matter of scale; the First World War, fifty years later, carried the process several stages further, tapping even vaster reservoirs of power, and complicated by the ever-accelerating speed of technical and industrial growth.

The balance of apparent military strength at the outbreak of the war was unequal: 136 German and Austrian infantry divisions, with 22 cavalry divisions, against 199 Allied infantry divisions, with 50 cavalry divisions. But such arithmetic is deceptive. All through the war amateur strategists would fall into the temptation of making such simple comparisons, and be baffled when events belied their calculations. The Central Powers possessed in the German Army, which provided 87 of their infantry divisions and half their cavalry, a priceless asset; for if this force attained excellence only in particular and limited parts, its general standard was nevertheless extremely high. This fact, in the early days at least, more than offset the weaknesses of the polyglot array of Austria Hungary. The military quality, the productive capacity, the practical homogeneity, and the central position of the Germanic empires equalised their numerical inferiority.

The ‘driving-wheel’ of the German Army was its General Staff, which, as well as providing the central plan and organisation upon which all formations would act, supplied also the corpus of highly trained and efficient staff officers within those formations that was necessary for the easy running of the great machine. Thorough, unified training and doctrine counted as weapons in themselves: ‘The higher commanders were accustomed to deal with large bodies, were trained to disregard loss of life, and to believe in resolute and united action; and vigorous subordinate initiative was taught as the leading principle of all command.’¹ Yet within this very citadel of martial virtue there lay a weakness: the Chief of the General Staff was Generaloberst Helmuth von Moltke, nephew of the great von Moltke of the Franco-Prussian War. He had not inherited the talents of his namesake; irresolute and over-sensitive, he lacked the grip and determination of his famous uncle. The most formidable mass army in the world would enter the war under a direction all too prone to vacillation and compromise.

Drawing upon a reserve of 4,300,000 trained men, the active German Army was organised in 25 army corps, each of two divisions. Alongside the active army, ready to take part with it immediately in action, stood 32 reserve divisions, whose capabilities proved to be one of the first major surprises of the War. Hardiness, endurance, and often great bravery were the characteristics that ran through this whole great mass of infantry. The cavalry, on the other hand, despite the Kaiser’s personal interest in it, proved to be a disappointment; Dragoons, Cuirassiers, Hussars, even the Uhlans (Lancers) whose name had become a byword, all seemed to lack the dash and thrust that had been expected of them. The German cavalry divisions had been diluted with light infantry to give them firepower, the effect of this was a sapping of the true cavalry spirit that put them at a disadvantage on all fronts.

The German field artillery was ill equipped; its standard 77-mm. (3-inch) gun, though light and easy to handle, was an adaptation of an out-of-date model, inferior to that of any other

Reviews for The Great War

[schmerguls · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

1155 The Great War 1914-1918: A Pictorial History, by John Terraine (read 5 Mar 1972) Once again I have fought through those awful years, 1914-1918. This book has many pictures, and the accounting of the war is well-done. It is the most interesting of wars--(my son says it is boring: generation gap). I never tire of reading of those awesome times.

[johnphelan-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Nearly 50 years after it was written this remains the best short introduction to the First World War.